The young man stood at a fork in the road. Two paths lay before him.
One, simple and clear — a short distance more over firm stone before an abrupt end. Silence and relief from his weary journey.
The other, stretching on endlessly through brambles and darkness into the unknown. It appeared little different from the dim and rocky path he had walked for all memory.
He was so tired.
If he turned left, he could finally rest. The silent clearing lay waiting, bathed in a cold grey light. A few paces more, and it would be done. But there would be no turning back. A hollow end to an empty struggle.
He looked to the right. It was so dark. He could scrape and stumble down that path forever. For all he knew, those dark woods were all there were. Reeling and fumbling through unyielding brambles until the end.
The young man stood staring at the crossroads ahead.
This choice, was all he had left.
★ ★ ★ ★
Jack was a piece of shit. At sixteen, he spent most days wandering the streets and getting high. He surrounded himself with like-minded lowlifes. Between them, there was little more ambition in life than scraping together enough money to buy their next dime-sack. It was a dead-end existence.
It hadn’t always been like this. Jack had done well in school through most of his childhood. An outlandish imagination had helped him weave stories and fantasies so vivid that they could almost block out the realities of the world.
But those days were long gone. A lifetime of abuse in a broken home had taken its toll. The last drops of hope had been wrung out of him like water from a parched sponge. Fear, anger, and despair had numbed and hollowed him until there was nothing left. There would never be a life beyond this. It simply did not exist.
And so he had given up. Being too high to think was better than being alone in the empty darkness of his mind.
Jack tried everything he could get his hands on — amphetamines, barbiturates, hallucinogens, and good old fashion booze and weed. The only time he felt alive was when the drugs had him grinning like a jackal and cackling like a hyena.
He had fallen in with some bad people. Not out of any real sense of comradery with the burnouts and criminals, but simply because that was who had the cheap drugs. And it usually followed that the seedier the clique, the cheaper the drugs. On one occasion, one such group had taken him to buy ecstasy straight from the producer — a shirtless, tattooed goblin, whose van was full of machine guns and other illicit weapons for sale. Ironically, that creature was one of the few to caution Jack that taking so many pills in such a short time was dangerous.
It seems obvious to say that it was only a matter of time before something went horribly wrong. But Jack no longer cared.
Live or die, his life was not worth much anymore.
★ ★ ★ ★
Street lights bathed the asphalt in a dim yellow glow. Nights were always like this. Yellow and black. Sometimes they felt like the only two colors in the world. Everything else was just a bad dream.
The pavement was rough and hard. Sitting slumped against a row of postal boxes, it radiated icy cold through Jack’s jeans. It might have been uncomfortable, but he was too high to care. Two other shapes were slumped several feet away, smoking cigarettes and basking in their delirium.
It was somewhere around 2:00 a.m. They had been rolling for about an hour, wandering the streets, chain-smoking, and reaffirming their love for MDMA. At some point they had stopped to sit down by this row of postal boxes. Nobody really remembered why.
Jack sat slow blinking at the street light opposite him. One pill was good, but two were better. It was a heavy dose, but just what he needed to shut down his brain.
He felt okay. These were the only times he felt okay. Nothing was wrong. His problems didn’t matter. Life didn’t matter. He smiled.
Something across the street came into focus. A truck. A large, white truck. It came to a stop.
Strange, there usually wasn’t much traffic nearby at this time of night…
A crowd of shapes piled out.
People? This many? Strange… He heard someone talking.
“Yah, that’s him. That’s that motherfucker.”
They were coming closer. Jack’s eyelids drifted open and closed, unconcerned and oblivious.
“Hey bitch, get up!”
With a cloudy head he glanced around at the shapes now surrounding him. There were four? Or was it five? One was looming just above.
“I said GET THE FUCK UP!”
The shape above him was yelling. He dragged himself to his feet.
SLAM!
Jack’s body was thrown backwards into the postal boxes. He staggered forward and looked up at his attacker.
Another burnout. To an outside observer he and Jack would have appeared little different. Long hair, trashy graphic hoodies, and beat-up skate shoes. But the other shapes were different. Shaved heads, white tall tees, and tattoos everywhere. These were grown men. Skinheads.
“Yeah, what’s up homie? You wanna fuck with my sister, huh?” The figure opposite Jack was slinking towards him with its fists up. He tried reasoning with it.
“Dude, I don’t even know your sister… I don’t even know you…” His slurred speech trailed off. It sounded more like a junkie than a voice of reason.
“You lyin’ faggot. I’m gonna kick your ass.” The blurry yellow shape edged closer. It pulled its arm back and threw its fist forward.
THUD!
Jack reflexively put his arms up as the blow flew in. It was a clumsy punch, easily blocked even in his delirious state. The shape pulled its arm back and threw three more.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
The blows landed on Jack’s arms and shoulders. A rough life had made him a better brawler than most. This burnout was smaller than him, and obviously not a skilled fighter. Under normal circumstances Jack could have laid him out with a few well-placed punches. But now? He was so high he could barely stand straight.
He glanced at the figures swimming at the corners of his vision. They were jeering and egging his attacker on. The skinheads were a different sort of problem. These were not delinquent teenagers. These were full grown men. Dangerous ones.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
Another series of blows came at Jack. They bounced off his raised arms and shoulders.
“Man, I don’t wanna fight you.” The appeal came out weak and slurred.
THUD! THUD! THUD! WACK! THUD!
One managed to connect with the side of his face. He staggered back and glanced between his opponent and the skinheads behind. These were real gangsters; career felons with nothing to lose. They were always toting weapons and spoiling for an excuse to use them. They wanted this. For some reason they wanted to see this burnout pummel Jack in the street.
THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD!
More blows. He couldn’t fight back. These men might kill him if he did. Or worse, they might beat his head in with some blunt object and leave him crippled. The only thing he could do was take the blows from this burnout and hope that they were satisfied.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
Fists continued to fly at Jack’s face and body. He protected his head as well as he could. The cycle repeated again and again. A series of punches thrown, a step back, then more. Time stretched on endlessly. The hails of fists were punctuated by Jack’s appeals and jeers from the onlookers.
Two more punches collided with his face. The delirious teen noticed a trickle of blood running from one of his eyebrows. He was too high to feel much pain, but the sight of the blood worried him. The numbness made it impossible to tell how much damage was being done.
Eventually the blows began to slow. The burnout took longer periods between the flurries to leer at Jack. After what seemed like an eternity, they finally stopped.
His assailant stepped back.
“Yo, let’s go. This faggot’s done.”
The group broke apart. The skinheads gave several last jeers as they walked back towards the truck.
Jack lowered his arms as he watched them go. Suddenly something caught his eye. One of them was a girl. She must have been standing behind the others during the fight. As she withdrew to the truck, she glanced back at him.
Jacqueline. He knew her. His friend, and his high school crush.
“You shouldn’t have fucked with their family, Jack.” Her voice sounded almost apologetic.
Jack watched as the shapes entered the truck, then drove off into the night.
He stood staring into the darkness. His ears were ringing, mind still thick with the drug-induced haze.
He turned around.
The scene behind him revealed nothing surprising. His friends had run off. They didn’t care whether he lived or died. Why should they? Jack himself did not.
He turned back around.
The young man stood staring at the black road before him.
★ ★ ★ ★
Jack dragged himself back to the house where he lived. He slipped silently through the door and into his bed. Several fitful hours passed. More nightmares. There were always nightmares.
It was still early when he pulled himself from his bed and shambled into the kitchen. The thought of food was revolting, but he knew he needed to eat. The cheap ecstasy pills were cut with so much speed that he often forgot for days at a time. It had left him emaciated with frequent fits of lightheadedness.
The unripe banana may as well have been solid wood. He choked it down and stood staring listlessly at the linoleum floor. Footsteps jerked his head upward.
He let out a breath. It was only her.
The statue drifted into the kitchen and began preparing a pot of coffee. Its movements were cold and mechanical. Jack threw away the banana peel and turned to leave. He was two paces from the entrance when a hollow voice echoed behind him.
“What is that?”
He paused. “What is what?”
“That. On your face.”
Jack stood with his back to the voice. “It’s nothing.”
“Look at me Jack.”
He slowly turned his head and locked eyes with the automaton. Its glassy orbs widened. Something stirred faintly within them.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. It’s fine.” Why did it care about this? It didn’t care about anything anymore.
Jack turned around and crossed the remaining space to the entrance. He was cut short mid-step as his foot crossed from tile to carpet.
It was him. The figure somehow managed to consume the entire entryway with its presence. It stepped forward. Jack stumbled two steps back.
“What happened to your face, boy?” The voice was cold and deep, like the muffled crushing of some mammoth ship sinking to its fate in the black depths of the ocean.
He shouldn’t have lingered here. The thing was unpredictable. It may well decide that Jack’s failure to defend himself merited a blow or two of its own. And this thing was not another scrawny burnout. He had seen it remove entire sets of teeth with one swing of its fist.
The icy blue eyes drilled into him. Pinprick pupils remained fixed as the thing began moving menacingly forward. Jack’s feet reflexively moved backwards as he glanced between the monster and the statue behind.
He relented. It didn’t matter anymore. The drugs, the fight, everything from the night before dispassionately dribbled out in a single stream. There was almost some faint hint of motherly concern on the automaton as he spoke, barely perceptible behind its thick porcelain mask. The monster’s face twisted from anger to disgust.
When he finished, the three stood silently staring at each other. The monster leered at his weakness, revulsion radiating from its seething scowl. Some imperceptible emotion was emanating from the machine. Finally, she spoke up.
“We’re reporting this to the police.” The voice was flat and logical.
“They ain’t gonna do shit for him.” The monster never broke it’s leering gaze.
Jack didn’t care. He no longer cared about anything. Let them do what they wanted.
And so the police were called. A report was taken, and the white truck identified. It wasn’t a difficult search. It belonged to a well known criminal who already had a warrant out for his arrest. The police warned that these men were incredibly dangerous and wouldn’t think twice about killing.
As they wrapped up their questions, the lead officer threw Jack a dismissive glance. He remarked, halfway to himself, “Hope I’m not gonna be cleaning up your body at another one of these guy’s parties.”
Nobody believed that Jack didn’t know the assailants. Nobody believed that he’d done nothing to provoke them.
He didn’t care. These people’s opinions had long since ceased to matter to him.
★ ★ ★ ★
Little came of the police report. One more minor offence was tagged onto the skinheads’ long list of crimes. For them, it would change nothing.
The effect on Jack’s life, however, was profound. Any last semblance of freedom was gone. The isolation was not imposed by his parents (his father preferred spontaneous beatings to calculated punitive measures), but by his new status as a social pariah and constant target for the skinheads’ pursuit.
He was a snitch. The police report had condemned him to that status. The burnouts, stoners, and lowlifes who had been his companions wouldn’t speak to him. Being seen with this outcast was to risk becoming one themselves. Word traveled fast, and his attacker, who he later learned was called Travis, had many friends among the seedy clicks that dominated social life at Jack’s school. He was the subject of constant glares and venomous whispers wherever he went. Between classes, during lectures, at lunch, and in the bathrooms, there always seemed to be a spiteful pair of eyes following his every move.
Jack had spent most of his life wandering alone. Being so hated was new, but he could adapt to the isolation. What was truly intolerable was the sudden inability to venture out to the streets, parks, abandoned lots, and construction sites where he had grown up. There were different homes in different cities, but there was always a grassy field or quiet bystreet that he could retreat to when times got hard. These had been his only refuge from the monster waiting for him at home. To go out onto the open roads now was to risk death or worse.
The skinheads never stopped looking for him. They had eyes and ears everywhere. The street dwellers lurking at the bus stops and parking lots were always watching. The gang would know the moment Jack was alone. Groups of them came prowling the streets surrounding his parents’ neighborhood.
Jack was a prisoner in his father’s house. He couldn’t decide if it would be worse to remain there, or to risk death with the skinheads outside. Every creak of the floorboards left his entire body tensed. He always knew what would come next.
Ominous silence would settle over the air as heavy footsteps approached the door. The lock, destroyed long ago by monster’s rampages, would explode open. The thing would emerge, leering and ranting. Jack would be backed into a corner, his worthlessness spewed out of gnashing teeth alongside droplets of spittle. Occasionally he would be thrown across the room. Occasionally he would get a bloody nose. That at least was a surprise.
Eventually, Jack learned why he had been attacked. Travis apparently believed that Jack had convinced his younger sister to do coke with him, intending to take advantage of her while she was high. On hearing this, Jack, for the first time since the attack, felt a bubbling of rage and indignation. He realized what had really happened.
He had gone to a party several weeks before the incident. As usual, he was high — this time on a concoction of cocaine-laced weed that his friends endearingly called “coco-puffs.” He had been approached by a lascivious fourteen year old, following him across the house making aggressive sexual advances. He had rebuffed her every time. No matter his current state of mind, this creature was simply disgusting.
Eventually, as he was wont to do, Jack became too high and lost consciousness. As he lay on the floor, the pubescent stalker had stolen his bag of narcotics. Not realizing that it was something other than normal marijuana, she had smoked the medley with one of her friends. She was confronted by her older brother on returning home, obviously high on something more than THC. In a panic, she fabricated a story about the hapless burnout from the party, condemning him and absolving herself of all blame.
The tale had spread among the seedy circles of burnouts and lowlifes. Its originator had a reputation as a liar and a thief, so her word carried little credibility beyond that world. Regardless, the damage was done. The grimy bottom of society didn’t need evidence to condemn Jack. This rumor was more than enough.
An encounter with a once-close friend encapsulated the ever-present hostility in which he now lived. One day, as Jack approached his school’s large metal doors, Jacqueline caught his eye.
“Jack, you’re a faggot.”
It was the last thing she ever said to him.
★ ★ ★ ★
The room was frigid. Faint mists could be seen from the condensing vapors in Jack’s breath. Despite the approaching winter chill, his father refused to heat the house.
Jack sat on his bed, hollow eyes fixed on the drywall opposite. A long, grey shape lay propped against it. He had scarcely moved in the last hour.
Empty. There was nothing left behind his sunken grey eyes. No joy, no anger, no hope, and no hatred.
There was nothing left.
He had never known another world to yearn for. He had never had close friends to miss. This was life. Reeling and fumbling through darkness and brambles until the end. The young man rose to his feet.
He was so tired.
A few paces more, and it would be done. The firm stone of the tile floor felt cool against his feet.
He took one step, then another. A cold grey light shone from the metal below. He picked it up.
The gun’s weight felt substantial and reassuring. He stepped back and sat slumped on the edge of the bed.
Silence and relief from his weary journey. He lifted his chin and pressed the cold, hard metal into the soft skin below.
A hollow end to an empty struggle. He gripped the body of the weapon as his finger stretched haltingly toward the trigger.
His eyes squeezed shut.
All of the pain coursed through his veins like poison. The anger, the fear, the hatred and despair. The violence and isolation. The hopelessness and suffering.
There was nothing left in this world for him.
There would never be a life beyond this.
Nothing else existed…
…
… All of eternity passed…
…
… And another thought flitted through his mind — a strange, silvery flicker in the darkness.
He would always have this cold path. He could always return to this silent clearing and find this certain end.
But what about that brambly and uncertain road? There was likely nothing more than thorns and darkness forever. But what if there was something else? What if there was something that could be glimpsed just past the next bend in the road?
What if there was something worth living for, somewhere out there?
If he chose this ending now, he would never know.
Another eternity passed as the strange thought flickered in his mind.
Jack’s shaking hands loosened on the cold metal. The barrel slid from beneath his chin and off to the side. He sat slumped on the bed, misty vapors rising from short, thin breaths.
And so the young man decided to continue on for just a little bit longer.
Just long enough to see what was around the next bend in the road.
★ ★ ★ ★
A crisp breeze whistled through winter air. Snow dressed the rooftops in puffy white quilts. Jack heaved his final suitcase into the sedan. He turned and faced the road, rubbing his hands together for warmth.
Six months had passed since the assault. His name was cleared, but he had never been more hated by Travis and the gang.
He had heard the truth from the drop-out’s own mouth. Travis’ cousin, the ringleader of the skinheads, had been apprehended and scheduled for trial. Police had asked Jack to testify against him, bearing witness to one crime of many that would add up to years in prison. In an attempt to discourage damaging testimony, Travis had approached Jack one day outside of school.
His manner had been uncharacteristically meek as he asked Jack for a moment. The truth, it seemed, had been known to Travis for some time. After being caught again with stolen drugs, his sister had confessed. The entire premise for their bad blood had been based on a lie. Travis accepted fault, and gave something of a halfhearted apology. He concluded with an appeal. Since his cousin ostensibly had little to do with the whole affair’s planning, he hoped Jack would give a favorable account at the upcoming trial.
Jack said he would think about it, then turned and walked away.
When the trial had come, Jack had told the truth. It was not a favorable account for any concerned.
A sudden clamor wrenched Jack from his reverie.
A stream of cursing followed as his father emerged from the front door. Apparently, his mother had dropped a prized boxing trophy. It was undamaged, but her carelessness still evoked a sound berating.
Jack popped open the rear door and slid into the vehicle. It would be unwise to allow his father to see him in any state other than complete readiness. The sedan rocked back and forth as the last of the bags were loaded in.
They were moving again. This time their destination was some godforsaken desert near the southern Mojave. Things would not be any better there for his family. He knew that by now. But Jack was holding on to something else.
The vehicle backed out and pulled off down the road. Houses, businesses, parking lots, and fields rolled by. Soon they were on open plains; expanses of grass, rock, and dirt that seemed to stretch on forever.
As he sat staring through the foggy glass, one thought echoed in his mind.
What if?…
End
James B. Cutchin 