Twenty Days

The boy sat at the foot of a statue, feeling the cold. It was the dull edge of town. All the alleys were full of rotting fish and crawling smells that made you want to throw up. The man walked into the square and saw him. The sky grew dark and clouds gathered, blotting out light. Or so it seemed to the man, who shook this edge upon himself.

Leave me be, he imagined the boy saying.

Rain began to fall like it had not fallen in more than a million years, and the man’s voice burnt out, he quavered “Hello”.

The boy looked up, his cigarette issuing tendrils, and as the man was about to ask him his name, he realised that he already knew. It was Adam. It was his son Mike’s best friend. Jesus Christ. He asked Adam what he was doing out here, and the boy laughed a little.

“Don’t tell my parents about this,” said Adam, taking the stick out of his mouth.

The man laughed nervously and nodded, and kept walking down the road, as if he had been on his way somewhere. He must have walked for a mile before he turned round a little bit and went back home a different way. The rain just continued and grew, so that his suit had become completely soaked by the time he arrived at his front door. The man put his briefcase down and traipsed through the hall towards his waiting dinner. It was not waiting for him. He found his wife upstairs, cleaning the bedroom.

“Hello,” he said. She looked up and smiled at him. She stopped smiling, shortly. “How’s your day been?” She apologised and told him that she had not expected him home so early. He wondered what she was thinking while she left the room to switch on the microwave. He followed her, and put his hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry Sarah,” he wanted to say, but he would not have meant it. She smiled like a stranger, a real strangler, and he continued. “How have the kids been?”

They sat down to their meals at their table. They all sat away from one another, the six of them silently waiting for the meal to end in the land of the surreal. They didn’t watch any television – it was prohibited. His son Mike was probably pissing himself. He laughed at a joke someone made, and had this weird feeling in his stomach. Something was wrong with the food, probably. Sarah was shit at cooking.

He waited till everyone was asleep to have sex with his wife. She had even gone to sleep, but she woke up soon. He felt like he was crushing her. She just kind of sighed and then, afterwards, looked like she wanted to go back to sleep.
“Bitch,” he whispered, and when she turned to ask him if he’d said something, he told her that he had not. But he kept talking anyway. “I’m worried about Mike,” he said. She asked him why. “I don’t know,” he said, and rambled on a while, then started to cry.

Sarah had drifted off to sleep as he’d begun to talk, and he saw that she hadn’t heard a word. One of his eyes twitched, and he joined her. John took off his ring. Part of him wanted to bury it.

***
“Youre parents are, dead.” The letter had been scrawled in pink glittered gel-pen and slipped under the front door that morning. For the first time, a boy woke up and his mum and dad were not there, but Mike did not worry. He went to school instead of worrying, and returned with his best friend. He was not allowed friends round normally, so he thought he would. His parents were not dead. Something else must have happened. Adam gave the letter back to Mike after looking at it, and sat there. They sat there and waited, Mike’s annoying younger sister Ariana waving about with a Wii. They kicked her off of it and started playing, pretending to shoot each other in a game and laughing and talking about people at school. The hours marched on, and Mike left message after message on his dad’s phone until a message told him that his credit had run out. His mum had not been there when he got back home, like she usually was. She did not work. Where – where was she?

“You should report them missing or something,” said Adam, but Mike shook his head. It was too early, and too silly. He did not know what to make of it. The two friends went into the kitchen and tried unsuccessfully to boil some eggs, because that was what they had once seen a grown up do. They did not know what to do and time was getting late, so Adam phoned his mum and said that Mike was having a sleep-over. In the middle of the night they went downstairs to smoke and found that Cassandra was there. That Cassandra was back.

“Why didn’t you phone me?” she asked, and neither of the boys said anything. She looked into their eyes and then shook her head.

“Did it take you long to get back?” whispered Adam. She said nothing. It was all stupid.

* * *

Mike and his friend were gone, and so was her car. He didn’t answer his mobile. Fuck. She asked their next door neighbour, who might as well have been an Alzheimer’s patient, to look after kids and called a cab. They were going down to the statue, she felt she knew. Fucking stupid kids, stealing her car. They were only ten, or eleven, she wasn’t good with small details.

* * *
“Maybe I’m God,” thought Adam.
* * *

As Mike drove along at ten miles per hour down the road, he got strange glances from passers by. He had forgotten to shut the boot of the car, and some of his older sister’s clothes were sprawling out. A red lace bra flew in the wind. They didn’t know what to do, so they were driving away from everything. It had been Adam’s idea. Adam always had strange ideas like that.

But he came to a turning, he didn’t control the car properly, and they almost crashed it. He almost crashed it. They did not know what they were doing so they went back home. The old woman who lived next door was there, playing with some soup. She said that Cassandra had gone somewhere in a cab. They knew that they were in trouble.

* * *
His father returned that night in a cab with Cassandra. When asked about what had happened, he said that he did not want to talk about it. He had a shower and changed his clothes. But Cassandra never went back to university. She just stayed, looking strangely at him every once in a while. Mike noticed her doing this and wondered. A few years passed, and he and Adam were fourteen.
* * *

Adam’s first, but not immediate, action of any consequence was to worry about a folder he had borrowed from Mike. He was going to miss the next day of school but he would leave his friend in the lurch. So he sat there anxiously while everyone talked, worrying about the length of his trousers which were too short. He needed new ones. He reminded Mike about the folder again, and an argument broke out like a rash. He did not brood upon it in those days, but a few years later he would be reminded of it and realise something necessary about arguments. It was easy to get angry – happy and sad, simple forms of joy and despair, unfeeling slaves… Anger was full of pleasure bound to hate tied to guilt wrapped in power. Anger was dangerous, and from this argument Adam found unlooked for a port of call. Anger hated simplicity, and revelled in monsters.

A few snatches of thought remain from those days. He went on a journey past fields towards town, not having allocated them any particular religious significance yet. They weren’t important to what happened. When he arrived he stormed down the street in the dark, past sales, and bought a leather wallet from a shop with the last of his money. He returned home with the fucking ridiculous idea of having bought a new wallet when he hadn’t even gotten another job and he didn’t like his friends and he hated himself and sat alone in the deserted and warm house, full of the last remnants of Easter. He took a Smirnoff ice and began to drink it, feeling bad (in a good way) for doing so. At this point he didn’t know much about the strengths of different drinks.

And he put on a DVD, and watched twelve minutes. Then some of his family returned home, and things felt normal again. Apart from vague wondering about vague things (this declined as the days went on, gone very soon, a dim reaction from his direct imagination), he didn’t think much about the situation. He cried at various points, of course, thinking he was thinking about it. But it was too big, and the anger had subsided.
* * *

“I love you,” Adam said, and kissed Kate. Claire. He kissed Claire. She smiled at him and turned back to her laptop to type an essay. He could see her change even as she turned her head – could see her mind age. She – she didn’t think about things. The world can’t have interested her. All of her (now his, his too) friends were setting around her room, and she was busying herself with a piece of machinery. He didn’t like her.
“So, Mike,” – they were all just lounging around, doing nothing – “why are none of you real?”
No, he didn’t say that. He didn’t even want to or think it. Jesus Christ, what would they think if he said something like that.
“Want to go out?”
His friend sighed. Yes, then.
“Anyone else?”
None of them said anything, they all just sat there. Looking. He really missed his dead friend.
* * *

Adam walked up the pavement as the rain crackled around his ears. He could see the fields stretched out on the other side of the road, imposed before dim houses and high buildings upon the horizon. These were fields of power, just like the other two - the one near his school, where he went for renewal, and the one near his old house, where he went for remembrance. This field was where he had decided lay God and highest magic. The flight of a black bird nearby assured him of this – it had stopped upon a tree, its branch quivering a little. Then it flew off towards a housing block. Adam followed – it was a sign.

Part of him realised that none of this meant anything. That the bird was not the holy spirit, that as he walked in subways and then finally back to those fields he had first come across, all he was doing was getting wet. A part of him thought about what he was avoiding. Another part of him thought about girls. (a smaller part of him thought about men). His life believed in making a multitude of different lives – and it was this greatest part of him, his deepest impulse and the sane voice behind all decision, which compelled him to become mad.

His phone shook in his pocket – it was Mike. He was ringing about what had happened to their friend. Probably he wasn’t going to mention that, it had happened three years ago and no-one talked about that anymore. They’d moved on like he’d moved on. They were seventeen now, for Christ’s sake. Mike was probably going to ask if Adam wanted to come to the hospital with the others. He didn’t. He switched off his phone.

He knelt before a statue commemorating the First World War, and spoke a hymn of his own making. He tried to cry but several parts of him rebelled and he couldn’t do so honestly. He had remembered Turanson – the crumpled up god he had made as a snarling paper thought in desperation the last time exams had come. He wanted so much to have a hallucination or a vision (what was the difference?) like he knew Stephen had had in that story about the white thing, the Mastadon, but had lied about. The completeness of the name had freaked him out – it came to him from nowhere, a word that already seemed to refer to other things. And he had looked and asked about it on the internet, to be told by another man that he too had met Turanson and that he was a harbinger of the decay of modern society. Adam thought the man was talking bullshit, but this did not abate his fear. He had forgotten about it over time, but how could he pray to God, God who he had gradually forgotten, when he was living in a world of dirt? He was guilty. He was able to cry and enjoy crying when he realised this. And so he walked back, completely wet, towards where Mike lived, making endless bargains along the way. Turanson was just a poem he’d written. Turanson wasn’t real.

“Hey,” he said, wiping his hair back. “Mike in?” The sister – Ariana or whatever her name just looked at him, and walked back into the living room. There was a lot of looking, a lot of silence in the world. Well fuck you too. He shut the door and walked up the stairs to his friend’s room. No-one was there. He saw a five pound note lying by the bedside table, considered it for a moment, and then left. He’d just go home. There was no point in staying out much longer. Would be dark soon.

He reflected as he walked along about how crazed the last few years had been – how many things he had believed, how many people he had met. He had begun to think about what he would do if someone tried to attack him, a few months ago at the year’s beginning. Girls had been momentarily been replaced by proverbial wooden swords, and Adam took the step of carrying a wooden stick he’d found in a little mini-wood near a friend’s house around with him (he did not give this one a particular designation for quite a while, until he’d read a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Star Wars had been inspired by it, and he decided that the wood was symbolic of his unconscious awakening. It didn’t have literal power, for once). When he left, he would pick up the stick again and walk home with it concealed. It was a pathetic little thing – likely to snap if it hit a strong wind. He almost threw it away on the second day he had it, but changed his mind as it’d be a betrayal of the stick. He didn’t really reason that decision out too much.

He abandoned the whole thing after he left home one night for a walk near a park. He entered the park and could see people playing at night basketball. He clutched the stick close to him and stalked off towards his school. He could hear police sirens and walked towards them. They were very far off though, so nothing came of it. As he walked back, he thought of how stupid the whole thing was – what would he have done if the sirens had been close, or if he had encountered criminals in the park? What had he been expecting to encounter? The next day the stick was dropped and forgotten about, and shortly afterwards the whole train of thought.

And another time he had thought about universes, about how worlds might be made. About how everything made sense, because in the beginning there would only be two probabilities – that there would continue to be nothing or that something would happen, so, with eternity to spare, something did, and chaos erupted from the void. Adam jumped into a puddle a little way before his front door, and entered the house with dirty shoes. He stood looking out from his window, late winter wind billowing curtains out around him. And then his phone rang again – it was Mike, and he answered.

* * *
“So I’m going to kill my –” The line crackled as Mike ejaculated air instead of words, his throat all caught up like a fish-hook. “I’m going to kill my dad. I’m going to kill him in a couple of weeks.”
* * *

The dyslexic boy looked at the clotted puddles of the alley, their surfaces silky with slime and rain. Adam could see his face within one of these puddles, its features collapsed into non-expression, black against grey. He wasn’t sure what was going on. He struggled to make everyone hate him. He didn’t want to do it but everyone was pushing him. Beside him, in the nearby field, a tall thick tree imposed himself upon the grey land, his branches twisted and skewered at awkward angles in difficult directions, their bark stripped of all leaves but one by the harshest realities of season. But one; and even she was left shaking, struggling for dear life, her surface already smeared with mud and frost. No buds could be found yet, no new leaves were growing, for the tree knew secrets.

Adam looked at the tree, its stumpy ends misshapen like clubs, and without flicker of doubt, as a streetlight clicked on in the growing dark, he passed forwards.

A row of trees now, beside a neighbour’s house – their bark stood as spears piercing the earth, an explosion of sickly green pine leaves emanating from their surfaces, determined to escape from the ground – to explode in dazzled light. Next to them, enveloped on its border by the spread of dark emerald ivy along its brick, stood a high wall. Hiding from it, there lay beyond Adam on the other side of the thin road another house. The bark of the fence there shook with every gust or breeze of gale, boards missing here or there, a clear vision of the unintended garden within made complete, made as if to fit the nasty pebbles outside of the street on which Adam walked and had lived, glowing chewing gum cemented, glistening in human ambience beneath his feat, made black and red and white and grey by wind and rain and waste.

* * *
They went out that afternoon to go bowling at a local alley. After a little bit of conversation, Mike’s dad put his hand half-affectionately on his son’s shoulder.

“We do do stuff like this all the time. We will, I mean. From now on. Now that you’re better.” His father smiled, and Mike smiled back as his dad’s phone rang.

“Hello?” he began, but his face grew slightly more serious as the call went on. Mike took his go, striking down half the pins. He felt angry. He didn’t have to be, not at everything. He turned back to his dad to see him with his jacket on, the phone still clutched awkwardly against his face.

“Get you and your brother a sprite or something, Cassie, I’ll – Yeah, hold on, I’ll be right there – I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Same old thought Mike. That evening Adam came round and the two of them talked in his room in the early hours of the morning so that no-one else could hear. Mike related to his friend what he had found out. What the facts were. Both of them knew that his dad was not nice. When Mike was younger he had not noticed how he had treated his mum. How there had probably been bruises, or beatings, or how he had hit her. He had figured it out now, though. He had come back home from his hospital visit to see his father shaking his older sister Cassandra as if he wanted to kill her. He was sure that was what his father was doing – trying to kill her. She shouted at him that she’d seen him digging, asking him how he could bring himself to bury. That he was sick. His father pushed her away and boomed out through the back door, his face shaking. She had noticed Mike, and then had sat down and cried. He went over to her, and she told him that it was terrible when she found her father that night long ago when he had gone missing. He told her that he understood. She looked at him silently, and then began to cry again.

“So you see, Adam? He killed my mum. That’s why she went missing – she didn’t leave, he killed her. He hit her like he was hitting Cassie.”

Adam said nothing with blue eyes.

“She caught him burying my mum.” Mike shook with anger, not sadness, “she must have – she must’ve been too afraid to say anything, he must have beat her. Did you ever wonder where that note we found came from?” He pulled it from his pocket, folded a hundred times again and again, and those words glittered again in the darkness – ‘Youre Parents are, Dead’. He looked at Adam like he wanted to be proved right, wanted anything to be true.

His father came back home late, expecting everyone to be in bed, but could hear Mike saying “So I have to do it.” He paused in the hall, and walked up the hallway very quietly so that he could hear more.

“Why?” asked Adam.

“Because my father’s fucking sick. I know what he did.” His father felt his soul stop and quiver. “I’m going – I’m going to do what I said on the phone. In twenty days I’m going to murder him. I’m going to do it at, hh, - at eleven o’ clock.”

* * *
Nineteen and a half days passed.
* * *

John had his dinner in the end, after work, outside a local pub in the beer garden. No-one else was outside in the fresh and the icy, but he supposed that was to be expected. He watched a spider crawling along the shrubbery of the wall. It was black and it stalked round and round a stalk of grass, flattened on its side. It disappeared from sight for a second, before the grass shook, overgrown, uncut, all around. Some of the clouds above in the night were dark and he could not see them. The trunks of the trees swayed. Asleep, faint, funny for just a moment or two or a chance to dream such a dream as this – he wanted to be dreaming.

As he walked home, he felt like little words lay in the fretful night. There was a face somewhere about, a place with a light strung outstretched, and he would be able to see nothing when he saw that face again.

When he was younger than he was today, he had had a dream. The most wonderful dream he felt anyone had ever had – and in this dream a girl had walked with him in a world where all the lights had dimmed and blown out. In this blank beyond, surrounded by dread black, they tried to make memories last and walked out of the city into some woods where many women were running amongst them. The women were trying to get out but they could not. The girl had told him that she’d been a terrible person in her life and that she had been born in this magical wood. She just walked along here because she could do nought else – but then they both realised that all the way, their entire lives, they had been each other’s best friend even though they had never known it. A white thing in a green coat with a body like stilts had then topped its hat to them. It told them that its name was Briglot and that it was running away from a bear. She journeyed with him, she learnt, and she remembered many things before they both came to a hillside. And along this hillside, at its head a dark tower, stood all the people she had ever known or met, and all those she hadn’t were assembled in the shadows. All were silent, and all bore a torch in their hands. She had allowed the lights to go out one by one, and when the last one faded, John woke up, the magic dead. And he had grown up.

A dog barked somewhere a few streets away, and John’s eyes ached. The rain just continued and grew, so that his suit had become completely soaked by the time he arrived at his front door. His son Mike answered the bell. John put his briefcase down and traipsed through the hall towards the back door to the garden. It was waiting for him. He got a couple of bits from a cupboard, and then he turned to look at Mike, and said “I’m going to work on the car for a bit. If you could tell Cassie that I’m – that I’ve eaten out, that would be great.” But he knew that Cassandra was out on a date tonight.

The air was stifled in the garage, hot and humid, with tiny flakes of dust and more spiders everywhere floating in the twilight. In an alcove where once there had been windows stood a multitude of rotting planks, coated in a green substance that had spread to the ochre-smeared walls and floorboards too. In the corner, a petit crib they had used when Cassie had been young, and on the ceiling an ancient, blown-out light bulb. He shut the door gently beside him and hobbled towards the crib, putting his hand onto its hard surface. He turned towards the ancient car, and smiled in spite of himself. What a waste of money it had been, his plan to fix this old thing up. What plans he had made. What kind of a person he had wanted to be. He looked at his watch – it was five to eleven. He pulled the tarpaulin off. All gone, soon.

He lit a match, and then blew it out. He was going to write first, for a minute. He had kept a diary for twenty days. He ate and drank while he wrote, even though it made him feel unwell.

“When I got back, I had a glass of wine and ten spoonfuls of sugar.”

He paused, and then wrote “I did stuff like this when I was a kid.” Then he lit another match, and the pad smouldered. He didn’t want to be left behind.

There was a minute left. John took the last bit of the sugar and his pulse raced. His lungs gasped for air and his head felt it was full of lead. He’d seen few people in the last few days, save for his old best friend who he had not seen for his last few years, now a small balding runt. He heard the back door open – the night was silent, but he could hear a creaking from the house. John felt a sudden pain in his chest, like someone had shoved razors down his windpipe. He rasped, and then got up. He took a tool from the side (he wasn’t sure which one) and began working on the car. He was just moving things around, unscrewing things aimlessly. He came to a halt when he heard the door behind him open, but then he kept on going, his eyes burning. He kept his back to his son. He could hear his son just standing there, and he kept working.

Then he feels lead against his head and he his bleeding then he is dead.
* * *

Then he heard a little rattling sound a little far away, like pipes were dripping beneath and around the floor boards outside the house. Then Cassandra entered the garage, and saw Michael bent over a strange thing – a body, its face covered with a single speck of blood. He’d left a frantic voicemail on her phone explaining what he had done, and why. She had not believed him for a moment, but it was a strange world.

Cassandra looked at her brother, looked at his own fragile eyes and face, and wondered what he would become or do if he knew that he had gotten everything wrong.

“Y- y- you know I had to,” he coughed, his whole body shaking as he did, “had to d-d-do this – I, I didn’t –” he whispered, and the light flickered from his torch.

There was a pause. “I know,” said Cassandra. She raised her head to him, and with more difficulty held his shoulders and sighed “I’ll make it good again.” Her soul died. They rolled up the body in a carpet and then Cassandra drove off with it. Whilst driving she almost crashed the car when she realised that her father had only been knocked out.

When she came back, Mike was sitting on the sofa with a full can of flat coke open in front of him. He looked up at her, his face shaking.

“I didn’t want it. Not like this,” he said, and left to go upstairs to try and sleep but fail.

Cassandra remained in the room alone, thinking about him.
* * *

“Maybe I’m god,” thought Adam.

Aged Thirty

He spent all of his day wrestling with angels and demons, vomiting with every punch. He had drunk so much, too much, and he suspected, in his more lucid moments, that someone had done something to his drink. He was normally more careful than this. He woke up to take water but the feeling made his body quiver once again. He came to realise as time went on (as an entire day of his life passed by without fanfare) that he was in the process of securing his own salvation. That girl in his team, that one who was so beautiful and so unsure – he would need to stop sleeping with her. In the tremors of his fever he imagined the two of them, her white and him black, as a floating yin-and-yang drifting through pockets of air and thought. He had promised her many things. But he would now stop. He was above that. The memory of her above him did nothing for him. It was a squalid insult to his wife, who he still hated.

Three hours passed and he pulled a blue t-shirt and jeans on. He walked out into the night like a marching wave in the ocean – the crescent moon shone directly above his path, trees whistled, and the distant doom of cars riding meant nothing anymore. He was the general world – there had been no reason for him to be depressed, he reasoned, no reason for him to stretch out long sighs of prayer. When he had been a boy, he had asked God that he might become the man he wanted to be, that he should be. He realised that that man had been within him all along, or some bullshit like that, maybe. A man asked him for some change outside of McDonalds. He said maybe, if he had some left afterward.

The meal was good. The man who served him looked beaten down and depressed. He wondered if he would ever be saved, like he had just been. Maybe not

On the way out he saw the man asking for change again, and a girl saying she had none on her. The girl. His student. He could never remember names. He was funny, with names. He placed a pound coin in the man’s hand and led her away with his hand on her waist. They said nothing. He brought her back to his room and she began to kiss him, lying down on the bed. With forced breath he flipped her over, and they screwed one another. When it was over she lay there in his arms, and he knew that she wanted to go. That she did not like what she was doing, but felt like she had to.

“I don’t want to be Othello,” he murmured to the unseen, his masque of thoughts broken for a moment. She asked him what he had said, and he told her nothing. She obsessed him. She never addressed him by his name, he noticed. She never called him Adam.

He did not sleep that night, and morning came. Ariana and Mike had seen their mother again a year ago – she had been told to come back as part of a recovery programme to make peace with those you had hurt. He had not seen Mike since they were kids. He would tell his father in law what he had done today.

Adam put the pen down, and looked out at the garden, wondering what was true. Ariana was out there, planting flowers. She loved him, he knew. There was a time when he would have given everything to hold her between his arms, when the sound of her voice or her furrowed smile would change the world. And the world had changed – it had moved on, so to speak – but not in the way he had thought it would. That love was now gone, and he found himself resenting things about her he had once adored. He was not sure that he loved her. He felt responsible, though. Responsibility was enough. He was, for example, he knew, responsible for this – for these papers he had found and continued.

A fanfiction for the friend whose sad life he felt responsible for, all because of a silly little note he had written as a boy which had probably meant nothing but which, which did not prevent him from, from feeling like his life was, was something torn. He would tell his father in law what he had done tomorrow, or next week, or year, or life. He took the pen up again.

“Your parents are dead,” he wrote. He started to cry, and felt ashamed because he was supposed to be a man. “‘Youre parents are, dead’ – that’s the note that drove Athene mad. That’s why she lost her mind. You parents are dead. Your parents are dead. Thinking about the people she’d met in hell was strange – they didn’t feel like they were real people. Your parents are dead…