The History of Writing (Part Three) One for the Ruins

Most people had the annoying tendency of telling Randal Fincher that prison had irreparably fucked up his life. Or if prison itself hadn't undermined his every chance of a decent future for him, whatever thinking and decisions had determined his karmic path in his life before prison had probably sufficed. Of course, this message was never delivered so nakedly. It was sanitized in the context of etiquette, wrapped tastefully with tasteless pity, and finally sold as an unwanted donation of love. Ten million kind words & helping-hands awaited him wherever he was familiar, or if he did something familiar. He felt like he couldn't clear his throat or blink with any emphasis or else someone would ask him what the problem was, already ready with an answer. 

One of the many, flippant diagnoses ascribed to him over the years was, he was a social-retreat. That meant Randal had some pretty dire misgivings about the world. It meant he saw chaos & fury where a sane individual saw only the ordinary run of things. And it meant the moments of life known to bring people pleasure and joy--or even the pause of considered horror, in one case--would never mean anything for Randal. He was routinely told that none of this was his fault and he was routinely told it was his highest responsibility to keep these hazards to his social well-being firmly in mind for as many hours of the day as were possible. Apparently, anger had made a psychic slave of Randal Fincher, and anger can tap into a frightening patience and irregular strength once its proverbial eyes have nestled themselves in the person they intend to override.... 

he'd had a genuine fear of these things since at least High School--with the decades after only contributing to that enormous well of misery. It seemed to kill friendships whenever the quiet hope of friendship took up a little space in his mental-registry. As though the bonds between...the fibers interconnecting feelings of warmth with feelings of bitterness and hostility were extremely delicate and subject to the whims of rules both steadfast and wildly inventive. That cerebral landscape represented in every community, in all civilization since at least the dawn of illustration & language. 

So, every day his affairs were ordered as tightly as he could order them. His dishes and clothes and person were seen to with near-religious ceremony. No utensil was replaced to where it was supposed to be replaced without the man studiously/reflexively counting that none had been lost or misset. Whatever small objects he'd collected from the world outside his apartment: assorted free books, lost baby/children items he had the awkward compulsion to "rescue", business cards, self-awareness pamphlets, various advertisements for coming-grocery stores, coming-laundromats, coming-beautyshops, etc...were either thoughtfully placed somewhere they'd be remembered without Randal having to see them regularly or they were confidently dismissed to the garbage. The apartment and everything in it were an investment. What he was investing in, he was much less sure of. 

Since about the age of 14, when his mother divorced his father for no other apparent reason than that she felt like it, big, future-sized leaps of faith, like what a person was supposed to do with 40 or 80 years of life when the standard options were either exhausted or never truly available to begin with...took on the shadow of a something either hardly larger than a mouse or else their threat was so vast and beyond reconciliation, recrimination, or any philosophical response whatsoever. He didn't hate women, but he judged them as he would judge any man, and this was universally unpopular. The very blood-driven need to declare one's concerns and the parameters of those concerns made serious conversation all but impossible to illustrate or express. Trying made him feel hollow. Not-trying made him feel bad in a different way. By the time he was in his 40s, by the time his karma brought his eyes to a television screen projecting Sisyphus in Brooklyn, it was enough that "nothing really terrible" ever happened. It was enough he could keep the drama & hassle of the world at some negotiated distance. He missed the taste of certain girls and the sounds of certain voices and the familiarity of anything approaching real friendship (like the Ed Crane character in a certain black & white movie...) But he'd have preferred uncompromised death than to call back any of the people who were meant to provide guidance with these struggles: that was a shadow bigger than his deficit of faith. 

Better to... On the morning of... He finished his shift, walked out to the bus... The next day was already planned: Protecting himself from frivolous overspending allowed for something like $10,000 to accumulate in a savings account he'd set up after his final release from an institution/facility--money without obligation or an expiration date. Randal felt a subtle, distant, alien kind of giddiness when he thought about doing anything with much confidence. All of the things that were denied to him or taken away with neither justice nor fair compensation had chiseled out an unlikely space in his person. Some blessed fruit of detachment where noble & ignoble suffering alike preserved some indefinite-canvas of braintissue that kept the innerear and its concomitant heart/lung functions quietly brimming with equanimity. It proffered mediocrity with an uncanny measure of relief. It rendered the dull chatter of the world to the smallest line on a ruler. He'd be checked-into the low-rent motel room by the end of the night. Outside the trainwindow: the New York landscape screaming to remember what its oldest inhabitants had drawn and produced and so many after had typically dismissed like sociopaths if they ever heard of them at all. 

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