People know who you are now. They know where to find you if they have to.
So you’ve taken a more measured approach. Every day, another litany of woes. Every day, another dispatch from a world that to your eyes is as colorless and gray as ashes. Every day, further confirmation that life for you really must be a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
You’re good at it, I’ll give you that. You could do this for a living, if there was actually a paying market for it. You’re the devil’s propagandist, and I don’t mean to flatter you when I say that you’re dangerous. A person hardly has to get past the titles of your posts to fathom all they need to know about your agenda:
10 Reasons I’m a Cosmic Joke and You May Be Too.
Why Leaving Las Vegas Was Really a Comedy.
Why This? Why Me? Why Now?
I Still Resent Eating.
You, Me, and Everybody We Know = God’s Chew-Toys.
If your descent into nihilistic spectacle had just been that first time, I would’ve been willing to overlook it as a cry for help, one that finally ensured that you got what you needed, and once you were discharged, your thinking had been corrected to the point where you could see what a nut-job you really were: Hoo weee, am I ever glad that’s over!
I would’ve been willing—deliriously happy, actually—to give you the benefit of the doubt that you were at least going to try. I would’ve been happy to wish you well, and a life of contentment, from the other side of our shared continent, and we’d each go on our way, and you would never even have to know that I exist.
So remember: You’ve brought this on yourself.
You have summoned me.
What you’ve been doing all along is a kind of prayer. You’ve been petitioning the universe, and the universe is kind, so you shouldn’t be surprised when it responds via the only avenue you’ve left open for it. Over time, you have given it all the instructions it needs to see your final wish carried out.
Do you see the beauty of this? Are you even capable of appreciating the wonder of the grand design? You lack the courage to act on your professed convictions, so the universe employs another route to see them carried out. Once again, you’re awaiting the arrival of someone who will show up and take control of the situation, and remove your choice in the matter. Only this time, you don’t realize it.
It isn’t all about you, you know. It’s bigger than you, and always has been.
I want to tell you a story, as long as I’m in transit and have nothing better to do than ignore the so-called in-flight entertainment. It’s supposed to be a comedy, but I can’t say I find it particularly amusing. It’s kind of mean-spirited.
But there was this boy, you see, in the neighborhood where I lived before. He was old enough that he probably should’ve been called a man but, for reasons of his own choosing, that label never seemed to fit. He appeared never to have graduated into manhood, or to have even considered that he should, so I call him a boy.
You remind me very much of him. He was dismal, just like you. He was self- absorbed and sour, just like you.
And every time he stepped outside the house, it was like the day suddenly got cloudy. By his demeanor alone, he could steal the sun from the sky and the moon from the night. You expected flowers to wilt in his wake, grass to die under his footsteps. His projection of negativity was so pronounced it was having an actual visceral effect on me.
He was contagious. Just like you.
I like to think I choose my neighbors carefully. The people you surround yourself with are important. I appreciate the kind of people who look forward to what each day is going to bring. I esteem the company of people who keep it cheerful and positive.
But seeing this dismal, sour boy pollute my environment . . . this disturbed me. It gnawed at me. How could I have been so wrong? How could I have missed this? How could this weed have sprouted in my garden? And you know that, before long, there’s never just one weed. They spread.
I did try to help, I really did. I asked him why he never smiled. He had black hair that hung down over one eye, and kept flipping it out of the way, but it kept falling right back, and might as well have been stuffed in his mouth for all he managed to communicate.
I really did try to think of something I could do for him. If he would’ve just made an effort to stand up straight, it might’ve made a difference. It might’ve demonstrated a willingness to try and get better. Posture has an enormous effect on mood. But he seemed perfectly resigned to letting his shoulders hang as steep as a couple of ski slopes. And he completely misunderstood my intentions. There’s no point in recounting what he called me.
So it became obvious there wasn’t anything left to do but pull this noxious weed. They say it takes forty-three muscles to frown, and only four to smile.
Anybody with a good knife can carve a smile into someone’s face before they lose their nerve.
It takes real dedication to immortalize the frown.
But I think you’ll find that keeping myself motivated is nothing I’ve ever had a problem with. Especially when I deeply believe in the outcome.
Can you feel my eyes on you, now that I’m finally here? They say people can, sometimes. I’ve heard that army scouts, observers, snipers—the ones whose success and even lives depend on not giving their position and presence away—I’ve heard they’re trained to avoid letting their gaze linger directly on their enemy for very long. To the side is better. Because some people really can feel eyes on them, following them. The hair on the back of their neck prickles up and they just know.
But I don’t think you do. You’d have to be a different kind of person. You’d have to be fully alive.
Here in your neighborhood, there must be a hundred ways to blend in and places to watch you from, and I’d be amazed if you’re aware of even a handful of them. It’s a busy place, full of life going on all around you, and if you’d just opened up to it and worked to make your disposition a little sunnier and meet the world halfway, we wouldn’t have to have this encounter we’re about to.
As I watch you, it becomes clear to me that even though I tell myself I’m doing it to learn your habits and timetables, what I’m really doing is giving you one last chance to change my mind. So show me something. Give me a reason not to follow through. Reveal to me some heretofore unsuspected capacity for joy beyond your masochistic perversion of it.
But you’re giving me nothing here. Nothing. If anything, you’re making this too easy. This shouldn’t be such a cut-and-dried decision. I should wrestle with this, for god’s sake. I should anguish over it.
Instead, I can’t help but think it would be a kindness. When you left to go out for another coffee a few minutes ago, I almost expected you to melt under the onslaught of the rain. I’ve heard it can be like this in Portland. Which doesn’t bother me in the least—I love a good rainy day—but even if it did, I still would refuse to let it. But maybe that’s just not you. If weather has an influence on mood, and with some people it definitely does, then it may be that this goes some way toward explaining yours. So why have you never thought to just move away?
Although it can’t be like this all the time. And you, if you’re anything at all, are consistent. So let’s just dismiss that right now. HungryGirl234 is not a foul-weather creation.
Really, it’s unprecedented how much I’m bending over backward for you here. No one else would be giving you the kind of last-minute leeway that I am. It’s not very many people who would break cover into the rain, and hurry along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street to get ahead of you, to beat you to the coffee shop just in time to open the door for you.
And do you offer me a smile for this kindness? No. But then, neither do you act as if you’re somehow owed it. You nod, okay, but it’s barely perceptible, and looks to be an effort, almost painful.
In you go, just as I decide this has to be your final test. The very last chance to win your future. With the coffee house not two block
s from where you live, you’re obviously a regular here. They would know you here. They have to, all of them. So, one laugh with the barista . . . come on, I’m pulling for you. I know you can do it.
Except you don’t.
You just stand there encased in your green rain slicker, the hood like a monk’s cowl dripping water to the floor, your head down as you count your change, then seem to decide as an aftermath to drop it all in the tip jar. A nice touch, close, but by itself it’s not enough to change anything. The condemned and the terminal often give away their worldly goods, although if you don’t realize that’s what’s actually going on here, that’s the least of your problems.
And it’s a shame, really, that you don’t get to notice the look on the barista’s face as you turn from the counter. She knows you, knows you better than you think, maybe even knows who you really are, that you’re an Internet celebrity of the sickest kind. She knows what matters, and wishes better for you.
You really should’ve contributed more to her world, you know.
And look at this! You’ve at least got one surprise tucked away inside. Your stop with your to-go cup at the spice island? All along I’ve had you figured you for the no-frills, black coffee all the way type, but you’re a cinnamon girl. Who knew?
And it’s an extra large for me, because I’ve got every reason to think it’s going to be a long night ahead for both of us, one that I trust we’ll both find purifying.
But then you’re not even gone two minutes before everything goes wrong. I’m barely out the door and back on the sidewalk myself, so all I can do is watch. Watch, and can’t help but think that I’ve failed you. If I’d been closer, maybe I could’ve . . .
It’s not even your fault. You’ve got the walk light at the corner. It’s yours. Anyone can see that. Even knowing you as I do, there’s nothing in me that believes you have any other idea than that you’re going to cross from one side of the street to the other, without incident, the same as the hundred thousand times you’ve done it before.
The thing is, I know what’s going to happen even before it does. Look over and see the car, and the hair on the back of my neck prickles up and I just know, know that the car’s going too fast, that it can’t stop in time, and I’m running along the sidewalk, and if I’d been closer I would’ve pushed you or pulled you, whatever it took to get you clear. Because this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.
You were meant for so much more than this.
The driver is aware, at least, for all the good that does, the brake lights smearing red and the car fishtailing on the wet pavement. But you don’t know any of this. You never even see it coming, and I wonder that if you had, if there was time, even just a moment to react, if looking at the genuine prospect of your mortality would’ve made a difference where nothing else has.
Instead, lost inside that hood, you’re blindsided. One devastating impact and there you go, tumbling into the air in the rain and the brown fan of coffee. It’s not enough that you’re hit the once, is it? No, you have to land on the windshield of the car passing by in the opposite lane, and bounce spinning off that one, too.
Even I have to wince, and shut my eyes for a moment.
And does it verify your worst suspicions about the world and everyone in it, that nobody seems to want to touch you now? They’ll crowd around, they’ll look, but you’re used to that. But I’m used to things they’re not, so it doesn’t bother me, not in the way it bothers them. I don’t mind joining you on the pavement. I don’t mind touching you. I don’t mind holding you. I don’t mind the parts of you that leak onto me.
Or are you even aware of anything at all?
I’ve never seen anybody breathe that way. This can’t be good. A sharp little gulp of breath every few seconds, like a fish drowning in the air. The way your eyes are roving around, they’re like a baby’s, trying to find something to focus on, and it would surprise me if you have much of any idea what’s happened. If you don’t, that’s okay, and I don’t want to tell you.
“Stay with us, Deborah.”
Right, that’s me saying that. And I think it’s me you’re seeing now. At least your eyes don’t leave me, but in a way, that’s even worse, because I can see the million questions behind them and I don’t know how to begin to answer them. Not here, not now, not this.
I can’t even begin to answer my own.
This would’ve happened whether I was here or not.
I haven’t changed anything. I haven’t affected anything. I’ve haven’t had the chance to make one single point to you.
So I was brought here to what? To witness? That’s it? That’s it?
Sometimes all you can do is kneel in the rain and ask what it is that the universe is trying to tell you. But me, I’m supposed to be way beyond that by now.
You don’t mind that I’ve let myself into your apartment, do you? It’s almost like the keys crawled out of your pocket and into my hand.
I thought I’d be seeing the place under such different circumstances. Thought you’d be seeing it anew for yourself, the way it goes when we’re with someone seeing something for the first time, and we imagine what it must look like through their eyes.
That’s all gone now. The today that never happened.
I have to admit, never in my wildest imaginings did I expect lemon yellow walls. Maybe you were trying, in your way.
I’m talking to you like you’re still alive, but right now, I don’t even know. I just don’t know. It didn’t look good, down on the street. The state you were in, it didn’t look like there was much reason to hope. That’s funny, coming from me, isn’t it? I always find a reason to hope. I’m the quintessential hope-springs-eternal guy. So if you don’t mind, I’ll keep the dialogue open for now.
Lemon yellow walls. Bugger me sideways. You really had me fooled. But it’s the posters that are the illuminating part.
It takes a while to sink in. At first I wasn’t grasping what it is you’ve really been doing here in the main room, what these posters mean together. I didn’t see them as related at first. At the west end of the room, the one of some forest, either early morning or late evening, everything foggy, that one lone figure standing in the middle. And at the east end, the poster looking out on the opening of some enormous cavern, with a tiny boat sailing out into the slanted beams of sunlight coming through. At first glance, who would think these had anything to do with each other?
But it’s the one in the middle of the north wall that ties them together, isn’t it? That’s the link. Except for the crescent moon, it’s so dark and indistinct I can’t even tell where the person kneeling in the middle is supposed to be. What is that? Is it a prison cell? A dungeon? A storm drain? A log fucking cabin? I’d really like to know.
The title, well, that makes sense. The Dark Night of the Soul. If you’re going to give the thing a title, that’s as good a name as any. And the quote, too, what’s that for, just to rub it in? The mystic heart senses that suffering and sorrow can be the portal to finding the light of what is genuine. Run not from the darkness, for in time it ushers in the light.
Look. Don’t you dare talk to me about the dark night of the soul. Honestly, this is why I’m here? What kind of joke is this?
From what garbage pit did you dredge these deceptions, anyway? Who told you you had to go through these things? They’re just illusions. What garden of lies did you pick from to settle for the notion that pain and sadness are anything other than unnatural states of being that it’s our duty to repel? What malfunction sent you on this detour, and convinced you that this shadow path you’re on was remotely normal?
Me, I was raised better than that. I was promised better than that. I was promised.
That is my birthright. That is my due. And I will have the happiness I deserve. But you? No, you fell for the worst sort of propaganda.
And look at you now.
It didn’t have to be that way. It’s not supposed to be that way. Not for you, not for me, not for anybody,
and all of you who think you’re going to convince me otherwise, you all find out that the light fights back, don’t you? The light doesn’t want to go out.
It’s so clear now. I was giving you credit for being way more dangerous than you really are, when all you are is another empty puppet. You’re a casualty of endless failures of imagination, and your own savage torpor. You just couldn’t conceive that you live in a world so generous that everything was yours from the beginning and all you had to do was say yes. You had to make it so much harder than it really is.
If you can’t deal with my exceptionalism, fine, but that doesn’t mean you get to try to rob me, or drag me down to your level.
You will not rob me.
Not. Not. Not. Not. Do you hear me? Not.
You know, I really should leave here, because you’ve got nothing to teach me and this whole thing’s been nothing more than a clerical error, so yes, I should just turn around and leave, but then again, you should take it as a back-handed compliment that it’s so hard to turn away.
Because it’s not just the posters. No, it’s the fine print. My god, what kind of obsessive-compulsive are you? Until this moment I’d been wondering if you’d even seen the comments people left for you during your escapades in starvation, and now it’s obvious that you did. And have, every day since.
I’ll hand it to you, it’s impressive, the patience it must’ve taken to print out every single hateful thing anyone had to say to you, and tape it to the wall around the forest poster. And then do the same thing with every kind thing someone had to say, and tape those around the cavern picture. Hundreds of them. That’s patience.
You know, before, I suspected you hadn’t read a word of any of it because I had you pegged for such a narcissist that you wouldn’t even bother taking someone else’s opinion under advisement.
And I was absolutely right, you are a narcissist, just a bigger one than I even dared imagine you could be. Every time your printer spit out some hate mail or a love note, and you tore off a little strip of tape, that’s somebody telling you you matter, even the ones who wished you’d just die already, because at least you got a reaction.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 36
