014 - How Constant Self Help Can Harm Creativity

Self-Helping Yourself with Allegory  🐾 With excerpt of novel in progress, Claw 🐾

We're pushing lots of buttons. We're clicking and liking and commenting. We're beeping and booping, scrolling and scheduling. We're drinking from a fire hose of advice, opinions and external standards for how we should live our lives. Where's it all getting us?

Welcome to episode 14. This might be the most vulnerable episode yet of Actual People. Today's episode is a monologue that discusses an over reliance on self help patter for facing our personal challenges and considers the value of rich metaphor and letting things lie in order to find clarity.

Host Chauncey Zalkin ends by sharing a draft of her allegorical novel in progress called "Claw" which starts around the 23 minute mark.  Listen if you dare.

Topics:

• Writer's Block and Deep Work
• Efforting and Letting Go
• Advice Bros
• Metaphor
• Self Help as Distraction
• Her favorite self help book ever with her own interpretation of the tool it offers.

Written, directed, and executive produced by Chauncey Zalkin. Intro/Outro sound engineered by Eric Aaron. Photography by Alonza Mitchell with Design Consulting by Paper + Screen.

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Transcript

  Welcome to Actual People, a podcast hosted by me, Chauncey Zulkin, dedicated to meaningful conversations about the evolving landscape of our lives and the power of our own creativity and imagination to make magic. 

  Hey there, I'm so glad you're back for another episode or if this is your first episode, welcome. I have to be honest in recording this,  I've had a bit of writer's block.  I feel like I'm  spinning around in circles, unable to grasp what I'm talking about.  I'm like, what is it that I'm actually trying to say here?   It's funny because  I've been reading the book Deep Work. By Cal Newport. Which  I  recommend, you know, I thought, okay, the whole point of the book is in the title. Why do I have to read this book? Because it's true of many self-help books, that the entire thing is right there in the title. You don't really have to read it.. On occasion a book will come along where there's enough depth and perspective to actually warrant the time it takes to read the book and deep work is like that. But ironically  I am unable to get into the zone. And focus.  I have a therapist, and my therapist used this word I had never heard in this form before she told me that I keep efforting.. She said you keep efforting and efforting and efforting and efforting. And she suggested that I just kind of stop. And she didn't mean stop this podcast because this is the bright spot but she meant as far as business development ,going after clients and creating streams of income, that banging said head against wall might not be the best way forward. And that maybe I should just stop, stop everything. And take a moment  That in and of itself has been a very difficult directive to take on board. At the same time I have been trying it.  Beginning with last Friday,  after I dropped off my kids.  I went to the movie theater. I went to go see The Fall Guy, and I'm sitting in the movie theater. It was one of those brand new movie theaters,  reclining seats. And I started to hear that the audio was slightly muffled and I felt uncomfortable because the audio was muffled and I left  this chair and I went out to the lobby. And I told them, I said, you know, the audio is just a little off.  And then I went back.  I tried sitting in another seat. And I was able to finally enjoy the movie once I accepted the fact that the audio was not perfect. It was a fun movie and it was what I needed, which was to completely relax. But it was very hard to do. It was very hard to not feel bothered by the fact that the audio was not crystal clear. Nobody else in the theater noticed or if they did nobody got up, like I did, twice, to ask about it.

 Another day I tried to just. sit around and kind of do nothing. I was exhausted. I had not slept very well and I thought, okay. I'm going to watch a TV show in broad daylight. The idea of sitting in the middle of a weekday, watching a TV show  when I wasn't sick  was just unfathomable to me.  It was like deciding to do hard drugs. Like, I'm just going to sit there and watch a TV show.  And I had to tell myself you're going to rest. You're going to watch a show. , and you're not a derelict person. If you do it. So I started to watch the TV show and I kept getting up and doing things. And later in the day I reported, oh, today. I just sat around and did nothing. and watch TV. And then I realized, no, that's not true. at all. 

I tried to sit around and do nothing, and I ended up cleaning the house, sending an hour or two of email. going to the gym, going to the grocery store  and obviously picking up my kids from school and bringing them home and cleaning up messes and dealing with the four pets that I have, but because I wasn't working  on my computer staring at a screen from the time I opened my eyes, until the time I picked up my kids, I felt like I hadn't done something. It's very hard to unwind. 

And we all know that technology in this go go go. Culture is one of the biggest culprits. And that we're addicted to the dopamine hits the pushing of buttons. I think we're coming to the realization that a lot of what we've been doing might be slightly pointless. All the clicking, all the sharing. All the commenting on the life hacks. What has it given us? 

What has it brought us?  Maybe all of this is not as effective as we thought it was. In any case, we’re reaching some kind of a tipping point.  I took social media off my phone, all but TikTok, which I rarely click on. But last night I couldn't sleep. And I was reading an article which took me to TikTok where I discovered a woman crying because she was in her thirties and she was so lonely and she was so tired of dating apps and just being alone that she had a breakdown and it was very poignant. And. she was breaking down because of her inability to connect. 

It's very difficult to completely unwind the cord that has been wrapped around us since we all got smartphones.  We think we're finding a shorter distance between ourselves and other people, but really finding ourselves very far away. And so back to this efforting, efforting, efforting, it's a bit of a self-punishment.  You're feeling like you need to push all the little buttons  that   pop up and react to everything.  So this last few weeks was about me taking my foot off the gas a little bit and realizing that the world would not implode if I didn't keep efforting. And I'm not religious but the phrase that kept popping  into my mind is Let Go and Let God.  Let the universe do things, But the more I try to relax and read things like Deep Work, the more I felt pressure. More pressure. 

So now I've doubled down on the relaxing, which means going to the pool, swimming, almost every single day,  sitting on the curb, outside my house, watching my kids play baseball with a tennis racket and a tennis ball with bases in the middle of the cul-de-sac.  

I'm trying not to stay on LinkedIn half the day. I was all on LinkedIn's jock for almost a year writing content. I created a newsletter, commented on things, added people, had networking meetings And it all added up to basically nothing at all, and the things that I read on there for the most part, they don't feel authentic. There's a lot of people I respect and admire that spend a lot of time on LinkedIn but there is also a lot of preening and showboating.  

The word authentic itself doesn't feel authentic anymore.  

We're just drowning in advice. You can read a million self-help books and not be any more enlightened than you were when you started. Just more burnt out. Maybe you'll have one or two new tools in your arsenal that are really effective for you but at the end of the day, you really have to do your own work. 

Let me tell you a story. So there was a period in my life where I made the tough decision to leave my husband and that decision meant I had to leave Brooklyn Also eventually my business from a Friday to a Monday, I was living near my mother in coastal South Carolina with my two toddlers who had just started to walk. I was really still in the thick of it. I was still nursing. and everything was suddenly just upended for me. After having my own company that was thriving in New York, a company where I felt the most autonomous and  was the most profitable of any endeavor that I set out to do., my ex-husband had been my partner in the business.  We did very different things within that business. But it just  was too difficult to keep the business going. I just couldn't sustain it away from New York. 

My mother, wasn't going to be able to be as helpful as some parents could be. I couldn't travel very much.  Money wasn't endless. I was now a parent and I had these two beautiful little babies that I had to care for. So it just made sense that I take a step back and take a job and get a regular income and just take a moment.  I saw a bunch of listings for this ad agency that was within an hour of where I lived.  In quick succession, I applied, had an interview and was offered a job.  The speed in which I found myself with a job offer surprised me.  I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I wanted to even be doing this, but the way it came to me so easily made me feel even more certain that this was what I had to do. Maybe it would be good for me to go back to agency life and check back in with what the newest best practices were. It was a digital agency and I hadn't really worked in an agency that called itself a digital agency so it wouldn't hurt in terms of any future business I was going to take on, right?  But just a couple of years before that I'd been living in Europe, and I'd lived in New York almost 20 years on and off. I'd never lived in a place like this. I'd also finally broken free from corporate life and nine to five jobs and agency life and I had my own business, and so to find myself suddenly living in this small Southern coastal town in this  cottage near the marsh, it was a really big change.

When I first got down there, I wasn't expecting to stay there. I was living in my mother's house and I felt, even though our relationship was really problematic, it was a really nice roof over my head. And I thought, okay, this is okay for a minute. But then I had to get out and I rented a beautiful little cottage in town. And I made a friend. And when those six months were up, I went back to my mother's house thinking, okay, now I need to plan to get back up north. But then I realized I wasn't going to go back to New York anytime soon. 

It was just too much. So I thought I'd rent a house again. But that proved to be difficult. So then I ended up buying a house.  So now I'm in this white clapboard cottage  a couple of blocks from the marsh. I'm living in the deep south and I have this big live oak in my backyard with all of that stereotypical beautiful Spanish Moss dripping off of it.  The light filters through it in the early morning as the sun is rising and we have all these Camellia trees and they would be in bloom in all these different colors of pink in my backyard. So there was this romantic part of it and I thought this is a phase of my life. I should just embrace it.  It was really a departure from anything I'd ever seen and in that way, it was exciting for a while. And when I got the job, I felt like I had been transported into a completely different life altogether. 

I'd have to leave by 6:45 in the morning so I'd be up at the crack of dawn and I’d get my toddlers ready. When I went outside to get in the car, I could smell that sort of loamy smell of the marsh. I would buckle them both in and I would drive 15 minutes over those long, low country bridges. The same ones that were made popular in movies, like Prince of Tides and The Notebook. And there was this little daycare / Reggio school, a progressive child-led education. And they had ducks and rabbits. And I would drop them off on this one little island. And then I would drive another 40 minutes to the agency.. The agency was tucked on a little side road near the base of the bridge to Hilton Head Island. When I got the job, they said the hours would be nine to six but I couldn't do that. I had to leave by five in order to get my kids  before the school closed. And they said, well then fine. You have to come in at eight. in the morning. And I had to do it. So my girls were often the first ones at the daycare and the last ones to leave.  When I got to the office, all the lights would still be out. and I would be the one to turn them on and I'd go into my office and eventually I came to take that time to meditate for 20 minutes to steal myself. for a day that I came to actually dread. 

And then I would drive home at the end of the day, pick up my girls, take them home, cook for them, play with them, bathe them, put them to bed - and then do it all over again the next day. 

I don't think I really have to point out that this was all going on during a monumentally difficult time in my life. I was a new mother going through all of this. The commute was the only time I had to myself.  It was a beautiful drive but the coastline curved so there were large swaths of time where the sun would be shining directly into my eyes in both directions.  I would be coming into work as the sun was rising and I would be leaving as the sun was setting. 

I took the time to listen to podcasts. Again, this was the beginning of 2017 and the only podcast I had really listened to before was “Serial”, that incredibly popular spinoff to “This American Life”. The podcasts at the time that were the most popular, other than true crime was “The Tim Ferriss Show”, who had written “The Four Hour Work Week”, and Louis Howes’ “School of Greatness”. These were your average ‘self-improvement bro’ podcasts. They would interview self-help gurus and experts of all kinds with varying degrees of legitimacy. 

Though these podcasts are still around and probably still popular, at the time it was still new for men to engage in these kinds of conversations. It was part of the movement of more kindness and empathy and self-awareness in male culture. All the ads on these podcasts were for adaptogenic mushroom teas and biohacking supplements. 

Did you know that there were 45,300 new self-help books published in 2020? Of course, that was quite a year for self-improvement, but the market size of self-improvement products and services is expected to be worth around $460.7 billion by 2032. Previous to this time period, I never really. read self-help books, but I did find some creeping into my life. And I'll tell you my favorite one, arguably has the cheesiest name of any of them, and it's called “Loving What Is”, by Byron Katie. 

A woman who, by her own account was absolutely miserable, mean and nasty and had the worst of the worst self-talk going through her head that you can imagine one day she literally woke up and realized that it was her beliefs themselves that were causing her misery. She detached her beliefs from herself and looked at them objectively. And she gives us a really easy to digest framework  that people can use to interrogate their own beliefs. 

These are four questions and something should calls a ‘turnaround’. I might be simplifying a little bit, but here's the gist: 1, is it true? The belief that you're having. 2, can you absolutely know it's true. This is where it starts to break down.  Number 3, What happens when you believe that thought, like what happens in your body, in your mind? How does it feel to have that thought, and then 4, who would you be without that thought?  And you sort of imagine what it would be like if I didn't feel like this, like in your body, would you feel more relaxed? Would you feel better?  

But the real magic in this is the turnaround. So, here's an example,  let's say you have the thought, “My boss doesn't like me” and then so you question it: “Is it true that my boss doesn't like me?”  Then number 2, you say, “How do I know it’s true?” You look at that so-called proof and you start to unpack it and think, well, that's not really proof. You know your belief starts to break down. So then you ask yourself, “how does it feel to feel like my boss doesn't like me?” Of course it feels terrible. It's a horrible feeling. It's making it hard for me to work. You feel bad about yourself. And then you ask yourself, “Well, who would you be without this thought?”  And then obviously it all opens up and you feel, oh my God, I feel so much better. So why am I holding on to this thought, but the real magic comes in what she called the turnaround which is well, instead of the assertion, “My boss doesn't like me,” try the statement, “I don't like my boss.” Does that ring true? Maybe you're the one who doesn't like your boss. Maybe it's a projection. And then try out, “Maybe my boss doesn't like my boss.”  Maybe he's projecting stuff onto me and he's acting out his own pain and wounds. Look at that. Examine the evidence. 

And then think about maybe “I don't like me”. Maybe I'm projecting this whole thing onto myself. And assuming he doesn't like me and play with that. And just so much stuff comes out of that. So that's an example of a super useful tool.  It's a good framework for getting unstuck. It's very edifying and it's very actionable.

It's something you can understand in two seconds. But we spend a lot of time reading what we already know and already have grasped.  But we bathe in the advice. We get a little addicted to it. Then the advice. We get a little addicted to it. 

So I was getting a little bit addicted to these podcasts. I was definitely fragile and I needed something like a friend that could be there on this commute. I was in a military town. I don't get along that well with my mother  so I listened to these guys and I started to listen to Sam Harris, who was an atheist who thinks we don't have free will. I had to look that up. See? I don't actually remember what Sam Harris thinks and I listened to this guy for almost a year. And that's the point? This is six years ago. I don't know if any of these things made any sort of difference in my life whatsoever.  They might've, but nothing really tangible or lasting, but what does make a really tangible difference in my life came from the negative experience that was going on underneath the surface of these long commutes, listening to podcasts over these in long stretches of flat marshland these podcasts were the slightly soothing back rub in a horrible time. It was a horrible time, not just because of my divorce. But because of the detritus that I picked up after my divorce.

I found myself in this rebound relationship and I was just delighted. What incredible luck. What are the chances that I would meet someone in a place like this?  A small sleepy town in the picturesque deep south.. My friend likened the story to a Diane Lane movie. She was like, oh, you're in this Diane Lane movie. You meet him at the farmer's market which is how we started talking. He was ostensibly a single dad and I was a single mom. 

Our kids were in the same class together. He was 10 years younger than me, but very handsome. And I totally played into this narrative. of this Diane Lane movie. Other than my divorce around this time in my life, things had been going pretty swimmingly for me.  So, okay. I'm going to Diane Lane. Era, and I meet a cute guy in the farmers market and the deep south, after a divorce, that sounds like a good story to tell myself but what seemed like  fortuitous serendipity was anything, but. That little Lark became a quite serious and absolutely terrible relationship. I couldn't really make sense of what was happening at the time. It's kind of like that boiling a frog alive scenario, you know, where you put the frog  in the cool water and you start to boil it slowly and it doesn't even notice it's being killed because the temperature is rising so slowly  it doesn't jump out of the water. That was kind of what I was doing.  I was embroiled in such strong feelings that now seemed completely ridiculous. Because the emotions are long evaporated, so I can see it for what it was, but those bad experiences, those traumas, if you do the work and let yourself process it and sit with it, you usually come out clearer or more evolved somehow I was living  right next to where the Marines did their first training near Parris Island. And so there was a lot of bumper stickers that said  “pain is weakness leaving the body.” And say what you will about what the connotations of that and the toxic masculinity associated with it but it really resonated with me. I felt like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. 

In an earlier podcast with Dr. Joyriel she questions if this is strength or just building walls around ourselves from trauma, I think it's both, but you do learn from pain. The self-help books offer tools, but they can't penetrate the way our own experience can. And one way to process experience is through. Good storytelling.  It's those powerful metaphors, those allegories where insights bubble up from our own experience and rise to the surface to heal us.

The first stories we get, we get as children. They help us to understand our world and understand good from evil, right from wrong.  These are necessarily flat characters. They have neat edges to them because that is what our brain can handle. And they also work in a binary. As life goes on. We moved towards stories where the characters are more complex. There is more nuance. More context -and that's where the richness of metaphor really begins. And it's something that's very hard to encapsulate in advice writing. A book called the “5AM Club” is a good example. The author really tries to use storytelling to make a point but the characters are so flat and so clichéd that it comes across as silly, I would say even unreadable-  but in immersive fiction,there's a space inside of it, a kind of magic that defies rational thought which really helps you process complex emotions and complex experiences. 

A good guy might be rough around the edges. Like Tony Soprano in “The Sopranos”. He was a killer. He was a mob boss. But he was also loyal to his family.  You understood that it was childhood trauma. There were complex social norms. There was toxic masculinity. There were cultural expectations in his community. These aren't excuses, but they give texture to a character. People have an easier time absorbing these contradictions and complexities when they're painted  in the world of extremes. On the other end of the spectrum, you have authors like Raymond Carver who pull the extraordinary out of the ordinary.

As we wade through these gray areas in our life, literature and storytelling can really help us process these big emotional experiences, the ones that feel unfair or don't seem to make any sense. The ones that make you ask, how did I get here?  Did you ever notice that those big emotional experiences, once you process them, they seem to take on a palpable life of their own? and they're stored somewhere far away, but you might be walking down the street one day and they'll catch a scent in the air and that whole period of your life will come rushing back to you in that moment and that period will have a shape and a color. it'll have form. It will be palpable. It just sort of stops you in your tracks. 

It becomes a story.  

So I started to draft a novel several years ago, trying to make sense of this terrible person that I had gotten involved with and what it all meant while I was still being boiled as the frog - but as time goes by, as does happen, I became less and less emotionally charged over the subject matter as it faded into the rear view. At the same time, I began to develop new ways of understanding that horror movie feeling that I had while I was going through this ordeal. And I came up with a story called Claw. And it's about this creature, that on the outside is very handsome, smooth skin, good bone structure but just underneath the surface lurks a monster. As the story starts out, a lot of disorienting things start to happen which is the truth of the feeling of the story that I lived. I was  physically uprooted, displaced.  

The metaphor is more true to the experience than any simple recounting of facts. 

I thought I would just read a little bit of it to you:

When I got back to the Target  parking lot, my car wouldn't start. I was going to be late to work and I was already on thin ice. I looked around and saw two decently put together, people walk into a store. Either of them would probably have given me a ride and not dumped my body in a ditch. But I couldn't bring myself to approach them.  If I got a ride, I'd have to make small talk and force a friendliness that would exacerbate my ever-present awareness that I'm just not friendly. Not these days. And I have to be careful not to see any of the off, putting things about South Carolina that constantly circled my mind. I did not want to have to ask anyone for anything. Any interaction with strangers made me feel worse because people seemed genuinely happy to be here. Even worked hard to get here. 

It was as if I was ordered to this low country golfing enclave as a punishment. And I was resentful of my captors, but I had no captors. I came here entirely on my own to escape a marriage. I was looking for respite at the very least.

So, no, I wasn't going to ask these people for a ride to work. So I began to walk the three miles. I walked on the south side of the street across the road was a horse farm, a golf course, plenty of manicured Greenway than just marsh.  I crossed the street to at least be on the side with a pretty land. I usually only got to see from my car.   It rained the night before and wet leaves squelched under foot, and it looked like another rain was coming. The clouds moved from clusters to a thin veil with a ripples resting belly down over top of me. ..., it looked like I was under the sea. The horses moved to the far side of the pasture, waiting for the first drops.  My feet started to hurt on the hard pavement. Sweat percolated on my forehead. There was a stickiness to my thighs and the denim that swooshed as I walked.  A block went on for what seemed like ages. 

Even when I could see the next corner, it still felt like there were at least two more New York blocks to go. As I got closer , I saw that there was a man standing there lingering and glancing back at me.  I thought, well,  he's not going to rob me because he's wearing this crisp lemon yellow Izod  which doesn't go well with robbing people. But surely he's going to try to get me to join his church. Why he'd be standing where there was almost no foot traffic was beyond me. But such as the way of the Lord, I guess. 

Now I'm standing on the corner with my back to him and he says:

“Excuse me?”

I didn't budge. I waited for the light to change and the wind picked up. 

“Nice break from the heat this morning”, he said. 

I continued to say nothing.  

“Nice break”, he repeated. 

“Yeah,” I mumbled. The light turned. And I said “bye” with a little wave and started to walk. He started walking too. When I feel scared, I usually get angry. So I was kind of puffing myself up to get this guy off my back and show him  I was not going to play around or be meek, but then he said my name. 

“Alicia”.  

That's when I whipped around to see he was gone. 

He disappeared into thin air. My heart started to pound. I looked in the bushes across the street, around the corner.  And I went over what he looked like in my mind, I held onto the image of this lemon, yellow Izod, and I thought about the whole look and suddenly it seemed like it was a disguise of some sort.  Alicia, I could hear the voice echoing in my head. I crossed back to the other side of the street where the outlets and the gas station were. Maybe I imagined him saying my name. Maybe I just made him up entirely. I was tired. I was not getting much sleep. I tried to shrug the whole thing off and I walked into the gas station to get water but when the door closed behind me, the first thing I saw was that yellow shirt. There he was at the counter putting his wallet into his back pocket.  I went and hid in the snack aisle to try and get a good look at him. He had taut calves and point angles. Like. He had an athletic  build. I walked toward the door, keeping my eyes on him, but just as I felt for the handle, he turned and saw me. 

“Alicia!”

Upon hearing my name again, my heart froze. He just walked casually in front of me, biting into an energy bar with a gotcha expression. And I knew I was holding my jaw in this tense position. I found myself doing that lately like I was holding still for a dental x-ray with a bulky film, digging into my cheek. I was used to enduring a certain level of discomfort.  

“Do I know you?” 

I felt like he was leading me into a false reality where we did know one another, but we did not know one another and I wasn't going to be tricked. That was my attitude and I could feel my hands making fists. 

He laughed and said my name again like I was a silly child in need of correcting. And he pushed a lock of hair away from his face. I noticed his clear complexion and almost wrinkle-free skin. He had that face of someone who had just had everything going for him, his whole life. Like he'd won the golden ticket at birth and knew he was in the clear was all going to be okay for him no matter what he did.  I guess they call that white male privilege, but it's something more, it's utter and complete shelter from any struggle outside the self. But the self can be a mighty thing.  

He was carrying a bag and he opened the bag  and he pulled out a windbreaker and he put it on. I recognized the windbreaker immediately as I had the exact same one. He put his arms through the holes carefully and deliberately and I realized I was being lulled into waiting for something, like that big x-ray machine, to flash bright in my eyes. I was holding my jaw again in that awkward position. And I, I sort of snapped to have to go. 

“I just want to ask you one thing,” he said. 

“What's that?” I crossed my arms. I have a way of being overly familiar with strangers and I know that. I think it's all my years living in New York where I had conversations with people at lunch counters, clothing stores, bars, the subway platform. 

“Did you see the security light go on outside your house last night?” he asked.  

I had indeed seen the security light go on outside of my house. In fact, I woke up and retraced my steps throughout my window filled home wondering if my movements from one of the windows had caught me at an angle from the motion sensor and found nothing. I checked the doors and went to sleep with my phone, , getting lost in the phones, jagged flow of images and words that exacerbated my constant sense of floating. This man is trying to scare me. I thought. 

“I'm calling the police,” I said, 

“No, calm down, calm down. It's Jonathan, by the way.” He stuck out his hand for me to shake it.  

“How would you know that my security light went off?”  

He looked accused. “I don't know why you're pretending you don't know me.”

I went to open my mouth. I didn't know what I was going to even say. And he said, “come on.” 

And I could never, to this day, explain why I followed him.Before I knew it I was sitting across from him  at the Starbucks across the way, looking out the window, watching a cement truck roll by. Jonathan started to talk to me about the music on the radio when we heard a loud screech. We looked up to see a car veering off the road, rolling into a ditch on the far side,  we ran across the road into the median, waiting for the traffic to clear. Nobody else came out with us, but the smoke was billowing.  Jonathan just lit a cigarette and looked both ways, he seemed to be noticing me, noticing him, but not making any movement to cross to the other side of the street where the car was. I made a move and then he followed me. We ran across and down the embankment where the car's tires were facing up and still rolling slowly. You could see all the grid work of the overturned car. The driver was stuck behind the wheel, but very much alive. He looked dazed and he looked terrified. 

I started to yank on the door to open it  Jonathan stood next to me, smoking, watching my efforts before bending down next to me, nonchalantly with a cigarette it's still stuck in his mouth as he pulled the door a little bit before taking a step back and  letting me do the work of helping the  man out of the car, the car started to edge his way out and we helped him to his feet. But his legs were shaking so badly. He collapsed. We saw that there was an old wheelbarrow down by the water. I pulled it over towards him and we hosted him onto it and rolled him away from the filtering smoke. The guy was still moaning. I held his hand and I dialed 911 and reported the accident. Jonathan walked away toward the trees while I did this  and then he motioned for me to come.  I let go of that man's hand and I went.  He pointed to a smooth rock where we could sit down . He sat and made room for me. He returned to a story again about the song we had been listening to in the Starbucks and seeing that band perform live. The lyrics went “Called to the devil and the devil did come. I said to the devil devil, do you like drums? Do you like cigarettes? Dominos and rum…” He drummed on his leg.  And then he stopped and rested his wrists  on the knees of his jeans with his hands hanging down.Then I saw him clutch at his sleeve and pull the sleeve over his hand. Something wiggled under his sleeve. I pretended to tie my shoe and looked over to see what it was. I noticed a talon peeking out a sharp raptor kind of tapping at his shinbone. I sat up quickly and all the blood rushed from my head but he was just looking up at the tree and finishing the last drag of his cigarette. I asked him about the band again to just keep the conversation going. My heart was pounding into my throat at this point. 

“Are you from South Carolina?" I asked.  

“Yep.” He breathed smoke into the leaves above us. 

I realized that he was attractive, but only from certain angles. From some angles he was perfect, chiseled, almost uncannily, good looking. But from other angles, he was almost grotesque. He had large sparkling teeth, a pronounced Roman nose, almost like the gag kind that are attached to  eyebrows and black glasses. 

There were two ways of viewing him, slimy lurker or a young Matt Dylan. I was watching both as they morphed to and fro like a hologram as you circle it. Just then an ambulance pulled up and two men with round Southern bellies got out and asked for us to point them to the driver. We walked them down to the edge of the marsh where we had propped the wheelbarrow against a rock. But the wheelbarrow, when we got down there, it was empty. 

The man was gone. I realized we had just left a man who got in a car accident alone. I glanced over at Jonathan and saw the raptor lying inert against his jeans. He looked at me and pulled it back up into his sleeve. The two men ran down the embankment to the car and we followed  then they stopped.  To see an alligator slithering back into the water. Oh my God. 

I thought I would pass out. I lowered myself to the grass and the men radioed for help, which we all knew was too late. They got on their knees and began feeling around in the mud for the body.  Jonathan pursed his lips in resignation, but didn't move a muscle. He had one hand on his hip and gazed blankly into that water. I could hear his breathing slow and measured. 

His yellow Izod was as crisp as ever as I watched his chest go up and down. We did what we could. He said, and I stood there feeling the need to get close to him. Like a magnetic curiosity and desire to unsee his deformity and see more of the him that I liked. I kept my eyes on his and I didn't look down at the water. If I just focused on his face and head, I wouldn't have to think about the alligator slithering away after his meal. It would make no sense at this point to have a normal conversation. 

So we didn't. I looked into his face, desperate for remorse, regret, the horror of what we just saw, but I found nothing, not delight or glee or satisfaction, not apathy. If anything, just acceptance. People die. 

People slither away into the marsh in the jaws of an alligator and die. He walked up the hill and he waited for me. He looked behind us at the EMT on the radios, khaki pant legs covered in mud, not a ripple in the water. 

Two police cars came roaring down the road and pulled off into the grass, dust flying. The traffic was slow now. Rush hour was over. A patch of daffodils peeked out from the side of the road. We walked back into the Starbucks and the air conditioning was cold. The sharpness hit me. I forgot what was going on around me. And I felt light, almost happy just to have someone to talk to. We ordered at the counter.

I was playing a role now with him. It reminded me of how I used to stop at red lights and look into the car next to mine. Whoever was in there. I would imagine myself in there in that life with them. Right now, I was with this man in his yellow shirt. It was like I was in a car full of frat boys on a road trip to a concert, hats backwards, the misogynist jokes flying. Someone would say something surprisingly sensitive and vulnerable and then covered up with a joke or a laugh that re-introduced casual brutality. They trade fantasy football picks. I could imagine Jonathan in that car brimming with nervous energy, revving up to play his role and not be seen for who he was: a monster.  

You know if something vibrates and that vibration is strong, rapid and disorienting, you can't really see the thing clearly.  People add blur to their social media pictures to distort features to look smoother and erase blemishes. What I was, was in a deep harmonious blur.  

We sat down. 

He mumbled something about his izod being too crisp, too new, almost reading my mind. He pointed out the folds and the fabric running across his torso, said it was a gift from his mother. This flash of self-awareness was disarming . Likable in fact. I started to feel guilty about my judgment. 

Both of his hands were tucked under the table now.  I was reimagining his hand as a disability. Maybe he was born with a birth defect. 

He started telling me a story wide-eyed and blushing. While he's telling the story, a man walked in, he walked right up to Jonathan and whispered something in his ear. Under his jacket, I saw a gun. It was a cop. He pointed to the EMT guys from the accident standing outside. They wanted him to go out and give his account. Jonathan stood up and straightened his pants. His eyes were stony, but his limbs were jumpy and floppy as he walked outside. He suddenly had the look of an outlaw. 

Is this what malice looks like?

 Something was brimming in his eyes, duplicity, deception, double lives, all the d’s, the devil.  

Through the window. I saw him play with his hair, moving it around to cover up his forehead. His other hand remained hidden with an outline, the shape of a  scythe in his pocket. I was staring at him both attracted and disgusted, repelled and compelled. While I sat there, everything outside started to dim into a bruised purple. Like Twilight, but also like someone had dimmed a light on a computer screen. The only thing that wasn't dim was him and his pocket. His pocket glowed. The cops looked down and saw the glow and he noticed that they saw it and he looked in the window at me. I felt like I needed to protect him. 

And I started to get up to go outside.  I was gathering my things when there was  a sharp bang against the glass. They had him pushed, flush against the glass.  He looked me directly in the eyes and his mouth open. Blackness was swirling inside and a single tendril of smoke drifted up. His eyes were bulging and frozen.

One of the cops had an arm around his waist and reached into his pocket and pulled out his hand, which was now a bloody dripping stump. No claw. He smiled almost like a wince, but with perceptible joy in his face as he'd fooled them. He'd remove the claw, even though it cost him what would have been a fatal hemorrhage had he been human. I was alone in the Starbucks now everybody had left dispersing into the parking lot in horror. Some leaving in the car, some staying and watching  from the outer edges of the strip mall. He was looking into my eyes and breathing slowly unblinking. 

He mouthed the words. I know you. I pushed my chair back, screeching along the wood floor. I felt  invisible tentacles  linking us, drowning me somehow, but lifting this man up. 

His mouth was still open and gaping, the black smoke rising in wisps. And I realized his lips were not moving, but yet he was definitely speaking to me.  

The cop found me on the ground, keeled over with throbbing pain in my eyes. She pulled up a chair and helped me onto it. It was just her and I now in the Starbucks. She was thick and solid wrapped in her heavy navy uniform. Her gun shown in her holster and her leather belt was cracked and stretched against the  fabric. She handed me, eye wash and said, come on. She took me into the bathroom, put this in your eyes. I was lightheaded , and definitely anxious, but I just followed her instructions. 

I washed out each eye. And she handed me a paper towel and took me by the arm out the back door. I sat down on a bench  the sun was bright. The clouds were gone now and she brought me water and sat down next to me.   She was disarmingly kind, which didn't match her authoritative look, you're going to be okay. Where is he? 

I asked. She shook her head with an expression that looked like pity. 

“He's gone.”  

My stomach dropped. “What's going to become of him?”

“I don't know. They'll keep him overnight and then release him probably. They don't have anything to he keep him on.” 

“How do you know is gone”? 

She got up and said, come with me. We walked along the back of the outlet stores, a couple of H&M employees walked by pulling a wagon full of hang tags. There was a bus boy from Wings Palace standing against the stucco and smoking. We   stopped at a store room door. She unlocked the door and held it open for me and she said, “last chance, are you sure you want to see him?” I nodded. 

Inside there was a long table facing the door and at the table sat three or four groups of people, all detainees of some kind of crime, probably shoplifting. He sat in the middle of them all. His hands were cuffed and he leaned slightly forward. I met his eyes and he looked right at me and raised his arms slowly. He had two bloody stumps, dripping blood down his arms, and he smiled a sly smile at me. I went over. Can I talk to you for a minute?  

He slid around on his stool and cleared his throat. “Sure”. His expression didn't change. 

“Did you have anything to do with the accident back there? Did you know that guy?” 

He answered the way liars do. “How would I know that guy?” he said raising his zip ties slightly.

“I don't know. Why are the cops talking to you and why not me?”

“I don't know. Look, why aren't you interrogating me? I don't want to talk about this now or why you don't recognize me. This is upsetting enough.”

“I'm afraid,” I said, 

“That's not my problem,” he replied. 

Just then the door opened with a loud creak and banged shut. The cop that was protecting me, left the room. Now I saw that everyone had left the room and it was just us. 

“I want to get out of here,” I said.

“Well, I can't, but you can. Goodbye then,” he said.

I got up and walked out, leaving him alone in the empty store room. 

Back in the blistering sunlight. I looked at my phone and I couldn't believe it was only 11AM, but still I wasn't at work and hadn't called and that isn't good. The cops stood waiting for me. 

“Your coworkers were here.” 

“I'm not going back to that job.”  

She didn't seem to hear. 

The door slammed shut and out came Jonathan walking toward us with no zip ties. 

The cop looked at him. “You're free to go.” She pointed him down the road one way and turned the other way toward the parking lot and looked at me. “There's your car. Your mom brought it. Just needed a jump. You should go as far away as you can.” 

I nodded and walked to my car through the empty lot in the now blazing sun. Before I could close the door, there he was. “Hi,” he said, leaning into my car. 

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I'm going to keep walking,” he said. He looked down the road like he was trying to see where he might be headed. 

“Okay,” I said, and pulled at the door handle. 

He backed away as I closed the door, but then I rolled down the window.” Take care of yourself.” I put my car in reverse, struck by a strange sensation of desire that I had to use all my power to fight. He knocked on the hood to say goodbye and I pulled out.  

All alone now, I passed the place where the accident happened and decided to pull off. 

I drove  onto the wet grass and stopped and got out and walked down the embankment. The car had been hauled away. I could see a depression in the grass where the alligator dragged the body back into the water. I went over and was staring into   it at a safe distance when I spotted a set of keys from a rental car. I scooped them up. Wondering if they needed them for evidence. Not that there will be a trial against an alligator. We were the negligent ones. As I turned to leave, I saw something else glinting in the grass. Glasses, just the reading kind, but nice ones. 

I put them in my car. I drove down the road a little bit and saw a Holiday Inn. Went to reception. Over the loudspeakers, Pharrell summoned the empty lobby to clap along, if you feel like happiness is the truth as an unsmiling blonde came out from the back. I asked her if they had any rooms and she said, “yes”, and wordlessly checked me in and handed me a key card. I drove around to my room, feeling the slightest lift of freedom in my chest. The bed was inviting with its taut corners and extra pillows, the flat screen over the heavy chest of drawers. I loved it precisely because it wasn't home. I went back outside and pulled a bag out of my trunk. I had my beading suit and a towel with me from the gym. I went to the pool  and jumped in and started to do laps. The air was warm. The pool was only slightly cooler. 

I dove to the bottom and felt around the pool floor. I close my eyes and let bubbles float from my mouth. I could hear my heart. I held my breath as long as I could and then I kicked my way to the surface. I got out and grabbed a towel back inside. Dry, except for my hair, I laid down crossways over the bed and I looked up at the stucco ceiling, and before I knew it I was waking up to the sound of loud knocking on my door. I put on a robe and looked out to see a yellow Izod through the viewfinder. I took a deep breath and before I could think, I opened the door. He came right in, walked past me and collapsed on the bed like he owned the place.  

“Where'd you come from?” I asked. 

“I walked here,” he said, out of breath from the outlets. 

“Yeah.”  I was suddenly feeling very awake. And so I watched him, this stranger with claw hands drift off on my freshly made neutral bed. A human strong man hand now crossing over his chest, the other hand draped over the side of the bed as his head fell to the side. 

I let him be. I turned on the TV, no news on any local station about the accident. I opened my laptop. I sat on the edge of the bed and fell asleep again for a while before getting woken up by a couple arguing outside. The monster was still sleeping, curled up with an arm under his smooth face. I went to the bathroom and ran a bath. After a while I got up dripping from the water and grabbed a plush white towel and held it to my face for what seemed like a long time. When I went into the bedroom, he wasn't there. Neither of us had fallen asleep under the covers and the bedspread was wrinkled into a swirly shape where he'd been, I got dressed in the same clothes I had on all day and opened the door tentatively to see him stooping near the vending machine. He scooped up an energy bar from the bottom. 

I tiptoed out of sight just as he was standing up. I found my car in the parking lot, got in and backed out without looking in his direction. 

I drove for 10 minutes and pulled into a wild wings parking lot. And went into the dark restaurant ring with TV screens and sat at the bar and ordered. While I waited, my phone buzzed with a text, from a phone with no caller ID. It was a picture of a hunk of concrete on the side of the road. I had no idea what it was. Was it from the accident site? It was hard to tell. My wings arrived. The chicken skin was withered, leathery and puckered with feather follicles that were stained orange from hot sauce. I dipped a wing into a cup of ranch and orange dye spidered through the white. I took a bite. A player on the screen wiped sweat from his brow with a small white towel and put his hands on his head and looked up at the sky. 

I finished, paid, and got back in my car.  I drove past houses topped by frowning oaks with sleepy moss fangs, past long low bridges where moonlight reflected on still water, where reeds splayed and choked at murky edges, and where what teamed under the surface  gave no hint  of anything above the waterline. 

I drove until I was out of the low country.  I was driving west cause I wanted to see the mountains before I went Northeast again. The trees rose taller now, more dense and dry, wicking away vagaries in a crisp pine swirl of air.