Graceless

The National: “Graceless”

He was a tall blonde man when he first met her again.

It took a long time for it to register that this was the boy she had played with.

He had already died once.

She was 14, so he must’ve been 17.  The brink of graduating to Real Life.  The first adult she had known as a child, her first and constant hero.

She still followed him around wherever he would allow her.  And when he began the Games of Cruelty, she was his eager assistant.  She played right along, even when she had to play captive.

What do you call it when you like it?  When you like to see the fire in his eyes?  Like being hurt because it’s for him?  Knowing that he has to do all of this to you.

Because there are the words he can’t say, can’t express all those things like a lover.  But he has his books of philosophy, and he was teaching her well.  All those grand words.

After that, any other boy was ruined for her.

==

The reason you shouldn’t kiss your brother is  . . .

(once you realize how easily he fits you, nobody else can take his place)

She thought he died at 17.

And he did.

He drank too much, took some pills and went swimming.  Tried everything he could to kill himself without hurting himself.  

No, he saved his hurt for his Note.

She never read it  (??)

But it was talked about, and she never saw him after he walked out of the kitchen. (SCENE!)  He was sad, scrunched, not talking, especially not to her.  And he was screaming just a little too loud.

He was found floating. Which was ironic, because he never could float.  Not when he was alive.

The man who said he was her brother told her that yes, he was found.  Not floating, but trying.  In the water.  And rushed to a hospital.  And they didn’t let him out until just now.  4 weeks earlier. That was how long it took to find her.  

And she looked into the eyes of this man, with crinkles around his eyes.  Homeless, dirty blonde hair genuinely dirty.  But still his halo.  And she fell in love with him all over again.  The body she had watched him grow into awkwardly, was now his own.  But he still felt like a giant, too big for nomral people furniture.  His beautiful hands and legs sticking out at funny angles, no matter how much he tried to keep himself folded up into a tiny shape.

It was the same man, and an imposter at the same time.  She was eager to greet him, to bring him back, no matter who he was.  He even told her about all his past lives, all the people he was before this moment.  But she knew the scar on his neck, on his wrist (the one that matched hers, when they were first playing at suicide.) These telltale landmarks brought his body back to her.  The mirror of her own body.  

Insisted that he come home with her.  She grabbed him by the arm when leaving the diner, hugged him in the parking lot before she let him get into her car.

A dream come true, a ghost returning.

He cried the same way he did before.  His whole body shaking.  Hugging him was still like hugging a building.  They stood that way, in the parking lot of the diner.  Diners peering out at the strange shadow which enveloped her.  She spine curved outward, like a heroine in a black and white movie.  He kissed her face, not romantically, but like a dog or a chicken.  He licked her and pecked at her, drinking her tears and making her laugh.  His eyes were shiny.  All she wanted to do was to crawl inside of him.  To take him into her, to never let him go ever again.

==

You had kept swimming because your parents told you to.  

If you stop now, if you hesitate because of him now, you’ll never go back into the water.  And he wants, wanted you to be happy.  

So you kept swimming.  Swam farther, swam deeper.  Never knowing that he was trapped.  in a white building.  In a white belted jacket.  The hero prince tied up in a fortress, reports of his death greatly exaggerated and believed.  Caught in a colorless world.  Maybe white, maybe in the clouds.

While she was out in the world.  Mooning over him, seeing him in every tree, the North American landscape.  Blooming flowers, a peach tree.  Every spring,

“Have you ever seen such a glorious day?” (SCENE)

She spent the rest of the spring and summer bringing him back into nature.  The house where they grew up in.  

She was so happy to bring him up into the sunlight.  Showed him the grave where she had dropped all her pain and sorrow in flowers.

He laughed.  And then stopped laughing.  He’d come back to her shrine, in the sunlight and shade.  Moody.  Until the day he tore it up.  (SCENE)

He looked better when she brought him home.  He shaved off his shadow and wanted to hear everything she had to say.  And everything was met with a gasp or a sound of curiosity.

It was like taking a drink.  Every smile was like a shot of whisky to her.

She couldn’t get enough of him.

Every day at work, she kept calling and leaving messages on her machine.  he wouldn’t pick up, unless he heard her talking, and was feeling brave and had something to say.

Just to be careful,  I always made sure I could talk for a full half hour.  But usually, my side of the conversation lasted less than a minute.  It was hard to keep convincing myself that I wasn’t speaking to an empty house.

Hansel and Gretel in the forest.  Abandoned by our parents, abandoned, abandoning the world.

We weren’t really brother and sister.  Although maybe we were.  His father and my mother.  An affair and then the word boyfriend and then he lived with us and brought his son.  And then, the son was lost to all of us.  (A 14 year old mind can accept the concept of a Mental Hospital.  Of being committed!!  I would have visited!!  Every day.  But maybe that was why I wasn’t told.  It helped me to lead that “normal life”, until he came back.)

RECTANGLE OFFICE!! 

3pm

We need to ride this hashtag

He means capitalize on it.  Any publicity is good publicity, especially if you can piggyback on someone else.

Sell, sell, sell.  Jab, jab, jab, thrust.  “Marketers ruin everything”

Once the public becomes immune to this tactic, I’ll find another. It’s a war, and we are murdering them.

She sat stonefaced at the meeting.  All of her research showed savvy customers.  People who hated all of the marketing shot out at them from their computer screens.  The young ones simply ignored them, the older ones complained.  Nobody really noticed them.  In test after test.  

But there was a correlation between sales and the use of computer-only ads.  At least when the Ad Agency got through with them.  Cherry-picking the best month.  It was cheaper for them to implement, one idea straight to a million eyeballs.  No commercial production values, no models, no art of the old fashioned tagline.  Today, it was a matter of coming up with something clever and including the brand in the corner of the text.  Are people supposed to think that the company has clever people working for it?  The guys at the sneaker company have the funniest people around their watercooler, then their sneakers are cool.

The room was heady with testosterone.  Her boss had ignored her, as per usual, in favor of doing a fist bump with his buddy the Project Manager.  She was not politically important to him, nor was she interested in drinking him under the table or hearing about his newest sports car.

“I don’t care where you go on vacation”  SCENE

The last time everyone in her department got together (all 4 of them), he had taken them all out for drinks.  On the company account, of course.  She sat there, gamely, with a smile, as he rattled off all the numbers that described his vehicle.

I got the XTP for 35, with a significant number of add ons for only 70.  That beats the first car I got for 40 and resold to my neighbor for 55.  I used to be able to do all the upgrades on my own, but I’ve been trying to hack into this one and haven’t broken it yet.

==

BOARD ROOM

She looked around and realized the only one who was even paying attention to her was the salesman on the account, who kept looking for her hidden cleavage and whom she suspected of jerking off under the table.  If she thought it would help her career, rather than build their egos, she might even consider seducing one or two of them.  Most would fall easily, especially when they are on-site.  During the 6 months of the projects, boys get awfully lonely and life gets stripped away in favor of the industrial park.

In California, the trees in the parking lot were what she remembered.  And the landscaping around the hotel parking lot.  

Her memories of the beaches were different.  Sunset holidays, where everyone pulled over for the entire show.  Not just the sun approaching the horizon line, but also the sky and its transformation afterwards.  

She also remembered the picture window that faced out on an intersection.  The programmers that were friendlier to her would share their version of people watching.  Cars.  Someone would shout, “Red ferrari!!” or

1637 words