A Peaceful Present

I

I’m walking up the stairs at a patient pace, wearing blue jeans and a dark blue T-shirt that reads POLO in bold white caps across my chest.  Blue is my color.  I wear it well for whatever reason people wear a certain colored clothing better than other colors.  This isn’t my opinion.  Many others have told me.  Maybe it matches my olive-colored skin and black hair in some way.  I wear buttoned-down shirts and slacks Monday thru Friday at my day job.  My father-in-law’s business.  I was handed the job as sales manager after I married his daughter.  Nonetheless, Saturday gives me a serene break to wear ultra-casual clothes. 

I keep my steady pace up the stairwell.  I’m in no rush.  I always take stairs as oppose to elevators as long as it’s ten stories or less.  It’s my subconscious need to keep moving in the direction of my destination.  No waiting for the elevator to reach ground level, doors open, me pressing button seven, a moment, the doors closing, a moment, rising to floor seven, a moment, the doors opening, and then me figuring out which way to take the hall.  I’d rather keep my heart rate consistent with wherever I’m coming from, driving fast, and jetting out into a parking lot.  Today’s parking lot is at my cousin Dwight’s condominium complex.  I’ve never been here.  But I guaranteed myself on floor two of the stairwell that this place’s mechanical machinery performs slowly due to the average age of the residents – 75.  My cousin Dwight is forty-one years younger than that, so he’s helping out the census of this elderly population.  He moved here, I’d say, about three months ago.  Soon after his parents died.  Not a good happening in one’s life.  Both of your parents, not elderly, dying in a horrific car accident due to a man falling asleep at the wheel of his car and driving into oncoming traffic a couple of lanes away.  There was no screeching from the blitzed speed of the sleeping driver.  Both cars were traveling sixty-five miles per hour with no guardrails. 

            Dwight’s parents, Aunt Natalie and Uncle Marty, were killed on the spot…or so goes the speculation.  Jeff Tinder, the sleep-deprived driver, lives with paralysis.  What’s better?  Being non-existent or living paralyzed with the knowledge that you accidentally killed two people?  Anyway, Dwight bought the condo with, and I’m only surmising, his parent’s death benefit and called me here on a Saturday morning.  Floor five.  He told me he was gonna give me something to write about.  I’m a freelance journalistic writer when I’m not managing my father-in-law’s concrete company, drinking beer with friends at a pool party, or trying endlessly to impregnate my wife.  Three different fertility doctors say we’re both fertile, but I’m thirty-eight to my wife’s thirty-five and still no stork knocking on our door. 

Dwight sounded convincing that he has material for me to shop around.  I’ve never known him incredibly well, but I do remember him being straightforward and honest.  When we were teenagers, we had a cliché family reunion picnic with the ubiquitous hot dogs, burgers, beers, cheesy pictures, water skiing, and three packs of relatives I’ve never heard of.  I was seventeen and he was thirteen.  He noticed there were some teenage females a few camp houses away that were having their own type

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of picnic.  But judging by the lack of adults, theirs wasn’t a family reunion.  They had to have been a few years older than Dwight.  More my age.  He was aware of them before I was.  I may not have at all if it wasn’t for his guidance to Uncle Marty’s Chevy Suburban. 

“Older women like me because I’m mature and in my prime,” he told me.  “Jump in,” he added, referring to Uncle Marty’s SUV.  All he talked about was him getting a Super Nintendo and had the grades to earn one.  He just needed to stop getting into trouble at school.  “‘Finish the year off without any scabs and you get your game system,’ my dad says.” He cranked on the engine to the Suburban. 

“Where the hell are you going,” I asked him. 

“Don’t mention the Super Nintendo to the girls over there.  They’ll think I’m finishing eighth grade.”

“You are,” I admonished him. 

The SUV went into reverse and soon we were hightailing around the lake towards the teenager party.  Dwight hurriedly turned the radio station knob to the right, looking for a channel he wanted.  Then he got it.  He turned the volume knob to the right by twenty decibels to blare Alive by Pearl Jam.  He slid down the windows with the driver’s door control buttons and screeched to park the SUV next to the other six cars parked by the lake.  All of the teenagers flashed their stares at us. 

“Now what,” I asked him. 

I was always a fairly shy person.  I’m the type you need to speak to first in order to get me to begin a conversation.  After I read the tone and body language of someone else, I can carry a dialogue as long or as short as I wish, pending the behavior I read of the one who started the talking.  Perhaps I’m judgmental.  I can immediately know if me conversating with whoever will go anywhere and keep me interested.  I usually let the other person ask the questions, so I can answer. I was the same with girls.  I had one girlfriend my entire life and that didn’t begin until college.  I ended up marrying her. 

“We marked our arrival.  Now we need to get out and say hello,” Dwight answered. 

He opened the driver door and got out.  I reluctantly opened the passenger door and stood by the car.  He walked towards the group of drinking teenagers.  They were drinking Natural Light.  A crappy, cheap beer that young people like to drink.  I slowly followed his tracks in the grass leading to the lake.

3

“Who are you,” asked one of the teenage boys. 

“I’m Dwight Thornfield,” he answered with an assertive tone.  I suppose assertiveness can be coupled with confidence.  Dwight never shied away from anything back then.  “I thought to come by and check out the party y’all were having.  Can we grab a beer?”

“Your family picnic doesn’t have any,” asked a different teenage boy.  The girls just watched the males interact over the territory crossings. 

“Who wants to drink with their family,” asked Dwight.  He stood among them sitting at the concrete shore. Meanwhile, I was standing halfway between the car and the party. 

“You can have one,” answered the first teenage boy.  He grabs a Natural Light out of their nearby ice chest and tosses it to Dwight.  “What about him,” he asks, pointing at me.  As soon as Dwight opens his beer—

“—Dwight!!!”  This was my Uncle Marty’s voice through a loudspeaker.  “What are you doing over there?!” 

What was Uncle Marty doing with a loudspeaker?  As if he was some type of pre-pubescent camp counselor?  Dwight chugs the beer in one ten-second gulp.  He crunches the can skinny with his hand and throws it in a nearby trashcan. 

“Thanks for the beer,” Dwight says. 

“How old are you,” asks one of the teenage girls. 

“Do y’all come out here often,” Dwight answers with a question. 

“Dwight!!!”  There went Uncle Marty again.  I started walking back to the car and got into it.  Dwight spoke with the teenagers for another thirty seconds and walked back to the car. 

“Don’t tell Uncle Marty this was my idea,” I tell him. 

“But I won’t get the fucking Super Nintendo,” he answers.  “You’re my older cousin.  You gotta look out for me.”

He reversed the car and pulled away from our oh so brief encounter with any potential fun that day.  He parked Uncle Marty’s Chevy Suburban in the same spot as it was when we “snuck away.”  I didn’t say shit in those twenty or so seconds between the two territories.  What would Uncle Marty have done to me if I said it was my idea

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to drive his car to a teenager party?  I decided to take the comeuppance.  However, when we got out of the SUV, Uncle Marty stormed towards Dwight. 

“What the hell were you thinking in taking my car?!  Who do you think you are?!”  This was the first and only time I heard my Uncle Marty yell.  He was always a very soft-spoken man who made you feel the utmost comfort in his presence.  He certainly wasn’t judgmental.  Perhaps this was the inevitable explosion after the incessant boiling of Dwight’s delinquent school behavior. 

“I just thought to say hi to those people over there.  Rufus was just along for the ride,” Dwight answered. 

He cut off my line.  I thought I was supposed to take the hit and keep his wish of getting a Super Nintendo.  He told both of our parents the truth and didn’t get his gaming system.  I’m not sure he ever did.  I think the only reason why this story sticks out in my head from only a handful of ones I have of Dwight in my life is that he didn’t act like a child.  He was a mature rebel.  Rebel with a cause.  Only thirteen and stood up to the whole family like a thirty-year-old.  I was nothing like that.  Not only was I shy and lacked any impressionable degree of confidence, but I would lie and say it was someone else’s fault for my bad behavior.  Just like every other kid does.  What made him so different?  Perhaps I should just leave the intangible level of maturity in oneself as the immeasurable quality that it is.  But I do know it’s a mark of intellect.  I admired him that day even though I was four years his senior and still had no bravado act in my personal catalogue of characters to play.    

Floor seven.  Open the door and down the hall.  Number 725.  Take a…right.  Yeah, Dwight is an eccentric.  He hasn’t worked in years.  A grown man living off his parent’s money in his thirties is a succinct summary.  One of the first things he does after his parents die is buy a condo.  Is he already in a mid-life crisis?  I haven’t had mine yet.  I don’t have to prove to myself that I’m still young and have a majority of my life ahead of me.  He’s thirty-four years old and been living off of his parent’s retirement checks, trust funds, or whatever else is financially planted.  Having roamed the earth’s grounds for all that time and accomplished nothing worth documenting for future readers.  There’s no feat in that.  What proof of life does he have?  I wouldn’t idly pass days living off of riches if that were even an option.  Would I?  What happened to accomplishing something while I’m young?  What have I done worth talking about?  Being an aspiring editorial writer?  I hate that word aspiring.  It sounds like I haven’t figured out how to do it yet.  What I haven’t figured out is who will pay me.  A writer who can’t produce kids and manages his father-in-law’s concrete company.  Wow.  A happily married man who’s still trying to find the perfect publisher for his editorial pieces.  There we go.  That story would make ABC Family on a Sunday afternoon.  Seven twenty-five.  Knock, knock, knock. 

5

Only a few seconds later, the door opens and it’s the expected host.  Dwight wears a light purple buttoned-down shirt, khaki pants, and brown dress shoes.  Did he portend my outfit to play my opposite today?

“Hey, Rufus.  Thanks for coming out here.  Come on in,” says Dwight.  “I hope you found it all right.”  I enter into a enormously large room.  There are no hallways or doors that I can see from the front of this domestic landscape.

“New Orleans isn’t exactly Houston.  It’s one large neighborhood,” I answer.

Up a few steps to the right serves as the dining “room” with an eight-seated dining table positioned in equal distance from all three of its walls – the front, the side, and the partition that provides a counter island to break up the potential monotony of a bland, rectangular room.  Once I walk around the counter, I see that it hides a kitchen behind. Enough of a kitchen to create dishes and wash them but not enough to create a meal for that dining table’s potential company.  

“Let’s go to the living room where we can get comfortable.  Today might be a nine-to-five day,” Dwight tells me.  With that, he gives me his memorable innocent subtle smile with slightly squinted eyes, showing the crow’s feet that only give his physical persona character.  A smile no one can detect a trace of guilt in.  Makes you believe his every word.  Well…so does his honestly that I remember.   

“Yeah, you told me that on the phone.  What are you about to put me through?”

The front left side of the space is the living “room” that houses four white 1970s style crescent shape chairs surrounding a large circular glass coffee table.  A few books and several magazines spread out in a semi-circle on the table for whoever his mysterious company might be.  I say “mysterious” because it doesn’t look like anyone has altered the penthouse a hair out of place since he moved in.  He must be the cleanest bachelor I’ve ever visited.  Covering the living room’s walls is an electrical framed poster of Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar inside an arena.  Another is a print of Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory, taking up the rest of the center.  And on the other side to balance the Hendrix out is a picture of his parents and him as a child.  He’s smiling a wide child’s smile that makes up a quarter of his face and reveals true, sincere happiness.  Not a smile the photographer forced him to contrive for a banal family photo.  These are the only pieces hanging up in the entire one-roomed condo penthouse.  Perhaps he’s still in the midst of decorating.  Because other than those three pieces is just the bare, light gray walls that offer you a sad host.  The carpet is also light gray which makes the walls bleeds into the floor, giving you no sense of direction.  At least the carpet does turn a darker gray a step above the living room in the back left corner where there stands a bar and a small high table with high chairs that would require one to lift themselves up and onto with effort.  This table and

6

chairs also has a 1970s style to it with a maroon colored satin felt that I suppose is comfortable once you seat yourself.  On top of the adjacent glass bar is all the top of the line brand name liquors.  Johnny Walker Blue Label, Highland Park single malt scotch, Hibiki 17 (I don’t know what it is but it looks fancy), and elegant Grand Marniers.  All of them appear half drunk.  

“A conversation doesn’t have a tagline.  You’ll have to figure out how to sell it after I expire.  Beer?”

“Am I not working,” I ask. 

“We’re going to be conversating.  Is that a word,” he asks with a chuckle. 

“Yes and no.”

“No on vocabulary, yes on beer.”

Dwight enters his kitchen and opens the refrigerator.  I take it upon myself to continue walking through this large, spread out, yet geometrically graphed room.  I do not consciously take my next steps.  The sweep of the loft seems to consistently pat my ass with a broom to keep moving to a yet to be seen dark corner I’m being swept into.  You don’t absorb the room.  The room absorbs you.  Ah, finally, as one makes their way around the curved sweep the counter/kitchen island provides, there’s the den with a one-hundred inch high-definition television that shows a picture of a waterfall and plays Sunshine Superman by Donovan in a low-leveled volume.  Maroon couches corner the TV against the wall with a large block of wood in the middle of the set-up serving as a table.  On top of the wooden table, sits a sand-filled hourglass and a clean ashtray.  There’s not a single speck of ash in the tray.  I wonder if it’s ever been used and who’s he expecting to use it.  I don’t know if he smokes.  It doesn’t smell like smoke in here.  And to the right of the den is the only door in the entire place – his bedroom door.  I assume that that’s where the bathroom is as well.  I don’t like the idea of going through someone’s personal space to take a piss or, even worse, a shit.  I guess I have no choice should that happen.  Why did he want me here to start?     

Dwight calls to me from behind.  “Your much needed beer, Sir.”

            I turn around and walk towards Dwight who is standing by the crescent shaped chairs and the glass coffee table.  He hands me the opened Stella Artois bottle.  I immediately take a sip of the Belgium beer.  I’ve always loved Belgium beers.  That’s at least one thing American corporations cannot get right.  An appetizing taste of beer.  You gotta to go to local breweries to satisfy your tongue.

            “Have a seat,” he says. 

7

I don’t respond.  I stand staring at his face, searching for any readable behavioral ticks that could reveal an ulterior motive for me being here.  Surely, he’s not having me on a Saturday morning so we can drink and catch up on the small collection of distant memories of us spending time together.  But all I can see is his genuine smile that could light up a room in the pitch-black dark.  Have I gotten more judgmental than I used to be?  Perhaps.  But an impromptu meet up with a vaguely known cousin arises suspicions without the condescending connotations of the word judgmental.  He still hasn’t sat down.  I sit in one of the chairs left of the coffee table.  He then sits in a chair across from me on the other side it.  Manners.  Allowing his guest to sit before he does.  What else can I expect from a sire of one of the most powerful families in New Orleans?  I suppose he’ll also let me begin the conversation. 

“So how are you holding up,” I ask him. 

“Perfect word.  Holding.  Because I feel if my hands let go of my body, it’ll melt into a pile of dust.”  He swigs his Stella. 

“Yeah, it hasn’t been that much time since…”  I, like most people, cannot utter the word death in the short aftermath of one.   I sip my beer to cool my throat.  As if to extinguish the potential burning of my esophagus for that heavy word being ignited. 

“Thanks for coming to the funeral,” he responds with coolness.  “It was the first time I met your wife.  She’s a lovely woman.  I’m happy for you.  Or rather content.”  Dwight loses his smile for the first time.  I suppose I’m finally welcomed, and I no longer need his unabashed happiness that I’m here. 

“It was a beautiful funeral with hundreds of people there.  You must’ve paid a small fortune to say goodbye.” Conversations about funerals and death always makes me take a breath in between each word of my sentence.  For some reason, that note I just gave came out smooth sailing with zero waves crashing against the hull.  “What are you doing with your time now?”

“Brooding, reading all of the diaries I kept of my life in the past,” he answers.  “You know, I stopped writing in my diaries seven years ago.  I came to the conclusion that I had lost interest in myself.  And besides, who would read these pieces of personal expression?  I don’t have an audience.  You still write for that future unknown reader?”

“I write all the time.  Different editorials on social sciences.  Culture, the differences between each, lofty pieces on the respect that the poor should receive—“

8

“—Perfect.  You’re speaking music to my ears.  We just need to agree on the correct instruments to use.”

“Not following.”

“I haven’t lead yet,” Dwight answers.  His tone hasn’t raised or lowered a single decibel during my brief time here.  That tells me he’s comfortable and content.  But there’s still something he’s not telling me.  “I need to end myself,” he says.  He gulps his beer. 

“End yourself,” I ask.  “Are we using coded language for something?”  I gulp my beer a bit more than he just did.      

“As it sounds,” he answers nonchalantly.  “I’ll be dead tomorrow.”

My breathing stops for a few seconds.  A solid silent fifteen second moment.

“You have a quick, lethal disease no one knows about?”

“I’m gonna kill myself, Rufus,” he answers nonchalantly again.  “Tomorrow night at about ten o’clock.  I figured I’d put in a full day.”

I reluctantly try to keep the mood even with my calmness.  I’m anything but calm.  He’s a kid for Christ’s sake.  So am I.  We’ve always been kids who would see each other once every few years.  My earliest memory of him is when he was about five years old.  That would’ve made me nine.  He was aggravating the hell out of me talking about his friends at a daycare my parents could’ve never afforded when I was that age.  His daycare had an Olympic-sized baby pool and the healthiest snacks that never came in cheap, plastic bags.  Meanwhile, I was attending a public elementary school that would serve us milk in a bag and defrosted chicken and rice.

“I’ve never known you to be suicidal.”  That’s the best answer I could give him.  Another quick chug of beer.

“You’ve never known me.  That’s why I want you to write about what I share.”

I’ve never spoken with someone who will commit suicide within forty-eight hours.  Suicide is usually unseen and unpredictable.  “No one saw it coming,” is what they usually say.  Yet I have the luxury of seeing one arriving soon.  I retain my cool, professional decorum despite the revelation.  I’m not a callous person.  I’ll worry about success in saving a life later. 

II

Why on earth did Dwight invite me, out of all people, over to this new condo to inform me of his suicide?  I should probably call the cops.  But my instinct tells me that he desperately needs someone to talk to who doesn’t wear a uniform.  I have to treat him seriously but without a sense of panic.  My character has been written out – a professional psychologist who’s helping a suicidal patient who he happens to be related to.  It’s personal but I gotta keep it professional as well.  All of these thoughts take me a few moments to gather after he slapped the lethal news in my face.

“What made you decide…,” I ask an unfinished question. 

“…I just can’t be a human anymore knowing what I know about us.  I’m surprised you can.”  Another beer gulp from the both of us. 

“Like…”

“…A question for you, Rufus.  When one person asks another about what’s wrong with our Neandthral race making one no longer wanting to be, where does the questioned begin,” Dwight responds.  His manner remains confident but with low energy. 

“We need to start with specifics.”  I remove my digital recorder from my jean pocket and press the record button.  I put the recorder on the coffee table at the radius between the distances from one another.  I came with it because he said that he was gonna give me an editorial to write.  As vague as that sounded, I still arrived equipped.  “All I know about you is that you’re an only child, spoiled brat, never had to worry about problems or consequences, never had a long-term relationship—“

“—Uh-huh,” he cuts me off.  “Let me stop you there.  I’ve had one long-term relationship.”  He sips his beer solo this time.

“Then forgive me.  Your parents…you know…three months ago marking the only freak occurrence in your life, and I’m supposed to make your story interesting?  I don’t see a day’s pay out of your bio.  Now if you wanna talk to me as a cousin and let me help you with your suicidal thoughts—“

“—Not suicidal,” he says.  “Suicidal.  That’s a temporal adjective.  I’ve scheduled it.  I’m not interested in you trying to reschedule my death.  It’s quite comforting to know that you possess a finite end.”

“And humans are that repulsive that you wouldn’t miss being happy, excited, in love, astonished by the beauty of art, literature, fascinated by the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls?”  I begin to ramble hurriedly.  Already I’m letting my emotions get the best of me.  I pause for a moment.  He luckily says nothing.  I swallow my impulsive anxiety.  “There are a million reasons to live.  I’ve never heard of one convincing

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reason to die.  To be completely extinct is rather horrifying.  Why are you so special to make it okay?”

“Well now you’re getting into what’s okay.  What’s good, what’s bad, and all the futile concepts philosophers have argued about for thousands of years.  Let me tell you about my first memory.  They say the majority of your memory is catalogued from your childhood and teenage years.  We lose our capacity to store new information in our brains the more we live.  You?”

“I think that’s universal,” I reply.

“Honestly, the first image I’ve locked in my head must have been when I was between one and two.  I was lying on my back sucking Coke out of a baby bottle staring at the high ceiling through the glass coffee table that sat in our living room.”  He slides his back into the chair a few inches, seeming that he just became comfortable enough to talk to me about something other than suicide.  “I couldn’t drink milk ‘cause I was lactose intolerant.  Who knows?  Maybe I was younger than one year old.  That’s just the frame.  I wanted to tell you about the first recorded episode.”

“So you have a prepared structure to this quote unquote interview.  A chronological reminiscent narrative.”

“It shows you I’m methodical, not whimsical.  Doesn’t that grant credence to my important decision?”

“Is this the same coffee table,” I ask.  He has so far controlled the conversation. I need to start constructing speed bumps in his drive by changing the subject when it accelerates towards the wall that’ll obliterate the car.

“It never broke.” 

We both sip our beers at the same time.  I’m wondering what he’s feeling when he says his words.  He’s not gonna convince me he can be cool about his young life ending.  Now if he was eighty-something years-old and just lost his wife of fifty years, then I can see the want in ending his own.  I understand when you can no longer live without the core love of your life.  Ending yourself is always an option.  There’s never royalty in suicide, but I comprehend the rationale when that happens.  I’ve heard about that around the country from time to time. 

“I must’ve been four years old because it was at Happy Days Montessori.”  He continues with what appears to be serene pleasure.  “I was sitting on a swing on their swing set that’s still out in their playground to this day.  I swung back and forth

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reaching immense heights,” he motions himself in his chair as if on that same idle child ride, “in my four-year old purview.  And next to me sitting in a swing but not swinging was another kid my age.”  He stops his pantomime and smiles.  “He sat staring out ahead of himself singing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’  I suppose it was Christmas time, and he recently learned it.”

“Did you sing along?”  I involuntarily crack a smile.

“No.  I asked him his name and his name was ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’  He kept fucking singing.”  Dwight laughs as he gazes at his bland white ceiling.  He raises his beer bottle to take a sip but stops and rests it on his leg.  “I asked him a second time, a third, a fourth about his goddamn name.  More times than I could count at that age.”

“Who was it?”

“He ended up being a great friend.  My oldest friend.  Mark Stocks.  Why that uninterrupted five to ten minutes of time sticks out in my head will forever go unanswered.”

“Must it be answered?  Sounds like a pointless search for meaning.”  I move the digital recorder a few inches towards him.  No longer equal distances.  No more pinpointing the radius. 

“It means that I’m glad I stayed friends with him.  He’s probably the most honest friend I got.”  Dwight smiles at the ceiling.  “Mark never carried an air of pride. Never sought power.  Today, he makes a good living as a civil engineer but never says a word about his success.  If it was up to him, I don’t know if we’d still be friends.  He’s just not the type to stay in touch.  He lives in his own little world without a single similarity of what I have.”  He rubs the top of the beer bottle with his right pinky finger.  “But he’s always been that outsider I can go to get a redemption from humanity’s evil.  All the world stays dressed up in the same costumes so their second acts never end.  Now I’ve changed my outfit, and I got no one to answer.”

“Besides the law, government, and other people’s well-beings.”

“No to the first two and yes to the third.”  He swigs his beer with his neck craned back, making his chin raise high in the air.  Like he just won a playoff game as the starting quarterback. 

“You’re not a vigilante, Dwight.  No one’s above the law.”  I cock my head back giving my throat a large sip of beer.  I’m not trying to mimic him.  The replicated behavior seems to keep me unfettered.  I’m acting, not impersonating. 

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“Of course there is.  I was offered to live in the society where two plus two doesn’t equal four.  They can make two plus two equal five if it seems better.  When you have a certain social status,” he hunches over, giving my eyes a cold stare, “then rules don’t apply.  That’s why I’m killing myself.  The caste system that leaves the masses fighting each other and abide by written rules and expectations.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”  I hunch over myself to hit the tennis ball back over the net to deflect his budding objective.  Yes, the ball is on his side of the court, but I can keep hitting it back to keep it in motion.  Tit for tat.

“There’s no such thing as boundaries when you’re a part of the group that draws them for the majority of this country.  I lived in their system for three months, but I ask you to write for the people’s future.”  He leans forward quickly and tap, tap, taps the digital recorder.  “You’re a citizen.  A constituent.  A common folk.  A voter.  A laborer.  A married man.  What else?  You have dozens of labels because they’ve sealed them onto you.”

“Are we venturing into conspiracy theories?  The government’s been in my backyard when I have no idea?”  I straighten up in my chair and lean towards him.  I, the psychologist, must keep both of us engaged.  I’ve already convinced myself that I can’t let him convert me to his creeds. 

“It’s near the opposite.  There barely is any government.”

“That’s ridiculous.  Who’s the President?  Who’s the Secretary of Defense?  Congress?”  I’ve already drank three-fourths of my beer.  I can’t get buzzed when dealing with one’s soberly intoxicated mind. 

“Who’s Vito Corleone?”

“The godfather.  Marlon Brando played a fictional character.  Fictional.”

“Aren’t all characters fictional?  It’s the people who are real.  Not the role they’re playing.” 

Dwight gulps his Stella Artois matching my quarter left.   The only thing I need to let him stay ahead of me on is drinking.  Hopefully, his buzz can make him break the character he’s playing of a young, headstrong soldier with suicide as his last mission.  

“There’s just too large of a cast of ill-informed people to pull wool over their eyes.  That’s fiction.”  I lean back into my chair and set my beer between my legs.  It’s still fridge-fresh cold. 

13

“The best ideas are the most simple.  You’re giving the crevice in society too much thought.  Too much effort.”  His hand gestures become animated as if he’s painting an abstract for me.  “There wasn’t a grand operation by a secret society that traveled millions of miles over centuries of time.  It’s either you understand it’s reality or you don’t.  The only catch is your need to have a large load of money.  Money.  You know that coin they created eons ago to start oppression?”

“I’d say oppression began with physical strength.  Barbarians versus the meek.”. 

“You’re right.  They are barbarians.  They created currency.  Murder’s only physical oppression.  There had to be social classes for the meek generations to survive.” 

I can tell he’s passionate about what he’s saying simply due to the beer spit flying from his lips every third or fourth word. 

“Think of today like this.  You got a score of people playing roles in America’s government.  You got lower positioned people like legislators who write laws for the citizens to break, so they can either be fined money or imprisoned.  The oppressed live in various different forms in various different degrees.  The prime example is the law-abiding family man who shows up to work on time, takes his wife and kids to ball games to keep them distracted, watches mindless television, and participates in at least one community-based activity, leaving the ones in power alone.  The lawbreakers stay punished and the law-abiders stay occupied.  The rich has always had to keep the poor busy, so the poor doesn’t pay attention to the machine operators.  That’s what the elite in this world is.  Operators who oil the machine everyday by instilling fear in us with differences in culture, race, creed, finance, and anything else that keeps the population divided.  The masses need to be kept finding villains amongst themselves.  Not up in the glass house on the cliff.  Not your local politician who quote, ‘Will bring a better tomorrow for America.’”  Dwight stretches his arms in the air leveled with his shoulders.  “The only qualification of initiation into the untouchable elite is having a lot of currency.  Why do you think everyone wants to be rich?  Luxury is synonymous with privilege.”

“And no one has ever reported this elite club in the history of humankind?  You’re the insane one ready to off yourself.”  I shake my head vehemently.  “I’m sorry but I can’t believe your version of reality.”

“It’s not reported because it’s not a secret effort.”  Dwight’s eyes widen as if he just saw an explosion.  “It’s the way things are.  It’s like reporting that the sky’s blue.  A headline saying all humans sleep.  There’s never been a need.”

14

“But a revolt would’ve happened by now.”

“There’s been thousands throughout history.  Revolutions against the powerful.  The rich.  Governments.  That’s nothing new either.  Where you been, Cousin?  Surely, you’re not a history buff.”  He turns his face away from me, crosses his legs, and sips his Stella.

Quid pro quo.  He has possessed me with silence.  I cannot argue simple facts.  Damn his natural confidence.  He’s shied me away for a moment.  Seems to be either not making this up or wrote an interesting story and rehearsed it incessantly to convince me to write about it.  I thought I was writing about him.  Well…maybe I’m thinking too much.   

III

Conspiracy theories.  That’s what these are.  The world’s government rulers are all having parties with one another while their populations stress tomorrow.  Sounds like a novel.  And I’m not a fiction writer.  There’s only a moment of silence to recollect my thoughts.  Dwight immediately continues with his obsession. 

“You see how the I-phone has taken over your life?  It thinks for you.  It memorizes, analyzes, and encapsulates your existence.  You no loner need to offer opinion in social discourse since you can press an icon with your thumb and offer computerized thoughts.”

“You’re over-exaggerating.  The cell phone is an electronic notebook for business conveniences.”  Now I’m being adamant with my tone.  I’m starting to get a feel that he’s overcomplicating minute aspects of life in order to decorate the simple truth.  Hyperbole only works in poems and Vonnegut.    

“But your life is stored on a smart chip,” he exclaims.  “All music, movies, notes, recordings, internet search history, passwords, emails, phone numbers, books, and anything else that’s important to you during your days is all stored in the back of that phone.  I say this to show another example of how you are not an individual in the powerful’s eyes,” he continues with his vocal stream of consciousness.  “You’re a number.  A part of their systems.  The I-phone is one of them.  Surely, the aristocrats and rulers don’t need you for anything,” he continues without missing a beat, “but if they needed to frame you for something…like finding something illegal at your father-in-law’s business by a low-level whistleblower, then they can blackmail you into jail with a simple tap of a finger or click of a mouse.  Reality’s always manipulated so everything remains a false sense of security in the world of the rulers and the ruled.  You’ve been playing the part of the latter your whole life.  Every single generation throughout history has protested against the hands that feed them.  But what do protests do?  They’re only an exercise in free speech.  Revolutions change history.”

I look at the digital recorder’s light to make sure it’s still on.  I also needed to look away from him for a moment. His cynical tirade is continuing to unnerve me.  “Have you spent too much solo time researching conspiracies on the Internet,” I ask with a sardonic smirk.             

“I’ve learned all of this in the last three months, Rufus,” he answers.  “A man came up to me at my parents’ funeral.”  He wears what seems to be an attempt at a frown.  More like an upside down smile showing his disgust for his following words.  I don’t ever remember seeing such a remorseful face on him.  “He told me his name was Ned.  He shook my hand.  Skin was as soft as silk but grasp as hard as a metal clamp.”  Dwight begins speaking at a much slower pace than he had been.  It’s almost as if he has to admit something to exonerate his guilt.  “He told me he was a business partner of my father’s, and he wanted me to come see him when I had the time to talk about a

16

job.  A management position at his marine engineering plant.  As he said, ‘I just wanna talk about it.  Not asking a word from you.’  I thought This could be the start of something I’ve been needing.  Something I’ve always ignored from my parents.  We set a date and time right there next to their open caskets.  The following Monday, I went to his large office that consisted of four lobbies to amble through and twelve gatekeepers to provide my name in order to get to the final destination.  I finally sat across from Ned’s desk inside his garrulous office.  There were large widows covering the back and right walls.  On the left wall, there were seven shelves of hard-back books anchored next to a medium-size mini-bar.  A medi-bar, if you will, crowded with the finest whiskeys and scotches.  On his desk, were family photos, I assumed.  They contained a woman, him, and kids from years past.  And a stack of folders that were neatly topping one another, giving the impression that he had work to do or did it already, and he was too OCD about how to place them back in order.”

“This was no job interview,” I tell myself aloud. 

“It was his sales pitch to me from the better of society,” Dwight says with a rising anger.  “He offered me a longer and much more privileged life.  A life where money doesn’t buy much.  It just proves your mortal worth.  They would get me an expensive car.  Give me a yacht.  If I didn’t know how to work one, then they’d get someone lesser to teach me.  If I developed a critical health condition, there’s only one doctor to call at his house.  If I got in trouble with the law, there was another man to call.  I don’t know what the legal fixer did for a living, but he would be the one to get rid of it. A life with no blemishes.  Isn’t it nice?”

“And you took the position then and there?”

“Ned’s words and comforting tone made it easy to nod my head and shake his hand.”  I finish my beer before him and set my empty bottle on one of the coffee table’s magazines.  “My parents were apparently a part of this league for a couple of decades.”  Now his face does wear a genuine frown.  His eyes lower, staring through the glass coffee table to the ground.  A flipped direction from his infancy’s gaze.   “Ned told me they’re the puppeteers and everyone else the puppets.  When the hands take a break to rest, the puppets still have the strings wired inside of them for the next day.  And the day after that.  And forever.  Now it’s time to put a blemish in my head.”  Dwight finishes his Stella and sets the empty bottle near mine on the same magazine.

“What does that mean?”

17

“I’m going to die for the masses so the royalty crumbles.  Gonna blow the brains out the back of my head with a .22 revolver.  Meanwhile, you have to publish and sell my revelations.  For the better of the puppets.  I’m not gonna to slit my wrists,” he continues in quick succession.  “That’d take too long and there’s a good chance that the blood would scare me enough to drive myself to the hospital.  I’m a coward I suppose.  I thought of hanging.  But, again, I’m afraid of cracking my neck.  I read it’s immediate, but…tying the noose and then tying the rope around a cross beam…all of that takes too goddamn long and I’d be talking myself out of it.  No pills, no oven gases, no jumping from the top of this condo complex.  I did something yesterday I’d never done.  I bought a gun.  A silver .22 revolver.  I can just slide the barrel inside my mouth and point up towards the brain and…then…click.  Boom.  Done.”

“You’re beyond sick.  Modern day psychology does very well with therapy.  Why am I the guy to play the role of the therapist?”  I accidentally reveal my character’s objective to him.  Perhaps I’m starting to feel guilty about assuming that role.  But I’m the only one here.  He called me goddamn it.  I let the bitterness spill more out of my mouth.  “Do you think about what you’re doing to me?  How am I supposed to live comfortably, knowing I’m the last person you’re ever gonna talk to?  Multiply the word burden exponentially.”

“I didn’t plan on bringing you down to my level.  I thought you were intelligent enough to separate ideas from feelings.”  Dwight’s face shows a sincere concern for me. 

Aha!  He can’t be that fucking emotionless! 

“I want you to have my story.  ‘A thirty-something New Orleans socialite who lost both of his parents to a horrible car crash counts down his last hours of life as he reminisces about the short one he’s killing.’  That’d fucking kick the public’s balls into their chests!  Wouldn’t it?”

“I’m not looking to spread a campaign or make money off your death.”

“But you already pressed the record button.”

I lean back into my chair for the first time in several minutes.  I missed hitting the tennis ball back to his side.  But I convince myself it landed on the sideline, so I didn’t have to hit it back to get the point.  However, the umpire didn’t make the call in my favor.  Dwight still gets the serve. 

IV

While I stew in my lost tennis match, Dwight stands and enters his kitchen.  I rewind my recent thoughts scrolling across the mind’s screen show.  Most of them carry the attitude in combating his hubris.  H re-enters the living “room” with two cold Stella Artois.  He hands one to me, and I place it on the coffee table. 

“So you weren’t ready,” he asks.  He sounds offended.

“I’m ready for a beer.  Just not ready for a sip yet.”  Again, I need to pace myself slower than him with his drinking.  I’ve lost control of the conversation so far.  I’m still waiting in Uncle Marty’s SUV passenger seat.  Dwight sits by letting his body weight carry him down into the chair causing a subtle plop sound. 

“My life’s indefinable,” he admits and gulps his beer.    

“Then create a definition for it.  You’re supposed to digest yesterday, so you can shit it out tomorrow.”   

“I don’t have what you got.  A wife, a house that I bought myself, a hard-working job, a passion of journalism that gives you eternal sprite…I have no idea what any of that’s like, and I’ve lived no day to indicate I will.”  He sips his beer again.  “I’ve spent the last three months posing as a marine engineer manager.  An affectation to society’s eyes.  Meanwhile, I’ve attended country club parties with millionaire and billionaire ‘colleagues,’” he uses air quotes, “to map out any land that needs irrigation for increasing business profits, pressuring politicians, and widening the socioeconomic gap.  I have a cause to die for now.”

“And it’s my job that the cause gets spread.”

“Aren’t you honored?  I don’t feel the need for love.  I don’t feel the pain of sorrow.  I live in childhood memories and drunken college nights.  That’s not a life worth fiction or non-fiction storytelling.  The nail in my coffin was the evil of the greedy rich.  That the world’s clock stops and starts on the wrists of the wealthy.  Even measured time only exists because of them.  They can clock the sunrise and the sun set via a slave wager’s time card.  ‘Only another weekday.  At least they get off two days of the week…sometimes.  We surely don’t like paying that overtime bullshit.’”  Dwight kicks the corner of the coffee table.  He’s allowing himself to lose control of his prior headstrong nonchalance. 

“Overtime.  One of the people’s few half-victories in the last couple of decades.” Dwight raises his eyebrows with a sarcastic shock.  “There’s still ways for the corporations not counting it though.  It just depends on whether the millionaire owner or manager wants to take the time to travel a roundabout way to avoid it or dutifully paying them for Saturday.  But I digress.”

21

“Not digressed but obsessed.”

“The reason why you’re here.”  This retort makes me grab my second beer and take the first gulp.

“Do you find it disturbing that someone else values your life a thousand times more than you?”

“That’s an odd question.”

“Do you have an even answer?”

“I expected this from you.  I didn’t think you’d cheer me on.  But…”

“…What?”

“But I have solid reasons I can provide the living.  It’s my birth, my life, my death.”  He pauses for a moment and appears to be at loss for words for the first time.  “But…I’m happy to hear you value your first cousin.  I value welfare life too.”

I feel more confident in my free therapy session.  It was a shitty answer to my question, but I need to keep him responding to me and not to the group of elitists trotting around in his head with condescending smiles. 

“Do you like Chinese food,” he asks.  Wait.  What?  Is he trying to take the driver’s seat from me again?  I play along. 

“Who doesn’t?”

“I was hoping you would.”

Knock, knock, knock on the door.  I jumped an inch out of my chair.  My God.  Someone from the outside realm is trying to enter this world.  Dwight chuckles and stands. 

“It’s only lunch.  Relax.”

There was something about an intruder that disturbed me.  I was comfortable in the world of death and demise at high noon.  Timed lunch.  Has the rest of the day been precisely planned?  Perhaps I’ve misjudged his intelligence.  I may be confusing his age with his smarts.  Is he setting me up for something more than his post-death anarchistic agenda?  I could apologize to him in some way for not taking him as seriously as I should have.  He has valid points.  But I’m still trying to make him figure

22

out his valid life.  I watch him walk to his countertop, grab a wallet, head to his front door and open it.

“Hello,” he says to the stranger at the door, dressed in a work uniform and holding a bag.  “Come in, come in.”  The delivery guy enters the condo and follows Dwight to the living area where I sit.  “This is Rufus, my cousin.  What’s your name?”

“Ted.  It’s thirty-two-seventy.”  Ted gives Dwight and I a quick glance, showing zero interest in having a conversation after admitting the price. 

“I’m Dwight.  Sit for a minute, Ted.”  Ted doesn’t look thrilled at all.  He isn’t disappointed but he appears to be thinking about a specific delivery route instead of talking to customers. 

“I have to…”  Ted tries to be as polite as possible without saying, “No.” 

He was too shy to tell Dwight he wasn’t interested in our company, and he had more houses to tend to.  But how often does Ted get asked on what he thinks?  He should’ve been more willing. 

“This’ll only take a minute.  Have a seat, answer something, and I’ll pay you.  I won’t want our lunch to get cold.  Rufus, the recorder?” 

Ted places the food on the glass coffee table and takes a seat after saying only three recalcitrant words.  I glide the recorder on the coffee table closer to Ted. 

Dwight asks him, “Ted, would you live in this country if we had no money and the government as we know it?”

“I would never move out of America.”

“But hear me out.  Do you see it as a possibility for money ever to vanquish and having only a few honest people representing our country across the globe?”

“I wouldn’t have to work and nothing would cost anything.  I don’t see how that’s possible,” he answers.  An astute, quick thinking young man. 

“Exactly.  It’s not,” I answer.  “Why are you wasting his time?  I’m hungry.”

“It’s possible, Ted, by way of revolt, reform, and progress.  Let’s not deal with foreign governments in trading. Why is it impossible to be the first modern self-reliant country?  That’s not something to go to war over.  And any country to go to war with the U.S. is crazy.  We have all the ammunition and just enough willingness to commit war crimes to keep our rich gloating at their lobbyist parties in front of their

23

families and friends.  You don’t think it’s possible because you don’t create money, Ted.  What you don’t create, you can’t destroy.”

Ted stands.

“Then why ask me if it’s possible?  No offense if I’m blunt.”

“I like it.  And I asked you so you can provoke the reasoning outta me.  That’s for Rufus’s sake.  But I do wanna know if you’d still live in a relative society of non-materialism and self-reliance.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he answers. 

“Would you join the long fight to make you see it?”  Dwight jumps a few inches from the ground.  His excitement is pulverizing. 

“As long as I don’t get in trouble, then I suppose.”

“Then you’d be the second line of defense!  Thanks, Ted.”

Dwight pulls a fifty-dollar bill from the wallet and hands it to him. 

“Keep the change and don’t ever stop dreaming of a more balanced co-habitation.  You need a voice outside of this room.”  Dwight shakes Ted’s hand with fervor.  Dwight looks like a politician promising the delivery guy a better tomorrow. 

“Thanks.”

Ted walks to the door, opens it, exits, and closes. 

“That was a fair commitment.”  He claps his hands in the air and spins around on his heels.  He enters his kitchen.  Clank, clank.  It was the sound of dishes coming from a cupboard.

“I wasn’t convinced.  And how were you so motivated about Ted’s conquering of struggles while you’re incredibly listless with your own?”  Back to me trying to knock Dwight down a peg.  Metal scrapes.  I’m assuming this was the forks and knives being taken from a drawer.  Also, I think my ears finally pick up a faint sound from the TV area playing Dear Prudence by The Beatles.    

“I’m dying for him!  He’ll be living for me,” Dwight yells from the kitchen.  I don’t have to look at him to know that he’s still wearing the politician’s coat over his shoulders. 

24

“You and him can’t be defined as a plus and minus statement.  Your supposed fight is too serious to be taken lightly.”  I sip my beer to clear my throat for lunch.  He re-enters the living area with white plates, silverware, and pink napkins.

“Since when does the interviewer take a stance on the subject at hand?”  He hands me a plate, fork, knife, and napkin. 

“Since we keep talking about your death.” Dwight removes the to-go boxes from the bags and opens them on the coffee table.  He displays the Chinese food to me with a sweep of his hands, indicating for me to help myself.  So I do.

“Okay.  Then let us start talking about my life and what it has and has not done for me.”  Dwight sits and I serve myself.

“I’ll only write about what it has.”  I finish my serving with a healthy dose of kung pao chicken and brown rice. He gulps his beer again and then serves his plate a portion. 

“Can I start with what I miss?  What I miss.  That pang in the abdomen for when I saw Samantha’s face.  That beauty was my long-term relationship.”  He continues without letting me swallow my food and respond.  “God, I miss that face.  That’s the kind of love you read about in fiction and think its only fiction.  But it came from a real place inside the bowels of the author.  The gut-squashing, bloody bullet hole you feel when that one person in the entire world’s population shoots you with love.”  He continues without missing a verbal beat.   

“Why did that leave me?  I never found that person again after Samantha.  The extent of my society was drinks at social clubs with the same pretentious yuppies talking about how they were going to rewrite the nation’s laws, morals, and ethics.  Didn’t force me to love.  Forced me to hate.  Now I look at love in the history books.  ‘Oh, I remember that time Samantha and I…’  Well, I’ve searched and searched for another Sam in the numerous social gatherings.  Those women were wives, mistresses, or female entrepreneurs who didn’t need a man to share her wallet.  Those women are married to their elite careers.  Samantha.  The one I met, loved, and threw away.  You can’t rewind time by ten seconds, much more ten years.”  He pauses a moment, floating in a cloud of recollection.  I don’t dare open my mouth.  “I miss the holiday dinners where my other uncles and aunts would come over and dine with us.  Two out of three of my uncles, Larry and Kent, would get inebriated and aggravate the shit out of my father.  They would pinch him in his ass, cut farts behind him while he sat in his living room recliner.  And I was eight, nine, ten years old loving all of it.  My cousins, on my mother’s side, and I would play elevator.  I’d be the elevator operator and pick up one of them from downstairs.  They’d act like a businessperson getting to an appointment.”  He smiles as he looks at Dali’s Persistence of Memory.  “We’d ad lib.  Kids…better ad libbers than Robin Williams….and I’d drop them off on the third floor. 

25

Then I’d go back down.  My mother would get pissed I was monkeying around with the elevator.  ‘You’re going to break it and it’s gonna cost your father so much to fix it!’ We didn’t care.  When do you care about responsibilities when you’re young?  The goal is to stay having fun.  When you’re a kid, you invent millions of ways to do just that.  It’s when the kids get older, the less times that happens.  As if the only reason family and friends get together is to bring their kids to one spot to see which ones are getting bigger quicker and cuter faster.  When do we stop paying attention to human progression?  When it turns into digression?  Tell me the age we begin to digress.”

Dwight sips his beer and rubs his temples with his right hand.  His middle finger on his left temple and his thumb on his right one.  I can’t answer that.  The fuck do I know?     

V

Dwight put himself in the mood where he should be.  Even if it’s only nostalgia, it makes him search for those lost feelings of love rather than his newfound hate.  I need to keep his mind on the past positives, not the present and future negatives.  And according to him, he doesn’t have much of a future left. 

“Doesn’t it make you yearn for that lost love,” I ask.  I finish my meal.  I ate a half-plate quickly during his recollections.  “That’s the thing about that ineffable feeling of true love.  It can end.  But it can start again.”

“Oh, don’t you sound like a fucking Lifetime movie.  I got none of that anymore,” he answers with a frown.  “Isn’t that clear as day?” 

Keep searching, Dwight.  Keep using those eyes revolving in the middle of your head, looking for a future, smiling photograph that only appears intangible mentally in his now destitute definition of promise.    

“You have no mission,” I finally admit.  “You could barely get a rise out of our delivery guy.  You’re talking leaps and bounds and forgetting the ground underneath that you pass over.”  I put my half-eaten plate on the coffee table.  I also finish my second beer in one long swallow to wash down any kung pao chicken left over in my throat.

“Every long leap begins with a running start.  And that’s where I am by talking to you.”  He eats his food off of his halfway eaten plate.

“Do you honestly believe you can’t love anyone or anything in the future?  There’s gotta be another Samantha somewhere.” 

Dwight puts his half-eaten plate on the coffee table.  His plate’s rim almost touches the one on mine. 

“You can remember you felt this or that.  Good, bad, blah, blah in your philosophizing. I do remember what it felt like to love Samantha.  I was only seventeen years old and fresh into college when I met her.  Through a girlfriend Stacy. Stacy Bergeron.  Shit.  I wonder whatever happened to her.  We used to be good friends.”  He sighs for a few seconds.  Again, his past mental episodes play in front of his eyes and he must watch them.  Must.  “Anyway, she introduced me to Sam at a party at my apartment I was having with my frat pledge brothers.  I told Stacy to bring as much pussy as she could find.  She only brought two.  Hers and Samantha.  But, of course, I didn’t care.  It was a hell of a night.  Drinking, dancing, laughing, making out with whatever girl was near you.  But not me.  I waited for Sam to get in my vicinity so we got busy kissing.”

“Only kissing?”  I share a smile with him. 

27

“Yeah, I ain’t a sexual predator.  Never was.  But after the fourth or fifth time we were together, yeah, we had sex.  She was as virgin.  I wasn’t.  We loved each other and had a relationship that lasted my first three years in college.  She was a little that was good and a lot that was great.”  He takes a moment to look at the boring bastardized ceiling and takes a slow sip of his almost empty beer bottle.  “Couldn’t think of one negative about her and us.  Even when I obsessively tried after our breakup.  She had the looks, brains, responsibility, social skills, taste in music and movies.  She had everything but a good boyfriend. 

He raises his bottle in the air.  “It makes all the bad feelings good.”  He drinks the remainder of his Stella and keeps hold of the empty bottle.  “You get anxiety attacks after you leave them and before you see them.  You get depression when they’re not around, but you stay content you got someone you’re feeling that way about.  I used to get mad at myself for being immature around her.  And I can be anything but mature as I sit here and talk to you now.  I haven’t evolved.  Neither have my feelings for Sam have ever devolved.  I’d marry her in a heartbeat.  Right here, right now.  She’d be a reason not to kill myself tomorrow.  I know you’re still searching for one.  Samantha.  But that’s a dreamer dreaming.  Yet we always gotta come back to reality and stop when the light turns red.”

“I was asking about future loves.  Not past ones.”

“I know what you were asking.  The only loves I ever had are gone.  My parents and Samantha.  When anyone says the word love, my heart can only recall the ones I’ve lost.”

“Didn’t know you still had a heart.”  I’m quickly losing my patience with his calm and collected attitude.    

“My parents.  The Thornfields.  The Kennedys of New Orleans.  My father was married to someone else in his twenties, you know?  He met my mother in his late teens, they dated for a year or two, and broke up.”  He extends his empty beer bottle to the coffee table and then leans back still holding it.  “I don’t know why and I don’t care to.  Then my dad met a woman.  I still don’t know her name since there was never any point in sharing it with me.  He married her at twenty-three.”  He finally gets the gumption to put his empty bottle on the coffee table.

“They were married for a few years.  Apparently, he still talked to my mother while he was married.  They were only friends.  No affairs to dramatize the short-lived church-bondage,” he says holding his hands in the air.  Perhaps to exonerate his parents of any potential guilt.  “So after the divorce, my parents started seeing more of each other.  My mom served as a sympathetic ear to my dad’s marital failure.  Seeing turned into dating after my dad unexpectedly kissed her one night.  He never said he

28

lost love for my mother during his first marriage.  I’m just making an educated guess that he hadn’t.  So my father, being both the hard-working and lucky man he was, got a second chance.”  Some people get second chances.  Sometimes third, maybe fourth ones.  I only got one.  Never been hard working.  Never had luck.  You need at least one to survive.  My dad had both.”

“They were still a part of that millionaire’s club.”

“Ned told me they were so they could provide me an eternal sunshine.  Whether that’s true or not, I still ended up with constant rain storms.”

“You got granted luck.”  I scoot my chair closer to the coffee table.  “A young, talented man who inherited the wisdom and talents from his family.  That’s the wealth he can gleam with pride aside from the six zeroes included in his new bank account.”

“A kind summary.”  He pulls at the paper label on the neck of the beer bottle. 

“I wrote that.  That was from the only fucking piece I’ve ever had published in two years.”  Anger rises in my voice.  Now I’m getting frustrated with myself.  I always suffer from the hunger pains as a starving artist.  “That’s when I wrote that local piece about your father expanding his business and the city eyeing you as the heir of the executive position.  I only got it published because I’m related to y’all.”

“Anything more from that local paper?”

“Just them telling me, ‘Stay friends with us in case we need to get to you for something.’  You committed no crazy crimes to get me famous.”

“I couldn’t if I tried.”

“But your parents…”  I move the digital recorder closer to him, detouring through the obstacle course on the table of two half-eaten plates of Chinese food, magazines, and four empty Stellas. 

“A good couple.  I was brought up well.  I loved them.”  There again, he uses the word love without me throwing it at him.   “But their friends…the country club parties and the big weddings for some person I never heard of.  Life was made to dress up with us. I think I owned a tux at three years old.  We were a family behind the locked door to our house.  They taught me decorum, manners, respect, and how to be selfless since I was never more important than the person sitting next to me.  But their accident was the most mortal fluke of all time.”  And into the mortal conclusion.

29

“Car accidents are one of the most common deaths in this country.”

“But the both of them?”

“Well, they were married—“

“—I ask that rhetorically since they were in the middle of a divorce.  Thirty-seven years of marriage about to end.”  Dwight scowls at me for the first time.  He has powerful facial expressions as if he’s an animation in a cartoon.  He makes me feel guilty for asking questions.  “Not by death but by law and church.  My mother just had the decency to pick my father up from a car dealership because he was having a part recall looked at.  They were on their way to a divorce hearing, taking the most alternate route.  I don’t believe in chance.  I believe in everything being programmed.”

“Do you see a divine programmer?”  I lean back and cross my arms.  I feel more relaxed for winning a couple of rounds in a row.

“Of course, I don’t see it.  And neither should you.  We don’t taste it, smell it, hear it, or feel it.”  He leans up in his chair, but he’s gotten rid of the admonishing scowl.  “You can say you feel it all you want when you go to church, but what you feel is the closeness in a fraternal order.  The coming together of people in one building believing in the same immaterial beliefs.  I’m saying the Thornfields were meant to die that day together in their car.  They were never meant to get divorced, nor to see their only heir amount to shit.  It’s not an accomplishment to have the same last name as my parents.”

“Your father made something of himself.”

“And I wasted my audition.”  He leans back into his chair and sulks.  “Perhaps I thought life was never gonna change.  My parents would always be there still wishing me luck.  Still making the calls to see if they can land me an interview with one of their business friends.” 

“But you had to do it.  Your father wasn’t gonna set up the dominoes for you not to knock them down.”

“Why should he?”

“He shouldn’t.”  The days I raise a kid won’t include unrelenting spoil in finances and lack of discipline.  Could I blame nurture over nature for his soon-to-be wasted life?  He’s too comfortable with suicide.  Perhaps that’s ‘cause he’s become saturated in a securely padded-room with his upbringing and zero responsibilities.  To be comfortable with death, you gotta be too fucking comfortable with life?

30

“I don’t know why they were splitting up after all that time.  Don’t know what my mother was gonna do since she ran his company for him.”  Dwight stands.  “What was he supposed to do without her?  I do know that they loved me more than life itself.  And now that theirs is gone, I got no reason to live mine.  Tell me, Church Boy.  Wouldn’t they wanna see me in heaven sooner rather than later?”

“You’re an atheist,” I ask him.  “There’s a heaven for atheists, you know.” 

“I suppose it’s the same heaven for theists.  The same place full of eternal bliss and there’s no such thing as flaw or error.  What a great place for us to create because we’re reluctant to the universal inevitable.  ‘Yeah, you’ll die and be nothing but this intangible figment of yourself and then you’ll fly away to an eternal zone ripe with bliss filled with all your friends, family, balloons and your fucking favorite music playing 24/7.  It’ll be great.’  Why don’t we welcome death if it’s so fucking beautiful afterwards?”  Dwight sits again.  I thought for a moment that he was gonna get us another beer.  That’s the extent of this day – cold Stella Artois, Chinese food, and conversations about suicide and the rich.  Yet I haven’t worked this hard with my mind since I don’t remember when.       

“You’re elaborating core beliefs to create hyperbole.  That’s not reporting information. That’s decorating a desert.  You can’t use materialistic beauty to ignore the desolate land.”

“What’s one of the main things we’ve been talking about,” Dwight asks me.  “Did you hear me when I said I wasn’t going to be alive tomorrow?”

“I meant that you’ve thought about how tomorrow, every last speck of your existence, here, there, anywhere, defined and undefined, will be extinct.  One hundred percent of you from then on will only be a topic of conversation.  Amongst who, I have no idea,” I respond with sharp penetration into his cozy confidence bubble.  But he continues without a scratch from my tested patience. 

“Yeah, there are many ways to put it and that’s definitely one.”  I wish he would stand up again.  I wish for anything that shows he’s losing control of his physical motions.  I don’t want to keep him on the defense because that will make him react defiantly aggressive.  I don’t want to have him on the offense because I got no valuable end zone to protect.  I need him to be a referee and watch both the offense and the defense, calling fouls when either of us breaks the rules of play. 

“Does it make you feel better to think we have an elite club or whatever you want to call it?  A level of existence that holds supreme on earth, but there’s of no such thing as a divine club after we’re cremated?”

31

“Good question,” he calmly compliments.  “It actually makes me feel worse.  Makes me feel terrible that I’m a being of such a despicable species that’s capable of human crimes.  I wish I could’ve been a dolphin.  Intelligent, happy, manipulative, and enjoys sex.  Can’t choose how we’re born.  However, we can choose how we die.”  His gentle demeanor softens my pointed rebuttals. 

I smile and tell him, “All I can say is that God will welcome you.”

Frustratingly, his voice rises with a stolid face.  As if he has pinned me in our verbal combat.  “You can say all the God stuff you want, but I’m just gonna lump you in with the rest of the humans as a part of the greatest redemption tale of all time.  Man to God.”

I lean towards him from my chair with my eyebrows lowered into an assertive allowance of charades.  I take a moment to compose myself.  I feel insulted.  I’m an open-minded guy and tolerant of different beliefs of any subject.  Don’t ever talk about politics or religion in polite company, they say.  But I figure, as long as it’s polite company, then they should know how not to take other’s opinions as an insult.  My intelligence isn’t insulted.  My beliefs aren’t insulted.  I’m not insulted on behalf of God.  My familial love for Dwight is insulted.  How can he be so stoic about mortality? 

“You’re a sad, miserable person,” I inform him with a gentle tone.  “Don’t make those adjectives synonymous with atheism or theist stupidity or whatever other labels you wish to pull outta your ass.  I know there’s a god, but I can’t prove it.  Just as I can’t prove love exists.  I can’t prove emotions.  Nor the pain I feel when I see my wife cry about not being pregnant for the sixteenth time in a row.  But I feel it.  I feel emotion.  I feel the pain of love.”  This time I’m not missing a verbal beat and allowing him to interrupt. 

“I love her and I adore her.  When she laughs, I laugh.  When she falls, I rush to pick her up.  When she burns toast, I still eat it because she put the bread in.  And just because you don’t have someone this fucking day and moment that involuntarily kicks you in the gut every time they shed a tear, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  It doesn’t mean one person can’t make another happy just by having a good time while the other has a horrible one.  That’s my wife.  A life more important than mine.  Like Samantha to you.”  I had to get back to him for a second.  But I continued right away with my aching viscera. 

“And I believe those immeasurable spirits inside of me can’t exist without that unknowable magician pulling those millions of invisible strings.  It’s the arrogance of not being able to experience it that kills you.  It makes you state it’s not around.  We can’t prove shit without it already being there.  That alleviates the burden of proof.  A son can’t prove his birth by pointing to his mother’s stomach.  But a mother can prove

32

his birth by pointing to her C-section scars.  There was something that knew we were alive before we were born.  It’s not our job to prove it to ourselves.  I say you’re an idiot.  A person who’s got no knowledge of what they’re talking about when it comes to mortality.”

“Isn’t that just a mere opinion,” he asks.  “An idiot from one side of the argument will call the other side of the argument the same name.”

“See?  You’re wrong again!”  I take a moment to quell my loud voice.  I faintly hear Dear Mr. Fantasy by Traffic playing on the high-definition TV around the corner.  “You’re an idiot because idiots give up on something when struggle’s introduced.  Usually it’s a goal or a feat to accomplish and after so much time and series of setbacks they quit going after it.  Not because of the number of failures.  It’s because they’re not smart enough to know how to get past them.  This objective is living.  The biggest of all.  And I suppose the most difficult to comprehend.  Yet it’s complicated to the ones who make it complicated.  Quit acting like you can explain the beginning of the universe or why a monk can see his god during a catastrophe or any other endless discussions that’ll never give us confident conclusions.  We can’t say ‘cause we don’t know.  We’re a bunch of fucking animals, Dwight.  Now if you can’t give yourself credit on how to live to be one of them, then you’re inventing yourself as a new species.”

“I ain’t guilty ‘cause it got too hard.  I already explained I got no struggles.  I’ve—“

“—Except the struggle to comprehend life.  Which part confuses you the most?”

“The animals, Rufus.  Us.  I am of your species goddamn it.  And I don’t wanna be after all I know.  Have you lost track of the facts of our civilization I gave to you?”  Now his voice has arisen in volume.

“You’re making a statement.  You invited me here to record your obsession with how you’ve lived, your elitist thoughts on the human race, and your righteous decision to kill your only life.  You’re making a lethal statement saying what?  Listen to me but don’t follow my example?  Respect me but don’t revere me?  You sit here as a very sad, pathetic man.  I don’t see a confident, nonchalant intellectual who’s wisely taking his life as a rebellious philosopher.  I see a sorrowful, embarrassed fuck who’s got nothing to define himself as since he’s never accomplished shit.  So he’s quitting to save grace.  Well, there’s no grace in suicide.  There’s no grace in me writing a single fucking word about your boring fucking life.”  I stand as if I’m visually making an exclamation point with animated emphasis.  I almost knock all the garbage off the coffee table with one strengthened swoop of my arm.  But no, your cowardly journalist, reneges.  Dwight stays seated.

33

“Do you ever want me to care,” I continue with vehemence.  “You want me to call a hospital to pick you up and for me to keep tabs on your progress?  Why should I bother?  I initially planned to have a relaxing weekend with my wife.”

“All I can say is that I’m fine going on without a word if that’s what it comes to.”  He holds his calm demeanor a few feet away from my standing. 

“That’s a fucking lie.  You won’t do it without me writing about you.  You know how I know?  Because you keep searching for reasons that you’re killing yourself.  First, it’s the elite realm that lets society churn its bloody cycles.  Then it’s your parents’ death.  Then it’s Samantha.  Then it’s all of the above.  If your life comes down to a multiple-choice question, then you haven’t figured your chicken shit excuse out.  You want help.  And I can easily become your favorite cousin by giving it to you.” Game.  Set.  Match. 

VI

There’s a long moment of silence with us staring deep into each other’s irises.  Have I got him?  Have I saved my distant cousin?  I don’t believe a death to life transformation can happen in a few minutes.  But I got him where I want him.  He’s silent for the longest time since I stepped into this condominium. 

“I’m the only person for you right now.  You give people too much credit.  They can’t explain everything to you.  In fact, there’s a canyon of things that we’ll never be able to tell each other.  And an accurate description of God is one.  Just because people give you an unjust description, doesn’t mean that there isn’t any afterlife.”

“Then how would it come to be in the first place?  If we can’t describe something we invented, then we didn’t construct a convincing story when we wrote it?”  He’s immediately back to his unwavering debating skills after missing dozens of beats. 

“Spirituality is all on the individual’s purview.  ‘What do you see God as?’  That’s what one has to ask him or herself.”  

“Okay.  But how about this?  Why believe in the idea that humans created an afterlife when there isn’t one?”

“You’ve never proved that there isn’t an afterlife.”

“And you’ve never proved that there is.”

“I don’t have to.  I don’t even have to explain.  It’s impossible.  And that’s where the error of man is.  And I say man on purpose because that’s all it’s been with religious orders.”  I wish he would get me another beer.  It helps me become loose lipped.  “Liquid courage” is what they call alcohol.  I was wrapping my mouth shut with caution tape earlier.  “But the fault is making a tangible institution out of one’s belief systems.  When it comes to the afterlife, there should be no politics or hierarchy or one hundred percent confirmed literature to dictate the salvation of the masses.  I have my own beliefs.  Sure, they do arise from religious education from my childhood into my high school years.  But there’s no such thing as a perfect seed since you can’t ever predict weather’s changes that’ll come to give it growth.  It’s your youthful naiveté that’s leaving you cynical and atheistic.”

“No, it’s my intelligence.”  He points at me with a swing of his arm as if he’s jabbing me from a distance.  “It’s me using my brain and not my gut.”

“Then that’s where you’ve gone wrong.  Stop using reason or logic for something that can’t be explained.  It’s just a powerful ineffable force that would have to come to you.  Morals aren’t learned in a textbook.  An IQ doesn’t define ethics. 

35

There’s a whole world out there that doesn’t exist in front of your eyes.  I know because I’ve felt it.”

“I can’t take that as proof.”

“It’s not proof!  You’re a fucking one-track mind.  That doesn’t show shit in intelligence if you can’t read the signs of a legitimate detour.  Experience is only central to oneself.  It can’t be shared.  And that may be the most important reason to stay alive.  It’s to live to the day when you know there’s a million elements beyond flesh.  You’re still living in Plato’s cave, seeing the shadows on the wall.  I’ve seen the light outside the cave.  One reason is the existence of my wife.  You have no light.  You have no reason to hope.  You don’t understand what I’ve seen while I understand what you haven’t.”  I still have him lying back in his chair.  I prefer him to be relaxed.  I don’t want him to lose control of his words or body anymore.  Perhaps that was a mistaken motive to begin.

“I’m young but smart.  Since when is age synonymous with wisdom?  People don’t change.  They only learn and evolve,” Dwight says.  “So my roots of knowledge of human affairs have already taken hold several feet underground.  I’m not mistaking error for malice.  We’re cognizant of our selfishness.  Cancer doesn’t have a cure available ‘cause it controls the earth’s population.  Same with AIDS.  They’re both curable diseases with the ruling class possessing them.  They’ve cured themselves of these diseases for decades.  I’m trying to get it through your thick fucking head that I’m ending my trip on this vital journey.  I’ve reached my goddamn destination.”

“You haven’t reached a destination.  You may have never had one.  And if all you say is true, there should be a mass suicide of billions of people?”

“Of course not.  I only speak for me.  What business is it of yours anyway?  That’s the biggest disconnect with suicides.  The prevention.”  Dwight unbuttons his second top button.  I can’t see any sweat, but maybe he’s feeling the heat of responsibility.  “I’ve thought long and hard about it.  My mortal end wasn’t a whimsical decision ‘cause I was in a fucking bad mood yesterday.  I’m so clear-headed about the decision that I shared it with you.  My death.  Not yours.”

“But it’s inherent benevolence to not allow another person, especially family, to kill themselves.  All humans aren’t evil despite what you try to blanket us as.”

“That’s a misconstrued point.  We’re not all evil.  It’s what’s in place and has been since the dawn of our existence.  To think that the levels of society will of a sudden change now…”

36

“…But I’m gonna have to call the cops before I leave here.  I might even have to put myself in harm’s way.  You don’t wanna make my wife a widow.  Do you?”  I cross my legs gently to keep and show my composure.  I can’t let go of the steering wheel.

“I’d never hurt you or anyone else.  You’re the one escalating it to conflict.  My time’s done, Rufus.  I have no one reason.  I no longer want to live, and I’m giving you the opportunity to share my story with however many others.  I mean no harm.  I just prefer a dead heart over a beating one.  And the breaking point was the information shared with me about the untouchable, immune ruling class.  None of your optimism or support will change my decision.  Now it’s your job to inform the public of this high, upper-class microcosm that forces you to walk a straight line rather than ever allowing you to dally in circles with a head full of your own wills.”

I can’t accuse Dwight of not having a sincere method to his madness.  He has an eloquent way of elaborating on the body of his life’s essay, justifying his wretched conclusion.  Not saying I agree with him.  However, I’m beginning to understand the logic of his argument.    

“Round three,” he demands and stands.

“Absolutely,” I answer.  Thank God, I’m thinking to myself.  So much for letting him stay ahead of me with his drinking.  My angry outbursts have kept him unfazed.  His mind’s made up.  Grass is green.  Sky is blue.  I guess I’m the one over-complicating shit.  “I never turn down a beer.  But I gotta slow my pace to stay interested in death,” I admit.  Damn loose lips.  That came out in a Dwight-styled nonchalance.  I realize I haven’t matched his wit as well as I previously convinced myself. 

He smiles for the second time all day and walks into his kitchen.  I hear the fridge door open and close while I straighten up my sitting posture.  I think about my wife.  How would she deal with a family member’s suicide?  She’d call the cops right away and cry during the call.  She is a strong woman, but she’s also got a practical manner of thinking. That may be the only difference between her and me.  Her being wholly objective while I’m primarily subjective.  She sees the clouds as blocking that pure blue sky.  I see the clouds as remnants of a divine painter’s brush to decorate an otherwise plain background.  Pop, pop goes the beer bottle caps in the kitchen.  Dwight returns and hands me another Stella Artois with his own in his hand.  He sits.  

“I was offered a political career.”

“You?”

37

“Yep.  You don’t need a political resume to be a person in power.  All you need is millions of dollars within your stroke of a pen.”

“Or the family who’s already in their club.”

“My campaign slogan was gonna be: ‘Communism Bad, Capitalism Good.’”

“That doesn’t make sense.”  I guzzle my beer a good bit.

“It was a joke based off my inexperience.  But being the son of the Thornfields, what does it matter if I can’t even spell capitalism?  Who cares what ism it is anyway?  Only the brainwashed masses do.”

“Because the government doesn’t affect the ones running the government.”

“Very good, Rufus.  Did you play back your recorder and listen to notes?”

“Come on, now.  Don’t condescend me.  I’m sitting on your deathbed.  But there is a vast difference to a democratic capitalist society than a non-democratic socialist one.  The average moron could feel the effects.”

“Don’t give too much credit to the average moron.  Our leaders aren’t democratically elected.  They’re driven by one another based off strategies concluded from who appears to be the most divisive candidate.”  He looks up at the ceiling to search for whatever information he supposedly received from the ones in control.  That ceiling gaze pisses me off more and more each time he does it.  He’s surely not confident enough to remain locked in my eye when making supposed irrefutable statements.  What a crappy politician. 

“Yeah, they always like the most divisive reality TV star.  That keeps citizens vehemently bickering at each other about the person’s ethics and/or scandals, so the rich who are placing these quote unquote public officials in front of our TVs can keep our minds busy addicted to twenty-four-hour news channels rife with political pundits and former officials yelling at each other.”  He smiles.  Is he convincing himself that he has me on the ropes?  To be honest, I remind myself that the ropes are behind me just in case I need support to stand.   

“And you have no proof where your taxes go.  They come outta your check listed next to a name like “Medicare” or “Social Security” and then land in the sum of the government’s bank account.  Remember, the government receives money, not the people running it.  They need your cash for welfare checks, one good thing I might add, Social Security checks, the Department of Education, the EPA, and all systems that were in reality created to do something for our young civilization.  But you still have to stand in awe to the size of our military.  Regan’s famous for that cock-

38

extension job.”  He guzzles his beer.  So we’re now both in the guzzling stage.  I wonder how many Stellas he has in the fridge.  He did tell me earlier that this was a nine to five day.  I look at my phone.  1:35pm. 

I ask, ”But the officials get approvals for working at jobs they’re not supposed to work at?”  Now I’m gaining sincere interest.

“They work at those jobs.  You’re not listening.”  Dwight throws his arms up in the air like he’s upset with a student not paying attention in class.  “You and I don’t hire them.”  Dwight smiles again as if he knows that he’s morphed me into a student.  “And they have no rules to hinder their next step.  Usually when some big time government person does get pinched and receives a prison sentence, then that’s just a façade.  He’s the public enemy and goes into exile for however many months or years.  But he surely doesn’t go to prison.  He goes into hiding out of this country for his ‘sentence,’” he gives his air quotes to me again, “and comes back to his home whenever it’s over.  The rich sometimes pay a couple of prisoners hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell people stories about the supposed political convict and his stay in jail when they get out themselves.  You have no way to know otherwise.  I could’ve been a young Regan.  Maybe a young Clinton.  My parents were well known Republicans, so I probably could’ve been a Regan.  Republicans still love to masturbate to him even though they couldn’t be further away from his principles of doctrine this millennia.  However, if they wanted me to go rogue and create a large fissure in the local state government, I would’ve come out as a Democrat and inevitably won.  Then, my Republican friend, Senator Fletcher, and I would be enemies only in public.  It’s all a game.  Where next do you move your rook?”

“If they don’t gain money, then what is it?”

“Aha.  Democracy has to have some credibility to keep the masses deluded.  He continues, “Money is expected out of the millionaires during campaign seasons.  Whoever the heads of the larger industries are, they buy everyone from the president to the local mayor.  Most often than not, you can predict who will win due to the publicity and the higher number of scandalous charges.  Remember the divisiveness?  When there’s a dead heat, that only means that the larger industries’ chiefs are warring with one another on which politician will bend over farther for them when they need.” 

I haven’t lost my interest.  I keep the conversation going by asking, “So what happens to my vote?”

“It’s counted for a zero sum game.  That’s the people’s democracy.  Not the wealthy’s, which is the result the people get.  Then, of course, the politicians govern on what the wealthy need them to do over writing those arbitrary, sometimes non-sensible, laws.  The only core sense they all have is derision amongst the population. 

38

Keep us all arguing about different ideologues injected into our brains by the government-owned media.”

“What about your vote?  You’re a millionaire.  Some big-time gas company tycoon is choosing for you?”

“That’s my pay into the system of freedom.  It’s a guarantee of a manicured life. What’s a hundred thousand every so often to a multi-millionaire?”

“But you’re not the billionaire’s poor in this case?” 

“You ever heard of power over money,” he asks me with emphasis in his question.  But it is a rhetorical one.  “Money first, then power.  While the size of the checking accounts fluctuate on paper with fraudulent purchases and deposits manufactured by bank CEOs, power remains steadfast and eternal.  Each ruler bequeaths money and power. Then the financial cycle of life begins again with a new generation.  The rulers can only help out industry owners, not managers at a marine engineering plant.  The managers will always support the owners.  Just like in your reality.  You know, the alternative one.  You support whichever political party you registered to at eighteen years old.  You believe the party precedes the person.  That’s half-true.  A politician will never buck against the R or D that’s listed after their names.  But preceding all that, they were placed in whichever party by their millionaire and billionaire friends.  Sometimes, they’re placed in the wrong party as a back stabbing by the elite.  That simply means they didn’t like that person due to lack of ambition, or reluctant willingness to bend over backwards for them or whatever else might not help the chiefs’ industries.”  He finishes his rant with a long swig of beer. 

“But you still have to admit we’re not a socialist country.  The government doesn’t own businesses, products, commerce, and labor.  There’s proof by tax returns.  Trust me, I’ve seen them every year for the last eight years.”

“And that’s your father-in-law’s company you said?”

“Yeah.”

“What are the average annual business profits?”

“A million and a half.”

“How do you know his business has to play by the capitalist rules?”  Dwight raises his eyebrows at me to indicate a “Gotcha’” comment.

39

“Is my father-in-law really in the millionaire’s society?  He doesn’t live like it.  He belongs to no clubs, takes few vacations, and works as hard as any owner I’ve seen who doesn’t need to.”  I pause for a moment to recollect my thoughts.  “Would it make a difference if he was?  If my father-in-law does belong, is it okay to ask him?”

“As far as I know, it’s okay to ask, but you’ll get the same answer either way.  ‘No.  What are you talking about?  Let me know when you find that privileged class since I make enough.’”

Dwight has got me thinking.  Getting that knowledge can be a feat.  Joining their status can be a new goal of mine.  Why can’t I one day become a millionaire?  Isn’t that the American dream?  I don’t have to spend my life in the middle of the middle class.  If there’s even a middle class anymore.  My wife has to work because I don’t make enough, and I work because she doesn’t make enough.  Is that modern day bourgeois?  The only ways for me to get out of it is to strike gold with editorial journalism or take over my father-in-law’s company.  The former is much better than the latter.  Could Dwight be that piece?  Or is ignorance bliss?  What I don’t know or experience can’t hurt me.  I need to pick one of the roads.  The avenue of affluence or the one of average.

VII

We both sip our beers and laugh at each other.  I don’t know why we’re laughing.  Not because of intoxication.  We just simultaneously felt a visceral need to laugh in each other’s faces, marking the first personal connection I’ve had with Dwight Thornfield in years.  Earlier was the first time I’ve ever gotten confrontational with him.  And him with me.  Well…there wasn’t enough time spent together to get comfortable enough to have a fight.  It’s got to be about 3pm by now.  I don’t look at my phone ‘cause I no longer care. 

“But democracy is the best form of government ever known to man,” I say interrupting the laughing break we took.  “That’s more fact than opinion.” 

“In the elite’s eyes, yes.  When everything’s for the greater good, then individuals are more willing to forfeit their liberties.  Keep believing that your voice is being heard, Rufus.  What’s changed in human welfare in your lifetime?”

“That’s not government’s role.  And it’s surely not a dictator’s role.”

“I’ll ask in another way.  What has a democratic system or our majority changed for the better you?”  He playfully winks at me. 

“You’re asking the wrong question, Dwight.  My life’s never gonna elevate to an imaginary higher level simply because of what kind of government America has in place.  I’ll live another sixty years without that happening.  So will the rest of the country.  Now you’re the one giving too much credit to countries’ governments.”  I wink back at him.  So we’ve started a new light-hearted game.

He says, “I’m just speaking about democracy.  Democracy.  The idea if the citizens vote for the politician and some of the issues, then there will be a greater good for everyone.  That’s what they’ve had us believe.  Correct or incorrect?”

“Correct,” I answer my silly teacher. 

“Okay.  So rather than me asking you for a third time, I’ll just tell you another reason why it’s not worth representing our kind this day in age.”  Shit.  I was just starting to have fun with him.  “Give the entire population the idea that they’re somehow in charge of who governs them, what they govern, and how they govern and the constituents will remain mute.  In fact, all they need to do is click a button and their vote’s supposedly cast.  Did their lives ever change after they clicked those buttons or pulled those levers or checked those bullshit ballots?  Of course not.  If you control where a car’s going, to go back to your shitty metaphor, you need to have your foot on the gas and your hands at twelve and two.  You can’t keep saying, ‘Push down on the gas pedal and let go of the wheel.’”  He laughs by himself this time.  “Change happens when you say it gets to happen.  Otherwise, you’re not in charge.  Democracy is more malevolent considering that it’s a façade.  At least dictators are honest about

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all going their way.  Money was created a long time ago as a tangible piece to honor, esteem, valor…all of the subjective concepts that make one man superior to his brother.”

“What does that have to do with what—“

  “—Hear me out,” he quickly responds.  “Money was created to keep the inferiors corrupt, so they continue to work for themselves and steal from others.  Dollars don’t exist for the ones who created them.  For the world powers, money’s just a mathematical means to:  ‘I’m stronger than you.  So stop what you’re doing or there will be your poverty as a consequence.’  Hence we’ve always had wars.  Wars show which side has more imaginary dollars in the end.  Which side can keep printing out phony bank accounts.  Each life costs a dollar.  No more, no less.”  He swigs his beer, so I gulp mine.  I’m getting pretty fucking buzzed.  Fuck it.    

“You can’t win a war with a hundred lives.  You can win one with a million and still dip into your citizenry for the supposed value of patriotism.  Patriotism.  Go jerk yourself off now.  Patriotism.  This was invented as a vital credit score.  You can’t take a mortgage out on your house, but you can ‘die for your country.’  The country that’s able to produce the most deaths of its citizens is the one who’s always able to win.  That’s where democracy is genius.  You volunteer to die for your nation in the name of protecting its citizens.  You’re not forced into the military like fascism.  You make yourself believe in the power of your own free will of choosing to fight for your land.  Uncle Sam is watching over you.  Uncle Sam was invented as propaganda by the Wilson administration in order to partake in World War I.  But, anyway, the more dollars you can afford to lose the less value you’re required to place in them.  Millionaires don’t need bank accounts.  Rich presidents or prime ministers don’t need nuclear weapons.  All of them already know that if the worst happens, they can still sleep solid for seven hours.”  His voice rises after each sentence like an elevated metronome.  As if he needed our macabre debate to invoke an innocent melody.  I think I hear Take Me in Your Arms by Kim Weston playing in the TV area but my mind’s not allotted time to stop the present dialectic to care. 

“How else do you think the global economy came to fruition?  It’s almost a complete joke how easy the world leaders can pull wool over the rest of our eyes.  They’ve started printing checking account balances on the same sheets of paper.  And their central banks are all at random, small, remote spots in the world.  Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, etc.…  Safe places that’ll never see a second of combat for the rest of man’s history.”

“But if the money doesn’t exist, then why would they worry about wars?”

“Those banks are the world’s balance sheets,” he answers with a smile.  He’s smiling more often after beginning our third beer.  Despite the content of what he’s saying,

42

I’m enjoying his new facial expressions.  “They’re only to keep the scales on world leaders’ balls’ sizes.  France can’t all of a sudden say they have more net worth than the U.S. because the U.S. ignored them on Russia teasing France about how small their dick-size.  It’s their form of honor.  There are still people doing this.  They continue to abide by the same mortal flaws, weariness of deceit in their own circles, and biased math errors.  One always has to check the other.  It’s an international country club.  Some days everyone gets along because they celebrate something that appeased all parties.  Some days a few people get a bad time on how others succeed, so there’s animosity and vengeance.  But it all subsides.  Meanwhile, hackneyed journalists on X number of propaganda stations say this political party did this and this political party did that are reporting all of the falsified feelings of the surface.  Keep us screaming at one another.  Our best of days is the world leaders’ worst of days.  And that’s the way it’s always been and continue to be.  Me, my cousin, is better than both.  So I gotta check out.  I’d never join the military.  What are you fighting for?  Don’t give me that freedom of country crap.  That’s what the government gave me as an answer.”

“How do we protect our country from other countries’ armies without military? Diplomacy?”

“I understand the necessities of military.  It’s one of the largest necessary evils of humankind.  But what’s the individual’s honorable reason?  Surely, you’re not fighting for your country in true reality.  You’re fighting for your government.  You’re doing it for them, so they won’t have to.  The elected officials should have at least one of their children go to combat to even the score somewhat.  They need to risk everything we do.  We lose limbs and lives in the name of U.S. propaganda king Uncle Sam.  Oh, but we get medals.  And we’re mentioned at ceremonies.  We have our names written on walls.  Yeah, that’ll make up for losing a life.  Another thing.  The government should pay everything for the rest of these soldiers’ lives if they do come home.  Not just school and health care.  Everything.  Have them live like the president.  It’ll then cost the government financially even more.  Put the government as taking the most at risk when they have to ledger books against a country that’s getting too cocky.  Fuck joining the military.  That’s the worst-case example of working for someone else.  You may be dying for them while they’re enjoying lunch in an expensive hotel.  What you need to understand is that the social divisions are not systemic on purpose.  Ancient engineers didn’t construct it.  It all trickled down from one source.  The hands holding the currency printer.  Materialistic value established.  Collectors became the strong and debtors became the weak.  Wages were given to the laborers to labor.  The powerful money owners had buildings established for them to rest and control the bricklayers who had to still borrow from other laborers for their own peace of mind.  They never wanted to lose their god-like status on earth, so they had to continue to invent ways to keep the poor poor.”

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I say, “I thought you said they didn’t invent schemes.”

“I said the beginning began with the masters having self-interest.  Of course, they’re the same ones who gave themselves governments, government titles, and hundreds of schemes to control the population.  You definitely need systems for a handful to dictate hundreds.  Hundreds turned to thousands and thousands turned to millions and the systems never had to change.  They just needed to evolve with the times.  Like with the invention of democracy by the Greeks.  And any other form of government within the last eon that gave people, you know, those bastard things called rights.  A person fighting for their rights as a civilian is as ancient as the pyramids.  Twenty-first century America is not the future.  We’re just in modern times of the powerful and the powerless.”

“We don’t live in an iron-clad dictatorship,” I exclaim. 

“No, but we do live in a puppet show.  The president and his cabinet are the puppets for the millionaires and billionaires.  You don’t have a voice, Rufus.  All you have is a social security number, so they know that you paid them your taxes, how old you are, where you live, etc.”

“You’re the cynical fatalist.  I’m the leveled realist.  I understand there’s more done behind the scenes than we know and that corresponds with one government working against the rest of the world’s, but conspiracy theories should be called conspiracy hypotheses since I don’t know of one other person who’s saying what you are saying and who your suicide is gonna speak to.”

“There have been other rich pariahs.  Any famous millionaire you know who’s died before seventy-five never took their offer.  Again, the hidden cures for all the world’s diseases are kept in the powerful’s medicine cabinets.  I’ll be the first one who speaks out.  And hopefully there’s a domino effect on speaking, not killing.”

“I simply don’t believe no one has spoken up by now.”  I shake my head with fervor.  “Especially famous people who deem themselves philanthropists.”

“Famous people have careers to protect and non-famous people have reputations to preserve.  Any others are deemed conspiracy hypothesists, if you will.”

“So what’ll make people believe you?”

“I’m willing to die to start the revolution.  The rest will be spoken by the living. I place the responsibility onto you to compel others to speak in honor of me.  You’ll have an audience from all sides.”  Weren’t we laughing like giddy schoolgirls minutes

44

ago?  How can I get back to that?  Not now.  He’s gotten me knee-deep in the quicksand of mud-slinging thoughts. 

“What’s it you want done?  The powerful can’t become the powerless.  You said it yourself.”

“No, I said they don’t want that to happen.  First off, eradicate the dollar.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“Yeah.  Why not?  Out of chaos comes order.  Correct?”

“That’s impossible.  And your nonchalance shows your ignorance.  The math doesn’t add up to the global economy.”

“Fuck them.  If the dollar doesn’t exist, then what are they gonna do?  Remember Ted’s reaction to no money?  They won’t attack us because we’ll have no money to lose or gain.  Imagine a society with an empty bank account.  No more social clubs that cost to get in, no more organ transplants denied because of shitty health insurance, no more armed robberies with—“

“—You’re already all over the place.  One solution can’t solve a hundred problems.  If you take the dollar tag off, you’ll just end up with social clubs that don’t cost anything, doctors that won’t work, and you’ll still have armed robberies over better cars, TVs, etc.  It just won’t cost shit.  I can keep imagining because it’ll never happen.”  I chug the rest of my beer and semi-slam it on the coffee table.  When the fuck is he going to throw away all these empty bottles?  When’s he gonna wash my half-eaten plate?

“The score’s been one to nothing for too long.  The poor must defeat.  And that starts with getting rid of finances.  That’s a goal by the masses.  I’m not saying it’d happen in one day.”

“But I’m saying that it never will.  It was invented, it has begun, and it has continued.  Currency has no mortality.”

“Nothing’s impossible.  You sell your intellect and will power short,” he says in a condescending tone.  “One side can’t stay undefeated throughout the history of time.  If our species is to survive, then that’s the first step.  Greed is the umbrella of which all destruction covers.  From war to hunger to lethal sickness…I don’t wanna be redundant.  That insults your intelligence twice.  And I hold nothing personal against you.  If you take the comfort out of being rich, then you take the suffering out of being poor.  Let’s lead the world on something besides the size of military.  I call for a social revolution.  And it’s my dying wish that you make it your living goal.”

45

A country without currency.  The naiveté.  I’d think he means well, but he doesn’t.  It’s this irrational thinking that’s led to his demise.  My reasoning can’t lower his cantankerous angst.  He’s just a child.  How am I to inject wisdom inside a child?  You can’t create experience.  Suicide is one mistake you can’t make up for.  I need to keep him talking.  Let him rationalize his way out of destruction.  That’s how he’ll learn something considering he’s his only friend.  I’m giving him till 5pm.  I’m surprised my wife hasn’t called me yet to check on my whereabouts.  I probably wouldn’t be able to stay shit to her without violent anger. 

IX

I look at my phone to check the time and any missed calls or texts.  3:47pm.  No calls.  No texts.  I can’t interrupt my therapy session by calling my wife.  I’m assuming she’s fine and keeping herself busy putting more ixora flowers in our front garden.  Of course, Dwight interrupts my thoughts. 

“If you called authorities on me, I’d go to jail.”

“But you’d be alive.”

“Alive and suffering even more than I am now.  All that’d do would make me stir crazy and increase my compunction for death.  There shouldn’t be too many prisons in this country.  Especially for people who plan to die.”

“You keep trying to justify your suicide.  It’s other people’s faults that you’re dying.  As if you have nothing to do with the reasons what so ever.”  Time to destroy his mental prison.  Attach dynamite to those four concrete walls and pounce on the goddamn switch to ignite the explosions. 

“The only imprisoned crime I see is murder.  The ending of someone else’s life should constitute the lengthy ostracizing of another.”

He’s got me angrier than I’ve felt in a long time.  The fucking arrogance of him dismissing his heart beat as a triple-A battery.  Throw it in the trash can without a care knowing that you can insert a new one to get the device to work again.  I’ve almost lost care for how much battery life he has left.  “But there’s a plethora of crimes to jail!  Rape, armed robbery, pedophilia—“

“—And jail stops those from happening?  Never!”  He looks like he wants to spit on the ground but manners stop him.  “Jail has been a successful business for governments long before the days of debtor’s prisons.  Any way to keep the nature of humans legislated.  ‘Don’t touch this, don’t walk there, don’t say that, and don’t sit here.’  Keep the goddamn moronic cops out of all those problems.  Leave the cops, who are beneath the rich, as you must know, to the murders.  If we pay them so crappy, then let them handle one thing.  Murderers.  Finding them and locking them up.  But humans aren’t gonna stop stealing ‘cause there’s an incredible profit to be made off of jailing them.  The worst is the jailing of non-violent criminals.  Addicts, shoplifters, identity thieves, etc.…addicts need social, scientific therapy to cope with themselves, shoplifters need to get their hands burned reminding them not to take what isn’t theirs, and computer criminals need to get their nerdy asses kicked by their victim.  The power club can’t have it both ways.  They construct the rules and enforce the punishments for breaking their rules.  That leads them to act in their self-interest of making more and more of those laws.  Especially, when they pay sheriffs and wardens handsomely to keep their affectations as public’s servants for the greater good.  The former is like democracy.  All of it sounds nice in theory and decorative

47

superlatives.  You gotta remember, Rufus.  It’s not that reality’s fake.  It just lacks the majority of truth.  Another thing is that there shouldn’t be any state that has capital punishment.  This entire country should be without.  The government doesn’t deserve the right to kill its citizens.”

I say, “They’re doing it in the name of the victims.  In the name of justice.”

“But punishing a killer with death is condoning murder by one out of the two parties.  The ones who govern us control our fates literally.”

“I just know that if any fucker ever killed my wife, then I’d want him to die in front of my eyes.  No more, no less.”

“I’ll definitely come back at you with the age old, ‘What good will that do?  Won’t bring her back.’”  He smiles as if he just accomplished convincing me to switch aisles of the argument.   

“But it would make him gone.”

“And leave you here either way.  You’d still have to live without your wife.  Look, I’m not having the back of murderers and saying they’re okay.  But the government, out of all entities, shouldn’t be a murderer too.  It’s already busy killing other countries’ armies.  Why make them domestic killers in the name of God?  That’s usually how they hide behind it.  They’re doing God’s will.  As if they were appointed jobs directly by him.  In NATO, only the U.S. and Turkey commit genocide of its citizens.  Are we supposed to be as barbaric as Turkey?  A country that’ll stone adulteresses to death?  All I know is what I feel.  We don’t gain anything when losing killers.  Prisoners, on death row or not, hit your pocket book either way.  Meanwhile, your taxes give wardens raises.  That’s why there shouldn’t be as many prisons.  One per state should do it.  And we’re only talking for murder.  The punishment for murder should be ten years flat.”

“That’s insane.  Murderers are also playing God, to go along with your impromptu divine argumentative backup,” I say with exhaust in my voice. 

He quickly responds, “Taking ten years out of someone is long enough.  There’s no reason anyone should be locked in a jail cell for the rest of their lives.  Jail’s a human zoo.  It doesn’t help them.  It only makes them more vengeful towards people,” he adds.  “Meanwhile, rapists, pedophiles, and addicts should all be mandated to strenuous psychiatric treatment.  Those are all mental disorders,” he says with his eyes wide and eyebrows raised.  He looks like he just discovered this penal system revelation.  “The sick human mind is not treated or cured with incarceration.  Again, that only makes them worse and increases the likelihood of repeat offenses.  Why do you think the recidivism rate is so high?  Being locked in jail for X number of years

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where they learn the ins and outs of behaving like a convict, doesn’t help morph them into an upstanding citizen when they’re released. For all the money that is made and goes into prisons, that could be diverted to professional psychiatric help and whatever research and development that can happen in search for anything close to a cure.”  Dwight exhales the former sentence with a long breath.  No more timed metronome.  This was an ejaculation of tense meter.  All of a sudden melting into the jazz genre. 

I respond, “Why should we wanna help pedophiles or rapists?  If anyone raped my wife or sexually abused my future child, I would want them to suffer for the rest of their lives!”

“But there aren’t any treatments or cures for those deranged people,” he says as he leans up in his chair, knocking his knuckles on the coffee table.  “It’s an extreme mental sickness.  They’re not thinking about your wife’s or kid’s well-being.  Their brains compel them to aggressively take control over another sexually.  When someone makes a foolish mistake or commits an act that their severe chemical imbalances force them to do, their lives shouldn’t be ended.  The wealthy are only interested in making profits out of jails with people violating the laws written in their handwriting.  The more inmates, the more money.  Whatever happened to redemption?”  Dwight extends his arms in the air and hangs his head down imitating Christ on the cross.  “Is that only a figment of imagination?  Prisons are one of the most ancient forms of oppression.”  He sits back onto his now weathered chair cushion. 

I’ve realized I’m sitting on the losing side again.  I missed hitting the tennis ball.  I’m playing defense.  I’m the horse in a polo match.  How apropos for my T-shirt. My mind’s sliding into an afternoon tranquility.  Can’t take any more excitement.  I gotta leave soon.  And I don’t think I can stop Dwight’s plan.  I’ll call nine-one-one after I step outside of this shallow condo.    

X

But it’s not 5pm yet.  I blame the beer on my recent laissez-faire attitude.  I must place mind over substance.  “You can’t kill yourself.  Plain and simple.  That’s not a solution. It’s a macabre end to a bright and good-looking person who has no limits on tomorrow.”

“There’s nothing interesting about me.  I’m never gonna win a world series.  Never gonna win an Oscar.  Shit.  I’ll never be a general manager of anything.”

“Why the last?”

“Don’t wanna work for it.  I’m just one of over seven billion humans planting their feet on earth.  A hundred years from now, no one will ever know I ever existed.  Who cares what I haven’t done?”

“Not to be an afternoon special, but what’s wrong with planning on changing that,” I ask.  “Are you that lazy to care for a different, more productive tomorrow?  It’d be different if you were eighty-five years old,” I wave my arms around in the air in a jittery fashion, “and stating all this as fact.  But you’re only thirty-four for Christ’s sake.  You can create years of accomplishments before you’re forty!  Work, travel, and get drunk with strangers!  Do all the things I can’t fucking do!” 

I’ve had enough!

  “You’re a writer,” Dwight responds with calm demeanor.  “Write my years and set some goals.  I’ll show you a person who can’t complete one due to lack of self-respect.  Have you heard me say I don’t give a fuck about being forgotten?  I hope I’m forgotten a lot sooner than a century.  I’m not even a blurb on the static frequency of humankind’s history,” he exclaims.  “Nothing changes for the Roman elite and nothing changes for the poor philosopher.  The Homo Sapiens’ life cycle’s defined by how many ways death can end it.”

“Well poor fucking Dwight.  The world’s a terrible place and your existence is worthless.”  I’ve had enough of his presence.  Fuck him.  I’ve never carried a conversation with one person this long.  Especially with someone who’s as emotionally draining.  This day has become a toilet with human waste floating in the water.  Goddamn!  Won’t it be nice when I can flush it? 

He finally finishes the last quarter of his beer with a brief chug.

“And when’s the last time you’ve looked at your pitiful face?  Your parents didn’t choose to end theirs early and they were in the middle of an end.  Their end’s your beginning.  Who is Dwight without Mr. and Mrs. Thornfield?”  I jump up and grab his empty beer bottle and slam it on the coffee table.  This time was not a semi-slam.  I hope I break this fucking table.  “You can’t answer that ‘cause you haven’t the

50

slightest idea!  I work hard at having money and making sure my wife’s happy!  She and I have been laboring to have a baby, but it hasn’t happened yet!  And that’s what kills me!  Not being able to start a life!  And in so many ways, you rejoice one not started.  What a sad, sorry man you are without a definition.  You’re right.  You are without a purpose.  Live for yourself, not others.  Because me and everyone else will be able to carry Dwight’s life definition throughout the rest of our days as a waste of time.  ‘Oh, all that he could’ve done and gave up,’ is what they’ll say.  ‘Never be like your cousin Dwight,’ I’ll tell my future child.  But if you care less about what people say you are and more about what you live as, I’ll smile when I call you cousin.  Surely, you didn’t think that you’d tell me you were going to kill yourself and all I was going to do was say, ‘Oh, gee.  Too bad.  What’s bothering you?’  You’re not supposed to understand your purpose all the time.  I’m not sure if we’re ever supposed to.”

“It’s worthless since the world’s run by the aristocrats.  I don’t need another fifty years to tell me that.”

“Well, I got four on you saying it’s not worthless.  I have many purposes.  That, in itself, is worth.  And you have worth to me.”

He stands and yells, “I’ve told you!  I’m doing it to the evil Oz playing the role as the house!  A majority of us has to borrow from the house just to get a comfortable seat at the table!  Too much fucking disgust in the world to live inside of it!”  It’s as if me saying that he’s worth something struck a nerve.  Has he constructed a bulwark against a scintilla of love?

“Sit down.  Relax.”  I make a lowering gesture with my hands even though I’m back to enjoying him losing control of himself.  He’s matching my temperament.  Who will crack before the coffee table?  He listens and sits.  “Don’t’ you know that good always conquers evil?”

“Fables tell us to believe that.  Like we’re in control of our surroundings.”  Dwight’s tone levels out to his former nonchalance.  Damn. 

“But supposing we are.”  I raise my voice to try to return him to more of a combative attitude.  Why did I tell him to sit down?  I guess just a natural reaction to him getting pissed at my emotional daggers.  That would be my natural reaction to anyone getting upset in a verbal fight with me.  “Suppose you’ve taken this millionaire’s conspiracy offer and stretched it to deranged boogeyman fables to satisfy yourself?”

“What would I get out of that,” he asks and folds his arms.

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“A way to make a statement to them.  Perhaps there’s more to your story than you’re telling me.  Someone else might profit from your self-immolation in the face of spite.  But think about it.  How can I be a strong rebellious voice covering a dead man’s world?  I got no experience.  No concrete proof.  I got zero fucking passion in writing your shitty stance.  If anything, they’d accuse me of making fame and fortune off of your tragedy.”

  “I expected you to take it seriously!”

“Lazy thinking, lazy feelings, lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy…You need to start convincing yourself that two plus two does equal four.  That the sky is blue, not black.  Quit dying in shadows and start living in reflections.”  Dwight sits and makes a pouting facial expression.  “Don’t hold me in contempt for getting angry at you.  You called me.  It’s coming up on five o’clock and that’s my goddamn checkout time.  You want your voice heard or not?”

“Sounds like your voice is the only one being recorded.”

“Editing’s elementary.  All I can do is pray that this piece has an inspirational ending.  Revolutionary leaders don’t start movements third-hand.”

XI

“I was born with a frown.  My goal has always been to achieve a life of consistent happiness.  Some people are just happy.  They don’t even have to strive for it.  They could be sitting on the couch at home watching the evening news. Happy.”  Dwight pauses as he looks at the family picture of him on the wall to my left with his face-stretching child smile.  I have to actively search for ways to find it.  And I keep searching…searching…my nature has left me with the lifelong struggle.  Joke’s on me.  It’s impossible for me to have any sense of serenity.  Yet I keep searching for it.  And when I don’t find it, I become even more depressed.  Happy people don’t understand my kind.  You seem to be the like.  So while you sit here struggling to find fatal misery, I’m in dire straits to find a blissful rebirth.”

“You can’t try, fail, and be satisfied that you at least tried?”  I’ve calmed my excitement.  I’ve run out of speaking with my tongue, while my mind speaks with ulterior motives.  My tongue’s now been abandoned by my brain.  I’ve used all of my energetic exertion. 

“How can you enjoy the same efforts when you get the same results?”  I think I see his eyes water, but I can’t tell. I’d love it if he broke down and bawled.  That’d be the healthiest event today.

“Of course, I understand misery.  Who can’t?  who hasn’t felt it?  You think we’re all sterile to pain?”

“I’ll never understand what it’s like to be at peace without a few cocktails inside of me.  I’ve been comfortable my entire life.  Where does one go when comfort becomes apathy?  When one becomes a millionaire and exempt from society’s rules?  How does one live with the guilt of having such a large checking account?  That’s what we won’t come to terms with.  That’s what you’ll forever wonder yourself after I die.  I’m the only one doing something.”

“If you could write what people say at your funeral, what would you come up with?”

“All those yesterdays.  It’s what I long for and what defines me.  Not an unknowable future.”  No tears streaming down his cheeks yet.

“Exactly.  Unknowable.  How are you able to define it in vain?”

“Because the last seven years have been destitute.  No highlights.  Not a single admirable story from that time I’d share with a stranger.  I finished Princeton, learned to play the guitar, learned French, and slept all other thoughts away.”

“You always seemed happy.”

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“I was.  Only now do I realize the last seven years has been my curtain-call.  The climax’s over.  Been too stupid to realize that I’m performing my denouement.  I’ve accomplished nothing since my graduation, and I have no plans to.”  Dwight bites his bottom lip with his top teeth in frustration. 

“Only you can plan something.  Look, never mind.  I’m tired of talking in soft caresses to you about why you should love life.  You’re let down by society and death and disease, and blah, blah, blah.”  I’m getting impatient with myself again due to the redundancy.  “You should know by now that I gain nothing with you staying alive.  I just think all you’ve said is senseless and unwarranted.  You know what I live for?”

“Your wife.”  He nods as if he already knows the answer to my question.

“My future.  You stay alive today, so you can wake up tomorrow.  The future being unknowable makes it exciting.  I have no idea what I’ll experience next.  Am I happy now?  No.  I want to be a self-sufficient journalist with at least one child, leaving my wife not having to worry about next year with getting pregnant, stepping outside of her father’s shadow, having a life of our own.  We’re indefinable.  We’re just the daughter and son-in-law of Thomas Crane.  What’s more deprecating than that?”  I say, “It’s the struggle to break that fucking glacier off of us that makes everyday one step closer to my serenity.  My success.  Serenity and success aren’t easy.  They usually go hand in hand.  Why is it the one who’s born into success the one the least serene?”

“Misery’s too comfortable.  I can’t save you.  And I’ll never be a fucking Hallmark card writer.  That’s because happiness and success aren’t cheap.  You lost your success.  That’s why you’re disgustingly depressed.  You’re right.  Your last seven years have been a waste of time.  What’s the last good memory you have?”

“I look at my time as a rose.  After I was planted, I was immediately watered to start growing out of the ground.” Now I can see tears in his eyes.  The tears are still pent up by his lower eyelids.  I slink down in my chair to relax my position. 

“I remember being small and watching my mother hang up pictures in the living room.  Each picture was of a painting of nature.  One was of an old barn in this large field with three monstrous trees placed in three corners.  Only the top right corner showed the gray sky with the white moon peering over the quiet, windless acreage.  She put that one in the middle of the six or seven paintings.  It was a long, beige wall waiting for its decorations to give it life.  I must’ve been four years old.  It was during the day and I wasn’t in daycare.  She asked me if I liked the pictures.”  Dwight’s tears stroll down his cheeks as if both lower eyelids broke the small waterfall over his facial dam.  He cries without making a sobbing noise.  The kind of crying you

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don’t realize you’re doing when talking about an emotional memory.  He didn’t wipe them away. 

He continued, “I pointed to the lonely barn and said, ‘That one’s good.’  I don’t remember what the other paintings showed.  I remember my grammar school days.  A handful of moments from each year.  Learning to tie my shoelaces in kindergarten and getting a smiley stamp to reward me.  I was proud of that.  This is when I grew large enough for small, red buds.  Something to show promise of life.  I displayed the smiley face to my parents when I got home.  By third grade, I grew a couple of thorns and started getting into trouble.  After P.E. one day, I decided to change from my gym clothes into my uniform in the middle of the classroom.  I was singing in joy about pulling my pants down.  Then some girl, Nicole Trudeau, went to get the P.E. coach, Ms. Reiner.  Nicole yelled a shriek that still pricks my eardrums as I talk to you now.  I had to spend the rest of that day to quote ‘write till my fingers fall off.’ I bloomed near the end of eighth grade.  I finished grammar school with A’s and B’s, a good job as Commander Harbison in the production of South Pacific, and had my first French kissing make out session with Ashley Hayward.  The spring that year had done its job by promising daily sunshine and cool, windy nights.  I celebrated that entire summer with a group of friends in riding bikes along the lake while smoking our first pack of cigarettes.  We also snuck in a large forty-ounce of beer once in a blue moon.  We’d share gulps while standing in a circle.  Thought we were cool.  We were.  Our group of girls would always come watch us thirteen-year-olds pretending to be twenty-year-olds.” 

Seamlessly and soberly for the first time today, he continues with, “Once I was midway into high school, I was in full bloom with all of my red petals and tiny, sharp thorns.  I took nothing seriously but girlfriends and I got away with it.  I didn’t have to worry about getting good grades, staying out too late since I never had a curfew, and cutting up in class, leaving my father with foul parent-teacher conferences.  My mother never went to those.  I realize in hindsight that she wanted to freeze me as an angel forever in her eyes.  My father handed down the petty punishments.  The constant feeling of innocent bliss without ever striving for it.  It was beautiful.  I could feel the heaviness of happiness all the time.  I was pretty and fresh.  Then I had my college fun.  But college is where one gets plucked from the garden.  Some time during those four to six years, depending on how long it takes your flower head to become too top heavy in order to keep standing, is when you’re supposed to become an adult.  Adult.  Jesus Christ I hate that word.  You become one after your climax is gone.  Pulled from your roots, cut by scissors in the butt, and set into a vase of water waiting to wither on the sill of a living room window.  My water has dried, Rufus.  The living room window’s curtains are no longer needed to stay open.”

Dwight bends his head down and sobs.  I don’t move an inch.  I just stare.  So he does have feelings.  Before now, he convinced me that he erased emotions with the

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end of a number two pencil.  I can’t remember the last time I cried.  My wife has made me tear-up when she cries about not being pregnant for the umpteenth time.  But Dwight has finally let his guard down.  I’m not finding joy in his unplanned dive into an emotional abyss.  I am, however, content.  Dwight became the first one to crack.  Touchdown!  Homerun!  Goal!  Bull’s Eye!  Hole in One!  Game?

XII

About five or so minutes pass by as Dwight bawls.  I’ve barely heard myself breathe during this time.  Whenever he stops and looks up at me, I stand and give him a long hug.  There’s no more for me to say to him.  The sharp-cutting pain in my stomach is from me thinking that this’ll be the last time I’ll see him.  But I’m more comfortable with leaving now than I have been all day.  He found his empathy for himself in the bowels of the darkest blackness.  Has he lifted his head out of Plato’s cave?  I believe he at least realizes that he’s been looking at the shadows on the cave’s wall the entire time.  Dwight picks his head up and smears the tears off his face with both arms on his long sleeves.  I lean forward and turn off the digital recorder.  I put it into my jeans’ left pocket. 

“I have to go now,” I say.  I remain standing, waiting for any type of response.  He keeps erasing the tears off his face with his sleeves.  “I hope you quickly learn to forgive yourself.  No one ever said that you must forgive others.  But every smile is contagious.”  I force a smile.  It’s obviously fake.  Dwight smiles but his is natural.  As if he’s a child again, standing in front of that photographer’s camera. 

“Thanks for being here today,” he says.  He stands and looks down at the glass coffee table.   “I guess I gotta do some cleaning up.”  I laugh. 

“That’s a good start,” I say.  I walk over to him and hug him tight.  I pat his back a few times.  He then hugs me back.  “My only cousin.”  I let go of him. 

“Goodbye,” Dwight says softly.  He gives me a face without expression.  I can’t tell if he means a temporary “goodbye” or a permanent one.  I don’t ask.  I turn around and walk towards the door.  I open the door and enter the hallway without looking over my shoulder.  I shut it behind me. 

I turn left and walk a few steps towards the stairwell.  But I stop.  No.  You know what?  I turn around and head the other way.  I’ll take the elevator.  It’s only seven floors.  In fact, I hope the machinery takes its sweet time carrying me down to the ground level.  It’s not that I don’t have the energy to take the stairs, even though I am physically tired.  I just want to let something else move me at its own pace.  I’m too damn meticulous in controlling my foot speed.  When I walk up stairs, when I walk down stairs, when I mosey around a job site, when I amble from the kitchen to the living room after cleaning dishes of whatever was left from dinner, and when I strut from my front door to my car parked on the front curb of my house.  There’s a walkway leading directly from my front porch to my driver’s door. 

Aha.  The elevator. 

Press the button stuck in the concrete wall.  Waiting.  Look towards Dwight’s door.  Nothing.  Am I expecting him to give me a P.S. message?  Today was mentally and physically draining.  Even though I didn’t move much, I suppose my brain faded

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into resting mode, cutting off stimulation to my muscles, joints, and nerves.  But my heart’s still thumping.  The blood pumping throughout my body’s veins.  Oh, I forgot.  I’m supposed to call nine-one-one.  Bing.  Elevator doors open.  Do I make the call before I enter this moving cubicle?  The phone won’t work in there. I’ll wait.  Enter the elevator.  Doors close.  Press the button that reads 1.

I think I’ve convinced myself that he’ll be okay regardless of what he does.  Even if it’s ending his life.  That sounds awful.  But the majority of Dwight’s mood today was mired in comfort.  It was rooted in pain, sprouted in disgust, and bloomed in hopelessness.  Yet his comfortable nonchalance, spiked with sharp disrespect for the human race, crumbled when he recollected his childhood.  It’s as if today’s Dwight already died in front of my eyes.  And that’s what led to my satisfaction.  Bing.  Elevator doors open.            

XIII

Dwight was a good man.  He wished no one harm and contained that youthful, yet naïve, belief that society was capable of a utopia.  He dreamed of love and cried for someone else’s sorrow.  As stoic as he seemed about ending his life, he wasn’t a stoic at all.  He decided on his death.  He felt his end at the death of his parents.  After the thousands of wet tissues he used, he simply decided that he no longer wanted anymore.  All that about the rich echelon club of society was a cop-out.  I didn’t write a soon-to-be published interview about the scheming aristocrats.  I have a reputation to protect.  As long as people I care about and myself aren’t hurt, then let the rulers rule.  Doesn’t bother me. 

You’d be naïve yourself if you didn’t know that there’s a handful of powerful people that rule our lives.  Dwight gave me the specifics of how it works.  I believed every word he said.  What would he have gotten out of lying about all those supreme beings that are behind the walls fidgeting with our minds and bodies but not our souls?  With the incarceration rate for controlling citizens to disease purposefully going uncured to government officials committing insider trading making them multi-millionaires in money being printed with fictional value for us to increase inflation.  And all the conspiracy theories about the powerful in between.  Those don’t exist for speculation.  Those exist as established facts.  What we don’t know already is what I based my interview on:  How much does a person have to lose to end his or her own life?  Dwight wasted most of his.  Was there any way for me to stop him?  How do you stop a racecar driver from pressing on the accelerator when he’s in danger of losing the race in flames?  Determination can be powered by adrenalin but can also be powered by silence. 

I don’t think Dwight ever revealed the source of his suicidal thoughts.  And yet, he did wonders for me and my wife with waking me up to the reasons of why I get out of bed each morning.  He’s also given me a publication in Timemagazine to come out three issues from now.  My editorial will be in the back somewhere.  “A thirty-something millionaire New Orleans socialite who lost both of his parents to a horrific car crash counts down his last hours of life as he reminisces about the short one he’s killing.”  Death and destruction sells.  First, his story made the local paper.  Then the story caught a piece on Inside Edition.  Then Time called me.  I originally told my wife that Dwight just wanted to catch up that day.  I told her nothing about his suicidal ambition.  After the local story was published, I had to tell her the truth.  She was quite upset.  She wasn’t upset about me not trying to do more for him to save his life.  How can you incriminate someone for not convincing another to stay alive?  She was upset because I was dishonest with her.  That was the first and only time I ever hid the truth in our marriage.  I had a lot of explaining to do about what went on that day and why I hid it from her.  Every lie needs honest an explanation.  But she was inevitably quelled that I got a published editorial in a national magazine.  Quelled, not happy.  To think…someone else’s mortality has given me my career livelihood.  People are more interested in someone figuring out why they’re killing themselves than they are

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with embracing life.  Why do you think the local news reports about house fires?  Is that newsworthy?  It’s not.  It just shows large flames, destruction, and people crying about their burnt homes.  Turmoil.  Dwight played the ultimate tumultuous character. Why are people attracted to Hamlet?  Dwight was a Hamlet.  A morbid and mortal paradox searching for insidious justifications. 

An old Chinese proverb refreshes me.  If you are depressed, you are living in the past.  If you are anxious, you are living in the future.  If you are at peace, you are living in the present.  I no longer live in the future.  I tell my wife to do the same.  Quit worrying about the future because no one can predict it.  Grasp today without forgetting about tomorrow. Dwight had the opposite problem with dwelling in his past.  Thanks Dwight.  But I end my narrative on Dwight without delving into the catharsis that he provided me by his stoicism on the vitality of life, and not by his obsession with an inevitable death.  Since it’s his story, I’ll allow him to end my personal, unpublished piece with his own words on why to swing your legs off the bed each morning and stand up.          

XIV

I eked out of my killing.  I had a last millisecond doubt of the bullet doing its job, and I turned the barrel to my cheek.  I now have an appointment with a plastic surgeon about the best fit for the right side of my face.  I was half-sitting, half-lying down on my maroon, suede couch in front of my television with the .22 in my left hand.  I’m right-handed.  Perhaps I wanted it to feel like someone else was ending me. I thought about my mother and her contagious laugh.  She’d laugh at her own laugh sometimes.  The embodiment of happiness.  Sometimes she’d giggle when she thought she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to do, like baking pumpkin pie.  My father hated pumpkin pie but always expected desert after his nightly dinners.  My father.  The most loving husband I learned about once I became an adult. He’d tickle my mom as she lied on the sofa in her pajamas fixing on going upstairs to bed.  He’d tell her she was his tickle hostage.  He also loved her laugh.  Maybe that’s why he did that. Besides seeing her uncontrollable mirth.  I presume it gave him a silent one of his.    

I thought of Samantha and all that could’ve been that never was.  She’s been my most educating loss.  Just saying her name brings out fifteen year-old smiles upon my face.  Of course, I thought about my group of guy friends.  Mark, Travis, Cliff, and Zach.  The ones I still care to see but never hear from.  That’s also my fault.  I neglected life feeling comfortable with my own scheduled parties and new post-college group of friends.  Those people that were supposed to better me in society.  That’s my parent’s only stain on me.  Writing out my future with their friend’s kin.  But I shouldn’t have tried in vain to live as their character.  I disappointed them for not saying, “Stop!”  They would’ve said, “Then continue how you please, my love.”  I don’t blame them for being a part of the celestial upper-upper class.  I’ll believe Ned in saying that they did it for me.  My parents didn’t think like me.  They sought out the positives in every event.  They sought out the positives in every person.  Meanwhile, I wasted my time thinking about the negatives I’d leave by ending myself.  Three seconds later I put the gun into my mouth, pulled the trigger, and curved the barrel before it was too late.  Now I’m happy. 

I learned that I’m too much of a coward to kill myself.  I ain’t ready for death.  I’m stuck with life goddamn it.  So now I need to learn how to deal with that since I won’t be ready for the end of it.  I’m dedicated to begin the mission of exposing the slave owners in our country.  The same mission I was giving to Rufus.  I may even go back to the ultra-rich group to become a manipulative whistleblower.  Get myself a digital recorder and hide it in my jacket pocket to document their bliss in others’ sufferings.  My words here will not get published.  This is my personal editorial for Rufus to keep in his private collection.  Anyway…there’s a long road for me to cover.  I haven’t finished learning about my mortal purpose.  Got too much more to figure out with half a face.  Now there will never be a day a mirror won’t let me forget my redemption. I’m not looking for the end of the road.  I’m searching for alternate routes.  Make sure you keep moving forward today in case you reach the end tomorrow.