“Don’t you ever want to stay in one spot, just settle down?” The man laughed, putting his hand behind the passenger side seat and backing in a straight line over an imaginary road.
The woods were overgrown with pine needles, the smell of sticky sap clinging to the air. The sun was more distant than usual, turning its back on this small section of Earth out in the country.
“I don’t think I’ve really found a spot yet,” Charles said. “I don’t know if I’m ready to give up and become part of this world. My head hasn’t caught up with my body yet, I don’t think.”
He pictured himself still falling, turning to fit his posture and inserting his spirit in through the top of his head. A mailbox with a black top sitting on a flag pole flew by, a carved wooden cardinal sitting on top of it. He couldn’t make out the name on the box, or the next one, or the one after that.
“Well,” The man sait, removing an enveloped that was ripped on one side from the pocket in the door. “We’ve got your case file here. The man you know as Dave gave it to me.”
They weren’t enemies, Charles thought. Sometimes you just have to kill for the sake of killing. He was less certain than before how this world worked, what kind of etiquette and rules applied here.
He shook the letter out of the envelope and opened it. “Great worker, independent, resourceful, no known strength or weaknesses. Ideal entry level ignoramus. Has a degree in biology, state level university.” He wondered as he read whether or not all bosses passed around this kind of information about their employees. Big brother is always watching, he could picture his eyes staring over the distant mountains. The letter continued, “May be a slow learner, but by immersion will pick it up. If he doesn’t, we have plenty for him to do.” Enclosed also were the recommendation letters Charles had sent, and his resume. He was these pieces of paper, he realized in a dull epiphone. He was a piece of meat to be marketed and harvested, argil to be plied and molded, a cake gestating in a bakery oven.
“So where are we going?” Charles asked, staring into the sideview mirror and cranking his window down with menial arm leverage. The sense of urgency from jumping into a car with a man who he had just seen killed miles upward had already been placated and changed into languid indecision. (The worst kind of indecision). He stuck his head out of the window, the wind striking him coldly like a bathroom hand dryer. He pictured himself a golden retriever with its head out the window, and he fancied himself better that way.
“You’re going to have to keep moving, that’s what matters.” His eyes glanced over as far as the rearview mirror and then back at the road. He shook out his upper body, uncomfortable in his enormous coat as the car heater started to kick in. “The man you know as Dave isn’t a man, and his name isn’t Dave. I don’t know why the sick bastard told you that was his name. He wants to take you with him on his journey, as far as I can gather. He simply wants someone to tag along with him, and he’s not a bad guy don’t get me wrong, but you’ll start to lose time, and things will become even less clear for you.”
The car crept up a series of dirt roads, carved into the woods like a thorn in a tigers paw. The woods were trying to shake it out, but they needed assistance.
“Why did you show me this?” Charles asked, shaking the paper back into the envelope. “Why do you have this, in the first place?”
“Lots of questions, huh?” The jocular man allowed a wry smile to buoy itself over his lips. “I wish someone would have told me these things when I started, it’s that easy. Now I’m out here alone, finding niches to make useful service of myself. It’s not better higher up, further away, you get out there and someone still wants to kill you, wants your spot.”
They passed a graveyard, the weatherworn wire gate creaking to and fro in the wind. A crow ate carrion somewhere inside, the corpses buried in their indiscriminate holds shuddered with unrest. Somehow, the place still exuded a sanguine calmness. Charles leaned back on the blue mesh seat cover, nervously rolling up his pants legs.
“Nature gets you wherever you need to go. Nature makes character, character becomes your nature. All you gotta do is relax and take things in stride.” The man nodded to himself, weighing his own words in his mind for truth.
He was struggling to make an identity appear in himself like trying to grow a beard manually by sheer force of will. He needed this identity so he could figure out what thoughts were positive and which ones were negative, what would be constructive thoughts and which would be destructive. To form any kind of real knowledge at all he needed a bedrock to start from, like the base of a snowman, or better yet the snow. He could start at entry level like he just had, sure, but that was like swimming against the current in a channel dug deep with no sides. The explosion had been a lucky occurrence, not a disaster. Mr. Pulp seemed lik a good boss, but his eccentricities would have prevented Charles from ever getting a grasp of the “bigger picture.”
Tents stood on both sides of the road, and as the Toyota approached the inhabitants came out to the side of the road and waved. They all wore tattered heavy clothes that at one time may have been considered gaudy or ornamental. The man reached out of the window and beat twice on the side of the car. “Nothing for you guys today!” He called in a hum. They continued waving as they disappeared like ants in the rearview mirror.
They pulled up to the booth alongside a gate, a square shaped white box with a microphone pressing out of the open slit at the bottom of the window.
“Ah, Mr. Richardson, you’re finally back.” The tollboth operator leaned into the microphone as he spoke. He had an ambivalent air to his face which teetered on arrogance, like he knew he deserved a better job.
“Mr. P is expecting you. You can go right in.” He pressed a button and the gate slowly pulled itself open. A long gravel road led up and around an old brick rectangle school building. The jutting black street lamps fizzled on as they arrived and it was immediately dusk.
A muscled man wearing hospital scrubs opened the door of the car for Charles and stood looming over the cabin.
“I’ll show you to your room, mac.” A female secretary watching from the doorway laughed when he said “mac”, like it was some sort of bet between them.
“Can I get your bags for you, mac?”
“No bags to get.” Charles said.
“Nothing to worry about, mac, some people don’t have belongings to bring with them.”
A fireplace crackled across the hallway, a group of older people sat watching a Charles Bronson action movie. A couple of cute younger girls with shaved heads knitted intently at a table, staring contentedly at each other.
The man showed Charles to a long hallway, the doors of five rooms sitting open. “You’ll be staying back here.” He said, touching two fingers to the numbered placard above the door. “Feel free to look around.”
The walls had been knocked out of the living room, load bearing pillars dotted the room. Tables were set up in a way where the course through the room forced you to go between them. A fat man with long braided hair played connect four alone in striped pajamas.
The man who drove him here, Mr. Richardson, was outside talking to a female nurse. He stood with his arms crossed looking up at her, she with one hand on her hip leaning against the scaffolding.
Charles pushed the screen open and walked outside, at which point Mr. Richardson stopped whatever sentence he was in and walked up to Charles with a fatherly smile.
“We think you need to quiet down those voices that you hear in your head.” He said. “I thought I’d just come right out and say it. You might need hours, you might need weeks, you might need years.”
Charles thought himself to be relatively sane, he could have sworn lack of identity was a common problem with people in his generation.
“Rest assured, you’re crazy.” The secretary added in a congenial tone. “It’s important you realize this and don’t fight it. You need to reestablish an ordinary structure in your life.”
That night, Charles dreamt that he was covered in a red shawl, wearing red sunglasses and staring through a red filter. He saw an unreal version of himself, a hyperrealistic representation falling thousands of feet through the air. Numbers gathered in his mind, repeating in an endless cycle.
He woke up, unaware that he had ever went to sleep. He pulled himself over to the mirror attached the completely empty cabinet and looked at himself. His hair was different than he remembered it, lighter and thinner than before. His eyes and facial features were slimmer and more resigned as well, the pronounced bags underneath contrasting to his sunken cheeks.
“I’ve gotta fix these things,” He resolved himself to. “I have to make a good impression.”
Suddenly, an impulse to get away occurred to him again. He pushed the door open, a light shining overhead from down the hall. He pulled on a coat over his pajamas that he hadn’t remembered changing into and shoved out into the night.
A light that he himself doubted really existed shone from the forest. A head swung out of the building, which eventually became a whole body. It was the connect four player.
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