Length: 2000 words
Tense: present
POV: 2nd
Some very minor edits.
Here's another weird one, sorry. It doesn't have much of a plot, and it's fairly experimental. If it's too weird, let me know. Suggestions are always welcome!
Oh, and a warning, there's some very unsympathetic cussing. F-bomb included, so beware. It was a difficult choice to put cussing in a you-narrative, but I had to represent the character. Don't take it personally.
Dan hates the sistum. He hates the church and he hates the hospital. He hates the supermarket and he hates the farmers’ market. He hates school and he hates his home. He hates me. He hates you.
Dan didn’t always hate the sistum. He was part of it, once. Mom was a bank teller. Dad worked in politics.
It was Dad who taught Dan to hate the sistum. Dan’s Dad was Shelia McGregor. She was active, but not an activist. She always said how much she believed in redemption. She believed in the sistum. She told Dan, when he was six or seven, “Our government was made so we can work with it, from the inside, and show people how life should be lived.” She never grew angry with anyone, no matter how stubborn. She was always ready to compromise with an opponent, and see things from the other perspective. Needless to say, Shelia rarely won any debates.
Dan’s Mom, Amy, was a shy and quiet being. She never complained, not openly. When her wife died in ’02— but I’m getting ahead of myself. Amy was peaceful, at least through her youth. She believed everything happened for a reason. She went to St. Mary’s college. She was as devoutly Catholic as they get. The good and the bad – she secretly hated Muslims with a passion, and saw her own affairs with Shelia as a deep dark sin. Not that she could’ve done anything about it. In the sixties, a band of robbers marched into her bank, shouting instructions. Most of the tellers either froze or cried or hid. Amy was too afraid to do even that. She followed the robbers’ instructions silently and without hesitation. Even when one of the masks slipped, and she saw a familiar face – he threatened her so harshly and she became so afraid that she swore she’d sooner sell her soul to the devil than turn him in. She meant it, too.
But that’s another thing you have to understand about Dan’s parents. They were old. Not terribly old, but older than some of the preschoolers’ grandmothers. When Dan started hating the sistum, Amy was in her sixties, and Shelia would have been fifty-eight.
I know, you asked about Dan. But to understand a man you have to understand his past. You have to understand the influences he came out of.
Dan doesn’t believe in the nature-nurture debate. He doesn’t believe his Mom and Dad formed any part of him. His views are his own. Biology and psychology, they’re part of the sistum, and they can go to hell. He doesn’t give a shit about his biological parents, either. Oh, and excuse my French – I’m just quoting Dan. Dan doesn’t give a shit if you think swearing is coarse or inappropriate. He wants you to go fuck yourself, dickface.
Here, Dan’s out tonight. Follow him quietly, if you want to see. And don’t step too loudly on that manhole cover – it clunks.
He’s with some acquaintances – can’t you hear their raucous laughter? They’re poking fun at Nancy, a kid they know from school. Dan laughs last, but his laugh is the loudest, fullest of rage and hate and that terrible, overdone insincerity.
Dan hates these friends. He thinks they’re coarse and dumb. One of them slaps him on the back, and he winces. He hates their guts.
See, he’s leaving them now. They’re drunk, of course. Dan never gets drunk in public. He drinks a lot, but he knows his limit. He never gets too high or too stoned outside of his room. It’s only alone that he falls prey to drugs. Folks says that’s how they’ll find him, dead on his beanbag-sofa, needles littering the floor, white powder dusting his leather jacket – and only question is when.
His friends haven’t even noticed he’s gone. But can you see him? Look there, where that fire escape nearly touches the street. See him, against the black brick of the warehouse? See, where the graffiti’s interrupted – I love Hit r, it says. See the smoke, yellow in the streetlight?
Dan smokes to calm himself. He smokes because he hates the gritty feel of ash in his lungs. He smokes because he’s only seventeen.
“Yo, Danny, wuzzup? Where ya off, I can’t see fuck in this dark!”
“Right here, dumbass. Wuzza matta with ya? Ya get lonely? Ya lookin’ fer ya mommy?”
The friends are getting up, and moving toward Dan. Why’s he called them over, you ask. I don’t know. He’s got no soft spot for any of them. All his soft spots callused up long ago.
No, these aren’t the friends he hangs with every day. Just about every gang in town wants to be Dan’s homies. He can work the economics.
Dan isn’t dumb. I know you’re thinking he is. I know, maybe I haven’t portrayed him in best light. That’s not my fault. Dan wants people to see him like you do. He doesn’t want you to ask beyond the gruff speech and the violent flare. I think he’s ashamed of what you might find.
He was first in his class, up to the beginning of fifth grade. It was when his Dad died that Dan started hating the sistum. At least, that’s my theory. He’d never admit to it.
But look, here he goes. He’s left the friends again. He has so many followers, and yet I suspect he’s truly lonely, and that’s why he prefers to be by himself.
What’s that? – why, it’s a piece of scrap metal, did I tell you we’re right behind the landfill? Dan used to use bricks, but even that’s too cliché, too much a part of the sistum.
Don’t get me wrong, now. Dan’s not an anarchist. Anarchists are as much a part of the sistum as you or I. Dan is his own being.
Dan’s father died in June of 2002 – but didn’t I already say? She was coming back from something politics – a march in San Francisco. She was driving too fast. She hurtled into a ravine in the foothills just off the 5. She was dead before the car stopped moving, the analyst said. There was no body – the car had exploded and incinerated everything inside, all the pamphlets, the contracts, the bones, the rainbow banners draped across the leather.
Amy grew morose after that. She had never been a pleasant woman. She was never one of those people who could light up a room by walking into it. No, she had instead the remarkable ability to change nothing, to barge in completely unnoticed. She could have walked into a wedding, a marriage, a funeral of a complete stranger, and no one would have minded. But after Shelia died, that all changed. She carried the gloom around with her. It was an incurable plague, and her feet the vector. It destroyed Amy, and it destroyed all of what few friendships she had procured in her long and silent life.
It was Amy who related the car crash to Shelia’s homosexuality. I don’t know if Dan could have made such a leap in logic. Remember, he was a fourth-grader then. He didn’t even understand death, not really. He thought his Dad was on a work-holiday, like the time she went to D.C. for a week. Only this one lasted much longer.
Amy went into a more deeply religious phase. It was God’s punishment for her own promiscuity. Amy knew she was the worse sinner. She had been saved. She knew it was wrong. She could have told Shelia they needed to change their ways. Amy was haunted by the vision of Shelia, knee-deep in hellfire, screaming her name with a thousand hatreds. She prayed three rosaries a day. When Dan turned eighteen, Amy planned on leaving town, and joining a convent in L.A. She made herself forget all thoughts toward other women. It was no mean feat, but she managed.
But wait! Dan’s begun walking. The pole’s swinging – he’s whacking that sign – Yes on 8, it said. He’s dragging the metal along now, scoring a groove in the neighbour’s lawn. Why, you ask – why not?
Follow him, if you’re not afraid. I can’t promise he won’t hurt you. But stop, now, and calm yourself. You won’t need that garbage lid! Dan won’t attack you. I’ll give him this, he’s never started a fight, never beaten up someone who didn’t beat on him first. He’s gentle even to the squirrels. No, Dan won’t strike at your body. He kills with words.
Ah— you’ve stepped too loudly on that twig! He’s turning toward us. No, don’t hide. You wanted to know about him, didn’t you? Ask him yourself.
“Who’s this? Whatcha doin’, punk, spyin’ on me? You think you all cool? You think you can getta know me by creepin’? Well, let me tell you, punk, you ain’t. You think you all that? No, you partta the sistum. I tell you, you just another fuckin’ partta the sistum. Ya know what, I don’t like the sistum. I—”
And that’s that. I think we’ve let him ramble on quite long enough. I assure you, it doesn’t change much. Dan’s not very articulate, or at least he tries not to be.
Is it an act, you ask. Maybe. I wouldn’t know. I don’t know how much Dan understands. I don’t know how sincere his philosophy is, or how complete. Sometimes I think there isn’t one at all, just a thousand random acts leading on a long road to nowhere. It’s his Dad, I said. Her death was sudden. It was pointless. Maybe you thought she’d get killed by hate crime and intolerance, heroically in a protest for gay rights. That’s what Dan believes, or so he says.
He’s still nattering on. Here, I’ll tell him to shut up. I’m sure you’ve had enough of him. I’ll tell him to leave.
He’s mad at me – but no matter, I’ve never seen him happy.
Now he’s heading toward my bookstore. I don’t know if he’d been headed there before our confrontation. Maybe our meeting was just coincidence, maybe either way I will wake up next morning to the cracking of glass and the tearing of pages. Dan has never liked my bookstore. Did I tell you, Dan doesn’t believe in stories. Stories have purpose, and resolution. Stories make the world into something comprehensible, make a character into something that fits into letters on a page. Dan believes in life.
Here, he’s at my window. Here, see him lift the metal pole. He hesitates – is he going to swing?
I don’t think Dan knows anything about the sistum. I don’t think he even knows what it is. Maybe it is nothing, maybe everything. Maybe the sistum is a lost hope, a disillusionment with life. Maybe it is you, me, Amy, Shelia, the faceless gangs of friends, maybe it is Dan.
But here, he raises his arm. He lowers it. He raises it again. The tension builds to a climax. What are his motives? What is his intent? But this is futile! I think Dan walks around the neighbourhood every night, when the town has closed its shutters and turned out its lights. He struts up and down the empty streets, hefting that iron pole. I think he must spend some time outside every home, every capitalist endeavour, lifting the rod and letting it drop. Certainly, I have seen him before, at two in the morning, when late at night I stare at the white monitor, an idea unfathomed consuming me and eluding my grasp. Certainly, my glass has never been broken before.
You now know Dan McGregor as well as I. Your guess is as good as mine. But come now, it’s late, and you are a newcomer to this town. Let me walk you home. Go to bed, have a good night’s rest, and if you want you can come again to see me in the morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment