The Nightmares Come While I'm Awake

Dearest Jane,

I know that you are saving yourself for me, but I understand that you can’t stop others from lying beside you. Once I have the answers, I will join you as that pretender did, asleep and forever beyond the world. Where he had to take a coward’s way, I’ll take a hero’s. They’ll put me there, knowing that it is where I belong.

I’m still on the trail. I started at your memorial, where children wept and women strung together flowers like a wedding garland. They spoke to me in hushed and hurried words, knowing that they needed to tell me, so that there could be justice.

One man refused, and I chased after him when he fled. I tried to talk the truth out of him, like you’d want, but in the end I had to resort to fists and a knee driven into his groin. He admitted to being a police officer, trying to walk the sacred path that I walk. Just as a job. There was a guttering flame of justice in him, a true desire that needed to be nurtured. I let him be, and told him to stay out of my way. He limped back to your memorial, to stand there and pretend like the truth would simply show up and prostrate itself before him.

I know better.

Clues are out there. Not just at the shrine, but in the cynical ramblings of the newspaper, in the songs they dedicate to you on the radio, and in the new rhymes that children call out on the playground. You are woven into the world my dear.

I followed one of the threads to a decrepit house that teenagers used for parties. They were dancing to some god awful version of “I Only Have Eyes For You” and doing drugs. Some of the women wore masks of your face. It was like some sort of sick Mass. I confronted the “priest” at his turntable altar between sets and made him tell me about the songs he was playing, the dance, the masks: everything I needed. Twelve teeth and two broke bones later and I had a name.

I’m getting close. I’m going to visit him tomorrow. I’m sorry I can’t tell you who it is.

Love,
John Stag