I'd never been so high above the ground before, even outside of my body, and everything looked so small that it was hard to take it as seriously as I really needed to. I wasn't sure what I was looking for but I knew the general vicinity that it was in and I'd know what it was when I saw it. Oh, I hoped I'd know what it is when I saw it.
Earth is woven with invisible ripples, shuddering off into space from some dropped cosmic stone. These ripples can come from all sorts of disturbances. Great charity and great greed cause equal peaks and valleys to stream off of them. A notable birth can send a tsunami of change ricocheting off the opposite pole, and enough deaths can tear the very fabric of the shared narrative with deep rents that never really heal. Old as the world is, she's covered in ancient scars from battles that nothing was really around to properly remember anyway. Floating and bobbing and occasionally sinking are individual human lives, the thin stream of their consciousness tossed casually by disturbances far below the level of their gross perception. The truly spectacular event is birth; a spark below the surface rises suddenly and bursts from the tossing waves, driven by internal momentum to skip across the tossing ocean of contingency like a flat glowing stone.
Above this fabric and shaped by it is physical reality. Grand structures of unmentionable complexity rise from myriad individual sparks and throw themselves together to determine the odd shapes that each story demands. This is where I was searching, reading the emanating waves of invisible determinacy to determine an object by its signature alone, never really knowing what shape that signal would take.
It wasn't born yet, I knew that, and yet a tangle of energy here, an odd burst of dissonance there... It was as if I knew the alphabet and had the page, but the nature of the words eluded me and I kept searching.
I had come from its twin, its shadow, the bleakness cast by its trembling light onto a world that demands at the very least the appearance of symmetry. A husk was behind me then, surrounded by fear and terror and other disagreeable background noises that drove me from that place like a spark from a fire.
Like I said, I would know what I was looking for when I saw it.
Here, I saw something near and close to what I was looking for, the birth of a new idea, a subtle shift in the reality of one individual that would spiral off into the wider world and make everyone around it rethink some fundamental characteristics of their narrative. I knew this was going to effect what I was looking for, but it's difficult to know exactly how.
Here, again, was the faint sense of invisible proximity. Here a thought died. I dived further. Her name was Dream and she appeared in the shape of a victorious humanoid breaking a thin ribbon at the head of a pack of striving sibling-humanoids. Her head was thrown back in a triumphant yelp. Her arms were spread to the sky and the last stride held mid-air for a glorious eternity. She was held aloft by narrow rays of pressure pulling upwards from the rarefied air of physical reality. If she were allowed to live longer, she would press her shape upward and make the world in a way conducive to her glorious birth, but she was not allowed. The shuddering waves of reality stretch not only outward but inward, and a passing ripple tore her from her elevation and pulled her backwards. Running in reverse, the ribbon tied itself together and stretched taut across the finish line. She sprinted backwards with muscles pushing, always pushing. Her colleagues and competitors caught her and then surpassed her as they neared the starting gun, its concussion now retreating into the dark confines of the pregnant barrel. Now they crouched over the markers, the gun held aloft, and Dream's legs disappeared into the ether as she tumbled forward and the others sprinted, like lightning, across the red track. Clouds chased each other from the horizon, covering the Sun and turning him to his shadow, who can throw only shadow. Dream pulled herself endlessly forward, stumps dragging in the grim dirt. She would pull forever and wither and die and I pulled myself from the nightmare vision and saw, briefly, the dreamer lying in a grim valley of pain in front of a hastily parked car, a broken bicycle with wheel still spinning at her feet.
I knew the rest of the story and excused myself, unwilling to further subject myself to unnecessary pain for the sake of fleeting curiosity. Dream would never revive but perhaps the dreamer would.
Another closely connected spark of life was snuffed out, it seemed mere miles from the event I was looking for, but an overview of the physical showed that I was on a totally different continent. This thing dying was to what I was looking for what the husk I fled was to me and I was sad to see it go but I knew that I couldn't change it so I didn't feel too much of an investment. A spark lifted from it like me and we touched for a moment.
It didn't talk in words but it talked to me and it said, "You're not supposed to be here. You'd better hurry or you'll be late."
"I'm lucky I got to stop by and see you on your way out," I said. "It's tough to say if we'll meet again anytime soon."
"We're going to but I don't think it's going to be a nice thing. Stay on your guard, you know I take things pretty serious down there."
"I know you do. Stay safe until then."
The accident withered into the distance behind me, my Father's mangled corpse in the tires of the truck that slammed him out of himself.
My Father. My Father. My father. I could feel the universal receding and the specific come into play as I began to associate the concept not with the bright purity of his spark but with the mangled wreck of a body left behind. I felt a brief twinge of self-pity, knowing I was about to grow up without a father, but it was too late to change my mind then. I knew what to expect: difficulties in school, more likely to get into drugs and alcohol, difficulty connecting with male peers and authority figures, you know. That whole deal. Hopefully I got some bizarre metaphysical boost from having met the old bastard in the beforelife even if I didn't remember it as concretely as I'd probably wish I had.
So now I knew what I was looking for. I searched his pockets for an identifier of some sort, found a passport, found the address that it was supposed to be returned to if it ever got lost, then hitched a ride on the next passing migratory fowl, its brain abuzz with thoughts of wind and bugs and rubbing cloaca with some preening chick, to go see what my new stomping grounds were going to be. It was on the small continent, on the positive half of the planet, near a long skinny lake on the clockwise coast. There was a big brick building full of sick people and people making babies. I had forgotten how stupid the current moment could be, throwing two such disparate groups of people into the same category without a second thought. One of the ladies making a baby was my Mother, Mother, mother I guess. Do I get a choice in this one? I guess not. The big ripples I was being pulled into were coming out of one lady's broken crotch, so I guessed that's where I was headed. Oh well. Here I go.
I was born in 1990, but I was supposed to be born in 1989. Two weeks late and as skinny as a chicken, mom said, but she also said I got lost on the way which seems pretty crazy to me to be honest. I was hungry and I guess I've always been hungry but who can blame me when my mom's vagina tried to starve me to death, you know? That's where I was coming from and this is where I was going:
I was going right to the top, man.
You know, the top of the heap? King of the jungle? That kind of thing. I wasn't going to stick around that dump waiting for things to get better like everyone else; I was gonna be a boss.
That dump? It was a little town and it sucked, it really did. It was slow and tired and lame and I just wanted to get out. Everyone out there thought the same thing but no one just left.
Like, this. The guy that owns the grocery store, he used to fight nazis or something. He's an old dude, but he was always talking about places that weren't there, you know? Telling war stories about far away places. Why didn't he just leave? Why didn't he just stay out in the world, if that was where his head was going to be at? Sometimes I talked to him; "Jerry," I said, "You're always talking about the women back at that place, you're talking about how great the weather was and how much you enjoyed shooting people or whatever you were up to, why didn't you just stay there?"
Always the same thing, he said "Family." He just put that down like it was the end of the discussion but it wasn't the end of the discussion for me. There was a whole lot more discussion for me. I wanted to talk about other things, like doing what feels right, or adventure or something, you know?
That stuff was hard to talk about while I was still wondering what I was going to do, but I kept trying and at least he talked to me about it.
My dad died just before I was born. Hit by a truck somewhere in Asia for some reason having more to do with money than anything real. Not that any of that money got to me or mom, of course. She didn't even find out he died until like a week after I showed up. Normal rough childhood, I guess - run of the mill even. You know, the normal getting picked on, getting roughed up, getting molested a little and never talking about it because it didn't seem like that big a deal kinds of things. I try not to dwell on those and just keep going, you know? I guess everyone has bad stuff that happens to them but none of my bad things left permanent physical scars and I could still operate all right and that's what counts, you know? That's what's real. Same as everyone has to deal with, and some have to deal with a lot worse, so I guess I was doing alright.
Grades weren't good, had never been good. Probably never were going to be good but I never seemed to drop out all the way. It was a good time. Everyone was always pleasantly surprised, you know? They just kept telling me to push myself and I guess it was good for my sense of purpose to keep having people tell me the next little bit I needed to push myself to. That was one more set of decisions I didn't have to make, so it was nice I guess.
I didn't know why I was thinking about this stuff so much that morning. I'd brushed my teeth, I'd taken my shower and everything, I was just feeling a little bit jittery. I was graduating that day and I didn't know what I was going to do from there on in so I was pretty jazzed. Just pretty god damn psyched, you know? My mom was proud; she'd made a special breakfast, what she thought my favorite food was even though I'd been too protective to let her know when my tastes had changed so it was really just waffles. I used to not like fruit and she still didn't put fruit on it. Habits change hard, you know? I wasn't going to force it then, though; I was about to leave.
In the bustle of the post-ceremony at my high school graduation, I lose track of my mom for a little while. It's only partially by mistake; in a big way I've been looking to lose her for one reason or another since the day began. Her pride is stifling, a cohesive fog that drops around me and makes me feel like my own victories are tawdry in comparison. This is what I've kind of been trying to avoid, I guess, that sense that in some way my accomplishments are reflective of someone else's. My teachers shake my hand and I kind of know this is the last time they're really going to have that much worthwhile advice to give me; they've been saving it all up for this moment, trying to send me off with one last little bit of spin.
Here's my English teacher, a tall dude with a shock of beard and a pubescent mustache. He's been trying to get me to care about characters in books all year, but not the books I want to read, the books he wants me to read. I haven't read an assigned piece all year and he knows it and resents me for being able to pass his low-ball quizzes anyway. He knows it invalidates his work in a weird way that he can't quite put his finger on. In the meantime, I'm always ready to discuss my own reading and it's not like he can pin me as a failure when I'm so clearly versed in the language he claims to be teaching, right? He shakes my hand. "You should really rethink college," he says, "I think you'd be able to learn a lot there and maybe figure out something to with your head."
"Hey," I say, "I'll give it some good hard thought. I've got all summer and autumn before the spring semester starts and by then I think I'll have a better idea of what I want to do."
His weird sunken face lifts into a hopeful grin. "You'll do well to consider my alma mater. It's a good school and it's got pretty girls."
"Ho ho," I say, "You dog. You know what I'm after anyway, don't you?"
He chuckles and passes and another one of these creeps comes up, a French teacher this time, a fat matron married to some small-time builder in the next town over. Her little family brings in just enough money to make her pretty well-off and she doesn't have any kids so she can spend it all on make-up. Can't spend in on a gym membership, though, this town's got no gym.
"I'm glad you decided to pass my course, Mister Blackmore," she says. "I hope it wasn't too strenuous for you."
"Just took some elbow grease and a little determination, I guess. Glad I could trust you not to make it too easy on me."
Oh, she liked that. Her rolls roll up and I can see her perfect teeth behind those thin greasy lips she's always wrapping around something greasy. Her husband or otherwise, you know what I mean? She thinks of herself as tough but fair and I guess no one has the heart to tell her she genuinely spends more time with young men than young ladies. Maybe she gets picked on for it in the teachers' lounge but none of that pressure ever turns into altered behavior so it's not worth much. She waddles off, fat and happy with the credit I've given her for my meager success. I plan sincerely on never speaking French again.
Math teacher! Excellent. She wouldn't be pretty if I didn't have to look at her for forty five minutes every day but I do, so she is. My grades in that class are the best my grades have been in anything and she knows it but she's never talked to me about it.
Maybe she will now.
"You did very well this semester, Cleve. Your other teachers tell me this isn't your normal performance."
Nice. "Well, maybe I'm willing to put a little extra effort in when the situation demands it, if you know what I mean."
"I'm glad you understand how important math can be. Try to work as hard at other things in the future, though." She shakes my hand and keeps going and I get out of the way of the incoming other teachers. She was kind of the only one I wanted to talk to and I need to smoke a cigarette. A small group of teachers and custodial workers is smoking behind the school but even though I'm not a student anymore, I don't feel like breaking that veil right now and I head past the big double doors I've walked into almost every day for the past six years and down a path. It's the path that gets used for cross-country ski trips during the winter, where people better connected than me smoke weed and drink beers and make out when they're supposed to be learning how to ski. It's kind of late and the sun's pretty heavy in the sky. I better get up here and down fast or I might miss my ride; I'm supposed to go to dinner with my mom and grandma tonight to the nicest restaurant in town. Best out of two ain't bad.
I find my personal spot about ten feet off the trail up a hill. There's a big rock that sticks out above a little hollow. You can see the school a little bit through the tops of the trees but the school can't see you and that's awful important if you're technically breaking the rules. Half the teachers are cool and couldn't care less but half of them are just sitting around wishing they had a good excuse to yell and bellow and put someone down and those are the people you gotta look out for. I smoke Indian cigarettes, it doesn't really matter what kind. There's a reservation nearby and they sell them cheap so I take a car ride over with my friend Stills, who graduated last year. He doesn't smoke, but he gambles, so he takes me every time he gets an itch and I stock up. I started buying cigarettes there when I was fourteen. He started gambling when he was 12, driving illegally and buying cocktails. He's never been caught because the cops along the road have been bought out by drug runners to not pull anyone over, or at least they used to. I hear things are getting a little hairier now that people are paying more attention but god it used to be great.
It's still great I guess, but it got glossy and lame at some point. Stills calls it getting tall enough to look over the slot machines but he's a delinquent and I'm not like that. I put my cigarette out on the big rock and get ready to head down the hill.
I come out into the parking lot and most of the crowd has cleared out, going to their own dinners, or church things, or parties for the people with parents who don't pay attention or parties with parents for people whose folks are chill. My mom is there looking around, probably for me.
"You smell like cigarettes," she says. "You know I don't want you smoking. You can't say you were with Stills either, I know he's not here."
"I must have walked through a cloud on the way over here," I say, waving my hand daintily at my face like a southern lady in a movie. My mom snorts and turns, walking towards the car. I follow a few paces behind, just far enough she can't look at me without losing too much momentum.
Stills doesn't smoke, I just told mom he does as an excuse for my own smell. She hasn't figured it out I don't think. She's hesitant to come right out and call me a liar. She thinks it'd hurt my feelings too much. Little does she know I know damn well I'm a liar.
"Aunt Gwen's over," she says, "We need to stop at home and pick her up before we go to the restaurant. I borrowed the Barker's truck for her wheelchair but I'll need you to load it up. I'm feeling a little exhausted today and your aunt can hardly do it."
Aunt Gwen is a peach. She's got these little legs, all shriveled up from paralysis and years of disuse, and she sits in a wheelchair and verbally snips at people too stuck up and self-centered to give her credit because she's "handicapped." It's funny how a certain kind of person things all sorts of injury are going to effect your brain, even parts that are flat-out called "extremities." I like Aunt Gwen and so does mom. We try to remember her wisecracks to repeat to each other when she's not around in her creaky old-lady voice. When she's with people she likes she has a regular old voice she uses with no problems, but company brings out the worst in her the same way it does with me I suppose. Her diaphragms powerful from belting out hymns in her creaky old lady church and she keeps in as good shape as anyone, rolling all over the steep roads with her strong arms in the hottest parts of the summer. She smells like a skunk ape when she comes in from those workouts but my mom and I don't have the heart to complain, it seems to do her so much good to get the exercise.
She's sitting in her wheelchair when we pull up, a little knit blanket on her lap to keep off the last bit of the winter's chill that's still in the air, even this late in the season, once night hits. "What took you so long?" she says, rolling up the side of the truck parked in our dirt drive.
"Cleve had to walk through the stinkiest cloud of tobacco smoke he could find," mom says, helping Gwen into the passenger side door. I fold up the wheelchair and put it in the bed of the truck, fixing it with a couple of spare bungee cords the Barkers left behind. One is red and one is blue and the blue one is frayed, with the loose rubber strands poking through the thread bare nylon wrapping. The plastic on the hooks is old enough to have cracked and the metal poking through is beginning to just show a touch of rust. The winter hasn't been kind to the truck, and there are scraps of bark and wood in the liner from the last load of firewood they carted to their clients. It may even have been our firewood, the last bit of which we used in a celebratory campfire the weekend before. The wood scraps cling to the fabric of the wheelchair but Gwen's used to the relative privations of our lifestyle and she won't complain about it.
The engine roars and grumbles when mom starts the truck. A slap of gasoline smoke fills my lungs and I wish I had a cigarette. Maybe some day I can smoke around mom but probably not and I kind of hope I quit before then. I climb into the bed and, grumbling and creaking, we back out of the driveway and head to the restaurant.