Flashes of Lightning

Rocco, barrel chested he was, lay on his stained sofa. His right hand hung over the edge of the cushion tenuously pinching between his fingers the neck of an empty beer bottle. His left leg draped over the back of the sofa like a branch over a fence while his right leg fell to the ground leaving his foot hiding under the coffee table, which was burdened with old magazines, more empty bottles as well as cans, and an abused ash tray. His boots were still on, but at least they were untied. In his drunken stupor, he didn’t hear the weather report on the television. It filled the screen with red and magenta, indicating the storm was right above him.

Every now and then a grumble of a snore slipped through his mouth. His eye lids fluttered, spurred on by a dream he was having… that really was a nightmare… that really was a playback of the most regretful event in his life. These nightmares had been harassing all week and he was barely managing to live a normal life in spite of them.

Each day was the same. He worked at a recycling plant where his days were spent sorting out everything that came in. This week he was doing the plastics. Last week it was glass, and the week before that, aluminum. Each morning he’d wake up, pack his lunch and a dark coffee, don the yellow reflective vest over a company crew neck sweatshirt with his navy blue Dickies cargo pants and out the door he’d go, making sure to grab his matching hard helmet.  

But ever since the incident, his life had changed, had been…infiltrated. In addition to his nightmares, he now found himself suffering from sudden flashes of images that raced across his eyes. They left just as quickly as they came — very quick, like lightning — and what manifested in these bursts were the most painful images of the night in question. 

It had been a stormy one when it happened; that is, when he did what to him had become the unthinkable (and yet he has found himself thinking very much about it). In fact, the weather was far worse than the storm that was raging outside at the moment.

His eye lids fluttered again and this time, it was followed by a quick gasp and a desperate shout: “PETE, NO, I’M SORRY! I’m sorry.” He weeped and weeped. “I’m sorry, the rain… I’m sorry….” The fluttering stopped and instead his eye lids clenched shut like knuckle-white fists as tears squeezed their way out along the wrinkles around his eyes, as if they themselves were running away from the terrible scene that had unfolded in his mind.

Rocco sat up, now fully awake and pulled himself together, roughly rubbing his face with calloused hands. He felt hot blood rush to his cheeks, reddening them.

The image of the pallor of his dead son’s face flashes before Rocco’s eyes. Not the image of Pete’s unblemished face in the casket when the mortician was done with him, but the one on the side of the road against the wet asphalt where a puddle of mud water splattered constantly in the pouring rain. Loud, it was very loud. In the span of under a second, a quick crack of white hot lightning illuminated his son’s bloodied and pale face. When Rocco saw the countenance of his son’s corpse, it was quite literally as if his mind had taken a flash photograph of it. Now it burned in in the memory card of his mind. When he had found his son, it was after he found himself by a tree, flat on his back and spread out like a fallen star. Who knows how long he had been knocked out, or how long for that matter, his son had been dead?

Rocco winced and resisted the urge to cry again, but the amount of effort that took was insurmountable. 

Still, he managed to check the calendar on the wall. Wednesday, one of his days off. Oh thank God, he thought, letting out a long, deep sigh of relief. Then he remembered, with furrowed brows that Wednesday was one of his days off … as well as Thursday and Friday and all the other days of the week. Rocco momentarily forgot he had been fired for drinking on the job. “Oh yeah. Shit,” he murmured to himself. He wiped any remaining tears with his sleeve and after a moment, got up off the couch, relieving it of the strain of his body, which somehow felt heavier with the burden he now carried from the incident—

— incident or accident?  

Incident implies that there was simply an unexpected event that occurred, but accident adds a darker, unforgiving dimension to that. Rocco, despite all the crippling, vivd reminders of the event, has yet to accept that it was, indeed, an accident. One where he and his alcoholism were one hundred percent at fault, and it had cost him his son. He apologized, felt remorse and regret, yes. All that came naturally, but if he fully accepted that it was an accident that he caused rather than simply an incident that happened, he would have stopped drinking. 

Consider this: if you ask for forgiveness but don’t repent and change, then what was the purpose in asking for it at all? That is the difference between an incident that could happen again, and an accident that you should learn from and prevent from happening again. Rocco has yet to accept the event as an accident.

Beer cans and bottles continued to litter his house for months after his son’s death.

Rain rattled his windows and the sound of it rang in Rocco’s ears as he got up. He realized the weather report was on in the television and the meteorologist was speaking of flash floods, downpours and lightning strikes all over the place. 

“Damn rain,” Rocco grumbled. “You made me hydroplane, you did,” he said, without mentioning the amount of liquor that had been running in his system when he picked up his son that night.

He stumbled his way to the bathroom, catching his balance on the small, white porcelain sink that now was stained with gray patches of grime. As he has done plenty of times before, he opened the mirror and looked for his savior: Vicodin.

But that little bottle of magic pills was empty. He growled in frustration and threw the bottle somewhere in the tub making a CLANG as if it were saying, it’s not my fault I’m already empty! He shut the mirror and froze at the sight of his face. 

There were two sides of it since the car crash. Physically there were two sides because when the paramedics had finally come and taken him to the hospital, and when he finally came to his senses, the doctor had told him he had severely scraped the left side of his face on gravel for about ten feet before finally landing flat on his back. It was a creative ordeal finding a way to only wrap the left side of his face, but the surgeons and nurses were able to do it. Skin grafting was in the talks, but ultimately rejected in favor of natural skin-healing. There was also the issue of money.

A few months later and his face was as good as it was going to get. The left side was lumped with raised scar tissue (keloid the doctor had called it) that puffed up his face. It had become remarkably smooth and pink. His facial hair was one-sided now as hair doesn’t grow on scar tissue. Calling him the Elephant Man would be an exaggeration but the left side of his face was indeed significantly larger than the right and if small children were to see him without knowing him, they would scream and piss their underwear in fear, and run to their parents claiming to have seen a monster.

A monster. That’s what he’s become.

The television continued with its weather report on loop. Rocco noticed it in the mirror and felt like it was on his team. “That’s right, it was the rain that killed my Petey.” But scattered in front of the television on the floor was the ugly reminder of what he had been doing that night before picking up Pete. Those bottles and bottles and bottles, now emptied of alcohol.

*****

FLASH. It was happening again … 

“How was work today Dad?” Pete shuffled his way into the passenger seat, taking off his backpack and nestling it between his feet on the floor. He shut the door as quickly as possible because of the rain. It was coming down hard, in curtains.

“They let me out early,” said Rocco nonchalantly, deciding not to mention that by ‘letting me out’ he meant, ‘I’d been fired.’ But Pete, still navigating the tumultuous early teens, was lost in a landscape dressed with girls, friends, exams, homework and sports. To him, Rocco getting out early seemed as commonplace an answer as ‘good,’ or ‘all right,’.  He didn’t understand the depth of that statement because he was wading in the shallow end of the pool where most of the conversations he’d had with his father resided.

They drove through blankets of suffocating rain. The  lines on the road disappeared in them. It was surprisingly loud, even in the car, where the pelting of the rain on the roof and against the windows made it seem like Pete and Rocco were under attack.

And there was also the undeniable stench of alcohol that made sure to reach Pete’s nose. “You go to the bar again after work, Dad? Geez, you might want to ease up on the booze.” He was now old enough to say things like that and Rocco still hadn’t gotten use to it.

“Just let your ol’ man concentrate and drive, will ya?” That proved easier said than done. No matter how much he tried to concentrate, his mind just wasn’t all there. The technical term was impaired. His hands and arms did things that he didn’t know he was doing and for the life of him he couldn’t drive in a straight line. 

Matters were made worse by lightning strikes flashing all over the place, momentarily blinding him as he drove. There was also a wild wind that detached dead leaves from their trees, causing them to harass anything they clung onto, like the windshield. Pete didn’t understand why his father didn’t have the wipers going. (It was simply because Rocco, in his state, didn’t think to put them on.) So he angrily flipped them on for him.

All this calamity resulted in a very confused and disoriented Rocco who couldn’t make sense of the violent environment overwhelming him. I would have stood a better chance if I weren’t so damn drunk was something he didn’t want to admit, although partly because he was too drunk to think that.

Suddenly, CRASH. The sound of crunching metal, shattering glass, screeching noises and the car horn blasting a perpetual death song. But before all these sounds which have come to haunt Rocco just as much as the images have, there was Pete yelling at the top of his lungs: “DAD, WATCH OUT!”

Then, black.

*****

The weather report continued to play in the mirror, and the urgency in the meteorologist’s voice that brought Rocco back. It was that and it was his two-sided face, one beguiling the other. It was the empty Vicodin bottle in the tub. It was the beer bottles that became parasites to his life, his livelihood.

It was the figure of his dead son, pale, gray and angry that looked back at him in the mirror. His face was sliced up from flying through the windshield that fateful night. His rain-soaked hair was and plastered down. Rocco jumped at the sight of that, his heart jumping ten feet out of his chest, his mouth suddenly running dry. He quickly looked back to see if his son were truly behind him.

No. And he didn’t know if that made things worse. He was losing his mind.

He needed an escape, fast. Rain pumped adrenaline in him and while guilt was mounting, he couldn’t handle it. He genuinely needed an escape and in the only way he knew how.

Rocco darted out of his bathroom and rushed to his fridge. But it was empty of beer. He checked the cabinet above the fridge. No vodka, rum, or whiskey. He had finished them all before crashing on his couch.

A panic rose up in his chest and his eyes were wild with desperation. Forgoing his jacket, he went straight for his car keys and to the front door.

On the glass panel framed in his front door, he caught a last minute reflection of his face. It stopped him for a moment, but the proceeded anyway —

Just to be stopped again by a second reflection, one that was further away. It was smaller but crystal clear nonetheless: the figure of his son; he was shaking his head left and right while looking at him straight in the eye.

“I can’t. I have to—” cried Rocco… as he grabbed for the door knob.