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

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Splashing

“Well, this doesn’t seem like work,” she thought at the first day of her steel and concrete job.   The shiny surfaces lured her in like a magpie.  

The polished impossibly long wood tables that seemed almost plastic.

She spent the first meeting as an official employee tracing the grain in front of her, trying to decide if the table once was a tree.  All the tiny details might have been created by an artisan, but no, they can design these things on computers now.  

She felt herself constantly performing.  Her own sense of self was gone.  Every genuine emotion occurred in the third person.  She knew she was constantly being spied on, or evaluated.  Her own worth was based on her output.  Or so she thought.

Her manager had a meeting with her, once every two weeks.  Over the phone.  He was eager to keep it under 15 minutes.  She knew that he had to block out 30 minutes for it (nothing in the company happened under 30, the scheduling system allowed those blocks as the minimum.  He was using the rest of the time to write his notes on how wonderful he was and how recalcitrant she was.

He was her brother.

They shared the secret.

The reason you weren’t supposed to have sex with your brother . . .

==

The police officer was responding to a call.  A swimmer in the reservoir.  Probably a teenager.  Honestly, he couldn’t blame them.  The humidity was overwhelming, you got physically angry whenever you had to leave any kind of air conditioned space.  The station to the car.  The car to the donut shop.  Your ice coffee didn’t stay cold long enough, or maybe there was just never enough to drink to get you cooled off.  

If he were really lucky, he’d find her skinny dipping.  It would argue for a temporary loss of sanity.  And ideally, he’d get a look.  Or pretend not to, preserving his gentlemanly status, flirting safely as a married man, but with enough leeway.  To look.  He’d offer his jacket and in a staged bit of awkwardness, learned from Ralph Kramden, he’d get a full glimpse at exactly the wrong/right moment.

He found her repeatedly,

once in shock (??)

She was shivering, the water couldn’t be more than 60 degrees.  He knew enough about hypothermia to know that a body shouldn’t be in the water for a full 2 hours in that.  (He didn’t know that she did it on a regular basis.  And she was fine, moving around inside the water.  Her teeth were chattering because he had torn her from her beloved water.  The air was the enemy.  The air, and now her wet bathing suit.  As soon as they got inside, she’d gladly give him an eyeful.  But he delayed, keeping her in the bone chill of the backseat, with just a blanket from his trunk.  The rescue was worse than the cold.

She wanted to swim through the pastures, the farmland just beyond the forests that lined the shores.  In the 1800’s, in Henry’s lifetime, the trees had mostly been felled for firewood.  Or to clear for farmland.  The Heather On The Hill.

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PLOT:

The cop finds her on a regular basis, every time her story gets a little weaker.

You try not to think about it, but when you do, all you remember is breathing in the water.  You were used to it, but never in a way that took away the awful feeling that reminded you of being a person, not a fish.  

You try not to think about the splashing.  The sharp pain and the blood in your mouth.  When you remember it, the sense of shock or surprise seems almost out of place.

The moment you felt his fist on the back of your neck, you knew it had only been a matter of time.  

You were still surprised.

Sure, there had been a fight before you left shore.  And all the week previous, the tension was in every word he said.

You swung back and forth from your position of being the Zen Christian to the evil bitch you felt you really were.  The one who wanted to scream at him.  The one who wouldn’t take him back anymore.  The one to hit him first.

But his smile got you every time.

(And you had no idea, when you got to the far shore, if he was still there, ready to come out to get you)

He pulled his disappearing act on you, again. And then he came back smiling, his big bipolar bear smile.  Too enthusiastic about everything.  

The week before, he didn’t even look you in the eye.

When he asked you to go for a swim, you thought it was too easy.  

There were a few times in his life where you couldn’t trust him.  And now it seemed to be one of those times.  You wanted to say no.  All the bits of your body that rely on your survival, the schoolmarm, the college friend who is always right, the nun, they all agreed that you shouldn’t go.  That even at your most forgiving, you needed to stay away from him, not be in the same room, never turn your back.

The sharp pain at the top of your spine was something you were waiting for.

And were almost relieved when it arrived.

Now, you thought, now, I can sink.

But somehow, you dove into it.  Had no idea if it was a knife, if you were bleeding, attracting him like a shark.

You couldn’t outswim him.  But you knew, you knew he was afraid of diving.  Diving under, so silent.  You were quick and could hold your breath, even after you took in some water and wanted to cough, wanted air.  you swam past his feet.  He was big and strong on the shore, in your bedroom, but on the surface, he was slow and awkward.  

You dove and he dove, but not deep like you.  He wouldn’t even open his eyes, even as kids, he wouldn’t open his eyes underwater.

You could do flips, front and back.  He complained of the feeling of losing your orientation, not knowing up from down.  And he stopped practicing those after he turned 10 and learned he could beat up the younger kids, the way the older kids had once beat him up.  You stayed out of his business after that, younger and still wanting to impress him, but afraid of him too.

There was splashing.  He once got you, dunking you, thinking it was fun.  You could still hear his laughter.  Him getting too excited about something.  And not knowing when to stop.  Not knowing that he SHOULD stop.

You try not to think about the splashing.

When he had you, breathing water.  When he was pushing you down, again.  Hurt.  And he wouldn’t stop, you knew, until he got tired.  That was all.  He needed to have his “fit”  and then it would pass.

You tried not to think of flowers, how guilty he’d feel for weeks.  And even how sweet he’d be.

And so you dove deep.  

You think he followed you, in such a rage that he forgot how much he hated it underwater.

The light from the sun came down as beautifully as ever, like church.

You were quicker than him underwater.  

You knew that he would forget that he couldn’t breathe water.

All that splashing.  

You got away from him.  From him trying to hold you down.  And you tried to keep him under.  

All that splashing.

You just knew you were alone on the shore, the far side.  

But you weren’t sure where he would emerge.  And if that was a knife in his hand.  

And weeks later, the longer he is gone, the more you are certain he is gone.  If not gone from the water, if not gone from your life, then maybe he escaped.  He got into a car, a summer hitchhiker, his trunks still wet.  Undead, he found a way to move on.  And he’ll come back. Come back into your life, someday.

And you’ll think, now, it’s now.  The moment I was waiting for.

But the more days pass, the more he is gone.  As if the crucial seconds were stretched out, as if this time, these days, were just him holding his breath underwater.

He was terrible at holding his breath.

But he was great at scaring her.  And jumping out at her from anywhere else.  A heart attack.

Every pond was an opportunity for him.  A message, the only way she knew.  Come, kill me now.  I’m sorry I didn’t let you finish.

She felt his eyes on her.  She talked to him, not out loud.  But silently, in a way you do when you have a tender relationship with your killer.  The man you loved more than yourself.  He was watching, even if he was dead.  And if he was dead, she needed to keep Swimming. Because otherwise, she’d never go back.

You mustn’t think about the splashing.  Or that shadow, which may or may not have been him, sinking  deeper into the water.  Bleeding from where you had gotten a better angle on him.  And unconscious, sinking, his worst nightmare.

==

There was an outlet on the river.  A storm, the river overflowed in April and this storm made the waters run quicker.

A body was found in a storm drain, bloated and unrecognizeable.  It was something she overheard on the radio.  And then the news.  Something in the background.  Not even something to be aware of.  Maybe it was him, maybe not.  

She hadn’t called.

Hadn’t reported.  And if nobody is looking for you, you are not missing.  Especially if you are not missed.  He liked being anonymous, hiding.  HIs own cave.  Living off the grid.  

The bear you loved.

You should visit his cave.  Then you’d know.

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