Chapter Twenty-One
Siberian Khatru
We were watching a Youtube video of a Yes concert from
the Philadelphia Spectrum in 1978. The
band was playing the opening number, Siberian Khatru when Jill said:
“You know seeing the Spectrum just kills me. It brings so many memories. My dad taking me to see the Icecapades, the
Harlem Globetrotters, or the Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus. Concerts with friends later as a teen and
adult. The Philadelphia Flyers, Sixers,
and Soul. So many memories. They kill me.
I’m back there, in good times with the people that I love. Everything is right with the world. And then they’re gone. Lost to time.
Never coming back. It hurts so
bad. Loss. And then the fucking guilt sneaks in. What I could have done. What I should have done. How I’ve let everybody I’ve ever loved down.”
“You never let me down,” interrupted Jackie.
“Oh really? Are
you living in France in a peaceful trans asylum colony right now? Or in a shitty, little apartment in goddamn
Albany with a fucking supervillain? No offense,
Alex.”
“Sure,” I laughed.
Jill looked at me.
“Sometimes, I’m so envious of you and your memory loss. I know that’s a terrible thing to say. I’m sorry.
But, you’re s supervillain. There
has got to be some fucked up shit in your past, man.”
“I thought you liked Yes,” Jackie said quietly and
confused.
I was thinking about what Jill had said. Damn, she was right. I must have gone through some serious,
worldview-breaking stuff, at some point.
Maybe, I couldn’t remember, because, I didn’t want to remember. Maybe, some stuff is better left forgotten.
“When I see the old Spectrum, like it was back when I
was a kid, I get pulled back there, to those times, to those people and places
I loved unconditionally, they were everything to me, and I have a taste of that
fucking sweetness, that purity, and then it’s fucking gone. Yanked away.
Memory is just cruel, fucked up, mental time travel.”
Then, you could tell that she remembered her dad’s
dementia, and she fell silent, looking distant, a part of her begging for
death. I learned to feel that way
too. Jill was more right than she knew.
(c) Copyright 2020 by Diana Hignutt
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