Honestly Kid

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 | Spare Parts, premature fiction

It’s the same upset­ting feel­ing he’s known before. Maybe known all of his so-called adult life. Certainly the last ten years of it.

Nothing achieved. Opportunities missed or entirely blown. Friends and so-called friends lost. Success (what­ever that means) almost entirely elu­sive. All the edu­ca­tion and what? None of the dis­ci­pline and hard work? No, there’s some evi­dence of even hard work. Of risks taken. But just the way he can and, more often than not, does lose at any game of strat­egy, he has mis-played his life so that he is in a weak, los­ing position.

He remem­bers, vaguely, those games of chess with his grand­fa­ther so many years ago. What was the goal? The king. Eliminate the king. Keep as many of your pieces while tak­ing as many of your oppo­nents. Never make a move that isn’t cov­ered by another piece. Protect, con­trol, win. He never won much at chess. Ever.

But life isn’t a game of strat­egy, is it? No, but using some strat­egy wouldn’t hurt. And know­ing what you mean by win­ning is essen­tial. If it’s enough to have played the game, to have lived, then stop whin­ing. If you must take your opponent’s king (whomever that is), strategize.

So, maybe, all this time he’s been think­ing about things incor­rectly. Maybe not really think­ing at all.

What strat­egy, what val­ues got him here? A long time ago it was God and Mom and Dad. The Trinity. Maybe not so very long ago. And then his divorce. A failed dream or two. Corporate jobs that felt dead and dead­ened him inside and out. Parties. Books. Movies. An urbane city life. Somewhere along the way Art invaded the pic­ture. Way back. It unset­tled The Trinity, invented mean­ing for the wan­der­ings and enlivened the parts of him that were being crushed under cor­po­rate cul­ture. And now? He’s off the track com­pletely. Back to Brenlee. Small, bro­ken, com­pletely with­out Art, Brenlee. A town which bared its soul to him only in the body of a dead boy, oth­er­wise he knows noth­ing of any impor­tance about it. That boy is what it showed him that he could never truly leave. This was its curse on him.

that. How bad is it to try to do good and be mocked for it, because oth­ers don’t know? Not so bad as that. How bad is it to bor­row and know you’ll never repay? It is all noth­ing com­pared to that feel­ing. Death wins out. Life wins out. The details between and around those two events exist in an absurd numb­ing haze. A haze he wants lifted finally. William would like to take a truly deep and clear breath once and for all. Perhaps once all this is set­tled with Tommy, when he knows who did it and why.

And Tamra’s sit­ting in his favorite chair on his porch, eyes closed, a light from inside his house offer­ing a dif­fuse glow over the whole scene. He knows he might hurt her, but he can’t dream of send­ing her away. She might hurt him. He could still feel that, couldn’t he? He parks in his dri­ve­way and her eyes open, the moment of peace ended.

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