What Price Freedom?
Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey
8/22/94
I’m in a town that’s a little like Seattle, only familiar streets aren’t where they should be on the grid (Aurora and N. 40th are near Belltown, which is more like an expanse of streets in residential West Seattle only poorer) and other things aren’t quite right either (there’s an office tower instead of a freeway just south of the Paramount, and a secret passage leading thru the abandoned F&N basement leads to a series of catacombs where stylish people hold banquets, fetish parties and tasteful orgies).
I find myself alone, as usual, when I stumble into a small Westlake storefront office, where apparently I’ve been hired as a computer grunt. There’s a woman working beside me, apparently the boss’s personal assistant (while I was dreaming this I apparently knew what the company did; I don’t remember that part now). The woman was about my age or a little younger; grown up but not mellowed out, white, medium-length dark hair, average figure, average overstatedly “understated” work clothes. We hit it off immediately, and it’s clear without saying so that we’ll be having dinner together. We have it at the Puppy Club. We stroll off from there to her place, a small bungalow in a neighborhood of lookalike bungalows, inhabited by lower-middle-class families, situated where either Belltown or east Phinney Ridge ought to be. We go to bed without saying a word; none are necessary.
After several days of this, I’m still not sure where I am, where this neighborhood is, most importantly where this house is in this neighborhood. I can only go by landmarks, like a Central District-style second-hand store on a corner in the neighborhood.
One Friday evening after work I’m at the Puppy Club’s bar. It’s some other country’s independence day this day, and the bar conversation gets around to the topic of freedom. I raise a toast to freedom and express a wish for my own freedom.
I leave the restaurant and go to my new home, only to find I’ve lost all sense of direction. I don’t remember its address, and trying to find my way via the landmarks only gets me further lost. I forget my lover’s name, and I’m having a hard time remembering her face or body. I walk into the kitchen of a bungalow that looks sort of like hers. A cute seven-year-old girl with missing front teeth cheerfully says hello and asks who I am and why I’m here. I politely tell her I’m in the wrong house. I can’t remember enough about the right house to even ask her to help me find it, so I walk out embarrassed.
I wander the neighborhood that I thought I knew. I’d wished for freedom and I got it. For what? I was alone again. I knew who I was, and I knew what the general world political situation was, but nothing in between. I was slowly losing all memory of having had a lover. I seemed to remember that I had a job, but not quite what it was. I figured if I wandered the vicinity of my job I’d find the place, somebody would show me to my desk, and the rest would come back to me.
After a half hour that seemed like days, she walked up to me, dressed in home sweats. I didn’t recognize her at first. She thought I was only pretending to not know her. She lifted her sweatshirt to flash her left breast to me, joking about you-must-remember-this (not singing the “Casablanca” song, just saying it). She had the most wonderful news: She was quitting work and applying for a graduate scholarship. But before she started school, she wanted to try to have a baby. With me. Slowly, the realization that it was indeed her came to me. She embraced me warmly. As I felt her firm waist and ribcage through her soft sweatshirt, I decided that “freedom,” as currently defined in rugged-individualist America, was a greatly overrated and misunderstood concept.
