Surrender [Repost]

Promtp: Guilty

Leep couldn’t believe it. He used the remote to turn up the volume.

He was sitting in his lounger, the comfortable one, with a pad of art paper in his lap, sketching ideas for his latest book, The Fog Monster. It was challenging, trying to illustrate fog, especially since he was not a trained artist. Did he give the fog a face? Did he give it a form? In his head the Fog Monster was unseeable, but children might need a monster they could recognize, a human-style monster that they could understand and relate to. After all, the Fog Monster wasn’t all bad. Leep didn’t want to scare his potential readers to death. But kids should know that life wasn’t all a bed of roses. That wouldn’t help them in later life.

He had the evening news on the television. He liked the news readers: Hal and Denise, and the pretty weather person, and the sports reporter who made all the jokes. He felt almost like he would be comfortable with them, you know, going out to dinner or something. They seemed like they would be easy to talk to.

He only half-paid attention to the broadcast as he contemplated his drawings, his mechanical pencil in hand. But he heard something that made him stop cold, as he was erasing the Fog Monster’s eyebrows, on the grounds that they were a bit too much.

Something terrible had happened. Denise was announcing that a man had been arrested for the murder of Vincent Demarco.

Leep could not feel his heartbeat, nor that he was breathing, nor his toes. He only felt a cold finger of sweat creep up his his spine, as he watched the police spokesperson speak in front of a gathering of news reporters.

He tried to concentrate, to really listen, but it was hard.

We have a suspect in custody, said the spokesperson. He has confessed to the crime. His name is Anthony Gizmodo, of no fixed address.

They showed a picture of him they’d taken after he was arrested. He was unshaven and unkempt, his eyes open a little too wide. Leep leaned in a little closer to the screen. Oh no. It was Tony, the homeless guy he passed every morning on the way to work.

Leep used to drop change, a few coins, in Tony’s hand or his hat as he passed, but he had to admit, Tony wasn’t the friendliest homeless man on the block. But, Leep guessed, he had no reason to be friendly. He was homeless, and neither Leep nor any other person with a home understood what his life was like. He regarded the passers-by, with their homes and lives, with a palpable resentment.

Tony was angry and sad, but he was no killer.

Why had he confessed? Was he coerced? Did he need attention? Was he hungry? Was he crazy? Leep knew only one thing: Tony was innocent of the crime.

He spent the rest of that Friday night, and all of Saturday, trying to figure it out. He was frustrated and confused. But he really knew what he had to do all along, the second he heard about Tony’s arrest.

On Sunday night, after dark, Leep put on his black ski jacket. He got the gun out from its hiding place. He felt numb. Once he’d seen a film of a gazelle, on the National Geographic channel, stare down a leopard. They’d locked eyes, and, Leep thought, reached a cosmic truth. The gazelle had no escape. It surrendered, and was chased down easily by the leopard.

Leep knew he was not the leopard. He was the gazelle.

He pulled up the collar of his jacket, opened the front door, and headed out into the night. There was a light mist, a fog, that lay as light as a baby’s breath on the streets and homes and businesses and pedestrians. By the end of the night, they would know that Tony was innocent.

—

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• Original Prompt: Fog, April 20, 2016.

Unscheduled

Prompt: Later

Nate sat in Row 17, Seat C, on his way to visit his father, who may or may not be dying. His sister said he was fading fast, but he’d faded fast before. Two years ago, Nate had sat with him for the last hour of his life, stared at his grey stubbly unresponsive face, wondering, honestly, if he wanted him to live or die, until Pop revived and went on to survive this last hour, and more hours, and even moved back into his apartment.

He didn’t like the air on planes. It dried out his nasal passages and his brain. His headache started within the first ten minutes of the flight. He asked for tea and the attendant brought him coffee. When he pointed out the error, the steward said, “Well excuse me”, as if Nate had been rude or attacked him. Migraine number two.

Nate had long legs, prone to cramps. When a different flight attendant came by and asked him to switch seats at the request of a married couple who wanted to sit together, even though it meant a window seat for Nate, he said, sorry, no. The attendant rolled her eyes, and then ignored his call button, when he wanted a glass of water to take his allergy medication.

Beside him was a lovely woman, very attractive, but she hadn’t bathed for a very long time. Or perhaps she was a particularly nervous traveller. Nate didn’t know. He wasn’t hostile, but he truly wanted the oxygen mask to drop. Something to muffle the unpleasantness.

Who knows what kind of upbringing his father had? Probably as fucked up as Nate’s. Because Pop believed in toughening up his son, which he interpreted as being distant, critical, strict, and unapproachable. Even when Nate was a man, with responsibilities and a career to maintain, his father did not alter his attitude. You are not good enough, why should I love you? Nate plugged in his headphones, listened to a podcast of a politician describing why the world was ending.

There was no tequila on the flight, so Nate had some vodka with lime.

They were over Cleveland, and Nate remembered a chat with his father about a girl he wanted to marry.

He ordered another couple of tiny vodka bottles, and the flight attendant said, Don’t you think you’ve had enough?

Nate thought, Fuck you, but didn’t say it. He was sitting quietly, throwing back drinks which were pleasantly numbing. What difference did it make to the attendant?

“Just bring them,” Nate said. “Ok?”

“Well sir, I can’t do that, but please have a glass of apple juice courtesy of the American Airways.”

“Are you kidding me?”

The flight attendant stared at him with shark’s eyes. Dead. Bored. Disengaged.

He thought of his father, a white sheet and one of those hospital greyish-blue waffled blankets pulled up to his chin, in a grey room with artificial light, with a long-unused machine with dials and lights and wires nearby, and the option of an ancient fat portable television to watch, and a bed tray with meatloaf dinner and apple juice pushed away in disgust, and an environment too noisy and too bright to sleep, and resentment building up inside his father like masses of bodies pushing forward, unstoppable, as at a riot.

“Give me the fucking drink,” said Nate.

The plane made an unscheduled stop in Cleveland, and Nate was taken away in handcuffs, which was a new experience. He shouldn’t have shouted and threatened, obviously; the airline has to take their precautions.

He sat in a small, overheated room at the Cleveland airport, waiting to be processed. Perhaps, he thought, his father would die while Nate was restrained for acting irresponsibly on a flight. His sister might tell him why Nate was not there. His father could then die content, knowing he was right all along.