• Home

Ghost Story

Posted on September 22, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

“If it’s the future you’re looking for,” he said with a mesmerizing wave of a very smoky cigarette, “the bitch is already here. Welcome to Dystopia my friends. The invisible protective bubbles are in place, everybody is falsely happy and the unfortunate are dying in the streets to be carted away like yesterday’s refuse shat out by an always hungry culture that never seems to eat.” It was easy to listen to him when he got like this. Easy and tiring because the man could go on for hours and mere mortals were not built for endurance. Endurance had to be learnt, practiced, trained for and earned with broken limbs and inflamed joints. Yet here was a man who seemed born to keep going, like nothing mattered except exposing the present for what it really was – the ugly future forewarned by yesterday’s science fiction writers.

“The robots are here,” he crowed, “Only they are much stupider than the ones Asimov and his like so adored. They don’t dream of electric sheep and they sure aren’t pretty enough to keep but fuck it! It’s all about staying ahead of the Joneses right?” He groaned as his overstretched back complained from the stress he put on muscles that were not trained to bear the load. He frowned at his own inelegant ageing and drank deep from his vodka tonic. He thought whiskey was a pretentious drink and he had enough words already to make one pretentious man. He didn’t need the product of Scottish imagination to fuel his own so he drank from the nectar of the communists and toasted them on their new found capitalism. He bemoaned the death of the Cold War and the birth of hot zones, he cried over spilt semen and laughed over dried milk in the teats of women so Botoxed by the fear of growing old that they had forgotten to procreate.

“A career woman is no less tragic than Juliet ever was and in failing to break the corporate glass ceiling as well as her own water she is becoming a receptacle for all the worst qualities in womankind. Fuck you bitch, you’re sucking me dry, you’re laughing at me while I prepare to cry and yet, in your rush to be man, you’ve become nothing at all. How long do you think before you lose it all.”

I watched him stagger through a decade of self-pity because he was abandoned in his quest for love. By an adoring public and the woman of his dreams and all that was left was casual sex and serious drinking. He could no longer create now that his muse and his adoring public were gone. He blamed the loss of catalyst for shutting him down and railed against the universe for making it wrong. A wise man said, or maybe it was just Jay-Z, that adversity makes a successful man stronger and brings out the best in him. For ten long years I waited for that moment to come.

This is not to say that I didn’t live my own life and make my own mistakes. Losing my virginity to the biggest slut in school was the first mistake, she told about the size of my dick, or the lack thereof. They laughed at me all through the final year of school and called me names like Micro Mini-Me and Very Tiny Tim. So when I got to college I went two years without sex even though several girls were available. And then, when solitude and digital pleasure threatened to wear a hole though my sanity I learnt how to get really good at oral. And through it all, college, graduation and my first few jobs, I avoided creating anything that might draw comparisons to him. The drunk on the couch that prevented me from bringing girls (or anyone else) home. The slob who single-handedly brought down the value of all the property in the neighbourhood - the monster that created me and left me to fend for myself because Mom wanted the perfect family and found a perfectly boring guy to give it to her. He was always around, at the back of my mind like an unfinished thought.

Until the day he died.

I wasn’t around, I hadn’t been for years and the few times we crossed each other’s paths in the kitchen or the hallway he grunted something vague and possibly erudite and I just averted my eyes. With him in the ground and the house to myself I finally found the strength to clean. Seven days of harder labour than I had ever been accustomed to and the yard got respectable and house looked like a home. When his will was unveiled I learnt that he had left me everything and ‘everything’ was a lot. I was able to buy up the houses on either side of the one I grew up in and park a really nice car in each garage.

I was bringing a different class of girl home and these women didn’t care about my shortcomings, as long as I knew what to do with them. Living in the same house with a dead man for ten years before he actually passed away taught me one important lesson – there isn’t a soul alive who gives a rat’s ass about someone else’s complaints.

With the old man gone, I’m ready to try and create.

Comparisons with the dead don’t really hurt.

I can live with that.

Comments