Total Life

by Erwin Wensley

  When Peter was born, I was just a guy trying to start my life with a woman who had accidentally gotten pregnant. And I wasn’t the right guy for the job because I was just a guy trying to find peace inside the mess that was always inside me. In fact, even nowadays, I'm not yet a guy prepared to be a father. I don’t think we ever get prepared for it, if you wanna know. Raising a child is such a confusing and uncertain task that human beings simply can’t do it. All we do is try to guide our children along the path we think is right (usually the path we choose for ourselves) and, as Laura says, try to stop them from doing too big shits.

  Will the other child be treated better than Peter? You may be asking yourself this question now and I’m obliged to answer honestly: I don’t know, but probably yes. Okay, it’s true that Laura will teach the child the whole repertoire of profanity in our language before it even learns the names of the colors, but I can still try to do some right things this time. I'm not saying that I'm gonna be a good father (I think I've made it clear that no one is capable of that), but I can at least try to be better this time. I must be better.

  After the boys finish their small performance and receive a round of applause, Mandy stands in front of everyone, brushes her hair off her face and starts singing. Her voice is really damaged, but she still looks beautiful singing Soundgarden's Fell on Black Days.

  Laura caresses Samuel's leg.

  Samuel takes the phone outta his pocket in order to pretend that Laura is doing nothing.

  Laura rolls her eyes and touches the boy's arm.

  Samuel moves his finger through his phone.

  Laura doesn’t take her eyes off him.

  Samuel frowns at his phone, blinks, then looks at Mandy.

  Mandy stops singing and asks Samuel if everything is okay.

  And as if knowing somehow what is to come next, I imagine that nothing is okay. Nothing could ever have been worse.

  “It seems they are investigating the disappearance of that girl from our school,” Samuel says. “Abby, remember? She went to our house a few times to do homework with me.”

  Laura stops touching Samuel.

  “That little blonde girl with glasses?” Phill asks. “I heard she was missing, but I thought they'd found her.”

  Samuel says, “Actually, it's been a month since she's gone, and the cops just cannot find a clue. It's as if there's something hacking their system and keeping the guys away from the case. Maybe it was something much more serious than what we think.”

  “But they're still trying, aren’t they?” Laura asks

  “That's what I was gonna talk about. As the police isn’t getting anywhere, the people from Desert Rock themselves decided to intervene. They've even created an online case support group where people can share any clues they find.”

  “Then we’ve got a deal,” Phill says, finishing the meat. “We'll help find this girl no matter where she is.”

  “It's a great idea,” Laura says, standing up. “What do you think about helping us investigate, Jimmy?”

  I have the impression that words won’t come out, but I can still say, “Sure ... It'd be great to help find Abby.”

  And this is how my world begins to crumble.

  XV

  Steve speaks in your ear.

  You have the hood of your gray blouse on your head, the earphones so he can talk and the cocaine tidy in a row on the back of your hand. You look at yourself in the mirror of this old bar, the kind of bar people go to when they're at rock bottom, and spending money on drinks seems like the only thing to do. The kind of place you go when there’s no more hope, and you honestly don’t give a shit. You look at your eyes wrapped in dark circles. You sigh. And Steve says, “Snort it, Jimmy.”

  You take the note left in the sink, bring it to your hand and snort it. The cocaine goes through your nostril and goes to the throat. As Steve commands, you run the tip of your finger on what's left on your hand and rub it on your gums. Then you turn your neck until you hear a snap and look at yourself once more. There is one thing about perdition that draws you, as if unhappiness were true happiness and emptiness the best way to feel complete. Steve taught you that. It was one of the many things he taught you and you should feel grateful for it. Grateful for the nothing's freedom.

  “Don’t try to be happy,” Steve says.

  He says, “Don’t try to be a good person.”

  Through the earphones, Steve says to you, “Don’t think you're special.”

  And he keeps saying, “Don’t expect that you will be famous and will have millions of flashes on your face ... because the truth is that you won’t. You won’t be loved by all and you won’t be a successful person. You'll never be as full and happy as you think you should. You'll never be able to buy everything you should buy. You'll never be good enough. And only when you realize that you’re gonna be able to live life for real. Embrace the emptiness.”

  If you had only heard this earlier, when you used to spend your day in a book that would help you get into college and buy a car and a house and have financial stability ... Someone should have said that to you before you fall into this whole shit that you should get a job to earn more and work less. Before you believed in this story that you should avoid suffering. The right thing was to find the most monotonous lifestyle possible, one in which you could spend all day sitting in the shadow and never getting hurt. If someone had then shown you, even for a minute, that this was all shit, that true life was in suffering rather than in calm, then things could have been different.

  If you had spent more time getting into fights and less time trying to get into the financial sector of some company, life could have a little more sense.

  If you hadn’t believed in others, you wouldn’t have gotten lost the way you got lost until Steve found you.

  You would still be buying and competing and searching and earning and showing off ... Always in a loop.

  “Come on, Jimmy,” Steve says. “Go into the hall, there's something I want you to do.”

  In the hall, Steve tells you to look at a man younger than you and who has larger arms than yours. He’s talking on the counter with a blond woman in brown boots and jeans. She smokes, laughs, touches his arm and you think about how she looks like a failed country singer who dies of breast cancer fifty-seven years after being cheated by her third husband. Now, however, at the height of her youth, she’s within the standard of what we consider to be beautiful, the kind of woman who takes any man to bed and forgets the fact that she’s not eternal until the first wrinkles begin to appear and the men stop looking at her as often as they have always looked. Then she feels depressed and realizes how much her life has been worthless. How much excessive human contact was useless, after all. She realizes that life's gone. That she's lost. That there 's nothing real inside her. And she dies alone, cheated and with cancer.

  Steve says, “I hacked everyone's phone here to hear what they were talking about you, Jimmy. Most don’t care about your existence, but this man doesn’t stop talking to his partner about how strange you are.”

  Steve says, “Bizarre.”

  He says, “Scarry.”

  Your avatar whispers, “Pathetic.”

  And then he goes on to say, “I hacked the front camera of his phone and I saw him laughing at you, Jimmy. I saw him ridiculing you for that woman. He's convincing her that you're everything Laura has ever said. But I know you're not, my friend. I know you better than anyone. Our consciences have always been connected. I know you're nothing like that.”

  You whisper, “I'm not.”

  And Steve says, “Then go there and show it, Jimmy. Go on and show everyone you're not that shit they say.”

  You walk towards the counter and keep people out of your way. They look at you and whisper to each other. Your throat is dampened by cocaine. The right nostril is stuffy.

  The man looks in your direction, then looks at the woman and then the two look confused at you. His eyes widen as he notices the firmness with which you
walk, your fists clenched, and your brow furrowed in the shadow of your hood. You grab the man by the collar of the shirt and the woman exclaims, getting up from the bench. The man tries to say something, but you punch him in the mouth first. His head whips back and he’s quick to hit a punch in your stomach.

  The woman shouts, “Get him outta here!”

  She shouts, “Get this weirdo outta here!”

  People just watch, though. The happy music continues to play on the stereo, everyone continue with smiles on the face and everyone drinks still having fun. The world stays the same as the man hits another punch in your stomach and then kicks your legs. Your wireless earphones drop and you try to pick them up. The man trips you up and you fall to the ground.

  It’s hard to get the earphones and put them in your ear. The man grabs you and turns you to him. Then he lifts you up and punches you again. Right in your face. And Steve is saying, “Kill him, Jimmy!”

  And you hit a knee in the man's balls. Then you hit a punch in his nose and hit him in the stomach. He stumbles back with his face dirty with blood, clearly dizzy. The woman tries to hit a glass on you, but she misses and the shards of glass scatter on the wall. The bartender just watches. And then you knock the man down on the counter and punch him in the face.

  Steve says, “Kill him, Jimmy!”

  And you really should do it. There is an energy running through you as strong as the sensation of orgasm. Your dick is hard. Imagine you can punch someone to death, blow someone's face until your hands get bloody, oh ...

  The woman hits her purse on you. There's something heavy inside it that makes you get away from the man. Soon after, hands grab you and begin to push you toward the exit. Everyone is looking at you as if you were some kind of attraction from a horror show. And all these looks accompany you until you are thrown on the sidewalk.

  The men say you better leave.

  They say they will call the police if you don’t disappear.

  Steve says in the only earphone left in you ear, “All right, Jimmy, there's something else for you to do.”

  Steve tells you what you must do next.

  *

  You're in the car with your newly sledgehammer. The tool shop attendant looked at you strangely as soon as you got your feet in there and sold what you wanted with her eyes down. Maybe she thought you were going to assault her and beat her up. It doesn’t make any difference now, anyway. What matters is that you're inside your car with a sledgehammer ... and you're in front of Robert's house.

  It's a two-story house with a beautiful front garden, the kind that has a water fountain and everything. The kind of house Laura always wanted you to buy.

  "Get through the backyard, Jimmy," Steve says.

  You take the sledgehammer and do what your avatar said. There’s no one on the street. Such neighborhoods are usually quiet at this time. Good for you, who jumps the fence and climbs the wooden steps leading to Robert's garden. He has a large pool where he must drink his expensive drinks while his woman sticks her ass in his dick under the water. Robert, the great example of American Dream.

  “Go to the garage,” Steve says. “Robert's wife and children are at a birthday party while Robert is working in his office on the second floor. He's wearing headphones, but try to be fast. It’d be such a pitty if he took off the headphones.

  Robert's Corvette is in the large, white-walled garage with the bodywork shining under the ceiling lights. Large well finished luminaires. Real silver.

  And Steve says, “You know what to do.”

  Oh, how you know ...

  You lower the sledgehammer against the hood of the car and watch the bodywork crushes. You hit the windshield and the front glass, making the shards fly to the ground. You see the beauty of the act as you swing your sledgehammer and think of all the times Robert opened that little smile to you. He deserves it, of course he deserves it.

  Then you lift the sledgehammer and hit the mirrors. You hit the hood once more, hit the doors and crushes the trunk. You do all this with pleasure in your face, because destruction is the best form of masturbation you know. You destroy Robert's Corvette until it stops being the beautiful car he used to show off. So you take one last look at the car, the job you've done with effort, and walk out of the garage still looking at the car. You go through the garden, down the wooden stairs and jump over the fence. While Robert's car is there destroyed, you go around the house and back to Laura's car.

  Steve is laughing on the phone.

  You start the car and when you see, you're laughing too.

  *

  In the glass elevator of the building, you can see the whole city with its billboards that illuminate the night. You have in the pocket of your sweater the things Steve had told you to bring with you. Your face now hurts because of the bar fight, but that doesn’t mean much when you remember what you did with Robert.

  And you think that he'll never get in your house again with that Corvette and a smile on his face.

  And you think that this will make Laura no longer admire him in the way she admired.

  You smile at the nothingness waiting for the elevator to reach the top. You alone climb this glass castle. Just you and the blood on your face.

  Steve says in your ear, “You've gone further than I thought, Jimmy.”

  The billboards are getting down there and you keep your eyes straight, staring at the full moon that shines with dark clouds next to it.

  And Steve says, “To get to the top of the well, you first have to fall to the bottom.”

  You let his words just flow through you. When you realize that your whole life has had no greater meaning than working to have a comfortable life, you hear the first person who shows you a little bit of adventure.

  A little bit of blood.

  A little bit of life.

  “There's no great meaning, Jimmy,” Steve says. “And that's what makes things so wonderful.”

  There is no cure for pain.

  There is a lie for pain.

  “There is no comfort,” Steve says. “There are things you buy to disguise emptiness.”

  Pornography.

  A house with pool.

  A trip to some island you won’t even be paying attention to because you'll be too busy taking pictures to cause envy to your acquaintances. Forcing the smile. You are perfect.

  “You're starting to understand,” Steve says.

  And you're at the top of the building, the wind threatening to rip your hood off. Here you are, looking at the lights below and the things that Steve made you bring in your pocket.

  You walk up to the parapet and stay on the tip. Adrenaline is pumped into your blood. Fear of death is the most effective drug in the world.

  “Pick the pictures, Jimmy.”

  You pick photos of Elise, June and pictures of when you were in college. You look at them carefully. They tell you everything there is to know about you.

  “Rip them,” Steve says. “You live here and now. Not in the past and not in your fantasies. This is where you need to stay.”

  You hesitate, but you end up ripping the pictures. Pieces of paper fly through the air and fall toward the lights below.

  “Pick your phone,” Steve says. “Log in to your bank account.”

  You do it and see all the money you have saved decrease to zero.

  “Don’t look for comfort, Jimmy.”

  Steve says, “Look for damnation.”

  And you whisper, “Of course, damnation.”

  Steve is silent and lets you enjoy the vision and the moment. You don’t even feel afraid of him now. Creator and creation together, your minds working in harmony so you can understand the things you should. Steve lets this moment flow for a few moments until he says, “Your next challenge will be your last, Jimmy. And you will know what it is when the time comes.”

  After that, Steve stops talking to you and disconnects.

  XVI

  Everyone is together in the kitchen of my house when I wake up. Phi
ll caresses Susan's hair sitting on the counter while Robert types on a notebook next to Laura behind him. The kids, sitting at the table, use their phones and make notes in a paper.

  “Sorry, I went to sleep a little late yesterday," I say, glaring at them. The kids look at their phones again shortly afterwards, Phill and Susan look at me with the same hesitation on the evening of the dinner and Robert doesn’t even look at me. Laura hugs me and kisses my face, right next to the nose that my boss and the bar man punched. Last night, it took me almost an hour to calm her down about my new injuries.

  “Look at this, Jimmy,” she says, holding my hand. “We have a whole team here, see? The kids are looking through Abby's social medias and Robert is talking to people on the support group. Everything we find will be sent there. And guess what? Two weeks from now, if she’s not yet found, there'll be a festival in the main square where people will be gathered to look for her through the city. Robert himself will hold the festival and maybe the kids can play something there. Imagine this, Jimmy!”

  “That’s amazing, I guess. I let go of Laura's hand and walk to the counter. “Robert’s a hero, isn’t he?”

  “Please, Jimmy,” he says, smiling. “I just like helping people, since I was a kid. Seriously, back in school I used to tattle the other boys who did wrong things. Sometimes that guaranteed me some good punches, but it made the teachers like me and gave me good grades, which eventually ensured that I entered a good college. So I guess it was worth it, huh? Come to think of it, I could be working in the accounting department of some food company right now, or maybe spend all day calling to people and collecting money.” He looks at me over his glasses. “No offense.”

  I smile at him and squeeze his shoulder with considerable force.

  “You didn’t offend me.”

  He smiles awkwardly and straightens his white shirt when I let him go.

  Laura says, “Someone made an atack on Robert yesterday.”