So I'm reading back over this blog. There's a lot to cringe over: overeager voice, unfinished stories, and, of course, dozens of grammatical errors (what I get for writing blogs on the spot then posting without even a cursory proofread).
Back to the unfinished stories. Hell, Luke, I thought to myself as I scanned through my own blog's archives. There's a lot of beginnings here, but not many endings. And only half of those beginnings ever got finished. You aren't even much better now.
Which got me thinking: I should post something new. Show the world (aka myself and imaginary future readers) that you can finish a story now. Spin a cohesive yarn from start to finish.
So I wrack my brains and the only story I feel ready to post isn't finished.
Damn.
But, whatever. The story is starting to stagnate; I could finish it in a few hours (I've got the conclusion elaborate, some might say redudantly planned in the back of my head) but somehow I haven't just felt the creative oomph necessary to spur me on to completion. Mayhaps postin' it on this hurr blog will do something. Not that there's any logical reason to think that.
So, here it is. Working title (for you guys; the original working title is too revealing) is "History". Or "White House". Whichever one strikes your fancy.
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[Enter Post Title Here]
I wake up and it is a scene from a bad movie. Terrible, underfunded, noir movie: obfuscatorily complex antihero alone with a complementally lugubrious backdrop of overly-dark, gritty scenery. I am entirely a part of the scene, the completing aspect: my mind is all hissing fuzz, every part of my body either numb or in pain. All-but scripted way to wake up: the only way you could wake up in a place like this. Surroundings shadowed, grim, unfamiliar: unspeakably sinister beneath a deceptive veneer of crumbling mundanity.
I am in an alley. I do not spend much time in alleys, can not remember the last time I was in an alley. This alarms me enough, much more alarming is that I am not simply in the alley but tucked away in the alley, face smeared with some ambiguous dark sludge, one cheek bruised and pressed down hard against the rough cold wet ground. Rough because I am in an alley, cold because it is October. Wet because there is drizzling rain, as cliché and obligatorily a part of this scene as if I am in a movie. It pitter-patters over my body, which has now awakened to complete pain, every inch of it, sore or bruised or something worse. The drops splatter against my soaked clothes, roll down my cheek while I lay there, trying to rationalize what am I waking up to, trying to feel if there is anywhere on my body where I am worse than just bruised. My head, maybe; there is a scarlet blossom of fire there that I cannot summon the strength to reach up and probe with either of my still-numb hands.
I do not know how or why I am here, lying face down in the back of a rainy alley with an [injured head]. Remember nothing, no events leading up to this. Only walking home from Doppler’s, leaving his house late. I remember leaving, walking; I do not remember arriving home, do not remember anything after the beginning of the walk. This is alarming, electrifying: for me, several steps closer to terror than waking up bleeding in a dark alley.
I lie there for longer than is logical, than is wise, mind numbed by the shock of finding a black gaping pit in a memory that has before never had so much as a line-thin seam. My ransacking of my mind is frantic, hurried, repeated over and over; ultimately futile.
My incredulity is penetrated, deflated by my tugging awareness of where I am. An alley, I called it, face down, eyes only half open. Now I push myself, staggering, to my unsteady feet—I have to hunch and lean against a slick brick wall to avoid collapsing back to the ground—and see that I was correct. It is an alley like a thousand other alleys; you could have the imagination of a brick and still see it in your head. The narrow, confining, sheer walls of cramped buildings. Ground-in stench of ancient garbage, the only light wanly hesitating its way in from unseeable lamps lining the street outside, light that from time to time flickers spasmodically.
I watch this scene long enough for it to work its way sinuously into my subconscious, to create a grim, phantasmagorical imprint that I am already aware will haunt me for the rest of my life. I forget nothing. Nothing—a decade from now I will recall the intricate workings of the smeared black grime intermittently plastering the walls of the alley as precisely as I do now, staring at it. The metallic clatter of rain hitting rooftops higher up, counterpoint to the dull patter of the raindrops flattening against the ground in front of me, the ghoulish odor of rotted meat and never-cleaned dumpster, even the uniquely-grained grit of the wall underneath my palm: all of these images, sensations, sounds—mine forever, snapped into my mind as firmly an imperceptive bear in an iron trap.
This is my gift, my curse: who I am. A perfect mind. My entire life sprawls out behind me like a redundantly detailed map, every excruciating intricacy precisely charted. The sinuous patterns of the shirt my father wore his last day before the end. Every sentence, every word, ever ground into my head by the nasal sneer of my first teacher. The acrid odor of a bonfire in my mother’s backyard, growing blacker and fouler as we heap the garbage onto it, burn it all away like a corrupted sacrifice to some foul deity.
This is why, now, I can hardly bring myself to think, have to put all of my weight against the wall I lean against. The wound on my head is alive now, rain-thinned blood rolling slickly past my right eye. This does not alarm me: I have been hurt before, worse: if the wound were going to kill me I would not have woken up.
It is not merely a hiccup in my memory, a stutter, though even this would frighten me. I look again inside a mind that has never before failed me and still: silent, stable black emptiness. Doppler’s, walking home—then bleeding and drenched, waking up in an alley.
More rational parts of my mind tug at my consciousness, urge me to focus on more imminent concerns. To leave the alley, find out where I am. Make my way home, bandage my head: to worry about this recollective gap later.
These parts of my mind are painfully easy to ignore. I drop from leaning to stooping, from stooping to crouching, crouching to sitting back, leaning against the wall. This whole time, thinking so hard, trying so hard to remember that for a moment I forget where I am, forget the alley and rain and blood crusting under my eyelid.
Trying to recover my absent memories is an exercise in excruciating futility. I stare into my mind like a pair of eyes gazing into a void, striving, desperately, to grasp at anything, no matter how slight. There is nothing, nothing at all: no glimmer of recollection, no flash of insight. I put my head between my hands and squeeze, wanting to scream until I can not hear my own thoughts.
It is useless. I accept this shaking, shivering, hands dropping mindlessly to my sides. I stare back out at the alley, but it is a different alley: everything moves slowly, disjointedly. I feel like a man trapped inside somebody else’s dream.
Somebody, I realize after a long time staring numbly into this dream, has to have done this to me. I reach up a hand, extend two fingers, stroke them across the split skin on my scalp, feel the breadth of the tear, the coagulating stickiness of the blood pooled there. Gingerly prod what feels like a narrow split in my skull: this is not the type of injury you get from falling down stairs, from carelessness. I move my fingers away, stare intently at the oddly-vividly red blood on my fingertips. This was done to me: head split open, dragged into this alley, memories stolen.
I am meant to be dead, I am fairly and immediately confident in this. It is obvious, I decide, that I was not meant wake up, that my life was planned to slip out of this hole in my head while I slept on oblivious. Wonder if the rain is the only thing that woke me, if I owe my life to the miserable wetness ironically soaking me into numbness. If not killed by the head wound than taken care of somehow else: even now whoever did this could be returning, to finish the job or revel in success.
All but the barest tip of my mind still numbed by the gash in my memory, by the gash in my head, I still manage to stumble to my feet, hands waving like clumsily manipulated puppets as I fight against a wave of dizziness.
This is another thing I remember, something else that has happened before: the killing, more accurately the attempted killing. I am a man considered dangerous to many people, am a man that has too many enemies, that has been a killer’s target too many times to ever assume I am safe. I remember, also, this: that each time before, I lived: lived on to watch the ones who wanted to kill me suffer, plead, die. I have survived this long not by refusing to be ruthless.
All these things I remember—this, I do not: Who has given me this tear in my scalp, has dragged me into this back avenue from hell. Who has managed to steal remembering from a man who forgets nothing at all, who has a flawless memory.
I know from experience what I must do: find a safe place, safer than this at least, which, a static succession of stuttered shadows reminds me, should not be hard. Discover who is trying to finish me this time, then instead finish them. This world favors those with the strongest will to survive. I kill—or I am killed. Nothing more.
I will not die, already I know this: no matter what happens, no matter how much of my memory has been stolen, I will not die. This person, these people, whoever has tried to kill me: for them, it is different. This is deadly for them, desperate flailing attempts to end the life of somebody they hate, fear more than sin itself. A struggle so serious they throw themselves into it with no regard for the inescapable knowledge that it could cost them their lives, that the stakes are the highest stakes there are.
But for me, this is always a game. I do not die, am not outsmarted. I am like cliffs, like history, like poetry: I endure, survive, remember it all. Whoever has done this to me will lead me on a chase, may hurt me, may hurt me, inconceivable as it seems, worse than they already have. But in the end it is they who will lie defeated, dead. Me who will walk away with another eternally blood-drenched memory.
I stagger out from the alley into the street. It is a street, like the alley, like a thousand others. The apartments form rigid ranks on either side, silent and stern and foreboding as an at-attention regiment. Evenly spaced street lights: the nearest still flickering, most burnt out. Gaps in the rows where the road turns away to identical lefts and rights, diverting into night-masked obscurity.
I turn left and walk with no more reason than instinct and an animal impulse to leave this place, to put as much distance between myself and this nightmarish alley as possible. The moon sits luminescently perched between mud-grey clouds, rain still clattering down unceasing as fresh misery.
I walk for blocks and blocks, row after row of buildings adding themselves to the endless stream of such apartment buildings catalogued in my memory, each made distinct by near-imperceptible idiosyncrasies, subtle variations on an infinitely similar theme that nevertheless remain starkly unique in my mind.
I find a part of the city that I recognize—I would say I recognize it vaguely; I have seen it only once: from a window of a bus as I drove past it. But the memory is not vague: it is sharp, defined, perfect—as are all of my memories. By the time I have found it—hours from leaving the alley, by my guess—I have planned my next move. I will go to Doppler’s. He is a friend, as close to a friend as a man like me can have. More significant, far more important is that I can trust him: can trust him as easily as I trust myself. He has been with me through some of the best and much of the worst; will unquestioningly understand the horror, the incomprehensibility of this massive flaw in my perfect memory. Will help me deal with whoever has caused this.
I wrap myself in this resolution like armor, steer myself onto a street that sets me in the direction of Doppler’s side of town.
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