Spectator

A short story about a man outside society and the role he believes he has to play in life

Spectator

When my name was called at our High School graduation ceremony you whispered among your cliques, unsure of whom I was, perhaps having even thought I was a transfer student thrown under the bus of society. What you won’t guess is that I sat beside you in Anatomy, having shared the carcass of a cat. You cheated off my test in World History, dated my sister, were in the Boy Scouts with me, but if someone were to ask you what my names was, you wouldn’t know it. That is who I am. There is one of me in every school, but you wouldn’t know that and I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t notice me either.

 

Don’t pity me for this life; I am as content as I could ever be. There is a certain leisure to being average in every way, a kind of weight that is lifted off one’s shoulders when the realization hits them- You don’t matter. I am blessed to be able to go through life without expectations, understanding fully my limits and never knowing what it feels like to let someone down, even let yourself down. The world needs people like me so that the rest of you can live and hurt like everyone else. I don’t envy you. I will never have my heart broken, never break a heart, never succumb to depression, never worry about the meaning of life, and never kill my abusive husband with a shotgun to the back in his sleep. I am truly blessed.

 

I will never do anything noteworthy in my entire life, and I accept this as the curse of my kind. I say "my kind" because although I have never met another like myself, I know we exist, but we might as well be the same person. We are the accountants of the world, working much like the machines we punch numbers into. Our schedules are mechanic as well, we wake, eat a healthy breakfast, go to work, eat a healthy lunch with an unhealthy vending machine snack, go back to work, leave for home, cook ourselves dinner (cook being a loosely used word here), watch the nine o’clock news, and go to sleep at promptly ten p.m. to ensure a full eight hours of sleep. We take pleasure in this routine, life being methodic is therapeutic.

 

My parents would come to pass away and I would attend their funerals like a son is expected, wearing a rented suit and tie, shaking the hands of the people who pretended to care about them. People would ask me how I knew the deceased and be shocked to hear I was their son. My sister appeared drunk halfway through the ceremony, sobbing and hanging onto the guests, pretending to be upset about the ordeal in order to get some attention. They would be buried soon and she would forget about them. I visited their graves once a month on the sixth to keep it tidy and lay some flowers down for mom. This is what’s expected.

 

It was at about this point in my life, thirty-one working as an accountant like my father, that my only sister was killed driving into oncoming traffic after our School’s ten year reunion, drunk as ever. Yes, she was popular. No, they didn’t know we were related. I remember reading about it in the paper the day after; she killed four people in the accident. Apparently an elderly couple was returning from the hospital with their son-in-law and daughter having just given birth to a newborn baby boy when my sister sideswiped them across two lanes of traffic ejecting the elderly couple from the windshield, having forgotten their seatbelts in the excitement, and crushing the skull of the mother upon impact with the metal roof of their van- the father’s jugular would get caught on a shard of glass and he would later die at the hospital. I also read in the paper that the young child had survived the incident, claiming the survival to be a miracle. He didn’t have so much as a scratch on him. When I saw the picture of the child I was filled with a sense of regret that my sister had taken away this child’s chance at a normal life, having left not a single member of their family alive he was given up for adoption. After a heartfelt, yet untrue, speech about making up for my sister’s mistakes, the adoption agency let me take custody of the unnamed child.

 

It wasn’t until I held the child in my arms that I realized why I had done this- the kid was average in every way. I looked at him in disgust, seeing myself in his beady eyes and he seeing himself in mine-we were of the same kind. The child would grow up to become just like me, a nobody in the crowd of somebodies. For the first time in my life, I felt rage. While the life I lead is pleasant to me I live it so that children like this can grow up normally and have a life they can find meaning in. There was nothing distinguishing about this child. He was neither adorable nor ugly, neither slim nor fat, simply there staring at me knowing full well what he was. I was angry because it wasn’t meant to be this way. This child was supposed to be the scarred youth growing up in foster care, face distorted from the accident that killed his family, distinguishing him from the crowd. He was supposed to have a troubled youth, full of depression and questions asked to a God who wouldn’t answer him. His turmoil would be saved by a young woman looking for a man as damaged as she was, and the two would live a life full of luster, finding meaning through extension of creativity through some form of art, expressing his anger at God for his troubles.

 

You might find it hard to believe that I knew all of this, but those of our kind always know. We are the great spectators of life, never participating but always watching through a screen of glass. People fit into cliques, much like they did in High School, you are one thing or another and nothing more and we can sort you into those groups with an efficiency you wouldn’t believe. A lifetime of watching does that to a person.

Living in a two-room apartment with a child of two months was certainly an experience I had never anticipated in my life. I discovered over time that I knew nothing about children, save the old wives tales I used on Dhamion, a name I had given him for its uniqueness alone, these methods were, of course, completely false. They included but were certainly not limited to- using alcohol to ease the pain of teething (which seemed effective at first but later discovered was terribly poisonous for him), bathing him in tomato juice to reduce chicken pox (I had a bout with this around age two, and this did nothing but create a mess in my bathtub the likes of which I have never quite been able to clean. It also turned out that I had overreacted to seeing a single blemish on his face that wasn’t the pox at all), and in another bout with teething I tried letting him gum on a frozen bagel (which he soon began choking on). Other than these few mistakes, I daresay I did no worse raising the child than any other single working man would.

 

I had plans of the grandest variety for Dhamion, the flourishing I was never allowed nor wanted, but had wanted for his life. His path was set, but something interfered. I will not say it was divine, maybe it was sheer luck, but this child was not meant to sit on the sidelines of life. Obsessed, I tried a variety of ways to set Dhamion apart from the crowd. I dressed him in extravagant clothing (you know the kind) and paraded around the only mall we had in town, hoping to incur some interest and perhaps make friends with someone who had a child themselves, hoping they might influence Dhamion in some way, but I was approached by no one. Dhamion’s cheeks were not pudgy enough for the obese women to pinch and his grin was not big enough nor laughs cute enough to draw the attention of the recent or soon-to-be mothers who love ogling the children of others. I also had him brought to a day-care center while I was at work in the hope that somehow the other children might interact with him and he make friends. Unfortunately, every week I was met with the same report from the Center, "Dhamion is very well behaved," or, "I have never seen a more quiet child in my life," or my personal favorite, "he doesn’t seem to socialize well with others."

 

At this point I was becoming increasingly upset with myself for not being able to change the path Dhamion seemed set on. Everything I tried ended in failure. There was a final trick I had up my sleeve though, something I was afraid to do, but knew needed to be done if nothing else would work. I stepped from behind the spectator’s wall and intervened directly.

 

I donated sixty-thousand dollars to Dhamion in a checking account when I returned him to the adoption agency; it was the least I could give him for failing to do as I had promised him. I allowed myself to return to my routine, trying my best to forget about the entire incident. Eventually, I made my way back to the spectator’s seat, watching the people around me go about their lives like they always had.

It took six years for me to finally receive closure about Dhamion. I was sitting at my home watching the evening news when a special bulletin was released, some urgent news unfolding somewhere in the world, I didn’t care where when I saw Dhamion, now eight, appear on the television. Yes, I could tell it was him.

"Mere minutes ago a riot broke out in the town of Ottawa, Ohio and has only recently been subdued. Unfortunately, it was too late to save Dhamion Estacado, the target of the frenzied mob. Allegedly, this largely Christian community believed him to be the son of the devil and after making a makeshift cross from two by fours, nailed and hung him in front of their church. He was the only casualty. We…" his voice trailed off as a smile broke out on my face. At last…closure. I actually gave life, a full eight years of life. My giddiness soon broke out into full laughter, the kind of laughter one cannot contain when remembering something painful, a kind of laugh one has while choking on tears.

 

We are the great spectators of life, the closest things this world has to real Gods. Our role has always been clear- live the life undesired so the masses can enjoy their lives, but I discovered that we don’t always have to be the spectators. In fact, participating directly seems to have a much more dramatic effect. I finally understood what God must feel like if he does exist, always watching his work but never participating in it directly, save for those few precious moments he puts his hand into something, like the tattoo of the number six-hundred and sixty-six on the back of a two year old’s neck, and then slipping back into his glass wall, watching greedily as his influence spreads.

Author's Note

I am considering changing this so that the child in question is the child of his sister so that he will take the child due to natural reasons seeing as he is the brother in a hope to make it more believable. There are more things I would probably change as well, this is my first draft

Reviews

[astronaut]

Welcome to Writers Cafe! It gets addicting I promise. :P
This is a nice first draft, and I agree with the change you want to do. My advice is to just write, and edit and change after, not continually edit whilst writing. Great job and keep writing! :)

~J

[Skeith]

Thanks for the advice, I often get caught up in my own writing and edit during the process, itd be hard not to but I certainly can try!