What I Learned from Unemployment

Well, it’s finally over. After six months, I’ve finally got another job! It’s been a long haul. As I’m sure anyone who’s been in this situation will tell you, it’s the uncertainty that’s the worst part. By the time the Borders.com skeleton crew finally disbanded in October, only one other person on the team didn’t have another job lined up already. Some of them actually left early to travel across the country to their new jobs.

Now that it's all over, and I can look back on that unbroken stretch of not working, what did it teach me? What do I march back into the workforce understanding that I didn't before? Well, it's really something that I was conscious of at the time, while it was happening, but I couldn't really acknowledge at the time. While unemployment has the veneer of an extended vacation, you can’t enjoy it the same way, because there's always a gnawing at your insides, knowing that there's this big blank of a future out in front of you. It’s a fog that you might come to the end of tomorrow, or maybe not for years. No matter how much you do to find a new job over the course of a given day, you go to sleep every night with the dead certainty that you didn't do enough, or didn't do the right things. There was a website you didn't visit, a person who you didn't talk to, a connection you didn't make. And you know it's true, because you still don't have a job.

If you can put that out of your mind (like I could at times), the experience can really be pleasant. Once you get over the thought that you should have something to do, somewhere in particular to go, you just sort of drift through the days. It’s a luxury that most of had as kids, and it’s nice to visit it again for a little while. And because I have a three-year-old daughter, even “empty” days were always full... I had to give up the dream that I was going to have these huge tracts of time where I would finally get back into the groove of writing every day, or time to read all the books, or catch up on all the movies and TV shows that are on my ongoing list. After a while, I decided that I was just going to use the time, as long or short as it might be, to enjoy being with my family all day, every day.

And like I said, now that it's over, I can look back at it with fondness. But like I’ve also said, when you have no job, every day is tinged with the thought that you should be doing something else. They really were good times, too. I was able to take my daughter to preschool for most of her first year, to wake her up in the morning and dance with her, which is always the first thing she wants to do, even if she's still sleepy enough that her extent of effort was slumping against my shoulder. And there were "date afternoons", where my wife and I would drop Lily off at my parents and have a few hours to relax at home, or times we would stay up late watching TV and talking. There were no limits other than what we put on them.

Now that I'm back to a daily schedule, I'm feeling the tug of wishing I were still there. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the opportunity and the money (by the way, I give endless credit to my wife for making it easy sometimes to forget that I was only pulling in less than half my Borders salary in unemployment). But now that I know how it all turned out, that I found something else and everything is going to be fine, I miss being with them. Knowing that I'm going to get home most evenings and have only a few hours when we can all be together is hard.

But there's always the weekends, and I have to keep telling myself that while I worked at Borders, I was fine with that arrangement. The adjustment period will end, and we'll all get used to the new normal, just as we did back in October when I suddenly had nowhere to go every weekday. The next chapter has begun, and it's up to me to make the best I can of it. But I think I will, and sooner than I would otherwise, because in those six months I've relearned what it is that I'm really working for.

“I’ve seen the future and it will be.”

The title of this entry is taken from Prince’s song “The Future”*, and for a long time I didn’t understand what it meant. But I’m coming to realize that its ambiguity is intentional. We never know what’s coming, but the future *will* be, however it turns out. It came to mind because of some work I was doing for my parents last week. My wife is in the ongoing process of helping them go through their house and organize, and this particular session involved a lot of paper shredding, which I volunteered for. I think of myself as an expert shredder, having worked in the Borders accounting department for almost a year in the 90s. What I ended up for my parents was disposing bags of papers with any personal information – from late-1980s check stubs to the torn-off subscription information of hundreds of magazine covers.

The experience – and the subsequent dinner conversation later that day -- brought into focus a kind of generational difference on the wired world we live in today. My parents – and by that I mostly mean my mother, since my dad is so reluctant to new technology that he’s never used the Internet – is inherently suspicious of anything and everything having to do with the web. It’s been hard to even get her to pay her bills online. She doesn’t seem to grasp that the people who have online businesses are hyper-aware that their livelihoods depend on making sure that your transactions are safe and secure.

My wife and I are much more realistic about security and privacy, but I can understand my mom’s mild paranoia. Patton Oswalt has a great chapter in his book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland that attempts to explain how he, and most of Generation X (of which I’m a member), are suspicious of the new wired world. Things that used to be free, like TV, now cost money to use, and things that used to cost money, like music, are now free. Growing up before the revolution, living through it, and having kids who never know what it is to be unplugged has given us a unique perspective, an appreciation for the inevitability, the possibility and the wonder, of everything the new world has to offer.

Not having used the Internet until her fifties, my mom doesn’t have the same trust that comes through familiarity and understanding. Shredding every document that has any personal information on it is a good prevention against identity theft, if (and this is a big IF) you believe the only thing keeping people from stealing from you is because it’s hard. Even so, I don’t think that any cyber-criminal worth his salt is going to be rummaging through anyone’s trash. There are much easier ways, and again we come to that flip-flop of common sense that Patton talked about.

In talking about this with my mom and wife, we started having a discussion about bullying, both online and in person. The consensus we all came to was that bullying seems to be getting better, mostly because of the spotlight that social media has thrown on it recently. On the other hand, it also seems like there are new opportunities for cyberbullying, so maybe the new venue is simply balancing out the equation. I don’t think that bullying will ever end… there will always be parents who are abusive or neglectful to their children, and in turn those children will always turn around and punish those around them. But the level of transparency is rising, from cameras on school buses to the saving of text messages.

And that, ultimately, that’s the crux of the issue. The Internet is a tool, and as such it can be used to build something new, or knock something down. I’ve always had a pragmatic view of society and everything new that gets introduced into it… there will be problems and solutions, some things will be harder and some will be easier, but eventually things will settle out, and more often than not we’ll turn out better for it. Society will progress.

An example of this that I’m trying to hold onto is the recent collusion of Amazon and the Department of Justice in bringing monopoly charges against all the major book publishers. They allege that they met with Apple in an attempt to fix book prices, which ironically would prevent Amazon from basically giving away e-books to promote their Kindle Fire tablet computer. Personally, I believe that this will de-value books in general, and as a result publishing companies will have to downsize or fold altogether, and book quality will go down, with unedited, unsolicited tripe being just as available as thoughtful high-profile titles. Now, if I wasn’t biased against the survival of the publisher system – bear in mind that up until this year, my whole life has hinged on the idea of books as quality entertainment and information – I’d have to go back to the last paragraph and say that eventually this will be a benefit for writing as an art. But right now I just can’t see it that way.

I firmly believe that with the way things are going, running a book publishing company is going to become an untenable prospect, and if they don’t disappear completely, they will have to downsize to the size of a small marketing firm to survive. If there were only time to adjust, there wouldn’t be thousands of jobs lost, and lives impacted. But my wife brought up a good point about this: the newspaper and music industries weren’t given time to adjust and adapt, why should books be any different? And maybe this will open the door for all those part-time writers – myself included – whose main reason for not being published is the sheer number of rejection letters to expect and hoops to jump through. Maybe we’ll be opening up a whole new world of voices and ideas. Or maybe people will start universally using apostrophes to pluralize things.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. I have to go back to Prince, and present my quote of “The Future” in full: “I’ve seen the future and it will be / I’ve seen the future and it works.” Here’s hoping that it does.

*Geeky Music Fact™: This song is probably best known by its being sampled in one of Prince’s biggest hits, “Batdance” from the 1989 Batman movie soundtrack. “Batdance” itself is a sample-filled remix of a song called “200 Balloons” that was also written for the movie, but failed to appear on the album at all.

Eloquence in its Purest Sense

For a few years at the beginning of the century, I went back to school for a few semesters. I decided that I wanted to take more math and physics courses, partly to see if I could do them, and partly because I didn’t feel that I gave them a fair shake the first time around.

There was one particular calculus class that I remember clearly; we had finished all the preliminary work at the beginning of the semester, and were finally getting to the basic premise of the whole thing. Calculus, we were learning by degrees, is all about determining the area when the shape you’re measuring is curved. It’s actually a pretty abstract concept… you have to divide up the area you want to measure into smaller and smaller bits, until you’re essentially divining what would happen if you were to split it up into infinitely small parts and measure them all individually. Surprisingly, there’s a very accurate set of rules for doing this.

Anyway, the teacher was spending a whole class period leading us through the steps to this final realization, and I realized about ten minutes before he was done that I knew where it all was going. There was no series of logical jumps went through my mind. The Big Idea was suddenly just *there*, and I had an intensely visceral reaction to it. My face got hot, my heart sped up, and I was almost jumping out of my seat for the teacher to get to the end of his spiel already, and tell me that which I already knew was right.

I’ve learned since that this kind of reaction isn’t uncommon. It’s said that Einstein had heart palpitations for days after making the leap of intuition that lead to his understanding relativity. Not that I’m comparing him and me by any stretch, but it happens. I can only imagine what must have been going on in his head at that moment… with so many thoughts arrayed in his mind, then having them all jump together suddenly into a beautifully elegant solution, seemingly of their own volition.

Later on, I read Dianetics -- the textbook for Scientology – just to see what the big deal was, and one of the (few) worthwhile things that I took away from it was the point that, at its highest level of function, the human mind doesn’t work in language. The majority of thoughts that go through our heads are, however… we actually think the words in our heads, even though we don’t say them. But those great flashes of insight occur instantaneously, with no coherent form or structure. They just *happen*.

Studies of the brain have shown that your mind does two things when you say a word… a certain area of the brain forms the word by flashing a particular pattern of neurons, and then another part of your brain works the lungs and larynx to actually make the sound of it come out of your mouth. It turns out that when you think a particular word, that initial pattern flashes even if you don’t actually go on to say the word. Of course, this means that if we know what neural pattern matches to what word, someone could literally read your thoughts by scanning your brain activity. But I digress…

While that’s a technology for the future, all these things also got me thinking about the past, and how people’s thoughts must have been structured differently before language existed… it took a while, but we actually made some significant technological advances before we had any way of vocally expressing them to each other. Creating tools and fire and wheels, first of all. The only means at our disposal would have been showing by example. True, the advances in knowledge come faster when you can tell everyone how it works -- or even better, write it down -- but I wonder if it comes at a price. We’re now so used to hearing spoken language in our heads and before our eyes, we might be cutting ourselves off from having these language-less flashes of inspiration. Clearly, they do come, but maybe they don’t come nearly as often. Then again, what good is brilliant inspiration if you can’t articulate it to anyone else?

Dear America:

Come on, guys. I thought we were past this. I’ve been so delighted in some of the advances that I’ve seen in the past few years, and now this. We even seemed that we were at least partially color-blind when it came to electing a president, but there have been a lot of sour notes in the last few weeks.

Now, let me start by saying that while I was employed, I kept up with current events a lot better, but since I’ve been disengaged with the business world, my grasp of politics has slipped some as well, so my facts might be off. If they are, feel free to call me on it.

It all started with this damn “don’t re-nig in 2012” bumper sticker that was making the rounds. I have to say, I was shocked that here in the freaking 21st century, we’ve got people out there thinking that it’s cool or clever to say something like that, and people willing to pay to freely advertise their bigotry right on the back of their cars. The manufacturer of the sticker has pulled the item from their site, but adopted a “Whoa! Can’tcha take a joke? I’m no racist or anything” attitude that’s, frankly, ridiculous. Of course you are. And, as one of Conan O’Brian’s writers astutely pointed out in a comic editorial, the word “renege” means to take something back, so if it’s not pointedly racist, the bumper sticker is actually an endorsement for the president’s re-election.

Yes, the First Amendment grants you the right to post hate speech on your car. But if you accept this, then you also have to accept that people will key and egg your car mercilessly because you have freely advertised yourself to be a bigoted idiot. Moving on.

Next came the Trayvon Martin case, in which a young black man was shot by a Neighborhood Watch member of indeterminate lineage, who was not subsequently arrested and is claiming self-defense. Granted, I was not actively pursuing the facts of this case, but since according the police report the shooter also suffered injuries, it’s clear that some kind physical altercation took place. If that turns out to be true, then what we need to do is take a hard look at the Florida gun laws (which, I believe I can assume, are more influenced by the NRA than anything else) and decide if it’s really a good idea for Neighborhood Watch members – “Watch” being the effective word here – to have the right to brandish firearms.

Because the victim was black, the racial tinge of this story can’t be left behind. Many people – including the media – convicted the shooter on the spot. I myself didn’t even learn of the physical altercation until over a week after I first heard about the case. I’m reserving judgment until I learn all the facts of this case, and I wish the media had done the same. Too many people are using this case to further their own agendas… the scenarios run the gamut from a wannabe gangster verbally and then physically attacking a passerby and getting shot in the process, and an innocent kid walking at night getting shot solely for the color of his skin. As always, the truth is going to fall somewhere in the middle, and in the end I think the only people who will come out of it looking better than stupid are the ones who hold their tongues until the investigation is over.

Then there’s the Hunger Games. I’ve heard about some people Tweeting and statusing their fool heads off, complaining (yes, *complaining*) about the racial diversity of the recent Hunger Games movie. It seems that author Suzanne Collins’s downplaying the racial identity of some of the characters -- and rightfully so, I mean, what point is there in discussing it in a futuristic warzone where you need to pay less attention to race than to whether someone is going to immediately kill you or not? – inadvertently caused some viewers of the movie adaption to be blindsided by the fact that some of the characters were, in fact, dark-skinned.

Oh. My. Lord. Is this really something the average viewer can’t get over in, say, about ten seconds? What would go through my mind would be, “Oh, I guess I thought Rue was white. Either I’m wrong or it’s an interesting bit of casting.” And that’s it. How do I know? Because, in truth, I must have missed that one sentence where Suzanne noted the skin color of one of her characters. I really did think Rue was white. But does it change anything about my sympathy for her? Of course not, because if it did, that would be – say it with me now -- *fucking* *racist*.

I’m sorry to be so blunt, but this whole series of incidents has swept the leg of my national pride out from under itself. I understand, really I do. We humans have been bred to identify and favor those who look more like us. It’s in our DNA, the product of billions of years of kill-or-be-killed evolution. But we’ve also proven that we are more than capable of rising above that. We can build a global, peaceful civilization, and the only people who aren’t going to be a part of it are those who can’t get past the fact that we’re all basically the same, and that every person on the planet is closer family to you than fortieth-cousins. If you don’t stop being afraid of this Other that you imagine is waiting around every corner to harm you, you will never advance.

What Beauty Isn't

As I get older, I’m becoming more and more aware of just how much time women spend thinking about their outward appearance. And frankly, it pisses me off. Not so much the fact that they think about it, but more that this society we’ve created all but forces them to think about it so much.

Let’s take as a given that it’s not women’s fault that they think about their appearance so much. It’s instilled in them since birth that they have to compete in the “looks” department. I don’t believe that’s something that you can’t escape… it’s part of our DNA. In the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s usually the male who has to have bright feathers or the slickest dance moves to secure a mate, but humans have mostly flipped things around. The point is that one member of any couple has to make an effort to get the other to take a second look. My issue is that it’s getting to the point where getting yourself to look “good enough” is actually detrimental to your health, which to me seems to be working directly against evolution, the instigator of this whole process.

So let’s ask the main question: where does the modern standard of beauty come from? Who’s determining what the ideal woman looks like in this day and age? Here’s what I think, and it boils down to four important factors:

Factor #1: Outdated Measures of Honor.

We’ve recently departed a century that saw more deprivation and poverty in fully-developed nations than ever before. Two World Wars and a Great Depression forced our grandparents and great-grandparents to do without. Having a large family was a goal left over from our country’s initial expansion, and thanks to advances in medicine, it became less and less dangerous to do so. At the same time, it became more and more necessary to feed them on pennies a day. Fathers being lost to battle, and mothers having to take on more of the workforce burden, made it almost a requirement to get by on next to nothing. It became a badge of honor, in a way. And from that, some degree of malnutrition and emaciation became the standard. It wasn’t until the flush of national pride and industry came back in the fifties that we stopped being thin out of necessity. So why didn’t we stay in the state of grace that produced pin-up ideals such as Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell? Because of my second point…

Factor #2: Generational Bullying.

It seems like every woman has a moment like this: a close relative -- a father, grandmother, or other authority figure -- who up until this moment might have been unconditionally supportive and loving, says something derogatory about their physical self. It might be part of a joke, or just a thoughtless comment, but it becomes something that she remembers for the rest of her life, and colors what she sees every time she looks into a mirror. Whether this bullying – and yes, that’s what it is – is premeditated or not, it is based solely on the insecurities of the person saying it. Whether they really mean, “I never had it easy, why should you?” or “I used to be young and beautiful, but you’ll grow old too, so don’t get too full of yourself,” the damage gets done. It’s like a mental slap across the face the first time a child hears this, and the first thing a child will do is look to their culture for clues on how to “fix” their “problem”, which leads them right into the clutches of the next factor…

Factor #3: The Fashion Industry.

Humans pass judgment on a person’s external appearance all the time. We’re engineered that way, by a whole host of DNA-instilled instincts that are there to attract us to – or repel us from – another person within seconds. In that light, what one wears becomes an extension of who they are. Actually, that’s not right. What one wears is an extension of who they *think* they are. The whole point of selling clothes is wanting people to look at it and say to themselves, “I think I would look nice in that. That would make me feel good wearing it.” So, if you’re going to design clothes, you want to show them being worn by someone who embodies how you want the wearer to imagine themselves feeling if they were to put it on. You want them to feel tall (because, as in all cultures, height equals power) and thin (see points 1 and 2). You want a living coat hanger, a blank canvas that the viewer can project their ideal image of themselves into, which translates into a woman who is six feet tall and has the body shape of a twelve-year-old boy. On top of that, I’m betting that some of the malnourished-body aesthetic filtered down from the European fashion centers, which were even more ravaged by war than we were in the States. I’m not saying that the fashion industry created the problem, but clearly it has magnified the distortion between how people really are and what they wish they could be. By being so omnipresent, the exaggeration has become the ideal. And speaking of pop culture omnipresence…

Factor #4: People – Teenage Boys in Particular -- Are Idiots.

A good analogy for this point was my introduction to pop music. From 1982-1987, the music I liked never extended outside the top 40. I came to the scene relatively late compared to my peers, and when I found the radio and MTV I was in a new world, more than happy to accept whatever was being fed to me. It wasn’t until later that I figured out that there was so much stuff that I wasn’t hearing, and that what was being pushed on me wasn’t always even good. I started venturing down the hidden side roads that led me toward what I didn’t even know that I really loved. I think it’s the same with men learning what they individually find is beautiful in terms of women… in middle and high schools, it’s the pictures in the magazines and music videos that you’re focused on, and that becomes your ideal. Looking back, it makes me shudder to think of how gullible and open to suggestion I was back then about female beauty. What makes it even worse is that I, and the other boys of my generation, were unknowingly reinforcing the twisted ideal of what our female peers thought they should look like. They liked us, and we didn’t even realize how much power we had, or how under the sway of the pop culture establishment we all were. It worked both ways, of course, especially back in the image-conscious 80s, but guys have never been as susceptible to these tidal forces. And why? Because girls are better at looking past the superficial. So, on behalf of all the men of Generation X (and Y) to the women, I apologize.

---

I’ve been thinking about this because I have a young daughter, and as I’m sure a lot of new parents do, I’ve been taking a look at the world around me and wondering why it is the way it is. As much as I wish for things to be different by the time my daughter is old enough to be aware of this, I’m not entirely sure it will. We might make progress in the right direction, but there’s just too much money riding on the beauty industry (by this I mean mainly cosmetics both applied and surgical, and weight-control products) for things to change very quickly.

On the other hand, there’s also a paradox in America. We elevate to celebrity status both women who have no discernable talents but are “pretty”, and people who aren’t conventionally beautiful but are supremely talented in their field. It’s a place where Kardashians and Adeles, Hiltons and McCarthys alike can become the biggest thing around. That’s got to be progress of some sort, right?

I have no idea what kind of body type my daughter is going to be once she’s grown. But I do know one thing… she’s going to be freaking gorgeous. I just hope that, however she looks, the world is accepting enough to realize it when the time comes. I’ll do my best to uphold my end of the bargain… to teach her to accept herself first, regardless of what the world thinks, and to not be the guy I mentioned back in point #2.

The Short Story is Alive(?)

A few entries ago, I came to the realization (for about the thirtieth time) that writing is what I’m supposed to be doing, to be the focus of my creative energy. Close on the heels of that, I received a response from a publisher that was looking at my short novel, “28 IF”. Their comments were that, while the material is “strong”, there is “a little too much philosophizing and not enough action”. I don’t really take offense to that; in fact, the philosophizing was always supposed to be the focus.

I’ve also, from a different source, heard some about the marketing aspects of my story. If you’ve checked it out (it’s presented in its entirety in older entries if you haven’t) it’s structured around the Beatles’ final album, Abbey Road, and incorporates all the lyrics from the album. This source pointed out that it would be a huge legal hassle to obtain the rights for publication, and what publisher in these times would want to take that upon themselves, especially for an unknown author? Again, I have to say that when I wrote the story, marketability was not what I had in mind. I just had an idea that I wanted to get out of my head and into the world.

But all this feedback got me thinking. Of the four major works I’ve started working on (three novels and one screenplay), all derive their structure from someone else’s work. “28 IF” was based on the tracklist of “Abbey Road”, my two unfinished novels are based on Dante’s “Inferno” and Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, and my screenplay “Syzygy” was originally conceived to follow the tracklist and imagery of Tom Waits’s album “Bone Machine”. In that last instance, I did thankfully stray from the original concept, but what keeps coming around is the idea that I’m not clear at all on how to create a long-form structure of my own. I always have to provide myself a guide to follow, even if I don’t always strictly adhere to it.

So maybe, after all this, the short story is really what I should be focusing on. I haven’t been in recent years, because it seems like the market for them has really gone downhill. That wasn’t always the case… when the Internet was first becoming a true marketing force for fiction, everyone was saying that short fiction, especially “flash” fiction that’s even shorter than short stories, would be the main thing, something that someone could digest all in one bite. That doesn’t seem like it’s come to pass. There are exceptions, of course… Joe Hill’s “20th Century Ghosts” and my former high school classmate Julie Orringer’s “How to Breathe Underwater” have been acclaimed short story collections by first-time authors, but on the whole, it’s novels that are the bread and butter of the book industry.

A long time ago, I promised myself that I would follow my muse as closely as I could, letting my mind, and not the market, dictate what kind of books I would write. I wouldn’t try to fit into any particular genre, or write for any defined audience rather than myself. Now I understand that I should extend that promise into the *form* of what I write, as well. If my mind is geared toward writing short stories, then that’s what I should write. One of my literary heroes, Ray Bradbury, wrote almost exclusively short stories. Even his most popular novels, “The Martian Chronicles” and “Dandelion Wine”, started out as story collections until he found a way to string them together. Maybe I can do the same.

And who knows? There may be an untapped market for short fiction out there that I’m just not aware of. I read a book recently that takes place in the 1920s, and I found myself being genuinely envious of a time when a writer could pound out a heartfelt story in a few days, send it to a literary magazine, and have it almost immediately published and read by thousands of people. Even back in the 90s, I picked up more than a few horror anthologies, and found some that contain little gems that I go back to an reread every once in a while. I have to do some research and see an online version of that exists.

Bottom line: I want to write what I feel, what I’m passionate about, what I can’t *not* write, and have somebody else figure out what to do with it. One of the more terrible directions I see the book industry going in is that, as publishers begin pulling back as an economic necessity, a whole set of existing safeguards that protect the reading public from crappy books are being lowered. In another ten years, the New York Times bestseller lists might not be populated by the best authors, or the most worthy books, but by titles whose authors have best learned the art of self-promotion. I can’t see how a person can create quality work, and at the same time work hard enough to get themselves noticed single-handedly. I’ve talked to enough of them on the phone, when they were trying to get their titles posted for sale on Borders.com. Not a single one of them had a title that seemed worthwhile, and when they would send me a sample copy, they were often laughably written and grammatically inexcusable.

I didn’t mean to go off on a tangent about the future of the industry, but my point is this: I’m going to write what I need to, in the way that I need to, and figure out what to do with it later.

DREAMSTORY #8: STAB

(Note: This is a story I wrote last year, but never got around to polishing it until recently. Just so you know, it's a little more graphic and disturbing than what I usually post here.)

He hadn’t known that the knife going in would have been the easy part. Never would have guessed it. He had been around violent people long enough, had committed enough acts of violence himself, to think that he knew what it would be like when the dice finally came up snake-eyes for him and he would be on the receiving end. He had thought it would be like a punch; he had certainly received enough of those, and there was a weight to them, a finality, a lack of ambiguity. There were the fleeting instants before you got punched, then the instant you were being punched, and then a painful parade of more instants afterward.

A knife, though… a knife was stealthy. It came out of nowhere, at least this one had, and it had none of that sureness to it. Where the very tip of it was at any one point in time couldn’t be pinned down so finely. Even as he had seen the blade flash out of the corner of his eye, seen it sweep in toward his chest, he couldn’t be entirely sure that it had stuck him until the hilt bumped up against his ribs. Then, of course, the pain came. It had reminded him a little of when he had gotten shots as a kid. If you didn’t look, you couldn’t tell the doctor had done it until it was too late and you felt that burning rush under your skin.

They had kept him in the basement room long enough for him to lose track of time. His sleep patterns had gotten screwed up enough so that he had no idea whether it was day or night. The waves of hunger that had at first accompanied the passing of each mealtime had long since blurred together into a constant stream of ache that spread throughout his entire torso, and in the last few hours had started working down the length of his limbs. He’d gone hungry before, but had never realized that arms could throb with hunger just as badly as his stomach could.

He wasn’t even sure he was in a basement. The only reason he figured that was because the floor was dirt. He supposed he could be in one of the unfinished buildings out past the airport, that sort of reverse ghost town that had been abandoned even before it had been entirely built. But the concrete wall against his back was cold, too cold for summer, and his only guess was that the other side of its thickness had never seen the light of day.

By the time the tall man had come in and started interrogating him, he was a total wreck. That was one reason They were so stupid (and by They he meant anyone who wasn‘t part of his team); you always ask a man what he knows before he begins to lose sense of himself. If you give him time to become hungry and tired and disoriented, who knows what he’ll say. Get him to talk when he’s fresh, when he still thinks he has a chance of getting back to whatever his normal life was before you took him. When that promise is still within his reach, when he can still smell his wife’s/girlfriend’s cooking, can call up in an instant the color of his children’s eyes, that’s when he’ll spill all he knows, so he can experience those things again. If he had happened to have a girlfriend, or children, even by this point he wouldn’t have given up hope, but their memories wouldn’t be his prime drivers anymore. He would be focused solely on surviving, and lies come quick and fast to the lips of anyone who just wants to live to see the light of day again.

The burn was spreading through his chest now. How wide had that blade been, anyway? It felt like it had sliced him wide open, even though he had only seen a medium-sized blade swoop under his field of vision as it punched into his chest. The feeling was accompanied by anger, a sudden shock of it that was equally fueled by fear and the sense of being startled. He hoped it had registered on his face, and for just a second had made his attacker wished he hadn’t done it, because the stabbee just might jump to his feet now on pure adrenaline and kick his ass. But it probably didn’t. He didn’t have a whole lot of say in what expression passed across his face now.

His hands had raised up instinctively, but had gotten to the scene too late to do anything. By the time they jerked up from his sides (Reason #2 that They were stupid… they hadn’t tied him up), the blade had struck, been ripped right back out of him again, and the man had started turning to leave. Instead of his hands raising to -- what? Deflect the blade with a particularly hard callous, knock the attacker’s hand aside? -- instead they flew to the wound. And, just for a second, he wondered how the man had managed not only to stab him, but to dump warm oil on his chest as well. It was everywhere, couldn’t be contained.

By then the door had slammed and he was alone. No one to take out his fear-ignited anger on but himself. Whatever opportunity he had once had to get himself out of this was gone. Maybe that was why they had made him wait so long, to get him so tired and disoriented that there was no way he was going to be able to give them any information they would want. And here was the result, what they had just been waiting for an excuse for all along.

He didn’t panic, just tried to struggle to his feet. His front was coated with the slick stuff now, and in the dim light he could see how dark it was turning him. There was so much of it… how much could he stand to lose? He had seen lots of guys bleed, both friends and victims of his own actions, and past lessons told him that even a little blood seemed like a lot once it was out from under the skin. But this really seemed like a lot. And there was a new pain under the split flesh, something that made him start to really worry. A burble was starting to work its way into his breaths, which were labored now from the effort of getting up off the floor. Two days ago, he was fit enough to run a 10K without breaking a sweat, and now he was winded and he hadn’t moved a foot.

Then he realized how dizzy he was, and a titanic fear began to creep in around the edges of his mind. Fear that he might not make it out of here (deep down he knew that it was a certainty, but he hadn’t let that black knowledge shine through the rest of his mind yet), fear that his friends weren’t going to be able to help him, fear that he was alone in this basement and no one was ever going to hear from him again.

Then he heard the dripping. One time, when he was a child, his mom and whatever stepfather had been around then had moved them all into a dingy apartment where the roof leaked and he had the sense that the walls weren’t straight up and down. The sound he was hearing now was what he heard on rainy nights in that apartment, and it felt like there had been an inordinate number of those nights before all stepfathers and living quarters moved on in the rotation. That pattering sound, steady and rhythmic but coming from so many places at once that the sound became chaotic and relentless.

He didn’t have to look down to know that he was the source this time, rivulets of his blood running down his torso and legs to drip off in a dozen places. He had become the house whose walls weren’t true. He thought maybe he should look at the wound itself, just to make sure, but he couldn’t get his neck to angle downward. Even his body didn’t want him to see.

It didn’t matter anyway; the fear was sitting on his head, sinking its claws into his brain, taking hold and promising to never let go. He found that he couldn’t even convert it into anger, a currency exchange that he had become an expert in, out in the world, where there was always something to spend it on. Here, the only thing breakable was the single dangling light bulb, and unloading some fury on that would only put him further in the dark. And for once, he wanted to stay in the light as long as he could.

The burble in his throat suddenly decided to become sentient and try to choke him. He couldn’t breathe, his windpipe filling with fluid. His muscles clenched, he threw his upper body forward and he heaved out a massive quantity of red stuff, doubling the pool that had already gathered at his feet, already turning the floor of the room into crimson mud. He tried to draw a breath, but he hadn’t purged enough of it, and retched again. He almost felt the urge to thrust his hands forward, to reach into the scarlet waterfall, just to catch some of it, as if he could somehow keep it and put it back inside his arteries where it belonged. But he was paralyzed with the effort of bringing it all up, and it escaped onto the floor. He felt his heels sink a little into the bare earth as he softened it with his blood. He felt lighter when the spasms were over, cooler. The fevered heat of his cheeks had mellowed. He knew he was going to have to do the whole thing over again, maybe in as little as a few seconds, but his mind was racing now, and he had at least a little while to think. And the thought that kept racing around, over and over like one of those circus motorcycles that roars loop-the-loops in a spherical cage was this: I’m not going to be remembered.

Maybe he would be, in the same way that he remembered dozens of friends he had known, ones that had all been snuffed out in the same turf war that he was seconds away from falling prey to himself, but not really remembered. There was no family that loved him, no hot homegirl that always had his back. He had relished the power that came with being part of a large gang for so long that he had neglected to realize that he was equally anonymous to everyone else who he called his “family“. No one cared for him more than anyone else, just as he cared for no one else in particular. His love was more for the gang than the people it was made of.

So who would spend more time on his death than it took to empty a forty onto a curb outside his house? When it came right down to it, the ones who had the strongest memories of him probably remembered him in fear; those he had terrorized and beaten, the living relatives of the punks he had taken down for the sake of honor. He would live on in their nightmares, but nowhere else.

That was all he had time to consciously process before he was hunching forward again, great gouts of red stuff boiling out of him and expanding the pool of himself that he stood in. His leg muscles were starting to shake, lack of blood making them all too aware that they were the only thing holding him up, and they couldn’t bear the responsibility anymore.

He leaned backward until his aching spine hit the concrete wall again, cold as a block of ice. He slid down it until he was half sitting up, sinking into the dark mud under him, looking up and around, his eyes rolling in their sockets like a terrified horse. It made the room appear to spin around him. He was so dizzy, even though he knew he wasn’t moving.

Every part of him was hurting now, the slash across his chest only a brighter flare in the overall wash of pain. He’d only been really, truly nervous a few times in his life, and now each of his limbs felt like they were getting butterflies. Even with all the pent-up energy he felt, his body was getting heavier, becoming harder and harder to move. He was solidifying, turning to stone while the ground below him kept getting softer. The only real movement he could muster was another halfhearted round of coughing, his chest pumping like a creaky bellows while the rest of him stayed limp, sputtering red clouds of mist off his lips.

This is it, he thought. Never going to feel better than this again. Never going to laugh, or get laid, or leave this room. He didn’t even know who the tall man was who had stabbed him, and he had turned out to be one of the most important people in his life; the one who ended it.

He thought all this with a kind of detachment, fully aware of what was happening, still terrified, and yet having a part of himself able to think rationally about it all, analyze it like a spectator. He wasn’t religious; once he became fully engaged in his life of crime, it seemed ridiculous to think that there was anyone out there looking out for him other than his gang mates, and even that didn’t have a whole lot to do with him personally. They were just all part of the same team, and even though it was the deepest bond any of them knew, it still wasn’t much deeper than a wolf must feel for any other member of its pack. He felt safe, secure in their numbers, and he felt it was the best he had any right to feel, so never tried for anything deeper. Besides, if he still chose to believe in another life after this one, he was sure whoever was waiting for him on the other side wasn’t going to be proud of the way he had conducted himself. He found that he was staring at his fingers, hypnotized by the way they kept reflexively balling into fists and slowly relaxing without him consciously asking them to; they felt as if they had fallen asleep, and now were in a perpetual needles-and-pins phase of waking themselves back up. Instead of that tense, buzzing feeling fading away after a few seconds, it just kept getting worse. The fact that they were bloodier than they had ever been -- except for maybe at the moment of his birth -- only made the process more fascinating. It was like he were looking at dripping red-wax candle versions of his hands, and he was melting away before his own eyes.

He took an unusually deep breath, felt his lung whistle and bubble, unable to fully inflate itself. Then he pitched sideways onto his face, his shoulder sort of breaking his fall, his mouth and nose just clearing the mud puddle that his life had suddenly manifested itself in, while his temple fell right into it. He lay perfectly still. Movement was no longer necessary anyway, and he hardly even realized he had fallen. His mind was burning, spinning with sparks of thought, knowing it was racing against time, time in which he had to think about all the things he never had time to think about before, come to a decision about everything he had ever been ambivalent about.

It was a race that he lost, of course. But as the seconds dragged out, he became less and less aware of that fact. His vision brightened, all the colors in the dank room ratcheting up and up until they all became blindingly bright, the coolness in his limbs doing the same, growing warmer and warmer but never too hot. Thoughts came and went randomly, less and less frequently, and as his awareness evaporated into that same bright clarity, time mattered less and less. As a result, those last few seconds that he lay artlessly sideways on the dirt floor essentially went on forever.