Should one be so inclined, one could trace Stephen Downing’s descent into madness with a finger moving upwards across a smooth surface, along the path of his irritation at the pronunciation of words. “It’s PULL it sir,” he would say, more of a need to educate than anything more sinister. “Not pew lit zir.” He needed things to be correct. He needed order. There were rules in this world, things he had been taught from childhood—don’t run with scissors, don’t stray from the single-file line, keep your hands to yourself—to which he clung when the world around him slowly melted into a dim recollection of chaos, a blurry perversion of the world his childhood had created. No one told him about entropy. He had no grandfather with a wool coat and pleated pants who took him aside at his fourteenth birthday and explained that systems were breaking down, order never remained, time’s arrow shot a path straight into disorder. New cities are built with the rubble of the old. Towers are erected from gravestones. In fact, his fourteenth birthday was met by that overwhelming sense of nothing in particular that had characterized his hitherto existence. The night Stephen Downing died could be characterized by a vast and profound nothingness, a glass overflowing with emptiness. Later—long after his death, he would come to regard himself as a victim of the millennium’s birth. He was a part of the umbilical tissue that dies as one’s life begins. It was Christmas Eve. On a dresser in Stephen’ studio apartment stood a twelve inch tall Christmas tree. He had insisted to the three people who stopped by, himself included—he came to regard himself as a visitor in his own home—that it was real. “No it’s not, I can see the plastic,” said his friend Dave, who drank to excess and had been diagnosed with most of the less harmful sexually transmitted diseases. “Dave, did you ever get those Herpes taken care of?” asked Stephen, changing the subject as a sort of punishment. “You can’t get those taken care of. They remain forever, long after the girls go away. At some point, I suppose, they’ll even outlast my ability to get hard.” “That’ll be kinda funny: a scorching case of herpes and no one to give them to,” interjected Jude. Stephen noticed Jude’s posture, way too confident for the kinds of things he said, standing there like an oak tree with his leather jacket and way-too-gelled-up hair. Jude laughed at his own joke. No one else did. “But seriously,” said Dave—nothing was serious to Dave: jokes, cancer, genocide, poodles—“this tree is fake. It’s obviously fake.” “It’s real. Trust me. I bought it. I bought it real. It’s real. It’s something real that I bought.” “No,” insisted Dave. “It’s not real. Sorry. It’s not. You were conned, because this tree is not real.” “You’re not real!” shouted Stephen Downing. “You’ve been conned! You aren’t fucking real!!! Ever think about that, huh? That notion ever cross your mind? You’re not real. Nothing is fucking—” He took his hand and slid it across the dresser, destroying some vases and the picture of her, of them, while the tree came crashing to the ground. “—REAL!” The shards of broken glass and plastic pine needles blended into his empty soda cans and dirty clothes on the floor. Jude and Dave stared blankly as if witnessing the Rodney King beatings. No matter how often they had seen the beatings, the outbursts, the tragic manifestations of a personality they had never known; they would never fully become desensitized. This was the way the world worked: Shock, a period of bereavement, a return to normality, a contention with normality, then another shock. The earth and the sun and the moon and all the molecules and atoms that make up life are round, and this is no accident. • • • • • • She took a deep breath, deeper than the ones she was used to taking, and swallowed the pill. The powdery after-taste had always brought with it a grimace. It was better than the frowns of grief. Just the act of concentrating on the round, white tablet while she drank from a waxy, plastic cup as if it was some sort of shot enabled her to take her mind, if only barely and only briefly, off her misery. Misery was something she had not grown used to. She had grown used to the smells of the city—the gasoline of public transportation carries a distinctively different scent than the gasoline of private vehicles—and the coldness of the strangers’ faces, peering silently, never speaking, walking in circles, all looking and frowning and drinking their coffee the exact same way. Their exhales produced the same foggy specters, all floating in the same direction and haunting the gloomy city with the same twisted smile. She had grown used to these ghosts. She had grown used to the rising inflections of these twenty-somethings—twenty-nothings, she called them—their bizarre jargon, their solipsism, their whole lifestyle which, as far as she could tell, exclusively consisted of two phrases: “oh my god” and “are you serious.” Oh My God was not so much an exclamation as a way to fill silence. It was used subtly to start sentences, such as “Oh my god, my mother is coming tomorrow.” This was always punctuated with a slight opening of the mouth and a rolling of the eyes farther than the eyes are designed to roll back. The response to these sentences, these eye-rolls, was always, unremittingly, “are you serious.” Though it seems like a question, it is not. It is not a question at all, but a way of letting people know that you are in with this crowd, this horrible crowd of drones trudging toward a millennium that will drive a stake through history. She had grown used to these thoughts, but not to her own misery. It was still new, still very undefined. Her misery wore an outfit of turtlenecks beneath trench coats, which were above a pair of one-half-size-too-small denim jeans. A scarf. Crimped hair. Her misery twirled around like it was in a feminine hygiene commercial. Her misery called her friends on the telephone, woke them up, became a sobbing burden, alienated itself. She had not grown used to this. • • • • • • William Gonne wasn’t entirely sure where he went wrong—he had suspicions that he had not gone wrong at all, that he had just changed, only slightly, and for the best. But his idea of Jude instilled the odd sense of somehow having accidentally—despite his intentions—done the right thing. Always being true to oneself was a principle Gonne believed in only subconsciously, and only in theory, and never when it came to his own progeny. Nevertheless, Jude was a relentlessly hopeless cause for retaining his father’s politics. One’s friends are much more influential than one’s parents, and even at times slightly outweigh one’s own morals and individuality. Gonne mistook his son’s willful acquiescence to his peer group for antagonistic rebellion. Fathers tend to ignore other variables that can dictate the outcome of their sons. William Gonne saw his child as a simple reaction, either for or against William’s own will. Jude, for all the emphasis his father put on their relationship, seemed oblivious, apathetic. Maybe he knew that his father stayed up nights worrying about their respective places in the universe, maybe he simply chose not to care. Jude had been raised on choices. “Insanity,” his father would tell him, “is a choice. Anger is a choice. Love,” and at this he would pause, imagining Jude to be hanging on his syllables, “is a choice.” Later, in therapy sessions, Jude would explain that neglect, isolation, alcoholism, and clinging to the remnants of broken dreams were all choices; choices his father had made; choices he had in turn perpetuated. But at this point, Jude was an oak tree, sturdy, unassailable, with initials he would never understand carved into his chest: W.Y. + M.G. He was uncertain what the initials stood for, only that they existed as a sort of passage into the unknown. A reminder of the mystery of the world. The world had always operated in ways Jude could never quite grasp. There was a chaotic order, a random pattern, a constellation that Jude saw as a horse sees his carrot, continually just out of reach. • • • • • As an undergrad, Stephen hadn’t given much thought to the poetry of William Butler Yeats. Most undergrads don’t. Yeats was one of those conservative figures of Modernism who straddled the line between formal and experimental, but his poetry said nothing to a twenty year old. Yeats seemed to be hopelessly in unrequited love with some woman named Maud, and a large portion of his canon was comprised of poems that disguise this love within his quiet philosophical mythology. But now, as the world seemed to be ending, Yeats’ poetry didn’t feel like mythology. It felt like an integral part of the truth that Stephen Downing was starting to uncover. Yeats had a theory of history that was based on what he called “Gyres.” Hard G. Like a gyroscope. These gyres were like two growing and shrinking spirals enmeshed in one another. As one spiral grew, the other shrunk, so that as one reached its maximum span, the other had just started growing, incubated within the history of the other. Yeats noticed that the spiral’s focus shifted every two thousand years. He went on to theorize that Christ’s birth marked a change in the gyres and then postulated that World War I, the only World War Yeats had known at the time, was the beginning of the shift back. The gyres seemed to consume all his work. He wrote about them in philosophy books and novels and poems. Most notably, in a poem called The Second Coming, which ends with a beast—presumably the devil—“slouching towards Bethlehem.” Stephen, in his current state, believed in the gyres infallibly. His contention was that Yeats was seventy years off. That’s all. He just missed. He saw a war and panicked. But the true shift was just around the corner, and Stephen slowly pieced together the clues. Would the Y2K phenomenon begin to satanically destroy the world? And what to make of the upcoming presidential election? Could any of this be tied back into the biblical philosophies? What more did Yeats have to say? Stephen Downing had to know. These were the foundations, to truth or to chaos. • • • • • • They met in a bar. Don’t they all? Doesn’t everyone meet in a bar? Their sole distinction was that they had both been employees of the bar. He had been working for extra money while enrolling in an online master’s degree course. He was getting his degree in human development, or global politics, or business, or the hysterical human condition of being over-worked. He wasn’t entirely sure. She was going nowhere, doing nothing, letting her inertia dictate her life. He had survived under the assumption that somehow, something would place her where she needed to be. She never once thought of her outcome being a product of her actions. Outcomes were designed by fate. Things just happened because they were supposed to. Experience had yet to distort her perceptions of the world. That’s what experience does. It distorts things. She fell in a sort of meta-love with him, more in love with the idea of love than with him. He didn’t really care to define his affection for her, saying, “whatever it is, it doesn’t need to be named. Naming strips whatever we have of its beauty.” She mistook this for a compliment. First it was image, then alcohol, then biological needs, then the exhaustion that comes with even thinking of separation. To him, she was beautiful—a terrible beauty. He liked the idea of people seeing them together. It enhanced his ego. She liked the idea of being able to figure out his brain; his uncanny ability to fool people into mistaking his eccentricities for intelligence. For a time, a long time, she had been fooled. Slowly, as he pieced together formulations of what he could only call the Truth, she had pieced together his only act of intelligence: being able to connect things. He could connect and justify anything. It was his gift. He saw patterns, order, constellations. He made an art form out of square-peg-round-holing. Banging dishes around in their apartment, cleaning up after their indulgence, she asked him how school was. “I read the last chapter of the bible today,” he said hanging up his coat meticulously on the rack she had bought in a marginally futile attempt to rid her carpet of his dirty laundry. She made one of those tiny, not-exclusive-to-English sounds of affirmation. He turned from the coat-rack. “Six times.” “Oh.” “Yeah.” “Yeah. Everything okay?” “Not really.” He left the living room and collapsed on his bed. His energy had been slowly draining, but today he seemed to have tipped over and spilled it all out. Her concern had turned to dread. There is something in the attachment to another, no matter how superficial, that directly links you to their pain, their failure. Just as the old Southern woman who cries when she hears of Sudanese children dying from starvation, she was having a tangible reaction to a pain she neither understood nor experienced. Her confusion was different from his, but it was present nonetheless. • • • • • • The Thanksgiving dinner was lonely, Jude being still single, still a partier refusing to settle down, and his father being a figure of sadness and isolation. William had been cooking the turkey on the grill, outside of the house that he had recently come to believe was much too large for his spirit. He had embraced the misery, tried to fill his house with it after her death, but his misery didn’t take up much room. It napped on the tops of couches, nestled close to him, purred softly in his lap. The dinner would just be a turkey, some stuffing, a cup of mashed potatoes, and his son’s sense of obligation, which were all sliced too thin and a bit too soggy. Mrs. Gonne had always taken care of the taste, leaving the entertainment for the rest of the family. The family had slowly dwindled as aunts and cousins moved away, ridding the house of the superfluous details and trite attempts at staying positive. Now the house had been stripped to its core. Walls, misery, turkey, William, and Jude. This was all William had. This, William believed, was all Jude had. In a way that Jude had not come to understand, his father was right. “It’s cold outside,” said William. “But I have the heat way up, so your coat is safe on the rack.” “Thanks,” said Jude as he hung up his leather jacket. “Listen, Dad. I, uh—” Jude stopped himself, unsure how to vocalize his thoughts. Finally, he began again, “Well, it’s good to see you.” They ate and drank politely, in a hopeful and sporadic conversation that was more painful than silence. With silence, there’s the implication that perhaps words aren’t needed. With this, both made desperate attempts to communicate, and both failed. As they cleared their plates from the over-sized oak table, Jude told his father that he’d love to stay, really, but he had to get going. William said that was fine and thanked him for coming, but they both knew it was not fine and that William would spend the rest of the night drinking a single malt scotch and crying for reasons anyone else could sum up with a few words but that he himself would never fully grasp. Jude stepped outside, through the screen door that had been put up in front of the real door as a sort of test. His shoes had been worn down enough that the cold of the driveway stung his feet. The wind swirled and for a moment Jude instinctively lifted his hand to protect his hair but then slowly brought it down to his pocket and fetched his car keys. He looked up only briefly, at the roofs of these cookie-cutter houses, where chimneys expelled smoke into the dark; the smoke, he knew, would find its way out of the suburbs and into the city like a wide-eyed idealist searching for identity, but there it would stay and rot and think about a better life in the suburbs, never fully able to complete its own life cycle. Jude entered his car and watched his own gaseous emissions mix with the chimney smoke. He would drive himself to Dave’s house, Dave who was always home, Dave who was always figuring out ways to help someone or something and always failing. Dave was a magnet for the defeated and the paranoid, himself too caught up in the instinctual world. Alcohol as a substitute for reality and sex as a substitute for love. Dave would help him. Or, Dave would not. This was the way the world worked. • • • • • • The phone rang twice, three times, stopped. Silence. A fourth time. Silence again, this time for longer. The sound of heating vents. Loud rattle. Should I fix those? Fuck it. Who could have called? Who would want to talk? I’ve nothing to say. Nothing exists within me. All is a manifestation of a world delving into chaos. He recalled the facts. The election elected a criminal. No. Did not elect a criminal, but received one nonetheless. We are powerless. We cannot stop the gyres. The criminal was a Satanist. I have proof. Gave up his life to Satan in the Skulls and Bones organization. Professed Christian. Deceiver. Name adds up to 6, 6, 4. Adding the suffix “jr.” evens the score. The bible prophesizes this. Mark of the beast. Barcode. American flag. Planes. Buildings. Uncontrollable technology. The world is unstable. I cannot outlast 2000 years of torture. I must cease. The slouching has—you only need—begun. I never loved anything anyway. All is lost. All is hopeless. The tree was fake. Does it matter? The tree was fake. Does anything matter? The tree was—you only need—the slouching—she was such a—fake—terrible beauty—two establishes a pattern—toward Bethlehem—you only need two—you only need—slouching—“PULL it, Sir!”—gyres—the world—this is it—hopeless—technology—this is the way the world—establish a pattern—circles—atoms—skulls and bones—don’t run with scissors —too much inform—I can’t win—heating vents rattle—all is hopeless—I cannot exist in a w—nothing is—ation—nation—mation—formation—mark of the—stay in the single file line—gyres—hopeless—yeats—tree was fake—
Stephen Downing fell to the floor, asphyxiated, confused. • • • • • • Dave and Jude discovered the body—a heap of clothes and broken dreams—just after midnight. “What could he—How could he—Oh my God.” Dave was becoming frantic, but Jude was used to these small intrusions of chaos and dismay. He had grown up around them. He pulled his cellular phone out, dialed 911, calmly informed the operator of the situation, and hung up. “Some people will be here soon.” “Are you serious. Oh my god” “Dave, I’m, I’m—” Words had been failing Jude all winter, but now he truly needed something to say. He grasped at anything, his mind swirling in a frenzy, but came up only with visions of Stephen’s fractured life. He wondered, as many people would come to wonder, what it all meant, what Stephen was thinking, what sorts of variables, all strung together, formed the circle of Stephen’s transitory existence. And what of that girl? What was her name? Jude could not be sure. Maybe he knew it at one point but dropped the seemingly insignificant piece of information shortly after. Or maybe the name was tucked away somewhere, in the deep recesses of his subconscious, with all the heartache and dysfunction his father had given. Maybe this forgotten knowledge was having a tea party with his regret for never having visited his mother in the hospital. And now he is left to compare, to place his mother’s death on a balance beam against Stephen’s. So drastically different. So acutely similar. Or maybe, maybe he never knew her name at all.
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