[Original Novel] Not Long Now, Part 2

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Part 1}

On the way, as every little bump in the road jostled me about, I struggled to read through a brittle pamphlet I’d found tucked away with the batteries.

“The Manifesto of Futurism”. A curious screed that the foreword identified as Italian in origin, having since been translated into a number of other languages including English. I could at once see why Grandpa might’ve possessed such materials.

It spoke of machines. Of clean lines, efficiency and speed. It glorified the breakneck pace of technological progress and the virtue of violent, unrestrained ambition. For all of its vigor and bravado, there was a conspicuous lack of warmth. Of recognition for the central importance of life, of human relationships.

“Somethin’ wrong? You look off balance.” The driver peered over his shoulder at me just a bit too long for my liking. I admonished him to return his gaze to the road. Perhaps a bit too harshly? He doesn’t know about the accident.

I intimately recognize the sort of person who writes such material. Enamored with whatever the new thing is. Always in a hurry to inhabit the future, disdainful of the present as though it is already the distant past.

Always immediately tired of their most recent achievement. Never satisfied being who they are, when they are, where they are. Always baffled as to why they’re perpetually unhappy. Unable, despite their intellect, to recognize the loop they are stuck in which deprives them of comfort and familiarity.

What a banal way to be. Relentless, a sort of mania which grips the mind, permitting no respite. No weakness is tolerated, no inefficiency. No color, nothing vague or sentimental. Machine men, as I once heard them described. With machine hearts, and machine minds.

To think that I came from such stock! Yet I detest automobiles. The cacophony of honking horns, screeching tires, sputtering engines and shouted vulgarities. The speed, the confusion and fear. All too fast, out of control, lives hanging in the balance.

Like those of my parents. I am not so blind to the workings of my own heart that I fail to recognize the role their deaths played in my lingering disdain for the automobile. I was too young to understand it at the time. All just a stupefying blur of sound and movement.

Peaceful at first. The subtle rumble of the engine. A gentle shake as we passed over each bump. Then excited shouting, followed immediately by screams. The whole car lurched. From the back seat I caught momentary glare from the other car’s headlights between the silhouettes of my mother and father....just before it smashed them into jelly.

I witnessed only a split second of it. How easily a pair of colliding metal hulks can tear someone apart. How effortlessly the wreckage impales their soft bodies. What fragile creatures we are, in the end. I’m told I was found wedged in the space behind and under the back seat. Anywhere else and I’d be with my parents now.

A long, terrible, cold journey awaited me in the aftermath. Step by step through the gauntlet of suffering that follows unbearable loss. Without knowing anything else about a man, by looking in his eyes you can know in an instant if he’s been down that path as well. Doesn’t matter how long ago, the changes are permanent.

Seems surreal that life goes on. That you could be gutted so completely, busted down to nothing so many years ago, yet be sitting here today in perfect health. An absurdity! Nearly tantamount to pretending that it never occurred.

But life kept happening to me regardless. I kept waking up each morning, kept putting food in my mouth, chewing and swallowing it. Damn me. Not strong enough to live, nor strong enough to die. That’s how it happened. Unbelievably, I recovered. More or less.

The hardest thing was accepting the authenticity of it. That I’d not somehow fooled myself but was really, at long last, re-engaging with life. An insult to their memory is how it seemed to me at the time. That I failed to spend the rest of my days in rags, weeping in some forgotten corner, and instead was restored to some semblance of sobriety.

I’ve been happy since then. Not frequently but I cannot deny that, here and there, I have found moments of sincere enjoyment. However terrible it often is, life is also heart wrenchingly beautiful. The ratio between those two is lopsided, but not so severely that I didn’t eventually persuade myself to live.

It turned out to be much less convenient than the alternative. I was handed off between various friends of Grandpa. Hot potato. Only so much charitable sentiment to go around, usually I was never with any one family longer than a year. It made me wonder to myself on occasion how close they really were to the old man.

Once I finally arrived at the caboose of that sequential train of temporary accommodations, there was no place left to put me besides the orphanage that Grandfather devoted his twilight years to building. To everybody’s confusion, particularly newspapers which were concerned at all with the philanthropic endeavors of industrialists.

He was and still is regarded as a brilliant man. But out of everything ever said about him by his admirers and critics alike, nobody ever accused him of being an altruist. Not that he was cruel either, just indifferent to everything except whatever project currently commanded his focus.

Why should such a man, whose soul if he had one consisted of angular metal shapes, all of a sudden become preoccupied with the plight of orphans? As mysterious as the man himself. Of course nobody complained, and in fact many public figures applauded his humanitarian detour.

I suppose I should include myself among the grateful masses. If not for his orphanage, I’d be on the street now. Easy enough to see, as the massive structure loomed into view over the horizon, why the city felt it permissible to close down their own such facilities. Grandpa’s orphanage could accept all of the city’s unwanted children several times over.

The motor carriage came to a juddery stop before the immense building’s great double doors. Nowhere else to go now but through them. It was the work of perhaps ten minutes to unpack everything, then the carriage bumbled back the way it came, belching little black clouds of putrid exhaust along the way.

The land around the structure looked to be cultivated into a variety of farms and orchards. Made some sense of where they might get the firewood which must surely be the source of the great, billowing plumes of smoke issuing forth from various tall, thin industrial chimneys poking up through the roof.

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