Author Games: Red Room

Task Six: Jack DeWalch

In the years preceding his capture at the hands of the Hunters of Artemis, Jack DeWalch had amassed a great cohort of companions in Atlanta, Georgia, all of whom approached the world in the same, easy way that Jack himself did. From Monday to Friday, they worked steady, unremarkable jobs, laboring over spreadsheets and invoices and PowerPoint presentations with the minimum amount of diligence that their positions required; then they'd thrust themselves into the splendor of the weekend with unrestrained fervor, filling the bars and clubs of downtown Atlanta with their raucous laughter and drunken exclamations of ecstasy, as if the drudgery of the previous five days had never bothered them at all. Neon lights seared themselves into the backs of their eyelids as worldly concerns sealed themselves into the backs of their minds, and women with painted faces and glassy gazes alleviated Jack and his friends' anxieties until the sun had risen, the stench of alcohol had faded, and they'd found themselves inside the same, poorly-furnished apartments that they'd been trapped within for the past four years. Then they'd swallow the bitter taste in their mouth, check the calendar—Monday already?—and they'd drive themselves to work once again, resigned and repressed. It was a cycle and an inevitability; it was a life that Jack had chosen for himself, and on those empty mornings between work and play that Jack had also chosen for himself, breathing in the humidity of a barren apartment and breathing out the substance-induced rapture of the hours before, he'd look at the walls of his apartment—no photographs, no achievements, nothing to stare at but spiderwebs and water stains—and he'd wonder if perhaps he had made a grave mistake.

This was the only issue on which Jack's opinions differed from those of his friends. Wesley, Eric, and the other men with whom he bided his time did not experience Jack's doubts about lifestyle in the same form that he did; they expressed the burden of their habits in passing sighs, in extra drags of cigarettes and half-hearted get-togethers on Sunday afternoons to simulate some kind of community, but they did not linger on heavy thoughts because they did not enjoy heavy thoughts. They preferred to embrace the better aspects of their lifestyle with a purposeful naivety—"free living," Jack's friend Wesley would say with a shrug as he discussed his midnight exploits, blowing smoke from between his teeth and grinning in the glow of a buzzing porch light. "Free living," the other boys would echo between snippets of other conversations, between swigs of sweet tea and curse-laden insistences that they would never tie themselves down. To the boys in Jack DeWalch's cohort, "free living" meant choosing unappealing jobs so that they could switch them on a whim, inviting girls into their beds who would not miss them when morning dawned and all pretended connection was severed; "free living" meant clawing at the emotions they used to experience for two nights out of a week and spending the remaining five huddled in a empty box of their own design. "Free living" became less free with every year that passed, and, though Jack's friends felt it in the thinning of their capacity for joy and the growing heaviness of their aspirations, no one seemed to recognize its source but Jack himself.

But he attempted to solve the problem, of course. He could not abandon "free living" altogether—these nights in the shadows of music bars were too precious to him, these rituals too sacred after months of honoring them—but he thought that perhaps there was a way to have both "free living" and genuine freedom, to experience the benefits of the lifestyle without losing pieces of himself in the process. And so while Jack's friends laughed and smoked and chased women who lived exactly like they did, Jack laughed and smoked and chased women who lived differently.

This was Jack was trapped in the Hunters' woods and his friends were not. This was why he paid.

In the golden light of a forest far from Atlanta, Georgia, purging the last of the hallucinogen's effects from his mind and erasing the taste of sour apple from his mouth, Jack leaned against a sturdy apple tree and thought of "free living" once again. He thought of his friends' method of "free living," and he thought of his own—more purposeful, more desperate, more deserving of blame—and as he covered his eyes with his left hand, he felt the weight of a hundred crimes descend upon his shoulders; for the first in his life, he allowed that weight to drive him into the ground, and he began to regret.