"The Bulwark's Shadow" - A Novel in Progress via Steemit (Part I, Chapter 2)

I'm posting up the chapters of this uncompleted book as I hope the Steemit community might offer up its criticism (which would force me to finish it, honestly). Started in 2008, this was my first foray into novel writing and was my undergraduate thesis required to graduate. The story is about an executioner in the not-too-distant future. Executioners are highly trained individuals with extensive educations built to help them execute their prisoners in the exact same manner that the prisoner's victims died. This is called the law of retaliation or lex talionis; you may know it better as "eye for an eye."

Because I was also getting my degree in philosophy, I wanted to explore the ethics involved. While I feel I'm a better writer now and could certainly expand most of this book, I also really enjoy criticism as I'm usually too close to the work to see what's working and what's not (though in this case, there's plenty that I feel is not working). So please...feel free to criticize the work if you'd like, but be constructive about it. Simply saying "this part isn't good" doesn't tell me much; don't hesitate to tell me why it's not good or offer up possible alternatives to make it better.

Thanks in advance!

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Previous Sections/Chapters:

The Bulwark's Shadow - Part I, Chapter One

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For some, insomnia is a problem. For me, it’s a choice. Why waste time on dreams when you could be doing something? You can’t control your dreams. At worst, they’re a six to eight-hour video of bits and pieces of your subconscious, and quite honestly, some of that shit is repressed for a reason. Why regurgitate it at night only to have it fuck with you during the day?

I used to enjoy sleeping. The prospects of seeing your hopes come to fruition, if even for a short while was fantastic. The dream world was a beautiful escape. Now when it happens, I wake up from nightmares I can’t stop, choking on my sheets. They stick to me like the smell of sweat and fear and only serve to frustrate me further. Perhaps it’s because there’s no one there to comfort me anymore.

I was never very good at dating to begin with, but when you find someone good and, in your eyes, perfect, sometimes you just have to know they’re going to leave you sooner than later, so you stop trying and you learn to be independent. There’s no one there to help during the bad times and no one there with you to enjoy the good times. You don’t have to worry about whether you’re doing something right or wrong or whether they give a shit about you, you just do your own thing and try to find contentment in that. Eventually, you realize that no matter how many shrinks you go to, no matter how many pills you pop to regulate yourself, whatever…we’re all just pawns in someone else’s game.

Not pawns really, as a pawn conjures up images of sameness. All the pieces of the “big board” are different. It’s like chess, but with different ways to move, different ways to hurt, different ways to win or lose. Some pieces choose to move out of the way of danger, extending their playing time on the board. Others face the danger head on, daring the inevitable to take them sooner. Then there are those that do it faster than others, but that can be messy and often affects a larger number of pieces than one would’ve first thought. Regardless, there are two malevolent players keeping the pieces in good working fashion, having no connection to them save the brief moment the player finger encompasses the unpawn-like pawn and pushes it ever so slightly towards its final square on the board.

Which brings me to another aspect of our chessboard existence; when occupying a square, more than one piece typically resides there. The squares are so large that “x” amount of pieces can, and typically do, interact with each other. Sometimes they exist with no pieces being “taken” by another. The taking of pieces we’ll call “death” (whether forced upon or natural) or “accident” and the coexistence of pieces we’ll call “interaction,” meaning anything from a casual conversation at a bus stop to a long lasting relationship ending in a long life and grandkids, the transaction between buyer and seller or the effect of a CEO’s decision on someone several thousand miles away. It’s all connected on this board of infinite squares and it’s fucking fascinating to watch these interactions unfold.

My square stays pretty empty most of the time. I’m one of the pieces that like to move further and further away from the others. Not so much because I’m afraid of being “taken” from the board, but the time spent sharing a square is sometimes stifling, even though the squares are of infinite size, just like the board itself. Boards plural, really.

Let’s say we, as interacting pieces exist on an infinite number of boards. The one above us is “Future,” the one below “Past,” and obviously, the one we currently find ourselves at each given moment is “Present.” Each board has an infinite number of interactions with an infinite number of pieces, so on and so forth. Some of the pieces move up with us, others stay on the board we were just on, staying in our past and never moving from that part of our own separate existence. Again, the fleeting aspect of the interaction between pieces. There is no day, there is no night, only interaction and the moving of pieces from the “Present” to the “Future” which of course becomes the new “Present” once we get there, etc. etc. The titles and the boards are constantly changing, but the pieces remain in play until they are “taken” from the board.

If this seems confusing, I’m sorry. I tend to ramble the later it gets. It’s also the reason I prefer watching over interacting. It’s more fun for me to watch the other pieces, to see the outcomes of their decisions before they do. What makes them move to a certain square, what is their reasoning or motivation? Why do some pieces interact more than others? What do the malevolent players know that the pieces don’t? That’s what I’m really waiting for when I stay awake at night. I’m hoping for an answer. When your thoughts move a million miles a minute, you can’t decipher them all, and certainly not while you’re asleep, so sifting through them while I’m awake seems to make the most sense. I sit up late, deciphering, watching, and waiting for that mental switch to be flipped and have my “aha!” moment. I’m waiting for a malevolent player to take me or push me into another square because quite frankly, I’ve lost the desire to do it myself.

I like my apartment pitch black at all hours. It’s womb-like and while I’m sure Freud would have something to say about that, he’s dead and I couldn’t care less. The dark is nice. It envelops surrounds and doesn’t pass judgment. It just is. Some people are afraid of it, but I have come to embrace it over the years.

It’s not that I hate the sun, but a person’s true personality shows itself when they’re surrounded by the dark. It’s like wearing a mask in a room full of people wearing masks as well. You tend to act differently when you have that small barrier between you and the rest of the world. For some reason, the more the mask covers physically, the more you reveal internally, the good and the bad. I’ve never understood that part of the human psyche, but for some reason it makes sense.

Dreams are the same way. The tighter we shut our eyes, the more illuminated our thoughts become. It is introspection at its worst because our brain unlocks every file cabinet full of thoughts, past and present, and sends the papers flying. You spend the entire next day subconsciously re-filing, re-organizing, and regaining composure. The way we deal with this process shows itself in the first hour of being awake and it affects the rest of the day’s events more than we’d like to admit. One file misplaced can ruin more than the day. It leads to a slip of the tongue, a wrong conversation with the right person and the next thing you know, a bridge is burned because your system of re-filing needs a serious overhaul and you don’t realize it until it’s too late.

This is why it’s easier to not get attached too quickly to people. You keep yourself distant enough that your filing system whittles itself down and file cabinets stop having a use because most of them are empty or getting there. This helps the small things to stay small and the profundity of the big things is exactly how it should be and not exaggerated.

For years I had problems with my filing system. I knew too many people and too many people knew me. The crossover of relationships was astounding and the amount of information was almost too much. It led to a complete shutdown for a long time. I didn’t even bother re-filing, I just let the papers lie there in the Hall of Thought and stepped back, locked the door to the hall and swallowed the key. The mess wasn’t going anywhere and I could always come back and clean it if I wanted to. That was a long time ago and I’ve since found a separate hall to file thoughts in after bricking over the entrance to the old one.

I still don’t sleep well, regardless of how trimmed down my thought processes. Most nights, I wake up in a cold sweat, reaching out for someone that’s not there, someone I don’t even know, but I tear the sheets apart looking for them in that 15 second window between dreams and waking when you’re not sure what’s real and what’s not when your eyes open. An hour of sleep is about normal anymore, and then I just lay there, listening to the “whit-whit-whit” of the ceiling fan, hypnotizing me into a clear mind-state. The nothingness of synapses not firing is very comforting. It helps to bring a blank mind in the face of emotional chaos.

I bring this up only because I’ve been thinking about my parents lately. They died when I was 17 and I went through some severe changes. I thought puberty had been bad, but this was much, much worse. My temper was short; I read into things too deeply, over-analyzed and thought the world was against me. It was only when I was truly old enough to realize exactly what it was I’d lost that my moment of clarity had come. That always seems to be the way, hm? Hindsight and such.

The only thing you can do is move on because the anger and the pain and the hurt don’t bring your parents back, they just consume you and force you to dwell on the things you need to let go of. It’s harder to do than it sounds, but when you realize the futility of trying to change the inevitable, your mind goes blank and you begin to start over from scratch, hoping you never go back to that place again. You never fully forgive the situation, and you definitely don’t forget it, but you push past it and move up on the emotional chain of consciousness. Balance.

My parents died during a robbery. My father owned a small little electronics store downtown and my mother did the books. She kept him honest. Not that he wasn’t, but he had a tendency to skim off the top sometimes so that he could steal me away for a weekend and spoil me. The bike when I was 12, the guys’ weekend at the beach when I was 16 (also, consequently, when he gave me “the talk” about the female gender). He was a funny guy. Most kids dread that talk with their parents, but my father made it pretty amusing and easy to deal with.

“Son, women are the devil’s way of making us men do stupid things. They do things to our bodies that are just plain mean, yet we eat up the experience like candy. Just remember to try not to think with your dick all the time. Believe me, I know, every thirty seconds you’re wondering what’s underneath that girl’s skirt who’s three desks away in class, but trust me son…they all look the same, save for the landscaping.” And then he chuckled.

I nodded like I knew what he was talking about, but I’m pretty sure the confused look on my face was evident. “Don’t worry son. You’ll have plenty of time to find out what I mean,” he laughed.

We came home that Sunday night, beet red from the sun and smiling so hard our faces hurt. Mom, on the other hand, was beet red from fuming at the fact that dad had borrowed money from the store account again. I still find this bizarre, as it was essentially his money to begin with, but I suppose I’ll still let mom win the argument, as she was the one actually dealing with the money. I stood there waiting for it, her glare piercing the good mood. I turned to head to my room and she let out a string of swear words that would’ve made Lucifer himself blush. I turned back towards her and watched as my father walked up to her. He put his hands on her hips, kissed her forehead, pulled his billfold out and explained that he borrowed it in case there was an emergency. He gave her the money, apologized and somehow that was that. He rode the storm of marital discontent like a rodeo champ and always came out on top. It was nothing short of fantastic to watch.

My mother was a pretty woman, but slightly severe. Tight-lipped and rarely smiling, you really had to know her to like her. She watched the books like a hawk and showed my father a great deal of love. Not much of a cook though. I learned how to cook a hot dog or order a pizza at a pretty early age. When she wasn’t handling my father’s money (or disappearance thereof), mom would sit up late, crocheting or knitting. Both of which she was pretty terrible at too, and admitted frequently, but it relaxed her. Even if my sweaters had a second neck hole.

One year, shortly after the Christmas season had passed, they were both out working late. I was home alone, watching the box and enjoying my new gifts. It got to be around eleven ‘o’ clock and I’d fallen asleep on the couch. I awoke to my Uncle Walter practically breaking down the door. I could hear him yelling for me through the thick oak and ran across the foyer. I opened the door and saw him, red-eyed and sobbing. There were four officers behind him in their work uniforms, gold badges blazing in the winter night, visible exhalations showing themselves slowly. I had goosebumped all over, but I knew it wasn’t from the cold. Something had happened. The Great Hall in my head started to slowly shut down and lock up because I knew it was serious and it was something that wasn’t going to be fixable. That doorway image has never gone away.

Mom had taken some trash out back while dad cleaned up the showroom. The police said they could see the footprints in the snow and that mom had fought hard with whoever it was that accosted her. They wouldn’t tell me anything other than that.
Dad was found, body limp and broken in several places, his head lying inside the now empty safe. Again, they wouldn’t tell me anything other than that.

I spent most of the night numb. I didn’t cry because I think I was just too confused to know what to do. The house felt truly empty that night as I lay in bed. The silence was deafening so I tried to fall asleep to some music, but my brain couldn’t keep up with all the thoughts that came racing through it. I wasn’t bricking up the Great Hall fast enough and I could feel myself clutching at my blankets, hoping to find some kind of solace or answer within them. I gazed out my window, open and letting in the moon’s overly bright stare down into my room. I felt dirty and cheated and promptly closed the curtains. The room felt instantly warmer, the dark holding me, comforting me.
Five minutes later I was asleep.

I slept most of the next few days. My uncle didn’t bother me, except to bring me food and make sure I was okay, but mostly he left me alone because I think he was probably lost in his own confusion and hurt as well. What could we possibly say to each other to make the other feel better? What sort of comfort comes from verbalizing a pain that feels awkward and silly when put into words? The only thing you can do is cry into your pillow until you’re so tired, you can’t cry anymore.