by Ford Collins
Groups never saw Lowell if he had established his position before they approached, even if he was planted in open space. Individuals would sometimes catch a glimpse of him standing nearby, and blink the apparition away before they entered their cars. It was this phenomenon of being hidden away in plain view that allowed Lowell access to the choicest dialog, which never failed to strengthen his hypotheses.
Mankind is steadily eroding the earth. Men pace the ruts set for them by all those before them.
As the stone is ground to dust and the path sinks further, each new generation sees only the etched walls around it and assumes it is the whole great, wide world. The sky above becomes so narrowed by the burrowing, that the light is fairly negligible.
A fairy tale had evolved to explain away the descent as Progress, with the gradual darkening passed off as a standing challenge for all men to reach higher and higher in order to succeed.
Down in the trench, they wallow and fester and multiply. The augmented weight of their progeny drives the flock faster still toward the lowest levels of existence.
The end could only be an implosion of a center too dense to continue. Many will be crushed into oblivion. The remainder will feed upon the wreckage, and eventually upon themselves, until they too crumble to nothing.
All of this behavior, illustrating near total lack of couth, education, modesty, selflessness, and common sense, adds to the burden shouldered by the Individual. It splinters bones and squeezes innards to paste.
When—if—men reach advanced age, they either fall beneath their accumulation, or look behind themselves to see the load they’ve borne to their ends and attempt to pry it free, to atone. They try to force backward the heads of younger men to see the loads they blindly carry on their own shoulders, to help them repent and find a light to fight toward, to gain footholds on the heads of other men to their fore and climb the mountain of the lost to save themselves. Invariably, they’re mocked, pushed aside, or ignored, and eventually they disengage.
“Just can’t help yourself, can you, kid?”
Lowell spun hard to his right, hands raised in fists, his pulse a syncopated blur before drawing back to a steady, though still rapid, pace.
The defecating man from behind the sushi restaurant sat in an unused handicapped parking spot, resting against the expired meter.
He waved his hand out over the slanted third of the first floor in a flourish, and flashed a cockeyed, broken grin.
“It’s never-ending, isn’t it? This parade?”
He spit and whistled between his teeth with every th and s, and reeked as if he’d been basted in grain liquor.
“Aren’t you… Who are you? How did you know I was here?” Lowell was still fighting to calm himself, but spoke with an even voice. His hands relaxed and dropped to his sides.
“How would I know you were here? Why would it matter to me, for that matter, friend?”
“You shouldn’t bother yourself with others’ business. It’s not polite.”
“I really don’t have a whole lotta need for etiquette at this stage of life, son.”
Lowell crouched at the outer end of the parking space, drawing his face level with the man’s grubby head.
“So, where is this parade of yours off to?”
“Huh… Beats me, friend. I just watch it passing by. Figure you’d be the one to know.”
“And why is that?”
The man’s body shook with a silent chuckle, and he dabbed at his eyes with a blackened scrap of cloth.
Lowell cleared his throat and repeated himself, “Why is that? Why would you say that?”
“Just a hunch, I guess.”
“Doesn’t look to me as though your hunches have paid off very well.”
“Heh... Yeah. No it doesn’t. And what you see is what you get, right?”
“I’ve found that there isn’t usually much below the surface in shallow water.”
“The damned.” The defecator still smiled, but his eyes had steeled.
“The damned what?” Lowell knew exactly what he had meant. He wanted to hear the old man say it.
“Mankind steadily eroding the earth. That damned.”
Lowell dropped his gaze to the floor. He flexed his shoulders forward and back, and stood, stooped over slightly.
He didn’t need to look in the old man’s direction to know he wasn’t there anymore. He’d heard a rustling from near the meter as he studied the arcs around the smooth toes of his boots. He imagined the polished caps as irregularly shaped black bubbles protruding from his veins, through the skin, preparing to hemorrhage and swallow him. He kept them contained and returned upright.
“Oh,” Lowell whispered. “That damned.”
[Ten]
Later that night, beneath twisted and tangled covers, Lowell dreamt.
He never saw his face reflected, but he knew he was nine years old.
He was in a suburban town that was buried in snow, and he wore grey jeans and a puffy tan winter jacket with thick orange and dark brown zigzags across the chest of the nylon shell.
His mittens were oversized and black. He wore navy blue moon boots with enormous rubber soles and a single white stripe over the front of the ankle of each boot.
He stood outside a ten-foot-tall cyclone fence that ran completely around an athletic field.
At the far end of the field, about two hundred yards distant, was a high school.
He followed the fence around to a side road that led directly to the front of the building, and made his way toward it.
He could see a large white bus with tinted windows parked in the circle in front of the school. This was his destination, he guessed.
The closer he got to the school and the bus and the circle, the heavier his feet became. His thighs burned with exertion. He felt a sense of urgency tighten his lungs, and the air that enveloped his head with each exhale became so dense with the reek of decomposing flesh it made his eyes sting and water. His tears froze into lines on his cheeks.
The nose of the bus lifted from the ground, and a warning siren tore through the dry air and into his brain.
Smoke poured from the bus’s tail, and Lowell realized the bus was actually a rocket, rising into launch position.
He knew he was supposed to be on the rocket. His brother had left a note, which Lowell pulled from his jacket pocket to read.
don not be lat my brother deer. the rockutt is going to leeve yoo too and yoo shold not be arond when the essplosun fills up the tuwn. we havn not alwas told yoo how we lov yoo so but we eech and evry one do. i can only hopp yoo will forgiv me brother deer.
The pain in his legs beat him, and he lurched forward onto his hands and knees, burying the note in the snow, and sinking down until his chin scraped to rest on the icy crust.
The siren gave way to the flaring rocket’s roar. The fence to Lowell’s left convulsed, sections snapping their ties and whipsawing in all directions.
The rot of his lungs had been replaced with an antiseptic wave of chlorine and cotton, and Lowell began to cry. Warm new tears melted the corduroy of saline icicles across his face.
“It was my feet! It wasn’t my heart! It was my feet! I had no chance! Please come back and take me! It wasn’t my heart!” He wailed to no one.
He couldn’t hear his own cries over the rocket’s howl. The only proof that he’d formed the words at all was the taste of blood boiling from his ruptured throat.
In the last seconds of the launch sequence, Lowell saw faces pushed flat to the insides of the rocket windows.
Tiny beads of eyes were all trained on him as he screamed red and turned away from the exhaust heat.
The rocket lurched and escaped its supports, melting snow within a hundred-foot ring around the discarded base as it glided ever more quickly into emptiness.
Lowell saw a small patch of crushed, soggy grass peeking from beneath his hands.
He was still holding the note, soaked through with snow and traces of blood dripped from the c
orners of his mouth. The words were smeared, completely illegible.
His body dropped to the earth, sapped of strength and desire to continue forward.
He lay there, waiting for the ground to erupt, split, and vaporize him along with the grass and mud and stones beneath him.
And as he waited, he felt a hand press down, nudging between his shoulder blades. He opened his eyes and turned back to see his brother smile and speak to him.
Lowell shook his head and pointed to his ears. His brother nodded and looked to the sky where the rocket had sped.
As he turned to follow his brother’s line of sight, Lowell sensed more than heard a sort of popping, and saw a flash of light, surrounded immediately by a cloud of pure white smoke. The flesh of his face compressed gently momentarily under the pressure of the expanding energy.
He looked back frantically at his brother, who patted a mitten on Lowell’s shoulder, and stooped to the ground. He took off one mitten and dragged a pink index finger around in the mud.
After a minute, Lowell could make out:
we misst it but i culd not think of yoo alon heer so i staad too for yoo. i lov yoo so brother deer.
Everyone else had boarded the rocket willingly, knowing it was bound for detonation in the sky above the town.
They had chosen to break from the world before it folded them forever in its diseased arms, swallowing them whole after they drifted from consciousness and collapsed into dust.
His brother laid down next to him, kissed him on the forehead, and pulled Lowell tight to his chest.
They closed their eyes and slept.
[Eleven]
Saturday morning was cold.
Long clouds split the sky into uneven rows like ashes raked over by fingers in an extinct fire pit.
Lowell looked out a small window by his bed. It faced the apartment house’s parking lot, and through the naked tree branches he could see the yards of properties the next street over.
He rubbed his neck, stiff from the awkward angle he’d passed out in on his couch. He was fully dressed, boots, unbuttoned pea coat, and all.
Lowell thought of his brother, exactly as he’d appeared in the dream. The minutes crept along the borders of his memories of the boy, pulling back minor details at first, working toward the center and inching in to reclaim every thread of his outfit, every lash from his drooping eyelids. The words, horribly misspelled but sincere, stayed scrawled in the mud above the boys’ prone bodies just longer than the broadest shapes of his brother’s face and clothes.
Soon, the last traces of his brother and the note sank back into the ground. Lowell removed his clothes in silence, showered, and sat at his kitchen table with a memo pad and pen. He raised the capped top edge of the pen to the center of his brow, below where his brother had kissed him goodnight, and tapped softly.
He mouthed the only line he could remember verbatim: “i lov yoo so, brother deer.”
And Lowell began to write.
Brother,
I never got a chance to thank you for staying behind with me to face the cold.
I never would have made it to that flight, but I think we both know I wasn’t meant to.
There is something noble about going down with the ship, but there’s something foolish about it as well. I choose to believe you acted nobly and I was the fool.
While I can’t understand why I was late to the departure, I can only assume you’re fully aware. It would mean everything to me if you’d return, even if only long enough to tell me how you worked it out.
Lowell
Lowell folded the letter and sealed it in an envelope. He didn’t put a stamp on it, and wrote only “Brother Deer” on the face, then put on his coat and boots, walked the letter to the blue post office box on the corner of Oxford and Monroe, and dropped it in.
[Twelve]
After mailing the letter off, Lowell spent hours sitting and staring at the blank memo pad and capped pen on his kitchen table.
Outside, a smattering of snowflakes drifted down around the house and each building and street and sidewalk and tree. The flakes melted on impact, leaving small wet outlines and droplets on everything. Eventually the sun burned away the slate sky and glistened through and within the billions of points of water throughout the city.
Lowell threw on his coat and boots, and set out for Crossroads Park.
No external sights or sounds registered as he began traveling. He receded into himself as he hadn’t been able to since lying in his bed Thursday night.
Trucks and teenagers slid by invisibly down Monroe, dragging their rattling drones with them over and around the bubble Lowell walked within.
His chest constricted, and he labored to breathe fully, but he wouldn’t slow his pace. His fingertips tingling as the designs of the event burned into his mind, singeing his eyes to smoking as they passed through from across the distance. The pain in his heart burst and dropped into his guts as he thought in turns of the murder, the murdered, his brother, himself.
The cold air finally began to fill him, patching the holes in his chest and stomach.
He couldn’t see the forms of that night through the ache anymore. As he passed from Monroe across the Inner Loop and onto Chestnut Street, he shook his head clear enough to be blinded by the brilliant sunlight cascading over downtown.
Lowell refocused on his surroundings and the final half-mile walk to his destination.
He turned left on Broad and walked west until he crossed over the Genesee. The river flowed north, chilled and glassy, to High Falls, just beyond Central One Plaza and the scene of the murder.
Lowell found clarity of purpose again as he neared the location. His breathing settled, his chest relaxed.
He needed to see the park in the light of day. He needed to find the footsteps that the shadows had scorched into the dust, and step in them himself.
At State Street, Lowell turned right and walked the block to Main, where he could see the plaza rising.
He crossed Main and felt his legs weigh down with expectation, though he had no reason to expect anyone or anything to greet his arrival.
As he made the final left turn into the southern mouth of the park, he stopped dead, stunned by the thin stretch of pavement, benches, and trees.
Every inch glowed as if ablaze from below. The far end was wholly engulfed in flames, pulsing as it licked at the space before it. The air shimmered inches above the ground, a river of fire surging parallel to its fraternal twin of water lying beyond the stone wall.
The ground moisture evaporated in the early afternoon sun with a hiss, audible even above the pervading din of the Genesee.
The sounds built in intensity independently and rose, interlocking, to combine into a wall of white noise around Lowell, cancelling out everything beyond its boundaries.
He closed his eyes and hastily retreated to the antechamber outside his hatch.
It was this interference that allowed him to bypass the corrupted wiring that had barred him from his studio over the past couple of days. It lifted him over the errors and let him once again access his place of contentment.
He was embarrassed now to look down on the wires and identify Insignificance and Legacy as simply terminals of incompatible tracks. The ideas had built to the point of a junction they should logically have formed, but couldn’t create a suitable congress.
Lowell previously identified that some legacies live on to dwarf the lives that spawned them many times over. He’d also isolated the dominant characteristic of mankind as its insignificance. To rectify the broken circuit, Lowell decided that the idea that legacies carried on as extensions of men was irrational. If the man that created the legacy was ultimately worthless, then any record of or monument to his words or deeds that served to guide or inspire future men would necessarily exist independently of the being, or suffer the same fate of insignificance. No being can create something more perfect than themselves.
Furthermore, the value of the legacy couldn’t b
e judged by other men, as they lacked validity as well.
Therefore, the collective legacy of man in the form most commonly attributed to it is a myth. It merely serves as a shell, protecting humans from some greater truth that they cannot comprehend. It can be molded by anyone at any time to suit particular needs. It is ever-present, and, when left unmolested for a great length of time, it will return to its purest form: nameless, faceless, silent, indestructible.
Lowell inspected the wires once more and found them soldered solid beneath him. He stepped down to the floor of the antechamber from the height granted by the intermingled rushes of sound surrounding him, and opened the hatch to his study. The clutter inside had sorted itself.
For the first time since he’d witnessed a shadow slay its reflection, Lowell felt whole.
[Thirteen]
Lowell marked the occasion of full reintegration not by employing his internal facilities, but by avoiding them.
The light that swallowed him in the park dulled and eventually dissipated once the moisture evaporated and the sun shifted and hid behind the high-rises to the west of the space. The air cooled in the shadows, and a chill ran through Lowell’s torso and down each leg. During his epiphany, his knees had dropped to the ground, his hands resting upon them. His folded body was the portrait of serenity, belying his active internal state.
The lower legs of his pants were dark from the melted snow, and wrapped themselves tightly to his shins as Lowell walked east on Main Street.