I wasn't born much. Those born not much will often dream of becoming more than everyone else. Like, all they have is their dreams. Reality rarely ever makes a visit to the homes of the less fortunate and forgotten. Most will entertain ideas of who they will be when they become someone else. But that didn't happen to me I guess. You can trace the lines on my face and the only thing you'll hear is the echo of my worthless father in everything I do. I guess he wasn't much either.
Tomorrow will be my 27th birthday and I can honestly say that I've never done a thing of value, aside from being born, according to my mother. But that woman's bat-shit crazy. She's convinced that the natives are stealing her garbage as revenge for putting up a privacy fence. If she's wrong about something small like that, how wrong could she be about something as "important" as my creation? I believe that most things happen for a reason and that some things, or some people, happen for no reason at all. They're simply just a border for all great things to bounce and bound off when on their way to destinations unknown. Like, without stationary objects, speed and distance could not be determined. I guess I just figure myself to be a part of the latter.
My name is Fan Brent. I'm not quite sure why my father was so insistent on naming me Fan. Maybe it was a prophetic primer to a life spent on the side lines. Or maybe it was the easiest sound for him to bluster out after two pints of Bristols Dry Gin. Often, out-of-town visitors to the fill station I work at will assume that I must be interesting given that I have somewhat of a unique name. Maybe I'm the son of hippies or reclusive author parents, I bet they wonder. They'll never know. I don't speak much, and when I do I sure as shit won't waste my few sentences discussing the motives of the stewed couch turd responsible for bringing me into this void. As I said, I don't talk much anyway. It's not that I don't like people, but was it Shakespeare who said, "brevity is the soul of wit"? I guess I'd rather keep my damn mouth shut and be scorned as retarded. I'm better at watching anyway.
I was born here in Boulder Flats, a small town about four hours northwest of Cheyenne. I don't know if I'd call this place a town anymore I'd call a zit a mountain. Three hundred people give or take, mostly native American, with no reason to stay here other than being too poor to leave. A hard working people shaped by a harder working past. Alcoholism is more likely to visit your house than the postman. As it did mine. At night there are few lights, and fewer reasons to bask in them. The wind snaking through the foothills, punctuated by the occasional barking dog, is the soundtrack to most my evenings.
I hate it here. There's a uselessness that permeates into even the most essential of tasks. Sometimes breathing seems like labor. Why continue on? Laziness, I guess. Suicide is too much work in a town like this. Between the gossip, stigma, and tradition, it's just easier to wait and let hell come to you.
So the night the comet fell from ether and smashed into my pickup truck was made all the more strange by the bland, black back drop on which it occurred. It was hot that evening. Summer had decided to make its presence known that week by overstaying its welcome well into the dark. The sound of crickets was only matched by the frequent click and hum of my old general electric refrigerator working overtime to keep itself cool. A warm, sodden breeze through the tiny open windows of my trailer allowed me the sensation of sleeping in the bell tube of a bugle while a silent breathy version of taps was blown. The T.V. flickered between thirty second and thirty minute segments of nonsense and misanthropy. My eyelids began to open and close as if summoned by magnets. All muscle and motion at long last succumbing to slumber's fragile rhythm.
I often fall sleep in my chair. Or so I will come to discover at almost 3:15 every morning when I'm awakened from the same dream, at the same point, at nearly the same time. Details of the dream lend less alarm than the manner in which it plays out on a seemingly endless reel. My subconscious pondering an apparently immune question. Sleep is necessary for sanity but not for survival, and always in short supply, I guess I've adjusted to its paucity as Bedouin does water.
The first sound to jolt me awake that night was the loudest goddamn sound I do believe I've ever heard. Starting first with a roaring hiss, then followed by a group of percussive bursts, and ending with an explosion that illuminated the whole room to heavenly proportions; if you believe in that sort of thing. Debris pelting the windows and aluminum siding created the illusion of an angry mob showering my home with handfuls of nuts and bolts. I came to still seated effortlessly in my overturned recliner. Smoke immediately filled the air in my tiny compartment. The odor of burning rubber quickly became overwhelming. To my surprise, I learned that instinct immediately takes over, posturing the body and mind to that of a rat. Without conscious reasoning or design I found myself clawing an open window at the far end of my tiny home, the structure birthing me onto the dry, parched prairie grass that rings my property on three sides.
For a brief moment I laid there in the night air envisioning myself as the apparatus in which every moving particle is inhaled, cleansed, and released. My lungs feverishly scrubbing every vapor before being dispelled into the nights gloom. I recall a strange peace enveloped me. Tears began to swell and form in the corners of my eyes and for those few fragile instants, I understood. I understood the preachings of swamis and monks. I understood the distraction in effort. I understood the vibrancy in silence. I understood humanity. That we are not just the center of the universe or just part of a greater living structure, but rather, a complex combination of both. Emptors, seated in private theaters of our own interpretation, fashioned by the mind to keep us consuming and creating together.
I was snapped back to alarm by a sound I now know to have been my grills propane tank combusting and arching itself across the dimly lit pasture adjacent to mine. Metal fragments, charcoal soot, and gas concocted a sort of anti-rainbow. Rolling over on to my hands and knees I crawled towards the edge of my home. Peering around the corner I saw both ends of my truck perched high in the air, head and tail lights both angled as if waiting to search the nights sky. The center of the green pickup was pressed firmly into a three foot crater and my house had shifted, leaning off its support blocks exposing the dirt and sun deprived grass that lay beneath. Several small fires dotted the perimeter while most of the gas appeared to have burned off. The Dodge intermittently hissed plumes of smoke as if it were the regulator on a pressure cooker.
I found myself immediately aware of my own heart beat again; relentless and ever-present, pounding my rib cage like a child eager to escape a locked closet. My knees started to feel shaky and cumbersome. My lower half couldn’t be trusted to account for my upper half any longer. Slowly seating myself on the gravel driveway, my mind began the tedious task of arranging the pieces of events gathered before and behind me in an effort to provide a much needed reasoning. Starting as all minds do with the harmless and ending on the absurd. Was there a mechanical malfunction of some sort? Was I the victim of a vicious prank? Was this an attack? Am I being punished? If so, punished for what? And by whom? I have my faults but I’m no one. Punishment should be reserved for those that leave an imprint. The invisible should be spared their amercement; deprivation will be their gallows.
“Fan!”
“Fan! Can you hear me? Are you okay?”
Not a single siren or light had pierced my thoughts and yet somehow, there before me stood four police officers. Volunteer firefighters could be seen feverishly extinguishing and examining the rubble of my vehicle.
“Are you okay, son?”, a voice called to me.
I recognized two of the faces immediately. Officers Frank Truston and Tommy Delfacto. Both local police, Frank was in his mid-50’s, a solid built man with pepper gray hair and a long scar from chin to ear. He had a calming fatherly sense about him. Tommy had graduated a couple years before me. Stern and cold, he had brown hair perched atop a slightly heavy set face and body. Most young people in town vilified him but I guess I never had much of a reason to. The other two appeared to be State Police Officers given their uniforms and cocky affectation. I was shocked to hear my name called out. For years I’d been wallpaper to the people of this town. A pattern on the days backdrop. The visual equivalent of a lawn mower or the scent of barbecue eminating from an undisclosed location in your neighborhood.
I hadn't updated the dazed look on my face because Frank began snapping his fingers as if trying to awaken me from hypnosis. I validated his presence, and mine for that matter, with a nod and short grunt. A sense of relief seemed to cross his brow. At this point, I decided to speak my first words in nearly 8 hours.
“FFFFUCK!”, I belted out.
I’m unsure as to why my brain allowed this to be the pioneer thought on the evenings proceedings, but my body definitely had a say in its selection.
“You can say that again.”, frank laughed. “What the hell happened out here?”
Leaning one hand in the dirt, I began to slouch and shuffle myself to my feet. I felt Frank and Tommy’s hand grasp at both my biceps.
“I don’t know. I was asleep in my chair when I heard this thing explode.”, I said gesturing towards the remnants of my Dodge Ram.
"I have no idea what could fold a truck like that", Tommy yelled while circling the smoldering mass, "but whatever it was, you're lucky to be alive."
Theres so much arrogance in the assertion of privelage in survival. There are no words for what awaits after death. Perhaps it is the dead that are truly blessed. Maybe we, the restless beings of planet earth, are doomed to chasing our shadows, unkempt and vague, standing on the edge of a precipice we fear, all the while aware only of the inevitable collapsing landscape behind and not the feast of ages that awaits unseen below.
"I guess so.", I muttered.
Releasing from their grip I began to examine the damage for myself. My vehicle laid destroyed and unused on the grassland as though it were some futuristic carcass from a poacher unknown. Bleeding like an insect, the smashed exoskeleton belched viscous liquid in a display of form rather than of function. Wires pulled from their sockets and left to sprawl like Medusa's snakes, sparked nervously as if given the daunting task of reviving this acrid landscape. A sense of sadness crossed the pit of my stomach. The loss reflex opened by an uninformed section of my soul. My brain apparently confused possession with companionship, as it does to so many people nowadays. This did not matter, I reminded myself. My father smattered his pickup with what little love his worthless heart could dribble out. I would not do the same.
The truth is, I had never been like him. He was hoarder of found objects. Believing the people of Fremont County were ungrateful and unknowing of the treasures that lay just below their noses, he used our front lawn as a forum to make his case. A three legged bassinet, a moveable dock for an above ground swimming pool, pedal bikes of all different shapes and sizes, an armoire with the name Steven spray painted across the front of it, six identical lawn gnomes, and countless legs, arms, and tops to luxuries unfamiliar. Washers and driers from several different decades lined the porch and yard creating an evolution scale of modern laundering. Our house appeared as an animal on the dissection table, it's viscera displayed outside the body for the study and scrutiny of others. The old man loved these things. And because he had so many of them, there was very little love left for us.
Since childhood I've avoided the collection of possessions. I had found early on that loving an object and expecting an equal emotion in return was akin to expecting flight from a balloon you just fastened a brick to. With title comes duress. Assets only provide what little enjoyment is derived from the fulfilment of it's purpose and possibly the status of it's presence; all the while absorbing each sentiment invested during it's inception, intention, selection, acquisition, operation, and maintenance.
For example, when I was nine my father fixed up one of the old bicycles he had found in a rare attempt at affection. I'm still unsure to this day what motivated the worthless bastard to do something generous when he had always been vicious and self-serving. Perhaps a perfect combination of spring breeze and whiskey had allowed him to lower his guard. Regardless of what it was, I knew enough to question it. It was not much. A rusted Schwinn ten speed with only six working gears and a seat that would swivel whenever I moved my hips. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the freedom it afforded. It was a vessel of escape and peace from the Van De Graaff Generator and steel gate that was my parents union. I would ride the endless dirt roads from dawn till dusk, spending hours without recalling a single soul. I'd lay in the sun beside the small streams that rose up from nowhere and sank back into the earth, perforating the endless pastures as if portioning the east half of the land to nothing and the west half to oblivion. It was my escort to shallower breaths. But when that bicycle was left from my sight, or returned home on flat tires, this was reason enough to be beaten. My father, only able to apply sentiment to plastic and alloys, saw this as a dereliction of fervor and in my family fists were fueled not just by my wrongs but by all misdoings ever thrust upon every member in it. Being forced to attend school with bruises chin to brow, elicited tone and volume of voices from others that only served to unsettle the ego. The whisper may be the most destructive and discomforting sound the body is capable of producing. Ownership I discovered had a price, and that price, like so many others, was not worth the reward. Walking became my preferred mode of transport from that point on. Reliable, cheap, and mine, my bones were of little care to anyone.
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