“I know, Dad,” I parroted back to him.
“Half the people you meet at public schools are leeches; failures. Too damn stubborn and too damn proud to admit that’s all they’ll ever be.”
“I know, Dad.”
“And the worst part of it all is that people will spend their whole lives angry; angry at never doing more with their lives, blaming everyone around them for their problems, but never once blaming themselves.”
He reached over to pour himself another stiff drink. He poured more into my glass even though I had yet to take a single sip.
“There's still that opening at my firm.”
“Not this again.”
“I'm telling you, Pete, this is exactly what you need right now.”
“Can we not just sit here and talk?” I asked. “Can we not just even enjoy each other’s company for once? You know, make small talk, laugh, and joke? Does it always have to be like this?”
“Fine.” My father surrendered. “What would you like to talk about?”
“How has Maria José been?”
“Great men talk about ideas, Pete—”
“Oh, come on! You're unbelievable, you know that? All you ever do is preach! Do you even care about anyone other than yourself? Do you even care about me?” I moved closer to face him. “Do you even respect me?”
His glassy green eyes squinted at me. His voice barely above a whisper.
“No, Pete, I don't. I don't respect you.”
“Say that again.” I rose to face him.
“I can't respect a man who is willing to throw his life away.” He drained the rest of his glass in one deep gulp and lazily rolled his head up towards me.
I fought down the burning urge to strike him. To watch this bitter old man tumble down from his throne. Instead, I stood there and said nothing. His tired, old eyes didn't care anymore. Pain was the only thing he was capable of feeling.
“Have a nice birthday,” I managed before picking up my bag and walking out the front door. No sad songs filled the halls as I left. No final words.
Just silence.
CHAPTER 13
“So, how are you today, Pete?”
I rolled my head across my shoulders, feeling the knots of tension tighten around the base of my neck and shoulders. It creaked and groaned in protest from every joint out to my fingertips. Sleeping in a car for a week will do that to you. That familiar sensation in my stomach convulsed. I’d felt sick the whole journey back to the city.
I looked into Sarah’s eyes, my dreary gaze with its black pools of emptiness contradicting against the ambient blue lakes of hers.
“Well, it’s safe to say that I most definitely didn’t get the job.”
I hadn’t told her about visiting my father. She probably knew anyway. She always knew about these things. It was most likely scribbled down somewhere in that binder of hers, marked with an old coffee-stained sticker saying ‘Peter Clayton’ in tiny, blue, scrawny handwriting. The past three years of my life and all its wonderful problems she had so lovingly documented.
A faint sardonic laugh echoed from deeper inside the smoke-filled room.
She cast her eyes downward onto her notepad. Her hand scribbled something across it almost out of reflex.
“Now why would you say that, Pete?”
“Why wouldn't I?” I asked, almost weighing up how this hypothetical question would settle for her in my mind.
“Pete, you’re a brilliant man. You’re full of so much great potential that there are so many possibilities for you out there. It will come in time; you just need to be patient.”
Her voice came across so softly, like a mother singing a lullaby to a new-born child, but to me it felt like a requiem to Peter Clayton, recently deceased.
Again, that same faint mocking laugh echoed off the walls, surrounding me. Like four signal fires, they were watching me, cigarettes dangling from their smirking lips. Thick clouds of nicotine coiled around me, blocking my senses and thoughts.
Marcus loved every second of my failures. Every week for the past three years, he had done this—chuckling at every chance to rattle my cage. In the low haze of smoke lit by his cigarette, he leaned forward to watch me suffer. I tried to close my eyes and take in a deep breath, but my throat burned from the stale air. My sense of smell and taste started to diminish.
“Ms. Applegate, would—”
“Pete, you've been coming here for three years now. Call me Sarah.”
“Do you mind if I opened the window?” I asked, but I’d already risen out of my chair. She gestured me forward with a wave of her hand anyway and twisted in her chair to face me.
From my new vantage point, I could properly see everyone beyond the mix of smoke and dim lighting. Marcus shifted slightly back outside the semi-circle, bored and weary, resting his frail body against a nearby wall. Underneath all that hair, it was hard to tell if his eyes were open or closed anymore.
Jonathan sat with his legs crossed and arms folded beside Alice. The two didn’t look each other in the eyes even once throughout the entire session. He routinely jabbed cigarettes into his mouth one after another, as if feeding a fire burning in the walls of his chest before tossing them into the steel, overflowing ashtray beside him.
The smell of Alice’s nail polish hung in the air, choking the last of life from the room. Occasionally, she glanced in my direction, a ghost of a smile upon her thin red lips. The blood-red nail polish she was using dripped in little droplets onto the floor, gathering into tiny pools as she awkwardly tried to take another puff from her cigarette. Some of it had smeared on the armrest of her chair like a bloody hand in its dying plea.
Tony had shown up for the first time in weeks and sat to my side, occasionally nodding in approval and voicing his opinions over Sarah whenever he felt fit. But I was not listening to him.
I cast my eyes across the room twice over.
Jason had not shown up.
FROM THE DIARY OF PETER CLAYTON
Last night I had a dream—I dreamt of mortality.
Ironic, I know.
Yet in this dream, I saw my body. Not my body as the out of shape, sagging bag of flesh it is, but as a mould of clay; fissured and cracked. Yet as it broke apart, the golden rays of the sun were finally being granted access to the deepest and darkest caverns of the sculpture. But then the sun would bow and depart behind the horizon and the moon would take to the stage. The sun had not just exited the stage; that was its final performance. All that remained were fleeting memories and past glories.
But by now, the sculpture was so broken and aged that it hardly resembled the original mould anymore. It was left on the windowsill to look out at the night and watch the moon and stars flicker overhead. Cobwebs had grown over it. A thin film of dust slowly covered its eyes.
The original cast had been worked upon. The original errors weeded out as more prototypes were made, yet only this grey prototype stood on the windowsill. Away from the other perfect moulds who could only watch in reserved awe and suspicion.
Forgotten by time.
This grey mould figure stood, sentinel to the eternally falling night as a new sun was cast in this play of life and this grey figure would watch as the new red orb of the sun was dragged down time and time again behind hungry, urban teeth.
This grey sentinel had watched a thousand suns be eaten, yet only knew one moon. He decided the stars above must be the souls of those suns that the urban teeth had eaten. He decided that one day there would be so many stars in the sky that they would form a sun larger than any he had ever seen—one that would burn brighter than all before it and could never be eaten.
The grey sentinel felt a sudden joy grow inside of his imperfect little body, knowing that he was the only one that would ever see this happen. The others were too far away from the windowsill and too absorbed chatting amongst themselves all day and night to pay any attention to the world outside.
Time went on as it does and more new moulds were created, until
everywhere the grey sentinel looked he saw another perfect mould. Yet he cared little for them; his whole life was the outside world now. He would sit patiently by the window, watching another sun get eaten and the night sky would seem a little brighter. Perhaps that was their plan all along, the grey sentinel decided.
But time as it will, moves on. The cobwebs on the grey sentinel grew thicker and the dust grew denser until finally one day, the grey figure could not see anymore. When I looked at this grey sentinel—I saw my own imperfect little face look back at me. Fissured and cracked; broken by time.
CHAPTER 14
During boxing, I told Jason of my dream about mortality. At first, he laughed, until I tried explaining it to him. Then he laughed even harder.
“Man, wait until you see this place I got lined up.”
Beats of sweat dripped down his face and his eyes bunched up.
He threw another hard punch that got inside my guard and knocked the wind out of me. I fell flat on my ass, wincing as my chest burned. I needed to quit smoking. But whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? His parched lips curled into a snarl and demanded that I get up. I wheezed, grasping my chest, and told him he’d won.
I was never really into boxing; the gloves just made it feel too fake. It masked the sensation too much.
Sitting on the edge of the ring, I asked him what he meant.
“This chick I know, man, let’s just say she’s hooked me up. Big time.”
“Anyone I know?”
His hammer-like fists pounded against a nearby cowhide punching bag several more times before he replied.
“No, I don’t think so. Only just met her.”
I turned to face him, trying my best to mask my concern.
“And you told her about what we do?”
The deep thump of bare-knuckle flesh smacked against compacted cowhide like a ticking metronome.
“How much did you tell her, Jason?” I slid down from the side of the ring, making my way towards him.
His fists slammed into the swaying bag once more before he paused to catch his breath.
“Relax, man. She’s one of them Goth chicks. Met her in the other clinic I go to. She’s into some dark and freaky shit, let me tell you.”
Jason laughed smugly to himself, but my features didn’t soften one bit.
“Quit lying, Jason. Where did you find her?”
“Online,” he snapped. “Now relax the fuck down, would you?”
“You know you need to run all this by me.”
He threw his hands up in defeat.
“Chill, would you? God, you’re such a fucking control freak! She knows enough to agree to it. She said she's up for some bondage: hit a little . . . you know . . . fuck a little . . .”
A trace of indignation betrayed my composure.
“Come on, Pete, you’re not going to fool me pretending you’re disgusted. It's a bad look for you anyway. You told me to be careful and this is the most carefully planned Playdate ever, Pete. This chick agreed to it all beforehand. No cops, no bribes, no worry. Everybody's happy, right?”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Money,” Jason laughed, “that’s what makes the world go around. Money is what makes every man and woman smile like a spoilt little child. That's what really controls people. Try preaching about that next time you go on bullshitting about anger connecting and controlling us all, eh?”
He playfully nudged my shoulder, but I was too fed up to entertain him.
Instead, I shook my head.
“We can’t be taking big risks like this,” I said. “It has been way too close the past few times. Somebody’s going to mess up or eventually report to the cops that we just kicked the shit out of them for kicks and get us all fucked up.”
Jason turned to face me.
“I suppose you think it will be me that’s the first to fuck up?”
I didn’t answer. He turned away after a long moment.
I closed my eyes and tried to assess the situation, using the thumping beat of his fists against the training bag to keep in pace with my thoughts.
“Okay,” I sighed. “It’s your night after all. Just—be careful, all right?”
The constant pounding of his fists was my only response. I took that as my sign to leave.
“So, since you’ve organised everything else, I suppose I’ll just go ahead and tell Marcus, Tony, Alice and Jonathan that—”
“No,” he stopped for a moment and turned to face me, eyes wild and glaring. “Just me, you, Tony, and Marcus this time.”
“Why just us?”
Another muffled thump was all that answered me. Fuck it. It didn’t really matter. Once I got paid and it ran smoothly was all I cared about. If he went too far again, I’d pull the leash. Hard. They could sort out all the drama amongst themselves. I was their dealer and they were my clients; however blurred those lines seemed to be getting.
* * *
I didn't sleep at all that night. I couldn't shake the feeling that something bad was on the horizon. I had learned to trust my gut—it’s what had kept me from getting caught for so long. All dealers eventually learn to trust their instincts, and I was no exception.
I spent the next few hours online trying to find information about our last Playdate. Lying on my bed with my back against the cold wall, I browsed the latest news highlights. This kind of stuff is usually brushed under the rug as just some kind of random act of violence. We've rarely had much backlash against these sorts of things. Hell, the crime rate was terrible enough in this city already—a few assaults here and there wasn’t going to be noticed that much. There was always news about the latest murder, corrupt politician or latest celebrity scandal. The people already had enough monsters that society had created to imagine that people like us stalked the streets at night and hid in plain sight during the daytime.
We were the other half of the newspaper. Those buried stories; the filler stories. Don’t act like you’ve never read them before; you know the ones: the one-hundred-word shock stories that are brushed over due to a lack of facts or that the editor just didn’t give enough of a shit about—you’ve probably seen them a thousand times before and just glanced over them without a second thought. You know them as the stories you see in every paper every single damn day of the week that so few take the time to fully read, and so many rush to defend how ‘fake’ the whole thing is.
It was this city really—if it didn’t drown you in its perpetual rains, it would try to drown you in its depressing stories.
People were too obsessed with what celebrity is fat now or what celebrity forgot to dress like a fashion model while going to do a grocery shopping or other such meaningless stories.
Distractions really. Little Prozac headlines to make us feel that little bit better about ourselves, something easily digestible to help dull the senses about the real stories in this world.
Mind numbing and life numbing little tales of our times.
Our stories would never come to light. There were always bigger monsters out there than us, other bigger distractions, and we were happy to lurk in the shadows. Let them believe that monsters live in the shadows or hide under your bed and we’ll continue to play human for a little while.
Until the next hit—the next release. The next Playdate.
CHAPTER 15
I had just finished printing out an article and was adding it to my scrapbook with the others. Some people like to keep a scrapbook of their cherished memories with labels like birthdays, weddings, holidays, a sort of reminder of who they are and how far they’ve come—a way of land-marking their lives.
Every few months, they’d gather their friends and family around to look back at places they’d been and laugh at the silly clothes they used to wear or their summer with the bad haircut.
Birthdays. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Holidays.
Repeat.
Every family has one—or at least used to have one before the digital age we now live in. Cal
l it a dying tradition if you will, but it’s still important—it keeps us grounded.
In this age, everything is digital—nothing is real or physical anymore. Everything we do is uploaded for all to see, and for some, everything they think or do. A sort of life scrapbook we have created on permanent display for all to see.
We claim we are more connected nowadays, but if anything, we’re more disconnected than ever. Sitting alone, safe behind our cyber screens, we add and add and upload more and more onto our little digital scrapbooks; all the while convincing ourselves that we’re good, honest, little complacent members of society—nothing like those terrible people that lurk out there beyond our cyber screens—in the real world.
It’s always the ones out there in the real world. It’s out there where all these terrible people commit all those crimes the newspapers always talk about.
My scrapbook had no label or much sense of order. Yet what was inside was a collection of short articles and stories from local newspapers with titles such as: ‘The Knockout Games’, ‘unprovoked assault in the city’ or ‘man found beaten in downtown district’. There were rarely any pictures other than the enlarged font of the headline followed by a short block of text. It was a scrapbook as much as a journal, documenting the effects of a drug. My field research of the drug ‘rage’.
On one page was the arrest warrant Alice had received the day we attacked random people in a shopping mall for a few kicks. She’d tried to run away in high heels from security, and of course, was caught way before she could make it out the entrance. I’d begged to get a copy of her mugshot for the album, but she always refused. Underneath the warrant was the bail money I’d used from my savings.
‘Aging supermodel attacks innocent bystander’. Exactly one hundred words. You’d think this city cares about that kind of news, but no. Not on that day. And not even a mention of how I orchestrated the whole thing.
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