CHAPTER ONE
It was a sunny day. It was, in no way, as shadowed and as frosting as it was inside Gavin’s head. There was not a cloud in sight and birds were chirping and up real high, a long vapour trail painted the path of excess and splendor across the sky. Gavin sat waiting for the bus and he stared up into the sky and he watched the white line slowly being erased and eroded from the blue canvas.
Gavin had never travelled before, not even in his imagination. Depression had a way of limiting the mileage of his dreamed escapes and painting them with an elaborately dull stroke. He always imagined those other people as being somewhat important and in going somewhere special, but he could never imagine himself as being one amongst them. He could never put himself on that plane, not unless it was crashing to the earth.
There are some things that a man does without any conscious debate. Things like scratching the tip of his nose or pulling on the ends of his beard into a pristine point, things that, like blinking, don’t amount to much more than a disregarding reflex, nothing at all that should define the character of the man or the virtue of his intentions.
For Gavin, this unconscionable act, this nervous twitch if that it could be called, was thinking about death. And not death as in other people dying or the unjustly suffering of other less deserving people at the whim of maniacal intention or godlike societal or corporate machinations - the popular rhetorical villains that most people hinged themselves to. Gavin thought not only of death but of dying. He thought about himself dying, in many, many ways.
In most of his imaginings, he posed himself as the unlikely hero, finding, in the worst chance, the only good thing that could come from his fated depression. He would imagine that he was seated on the back of the bus and as it sped along the avenue; its poor suspension had it rattling and bouncing over the tiniest little cracks in the bitumen.
He’d always be seated on the middle of the bus but with his head resting against the stained glass; his fingers pulling his long fringe out from beneath his eyes so his plain and worn expression could wane against the gallant and worrisome hope and expectation of the people driving in their cars and lining outside of the bus to let themselves onboard. And he hoped that someone could see, in his muted stare, the desperate words that he had no tongue to string together.
But as he’d list his eyes outside of the dirty glass, feeling impotent to his effect on the world, the spine of his attention would sever with the panicked musings of passengers, unable to contain their fright as a no good, down and out, such and such would appear from the thick of the crowd waving a pistol in the air. He’d look skittish and eremitic; not nearly the qualities one would want in a man with a gun in tight confines, scratching that solitary itch on a crowded and jittery old bus.
Gavin wouldn’t have seen him get on. Nobody would have. That was just how god strummed its chord, permitting, on the most average of days, an invisible note to be bridged into a calamitous and unfortunate song.
And every time he imagined that bus ride, its crescendo built into the same trepid surprise and the people would scream and they’d shout and the no good such and such, he’d wave his gun like a biblical wand, making his path through the huddled and scuttled mass, pointing his reverie into the sunken pride and weakened vice of every man, woman and child, taking their money, their watches, their cell phones and their humanity.
And they wouldn’t have heard; not the frightened people nor the screaming maniac, none of them, they wouldn’t have heard the sound of hissing from a broken main somewhere in Gavin’s mind. They wouldn’t have heard it before it had stopped when he was just a plain expression staring through the smudges and smears of stained bus window. And they wouldn’t have heard either, the sound of his voice as it spoke unto himself for the first time, without having to shout over an irking hiss.
He’d stand up, without much agenda and put himself in the middle of the aisle. The no good such and such would turn in his direction and his tongue would stick out like a maestro’s baton, conducting his vile shouting and cursing and spitting. He’d rush up the aisle from the front of the bus and his arms would shake and his veins would stretch from his skin like a rousing soul into a new born child.
And he’d scream and he’d shout and the people, they would ooh and they would ahhh and Gavin, he’d look unaffected and so barely attended with his hands outstretched in martyred demeanour and when the no good such and such would shoot him once and twice and then shoot him three times more and he wouldn’t believe that Gavin hadn’t fallen.
And the bus would halt. And silence would dance around the panted breathing of one and all. The no good such and such would have spent his fuel. He would be on his knees and his eyes would be glazed in remorse. And the others, they would not set upon him, not yet. They would watch in the same reservation at their bloodied hero who had fallen to the floor.
And in his last breath, Gavin would be able to see the lines of calenture drawn around every person, those lines that were etched beneath thick scratchy shading of life’s supposed languor.
And life was beautiful.
He had many of these imaginings. Some involved buses while others played out as masked gunmen invaded his local supermarket and they would play in the same deference as he would fall to the floor in a hail of bullets while the girl he could never tell that he loved, rushed to his dying side and rested his breaking head on her soft lap so that the tears she cried, ran down the curves in his cheek as if they were his own.
The boredom and predictability of Gavin’s world barely gave him the conditions for any extravagance in his life or meaning in his death. As the bus rode along towards the city centre, he stared out of the window and he played through his heroic imaginings and he thought about dying in a way that made him feel that life could be special, that his depression could have some explicable purpose.
The bus stopped about four or five blocks from work. Gavin hated his job. Well, he didn’t hate it. There was little other than his own ability to speak to that girl at the checkout that he actually hated. It was just another part of his life that he was ambivalently obligated to participate in.
Those last five blocks or so were loud and colourful and shouty and so busy and rude. Most people talked about how friendly they were, how they would invite anyone into their house and how they’d make a friend of the most invisible and unconscious stranger. People always talked imaginary wells of themselves but in truth, when time and space were pressing and when their heated rush had them barely tied to their own shadow and no nearer to the burden of responsibility, those same people were rude, pushing, shoving, racist, classist, sexist, spacist, timist, monstrosities of apathy.
Gavin didn’t warm to having to barge his way through the pointing elbows and prodding cases, but he had no choice. He didn’t hate it, but he’d have preferred a mount of other adjectively uninteresting tasks or leisurely spills than having to tide with these idiots and their important manner.
About a block from work, he passed a line of gingerly youth, standing side by side but with their voices graining against one another to compete for the momentary passing of distracting concentration and shuffling loafers.
Normally Gavin wouldn’t stop. He’d keep his eyes trained upon something that always kept itself ahead of him so that his eyes didn’t wander into the catching and selling stares of buskers and zealots and beggarly beggars because once they got his attention, they clinged like a wounded puppy to his most weakened vice, the tender fabric of his empathetic reserve that, even in the height of his depression and though bankrupt to his own plight, would shiver and quiver in polite response to the quims and qualms of well-intentioned and poorly taken individuals, regardless of their true intention or in how he would hate himself for not knowing how to say no.
Today, maybe because he was making changes and trying to undo his pattern, he decided to stop. And the first person he saw was a pretty girl. She would have been prettier were her face not crimpled and worn with spent desperation and collate
d anger as her voice went unattended as to her, it just seemed so improbable that people didn’t care about her particular plight in the same manner as she.
Gavin stopped and he turned and he waited for her to speak, but she ignored him. She had her head turned at a youngish man in a pin striped suit powering his way down the sidewalk, talking through a phone pressed against his rising shoulder to his ear and texting with each of his other hands as if each of his appendages had a mind and obligation of its own. When the girl’s voice spluttered, she turned her spiting face which looked like a bruised tomato and saw Gavin standing almost inappropriately, waiting for her to speak.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Well, what are you doing? Maybe I can help or something?”
“I’m taking signatures, for our cause,” she said.
She was speaking to Gavin, but her words had hardly the impact as her gaze did, looking over his shoulder at the people passing him by.
“What’s your cause?” asked Gavin
The girl looked allayed.
“We’re bringing attention to the plight of dolphins that are being needlessly slaughtered in Japanese bays every day.”
Gavin liked dolphins. He’d never met one before, but they were nobody ever had a bad thing to say about one. This sounded like something good, something for him to believe in. his face lit up and he said, “What can I do?”
“Sign here.”
“No, I wanna help. Is there something more I can do, like is there a boat I can go on and we’ll dress up like pirates and we’ll attack the butchers before they kill the dolphins and we’ll set them free and…”
“Just sign here.”
She shoved a clip board into his stomach. She wasn’t even looking at him. Her script rolled off her tongue like a child’s spit over a freeway bridge.
“But I wanna do something to help.”
“We don’t wanna help,” she said. “We just want to create awareness.”
“But I wanna do something. Can I give you money?”
“If you want to donate, you can go to our webpage. But if you really want to help, you can go to our social network and click like and forward our message and get your friends to like our page too. If we can just get to a million likes…”
Her attention waned again and Gavin felt frustrated. He had never given a second to anything other than his own depressive imaginings, but he wanted to do something, he wanted to make a change; in his life and in the world. He wanted to do something that mattered.
The girl pushed him aside and she started shouting at the suited men walking past. Gavin looked at himself. He wasn’t in a suit, but he was dressed in suited attire, somewhat. He had on black slacks and a collared shirt and even an oddly fitting tie. He looked the part of the lated worker but like everything in his life, he was still outside of a common definition. He was a made up word that nobody was willing to use.
There were a lot of people lined up though and Gavin ignored that first girl and made his way down the line. The next girl was shouting just the same and she was trying to look through and around Gavin as he stopped before her.
“I’ll listen,” said Gavin.
“That’s great,” she said. “It’s just, you’re in my way.”
“But I want to help. I’ll do anything. If you teach me, I’ll do what you’re doing so you can be free to do other things. I’m not scared of giving everything up, not anymore. If you want, I can shave off all my hair and tattoo something on my forehead. I’ll do anything. I just want something to believe in” said Gavin.
“Just sign here,” said the girl.
Gavin looked deflated. He didn’t want to sign something, he wanted to do something.
“Isn’t there something I can do?”
“Just sign here,” she said.
“But I want to do something more, you know, change the world.”
“This is how we change the world, signing petitions, forwarding messages, clicking like on stuff. This is activism.”
“But who does the things? Can I join them?”
“No-one does anything. God. We’re raising awareness. There are more important things in this world than what you want to do, ok? Now sign the petition or get lost.”
“What’s it for?”
“It’s for the dolphins, to raise awareness for the dolphins which are being fished and herded into brutal killing shores.”
“Oh, like her,” said Gavin, pointing at the other girl.
“No” shouted the girl. “Are you stupid? Our cause is to raise awareness of dolphins being herded in open waters. Their cause is for dolphins being brutally murdered in killing shores. They’re completely different. Listen it’s obvious you don’t get it so just beat it.”
She ripped the clip board away and starting pushing it past Gavin, to the people walking around and behind him. Gavin walked away and he looked at each boy and girl along the line and they were all shoving their boards and none of them were bring attended and they all shouted, “Like my cause” and all they wanted was a tick on a box and they didn’t want money and they didn’t want any real help, they just wanted someone to like what they thought was important.
Gavin walked down the line and there were scores them shouting into the sea of jaded workers all vying to ignore the shabby youths’ political plights. Gavin looked at each one and he tried to garner their attention but they pushed his away and he felt that veil of rejection, slipping over his untouchable skin.
Then he saw her, the first girl and beside her, the second girl. And they were neither at the start of the line nor were they at the end of the line. They were somewhere in the middle and they shouting about different causes, neither dolphin in the open sea nor dolphin in the bloodied killing shores.
“Aren’t you that other girl?” asked Gavin.
She tried to brush him off, looking and shouting over his shoulder.
“Our government is spending unnecessary monies on sporting events when they should be investing in education and health” she shouted, out into the open air.
“What about the dolphins?” asked Gavin.
She looked at him. She had no idea who he was or what he was talking about.
“What are you on about?” she said.
“That was you, just a minute ago at the start of the line. You were raising awareness for dolphins being slaughtered in killing shores. It was you. Have you changed causes already?” he said, adamant.
“Just sign here,” she said. “And click like on our social network.”
“But what is your cause?”
“We’re raising awareness for the abuse of government spending on lavish sporting events when not enough is spent on health and education.”
“I get it,” said Gavin.
“What?”
“Well, when we were kids, my dad took us all to Disney. We couldn’t afford it. He got a loan or something. But at the time, we were still having problems with the normal bills and stuff and we didn’t go to the best school either and I’m pretty sure my dentist was wasn’t a dentist, if you know what I mean.”
“What are you on about? That’s completely different.”
“Well, not really. I mean, the government spends on something it can’t afford cause it wants to make everyone happy even though they’ve been doing a pretty ordinary job at paying the bills and stuff. The same as dad.”
“That’s not even remotely close.”
“You know what we did?”
“No, get lost. And remember to click like on our social network” she said, pushing Gavin away.
Gavin walked down along the line and with each person, he encountered the same indifference. He wanted to help, he really did. He didn’t just want to help though, he wanted to douse himself in their ideals and before the whole world and before his mother, his father and his brother and his stupid fiancée, to set fire to and make ash of all of his wasted potential and to be remembered, in his sacrifice, on magnets and memes for the rest of ti
me.
He passed, on the last block, a great many people protesting this and protesting that and every time that he stopped and bid his ear, he was looked past and ushered off on his way. And when he tried to understand, when he took their plight and painted his own analogy, they mocked him and took offense to his genuine interest.
It seemed that they had no word for a ready ear. Their tongues twisted and twirled their words like small skipping stones that hardly even carved a dent in the attention of the insolent and disagreeing ears that rolled on by.
Their voices shouted against and over one another. They each had their account of a wrong and they were trained only in the fervid shouting at passersby that they had no script and no hushed tone to deal with a depressed young man who wanted nothing more than to hear what else they had to say.
At the end of the line was a well presented pair. They might have been mistaken for lovers were it not for the placard they were holding. It was bold and to the point. It read, ‘Only Jesus Has The Answer’.
Gavin paused for a second. He paused in his thoughts but not in his stride. It was quite a statement. It really left them nowhere to go, limited any possible interaction.
As he passed, one of them, the preppy one, obviously sensed his dwindling despair and thought to pounce upon it before it learned to feed itself.
“Do you have a second?” shouted The Preppy Man.
Gavin shrugged his shoulders. The Preppy Man looked confused. Like the others, he wasn’t expecting anyone to actually stop. And Gavin hardly wore a confronting sneer or a brotherly smile. He looked as one does when does when looking for their other shoe in a room full of clutter.
“Can I talk to you about our lord and saviour Jesus Christ?”
Gavin shrugged again.
“Do you have god in your heart? Do you know the path of Jesus Christ?”
His friend, obviously not his lover, The Preppy Girl, smiled.
Gavin shrugged.
“What’s your name?” asked The Preppy Man.
Gavin shrugged.
The Preppy Man’s expression turned sour.
“You don’t know your own name?”
“Is that a question or a rhetorical insinuation?” asked Gavin.
“It’s a question,” said The Preppy Man in a snotty tone.
“Well, in that case…”
Gavin shrugged again.
“What the hell is your problem” shouted The Preppy Girl.
Gavin shrugged once more.
The Preppy Man was set to explode.
“Do you know what you are?” he said.
Gavin shrugged again. He pointed to their placard and walked away. The Preppy Girl was shouting out something and though her words were tinged in wholesomeness, her intention was anything but.
Gavin hated religious nuts. They spent their wholes lives scaring the crap out of people just so they could convert them and then they could go off and do the same to other people. And they never actually did anything once they were converted except for scaring the crap out of other people and then convert them.
Like Cancer.
His dad did it once, scare him that is, for a greater good. He told him about the monsters under his bed and then came in every night to shoo them away. He got to act like a hero for a while. But one day he got lazy and stopped coming in. Gavin would shout out that the monsters were creeping out from under his blankets and that their sticky paws were almost at his twitching toes, but his dad just shouted out from the sofa that they weren’t there and they were just in his head.
In his head?
Oh no!