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Bungalow ranch style home after bungalow ranch style home for what seemed like an infinity; the houses seemed far too big for habitation by a single family, each occupying so much space that he imagined one could put a bowling alley inside them and still have extra room for a kitchen and several bedrooms, each with its own private bathroom. Some were modern cement constructions with black or silver aluminum trimming around the windows, while others had brick or aluminum siding walls with wooden window frames, and still others were finished with dirty pastel colored plaster and had Latin-styled clay roofs. He felt a vague nostalgia for his days as a carpenter when he helped build the foundations of many such houses. The lawns and gardens were universally enormous, but what was peculiar was that in front of each ‘plantation’ (it seemed the best word to describe these ungodly green spaces) some gardener or other––perhaps the owner, more likely not––was happily working with a rake and a hoe and whatever other garden implements they had at their disposal. Taken together, they looked like some kind of sales team, each proud homeowner dressed in similar fashion to his neighbor in Bermuda shorts and a white––always white––tee-shirt. They moved at the same pace, as though part of a Broadway dance production, snipping away leaves and branches with seemingly identical clippers, and appeared to be whistling in tandem––were they all listening to the same radio station through hidden earphones? Sprinklers whirred back and forth in lawn after lawn, while hoses could be heard hissing away from somewhere in the distance, and everywhere at once, always hidden, never visible, and what would such a scene be without the ubiquitous hum of lawnmowers framing what was beginning to resemble a musical composition of some kind––but could it even be called music? Was this a rehearsal for some ‘national’ anthem particular to this neighborhood, where instead of instruments the individual melodies were played with gardening implements: the sprinklers acting as the string section, the trimmers providing the hiss of snare drums, and the lawnmowers taking the part of the booming bass drums––or were they tubas?
In front of the largest house a perfectly fit middle-aged man wearing red plaid shorts and a white tee-shirt, gleaming even whiter than those almost identical white shirts on the other men––was pumping his fist in the air like a conductor during the crescendo of some iconic orchestral composition. Yes, he must be ‘the conductor’ of this bizarre neighborhood anthem! He had it nailed, the stern owlish look required for such a lofty position, that combination of keen hearing and observation, hunched in uncontested authority over the rest of the ‘lawn musicians’, uniting and ushering them with his every inflected gaze and motion. His perfect physique (but with small white tufts of hair clearly visible on his chest) and regal expression, suggested he may once have been a sports star, but such an important man would be better turned out in a suit and tails and maybe even required a special fragrance, all his own. But did these ‘bungalow ranch people’ (said as if they were a tribe or sub race of humanity of no small anthropological interest) even wear fragrances or did they instead revel in the scent of their own sweat as a kind of trophy brought home after the ‘successful hunt’, the animalic odor an emblem of a victorious day working in the garden?
As the bus meandered further on to the fringes of ‘bungalow ranch land’––did they have their own ‘bungalow ranch dressing? ––and beyond, penetrating into a new neighborhood which was filled with all manner of tidy little shops in modern strip malls–-each projecting wealth and hope in its own unique way: delicatessens, wine dealers, and organic vegetable grocers to import shoe stores (could M– be trying on shoes inside that very moment?), specialized auto part vendors, and finally a perfume boutique, awakening his attention, and ushering his wandering train of thought to his own fragrance trio now in development, in particular the Chypre. Would it be a smashing success or just another expensive concoction presented in a fancy bottle but soon forgotten after a blip of sales spurred on by a few rave YouTube reviews from others just like him? Opening notes were usually some citruses such as bergamot, known to be the most versatile citrus because of its ability to combine seamlessly with virtually any mid and bass notes, while bass notes were often some combination of woods, resins, musk, or moss, but what unexpected combination of florals and spices would he use in the mid to set it apart from the pack? Designing a hit fragrance was some tall order because so much had already been done. Yet there were still the Bleu de Channels and Baccarat Rouges, a fragrance that used saffron in a unique composition to give the impression of singed cotton candy: there always seemed to be something new exploding onto the scene. The perfumer had to tell a story; like a film director, he had to create a memorable character and story that resonated with everyone, cutting through their very being by dramatically revealing a feeling they had felt all along but just didn’t know it. A great fragrance needed to be Humphry Bogart in Casablanca or Jimmy Stewart in the final scene of It’s a Wonderful Life, a sequence that always made him cry and brought to mind the phrase ‘almost Latour massiveness’ which he had once read from a wine reviewer describing a great burgundy of such unexpected concentration that it rivalled this greatest of Bordeaux’s, known for epitomizing massive levels of dry extract in a red wine. From that day onward anything that moved him to tears would bring this phrase to mind, ringing like a bell on perfect cue. A song (Rihanna singing with Drake in ‘Take Care”), a bird chirping on a spring tree, a smile from a child walking to school, a star in the sky, a kid fighting his way out of poverty to do something great for mankind: ‘almost Latour massiveness’. But what would he select for the mid notes? He looked around for ‘the cloud lady’, angling for some random inspiration, but she was no longer there, perhaps having gotten off at some stop in ‘bungalow land’, perhaps becoming ‘one with the clouds at last’.
The bus continued into an industrial neighborhood, the entirety of which formed what appeared to be an intentional barrier or mote, separating, or more likely guarding, ‘bungalow ranch land’ from the city center, which increasingly loomed on the horizon like some kind of Dubai replica rising from the dunes. They crossed a bridge over a river he never knew existed––was it yet another mote or barrier of protection? The river was wide enough to allow passage of large maritime freight ships and oil tankers, but was it too shallow? Whatever the case, it was clearly man made, likely a civic plan to increase commerce by linking the city directly to the outer world: Asia, South America, Africa. It was unimaginable that this place could be connected so directly to such exotic places he had only seen in picture books or travel brochures but never visited, now the subject of news specials or films on political turmoil and world hunger. Before he knew it, the city center was in clear view, brick warehouses giving way to increasingly tall and slender constructions, reaching skyward in ever more dramatic fashion as the bus crawled block-by-block through the obstacle course of traffic lights set out before them. Marble and glass, aluminum and glass, then marble and glass again, but was this a pattern or a random sequence only suggesting the beginnings of a pattern that would never emerge, waiting to be disrupted by yet another fledgling ‘faux pattern’, equally illusory and soon to crumble back into randomness? A gothic cathedral broke the monotony of domino stacked tower blocks; it had the look of a genuine medieval cathedral from some city like Milan, as though it had been brought over by ship by a modern-day William Randolph Hearst, whose castle our hero had seen as a child. Maybe that was why the river had been dug out, to allow facile transportation of the delicate pieces of this magnificent edifice––or was it an atrocity for this very reason? Beyond the cathedral, the skyline swept upwards in dramatic fashion, culminating in a single point––the tallest building in the city, a twisting glass and steel tower having the appearance of a giant tapered drill bit or peak of a diamond tiara. Shangri-la? Valhalla? Ur? At this point he stood up and pulled the stop request cable hanging from just above the windows: it was time to get off and see what the city center had to tell him.
The streets were crowded in ways he had never seen, not even in New York or London. Attractive woman, whose mesmerizing wafts of perfume had him trying to guess which fragrance it could be, wearing face-covering sunglasses that looked like shields protecting their skin from harmful radiation, having the effect of making every woman seem equally attractive, yet equally mysterious––with their faces so hidden from view who could really say if they were beautiful? ––that was the mystery. That left only their clothes, shoes, figures, and the grace of their walk to judge––and of course their perfume! He was pleased that he could identify at least three scents, all of which were popular designer fragrances, that were nothing special but worked as intended by making the wearer seem more attractive.
There were buskers on every corner playing folk and punk alike, mothers with their small children, who sometimes wandered so astray they had to be quickly corralled lest they get trampled or run over by the herds: businessmen or bankers in London Fog raincoats ploughing through with no regard for anyone but themselves and their similarly-clad entourage, men and women, too nondescript to fit into any category, but no doubt concealing some atrocious secret or gripping tale worthy of a campfire confession game. The more he walked the more anonymous he became. Families and friends walked shoulder to shoulder instead of single file, blocking passage of anyone who wanted to walk faster. Often they would stop for seemingly no reason and gaze into their phones or some shop display and he would be forced to take a wide birth around them, only to almost bump into yet another person lost in some unknown reverie, just standing there, looking, looking, just looking into the air––had they spotted a molecule floating by and were observing it like some new undocumented species of butterfly that might be named after them if they could report it to the right authority? He began to imagine he was an NFL running back, sidestepping the blockers on his way to a winning touchdown. But there was nothing victorious in this! These dull meanderings were threating to claw into his day, prevent him from meeting his daughter as planned, and ruin any chance of resolution. Maybe he would trip and break a leg and end up in the hospital, or someone would accidentally shoulder-nudge him out into the street only to be run over by a bus, ending his day in a morgue instead of face to face with his daughter––her sapphire eyes now seemed so present in his mind’s eye, haunting him with the grim reality that they were so distant, so unreachable, so much a hopeful mirage.
There. A man, stout and resolute like a doorman at a biker bar, standing in the center of the chaos. He was crouched in the pose of a sumo wrestler yet had distinctly Nordic features defined by his bushy red beard; he could have been a Viking had he been wearing the right helmet instead of the white admiral’s hat balanced on top of his balding head or the oversized Adidas warm-up jacket paired with an authentic Argyll kilt, leaving the myriad tattoos on his calves exposed, no doubt for show. Dressed as he was, he could have been a long-lost member of the disco band ‘The Village People’ dancing on a float in a New York parade but today he was the ‘Admiral of obstruction’, ‘the blocker in chief’, and it was his job, perhaps even sole purpose in life, to block people. That was his unique craft, God-given talent, and he had been paid by the store owners to make strolling and window shopping so difficult, even impossible, that the shoppers would be forced inside to browse and maybe buy something they didn’t need or think they would ever buy, only to regret it as soon as they got home––shelving it away in the basement for some future generation because braving the crowds to return it was too painful a proposition to even consider.
Without even knowing how he got there, our YouTuber found himself in the middle of a large square, a monument of some Napoleonic figure on a horse marking its center––did they still honor such historic figures in this part of the world? The crowd had thinned out enough, or rather gathered in smaller, more manageable clusters around central figures or performers: a mime riding a unicycle balanced on the back of a llama––how was this possible without invisible wires? ––the drooling creature standing there just drooling, completely uninterested in the crowd, totally unfazed by the stuntman on his back, the gaunt and bedraggled preacher shouting so loudly and abusively at the ‘sinners’ around him, and evidently at the world at large, it seemed he was capable of murder that very instant; it was no small wonder anyone could be converted to whatever sect of Christianity he was promoting. An elderly African American man wearing a Santa hat walked in a wide berth around the various clusters greeting every person he passed with a loud and cheerful ‘happy day!’, some of whom were not even there. A man with white Rastafarian hair, silver tinted aviator sunglasses to match his silver jacket and pants, railed against every aspect of society through a megaphone: they were out to destroy you, they were coming for you, they wanted your children, they had plans for you, they would rape your daughter if they could...they, they, they! But who were ‘they’, a secret cabal of international billionaires set on world domination from inside a soundproof dome somewhere in the Antarctic, or just the figment of a diseased mind? That was yet to be determined. The YouTuber wove around these clusters, roughly following the path of the ‘happy day’ man not because he was following him, but because it described the clearest route to avoid the orbit of the various crowds. Eventually he became weary of being ‘the detached observer’ and approached a group of what looked like schoolchildren––as suggested by their smart navy-blue uniforms––on some kind of group tour from a foreign country. He nudged through them until he found the centerpiece: a woman lying on the ground doing snow angels. She had a peacock blue hat and had a poppy pinned on her left breast––it was the ‘cloud lady’! She was staring blankly into the sky muttering things to each individual cloud in the tone of a friendly neighbor giving motherly advice, pointing at them with her index finger or sometimes just her gaze. A few children were rivetted in awe while others just stood there simpering and giggling––it was clearly the highlight of their otherwise boring field trip, something they would remember forever and recount like war stories to younger children in secret tree forts late at night while their parents thought they were safely asleep in their bedrooms. He retreated from the scene––or was it a mounting spectacle? ––not wanting ‘the cloud lady’ to notice him, lest the children thought he was somehow related to her, or ancillary to her ‘act’, although he knew it was not an act at all.
Suddenly an invasion: a drum beat in the distance, more like a goat skin drum from a Celtic tribe than a modern marching band––the beats were clumsy and soft, although still loud, rather than taut and metallic––and the air had the acrid smell of smoke from burning plastic, almost stinging his eyes: yes, stinging them! On the far side of the square a few police motorcycles emerged from around the corner, suggesting the beginning of a motorcade, but directly following them was a man dressed like a tribal shaman leading a ravenous mob to the mouth of a volcano. A bear skin rug was draped over the man’s back, the bear’s head forming a kind of hood, with the open jaws sticking out from his forehead, teeth intact and gleaming in the sun, even from a distance. The bears arms were crossed over the man’s chest, which was otherwise bare. The police led the procession, which grew larger and larger as it rounded the corner into the square like a giant centipede emerging from its lair: ‘ELECTRIFY THE BORDER WALL!’, ‘US OUT OF RUSSIA!’, ‘REPORT THY BROTHER AND SISTER!’, and ‘BAN LIBRARIES, NOT ROCKET LAUNCHERS!’ were some of the slogans he could make out on the signs. As they approached, individual figures crystallized from a large cloud of smoke. A grotesque figure wearing a rubber Donald Trump mask, but on stilts with the enlarged body of a dragon. A nude man juggling what appeared to be five grenades. Flags: Confederate, Russian, Syrian (but with a black skull painted over it) and a Swastika! ‘Nazi larvae!’ our YouTuber exclaimed without speaking, although vividly imagining he was shouting. Next, an older man playing a drum suspended on his waist by a pair of straps hanging from his shoulders; his face was cracked and his hair black and kinky, almost like aboriginal men from Australia, whom he once heard smeared feces in their hair to attract flies, which was somehow considered beautiful in their primitive culture––but was this even true? Regardless, the ‘drummer-boy grown old’ certainly looked like a man with flies swirling around his head. The crowd stopped directly in front of two women who were talking beside two baby carriages and waited. The protestors obviously had no intent of acting with courtesy by taking a wide berth around the two mothers: their message was more important than any form of decorum. The crowd rumbled impatiently, punctuated by the occasional holler of abuse––‘get lost Barbie Dolls!’, ‘spread your legs bitches’––until the women scurried off, but in opposite directions, a parting of the seas of sorts, allowing the procession to march on, the drumming now so loud that the shop windows were shaking.
A siren howled and suddenly his eyes met those of the kinky-haired drummer. Their gaze locked, but there was only recognition on one end, because the drummer kept drumming away, his drumsticks moving in the metronomic rhythm of a video game soundtrack with the raging persistence of some cloven-footed marching boy leading an apocalyptic horde: it was an old friend he had not seen in thirty years but had kept sporadic contact with via Facebook. Him? ––of all people. What on earth was he doing here? Gone was this person from the past, his expression now had the dull whisper of an executioner, oblivious to any manifestation of joy or hope, marching and drumming, drumming and marching, without ever the slightest blink or gaze askance. Someone could collapse with a heart attack right there in front of him and he would just keep staring ahead blankly, drumming and marching as he stepped over the body. Since neither of them ever shared pictures of themselves on Facebook, there was no way his friend would recognize him––certainly not today, our YouTuber, now The Midnight Rider standing there in full bloom, looking nothing like he did thirty years ago.
His friend was always somewhat of a fanatic, a stubborn zealot who saw the world in black and white, about-facing his obsessions from one thing to another every few years as if an invisible switch were suddenly flicked somewhere in his head. At first, he was a gold bug: the US dollar was doomed, only gold would save us from a worldwide hyperinflation bank run dystopia. Then he was a golf nut, and after that it was the carnivore diet––posting memes on Facebook about how parents should be imprisoned for feeding their children tofu. Most recently he had been reborn as a Bitcoin maximalist, in what was perhaps a more modern take on his former self ‘the gold bug’. With ever increasing frequency he spewed out slogans on his Facebook timeline lifted directly from the social media memes of the apex Bitcoin maximalists about how the banks, all of them, and even all money, would fail and the world would be forced to adopt BTC as its reserve currency. The USD, and all other currencies, even competing cryptocurrencies, were just ‘Centralized Shitcoin Ponzis’ run by frauds and criminals. It was surprising his friend had not become an anti-vaxxer, but maybe that would come with the next pandemic. His gaze, locked on his own, menacing without recognition, an expression like that of a gargoyle, broke off as the mob passed, the maddening Space Invaders beat of his drum still echoing through the square. He had been saved an uncomfortable reunion!
Then a loud boom: someone threw a smoke bomb and suddenly a man dressed as Karl Marx came out from behind a car at the back of the thirty-yard procession and leapt at one of the stragglers: a fat bald man in makeshift denim shorts whose body was covered head to toe in tattoos like the ceiling of some kind of pagan cathedral from who knows what century. Fools, he thought. What complete fools. These right-wing Nazi scums and all their brethren were just puppets of the rich elites who ran the news networks. Their plutocratic masters were not housed in some secret dome in the Antarctic but walked there amongst us in grey suits frowning on the world, silently laughing as they brought down democracy in service of their own selfish needs. The guy at the stir-fry grasshopper kiosk wearing a rainbow tee-shirt wasn’t the enemy any more than these brainwashed protestors were. The true enemy was driving in the back of a Rolls Royce stretch limo somewhere, drooling into their phones as they plotted ways to short not whole currencies but entire countries, economies...the world as we know it.
The man who leapt on the tattooed figure was now on the ground, surrounded by others from the zombie procession, being kicked repeatedly as they jeered on. ‘From woke to broke in a single second,’ someone shouted. ‘Broken bones that is!’. Random passersby started throwing rocks at the lynch mob until the police at the head of the centipede circled back to intervene. As our YouTuber looked on, jaw agape, the decades old Radiohead song ‘Punch-up at a Wedding’ started playing in his head: ‘I don’t know why you bother...you come here just for a fight.’ It was a song he had listened to over and over with his son and daughter once on a road trip to New York. He retreated from the mob as the Police continued to subdue the violence, and when his eyes met those of a young woman who seemed oblivious to the mayhem unfolding, a new thought suddenly took hold, or rather struck him like lightning: where was his daughter that very instant and what was she thinking would happen that day between them? He had not thought about her, specifically, since he left the hotel that morning, which seemed peculiar since the entire purpose of his exodus that day and the day before to this very city, would culminate in their meeting––it was its sole purpose, its grail legend.
His second falling out with her came as an even bigger shock than the first, because they had appeared make up, and sincerely so. In fact, he had since visited her new family no less than three times, buying his first granddaughter a pricey scooter, the most expensive in the gigantic toy warehouse, to quell any lingering thoughts that he was a ‘cheap old man’, a ‘mean Mr. Mustard’ from the old Beatles song. He and his daughter had always shared a more intellectual relationship than he and his son. With ‘the skier’ it was always fishing trips, sports banter or new bands, making him feel like ‘one of the boys’, just an older version of one of his son’s friends, but with her it was their common sense of humor––which sometimes bordered on the bizarre, making their bond even more special and unique––that brought them closer. No one else had ‘our sense of humor’ he would always think proudly, and better, her jokes were quicker and more accessible than his own, which always made him smile. Once they were watching a video artefact of Pearl Jam, a rock band from some bygone era, whose members had long since been overweight with grey hair at the time of the performance; when Eddie Vedder, the balding crumpled lead singer, started railing on at the audience about some petty political issue she exclaimed ‘Earl Jam!’, making an unexpected connection to her mother’s father, who was an old curmudgeon, and everyone said as much. Yes, she was sharp as a whip, a Groucho Marx with the eyes of an angel. But only days after his father died of prostate cancer, his father’s wife––his third––started attacking M– (who our YouTuber had only just started dating) on Facebook, accusing her of trying to ‘steal her money’ before any mention of any possible inheritance had been made. What did M– have to do with it? It was a clear attempt to smear her, casting dark clouds around her intentions, and in so doing cast those same doubts in the minds of his children, who followed his father’s wife on Facebook, but not yet M–. They would think that she was trying to steal something from them as well, items so abstract and metaphysical they could never be put in tangible terms. It was her fault that his gifts to his children were not big enough. She was a gold digger plotting against the entire family to steal his YouTube income and endorsements, only waiting for the day she could finally dump him, ‘hit the road’ and live like a beauty queen happily ever after. It was his father’s widow’s ploy to turn his own children against him and M– to undermine any future attempt to retrieve whatever his father might have left him in the will. If he ever made a legal claim on an inheritance his children would immediately think he was trying to screw over ‘the poor old woman’, their step grandmother, who pampered them, but treated him, ‘the bookseller’ and his father’s former wives like criminals trying to steal what was rightly hers. To clear things up he sent his son and daughter an email explaining how M– had been attacked unfairly on Facebook and he hoped that they would not take sides and respect the painful and arduous legal process a son must go through when his father dies. The tone was tempered and even, not accusing anyone of anything, not even his father’s wife––she must be in a state of shock and mourning, he explained, to make such an attack and she didn’t really mean it. His son replied nobly, swearing to stay out of it, but his daughter’s reply was shocking: ‘You think you’re so perfect, so pure, so wonderful, so accomplished, but you’re really just an asshole!’ He replied, once again in a measured tone, explaining that he wasn’t trying to divide the family, just protect M– and inject some calm into the situation. It was also hard for him to have to deal with legal matters, especially so soon after the death. ‘Fuck you, asshole’ was her response. ‘I hope you don’t mean this; I know you must be in a state of bereavement, losing your grandfather,’ he responded. But she kept attacking him, trying to bend the truth by accusing him of saying things he never did, or taking positions he clearly wasn’t, only to use these ‘facts’ against him in her next ambush, swearing she would never speak to him again, until he had no choice but to switch her off and block her. Her vitriol was so out of the blue and certainly no way to treat him and M– in such a crisis when all he asked for was their impartiality. Losing his father was hard enough, but now to add his own daughter (once again!) to the list, was almost too much to bear. Whatever strategy his father’s wife had taken had clearly worked, ensuring that any future legal claim made on his due inheritance would lead to the scorn of his daughter, thereby strengthening her negotiating position. The real irony was that his children’s homes were furnished with hand-me-downs from his father, things the YouTuber grew up with, oozing with sentimental value his children couldn’t possibly understand; but these were ‘gifts’ from their beloved grandfather and not ‘items of inheritance’ as far as they were concerned.
Six months later she emailed him, and they started talking again without so much of an apology on either end, but it was only a few months later, completely unprovoked as usual, that things once again ‘went South’. They were discussing issues around his mother’s worsening condition when she started bringing up tiny details from the past, even decades before, such as when he once left her with a babysitter when she was only four years old and how irresponsible it was of him to leave her with a stranger, even though he was a trusted neighbor. How could she even remember that far back and what was wrong with babysitters? After a few rounds of these petty smears, he finally lost his patience and exclaimed ‘sometimes I get the feeling you don’t love me’, to which she responded, ‘that’s because I don’t, and I wouldn’t visit you if it you were the last person on Earth.’ And there he was, today, the day he had no idea would end with his Eternal Damnation, standing alone in a crowd, a far-right demonstration having just ploughed past him, waiting once again––no, hoping––for some turnaround in his relationship with her: that dreaded merry go round of misery, a nightmarish circus ride seemingly without end.
What was behind all this hate? He could only conclude that his two children had been spoiled by his parents, even though they never spoiled him––the opposite, really––and so they viewed any lesser treatment by him as a deliberate shortcoming on his part, rooted perhaps in some personal defect, some innate ‘cheapness’ baked into his very nature; now that his father was dead, the doors of their disrespect were blown wide open––they had been afraid of showing it before, perhaps believing the narrative propagated by ‘the bookseller’ and their mother that our YouTuber was ‘the chosen one’, the ‘apple of his father’s eye’. His father was the lynchpin that held the family together, and once he was gone their world was torn asunder and his spoiled grandchildren were free to act as though their father, ‘our hero’ owed them something, ‘war reparations’ for imagined atrocities committed in the past; nothing he could do, even a beautiful piece of rare jewelry bought by M– for his daughter as a spontaneous gift, could convince them otherwise.
His father was larger than life, known around the country (and to leading specialists around the globe) for his unique architectural style, which blended early twentieth century Futurism with modern building materials to construct some of the most distinctive office buildings in the country. He liked to gloat about petty victories over his colleagues at family dinners, or to his neighbors while chatting across the lawn, something he may have learned in the orphanage he lived in for over a year after his parents were thrown in jail for armed robbery––boasting to gain respect from his peers was necessary to move up the orphan pecking order. But he also had a generous and sentimental side, often surprising people with gifts when they least expected it, or providing animated accounts over a tumbler of scotch––some classic film flickered on the television screen––about whichever actress he had a crush on while he was growing up and what he would have done with her if he ever had a shot: Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr––who he considered a genius in his own mold, his soul mate for sure if he only had the chance to meet her. Out of admiration for his father, the YouTuber always tried to emulate this ‘grandstanding’ in his own videos, even if unconsciously. It was something that did not come natural to him, so he was always surprised when it worked––eerily often and without a pause or misspeak that needed to be edited out or re-recorded. As a struggling fringe actor, he always preferred roles about troubled characters, the modern-day Hamlets. He could have been Gene Hackman in The Conversation, or Frank Sinatra in Some Came Running. He wasn’t a natural hero––this should be apparent by now––and only sheepishly accepted the more valiant and victorious roles, never really identifying with actors like Cary Grant, John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood. This was why the image of himself as The Midnight Rider often seemed so fantastical and contrived to him, a costume or mask that didn’t really project the real man inside. In contrast to the dapper man of his videos, he liked to walk around the house in a pair of old pajamas he kept hidden from M– lest she throw them away: the longer they remained unwashed the more comfortable, sometimes even allowing him to smell traces of his own urine, an odor that made him feel grounded, balancing things out so that The Midnight Rider––who was only a way to be more like his father––would never gain true ascendency. How he missed his father! ––this was his most prized secret, hidden from public view because his father wouldn’t want him to miss him, even if he might be quietly flattered to know that his son did. Wasn’t our YouTuber, then, a better son to his father while also being a better father to his son and daughter? ––after all, he never missed a single child support payment, even agreeing to pay her without a court order. No matter how badly his father had behaved was during the divorce (smashing furniture once, the real cause of the cast he claimed was the result of him breaking an arm in a fight with an Eskimo) ‘our hero’ had never failed to be a loyal son and visit him regularly until his death, even though he never once returned the favor. After all of this, then, what concrete evidence could his daughter present that he was a bad father? Seemingly none. The worst that could be said was that he had never spoiled his children like his parents had done to them, but this was only because his own parents or even grandmother had never spoiled him or his brother––it was quite the opposite, in fact, as she would always block relatives from giving them money because ‘they didn’t deserve it’: he was just treating his children the way he was treated, if not better on account of him doing all the visiting.
In the darkness of night, during moments when all sounds––no matter how faint and bordering on inaudibility––were as loud and harrowing as an atomic bomb blast, he would sometimes entertain the notion that his daughter was insane, perhaps inheriting it from her mother, who was always in and out of the psych ward on anti-depressants just off some marijuana binge. His son once called him in an obvious state of duress, panic clearly audible in his voice. His sister had just told him that his fiancé was trying to murder him. ‘She’s gone completely crazy, dad. I don’t know what to do. I think she might try to hurt her.’ Disturbing indeed! Either his daughter was mentally ill and believed this, which was bad news, or she was gaslighting her brother to undermine their wedding plans, which was equally bad news. Was she delusional? Some kind of sociopath? Neither he tried to convince himself. She was his daughter, the little Princess he used to call ‘Astro’ because her eyes were the cold blue of Uranus and sparkled like a thousand constellations, her smile capable of lifting him to the heavens. But what about her dropping out of high school because she thought ‘the other girls hated her’? Or all the jobs she quit after a week because of some fellow employee she claimed was ‘trying to get her fired’? Or when she hid under the sofa for hours one summer when she was fourteen to avoid going to a remedial math class? At the time it seemed like only mildly troubling behavior, so he gave her the benefit of the doubt––what teenager would want to attend a math class in the summer? He even went as far as to defend her in front of his mother, who had hidden all the knives in the house and made appointments with various psychiatrists. But in the light of the present wasn’t this now just one dot that formed a broader pattern across whatever constellation ‘Astro’ was currently inhabiting?
The demonstration had cleared the central square, leaving almost nothing in its wake except for a few pigeons and a garbage collector, the sound of the jeering and drumbeats now fading into the hiss of the wind in his ear, yet still present as though to magnify the sense of stillness around him in the same way an echo highlights the emptiness of a vast canyon. It could have been a central square in some communist country on a day of great mourning––the death of a dictator, he thought––if it were not for the sonic residue of what had been so ear-splitting only half an hour before. What were they (still?) protesting or was it even a protest at all, but rather a lashing out against life itself, or no, all existence? The Right blamed intellectuals for inequality while the Left blamed the rich for the same thing. It all came down to inequality and rage. Yet for some reason this political shadow play didn’t seem to matter on this day of his possible reunion. Nothing mattered less in fact.
He had already started walking out of the square when he heard a shout from the opposite side of the central statue, seemingly from behind a row of dumpsters. A man then emerged, waving his hands frantically as though alerting him of an automobile crash. ‘Hey you! Yes, you! Stop!’ But our hero kept walking, slightly faster but not so much so that he appeared to be running away and risk provoking this new stranger. One such random person approached him in almost the same way, but repeatedly over the course of several months, during ‘the deluge’ after an initial meeting when the stranger shouted at him from across the street and then followed him into a donut shop to join him uninvited for a coffee. After that, the stranger, who was out of a job and seemed to have no friends or relatives, seemed to think they had become best friends, even though they had only chatted for five minutes about the weather. The stranger would often wave from the other side of the street, and one time even ran after his new friend when he was just about to board a bus, shouting out the question ‘what do you think of the new Matrix film?’ before jumping in front of the bus to make sure he got his answer before it pulled away from the bus stop. The rare occasions when he would humor the strange man, who was always dressed in sweats (just like the man who had now broken into a run from the other side of the square, a mere twenty meters away), he would just ask his ‘friend’ questions but when our hero tried to answer, the strange man would interrupt him with another question: simply being heard or listened to was apparently his only goal in these increasingly strained interchanges. But what arcane ‘law of attraction’ had brought them together? ––that was the question. The only thing he could think of was that the stranger looked almost exactly the same as he once did––a revelation that came to him while he was observing himself sitting beside the man through a convex corner mirror in a donut shop. The resemblance came from a period at the beginning of ‘the deluge’ after a woman he was sure was on the brink of yielding to his advances mysteriously blocked him on all social media platforms. He was completely blindsided, so mortally wounded by the mere implication that he was the kind of person who would drive a woman to block him (that was only for stalkers) that he ‘wandered around town in sweatpants’ for six weeks, a description he used in a reply to a friend he bumped into, who had asked him ‘what have you been doing these days?’ ‘I got dumped by my girlfriend and spent the last six weeks wandering around town in sweatpants,’ he replied. His friend broke out laughing and it quickly became an inside joke amongst his circle of friends, who had started to say ‘just got dumped by my woman so I’m wandering around town in sweatpants’ as a kind of greeting, a reply to ‘How have you been?’ ‘What’s up?’ or ‘Long time, no see!’. It was this revelation through the convex mirror that day that made him wonder if the man was ‘his double’ and was going through ‘a deluge’ of his own and was desperately searching, clawing into the dust bunnies lying in the corners of existence to find a way out. Such events seemed to find him and stick like thistles to his pant legs. Another time a man approached him on a subway, launching immediately into a far-fetched story about how he had woken up in a cell at a police station under fire from a wide-bore hose (his eyes impossibly widened, shouting the outrage of a man falsely accused) after going to bed the night before in the sanctuary of his home, which he had just moved into after arriving from the other side of the country––having just been released there from prison––to pursue what he said would be ‘a life of crime’. How could such a man possibly believe he was innocent? Was there no such thing as self-reflection these days?
And so it was with this new intruder, now directly facing him, staring at him eye-to-eye, demanding money: he only saw himself as a victim and not an assailant, even though he was obviously the latter. But was he ‘his double’ like the strange man, ‘his friend’, in sweats or just some random assailant like ‘the wide-bore hose man’? ––hopefully neither. Escape. That was the only thing that mattered now. Just as our hero turned his back and was about to accelerate into a light jog, he felt a firm hand on his shoulder. ‘If I tell you what happened to me would you give me money for bus?’ came a holler into his ear as he was forcibly swiveled around. The man––or was he now a bona fide assailant? ––narrowed his eyes in the way of martial arts expert in a film just before a blow or lunge. The attacker thrust one foot forward and in that same instant a head splitting sound cut through the air, so loud and incessant that the YouTuber looked above as though to expect a squadron of bombers overhead about to deliver their payload. The sound kept ringing, droning, hammering away, even though it had only been a couple of seconds since its inception. As if on cue, both of their phones started ringing with the same strident ring tone, although completely out of time in alien polyrhythm, like some atonal masterpiece of avantgarde music, although much, much louder. His assailant looked around in panic, his eyes like those of a fugitive caught in a spotlight from a descending helicopter. Seizing the moment, our hero, no victim––although he was only a potential victim at this stage––turned and ran as hard as he could, ran and ran until he could run no more, and then he ran even more until, in total exhaustion with his wabbling legs incapable of further movement and pulsing with a burning sensation, he came to a stop at almost exactly the same moment the sirens stopped. He turned: no assailant in sight!
He had always been graced with such luck in narrow escapes during his life. In one such case he had been dosed with Benadryl in a hospital to relieve a severe allergic reaction and was turned out on the streets by the hospital staff during a blizzard, the drowsiness from the drug threatening to leave him unconscious in the snow at any moment. Fearing he might end up in a heap and freeze to death he ran into the first open door he could find, a pub, only to find his friend, a professional magician: a savior sent to rescue him from certain tragedy. He was the cat who would always land on his feet, his mother told him the next morning. This time, however, it was the siren, which he found was a severe weather warning after he picked up his phone to scroll through the notifications. The sky above had become almost opaque and deep grey, although lacking and details or features suggesting clouds at all––no ripples, tufts, creases, or puffiness, just opaque grey like soapstone: in moments the beginnings of hail came, one by one at first, until he was under a shower of ice balls as large as olives. He needed to find shelter.