I had a bad dream again last night, baby.
Same as I do every night.
I miss you
Monday, January 27, 2014 3:56 p.m.
The call comes over the radio just as I’m getting settled in the patrol car. Criminal Mischief, a fairly common issue, but it’s the location that piques my interest…the Bank of America Plaza. There are many potential outcomes when a bank is involved, and few of them are good.
Officer Lewis is already on scene as I pull up and get my first look at the situation. A Hispanic woman, probably in her early 50’s, has climbed onto the sculpture on display in front of the bank. Nearly two stories high and made of intertwining metal spokes that twist in on itself, it always reminded me of those paintings by M.C. Escher.
The woman has somehow situated herself into the very center of the piece, crying and quietly talking to herself. She seems unaware of either of us as Lewis and I both attempt to talk to her, asking her to climb back out of the sculpture and onto solid ground. Using gentle, coaxing tones or firm commands make no difference, as she completely ignores our presence.
An ankle-deep water fountain surrounds the sculpture, and a silent discussion takes places between Lewis and I as to which of us will wade in and get her out. I wind up drawing the short straw, as it were, and step into the cold water. The wind has been blowing hard all day and I know that the combination of wet shoes, chill January air and strong winds will be a perfect start to my shift.
As I slosh through the water toward her, it actually sounds like two distinct voices speaking and, at first, I assume it is just a trick of the acoustics produced by the wind and splashing fountain. But, as I get within touching distance, the voices become much clearer and it sounds like she’s talking to someone on a cell phone, although I can’t be sure since she is facing away from me.
She has not moved, and there is no indication that she knows I am there, until I reach up and gently take hold of her leg. The moment I touch her, she lets out a shriek and yanks her leg up, then kicks back downward with all of her might. I catch the blow on the side of my face and, while not particularly hard, the sudden violence of it knocks me off balance and I go to my knees, nearly falling backwards into the deeper part of the fountain.
Lewis is there immediately, grasping her around the waist and physically pulling her out of the hole she has wedged herself into. Still screaming, the woman flails her arms and legs, and even jerks her head backwards, trying to head-butt Lewis in the face. I join in the struggle, and the two of us are finally able to subdue her and get her hands in restraints.
At the sound of the cuffs clicking into place, all of the fight leaves her and she again begins to cry and plead with us.
“He’s here!” she says through hitching sobs, “Don’t take me away from him. I finally found him again. I’m not crazy. He is here! Alonso!”
At the station, Lewis and I hand her off to the Booking Sergeant and then head for the shower room to change into dry uniforms. The entire ride in, she had continued to plead with me to take her back to the sculpture, insisting that ‘Alonso’ was there waiting for her. Lewis tells me that this is not the first time he’s encountered the woman responsible for our mutually soggy attire.
For nearly a decade, the woman, Carla Mendez, has been in and out of both jail and Tampa General’s Psychiatric Unit. Lewis was the arresting officer during two of those instances.
Eleven years ago, her husband and teenage son were killed in a hit and run. Since then, she lost her job and her home, and suicide attempts, public intoxication and breakdowns like this morning have become a regular part of her life.
“And, you’re never gonna guess what her son’s name was…” Lewis says as way of a prompt.
But, I don’t have to guess.
“You want to hear something really weird?” I ask, knowing that he will. “Just before I grabbed her leg, I could have sworn I heard two voices talking…like she was having a conversation with someone. And, that other voice I heard was definitely male.”
Lewis jut gives me a “yeah, right” look, slaps me on the back, and tells me to go see the doctor after that kick to the face.
“Wanna make sure she didn’t knock any rocks loose up there.” he jokes, but I don’t laugh. I’m too busy thinking about that other voice I heard, standing in the cold fountain water.
Instead of going to see the physician about my face, I stop by Dr. Breyley’s office, to see about my head.
Dr. Breyley is the Precinct’s Psychiatrist, and his office has been, for the past two years, a place I do not enjoy being. However, as I knock on his door, I find myself actually looking forward to talking with him.
“Tom,” he greets me as I walk in, “I thought our next session wasn’t for another couple weeks?” Although his grip is firm and his smile genuinely pleasant, I can clearly see both confusion and concern in his eyes.
“It is,” I admit, “But I hope you don’t mind my dropping by. Something happened this morning that I wanted to talk about.”
I give him a quick rundown on the morning’s incident with Mrs. Mendez, her sad history, and how I am convinced I had heard another voice speaking to her.
“And, you’re wondering if this has anything to do with Janey?” he asks, knowing the answer.
Janey and I had been together since we were eight years old. At an age when girls hadn’t yet registered as anything more than an annoying peculiarity, Janey was different. She was my best friend. Someone who played as hard as I did. Who liked the same TV shows and laughed at the same jokes. We were both only children and I guess, at first, we filled each other’s need for a sibling or confidante.
But, over the years, those platonic feelings began to change.
Days spent playing war and watching Star Trek, turned into tickle fights and wrestling matches. Happy, open laughter turned to shy, longing looks. Playful pushes into holding hands. Casual quiet time together, leading to nervous touches and, later, passionate embraces.
We married two days before I left for Boot Camp, and weathered my four years in the Army followed by the Police Academy and acceptance into the Tampa Police Department twelve years ago.
All told, from the day we met, we had twenty-four wonderful years together.
Then, she started having trouble sleeping and keeping food down. At first, we thought she was pregnant. We both wanted children, but we’d always figured that, if it was meant to be, it would just happen.
Turns out, she wasn’t pregnant.
She was dying.
Cancer had spread throughout her entire body. With chemotherapy, they told us she might have one, maybe two years, but she had seen the condition chemo had left her mother in years before, and refused to go through the same pain.
She said that she would live what life God offered her with as much respect as she could muster.
And, for seven months, she did.
Dr. Breyley is still waiting for me to answer his question, so I reply with a question of my own.
“What do you think the dream I keep having really means?”
He looks at me and I know he wants to give me the standard Psychologist response of asking me to answer my own question.
But, he surprises me.
“I think it means you miss your wife.” he explains. “I also think it means that, subconsciously, you still refuse to accept that she is gone. You’ve told me that, in your dream, you see her run into a room and close the door and, no matter how hard you try, you cannot open that door even though you can hear her on the other side, pounding and calling to you.”
“To me, this represents your belief that you didn’t do all you could to save her,” he continues. “Your career has been about helping people, and yet you felt helpless in the face of her disease. You feel that you could not save the one person who meant the most to you.”
I haven’t cried in months, but I realize my face is wet.
“So, if you are asking me, do I believe that what you heard this morning was a conversation between a woman and her dead son?” he asks, handing me a box of tissues, “Then, my answer is no. What you heard was probably her own voice distorted by the situation or by the wind. I think that, what you should be more concerned with is how you are going to come to terms with what has happened, and how you are going to get on living your life and accepting that you did everything you could do for her.”
“You had many years together, more than most in today’s divorce-obsessed society,” he says, “I don’t think she would want you to spend any more of them hiding from life. Each day of life is a blessing. From what you’ve told me, Janey understood just how important life is to the living. I imagine she would want you to see it the same way as she did.”
I sit for a moment before I can speak, then I wipe my eyes and drop the tissue in the trash as I stand and walk to the door.
I had planned to leave without speaking, but, as I open the door, I turn back to him.
“I understand what you’re saying, but, I have to disagree with one thing,” I say “You told me you think life is important to the living?”
He nods and gives me a serene expression of encouragement.
“Well, I don’t mean to be a smartass,” I continue “but, don’t you think it means even more to the dead?”
Tuesday, February 04, 2014 9:10 a.m.
A cell phone was not one of the items accounted for when Mrs. Mendez was booked in, so, as soon as I got off shift that day, I returned to the Plaza to see if I could find it. I looked in the fountain and the surrounding area, and spoke with staff from the bank, but no phone had been found.
For the past week, I have spent my spare time reviewing Carla Mendez’s file and researching what I can on the sculpture.
According to her file, Carla Mendez’s husband Roman and son Alonso where struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver in a crosswalk as they were returning home late at night after working an extended shift at a restaurant. Middle of the night, traffic was light, and they lay on the side of the road for twenty minutes before anyone stopped and called 911. Alonso was DOA and Roman never regained consciousness.
The common belief is that it must have been a truck or SUV that hit them, as anything smaller would have probably been too damaged to drive after hitting two grown men. They never found the person responsible.
Carla and Roman are immigrants, but Alonso was born in Texas. He was a bright kid, straight A student and headed to college on a scholarship.
Sometime after the accident, Carla was fired from her job at a daycare for repeatedly coming to work drunk. She lost her apartment after that, and has been living on the streets ever since.
Multiple arrests for public intoxication, various disturbance complaints and vagrancy.
Three separate failed attempts at suicide.
Several of the disturbance complaints were due to her showing up at businesses and residences insisting that her son, Alonso, was hiding inside and demanding to be allowed in. Once, somehow, she even gained access to the roof of the USF Behavioral Sciences Building, and spent fifteen minutes alternately screaming at passing students and singing Alonso’s favorite song, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones.
But things had been looking up for her and, prior to the morning I met her, she had not been in trouble for more than a year.
The sculpture she had been climbing is called “Solstice” and was created in 1985 by an acclaimed sculptor named Charles Owen Perry. It was among several high-profile pieces he did prior to his death in 2011. Perry’s mathematically-inspired works are renowned worldwide as a combination of geometry and imagination. He explained the piece he did for The National Air and Space Museum in Washington, dubbed “Continuum” as representing “…the path of a star as it flows through the center of the sculpture’s ‘black hole’ into negative space-time and on again into positive space.”
The Solstice sculpture is described as a “Two-thirds twist triangular torus Mobius” and, after Googling the descriptions for both Solstice and Mobius, my brain begins to spin. Could it be that he had, either through happenstance or design, created something more than a simple aesthetic of bent metal pipes?
I check two dates in Mrs. Mendez’s file and do some quick math.
The estimated time of the hit and run which killed Roman and Alonso Mendez was 3:30 a.m. on Monday, January 27, 2003.
Eleven years and twelve hours before Mrs. Mendez climbed into a sculpture to talk with her dead son.
It is now March 16 and I have become a regular visitor to the Bank Of America Plaza. I have viewed the Solstice sculpture from every angle I can. Taken pictures and made diagrams. I have touched it. Shaken it. Listened to the sounds it makes when I tap my wedding ring against the cool metal.
Most of all, I have just listened. Listened to the rain as it patters against the tubes. The sound of the wind as it blows through it. The echo of traffic, bouncing around the plaza and filtered through the piece of art that, after spending so much time around it, I have come to see almost as a kind of musical instrument.
I have also spent time talking with Mrs. Mendez, after working hours and, ostensibly at least, as a follow-up to her release from detention. At first, she was hesitant to speak with me, but an offer of a warm meal and hot coffee can do wonders for a person’s trust. She admitted that she went “a little off” for a couple of years, but, as she was walking past the Plaza during a storm a year ago, she heard her son calling to her through the wind and rain. Following the sound to the sculpture, she swears that she saw him illuminated by a flash of lighting.
She had been pretty drunk at the time, and it wasn’t until the next day when she realized that this had occurred at the exact time that Alonso had been struck dead, ten years before. She became convinced that he would come to her on the anniversary of his death, and had again visited the statue at 3:30 a.m. this past January 27, hoping to see him. But, there was nothing.
So, thinking it may have something to do with cycles, and not wanting to believe she had imagined it, she stayed with the statue all day, waiting for twelve hours to pass.
She swears that, come 3:30 p.m., through the rising wind, she could again hear him calling to her, so she went to him. She apologized for kicking me, but insisted that we were the ones who did wrong, by dragging her away from her son after so many years of waiting.
I apologize for what happened, and leave her sitting at the diner’s counter as her gaze wanders and tears begin to fill her eyes.
Since my talk with Mrs. Mendez, I have done more research on everything from psychic mediums to time travel to wormholes.
I am convinced that this is real.
I believe, truly believe, that somehow, some way, this sculpture is a portal. A kind of psychic tuning fork that, at specific times and certain conditions, resonates with a connection to something else.
Somewhere else.
Saturday, April 19, 2014 6:15 a.m.
It’s raining, but not very cold. That is a good thing.
I am standing in the plaza, in front of the Solstice. It really is a beautiful piece of art.
Mesmerizing.
In just three minutes, it will be exactly two years since Janey was taken from me.
I’m happy that there is nobody around this early on a rainy Saturday.
The wind is really starting to kick up the rain, and I have to squint as I step into the cool water surrounding the sculpture. As I reach up and grab hold of the metal tubes, I feel something pass through me and into the slippery structure that suddenly feels warm, almost hot to the touch.
I cannot gain any purchase with my shoes on, so I kick them off and use my bare feet to shimmy up the pipes, closer to the center of the piece.
Viewed through the focal point of the sculpture, the gloom of the clouds seems to brighten, and I realize the warmth I feel is radiating from the light I see.
One final pull, and I get my arm over the lip.
I hang there, afraid to speak. Afraid that I may have lost my mind.
I find my voice, weak though it may be, and call her name.
Janey.
No sound but the wind and my breathing.
Then….
“Tom?”
This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2015.