Short Story Part I

2003-11-09 - 7:29 p.m.

The play is over. It went pretty well, but the important thing is that it's over. Less stress, and more free time...well, except for swimming. I think it was mostly the play that has been bringing me down lately. Of course, I shouldn't say that. It's really just the overall load of shit that piles up senior year. But the play was a big part of that load and it feels damn good to shake it off. Lately I've been starting to wonder if the Adderall I'm on (yes I started again, half the dose) is what's depressing me. But I don't really want to mess with it until I know for sure so for now I'm just being happy with where I'm at.

As a fitting end to this little dark stretch, I'm going to post the product of it: the short story I wrote for English class.

Don't read too much into it or assume anything. It's just one of those things that your mind does when you give it a little emotional encouragement. It doesn't mean I'm goint to do anything, and it doesn't mean I'm nuts. Just read it as a story and be glad that most of my depression made it onto the paper and out of my head.

It's pretty damn long, so get comfortable.....it's almost 4000 words. I think I'll post it in sections to break it up for y'all.

Walking Man

A young man walks down a road toward nowhere, concentrating on each step forward. Every once in a while, he stops to look around (never backward) at the trees, day lilies glorifying a ditch, fields full of large round mountains of new-mowed hay piled high like temporary monuments to the back-breaking life of the farmer. Setting his gaze and feet directly forward again, he continues purposefully with neither haste nor languor in his step. A fleeting vision of a destination passes through his mind, ignored by the determined uncertainty that guides the man’s journey. He thinks of previous destinations, none predetermined but all turned by the passage of time into starting points and fading memories. Content merely to put a few more miles behind his feet before nightfall, he walks on into the spreading flame of sunset, waiting for darkness to illuminate the stars.

* * *

Mark loved the Interstate Highway System. Looking out at a horizon of gray clouds, corn fields, and a black ribbon of asphalt produced more exhilaration in this 26-year-old boy than any amusement park vomit ride. Mile marker 92 flew past the two decades’ worth of rust that made up Mark’s Sable, as the smiling driver imagined the road beneath him connecting him to a hundred cites, a thousand streets, millions of people, billions of stories. Chicago was another 3 hours in the westbound lane, but Mark saw instead the endless stretch of roadway reaching far beyond the southern tip of Lake Michigan. He could smell the long country miles of Iowa and Nebraska waiting for his baby blue blur to blaze across rolling hills and over trickling creeks.

This used to be his escape in high school. Long hours on the road to somewhere better were a wonderful relief from the binding, numbing, forced conformity of public secondary education. Rules for the sake of rules were not the modus operandi of Interstate travel. Speed limits were suggestions, and everyone’s objective was essentially the same: arrive at your destination in the shortest time possible. It provided a refreshing contrast to high school, a world where no one seemed to share Mark’s goals; everyone had a different idea of what everyone else’s destination should be. Mark could never quite get accustomed to the way in which teachers and administrators made learning secondary to their own holy trinity: power, order, and standardized test scores. Orwell’s Napoleon could not have created such backward priorities. Sometimes his classmates made Mark feel worse about the situation, though Mark never had trouble socially. He felt like the only student whose goal was to learn, rather than to perform. He was a misfit with lots of friends; people weren’t his problem, nor was the strange world of teenage politics. Mark just didn’t fit into the system, so he drove away.

* * *

The walking man slows his pace, then stops. Ahead about half a mile down his wooded, lonely road, a short path opens into a small clearing. The path sits straight before him, left behind by the road’s sharp right and resting at the bottom of a hill. Barely visible through valley fog is a cabin, indescribable in plainness. The man feels drawn to its painfully nondescript aura; it seems so familiar to him, but the familiarity is the kind that comes from the cabin’s unique condition of not being perceptibly different from any other. No distinguishing peculiarity of structure or appearance would separate it from the generic image that a “cabin in the woods” brings to mind. In fact, it is that image.

* * *

Illinois and its steel-and-concrete tumor, Chicago, were far behind Mark when he approached the counter at one of Dalton’s two gas stations. After paying, Mark returned to his home on wheels to rest and read his second-favorite book: the Rand McNally North American Road Atlas, 2003 edition. Its presentation had been a highlight of Mark’s seventeenth birthday and a liberating gift from his parents. The traveler calculated his mileage and gazed intently at the page dedicated to the state he had entered a hundred blissful miles before. He was amused by the path his road was following through the eastern Iowa countryside, which reminded Mark of his only other non-chemical escape from high school: his occasional Thoreauvian retreats at his treasured campground in Michigan. Interstate 80 carves basically a straight line through Iowa from east to west, as if there were nothing important enough to go around except Des Moines. Mark reflected on the geographic straightness of this section of his meandering life, decided that it was entirely inappropriate, and determined to get lost in Dalton, Iowa.

He did not intend, of course, to actually forget the two rights, straight south for two miles, and a left onto the entrance ramp that would take him back to the highway. In reality, when Mark drove the very short three blocks to downtown Dalton, he was looking for stories. As he approached the town’s center, Mark had already begun to feel familiar with the place and its inhabitants. Towns are like fruits; there are huge watermelon cities and small apple towns, but within each type, the differences are superficial. Every apple may have a unique shape and color, but there are still five seeds in the middle in pockets around a core, and there is always the flavor of painstakingly tended illusion in every small rural town. The excruciatingly clean storefronts were all ordered, as if someone had made a list of which establishments should be on a small town’s Main Street and planned the heart of Dalton accordingly. Mark parked behind Peggy’s Home-Style Restaurant, next to a dumpster full of refuse from its industrial kitchen. He retrieved his best friend from the trunk and sat down on a bench to make her six strings sing.

People walked by him with a variety of opinions on their faces. Some huffed away mumbling about bums and their guitars, while others stood to listen for a while, then passed in amused silence. Mark tried to read the stories on these faces and was disturbed by the ease with which opened their covers and turned their pages. There goes a businessman-father who is spending too much time at the office because he feels it’s his divine commission to make more money than his neighbor and to provide for the kids he hardly sees. Next walks by a young woman about Mark’s age, home after college and wishing that somewhere else existed. A sixteen- or seventeen-year-old drives by in the Honda Civic his parents bought him because he saw one in a movie. His violent, chauvinistic, millionaire urban idol is barely audible over blasting bass, which almost covers the whine of his brand new exhaust system. Mark could feel the kid’s pain from his own bench. It was the pain of someone whose society tells him that his value comes from the accessories on his car and the girls who’ve been in his back seat. It was the pain of someone who filled the gaps in his world with materials, followed MTV’s instructions, and still felt empty when the rap was turned off. Mark knew that kid in high school, just as he knew the woman and the father. The same people lived in his Indiana home town and everywhere else. There were no new stories here, only the same players acting out the same drama as everyone else, wishing they could be a part of the cast they admire from their couch on screens that are always too small.

He, who had only been in Dalton one hour, could already see through the painted faces of her children and see the heads of their parents through their sandy cover. He sensed the adults’ pride in the absence of “city problems” such as poverty, drugs, and crime from their streets and schools, yet he also realized with more pity than cynicism that they would maintain that futile but dignified illusion even if they were to learn otherwise, as many of them surely had.

Mark was about to rejoin the Interstate world in despair when a sweet-looking girl that was probably Civic-boy’s girlfriend sat down to listen to him play. At first he ignored her, but as he watched her watch his fingers dance in rhythm over the fretboard, he realized that she was really listening deeply. She looked at the chords composing themselves in his hand, but didn’t see the notes or melody. Her eyes penetrated the song without hesitation like an viewer of a painting who doesn’t look at perspective or brush strokes, but tries to see the heart of the artist and the soul that created the picture. He stopped playing.

“Keep playing,” she whispered, “I want to hear your story.”

* * *

Golden streams pass through the walking man’s eyelids to rouse him from his sleep, perchance from dreams He rises and searches the wooden panels of the cabin, but finds no more than the east wall’s window. His bed of one night is in a state of disarray, and he, feeling some obligation to his unknown host, arranges the sheets and quilt neatly. The only other furniture in the room is a solitary stool with four maple legs anchoring its cherry circle seat. Suddenly, the man blinks in shock as his gaze rests on a rope hanging down over the stool and bound to a rafter with a strong knot. The rope winds thirteen circlets around itself to reinforce the single loop of death.

* * *

Thirty more minutes of music didn’t answer all of Gina’s questions, so at Mark’s next pause, she gave voice to them.

“Where are you from? I mean, originally. I can tell you’re a wanderer because this town can’t be your destination.”

“It doesn’t matter. My house is parked behind the restaurant over there, but my home doesn’t exist anymore. I suppose I don’t really have a place, just a journey and a mission. I collect stories,” he explained.

“Don’t you have to get a job? How do you pay for your travel?” she asked as if it had never occurred to her that one could survive without a regular paycheck.

“Well, when I need money for gas and food, I do some work. Usually I only spend a few days in any one place. It keeps me moving and I like the physical labor,” Mark told her, “Too many people look at those who work with their hands in contempt, as if sitting behind a desk were inherently more valuable to society.” The girl seemed to be transfixed by Mark’s simple explanation. He had never thought of his own life as interesting to anybody else, yet he had lit some spark of imagination in Gina. Apparently, she didn’t understand that Mark lived outside her world; he was a perpetual interloper to all those living within her paradigm. Or she did understand, and it gave her some sort of strange epiphany. Mark shuddered. He only wanted to hear people’s stories, not affect them.

“Come with me,” Gina sang, “Come eat dinner at my house. I want my father to meet you.”

* * *

The walking man stares at the noose dangling directly in front of him. Had it been there the whole night? Why hadn’t he noticed it when he came in? Minutes fly past the man, who is stuck still in space and in time. The cabin walls spin around quickly, but they can’t distract his stare, focused and fixed on braids of twine that twist his thoughts. Two steps, then three steps draw him nearer in morbid curiosity. He climbs onto the stool to examine it more carefully, he tells himself.

* * *

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