"Much Ado" - Throwback Short Story.

I move among others in the pre-dawn haze. We are many drifting within this shroud of heavy, wet air, haunting the darkness that hangs thick all around us. I cut it first with glances, then with fear, then with focus.

My life is really about cutting. Years ago I cut my emotions away, carving them out of myself with more recklessness than skill. I disemboweled my soul as if with a dull spoon. It bled bitterness and confusion onto the floors of bars and clubs, and all over the unwitting attendees of many wild midnight parties. I cut until the pain went away, when the cutting neither hurt nor required any effort anymore. My heart, like Pandora’s Box, held the messy, vile emotions of life, and at long last I carved into the soft sides of it, too. I released torrents of sadness, anger, joy and fear. The ruptured receptacle rained insults and prejudice and indifference, soaking all who stood by with the steady drizzle of weeping psychological wounds – until the box, once filled with every conceivable pain, collapsed. Then I knew it was drained, for the emptiness was paradoxically heavier.

I performed this cutting as necessity demanded, since extraneous emotions only crippled my ability to heal. In order to care, I needed to not care, and therefore performed self-surgery with bottles and shot glasses to excise every last cell of feeling. It was my only hope.

Presently I wear my flatness like a crown, and I wonder if anyone notices it as I haul my gear through the darkness. My companions are cutters too, only they are cutters of another kind. They cut with hero swords of steel, showering the murky scene with sparks - steel clashing against steel in the ferocious battle. Unlike mine, their hearts are buried and intact, and they move with a deep, focused sense of urgency. Their hearts are all filled with fears and tears, stuffed and round like the bellies of well-fed children at bedtime. Yet for all of their sentiment, they are mere automatons of gallantry, missing only the cliché shining armor. I who am logic and reason, heart rent asunder by cutting spoon, should be the automaton – the machine that breathes. I breathe in the foggy haze, and a million tiny droplets of condensed water vapor rush in, perhaps to fill the emptiness. I smell oil and hydraulic fluid and gasoline as they invade my nostrils. I breathe in the anxieties and hopes of the others. I watch with detachment, and perhaps resentment, their acute awareness and urgency. I fill my lungs with their naïve sanguineness. I draw deep, full drafts of affectivity but my broken box leaks it all away before I have the chance to feel it.

Then I breathe in the sinister curiosity of the onlookers – the bystanders of this surreal scene where dead men lay, bodies broken and bloodied. They watch with vacuum eyes – sucking in the visuals of death and sadness – of futility and failure. They satisfy their morbid curiosities, or fuel their inner fires of existential questioning. When they have drawn it all in through those wide, round eyes, then they exhale the momentary peace of their souls. I breathe that in too.

I am a breathing machine, yet my movements are borne of a unique free will. Far different from the scripted, expected movements of the automatons, I am no longer slave to desperate emotion or sense of duty. I am master of my dysfunction. Now I meander down this poorly-trodden path hoping that I might capture a fleeting bird of sadness, or a colorful butterfly of regret, and force them to sit for as long as possible in the shriveled, fractured, would-be cage of my heart. I know that if they remain perched there, even for a fraction of a second, the emptiness will be filled just enough to push me through one more night – one more performance. In this, the serpent eats its tail – for I now walk this path to seek the feelings which I cut away so that I could walk this path.

I move through the mist toward the heroes with the steel. The noise is deafening at the battle scene. Bright lights like shining fruit on high, metallic trees hang over the heroes and their swords, illuminating their efforts. I dream sometimes that we are all thespians, unwittingly cast into a great play, and the onlookers are the audience, pleased that the admission is free. In this reverie, the lights then become great spotlights casting their rays upon on the star of this show.

He appears in this, his final performance, with a splendidly simple costume. His torso is covered with the green, black and white of a hockey jersey. His legs are clad in the blue-jeans of youth – too large, loose and pre-faded. Each detail of his attire, every stitch and tag and color, is perfectly rendered so that he looks like a real boy. Yet his costume stands in perfect contrast to his character, for he is most certainly not a real boy. His perfect stillness lends itself to the pantomime of a cold, grey statue. Eyes are glassy and fixed in an infinite stare. His limp appendages betray not a micro-movement of animation. He holds his very heart still in this effectuation of character, playing the dead man for us all.

I drift to center stage, still shrouded in heavy mist, still feeling the bite of the night on my skin. The lights are bright, but the automatons don’t seem to notice. They simply swing their steel, cutting and sparking, crushing and spreading. As the drama unfolds, the boy is a prisoner in a cage, and the automatons work at the bars with advanced versions of files and saws, duty and emotion commanding their efforts. I cover myself from their blows with helmet and goggles and gloves, and squeeze myself into the prison with the star. Neither of us has dialogue, but his silence is as stirring as his lifeless gaze. He’s a master of his craft. I am a master of my craft as well. I bring knowledge and tiny vials of potions. I carry weapons of life in sheaths on my belt and in bags, and he could not want for any person more skilled as his co-star.

I execute my role, nearly as perfectly as he. I require no script – it was memorized 1000 plays ago. The names and the theatres and even the back-stories change, but the final act - my act - remains exactly the same. I raise my hands to heal, probing the supple flesh of the neck. I lay my fingers along grooves and tendons, skillfully playing this sorrowful instrument. I hear no melody. I feel no rhythm. There is only cold stillness. The prison is tight on his chest and legs and hips. The bars are mangled doors, steering wheels, and plastic dashboard instruments. They hold him close in a last fatal embrace, and sneer and snarl at the men with the swords. As if alive, the bars then fix their attention on me. They never speak to me, and never is there a need to. With Death and Circumstance as bedfellows, they are invincible, and they see that I accept their puissance. Their word is final, and the only triumphs I’ve ever had are those which they’ve allowed me. I can see that they will not allow one this night.

I feel my way through the dark shadows, searching for a loop-hole in the laws of life. Logic suggests that there is always a non-zero probability of taking one battle even while losing the war. But the prison constricts around both the living and the doomed. Circumstance keeps a careful watch somewhere just off-stage while Death, dressed in the colorful garb of a jester, materializes behind me and leans his weight slowly on my shoulder. He no longer frightens me – we understand each other.

The boy is finishing this final act with flawlessness. I turn to technology to share the truth with me – the truth I already know. Shining in night-glow green I see a long, thin line. With each passing second the line grows longer and straighter. Death’s hand on my shoulder grips reassuringly. He is a gracious victor. Spurning arrogance, he fights any urge for celebration. I am only seconds away from concession as he appeals silently to my reason. In those seconds I process a sequence of familiar thoughts:

I cannot save this boy. I cannot move him. I cannot breathe for him, access his body or initiate care. I cannot win this battle. I have lost.

I don’t want to turn to look at Death, but not because I have emotions to hold back – my fractured box still holds none. I simply hate to lose. I hate myself, too, because the curtains are about to fall on this last, powerful scene, and I can’t empathize with the coming tears of a sleeping father and mother, now blithely unaware of the crack in their universe. Sorrow will soon flood in from all directions beginning with a ringing phone. But I have made it a game. In a sandlot that looks like a suburban street, on a foggy night, I’ve watched a figure in a jingle-bell cap hit my best pitch far beyond the chain-link fence, and my pride is sore.

The last control that I have is to choose the time when I quit. I decide the last second of the one-sided battle.

It is now. I quit now.

The sequence ends. The automatons continue to cut and saw until the prison is breached, but my game is up. The play is over. The stage lights go out and the curtain falls, only there is no applause. No flowers are thrown. No bouquets delivered. Death simply takes his trophy. With a final deep breath, I take in the scene one last time. With my eyes closed, I smell cigarettes, cologne and beer. I smell my own bitterness at losing. I breathe in again, this time the outbursts of the heroes, responding to the defeat with anger or sadness or fear or some blend of the three. It’s as close as I’ll get to really feeling anything, for as I take it in, it simply flows out of the cracked, breached heart.

I pack up my things and pull my gear along, and I suddenly sense that I’m not alone. I smell the familiar, hot breath of an adversary. Death is lingering - does he gloat? He stands behind me once more. I still won’t turn to see his face, inevitably adorned with the smile of a fencer who’s bested another foe. When he lays a hand on my shoulder again, I don’t sense conceit or amour-propre. Just the slow movement of lips to my ear. I hear a whisper – final words from the champion.

“Coffee.” speaks Death.

I smile slowly and turn. He is gone.

Death is brilliant. A coffee would be wonderful.

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