Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

“When you see yourself in the mirror, do you like what you see?” “I try not to look. I think a lot of people like me are like that.” “When you say ‘people like me,’ what do you mean?”

She nods and retreats into the elevator. The doors close and I’ll never see her again. Not because I don’t want to. But just because that’s how it goes. Life decides.

those little butterflies that come bubbling up in the pit of your stomach when you know—I mean really KNOW—that you’ve met someone special. Someone who will endure. Someone whose face you’ll see again and again for years and live a life all the richer for it. She could be the one. This could be love. That’s how alive all this feels. But love happens like this sometimes, doesn’t it? A lightning strike rather than a rising tide. You meet someone and everything goes warm inside you and when they put their hand in yours, you can feel every inch of their body, like dipping your finger into a river and being able to feel the whole ocean.

she’s left a little note behind on her pillow that reads, “You’re a good sport, Sport!” And in the light of this new day I don’t feel like last night was love at all, but it was a hell of a fun way to interact with another soul. Think about it: it took over 4 billion years for her life and mine to come together in that elevator. If that ain’t special, I don’t know what is. So right now I’m feeling pretty good about fate and kismet and being a good sport,

I offer one last smile at The Kid in honor of his gentle yet eloquent phrasing. “I just wanted you to see me.” That’s a beautiful thing to say to someone. I mean, don’t we all want to be seen? Before I leave, I lean in close and say, in my sincerest voice, “I see you.”

I was dead center of the bell curve in school. I was a prodigy of mediocrity.

Right now, none of the characters know what they want. And since they don’t know what they want, they don’t know why they’re doing anything. They’re just billiard balls banging against one another. And nobody wants to read anything about that—even if that’s just how people go through life sometimes. Naturalism is dead—at least in the marketplace.

Reality as a whole—past or present—just isn’t a good place to hang out, in my opinion. There are better ways and places to spend your time.

are and everything between me and the gentleman next to me feels odd and out of place all of a sudden. So it goes.

Anything worthwhile takes time. Maybe that’s what time is for: to give meaning to the things we do; to create a context in which we can linger in something until, finally, we have given it something invaluable, something that we can never get back: time. And once we’ve invested the most precious commodity that we will ever have, it suddenly has meaning and importance. So maybe time is just how we measure meaning. Maybe time is how we best measure love.

“A voice? What voice? The voice of my people? Always? Every second of every day of my life? That’s what Black people are always supposed to be? And

consider Renny’s words and I look down at my black hands. “Do I have to write about being Black? What if I were an artist that only drew White characters? What would that say about me?” “What?” “I mean, White writers don’t have to write about being White. They can just write whatever books they want. But because I’m Black . . .” I pause to look at my hands and reaffirm that, yes, I really am Black. The story checks out. “. . . does that mean that I can only ever write about Blackness? Am I allowed to write about other things? Am I allowed to be something other than simply the color of my skin? I mean, I can’t quote it word for word, but isn’t that what the whole ‘I Have a Dream’ speech was about?”

“Jesus Christ, State College. You’re more fucked-up than I ever imagined.” “A day of discovery for both of us, then.”

“Black lives matter!” they continue to exclaim in unison. It’s difficult to drown out, but I manage.

Average-looking enough to walk through an airport and not get noticed, but also Black enough in skin tone to have a cop tell him that he “fits the description.”

He would talk about reality instead of the fiction that had been sold to him. He would say to his son: “Treat people as people. Be color-blind. Love openly. Love everyone.” And then, in the same breath, he would have to say to his son: “You will be treated differently because of your skin. The rules are different for you. This is how you act when you meet the police. This is how you act growing up in the South. This is the reality of your world.” William would one day have to say all of these things to his son and many, many more. And with each word, his son’s heart would break. With each word, his son would be capable of a little less love, capable of a little less imagination, capable of a little less life. It was the bonsai of a child. His own child.

When you question whether or not people are actually real, you can’t help but feel a little stoic at the news that someone has died. And it’s not that you’re a bad person, it’s just that you have trouble getting emotionally involved in the life of someone who may or may not be real. And let’s face it: in this world that we live in, the fact of the matter is that it’s hard to think of anyone as being real. Everyone is just an image on a screen somewhere. Even the people that we meet and come across in the flesh eventually get reduced down to an image on a screen as we interact with them and their social media. So when Sharon shows Jack and me the grieving family on the screen, I can only offer up the normal amount of concern for these people who I have never met and will never meet. And that’s okay. That’s what people are. Science has proven that there’s a limited number of people that we can ever actually care about. It’s just a limitation of our brain and our emotions. So there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t make me—or even Jack—a bad person if we see the man and the woman standing at the lectern crying and the only thing we’re able to muster is faux concern.

After all, we’re not bad people. We’re just people caught up in the cycle of humanity and trying to get by.

“But people have always died, right?” The Kid asks. “True,” I reply. “And it’s not like the news makes the deaths. I mean, CNN and Fox News aren’t out there killing people in the streets. But they do add to the overall air of dread that we all feel. It’s the soundtrack of America right now. The jam we all bump and grind to. People being shot is the way we mark the passage of time now. Like, where were you when Sandy Hook happened? And do you remember who you were dating around the time when those people shot up that office building? But it happens so much that you then have to ask: ‘What office building?’” I try to flash a smile at the kid as my way of consoling him for the world that he finds himself in. “But it’s just the way it is. There’s no harm in it. Every generation had their share of tragedies. It’s just that we all happen to hear about them more. Fact of the matter is, the murder rate is the lowest it’s been since the 1980s. And I know you’re too young to understand, but believe me when I say that the 1980s were the heyday of bad things, and crime, and killings, and drugs, and everything else.”

His run took him out through the long arms of the countryside. He crossed over a small bridge and heard the splash of something leaping into the water. He wanted to stop and find out what had made the sound, but it didn’t quite feel right so he kept going. But the feeling came back to him, again and again, as he ran. He throbbed with the need to stop and linger, the urge to wait, to stretch out the moments and mysteries that were given to him, in case they were suddenly taken away from him.

try to explain to him that adulthood just isn’t built for believing in the existence of other people. If we all believe in everyone—really believe they existed—then we have to care about them. We have to change our lives. We have to admit that maybe some of us actually have it better than others and, in having it better, we have to admit that maybe we could get by with a little less so that others can have a little more and that means giving up some of the things that we have.

people, and eventually time. And the longer you go in life, the more you worry about something being taken away and you worry about going back to not having enough. We’re all afraid of being at the bottom of life’s shit stack. We’re all afraid of being poor, being injured, helpless, handicapped, all of the things that make us look at other people and say, ‘How bad. Somebody should do something to help them.’ The thing we’re most afraid of is being the ‘them’ in that equation.”

still got a scar on my leg from one of the embers that broke out of the belly of that thing one time when my father was shoving pine into it. Nostalgia’s a funny thing, though. Even back then, when it happened, I knew it wasn’t a particularly terrible experience. Even though I wound up scarred for life I wasn’t scarred for life, you know? That’s what I call “Now-stalgia.” When you know a time in your life is gonna last forever, even before the moment is over.

chasing something that will never come: normality. It’s brutal. And the father in this story knew it long before the eggheads in lab coats did their study and figured it out. But only certain tax brackets get the luxury of knowing something’ll kill you and being able to choose not to do it.

Fear of a future that might turn out to be nothing more than the present with more gray hair. Same failures. Same struggles. All of it with fewer chances to get it right.

He felt it at the edges of his world, the persistent sorrow, stalking him like some raw-boned animal. But it was not sorrow over the death of his father, as he expected. In fact, he didn’t think about his dead father very much. It wasn’t that he had not loved his father. Soot knew that he loved his father and, sometimes, he missed him. But, hour by hour it seemed, Soot’s memory gave up just a little bit of what it held of his father. It was as if the death of his father was too much for his mind to hold on to, and so it gave it up, little by little, in the hopes of saving itself.

saving his life by taking parts of it away.

You see, the thing about people is that we’re all creatures of habit. We like order, routine. We struggle to make a pattern out of our lives in order to mitigate the deep-down belief that there is no order to anything, that we’re all just marbles banging off of one another in a cold, infinite expanse.

Dear Mr. Lord of War: The whole world of my life spins under a radiant marquee of fear. Day in and day out it kills me, over and over and over again. Kills me dead, just to restart it all tomorrow. And all I can do about it is tell people that I’m fine. “Thanks for reading.”

And they’re going to always treat you differently than they treat themselves. They won’t ever know about it—at least, most of them won’t. Most of them will think that everything is okay and that you’re being treated well enough and that everything is beautiful. Because, I guess for them, all they can imagine is a world in which things are fair and beautiful because, after all, they’ve always been treated fairly and beautifully. History has always been kind to them.”

It gives my stomach knots. The whole of an indigestible lifetime bubbles up inside of me like some sort of Vesuvian existential crisis. It’s amazing how much you can get used to the intolerable, right up until the moment when you realize you have to pass it on to some pair of bright eyes that have no choice but to be dimmed by it. And now, here I am, breaking this kid’s world just like mine got broken.

The irony is enough to fill me to the gills and beyond. So my stomach does all it can: it vomits up all of the chocolate, all the Twizzlers, all the lynched dreams, the redlined hopes, the color-blind promises that got Stopped-and-Frisked, the brutal, melanin-driven epigenetically inherited Americana that nobody—not even me—wants to talk about . . . it all comes erupting out of me faster than the red glare of those famous rockets bursting in air. And all the while, the poor Kid watches, powerless to do anything about it. It’s all he can do not to get covered in my bile.

Yeah, the South is America’s longest-running crime scene. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. But the thing is, if you’re born into a meat grinder, you grow up around the gears, so eventually you don’t even see them anymore. You just see the beauty of the sausage. Maybe that’s why, in spite of everything I know about it, I’ve always loved the South.

But happy? No. I’m not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There’s just too much of a backstory of sadness that’s always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you’re just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself.

It’s like the thought of having lost them both is too much to fit in my head so it chooses not to know either way. But there’s a catch to convincing yourself that you don’t know a thing: yeah, it keeps your life on track, but for the thing or person you’re choosing not to see or know, you’re taking away their whole entirety. And ain’t that something to do to a person? To a group of people? Ain’t willful ignorance a hell of a thing?

People standing around in the dim glow of porch lights talking to one another about all of the things wrong with the world and all of the ways that things should be different and, more than anything, they talk about their anger and frustration. But the talk of anger and frustration is careful to avoid the conversation having to do with sadness. Because, ultimately, it’s sadness that sits at the bedrock of all of the anger these people feel every day. Sadness at being left behind and left out of so much of what everyone else seems to have in this country, in this world.

“Maybe it’s better if you don’t know who I am,” he says. “I think that’s true of everyone,” I say. “Knowing people gets to be problematic eventually.”

“No,” he says, glancing up at the same sky. “It’s not all bad. But that’s not the same as it being good. And when you really sit and think about the past you realize that things have been pretty bad for a long time. Things were never really good. They just had flashes of things that weren’t as bad.”

I mean, wasn’t I somebody’s baby once? Wasn’t I a kid for at least eighteen years? So when did I change from being a victim of the world’s cruelty to being a part of it? When did I become the thing that furthers the cycle of horrible things that crawl over the world each and every day?

“If you believe all that you say you do, then why don’t you do something?” The question hits me square in the teeth. “You know why,” I manage, half mumbling, doing the best I can to say nothing at all. “You know how it is. It . . . it just gets too big. All of it. Stacks up every fucking day and none of us can make a dent in it, so we just sorta move through it without ever letting it get its hooks in. It’s survival. It’s how you stay sane. It’s how you stay alive. And there ain’t no way to change that.”

There’s one more thing: the silence. The long void of two people dangling in the space between the life that might have been and the life one of them condemned them both to. I’ve always lived in that silence. Always found comfort there. As cruel as it can be, it’s easier than saying something. Saying something sounds a lot like change, and change isn’t something I’ve ever been particularly invested in.

Maybe that’s still true, just not in the way that I expected. Maybe the love story here is more reflective, you know? Like maybe Narcissus had spent his whole life hating himself before that one day when he saw his own beauty, his own worth. “Ha ha! Geez, that’s lame.” Laugh all you want, but I think learning to love yourself in a country where you’re told that you’re a plague on the economy, that you’re nothing but a prisoner in the making, that your life can be taken away from you at any moment and there’s nothing you can do about it—learning to love yourself in the middle of all that? Hell, that’s a goddamn miracle.

“So that’s it. Everything’s fixed now, right?” “That’s a dangerous word.” “. . . But isn’t that what we all want? To believe that everything’s fixed?” “What if it wasn’t ‘fixed’? What if you could only hope to help?” “Well, that’s anticlimactic.” “But it’s real. And reality is something you continue to struggle with.” “. . . What if it doesn’t help? None of it. What if I screamed and shook my fists at the heavens, only to have my voice swallowed up? Only to still be invisible.” “Then at least you said something. Even if you had to use someone else’s voice to do it.” “. . .” “Have you noticed that, throughout all of this, you still haven’t used his name? His real name, I mean. Or your own, for that matter.” “Maybe next time.” “Why?” “Names would just make it true. All of it. Not just true, but real. I’m not sure we can let it be real. I’m not sure we could face that reality.” “‘. . . We?’ What else could we do?”

Thank you to everyone who has ever learned to sing in a world that does not want to hear your voice. Lastly, a message to the Black boy that was: You are beautiful. Be kind to yourself, even when this country is not.