Chapter 7

Chapter 7
Following the service, John hopped into his car and began to drive, not knowing where he was going or what it was he was looking for. He only knew that it hurt too much to stay in Chicago right now, and he needed to be somewhere else for a while.

He had driven east for several hours when he got a very odd memory of a movie he had seen years ago called “The Mothman Prophecies” about a man who had started to fall apart following the sudden death of his wife. The man in that movie had become obsessed with a little town in West Virginia called “Point Pleasant” where he had some experiences with the paranormal. He did some quick calculations and pointed the car towards West Virginia, knowing that there was a very real possibility that he himself was cracking up as well.

Arriving in the little town, John saw that a monument had been erected depicting the fictional Mothman, who, according to local legends was sometimes seen right before some kind of tragedy was about to happen. John had not come here in pursuit of the paranormal however. He was simply a desperate man following some badly damaged and wounded instincts.

Checking into his modest little motel, John took out the bottle of Maker’s Mark he had purchased on the road and poured himself a tall glass. He had resisted the urge to begin drinking when he was on the road, but now he needed to feel something else. He took a long look at the glass and took a drink. He was going down.

John decided to take his bottle and go for a walk through the town, although it was mostly deserted and empty at that time of the night. As he walked, he thought about how it came to pass that he was wandering through a scene in a bad B movie in search of something he knew could never be. He hoped he wasn’t losing it.

Finding his way back to the main square in the town, he stopped at the crude Mothman statue and sat down. The clerk at the hotel told him that thousands of people came here every year searching for something supernatural, and John wondered if he would now be counted amongst their number. He pulled out his bottle of Maker’s Mark and took a long swig as he thought about it, depressed that it had come to this.

Looking around, John saw that an older man was now sitting on the other side of the statue, and he was for a moment alarmed at this disruption of what he thought was a private nervous breakdown. He saw the man stand up when he looked over, and he realized that he was coming over. Damn.

“Hey there young fella,” the man said. “What are you doing out here so late at night?”

“I might ask you the same thing,” John replied, not, actually wanting to know at all.

“I live here, and have since before all the fuss started,” the man said. “I raised my family here, lost my wife here, and will probably die here. I come downtown sometimes when it is quiet to remember what my town used to feel like before the movie and all the nonsense.”

“I understand the movie starred Richard Gere,” John said, faking ignorance. “Something about him losing his wife and then going a little crazy? Is that right.”

“Well that’s what it was supposed to be about. Instead it turned into a story about monsters and ghosts and a whole lot of hogwash that ruined our town here. Every year we get ghost hunters, and reporters, and a lot of other people trying to stir things up. Let met me tell you something, and I hope you hear me. There’s no such thing as monsters, that’s something most people learn when they start to grow up a little. As for ghosts? That one I can’t answer, I lost my wife 12 years ago and I still miss her so bad it hurts. I guess I would do just about anything to see her again. Hold her again. Hell, even fight with her one more time again. But so far those things all just happen in my mind.”

“Well I’m very sorry for the loss of you wife.” John said quietly. “And I’m sorry about your town. I guess people need to believe in ghosts sometimes. Maybe it’s about wishes. We have things we would still like to say to the people we have lost and we want this so bad we kind of wish them back into existence. I don’t know. I’m not an expert. Did it ever get easier for you after your loss?”

“I wouldn’t say it got easier, but it does get better. It gets better because every day I get to look into the eyes of the children she raised and see her there. I get to look at their kids and see them there as well. I see her every time I go downtown and someone shares a story about her, or I see one of her paintings on the wall of the coffee shop over there. So to answer your question, I guess I’d have to say I still see her every day. Not in the way I used to of course, but in a way that lets me see how much she meant to this world.”

And with that, the man wandered off, lost in his own memoires and apparently not wanting to talk about it anymore. Still, John found himself oddly inspired. Maybe the Stones were right. You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes, in a strange and weird corner of the world, you can get what you need.