LAURA

Laura is the face in the misty lights.
Footsteps that you hear down the hall.
The love that floats on a summer night,
That you can never quite recall.

Laura’s my name and coincidentally enough I was named after a song called “Laura” by David Raskin and Johnny Mercer. My father used to sing it to me when I was young and I can remember its haunting refrain sending me to sleep in his arms.

Since then, in many ways, the song has become a kind of manifesto for my existence, my retrospective way of living.

It seems that since I was young I have been inexorably drawn to the past, like a moth to a flame, or perhaps more like a distant dream that you try and recall but can never quite remember.

I’ve often been told, usually by elderly relatives, that I was “born old” and it’s true. I feel like I fell asleep somewhere around the mid 1950’s and woke up in my birth year of 1997.

Now I’m 25 and I feel a century old already. If I close my eyes I can see myself as that nurse celebrating V.E day in Times Square, kissing that hunk of a returning Navy Sailor, or Veronica Lake hiding behind her drape like fringe, draining a milk shake in a roadside diner and casually enticing some unwilling male victim into carrying out a criminal act with me.

But mostly I would describe my condition as a nostalgic malaise, as if I’d been born at the wrong time in history, but somehow forced to accept the living present where I now exist. You might even say that I’m experiencing a cultural identity that is inconsistent with my assigned time on earth. You might even call it trans-cultural, but let’s not get too woke about this. I’m the opposite of woke, I suppose. I’m more of a sleepwalker. I’m sleepwalking back in time, pretending I wasn’t born in this messed up age of ours. Walking around my town in 2021 like it’s 1948 is a strange phenomena. It’s almost like I genuinely believe I can bend the universe’s reality to my will, to my vintage sensibility. Suddenly everything becomes softer and more playful. I ignore the tropes of the deconstructed modern world and try and act sincerely with my emotions and intentions. Most people around me, however think I’m being disingenious and it’s all just a contrived affectation. What do I care? Lying on my bed listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra the world seems less bothersome than when I occasionally look online and see hellish visions similar to those for the hobbits when they peered into Galadriel’s mirror.

Living in the digital age has always appeared vulgar to me, which is why I tend to modestly cultivate my own little corner of the internet with witty and pithy videos, more to assert a return to sophisticated traditions rather than more sub-summation by zombie modernity.

I didn’t intend for my Hedda Hopper inspired videos to create such a minor sensation but I guess I’m not the only one who prefers an old fashioned way of life. My look is a cross between Kathryn Grayson, Rita Hayworth & Ginger Rodgers and I’m styled by several second hand vintage shops in my state. I tend to attract outsiders to my social media, as well as the lost souls in time and digital renegades.

I find a lot of my contemporaries treat me like a sort of living, breathing museum relic, one that holds a brief exotic fascination until they decide that I’m some sort of failed traditionalist who refuses to accept their reality of relative post-modernism.

If I’m 1948 in style, then my brother Joe is 2021 distilled.

We interact about as well as I imagine humans will with aliens should that encounter ever come close enough.

He believes in the future and I believe in the past. Even in the present, we can’t seem to find a meeting point of compromise. Whenever I see him making videos about micro-aggressions he’s “suffered” at college, I find myself wondering whether we should get a paternity test once and for all to settle matters as it appears ever less likely that we share any DNA whatsoever. I feel I’m far more robust than him. He once screamed at me “you’ve got a skin thicker than a rhino’s ass”, which I took as a badge of honour, not as the insult he possibly intended. incidentally, his skin is as thin as rice paper.

He spends his entire time looking at what needs fixing with the world, while I try and look at what wasn’t broken in the first place. He finds my rose-tinted view on reality corny and unfathomable and becomes increasingly irate when I don’t join him in his social justice outcries. I’ve tried explaining to him that I don’t belong here, but he still doesn’t get it.

And then, whenever I suggest he should look to get a girlfriend, he blows up like a volcano, shouting at the top of his lungs about how I am forcing conventional tropes of conjugality onto him. I wonder if perhaps he’s gay or some variation of the alphabet people possibly. I’m sorry I don’t understand modern mores and fashions. And before you try and cancel me, I should remind you that I am exempt from cancellation as I’m not from this actual time. You might call my trans-cultural dilemma my get out of jail free card.

As a result of my nostalgic sensibility I find it becomes increasingly impossible to find a man who shares my love of the past. I spend most of my evenings alone with Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. They don’t kick up a fuss about my way of life. In fact they appear to fully support it.

Mind you, it's a bit of a one sided conversation, as sadly they're all now dead.

My favourite movie is Anchors Aweigh. I must have watched it fifty times or more. For some reason whenever I put it on, all the aggravation and toxicity of the 21st Century appears easily forgotten and I’m lost in a reverie of gentle romance and music. I love all those old MGM movies and often wish I could step into them and remain there forever. Perhaps one day I will and everyone will ask, "where did Laura disapear to?"

As an aspiring mystery writer, I had recently found a complimentary job at my local library where my role is to digitally archive our entire inventory. I’ve always loved being in libraries since I was little. There's just something about the quiet power of books drawing people in off the streets to find something to enhance their universe. Late in the afternoon when it’s less busy, I browse for titles on the shelves that I plan to read at some later date.

I appreciate having a job that has such a dream-like environment in which I can continue my fantasy of nostalgia, though even here the invasion of modernity is spreading across the place like creeping ivy.

A  slowly building protest had begun to gain traction in the town from a small bunch of angry activists about removing some books from our library as they were supposedly incongruent with the progressive values of our age.

I felt immediately defensive about this; as it occurred to me that there was a symbiosis between my existence and the books in question.

I had always loved Dr Seuss books since I was young and although I had other books I cherished from childhood even more, I knew this might be just the tip of the iceberg for this trend of cultural extinction.

What was their offence exactly? Being of their time and not of now? This was exactly how I felt about my own existential predicament.

I phoned my brother to ask him if he was responsible for the current phoney outrage but he was already involved in another protest across town, decrying meat eaters for killing cows by drinking their milk. Or something. I would have felt less bothered if my brother had been amongst the motley crew assembled outside the public library. I could have easily made an example of him by remonstrating with sibling-like hostility toward him in front of his Black bloc peers.

It may sound strange but feeling protective of Dr Seuss and his books, I decided to pack a good number of the library’s copies of the specific ‘offending’ titles into my bag, fully intending to bring them back safe and sound and soon as the howls of the baying mob had quietened down.

It was now late afternoon and home time for me.  I was buttoning up my red, slim fitting duffle coat getting ready to leave. As I paused at the top of the steps in front of the front facade of the public library I could see the late October skies darkening and felt a frosty nip in the air.

The protestors at the foot of the stone steps were chanting en masse.

“No more racist books! No more Dr Seuss!”

I can’t say it was a particularly catchy tune but as I made my descent, it became louder and more insistent, recalling something akin to the fascist chants I had seen in documentaries about the Nazis in my history classes.

I was just about to take a quick diversion away from the protestors when I felt something hard had struck my head.

At which point, everything around me suddenly went darker, even more than the skies I had previously observed.

When I eventually woke up, all woozy and disorientated, I found myself in a stranger’s arms. I could hear his deep, baritone voice calmly insisting that I “wake up”.

As his his face came into focus, I felt instantly sympathetic to him, perhaps for no other reason than he reminded me of my protective father.

Stay out of this Dr Freud!

“How are you feeling?” he asked with geuine concern.

“I’m peachy!” which was a partial lie as my head was throbbing like one of Tom's thumbs that had been banged by a hammer in the old Warner Brothers cartoons.

“You look a little washed out. How about we go across the street and find you some water?”

I nodded my sore head as he helped me up onto my feet.

“Where did the puritans go?”

“They dispersed after I mildly terrified them.”

“Is that even possible? To mildly terrify?”

“I didn’t use force. Just shouted a few oscenities at them.”

Still feeling the effects of concussion, I wasn't entirely convinced this hero of the moment wasn't a figment of my imagination.

I staggered with his help across the busy street in search of the water he had kindly suggested.

It all felt like a dream as we took refuge in the stardust diner, a 1920’s style haven of dimly lit, wood-panelled interiors with white and black chequered floors that had no right to belong anywhere in 2021.

Suddenly I had a concern that I had left something behind on the street.

“Where’s my bag?”

The stranger retrieved my items from underneath the table.

“Here. I even saved your books before the mob got hold of them.”

“Did they catch sight of them?”

“No. But it wouldn’t have mattered if they did. I would have guarded them for you.”

I literally sighed out loud revealing more of my attraction to the stranger than I might have wanted to reveal at this early stage of our unusual encounter.

"You would have laid your life on the line for Green eggs and Ham?"

The stranger took a sip of what looked like a whiskey mac. I recognised it from one of those old Bogart & Bacall movies I'd like to watch. Perhaps it was simply apple juice.

"Who knows? In the heat of battle it's hard to know what you'd do."

“The world’s gone quite mad,” I ventured.

“No quite about it."

Handing me some ice water, I took some gentle sips and started to suspect that this maybe wasn’t a dream afterall.

“So you’re a fan of Dr Seuss I see?”

“I am proud to say I am.”

“You do realise this may end up in your being sent to the gulag?”

“No sacrifice is too great for “Mulberry Street” and “If I Ran A Zoo.”

“I much preferred the Lorax myself.”

At which point I proved my faculties had been fully restored by remembering a quote from the book .

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot. Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

The stranger couldn’t help but smile at my recitation.

“Would you like me to call anyone to have you taken home?”

“I’m in no rush,” I said, happily gazing into his blue sapphire eyes, that looked as tempting to dive into as the lagoons in old technicolor movies I’d watched so obsessively.

As the evening wore on, we decided to explore the menu where I found only pancakes made any sense in this amorous rapture I was currently experiencing.

Eventually we parted ways after he called me a cab back home. And yes, you will be pleased to learn that I managed to find out his name and secure his telephone number in the event that I might need further protection from the woke zombies hell-bent on annihilating Dr Seuss and his many works outside my place of work.

Returning to my family home that night, I felt amazing, as if my dreams and reality had finally locked together in perfect synchronicity.

To add a further resolution to my crazy day, my brother Joe offered me a rare apology after learning what had happened to me outside the steps of the library. I wish I could have exploited his guilt much further but I was simply too happy with the way things had turned out in my favour.

Lying in bed that night, staring at the ceiling there was no chance I would sleep. I was now fully awake (not woke) in a way that was truly energising.

I was no longer out of step with the time, because I had found a partner in crime.

Hey that rhymes!