This City (Owl's Eyes)

My second short story that I deemed "finished" beyond the first two pages- a quick peek into urban decay.

     The owl's eyes were what caught me. Like twin stars trapped in orbs of glass and set to roll amongst a field of ashen feathers and mange. There was a sort of serenity in them, a sense of beauty. But what I picked up on first was their sense of mockery. Not of me, of course. Nobody would ever dare mock me" not even a painting. But of the rest of the image, that’s what got the blunt of the ridicule. The way those eyes outshone the body and face, the beak and breast, they seemed to tout how they, as an image, are what made the ensemble beautiful. But without the body, without the bird, the eyes would just be two golden circles. And nobody would pay to see a painting of what could just have easily been two gold testicles hanging on a canvas like the remains of a decimated Christmas tree. They relied on the rest of the painting, but leeched out its beauty and took advantage of it.

     The artist had walked up to me and said that the image was based in his childhood experiences with some bullshit I didn't care about it. It didn't matter. Those eyes read to me the list of humanity's sins: the trail of societal inequity and sociological damage. I hated those f*****g eyes the second I laid mine on them. And so I decided to take my pen and stab them out right in the gallery. It served them right, after all.

     I didn’t bother to look back as I briskly walked out the back door, but I could hear the ensuing chaos. I wasn’t about to sit there and allow myself to be lectured by some pompous scribbler and his self-righteous fans about what was allowed. So I went outside. Desecration: it sure makes you want a smoke.

      That was about twenty minutes ago. A lot can happen in twenty minutes. An acclaimed blogger can desecrate a painting and then get the s**t beaten out of him, for one. If you'd believe it, the two events could happen in a span of those twenty minutes and not even be connected. The two men who had come were essentially bald, ambling apes, if you can imagine the misshapen forms they posed under cotton and denim. One was called Lenny, and seemed to think that I'd know whom he represented- his boss had told him I’d be here and that I’d know what I’d done to deserve what was coming. As if I had only pissed off one powerful person in this city. The other man was silent, with a large mustache in place of where normal peasants have mouths. Quite the pair, really.

     I'd like to say I put up a fight, but if you've seen me, you'd know that was a lie. It took them less than three minutes to work me over, though I think I managed to do them more physiological damage than they did me physical. Internal bleeding? Sure, but when your parents are compared to a beheaded chicken getting screwed in the windpipe by a wolverine on methamphetamines, it's a comment you're likely to remember. That kind of thing being spit in someone’s face by a bloodied, laughing maniac usually ends up putting brutes like them in their place. They still beat the ever-loving hell out of you, of course, but they always pull their punches just a tad if you appear to be a crazy m**********r. Which, of course, I am. Three minutes and they were gone. They left my rather faded field of vision and I let myself lie on the cold, wet cement. I was rattled and hurt more than I had the last time this had happened. But, when life hands you an a*s-kicking, you grab that cigarette you wanted twenty minutes ago. I smoke enough that Camel has stock in me, so I had a pack on hand. The universe is neat like that.

     I let my cigarette burn in my hand, the smoke wafting upwards as the broken streetlight shone through it. I inhale the tar slowly, my body still not quite able to handle anything else. I take one after another. The hot cherry is almost unusable at this point, but I let it smolder until it burns my fingers and crumbles to ash. I don’t need another smoke. Not for another few minutes, anyway. Lungs like charcoal, sure, but they don’t hold a candle to my soul. So I’ve been told, anyway.  The street is dark and dead, empty and soulless. The water reflects the fluorescent lights in a way that reminds me of the eyes of a drowned dog lying on a linoleum floor. I’m not sure why. I wipe my hand on my jacket, the touch of the old cotton feels cool against the raw skin on my hand. 

     The burn is good. It brings back a sense of feeling. When you’ve been beaten half to death you don’t feel pain a little while after it ends. Adrenaline and endorphins flood your body and make you almost numb from the wounds you’ve received: assuming you can last those few minutes of unbearable pain beforehand. Makes you able to walk, to run, to get to safety and cry yourself to sleep in a ditch until help comes or you die of pneumonia in a pool of feces and blood. I can walk away, but this isn't my first time out in the city. I carry the cigs just in case of a brutal beating. Or in case it rains. Or I go out to eat. They're all just about as common as one another.

     Shakily, I pick myself up from the cement and begin to walk down the rather abandoned street. The gallery doors are closed, and those two hunks of flesh are long gone. I don't think anyone’s planning on following me, and if they are they don’t want to kill me, so there’s that. They did break my nose on a rainy night, though, so there’s something to be said for sticking to classics. If I was a hard-boiled detective, I would have pulled my revolver and that would have ended it. But I’m just a self-employed journalist: not the most adept at dealing with men out for blood and what I assume is revenge. They never did tell me who they were before they attempted to cave my skull"so the beating was, on a whole, ineffective. I talk about a lot of people. Reveal a lot of truths about this city and the corporations and politicians who corrupt it. Kicking the s**t out of me when I’ve just destroyed a painting that they clearly had no investment in is hardly going to make me shut up. Human pus boils, looking to make a show before they get snuffed out. I’d pity them, if I still pitied anyone.

     The city does that to people, I think. It take s away just that small bit of humanity you have that makes you say a white lie to a stranger so you can move on with life. That sliver of yourself that allows you to smile while at work even though you feel like plunging a pen into your bosses’ ear. That segment of who you are that stops you from holing up in your filthy apartment and swearing off humanity for life. It takes that away and stomps it into a stain on the cement. What’s left is the human being who thrives around others just like them. Not strictly bad people, not ones who are stagnant piss to the core of them, but ones who are just reprehensible to spend time with and deal with on a one-on-one basis. Ones who take that extra step into amorality just to get"and one step is all it takes.

     Well, that’s in my experience. So now I write about others who go through the same thing. And I’m praised for it. Cheered on by the masses I loathe. The more I criticize them, the more they cheer"like a comedian who heckles the entire crowd. But my crowd is also my entire act, and they still love it. Life runs on irony like God runs on bullshit, and I’d laugh it off but it’s really not that funny.

     My shoes splash in the puddles on the way home- I walk in the cracked streets wet with what I have to assume is liquid despair. I used to think that life used to always be this way; with the meek ruled by the powerful and amoral in a system where people default to your enemy, not your friend. I then was told to think back to a simpler time, when humans simply hunted in bands of 20 or 30 across grasslands and we speared mammoths and ate over an open flame in kinship with one another. At which point I punched the half-retarded hippie in the face and told him that back then you were more likely to starve, get eaten, or get murdered than you were to live to see your own pubic hair. Society is a ball of filth, but at least we have medicine and properly-distributed agriculture. Losing contact with the proverbial mother nature and one another is a relatively small price to pay. I’ll take 100 years of isolated misery over fifteen of primal prosperity any day of the week. Wouldn’t you? Simpler time my a*s. If fighting for every second of your life is simpler than getting by at the least common denominator in a society that, at least to a small degree, fights so that you don’t die in a gutter, well, I don’t know what to think any more. And if I don’t, then I can’t do my job and I'll end up like the rest of them.

      It’s my job to protect people from those who would beat them down. I don’t protect them with a sword"I don’t kick down doors and kill those who oppress. Because there will always be more of those m***********s than I can ever kill before I get thrown in jail. I protect people with knowledge. Swear-filled, pessimistic knowledge, to be fair, but knowledge nonetheless. People given the methods and the cause have two choices"to act and to not. If they do, then I’ve done my job and can walk away as they burn the aristocracy to a cinder. If they don’t, they deserve their fate and I have to try again before too many of them die. Usually, if they end up with the s**t end of the stick, I have the clean conscience knowing that they stuck it up their own a*s first.

     My broken glasses catch the light of the last stoplight before my apartment, my eyes filled for a single second with a field of pure red before the light switches to green. This is how the masses feel. Everything is red or green. Stop or go. I see the light as always yellow: in life and when I drive. This methodology is exactly why I’m walking home and not driving- 65 points on your license in less than 24 hours and only via security cameras. Cameras, of course, because no cop in his right mind could catch me. That has to be some kind of record.

     The steps to the apartment building are a drab grey, the walls scratched by nails and smeared with all manner of bodily fluids. People have screwed exactly where I’m walking and people have died there, too. The small bit of blood that still drips off my face is added to the genetic cesspool as I go, my little contribution to the demonic child that will congeal out of the material one day in the future. Maybe it’ll inherit my wit or slightly jaunty smile. At least that’ll make it one of the better merciless overlords this city has seen.

     I turn off the steps and stare for a moment down the hallway. It’s long, badly lit, and smells of foul carrion and burning garbage. I slip another cigarette out of my jacket pocket and balance it carefully on the burns on my fingers. They’re incredibly sensitive, now, and I can almost feel the grit of the paper on my flesh. I light up and take a long drag in the hallway, knowing the smoke alarms are dead and broken like the residents they no longer protect. The nicotine brings me down for a minute, my mental faculties choking on the smoke and tar. The world seems subtly less fucked as my one good eye stares through the smoke at the peeling wallpaper, and then it comes crashing into place. Another drag, another momentary reprieve. I reach my hand up to touch my swollen, bloodied face. It’s tender, now, white blood cells probably distorting it more than the original damage already had. I must look like hamburger meat dressed in a dirty suit. Always a classy look.

     My apartment is at the end of the hall. 314, a number of no particular significance in history or in time, but to one solitary person: Me. Most facts and bits of information are like that. Life is full of more “you had to be there” moments than anything else. Memories are exactly that as well"transcribed into tales of amusement or pity they lose potency regardless of how much cocaine is pumped into the most empathetic listener. So subtle details like my room number, how many cigarettes I have left, how many broken fingers I have on my left hand, all of these things matter to me and nobody else. Well, the last one might interest the hospital nurse I visit once I clean myself up, but even the fact that it might is otherwise useless information. So point proven. Useless information, intellectual debris and some Whiskey are what are left to choke my brain once I finish my blog each night. 

     Of course, memories can be crucial to one’s well being, for all of their inconsistency and irrelevancy. They tend to make us who we are. I’ll never forget the last words my former editor said to me. “Damn it, this is not a negotiation.” At the time, it was infuriating, and, to be fair, he probably didn’t say exactly those words, but they still stuck. It was right then that I knew what I wanted to do with my life, so I struck out to self-publish online. I could write what I wanted, for whomever would listen. And it worked, if I remember correctly.

     I take one last long breath of my cigarette and snuff it on the wall, leaving a small circular singe and a smell of smoke to mirror the dozens that dot the same wall. I’m nothing if a creature of habit, but that can be said of the entire human race. All of history repeats itself? Hardly. Human history repeats itself because that’s what humans do. We have patterns and routines and all hell breaks loose if those get broken. Mine was broken by two thugs with a bone to pick, so I’m going to compensate by making an especially vitriolic post about them for my readers. Nothing may come of it, but at least it’ll give the fuckers the middle finger that I haven’t shut up despite the abuse.

     I take a few steps down the hallway and pause in front of my door. I reach my good hand into my jacket breast pocket and take out my keys. I have more than I will ever need on the ring, but it makes me feel slightly important. It’s a childish illusion, but when you think about it, any sense of importance is. I don’t care how big your car is or how well you play a sport: you’re no more important than a man 100 years ago who was fantastic at riding horses and screwing women. We all die alone and forgotten regardless of how well we think our situation or achievements define us. We remember the monument, not the man. That may be a little unfair, but I do hate Egypt, so I’m sticking to that view.

     I turn the key in the lock, the door is half sealed from water expanding the old wood and pulling at the metal plate behind it. As I swing the door open, I squint in the darkness, looking for the soft glow of my computer screen as my eyes adapt to the lack of light. My eyes can’t find it. A light cough sounds behind me, and I spin swinging a fist as I do. I make contact with nothing, and throw myself forward with the momentum. Another noise to the left of me- a familiar click of a magazine being shoved into an unnecessarily large gun.

     A voice sounds from the darkness, a gruff and coarse noise akin to claws being raked across cobblestone. “Don't move.” More filth, thinking they can command me. Fantastic. I keep silent.

     “Good. Now turn around. We're going to turn on the lights and you're going to listen to us and do as we say. Is this understood?”

      This guy actually think she has some control over me. As if I actually live in this City and fear him or the early death he represents. Driving a car in this city represents an early death, to hell with anyone who thinks they can scare me more than midday traffic.

     “F**k off, you crusted semen stain, I'll do what I want in my own damned apartment.”

     Silence follows for a moment. Then another voice comes from in front of me- more high pitched but carrying with it a cloud of foul scents. “I think you'll want to consider that statement. We want you to get out of this alive as much as you do, but you're going to have to cooperate. Sir.”

     I smile slightly, though even my teeth won't show off in this darkness. My apartment is customized to block out the city's lights that keep it hobbling long in an artificial daylight. I'm considering at least letting a little light in, given the circumstances.

      “You a******s assume I want to get out of here alive. You can make me a martyr, if you like, see how well that suits you.”

     “A martyr?” A laugh comes behind me and shakes what I would have called in my optimistic years my soul. “For whom? You have the scum of this city hanging on your every word, but somehow don't think they will act. We both know that what you do is a show so you can feel like you make a difference when you really don’t. You should know better. You can be no martyr. Turn around and face me so we can get this along. I haven't appreciated sitting in this shithole for the past hour.”

     I turn around; wincing as my body chooses a fine time to decide that the numbness needs to wear off. Suddenly, the lights of my apartment bloom, my eyes shut immediately from the agony.

     “F*****g! Damnit! Some warning would have been nice!”

     “Look at me.” The voice goes again. “Look upwards and see the face of a man you have deeply insulted.”

     My eyes gaze upwards at a man, or at least a creature that could be more called a man than most in this city. Tall, well-built, but also well into his silver years. A face like aged wood, eyes like small beads of golden dew. Dressed in one of the crappy designer suits I don't care about, he still manages to look respectable. For scum.

     “Good.” He continues, his accent now becoming apparent. “You have the look of a new dog. You are not broken. But you cannot be broken, can you? We cannot silence you without snuffing the dog that contains the voice. This, you see, is a problem. Do you agree?”

     I don’t understand the metaphor at all, but I think he’s implying he wants to buy me a pet, and then kill it. That’s cruel on a level I wouldn’t even expect. I don’t know what to say. This is a first.

      “Ah, so you can be silenced. Have you never before feared for you life? Or is this something else? You look damaged, dear friend. Is it that someone else has done our work for us? Is it that we have found your home? What would the secret be? I do not so much like killing men like you, but you are notoriously hard to work with in such a regard.”

     My eyes move from his, though they pierce me regardless. There are three other creeps around me. Hunks of redundant protoplasm with pre-built machines to do the work they can barely do themselves. Pulling a trigger is all you need. At this range, aim is redundant. I move my eyes back to the one in charge. “
It's a mix of things, really.” I smile. “You caught me on an off day, sorry about that. I'm usually always on my period.” A gun hits me in the back and pain flares up my spine, the already tender flesh rebounding the effect.

     “You think you can laugh us out of this? You are nobody but a troublemaker, and even a small one at that. You mess with the market by hitting the roots. But the roots will never grow if you keep telling them the plant is poison. You cannot build a plant of roots. So why try? Spew your s**t in another field and fertilize something new. That is all I ask. I work for men who work for other men, and you have offended many of them. They have asked me to come here to propose that, in return for your change of direction, you will be left alone. Life, perhaps, may go a different way for you. Better than it has. You will rise above the public. What do you think?”

     I look at this man and I see something in him. For all of his broken platitudes, he has a point. I could oppose them here, or wait to write about this incident, but they would return. And then I would die, no question in my mind. Or I could admit the redundancy to my actions. That maybe calling out the corruption of this city is like putting a band-aid on an axe wound. But how is that a way to live? How is that a way to go on and exist? Live like the rest of the crap in the room with me? I give up and this city will limp on like it always does and always will until it devours itself and collapses. I'll just be s**t down in the sewers, waiting for the rats to feast in my swath.

     What I do is not an action of desperation or repair, but an example I set. “Sir”"I begin, “You have a way of putting things in perspective. I see the system you're a part of now, and it reminds me of a piece of art I once saw. It was an owl. An owl, curiously enough, with eyes just like yours.” I slip a pen out of my pocket and place it in my good hand as I stand up straight to face him. He smiles a warm smile, as if I have decided to agree to his terms, as any sane man would. “Do you know what I thought of that painting, the one of the owl? It f*****g sucked.”

Author's Note

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