Waterboy 2nd post
“There’s something going on between this girl and I.” I said to Nancy. Nancy, of course, was the shrink my parents had found for me. They insisted I go every week. They liked being able to remind me how much money it cost to send me to her.
“Really? And what sort of thing are we talking about?”
“Well, I guess I should begin by saying that no matter what I say about her. Or how I end up feeling about her. I don’t trust her.”
“From what you’ve told me about your history, trust is going to come a little hard.”
“Yeah…hard, that’s one way of putting it. Another would be that my history makes me totally fucking limp.”
She raised her eyebrows, one at a time.
“That seems a little sexual.” She said. “Aren’t you wound up a little tight about this?” She said. “Didn’t you just meet this girl?”
“Sex is always a possibility. I mean, well, maybe it’s different for a man but orgasms are as necessary as any other bodily function. You can’t go a week without taking a piss can you? The same holds true for sex. I mean if a man goes long enough he’ll do it involuntarily, just like a baby wets his pants. But you’re right in a way too, I’m jumping the gun a little. It’s just all I think about. Every woman I meet the thought runs through my head. I need sex. Yet this other part of me wants it to be holy, like a Disney movie or something. Then there’s the danger.”
“Sex is dangerous?”
“Yes - no, I don’t know. What would I know? I mean theoretically sex with a woman you trust shouldn’t be dangerous. If you’ve figured out some reliable form of birth control, and you can count on your partner not to bring any weird diseases home with them, then sex is kosher. But what makes me think I can trust they don’t have any weird diseases?
-
“Hey Melinda.”
“Oh, hey Bernie. Are you done too?” We were standing around the corner from school. Melinda looked around, checking to see if anyone saw us. It was all clear.
“Yeah, all done.” I said. It was the end of fifth period. We only had to take five periods of class. Then one period of study session. But if you scheduled the study session at the end of the day you could just go home a period early.
“That’s cool.” She said, I could feel the conversation dying. There was so much I wanted to say, but how much of it would be redundant to her. How much of what I said had Network already shown her?
So I said something without thinking, just words to fill the void. “Hey are you on facebook?” A question as obvious as, ‘do you have a boyfriend.’ On facebook we become intimate without touching, an arms length friendship that, nevertheless, is advertised to all. And I knew, just like ‘do you have a boyfriend’, I had turned her off with my words. She didn’t want to lie to me. She didn’t want to cause me pain. Nor did she want her list of friends, the real ones, the ones she actually talked to, to question her about why she had accepted my friendship. I just wanted her to like me, and yet her opinion was already formed. I was a loser, nerd, outcast. My head spun with all the different things she might be thinking of me. Were any of those things influenced by Network if so what were the possibilities? What were the odds that anything to do with Network was idiotic? If so what does she know from the limited bit she’d actually seen of me?
I always reminded myself that Network had never really shown up until the doctors had made me start questioning my sanity.
“Not that it matters,” I added hastily, “I’m not even on it.” A lie. “How was class?” I asked caught in the avalanche of words I’d let loose. I worried that my voice would betray the underlying plea,‘you’ve been nice to me, don’t leave. You’ve looked at me and I construed that look as interest. Please, I know Network has stamped all the unattractive labels on me. Or do you not know anything, is all of this just make believe? I do not know. Just please, please – my heart begged – hang out with me long enough to get past this awkward stage.’
“Fine I guess. Mrs. Warner is a bitch.”
“Yeah.” I agreed.
Everything went real quiet between us then. Not so awkward anymore, just quiet. We walked home. She let me lead. I took odd twists and turns, not wanting anyone to see us. I wasn’t completely sure if I was doing this to hide and protect her reputation, or if I wanted this to be a moment only she and I shared. Either way she never questioned my route.
When we got to my house my parents weren’t home. My Dad worked as a chemist for some lab they’d just opened up. My mom was an engineer. They never got home from work until late. Melinda and I sat down and started studying, we didn’t talk much.
“Do you want to have dinner with me tonight?” As soon as I said it I knew I shouldn’t have. I’d broken the natural flow of the conversation with a plea to head off some place more intimate.
“Hey, you know what…never mind. I’m sorry. Just forget I said anything.” I back peddled.
She looked at me and smiled. It was the most depressing smile I’d ever seen. It was the smile a person would give to another persons small child as they wailed for a small plastic toy in the check-out isle.
“I can’t. My parents are expecting me at home.”
-
“She gives me some measure of hope. Hope that I won’t spend the rest of my life having to play the politician. And maybe, one day, I might get to the point where I can say what I want to say about things and have the respect of the people listening to me.”
“What makes you think no one respects you now?”
“Nancy, I’m a kid. Not a little kid, but still I’m a kid. I don’t have a license. I don’t have a car. I can’t get a credit card. I’m nothing, and don’t give me some bull crap line that I am something.” I’d come in to Nancy’s office talking. I didn’t want to give her the chance to ask about Melinda. I wanted to direct the conversation away from it. I was scared of the way I was feeling, it was too big.
“No one respects kids.” I continued. “Why should they? I mean just because I know more math than nine out of ten adults, just because I’ve read more books than my English teacher, and I take naps in history and still ace the tests - why should adults respect me? I’ve never accomplished anything but a few good grades. And I get it, I really do, the real world respects those grades but they’re still just grades. It’s not like I’ve invented anything new. Or even done something new for that matter. I’ve just digested what they told me to digest and spit it back out to them.”
“I don’t think that’s true.” I couldn’t tell if she was being genuine or was using a bit of politic speak of her own.
“True or not I can’t wait until I’m an adult to earn some respect.”
And how do you plan on doing that?
“For now I’m going to write.”
“Writing?”
“Yeah, I mean it doesn’t take any great expertise to write. You just sit down and put pen to paper. Or fingers to keyboard, as the case is. Anybody can make up a yarn. Then later when I’m older and I’ve gotten some respect as an author maybe that will open the doors up for me to do something real with my life - actually create something, instead of just giving voice to the stories in my head.”
Nancy smiled and shook her head. “You really think it will be that easy to write, do you?”
“Yeah, I do.”
A little piece of my brain whispered to me that Network was watching me right now. And all those people out there watching me through Network were listening. And they would all buy my book when the time came. When the time came.
“Besides it gives me hope,” I continued, purely for Network’s sake, “and…its not like I can stop. I need to write. Something goes crazy inside of me when I don’t sit down and write. I don’t always feel that craziness at night when I’m tired and all I really want to do is go to bed. But its there waiting for me when I wake up. And it only takes one or two days of penance to make up for it.” If I just kept this up the whole world would appreciate my suicide attempt as the eccentricities of an artist, instead of the ravings of a lunatic.
“Penance?” Nancy asked.
“Sort of yeah. I mean where does a story come from anyway? The logical answer is the imagination. But what’s logical about imagination? Maybe stories are just like fishing nets tossed out into some big communal pool. And storytellers are just the guys doing the fishing. That’s what I feel like. A fisherman. And if I don’t toss my nets out everyday – I guess its superstitious, but – it’s like I owe Neptune some payment for not being out there doing my job.” I’d paraphrased that line of bull from some Stephen King books.
“So writing is a job not an art?”
“What’s the difference between a writer and a dreamer, or even a storyteller?”
“I’ll bite, what?”
“The difference is writing.”
We both sat with that last statement for a few moments.
“Bernie, may I ask you a question?”
I looked at her in the eyes for a few moments. Something in the tone of her voice said that I wasn’t going to like the question. And somehow I knew it was going to be a major change of gears for our conversation.
“Do you still think about suicide?”
I let the question hang there.
“It is the simplest solution to an over complicated life.” I finally whispered.
-
“You’re problems with Network remind me of a fight.” Nancy said.
“A fight? I don’t follow, what’d you mean?”
“Karl Jung talked about going through a dark period in his life. He was at once searching out what made the mentally insane different by exploring insanity with-in himself and a lot of the time - he was in this state for ten years - he wasn’t sure if he was sane or not. When he talked about it later he talked about fighting with Angels and Demons...to him there wasn’t really a difference since one was just the fallen form of the other. But what he really described was the frantic energy he spent fighting these celestial battles. It was all in his mind, and he developed an understanding that in these battles he wasn’t constrained by his physical form, yet it seemed impossible to strike the Angel. No matter how fast he moved, no matter how many inconceivable blows he struck the Angel always blocked him, seemingly without effort.
“It was the fight of his life, yet there was never anything solid to strike.”
“Network.” I whispered.
“Network.” She confirmed.
-
Looking back I can’t quite tell where or how Network began. It was out in California. I was home alone a lot. I had friends and I felt like I knew all about them yet, I didn’t know them. Loneliness was probably the biggest factor. Loneliness and too much time to think. Mix all that up with a healthy imagination and you’ve got yourself a delusion and I’m the proof in the pudding. So I don’t really know if I was being followed. No logical reason would lead me to believe that I was being tailed. But if Network ever existed anywhere besides my imagination then all the evidence washed away in The Flood.
-
The world was asleep in the depth of night when dawn is still far enough away to seem impossible. I stepped softly out of the house and eased the door closed behind me. Florida never really gets cold, in the depths of winter when the states north of the Mason-Dixon line are swathed in snow and places south of that line are frosted with ice, Southern Florida sports balmy spring-like days.
Yet tonight was different. My breath rose up in smokey plums from my mouth. Supposedly below some invisible line near Tampa nothing ever freezes. Supposedly. The night before tonight old man winter had placed his icy fingers as far south as Naples. It wasn’t freezing as I stepped outside, but blood gets thin in the tropics.
Creeping down the stairs to the main street, my head swiveling back and forth searching for any sign of anyone, everyone - Network - watching me. I ran.
I didn’t sprint, keeping a steady pace my ancestors hunting antelope on the plains would have appreciated. My final destination was the local Kinkos. MapQuest had informed me it was five point two miles away, roughly six minutes by car. There was no car. My improvised route turned my trek into a seven mile jaunt. Twists and turns that the aforementioned antelope might just take. This was no practice for the hunt though. I was the prey, sniffing the chilled air for instinctual smells of the hunter. Signs I wouldn’t have recognized even if I had smelled something. As far as I could tell Network was no where in sight. Still, fences were hopped, backyards ran through, yapping little dogs and frightening big dogs avoided. The tiny flash-drive on my keychain was my proverbial torch.
Because of Melinda, I’d been writing every night.
Walking into the bright lights of Kinkos out of the cold night my face was flushed and sweaty, I drew a stare from the bleary eyed woman behind the counter. She shook her head and blinked several times, probably thinking I was just some mind addled hallucination. I wondered if she was right.
No one had followed me. At least no one I had seen.
I printed my story. One hundred and twenty-two single spaced pages. I asked the woman behind the counter to package it twice. Once in SASE. Second in an envelope addressed to a woman just a few miles north of me in Sarasota. She agented books in Florida. I was submitting my novel.
As I ran home I realized Network probably had a tracking device installed in my flash-drive. My legs had been wheeling against the pavement in a rhythmic motion that seemed like it would carry me blindly into infinity. Now they slowed as my flash-drive grew heavy. I pulled my keys out of my pocket and looked at the small plastic case. For some reason I held it up to the sky, the moon became my backdrop and the insignificant little piece of plastic did not cover the man in the moon’s smile.
“Fuck you.” I whispered. And I threw the it against the pavement. There was no satisfying shatter. The little piece of electronic wizardry was more robust than I had suspected. In the dark from where I was standing I couldn’t even be sure I had cracked. It didn’t matter. The flash-drive had served its purpose and if Network was tracking me through it, it was gone now. As I walked home my legs grew tight and heavy.
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