The Mural Gazer

Episode 4 - Sleep on it

The cold sank in while he slept, a penetrating damp. Welcome to the land of the living dead, he shivered, reaching past the steering wheel to twist the key in the ignition. The engine fired. He let it idle a while before cranking up the heater, bundled under his jacket, which he'd spread on top of him like a blanket. Sleeping bag? No! That seemed too obvious a declaration of his status – setting up camp in your parked car, just off the shoulder of the Trans-Canada Highway, instead of renting a room in a cheap motel.

I'm just snoozing. Liar!

How will other people see me? A cop for instance, tapping at the window, telling him to move on. That is the truth, isn't it? How other's see you? The 'authorities' especially: cops, teachers, parents, preachers. And what would their stereotype for Buddy Hope be, given his here-and-now? Homeless derelict, camped out in an old beater? He denied it, but not so vehemently as the night before. An insupportable weariness was taking hold. He was beginning to understand, vaguely, what might make a man consider alternatives, or rather, the alternative.

Why go on living? He'd never really asked before. Never seriously questioned the autonomic will to breathe. Now that he'd left Leanne, and Gloria, and Robbie, it somehow seemed he had permission, like the kid at the back of the class, who finally screws up enough courage to raise his hand, ask his stupid question.

Who am I? What's the point? What happens when you die?

You're not supposed to think about that, he'd been led to believe. This sense of impropriety had been transmitted silently, mysteriously, through unspoken transmissions. It was okay to watch people getting hacked to bits up in horror movies, or blown to smithereens in war movies; not okay to imagine the nullification of self, the sudden evaporation of spirit out the pores of your own body like alcohol boiled in a hot pan. Suicidal speculations roused obliterating electromagnetic forces in Buddy's brain. He'd somehow come to believe that if you approach too close to the precipice, your psychic polarity suddenly reverses, what had seemed repellent becoming inevitable in an instant... and hauntingly glorious.

They can't allow that! Can they? he thought, not certain which 'they' he was referring to.

Ridiculous taboo! Like asking a man buried up to his neck in the sand not to think about the tide turning, coming in. Be a good citizen, dwell on other things: learning your ABCs, what you want to be when you grow up, doing good by your family, upscaling your house, the kind of car you want to drive... soon enough, almost before you know it, you will find your thoughts narrowing to the minutiae of aging: wrestling your socks on, trying not to dribble in your soup, remembering what it was like to have a pecker that worked. Is that the time to ask: What the hell did I do with my life?

Perhaps if he turned the telescope the other way round, asked what he didn't do, things would appear not-so-bad. Heroes aren't usually nice people, they're self-important pricks; so if you want to be a part of history, be a bloody bastard. Have you got it in you? Would you want it?

A dream-fragment from the night before came back to him. He'd felt a hand, not his own, wrapping itself in the form of a claw around the hard, heavy texture of a stone, a round stone, river-rock, the kind people use to create decorative motifs in their gardens. The human species can use almost anything as a weapon, a voice informed him. If it had sounded sinister, like something out of a cut-rate movie, Buddy could have laughed it off, but it spoke in the fascinated-yet-all-knowing tones of David Attenborough... in fact, it was David Attenborough!

Homo sapiens is the most dangerous of animals. No other is as efficiently vicious, or prone to the insane spasms of slaughter and mayhem that so often seize mankind. In their murderous frenzies they are more deadly than any other creature on the planet, because their means include all manner of lethal instruments, blunt and sharp, and their motives are not bounded by instinctive desires for food, shelter and procreation. Hatred wasn't invented by men, but the orgies of violence, provoked by civilized notions of good and evil, certainly are of human origin. No other animal has ever been known to plan a genocide.

It occurred to Buddy, drifting back into sleep to the tune of his Matrix's idling, that it was a short distance from tailpipe to hatch. A bit of flexible hose, a roll of duct tape, some clothing or towels for sealing the gaps, a relaxing CD in the player, and maybe a sunset view, from a beach or mountaintop... Could it all come down to that? A day when he would want to go gently into that good night. An Emergency Exit Kit, he figured. Don't leave home without it.

Your EEK. He smiled. Couldn't help but see a glint of humour in his situation, a teasing spirit that rendered angst and anger ridiculous. The Malahat totem agreed, Keeping watch on him through the windshield of his Matrix.