prologue.
PROLOGUE.
If asked to point out the precise moment at which everything spun completely out of control, I would say it was when I inadvertently killed an innocent fifty-eight-year-old man by showing him a short film.
It was more of a commercial, I guess, but when you've been working on something a few weeks you come to think of it in the most pretentious terms possible. I don't know if that happens to everyone, or just me.
All the important information, exposition and such concerning me (and the content of the film) is on the way soon enough, don't worry. But of everything that has happened recently, all the calamities and catastrophes - this is called foreshadowing, by the way - of everything that has happened, the moment I consider to be pivotal was the death of the man in question - the circumstances and manner of his stupid, grotesque death. Were I more prone to cliché I would tell you I see it every time I close my eyes. I don't, of course, but certainly it comes up now and again. I used to see things on the TV that reminded me of it, or him, or him and then it, all the time. I no longer have a TV. Like I say, though: now and again.
It went like this.
The lights came up on the film I had been showing him and the boardroom was full of faces hanging slack, and this man's mouth was the widest of all. I suddenly discovered an ability I didn't know I had - I can differentiate between people who are stunned, and people who are at the onset of a massive coronary. It's in the eyes. You could probably spot it too.
Everyone else in the room (with one exception, which I will get to a little later) was, like him, variations on a visual theme - old, gray or graying hair, jowls, suit and tie. You see them everywhere, they're interchangeable. Some had glasses, there were some combovers and some bald heads, there were maybe one or two smartly-trimmed mustaches, and the odd beard. To make it easy to keep track, I will tell you that the dying man was named Dave. In everyone else's eyes I saw the blankness that happens when all non-essential parts of the conscious mind shut down in a mad dash to find an appropriate reaction to something. In Dave's eyes, I saw terror as naked as any terror has ever been. What you see in the eyes of a man dying unexpectedly can be described, in a curious way, as freedom, because there was so much in his life he thought was vitally important and which was, at that moment, not. There is no concern which takes precedence over your immediate death. Not your taxes, not your daughter's college fund, not your dignity.
The world had slowed down for the whole room, and then it seemed to slow down to a complete stop for everyone but poor Dave, for whom time and motion snapped back to normal and made up for lost work. I don't know how it felt to him. I can only say how it looked to me.
One of Dave's hands was visibly shaking and he was gaping - mouth and eyes - at nothing. He was one of the combovers, and he was whiter than usual. His breathing became heavier very quickly and then it was the only sound in the room and then he tried to raise his shaking hand and he seemed to be having a little trouble with this and then his whole body was shaking and his ridiculous combed-over hair quavered more dramatically as though it was a Dave's-Terror-Meter letting everyone know exactly how searingly shit-scared Dave happened to be at that moment and no one in the room was looking at each other and no one was looking at Dave at all, it was just a baker's dozen or so of the longest thousand-yard stares you might care to imagine and they were all just looking at nothing and the only person to effect any eye contact was Dave, scared Dave, who seemed to remember how to move his head and tried to catch the eye of everyone around him but either they were beyond paying attention or they were aware of him but unwilling to acknowledge that he was there and he managed to raise his hand, the one that was shaking at first, to his chest and then a thudding noise indicated he had just banged the underside of the table with his knee, I don't know which one, and his mouth was a hanging black O and from that mouth issued a noise like an outraged fat woman but they still would not look at him, still no one would acknowledge this man or his crisis, and his eyes went from focusing on nothing to not focusing at all and he shuddered a few times and finally, at the age of fifty-eight, David Howe died alone in a room full of people he'd known and worked with for years.
It was not the worst event that occurred at that company and in light of everything that happened I would say it seems barely significant, but at least to me it is worth noting. Like I say, it was then that all events and actions moved themselves irretrievably out of my control. I realize that they were probably that way anyway, if it had gotten to the point where the above could even have taken place, but that's how it seems to me.
What follows is what I have to offer by way of a confession, starting at the beginning. Any sane person would agree that I, of all people, have no place insisting on any principle at all, and to this I happily submit, but for that one point (of no one's contention, to be honest) on which I stand firm: That, up until Dave died in that boardroom, I honestly believed, and believe, that I had some degree of control over what happened around and inside me. That I'd had a plan and that I had worked with this plan more or less carefully, and that the plan was theoretically sound. David's death was one of the last times I felt any flavor of guilt over anything, and though I don't feel it now, I did then, and if I had known what would happen once I rolled that film, I think that the person I was at the time would not have done it.
I am not sorry for any of what happened except for Dave, and I can't apologize to him now. I thought about saying that this will be dedicated (ha!) to his memory, but it feels like the least worthwhile detail possible. So fuck it. The immortal spirit of David Howe, wherever it may be, will have to be satisfied with what I've said already.
Now that I have indulged myself in the shambling approximation of a moral stand, I think we can begin.
If asked to point out the precise moment at which everything spun completely out of control, I would say it was when I inadvertently killed an innocent fifty-eight-year-old man by showing him a short film.
It was more of a commercial, I guess, but when you've been working on something a few weeks you come to think of it in the most pretentious terms possible. I don't know if that happens to everyone, or just me.
All the important information, exposition and such concerning me (and the content of the film) is on the way soon enough, don't worry. But of everything that has happened recently, all the calamities and catastrophes - this is called foreshadowing, by the way - of everything that has happened, the moment I consider to be pivotal was the death of the man in question - the circumstances and manner of his stupid, grotesque death. Were I more prone to cliché I would tell you I see it every time I close my eyes. I don't, of course, but certainly it comes up now and again. I used to see things on the TV that reminded me of it, or him, or him and then it, all the time. I no longer have a TV. Like I say, though: now and again.
It went like this.
The lights came up on the film I had been showing him and the boardroom was full of faces hanging slack, and this man's mouth was the widest of all. I suddenly discovered an ability I didn't know I had - I can differentiate between people who are stunned, and people who are at the onset of a massive coronary. It's in the eyes. You could probably spot it too.
Everyone else in the room (with one exception, which I will get to a little later) was, like him, variations on a visual theme - old, gray or graying hair, jowls, suit and tie. You see them everywhere, they're interchangeable. Some had glasses, there were some combovers and some bald heads, there were maybe one or two smartly-trimmed mustaches, and the odd beard. To make it easy to keep track, I will tell you that the dying man was named Dave. In everyone else's eyes I saw the blankness that happens when all non-essential parts of the conscious mind shut down in a mad dash to find an appropriate reaction to something. In Dave's eyes, I saw terror as naked as any terror has ever been. What you see in the eyes of a man dying unexpectedly can be described, in a curious way, as freedom, because there was so much in his life he thought was vitally important and which was, at that moment, not. There is no concern which takes precedence over your immediate death. Not your taxes, not your daughter's college fund, not your dignity.
The world had slowed down for the whole room, and then it seemed to slow down to a complete stop for everyone but poor Dave, for whom time and motion snapped back to normal and made up for lost work. I don't know how it felt to him. I can only say how it looked to me.
One of Dave's hands was visibly shaking and he was gaping - mouth and eyes - at nothing. He was one of the combovers, and he was whiter than usual. His breathing became heavier very quickly and then it was the only sound in the room and then he tried to raise his shaking hand and he seemed to be having a little trouble with this and then his whole body was shaking and his ridiculous combed-over hair quavered more dramatically as though it was a Dave's-Terror-Meter letting everyone know exactly how searingly shit-scared Dave happened to be at that moment and no one in the room was looking at each other and no one was looking at Dave at all, it was just a baker's dozen or so of the longest thousand-yard stares you might care to imagine and they were all just looking at nothing and the only person to effect any eye contact was Dave, scared Dave, who seemed to remember how to move his head and tried to catch the eye of everyone around him but either they were beyond paying attention or they were aware of him but unwilling to acknowledge that he was there and he managed to raise his hand, the one that was shaking at first, to his chest and then a thudding noise indicated he had just banged the underside of the table with his knee, I don't know which one, and his mouth was a hanging black O and from that mouth issued a noise like an outraged fat woman but they still would not look at him, still no one would acknowledge this man or his crisis, and his eyes went from focusing on nothing to not focusing at all and he shuddered a few times and finally, at the age of fifty-eight, David Howe died alone in a room full of people he'd known and worked with for years.
It was not the worst event that occurred at that company and in light of everything that happened I would say it seems barely significant, but at least to me it is worth noting. Like I say, it was then that all events and actions moved themselves irretrievably out of my control. I realize that they were probably that way anyway, if it had gotten to the point where the above could even have taken place, but that's how it seems to me.
What follows is what I have to offer by way of a confession, starting at the beginning. Any sane person would agree that I, of all people, have no place insisting on any principle at all, and to this I happily submit, but for that one point (of no one's contention, to be honest) on which I stand firm: That, up until Dave died in that boardroom, I honestly believed, and believe, that I had some degree of control over what happened around and inside me. That I'd had a plan and that I had worked with this plan more or less carefully, and that the plan was theoretically sound. David's death was one of the last times I felt any flavor of guilt over anything, and though I don't feel it now, I did then, and if I had known what would happen once I rolled that film, I think that the person I was at the time would not have done it.
I am not sorry for any of what happened except for Dave, and I can't apologize to him now. I thought about saying that this will be dedicated (ha!) to his memory, but it feels like the least worthwhile detail possible. So fuck it. The immortal spirit of David Howe, wherever it may be, will have to be satisfied with what I've said already.
Now that I have indulged myself in the shambling approximation of a moral stand, I think we can begin.