Amongst the Gadflies

by Ford Collins

  Lowell ground his teeth to cracking, and quickened his strides.

  [Forty-Three]

  The pillars had ended and nothing else broke the white for as far as Lowell could see until he turned from Clinton Avenue onto Main Street.

  The courtyard where he’d spent hours and hours in quiet meditation surrounded by the beasts of the city had grown into a ziggurat of snow, pinned down beneath the skeletal fingers of trees at its perimeter.

  Lowell wished for a moment that he could sit on the benches again and watch the pigeons and squirrels go about their mindless lives, but they were long gone, and he knew he could not slow or stop moving toward the river.

  As he came around the corner of the white mass, Lowell saw a hundred-foot wave of shining black.

  He’d heard the buzzing for a few seconds prior to hitting Main, but had tuned it out between whistling gusts of wind. With his appearance, the wall flattened to a horizontal plane at Lowell’s eye level, and held steady as he approached.

  Finally, Lowell was forced to hold his progress.

  “Get out of my way.”

  “We do not approve, Lowell. We do not approve of what you are doing.”

  “It doesn’t concern me whether you approve or not. Get out of my way.”

  “Go back, Lowell. You have gone on far too long this way, and there is nothing left for you to prove here.”

  “You can’t stop me. You’re wasting my time.”

  Lowell tried to push forward, but the plane dipped to form a hand that held him firmly in place. The sensation on the small patches of his flesh that could still feel anything was of thousands of wings beating, and hundreds of mandibles gnawing and stingers stabbing at him. It didn’t matter to him, as his numbness dulled the sharpest discomfort. The hand released him, and the swarm reverted to its flattened plane.

  His elbows and shoulders stiffened, presumably from the toxins injected through the skin of his arms. Lowell raised his forearms in front of him, fists together and pressed down against the top of his head, and carved his way forward. The stinging began again, and as the savage attackers continued to bury their tiny daggers into every part of him except his covered face, he willed his body into stone. He felt nothing but the jarring of each pounding step through his feet and legs, up his spine to his brain. The gauntlet ran on for what felt like hours, stab after stab into his icy shell. A swath of tiny, twitching black bodies lay in his wake.

  He could hear the voices in his head from every direction as he passed through them, digging at him, trying to break his resolve to push on.

  “You cannot outrun us, Lowell. You cannot leave us behind…”

  His right lace snapped and the boot stuck in the snow, but he didn’t decelerate. He passed over a crest and onto the long, gentle descent to Crossroads Park.

  His muscles felt the load ease and fell to a cruising speed that allowed Lowell to save what little energy he had left for the task that awaited him on the far side of the river.

  “We are all the lives you have judged inconsequential, Lowell. Can you feel our displeasure, Lowell? Can you feel our sting? Your words may be ultimately of no consequence to us, Lowell, but your derision is symbolic of your greater… ”

  He couldn’t help but hear the words, but they struck no resonance within him anymore. The heat of his self-judgment had begun to build.

  He’d found the missing piece to the puzzle he’d been solving since he’d learned how to detach himself from the world and burrow into his empty cavernous place within. As a young boy, he’d fashioned the walls and doors and locks with the emotions he’d removed from his internal wiring and tossed aside.

  Lowell had no use for jealousy or anger or hatred or ecstasy. His satisfaction lay in the signs and connections that he dug out from the thoughts and words of others who floated around him like evicted spirits. They had no idea of all they allowed to fall away from themselves. They focused only on the superficial life. And Lowell retrieved what they cast down. All of the materials they donated! He could hardly believe his good fortune. Every bit had its place within his fortress.

  Once the structure was complete, he populated it with the observations he’d made of men, women, and children. Eventually he expanded to animals, even vegetation. Finally, he turned the scope of his unquenchable thirst for understanding to the lower forms of animal life: The bottom feeders, the vermin, the citizens of the kingdoms of pestilence and filth. By allowing for the possibility of simple connections between the classes, Lowell was fascinated to find much deeper and more profound similarities. Some explained man’s propensity to destroy what he cannot control or understand. Others rectified gaps in Lowell’s grasp of the origins of extreme examples of social behavior that had eluded him while he stuck to more linear, logical methods of deduction.

  The overlaps from group to group became Lowell’s obsession. So much could be explained in ways that no one else would ever grasp, regardless of how he might present his thinking.

  And these were the greatest questions he’d faced until the past week of his increasingly unwound life: What use was his work to anyone else if there were no means of sharing his discoveries with them? What had he spent his life accomplishing if there was no way to document the accomplishment?

  As he barreled down Main Street in the snow and artificial light of a November Wednesday in his shirtsleeves, khakis, and one boot, with three broken toes, frostbite over most of his body, and thousands of stingers working their way deeper to his core with each stride, an idea formed in Lowell’s mind.

  The key to everything shined so brightly in him that his skin burst into flame. His hair rose, crackling with brilliance, and danced on fire. He spread his elbows apart to free his face, looked upon the wave of insects that continued to crush inward, and tore through it with a pure white-hot light from his eyes and mouth.

  The tiny bodies sparked and disintegrated to dark gray dust upon the upper crust of the blanket of snow beyond the three-foot radius around him where his outburst had melted everything down to the wet pavement.

  The street lights closest to Lowell burst from the heat, followed by the next three in either direction on both sides of him. The shush from the Genesee down the hill, and the whisper of breeze that had picked back up in the absence of the swarm, were the only sounds in his ears now.

  Lowell crossed his ankles and sat in his perfect circle, his inferno having calmed to glowing embers in his eyes, and solidified his dissertation for final consideration during the last judgment he would pass on any man, and all mankind.

  [Forty-Four]

  As Lowell stood and began walking toward the bridge over the Genesee River, he could see that the snow was still dropping, burying his city and shielding its eyes from what he was preparing to do. The city had created him, for better or worse, and he wished to spare it any agony or regret over its role in his defining act.

  He paused in the spot near the center of the bridge, looking northward as the water flowed. The fire of his fury had subsided, and the cold of the iron rail crawled over his hands like frost over glass.

  Lowell wondered for a moment if the body had ever reached the surface again after falling below.

  He drifted to Lauren, who sat on her couch in his mind. He’d lifted her from the place her body had been subjected to such degradation, and transported her safely to her home.

  He couldn’t give her what she’d wanted most from him, however, so he forced himself to return to the present and look upon the rolling and jumping of the river beneath him.

  Lowell then wondered if he’d been the one to save his brother by keeping him from having to see him in his current state, or if his brother had truly been the one to save Lowell from his loneliness, and from himself.

  He looked over the hulking glass block of Central One Plaza to his left. His messenger work had meant nothing to him.

  But the freedom to think, largely lacking interruption and burdensome expectation, had been a gift he dearly valued. If he hadn’
t been employed there, he wouldn’t have witnessed the scene that played out a week prior and set him into the most chaotic and unnerving days of his life. Without the added stimulus, he may well have never solved his elusive riddle.

  At the foot of the building, a silhouette had taken its mark on the long, narrow stage of the park.

  Lowell looked down across his own imperfect self. He knew the time was at hand to tie up all loose ends and elucidate his findings to the world. It was all for show, of course. A celebration of his accomplishment strictly for himself, masked beneath this pantomime to satisfy the audience that he was, indeed, a hopeless lunatic lost in his own addled labyrinth.

  The distillation of time, error, sound, light, rage, weakness, and loss brought him a perfected essence to seal away and carry with him like a trophy.

  Lowell convinced his legs to rise and fall, his body to follow the last few steps along the path. His hand glided over the top surface of the bridge’s rail, riding along across alternating sections of stone and iron, until it fell with the down curve of the end wall.

  His eyes were tired. They had been open for too long, and had seen too much to have not suffered. Lowell could feel them itch and ache as he blinked away yet another cloud of flakes dropping in the never-ending storm.

  The sky was much darker than Thursday at about the same time. The overcast ceiling held out whatever drops of setting sun might have clung to the coming night otherwise. The bleached ground shone in reflection of the park lights, however, so lines were more crisp, even through the falling snow.

  Shadows played by drastically different rules in the bent light of these conditions, which added a nauseating distortion to Lowell’s perception. He found his position relative to the silhouette and regarded his counterpart in the void flatly.

  It faced away from him, and stood absolutely still.

  “Norman.” He spoke just above a conversational tone, to account for the shush of the river.

  The shape turned its head to pull in Lowell’s voice.

  “Norman, you can’t hide him from me anymore.”

  The dark head straightened forward, anticipating Lowell’s approach.

  “You’re a smart one, Norman. You thought I wouldn’t figure it out, didn’t you?”

  Lowell had covered half the distance to the shadow. His stomach knotted and his heart shook his ribs.

  “You never let them see you, did you? Just me. I should have figured you out, Norman, and I regret my underestimation now. You brought me here tonight to show me I was wrong, didn’t you?”

  By then he’d reached the shadow. Lowell grabbed the black shoulder and spun the mass around. Norman smiled his most brilliant smile, and began to clap slowly.

  Lowell’s eyes narrowed. “Give him to me.”

  He clenched the cloth around the shoulders of Norman’s coat and pulled him close to his face. Norman continued to smile, his eyes pinched just short of closed.

  “Give him to me.”

  He let go of Norman with his right hand and cocked his arm up by his own shoulder.

  The first blow landed squarely in the middle of Norman’s mouth, tearing his top lip to the septum and spattering blood over both of their faces.

  The second crunched in below Norman’s right eye, crushing the orbital bone in on itself and sending a tooth spinning from between dripping gums to the snowy ground.

  “You’ve done what you came to do, Norman. Now give him to me.”

  Lowell shook him violently, and watched as Norman’s pupils rolled back into his head. He released him, allowing the convulsing body to drop to the ground.

  He glanced at his fists, which had burst open on Norman’s face, and were split to what looked like bone, before dipping them into the snow to wipe them clean.

  The convulsions continued, followed by a rasping, guttural laughter. Lowell saw that Norman’s hair had become longer and grayed, bunched in knots and tangles. His coat was threadbare and filthy.

  He bent down and flipped the defecating man over. Lowell dropped to straddle his torso, pinning his arms down and sitting on his chest to keep him still.

  “I… Have… Nothing…” He punctuated each word with a savage blow to the old man’s head. “To… Say… To… You.”

  The defecator’s face had swollen to a gray and crimson ball. The few teeth remaining in his rotten mouth danced as a wet, squeaking laugh continued to bubble up from his throat.

  Lowell grabbed the stained lapels of the man’s jacket and leaned in.

  “Give him to me.” Lowell hissed the words through clenched teeth.

  He heard only more weak laughter from the ruined face, and Lowell reached to the back of the man’s head and grasped a handful of the greasy mane. He eased his weight off of the body and, with his other hand, flipped the man over to the concrete that had been cleared of snow during the struggle.

  Holding the old man by the hair, Lowell slammed the defecator’s face down until he could feel through the back of the man’s skull that the front had been pulped like that of the girl who had died in his withered fingers beneath the garbage truck tire.

  “Now… Give him to me.”

  Lowell’s palm shifted on the skull below it and shivered as a bolt of pain shot into his brain from the back of his head. Below his hand was a jagged, still-healing wound. The hair around it had shortened in length and deepened in hue to a chestnut brown, darkened with blood.

  He flipped the body beneath him over onto its back, and looked at himself. “You’re the one I’ve been looking for.”

  Ground Lowell grinned. “Congratulations.”

  Above Lowell said nothing and struck Lowell below in the forehead. Eyes. Nose. Chin. Mouth. The snapping of bones in his hands mingled with the popping of tissue and bone in his face. The final sections of walls and shelves remaining in his fortress were shaken loose and tumbled to the floor in a shower of dust and shards of broken glass.

  He struck until his wrists shattered, then flailed his hands at the mound of hair and jelly and teeth beneath them until the jagged bones of his forearms punctured the skin and arteries. The loss of blood was rapid and extreme, and Lowell faded quickly.

  He stumbled over the smashed body to the stone wall at the edge of the park closest to the river. With one arm draped over the rail and one thrust toward the black sky, he screamed. “This is the release from pain!”

  His head dropped, and his guts emptied through his mouth and onto his legs and feet.

  Spitting out the last of it, he screamed on. “This… This is the catalyst for my continued existence!”

  His chest heaved with the proclamation, and the weak final syllable trailed off into the darkness.

  Using one spouting wrist, he scrawled on the wall in blood:

  i lov you so, brother deer

  Lowell turned back to the body on the ground, wrapped his splintered arms around it, and lifted it to one shoulder. He wavered, regained his balance, and fell across the threshold, still squeezing the body to him as they plummeted.

  He sank to the river’s floor. His side was punctured and his ribs snagged on a large section of a branch caught between stones and protruding from the bed. The wood held him tight as the swollen waterway’s current washed Lowell clean of everything he no longer required, outside and in.

  The park and the city went silent again, save for the shush of the Genesee and the whispering breeze wrapping around millions of dancing snowflakes.

  [Forty-Five]

  The November blizzard ended as one of the city’s most majestic on record.

  It took local and state crews five days to reopen roads through downtown and the nearby neighborhoods. Damage to roofs from the weight of the frozen precipitation and to basements from flooding as it melted was estimated to be in the millions of dollars.

  The body of an elderly woman was found in her home by a concerned neighbor a week after the storm. She’d been taken by hypothermia after she ran out of kerosene for her space heater and couldn’t get out
to buy more because a mountain of snow had blocked her only exit. Hers was the only death on record.

  Lauren didn’t search for Lowell again, and didn’t report his disappearance to police because she assumed he didn’t want to be found. She imagined him making his way to a serene spot by the Atlantic Ocean to live out his days in meditation. Eventually this daydream faded, but it lasted long enough to allow her to let him go completely.

  By late December, only a half inch of snow rested on the ground. The worst of the winter had passed unusually early for that part of the world.

  Just north of Crossroads Park, the Genesee River drops ninety-six feet over High Falls.

  Sightseers can take it in from the Pont De Rennes, a pedestrian bridge that spans the gorge beyond.

  Two such photo seekers stood at the midpoint of the walkway, hand-in-hand, during a visit back to the hometown they’d left behind more than three decades prior. The couple, in their mid-fifties, listened to the white noise of the crashing water, and said nothing for a good ten minutes.

  Finally, the husband raised and steadied his arms for a close-up shot as a glistening gray blob passed by his line of sight. He pulled his face back from the camera and struggled for a few seconds to locate the object again. It bobbed up to the surface, spun around a few times, then slid back below the frothing water.

  The man pointed it out to his wife wordlessly.

  Once the object reappeared and the woman realized what her husband had been calling her attention to, she shook her head and motioned for him to complete their walk to the far side of the bridge.

  “Just makes you sick, doesn’t it? Such a beautiful place, and people treat it like it’s a dumpster. Disgusting…”