[MF] A Dark Night; White Square
The road is lonesome and the sentence is for life.
But you already knew that.
You also know that the only reprieve to an isolated mind’s self deception is undeniable truth.
Flickers of a complete alignment to reality slices through the monotonous carcass and exposes the raw flesh that is the Human Experience.
Punctuation is what I call them.
The colons, commas, and periods which split our life sentence into phases of phrases.
The colons: the assholes who I need to hate in order to live, the wrongs against me that went unpunished, real or imagined.
The commas: the brief interludes which we share with certain others, where for a moment, we breathe as one.
And the period, the stop. The moments of silent purity one can only look at in the past or the future, never during.
I write this as I sit in my bedroom apartment.
I try to focus on the waves crashing through the speakers of my iPad, but the sound is punctuated by the repeated asterisking of the young couple living above me.
The dragon is full of fire and brimstone.
He sniffs me through the mirror.
It is a bedsheet. But furtive imagination is the filter most often layered across my unresting mind.
My ceaseless gaze turns outward, folds around itself, and returns to its comfortable inward angle once more:
The White Square
I see the light, the white square floating amidst a curtain of I-5 dusk.
I am 19 again, the man-child in a limbo both brought onto him and one he ushered in with the foresight of a cataracted rhinoceros.
I had gotten up that morning at precisely 5:27 AM or maybe 5:33 AM. It didn’t really matter.
Nothing really did.
It was a time of penance and a time for peace. I was the only child of a man whose lowest bar I’d let slip through my half-hearted fingers.
The ladder gifted as my birthright was sent spiraling down the pit to be dumped with all the other unfulfilled expectations.
Rusty rungs.
Puffing lungs.
He offered me an education. I fucked it up.
He offered me a job. It wasn’t a choice.
The offer had been casual, the kind of pillowy push you give to a toddler who teeters along the edge of the pool.
“My company needs an intern. Do you want to interview?”
“Yeah,” I say.
I turn back to the screen: my teammate has been knocked and the final storm is closing in.
The following day:
I rewrote my resume, prepared meticulously, and as the polo-shirted Zoom meeting came to its formal conclusion, I sat pants-less, facing the reflection in the blackened screen, realizing the interview had been exactly what I both hoped and feared it was: a formality.
A strange feeling hits me in the lower part of my heart. It feels like a sigh, but not one of sadness.
It’s one where you hold your breath, unconsciously, and hardly notice as the air slowly ripples out the nose.
It is a slow dawning realization of my firm seat in the soft cushion of upper-middle class Suburbia.
An undeserved safety raft deploys while I flail in the ocean. A nepotistic dynasty has begun.
The work itself is easy. And it pays well. Too well, for a 19-year old with no expenses, infinite time, and an unscrupulous plug named Crazy Dave.
Every morning, whenever I feel like it, I drive from the burbs of Mill Creek to a city called Puyallup.
It is a mid-sized unremarkable urban town, 23 miles down the road. The drive is about an hour and a half.
There, I walk into a Walmart, I take pictures of tomato cans, and send them to my team of senior computer engineers to feed to an AI database which decombulates and recombarfs until its robobrain reaches computational contentment.
My supervisor is a woman named Maria. I met her on my first day, but our longest conversation would be a year later, at the company party. We talked about kayaks.
I later learn she is the mind behind Amazon Go.
I take a lunch break every hour.
I draw on my iPad.
I watch Rick and Morty.
I write my DnD campaign with the laptop they give me.
I nap.
And everyday, whenever I feel like it, I clock out and I drive back home.
$30 an hour.
I guess it’s the going rate for a college dropout with a rich dad in a tech startup.
A colleague with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Stanford takes me out to Mod Pizza.
The next week, I’m at the same restaurant, throwing up an everything-pizza ordered as a half-baked challenge after too many buds with too many buddies.
I meet with the CEO to ask about life.
I’ve read his Wikipedia page. Twice.
I should be known as the intern or at the very most, David’s son.
He calls me Victor.
The night before my first day of work, my parents are subjected to a series of whining tantrums erupting from my mosquito mouth.
I rage at the prospect of having to endure the treacherous hour and a half drive home.
A true odyssey, agrees one of my friends.
Completely unreasonable and ridiculous, he says as we share a pre-rolled joint.
My mom books me a room at a hotel.
It’s next to an apartment complex.
I am not impressed.
As I double-check the booking and prepare a scathing text to my mom for her utter failure to ensure my comfort, a wide-eyed man approaches me.
He asks, ‘‘whachu need, big man?”
I shrug him off and feel a twinge of pride at my incredible display of street intelligence.
I walk into the hotel lobby. The receptionist can’t find my booking.
Her manager, a curvy pear of middle-aged black woman, saunters over.
She checks the computer, all the while cursing about the “muthafuckin boss lady” who has yet to pay “her muthafuckin check.”
The receptionist nods politely.
“I think I have a room for Victor Jia,” I say.
‘‘How long you here foh?”
“One night, ma’am.”
She looks at me for the first time. Her eyebrows arch like a vulture’s wings before flight.
For a moment, I make peace with the inevitability of a night spent snuggling in the streets with Mr. Wide-Eyes.
Then, she turns to the receptionist and nods.
“Give him the jacuzzi room.”
I enjoy a magical night, one that reveals to me some secrets only learned at the college of Life. The jacuzzi is bubbling and the thin wisps of my dab pen swirl with the water vapors.
I giggle and slip into a princely slumber.
From that night on, I always drive home.
The routine begins to settle.
I began to fall in love with the route, the peaceful solitude becoming as intoxicating as the marijuana riding with me in my lungs.
Weed makes the music hit harder.
The moon shines brighter.
The vibe vibes vibier.
I am the lonely child and Mary Jane becomes my sister.
My twin brother: a wise old 2001 Toyota Corolla, the same age as me with grey carpet ceilings.
The same car my parents used to bring their baby to zoos, daycares, and museums is now stained with illicit smoke.
The steering wheel slides perfectly in my hands, of course it did, I was born for it, and every dimension of its chassis grows as familiar as a second body.
The feeling of forward motion, literal and figurative, slides into my life like the soothing sway of a cradle.
My wheels seem to ride smoother with the deposit of each hefty check.
My unwelcome virginity, my big forehead, my losses in meme stocks and the ‘D+’ I’d earned in COMPSCI101 become forgotten on the road.
At the bottom of the bottomless pit, hope begins to blossom.
I see weird shit. A casual car crash. An unsecured chain shooting sparks across the asphalt. A grown man in tears walking down the shoulder by himself.
But the white square. It came out of nowhere.
The twilight that morning had been especially ebony, the interstate particularly peaceful.
Every chord of the music dripped into my ears like sweet honey, remixed in the ethereal signature style of DJ Mary Jane.
The white square appears along my right flank with no announcement, no fanfare.
While not blinding, its radiance is an absolute oasis against the black sand of the night.
And the elderly man inside the light, his mouth agape, has pepper grey eyebrows and a few remembrances of hair decorating his gentle marble skin.
He is still, too still to be sleeping, despite his shut eyes and expression of statuesque nothingness.
I blink.
The white square and the old man remain, a painting hung in space, a projection too high-quality to be anything but real, but slowly growing smaller as the full picture takes hold.
It is the back window of an ambulance. Red and blue lights on, siren off, as if someone had been kind enough to let the old man rest.
Wow.
Even then, I knew I was witnessing… something. I was sharing a memory with a stranger who didn’t even know it. And never would.
He was alone, even more alone than me.
Yet, in one impossible glimpse, our stories were fated to intertwine.
In his last sentence, we had met and were together for a single line.
Why me? Why him? Why us? Why then? Why now?
While I read a comma, he had written a final period.
The end.
In the recent years of my life at that point, I had discovered: True failure. Self-hatred. Weed. Eminem.
And now I discovered Death.
I can’t help but stare, feeling my own mouth drift open like I’m joining the old man in a frozen and silent duet. The moment stretches forever…
Oh.
It’s gone.
The white square shrinks into the horizon, becoming a star who has lost its way in the sky and has come to settle along the Earth.
I could step on the accelerator. I could easily catch up. But I don’t.
I allow the red and blue lights to carry away the white square until it becomes a white pixel, then a white speck, and then nothing at all.
The song fades and switches.
25 to Life by Eminem.
I check my phone.
Puyallup is 17 miles away.
And I am 19 years old.
The dab pen finds my lips, the light blinks.
The road ahead is lonesome.
The sentence is for life.
I keep driving.