The Shattered Genesis
Part One: The Exodus
Brynna
I pretended not to notice the two unabashedly obnoxious college jocks in the corner of the room talking about me. Despite the differences in our chromosomes that some would say result in me, a woman, neve
r being able to understand them, little boys, I could imagine their inane, sexually charged babble as clearly as I could see the untouched drink on the table in front of me. I could feel their hormones raging and their egos inflating vividly, as if they were actually drilling said babble painfully into my ears. I had never had much respect for younger men. I had been around too long to be swayed by what they believed to be smooth-talking.
I was twenty-two physically. Only physically.
I began to contemplate the true meaning of age and time, only to be baffled a mere minute into my mental debate. Normally, I could sit and stew over the topic for hours, attempting to make sense of it all. But that night, I just wanted my brain to shut down, to submerge itself in silence. I was sick of raging thoughts.
Instead of trying to understand the deeper meaning of things, I switched my concentration over to the bar I was in and the patrons that surrounded me. A group of girls around my physical age were sitting directly behind me having an enthusiastic debate about something that was obviously of dire importance. I allowed myself to listen in as one of these girls allowed her spirited indignation to reach its maximum point of intensity; she raised her voice suddenly, shouting about an 'idol' and something called a jay-low. I wondered if perhaps idolatry had become a new college trend. It certainly wouldn't surprise me.
I honed in on a conversation that was occurring between a man and a woman who were also of my physical age. Every now and then, they would smile at something the other said. They looked boringly normal, like every other couple I had seen throughout my many years of existence. They were talking about so many different things I decided it would eventually become frustrating trying to keep up. I shut them out and moved on to a group of particularly average looking people in the back of the room.
“I am sorry but there is no way that Tolstoy is better than Dickens!” One of them exclaimed as he slammed his hand on the table. His friends laughed at his show of spirit.
Well, at least they knew who Tolstoy and Dickens were. However, I found their frequent hand-gesturing and the very discreet way they were looking around to make sure people were listening to their conversation to be brash and quite frankly, aggravating. “Look at how smart we are, world. You can only wish you knew what we were talking about!” Oh, Lord, spare me from such ludicrous shows of artificiality...
Now one might wonder what a condescending non-human would be doing in a place like that. Was I so miserable that I had to sit smack in the middle of a rerun of some ridiculous 90's prime-time drama or some wannabe smartly written sitcom and denounce their players in my mind? The short answer: Yes. It made me feel superior.
My thoughts were rudely interrupted when one of the aforementioned obnoxious jocks approached my lonely table by the window. I know how cliché it must sound but the smell of alcohol that wafted over me as soon as he opened his crooked mouth forced images of unshaven homeless men buried under piles of filthy rags to pop into my mind in unwelcome clarity.
“His future...” I thought to myself before having to fight off a smirk as the next thought tumbled to the forefront of my mind. “Okay, that was awful...”
“I don't recognize you.” He told me loudly over the sea of voices as he plopped his remarkably sizable posterior into the seat across from me. The chair creaked under his weight.
Was chivalry really that dead?
“I don't recognize you and I know everyone.”
Now, I had two different courses of action plotted and ready to go in my head. I could humor him and allow him to think he had a shot only so I could turn him down flat after he made his sloppy, drunken pitch. Or I could turn him away and be a humanitarian about the whole damn thing.
“Everyone?” I responded as I turned my head and looked at the television propped up on the wall behind the bar. The news was on; on the screen there was some diagram of the solar system with an arrow pointing far away from the reaches of our sun. I turned my head to look at him. In the dim light his features contorted, taking away his boyish good looks and replacing them with the features of a quizzical spider monkey; his arms were elongated and drooping at his sides and his uncommonly dark eyes were studying me with more curiosity than I expected. After blinking once, his appearance shifted again and that time, I was startled by the change; his nose had flattened and his nostrils grew taller and thinner. In his black eyes, I saw a dangerous lust. I had just taken a sip of my watered down margarita and wondered if perhaps it was stronger than I realized.
“Everyone.” He replied and I was tempted to say, “Everyone?” back again to see how long I could keep him repeating himself. “And I have definitely never seen you before.”
“You wouldn't. I don't go to school here.”
“You don't?” He asked, his voice rising as he prepared to give an impassioned monologue on why his overpriced Ivy League school was the best in the world. “It's only the greatest...”
Well, that was enough human contact for one evening...
“Hey, I am sure that is going to be one rousing speech but I'm actually on my way out. It was so...” I rolled my eyes to the sky, “nice talking to you.”
Anyone with half a brain would be able to tell that I was being sarcastic. But this young man did not have half a brain.
“I have a scholarship there. Football.”
“Yes, that is one big deal. Really, it is.” I started to gather up my bag and stand. He rose to his feet. “I'm sure you are just thrilled about it.”
“Oh, I get it.” He pointed at me, nodding slightly as something dawned on him that escaped me, strangely enough. “You like girls, right?”
“No.” I replied, unable to keep a small, disdainful smile from my face. “I just don't like boys.”
The girls who had been gabbing about the idols exclaimed in what I assumed to be shock but as it turns out, was a thrilled cry of feminine unity. One of them held their hand up to me as I passed and for the hell of it, I slapped it, allowing her to believe that we had formed an estrogen-charged bond, however short-lived it may have been. At the very least, I gifted those girls with a line to use when dribbling morons in a bar came up to them looking to, as the young people call it, “score.”
Once I walked outside, the wonderfully harsh winter wind filled my lungs and cut at my exposed skin. I walked to the curb and dug into my purse, looking for my ever-present pack of Camels. I found them and pulled one from the pack, crushing the filter and putting the cigarette between my lips. Now, for the real challenge: the lighter search.
It was while I was rooting around in my bag that I became aware of someone standing next to me. I looked to see a middle-aged man leaning against the street-light's post and outstretching his lit lighter to me. I know it sounds girlish and stupid, but I had always wanted someone to light my cigarette for me. I couldn't fight the strange glow I felt well up inside of my chest as I leaned forward and lit my cigarette in the flame he was holding.
“Thank you.” I said and after that, I was lost as to what to say, so in staying true to my social awkwardness, I studied him closely for a moment. He was at least forty, perhaps even a little older. I was never very skilled at pinning down someone's age by mere guessing. He was in need of a shave, but not desperately; his stylish goatee was starting to spread out across his face like an army of insurgent troops waging war on an untouched plain. His hair was gelled and styled in that perfectly calcul
ated mess that men seemed to favor in those days.
“You're welcome.” He replied politely. He seemed to take no notice of me analyzing every detail of his appearance. “So, not to sound strange, but I was watching you.”
“That sounds very strange.” I told him as I exhaled smoke.
“I know it does. In the bar, I was watching you. You seemed awfully disdainful.”
“That's my general state of being, I suppose. I didn't think that it was so obvious.”
“Well, I can assure you that it is.”
“Okay. Thanks for letting me know.” I looked out at the street as the cars flew past, letting the noises of the evening fill my ears in hopes of drowning out any more of his observations on my character. But it isn't easy to drown out someone who is standing right next to you and even the horns blaring and the rushing whir of the traffic couldn't suppress his voice.
“Do you often shoot down the advances of young men?”
“Who are you, the official spokesperson for the conversational and social rights of horny, drunken, college frat boys?” I asked, knowing that I was being prickly and as he suggested, disdainful. But as I said, disdain was constantly flowing from my lips and mind. It was my dominant status.
“No. Just an interested observer.”
“If you're trying to avoid sounding strange, please be aware that your attempt is not even close to believable, let alone totally convincing. You are failing miserably.”
“So are you.”
“I don't try to sound normal anymore.” I informed him somewhat more defensively than I had intended. “It just makes me look as pathetically stupid as those young twits in that bar.”
“Aren't you their same age?”
“I am. But I'm not a twit.”
“I like your use of the word 'twit.' One rarely hears that in conversation these days.”
“I like to keep a wide variety of insults handy, even if I am not insulting a person or a group of people to their face or faces, respectively.”
“Are you an English major?”
I chuckled to myself for a moment, thinking about how odd the conversation was becoming. Was he trying to pick me up or was he trying to annoy me? Neither option seemed particularly befitting of him.
“I would have been, I guess.” I told him. “At least you went with 'English major.' Generally, when people hear me talk, they assume I must have a mental deficiency. One young man, who must have thought he was God's gift to the mental health profession, told me once that he felt, in his not-so-professional opinion that I was suffering from Asperger's Syndrome.”
“And what did you say?” The man asked me. “May I?” He indicated the pack of cigarettes that I had started to put back into my bag.
I handed one to him and watched closely as he lit it up. I couldn't help noticing that it was quite attractive the way he expertly inhaled and exhaled the smoke.
Snapping out of my own observance, I answered his question.
“I said that was an insult to people with Asperger's Syndrome.”
He was the one that laughed softly now.
“I read a lot as a child and still read a lot today. That might be the reason for my advanced sentence structure, I suppose. I did take a test while I was in school to determine my IQ. Apparently, it was quite high. But I've never put much stock into that. I find tests that are meant to define one's intelligence to be, in most cases, horribly misleading.”
“Is it an effortless thing? The way you talk, I mean?”
“I suppose so. I don't feel like I'm putting much effort into it.”
“I see.” He nodded. “So where are you headed?”
I looked at him again, raising my eyebrows slightly. I had given the idea of him trying to pick me up and trying to annoy me the appropriate amount of thought but I had never pondered the possibility that he might be dangerous. To not immediately think the worst of a man was a new and very undesirable turn of events in my world.
“See, that was me sounding strange again. I know exactly what you're thinking.”
“That you're a rapist and a murderer? That's what I'm thinking.” I was starting to back away very slowly, so as not to give away my plan to run should he give me a reason to.
“Well, I didn't think you'd immediately go to rapist and murderer.” Every step of distance I put between him and me, he immediately mimed. “But dangerous, yes. I did assume that's what you were thinking.”
“Well, you assume correctly even if you did not correctly gauge the level of danger I believed I was in. Have a good night, dear sir.”
I turned away, expecting him to shake his head and continue on in the opposite direction. Instead, he caught up with me and began to saunter along at my side as I walked.
“Alright, I'll admit it,” I told him as my body began to tremble and my feet carried me forward at an even quicker pace. “You're officially starting to worry me.”
“I apologize.” He told me apathetically before turning his gaze to meet mine. With an intense warning in his eyes, he muttered, “Just go with it, okay?”
“No, I will not 'go with it'!” I snapped at him, stopping in mid-stride and turning around. I was going to go back to the bar and ask one of those drunken morons to walk me home. They probably wouldn't, but I would risk rejection in hopes of gaining safe passage to my apartment. I would allow their advances to continue just until I was safely inside with the door locked securely behind me. I would take their endless chattering about football, my physique and all the things they would like to do to it in order to avoid being assaulted by this strange man that was walking beside me.
“Brynna? That's your name, isn't it?” He asked calmly. I stopped walking and turned to him.
“So you're a stalker, too?!” I exclaimed before reaching into my bag and rooting around for the other item I constantly kept on me: my pepper spray. Just as I was about to dump the contents of my purse onto the sidewalk in order to find it, I looked up to see him holding the canister between his thumb and forefinger.
“You left your bag on the back of your chair.” He explained before placing my only possible weapon in his jacket pocket.
“Alright, I want you to listen to me,” I kept my voice steadier and bolder than anyone could possibly feel in a moment like that, “I don't know who you are. I don't know if this is because you're just craving sexual contact or if it’s in some response to some familial crisis that you experienced as a child...” I was rambling, trying to keep him at bay with my ridiculous over-thought and unnecessary musings. “But I can assure you that I am not experienced in sex and as a result, not good at it. Okay?”
Leave it to me to still be overly analyzing someone even as I faced the prospect of being horribly violated. Call it my defense mechanism. I firmly believed that I could talk my way out of anything. It was the last straw of hope I grasped at when faced with trauma.
I didn't realize it but I was backing away from him slowly, preparing for the moment that I dropped my bag and ran back to the bar. I looked behind me and my heart iced over with the unthinkably strong intensity of absolute, desperate terror. The two jocks from the bar had been following in our wake like shadowed specters in the dark. The dim light cast by the street lamps contorted their features again or perhaps my own fear did that for me. Perhaps I was seeing them as appearing monstrous because I knew what their unspeakable intentions were.
“Oh, my God...” I whispered softly and I tried to remember everything I knew about adrenaline rushes and the inherent, animal instinct to stay alive. Whoever said that when one is in a bind they can suddenly become unstoppable fighting machines clearly never experienced the fear that prey feels. They especially didn't account for when the prey had felt that same suffocating fear before...
“Listen to me, Brynna.” The man was walking towards me, reaching one hand out slowly.
“Do not come near me! I...” I scrambled for something, anything to scare him away. “I have a knife!”
The words tumbl
ed out of my mouth before I could fully realize just how ridiculous I sounded. Why would I have reached for pepper spray when I had a weapon that would end the current shenanigans in a more severely final way?
I've always considered myself as being of much higher intellect than almost everyone else on God's green earth. But in situations where one feels what I felt at that moment, it just doesn't matter what some faulty IQ test said about you. There is nothing to do, say, or think; there is only the swelling, smothering fear in your chest, paralyzing you while mentally driving you to act. It is so frustratingly paradoxical.
“Just walk with me.” The man instructed calmly as he reached out his hand to me. “You have no chance of outrunning them...”
“Oh, my God...” I muttered again. I looked all around me frantically for a way out. I couldn't go back to the bar and I couldn't run straight ahead. But there were no cars coming and I knew that if I had any chance at all, it would begin with me running across the street.
I turned and darted into the road, narrowly avoiding being mowed down by a cab that appeared from nowhere and went rushing by, horn blaring and a curse word being screamed out the window by the driver. I had never been skilled at sports or any type of physical activity; I possessed the endurance of an eighty year old with chronic arthritis and spots on their lungs. But with that adrenaline coursing through me, I ran, as some clever person who thinks up clichés once said, like the devil was chasing me, which in my mind, he was.
But just as that expression took a lap around my mind, I became aware of the fact that no one was chasing me in reality. I stopped running, allowing myself to stand panting on the sidewalk, leaned up against the brick wall of a closed health food store and ruing the day I started smoking as it limited my already hindered capacity for prolonged physical activity. I looked around, back up the street towards the music blaring out of the open door of the bar I had just left. I saw no one.
“Okay...” I muttered to myself, realizing that I was trembling even more intensely. I continued to walk quickly despite the tightness in my chest that made my heart feel as though it was attempting to beat through cellophane. If there were people around, I like to think that I would have asked for help but out of fear of looking like a crazed albeit well-dressed drunk on the street, I probably would have just barreled on past them as though I was just in a big hurry. In the city, no one would think anything of a twenty-two year old speed walking down the sidewalk. No one would ask questions.
The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) Page 1