Subterranean

When some people lose their minds, it is from misplacing them. Like a juggler who attempts to toss too many balls, their minds roll off into an unseen place when everything crashes and scatters. When other people lose their minds, it is from intentionally hiding them. Like a desperate man who tosses a set of keys into a field of tall grass, their minds become needles thrust into a haystack. James Griffin had thrown his mind into a thicket at sixteen and had not thought of looking for it until he was twenty-seven.

He sat numbly taking in the obscure shapes of women's bodies undulating in the blurred glow of black-lights. The view was further distorted by the haze of smoke that seemed to cake onto the surfaces of objects. The movements drug behind them a trail of the past, making even quick motions seem prolonged. His legs felt heavy with the weight of alcohol and his ears were stuffed full with the sound of disorientation. Deep, persistent bass massaged his temples while squeaky treble reverberated inside his ear canals. Abruptly, he heard the unmistakable sound of glass shattering somewhere behind him. On the fifth consecutive night of the twelfth consecutive month he sat staring forward, doing his best to stay lost. 

With the sound of shattering, his mind called out to him. The sense that something was amiss was so strong as to seem tangible. He turned his head to scan the periphery, expecting to find a little girl who had tugged on his shirt in a show of attention-starved pleading. All he found were other men slumped in chairs with greasy hair pasted onto their skulls with slight smirks on their faces and forlorn women scurrying between them. Some action was occurring around the scene of the accident. The sight of swept up glass spurred him to recollect himself.

"Need to leave," he thought as he wobbly arose from his usual spot two tables away from the stage. Unsure footing caused him to slip back into the chair he tried to rise from. The atrophy of inaction bound him to the reclined position. The fuzziness of every perception gave his setting a pall of irreality. He felt lost in a dreamworld of shadows and echoes. He was unsettled by how absorbed the countenances of his fellow-patrons appeared. They were entranced. He struggled concertedly to arise again. One foot in front of the other, he shuffled away from his lonely table. Concerned he yelled, "Let's go!" over the noise of the room as he motioned towards the exit. "Shut up!" "Get out of the way!" "You wanna brusin'?" "Sit down!" all shot out at him from different directions. He felt something strike between his shoulder blades with a dull thud and heard again the sound of glass breaking behind him. The prod of pain heightened his senses further. "What am I doing here?" he asked himself as he stumbled further out of the doomed room.

The redish glow of the word "Exit" hooked him and drew him reeling forward. Imbalanced, he placed his left hand forward desperately. His wrist was compacted as he collided with the wall to the side of the steps that lead to street level. Heightened pain sprinted through his nerves when he could not prevent his forehead from striking the wall. He bounced off it like a ball and crashed backwards in a drunken heap. The back of his skull plummeted onto the dirty floor of the seedy subterranean establishment. Confused, he stared upwards and tried to make sense of the reflections of purple neon lights. "Where am I?" he wondered.

The ferrous taste of blood trickled over his tongue. He had lacerated his cheek when his teeth shut upon striking the old wood planks of the floor. No one took notice of his tumble. No one came to his assistance. The back of his head pulsated reminders of his accident. Vanquished, he squinted at the criss-crossed lines of the drop-ceiling above him. The bass again tickled his ears as it shook the ground. Lethargy covered him like a blanket and his eyelids drooped. "Business? Great! Never been better! Adult entertainment is recession-proof." a gruff voice explained nearby. "The owner?" James wondered as he forced his eyes open again. "My customers are sheep and me? I am their shepherd. I lead them to the uh pasture. Times are tough and I make it easy." The man laughs. "Sheep are more profitable than you'd think. The trick is sheering them just short enough so that they come back to you for shelter, cold and desperate every night after wandering around. You know what I mean? If you buzz 'em too short, they freeze. You gotta keep 'em chilled but not frozen. So I know just when to pull the plug, flip on the lights, and sweep them out into the world." the voice bragged. "Must be," James thought. The image of lemmings following a leader off a cliff came to him as his eyes shut again. "It's all a mirage. Think they're going home but they're going to hell. Need to leave." He thrust his lids open.

He commanded his arms to push himself up. The spinning room sloshed him around, but he would not be deterred. James tentatively arose and moved towards the stairs once more. He cast a final, forlorn glance towards the smoky roomed filled with his lost compatriots. The hot sting in his back kept him from urging them upwards again. He moved on. His toe slammed into the first step. His hand caught the railing as he braced himself. He stood erect and looked at the mountain of right angles that barred him from escape. "Easy does it," he encouraged himself. Slowly but persistently, he ascended. Every time he flexed his quadriceps to lift himself, there was a commensurate decrease in clatter ringing in his ears. The thumping bass accompanied him throughout, but the attempt to lull him into submission was futile. James was determined to depart.

Passersby grazed him as they excitedly went downstairs. "No! Don't!" he exhorted, but their euphoric laughs were too loud to be spoken over. "Like lemmings off the edge," he thought dejectedly. "Need to leave," he reminded himself.

Midway up the stairwell, the wood paneling started to gleam with the light that seeped under the exit he had entered so often before. "What time is it?" he wondered. He thrust himself against the door jam and spilled forward onto the street. Sunlight exploded inside James' pupils. The blow dealt by brightness made him dizzy with nausea. Again, he felt himself tumble to the ground. Rather than the hollow thump of hard wood, the sound of bone on concrete dissipated from his collapse. It disrupted the otherwise quiet summer morning on the avenue.

On his hands and knees, he sneezed. Something about the light made him sneeze. He snickered as a memory bubbled up into his consciousness. When he was a child and happy, he mother used to kid him about being allergic to the sun because he had the habit of sneezing every time he'd leave a building for the outdoors. His mother's face made him wistful and he forgot about where he had just come from. The smog of the city smelled clean to him when compared against the stale atmosphere of his hiding place. When he began to see again, he could discern the skewed shape of his shadow. His vision passed from the grey his forearm cast on the concrete to the plaid of his shirt. The colors had been tainted by a film of cigarette smoke, but still struck him with a vibrancy he had been without for what seemed like years. He focused in on the intersection of yellows and reds that formed wrinkled criss-crosses. The orderliness pleased him. "Beautiful," he though as he traced the fine lines of tightly weaved cotton.

The A.M. rays lazily reflected off of the street surface. James again raised himself from his knees to his feet. He stood still to gain his bearings and squinted in search of familiar landmarks. Before him was a rod iron planter filled with pink and white geraniums and a maple sapling. He followed the trunk upwards through the dark green underbellies of leaves until it gave way to the brilliant morning mauve of sunrise shining upon the windows of a high-rise. The grid work of glass converging higher uplifted his sight until his craned neck stiffened above the top floor.

The picture was serene in its clarity, like the sight one receives upon poking out of the water after struggling to resurface. Wisps of cirrus clouds converged like a stratospheric doily. Up beyond the meddling reach of people lived truth untouched and untainted. "Yet it shines down upon and among us if we would have eyes to see it. Why?" James sobered. His mind burned like a newly ignited wick. He considered the vision, its overwhelming size and the shame it put to shadows. The quality of his perception rejuvenated him. The serenity of the gently sliding shapes nearly overtook him and clasped him in a new sort of chains. The more he thought about what he was seeing and how moved he was, the more he felt he needed to tear himself away. "It's not too late." In a fit of compassion, James turned around to face the place from which he was freshly emancipated. "I must save them."

He nimbly hopped downwards and reached the landing. "Hey! Everybody! Come quick and see the sun! It's daytime! What do you think you are doing rotting down here in the dark? This isn't real! Can't you see you're stuck in a trap, pinned down by your own appetites?" The fingers on his left hand fumbled for a light switch by the stairwell, but none was to be found. The patrons began to bark at him and the waitresses threw daggers at him with their scowls. A barrel-chested figure emerged from the mist of the flock and glided up towards him.

"Come on buddy, no disturbin' the customers," the man uttered as he lifted James up by the armpit and drug him back towards the day. His ankles clanked against the edges of the steps as he scrambled to regain his footing. The power of the mysterious man surprised him. "Would have been easier to have been kicked out before," James observed.

At the top of the steps, the strong man ejected James. In the midst of his flight, James reached for the man's lapel. Feeling the smooth fabric between his fingertips, he grabbed hold tightly and pulled the bouncer forward with him. They both crashed onto the sidewalk as the door shut behind them. The bouncer shielded his eyes, finding the sun oppressive. James rushed alongside him and raised the husky man who had been made weak by his new setting. He took him by the arm and pulled up slowly but firmly.

"See?" James asked with a smile. The bouncer blinked in disbelief.

Falling

It was as though someone hit the reset button on Erik Winters. He awoke high in the air. He was in the stratosphere. Erik was so high up that when he looked at the ground beneath him, he could not tell he was falling. The mottled patches of greens stayed the same size; the meandering ribbons of brown appeared unchanged for what felt like hours. His stomach, not his eyes, told him he was falling. The sensation forced Erik out of his confused malaise.

He remembered that he was an astronaut. He remembered that he was in the cabin of a space shuttle. He remembered a malfunction and shared panic. The sundry lights, dials, and instruments were all functioning as though nothing had changed. Constrained by a harness and pushed firmly against the back of his seat, he struggled to glance at the rest of the crew in his peripheral vision. They were all still. Everything was still in Erik's world, except his stomach.

He called out to the seven others by name, but received no response. The words he uttered were muffled, as though someone had stuffed cotton balls in his ears while he was sleeping. Erik looked back out of the windows to find the landscape barely altered. All was green and brown. He focused on a tiny speck that flickered with light. He noted the charcoal grey trail that slithered and dispersed from it. When he realized it was a fire, he began to panic. "I'm upside down," he thought.

Something about the fire set Erik off. The distant danger awakened him to the present one. His fingers immediately began to fumble with the central clasp on his restraint harness. He pulled halfway up on the releasing mechanism when he realized the futility of escaping. No parachute could save him. There was no joystick he could reach for with which to steer himself to safety. His thoughts expanded outward and he realized the futility of doing anything. Goals are luxuries for people with time. Erik had at most a minute longer, and that did not suffice for time at all.

His mind shot off images and half-formed thoughts in quick succession. He felt dizzy. He felt something warm drip onto his neck. He wanted something to drink. He wanted to have a conversation. Then his mind fixated upon the impending collision. Erik thought it strange how he could now relate to all the men and women before him who had been executed. He wondered what they saw moments before they stopped seeing. He knew no one had seen his impending demise through more than two and a half inches of glass.

Erik had never fully considered his own death before. Death was always something in the offing, something nebulous. It was even slightly agreeable to him while it remained theoretical. He assumed it would come to him when he was withered and prepared for it. It would cease his arthritic pains he thought. Now, death was plunging up towards him. Death was in the green specs of the trees and the scant taupe patches of dirt. It would be so quick when it struck. Everyone dies in an instant—breathes one second and not the next. It made him feel minuscule and he imagined what his ship looked like to the creatures living where he would crash. Could they make it out now? Would they bother to disperse or would they soon be breathing their lasts, too?

Erik felt the icy pall of isolation. More than being able to free himself from his demise, he wanted to free himself from his solitude. A man can freely choose to be alone, and we classify him as introverted. But when a man is forced into it—we classify him as imprisoned. Erik hated his powerlessness in a concentrated way. His ears burned with boiling over frustration. For all of his painstakingly accumulated strength and his exhaustively honed skills, the world would not bend to his will. Despite his share of human dignity, he would be ended as swiftly as a worm underfoot. The greatest insult, however, was that he had no one near him. He wanted to speak and let someone know he was scared, that he resented having so much unfinished business. He wanted to be coddled and reassured by a soothing whisper. Instead, the faint whistle of wind was all he heard.

He focused again on his situation. He pictured himself as a baby, swaddled by Mother Earth, tucked away into his place of submission. He was wrapped in a blanket of disorientation. What was this surreal truth that his life had become? Why was it his uniquely to suffer? Why would his body shortly be rearranged into fragments scattered at the bottom of a crater? How different this was than any cause of death he could have fathomed earlier! Yet, how identical the end was even if the denouement was original! One last exhalation.

He snickered to himself at the absurdity of it all. We don't know now, we hardly know backwards, and we don't know forwards in the slightest. He laughed at people's feeble attempts at foresight. He pictured a weatherman midway through a prognostication being struck dead by a falling light from the rafters above. Never saw it coming. That's the way it goes. We spend our time predicting the wrong sort of events. The only beliefs we can hold about the future with any spec of justification are our hopes. All else is vain or otherwise misguided conjecture. And what did he hope for all this time? He was living it no more than fifteen minutes ago. Erik then became distracted by the feeling of moisture pooling on his clavicle. 

The quilt-work of greens became tableaux and the hazy textures became clear. Erik had begun making out the shapes of individual trees when he started thinking about who he was. If no one else is to know who I am, it is all the more crucial that I die knowing. His mind raced across the most obvious attributes: man, 32 years old, astronaut, doctoral candidate. None seemed sufficiently encompassing. He thought about what he had been before: a punk, a rebel, a philanderer, a repentant, a humanist—mistaken. Erik thought that human identity is like a liquid that becomes more viscous with age. For all our attempts at improvement, at maturation, at becoming something we can be proud of—we always pour ourselves into molds that are porous. An astronaut? An astronaut! I'll seep right out of that before I turn 50. What can hold us? What definition has no holes? We slip through everything until we're caught by the impermeable sac of nothingness. He looked upwards to avoid discerning individual branches. Tears welled in his eyes.

Erik, who had closed his eyes a moment before, exhaled and died.

Old Man: Pride

Most of the time when I would go visit my old friend, he would be waiting on his porch. His eyes would be fixed on a point slightly above the horizon. White, wiry hairs corkscrewed out from below his wrinkled forehead and above his pale blue eyes. On a favorable interpretation, he looked placid. On an unfavorable one, he looked vacant.

As soon as I was within earshot, the gaze broke. He called out a greeting. Sometimes this greeting was in the form of a "Hey there." Other times, he would begin speaking about a topic as though we were already in the middle of a conversation. He simply supplanted the long-running monologue taking place in his mind with a new actor. Once he called out, "I have no time for prideful people!" I replied with a grin, "Well I think you can keep your appointment with me."

I climbed the graying wooden steps and crossed the creaking patio to take a seat tangential to him. The wicker chair crackled in response to my weight.

"Did you think the way something starts speaks to how it will proceed and finish?" He asked.

I looked down to collect my thoughts.

"My historian friends would agree with that suggestion. They always claim you won't understand where you are unless you know where you are coming from. In exploration at least, I would think that's true. It would be essential to get one's bearings and keep an impeccable record of your route. So yes, knowing the way something starts is important to understanding it."

He needed no time to gather his own.

"Apply that very thought to people. How do they begin? As itty-bitty babies. At their own request? No. Of course not. They're brought into the world unbeknownst to them. There's no choice in it for the living. No way to take credit for the start. Everyone is completely dependent to begin with. Show me the person who has given birth to herself, and I'll show you the person whose pride is well-placed. As for the rest of the arrogant dreamers, leave me be! For all of their accomplishments and accolades, they always start off as babies. The prideful live as though they've outgrown their dependency. But have they?"

"What do you mean?"

"Everyone," he lowered his head and glared into my eyes, "at every point in their lives—is woefully dependent on a great many factors outside of their control. Your ticker has to keep ticking, the beams above your head and the planks below your feet have to maintain their integrity. Itty-bitty little cells need to keep performing their tasks without fail or else. Gasp! Heart attack! Boom! Structural collapse! Agh! Cancer! I could go on and on. My point is that no one is in as much control as the prideful person likes to purport."

At this point in the performance, I felt it my place to play the contrarian. "I'll concede that a person does not begin in a meritorious way and that much of our continued existence is owed  in part to outside factors rather than those we are responsible. Still, if we slice all of that away, we get to the core of people. Even if the great preponderance of human existence is accidental, there is a sliver that is purposeful. The prideful simply grab hold of that sliver for all its worth, maximize it, and admire their accomplishments. How can that be so wrongheaded? If we all have our slivers and some of us take advantage of them and some of us prefer complacency, how is it more reprehensible to exercise our slivers rather than let them atrophy?"

He scowled at me. "I have not suggested that a person shouldn't take responsibility for what he can do. Nothing of the sort. Prideful people do more than take responsibility for they can do. They take credit for everything good and true in this world. I used to work for this woman. She waged a long battle to get where she was, I do not doubt that. She let you know—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly—that she won that battle and rightfully so. In the process, she made sure you knew that she was above you and that you could not have won that same battle. That's what grates me—the inconsistency of it all. The old think they're better than the young because they've lived longer. If you give the young a little bit of time, they'll get to be just as old though. The strong can pummel you into submission, but what if they snapped a tendon way-back-when? Then they'd be scrawny like the rest of us. Yes, Ms. Swanson, you are the vice president and that is a laudable position to be in. But don't act as though you haven't caught a break along the way. We've all caught breaks and breaks have broken us. There are headwinds and tailwinds. The only sensible thing is to get off your high horse and walk alongside the rest of us."

"I think you underestimate how much of life is about the choices people make. You seem to think that because there are choices, and that the viability of those choices is often itself unchosen, that people should ease up on defining themselves by their choices—specifically the successful, rewarding choices. Why begrudge people a sense of accomplishment for utilizing their talents? Your pride is another person's self-confidence."

"That's not true. Self-confidence doesn't make other people feel small. We are all itty-bitty. Besides being a lie, pride is disharmonious. Don't play the fool, Victor. You know full well that attitude I am talking about. I think you just like watching me get all in a tizzy. You need to be more careful with the elderly. I'm fragile you know. A regular porcelain doll." He smirked and the wrinkles in his cheeks folded together.

"Right, right. You caught me. Humility is a great attribute. I'll take it over the opposite. Still, talking small and being small is not so good as talking small and being big."

"Fine, fine." He smiled at me, but I could not leave well enough alone. Now that I had taken up a position, I felt the need to keep defending it.

"And I think you fail to grasp a mitigating factor in making pride so bad. It is completely natural. Show me the person that isn't prideful and I'll show you a corpse. Everyone is proud of themselves. Some are just more public with it. Some are proud of being exceptional. Some are proud of being meek. Some are proud of being in between, of being the average man. There are people walking around with humble faces that hide a holier-than-thou attitude. I think it was Twain who said something like, "When a man keeps telling you he's trustworthy, it's time to check his pockets for the sterling silver." Wouldn't the same thing apply here? A person who says he hates pride is actually quite prideful and only hates pride in others because it takes up room his own pride would otherwise fill."

His head kicked back slightly with a snicker. "Such a clever man, you are! I knew there was a good reason why we're friends. I'll only say this much: something being natural does nothing to excuse it. It only explains the origin of the thing."

Energy pulsated through my body as victory was now at hand. "Says the man who earlier claimed where something comes from says a lot about where it's going. And if I agree, then from nature to nature and no one is to blame at all. We're born, live, and die naturally and nothing we are predisposed to doing is unnatural. The only unnatural thing is to poke your head out of the flow of things and criticize it for not going a different, unnatural direction. So you are the one out of line, not the prideful people."

He laughed heartedly. "Very good my dear sophist, very good! And good luck with all that. If you'll settle for only what it natural, you'd better grab your cloak and dagger. It's a mad world you'll be a citizen of." His hand grabbed for the steaming mug on the little brown table between us. He shakily took a sip. "Checkers?"

"Sure."