Cityscapes

Way back when I first met Harold, long before he started to drink my whiskey and long before he disappeared from the bar scene of Merrimond, I was content. It didn’t seem to last after I met Harold though, he managed to change everything.

In this city though, things are always changing. Sometimes I think that the longer you live here, the more the city has already changed who you are. I didn’t always used to serve drinks even. I used to sit on the other side of the bar. I used to drink; I used to fight. The way the city’s gears go and grind, it’s haunting to realize you’re just another cog in the machine.

For Harold though, it wasn’t such a big deal. Harold for one never submitted to the notion of cogs or machines for that matter. Harold was rebellious in the only way possible; Harold was a pacifist. Sometimes there’s a person who you couldn’t describe with all the words in the dictionary, but not Harold. Harold was a pacifist.

Harold always talked so softly he could put a baby to sleep. Sometimes he would rattle off an epic tale that the bar would forget because the words were just too soft to commit to memory. He was soft and idealistic in an enviable way.

I remember the first time he came in my bar, it was just Karl and me that day, and we talked about the newest tax reform the mayor levied.

“They’ve got it all perfect this time Karl.”

“If that’s what you think, then they’ve gotta be doing something right.”

When Harold came in he sat down before the door closed behind him and lit his joint. He didn’t even wait to order his whiskey before jumping right in.

“What do you like most about your monotony?” he asked me so callously. He didn’t even know my name, but I guess Harold thought some questions were more important to ask first.

I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. Turns out even pacifists had their way of riling people up, especially Harold.

He apologized and ordered his whiskey.

He had hit it that first day we met, and from then on I could never shake off Harold’s insight. I think it wasn’t until the second time I met him though that he started to bother me. At first he was a customer, but slowly he became a regular. Harold became a constant in the monotony of my weekly grind. But even when I started to despise him, I still let him smoke his joints in my bar. After all, he was right.

Things settled in the most horrifying of ways. With the help of Harold’s insight and influence, the bar began to discuss more surreal subjects to pass the hours. Sports eluded us and the TV got dusty in the corner of the room. Harold eventually made every alcoholic a philosopher.
Everything was changing, but even that was going to change, and once again Harold would be at the heart of it all.

It started with the kind of morning where habit could steer the whole thing from when you turn on the neon signs to when the lunch crowd started to get things busy. It was the kind of day so sickeningly ordinary, it begged you to forget the fact that you lived in a city that wanted to tear your soul out. So ordinary it taunted you, like nothing happened yesterday or the day before that even.

It was a relatively quiet morning as far as Monday mornings go. There were regulars and the business folk getting their pre-work insobriety going, and then there were the alcoholics and the laid-offs. It was quiet despite the small crowd; groggy men enjoyed their solitude.

Harold came in and sat in his usual patched up stool. In the dim light he was peaceful, or maybe it was just the thought of the shot of whiskey in front of him, full. He was troubled. I saw it on his face when it was lit by the haze of dawn as he sauntered in.

“Murphy, we’ve known each other a while now, huh?” His words were disturbing but his voice was melodic, “I’d hate to say you were my closest companion.” He sat there brooding over his words as he contemplated his whiskey. He knew he had hit a nerve with me, sometimes I began to think he did it just for fun, but not this time.

“Look Harold, I’m not in the mood for your shit today.”

“You’re never in the mood, Murphy,” and even upset he spoke so calmly anyone would have sworn he was talking about a cloud or maybe even a marshmallow.

“You’re never in the mood for anything but serving drinks. But today, I need you friend, I need some support.”

Me and Harold had a good thing going for the last seven years, he paid me to serve him whiskey and lagers, and I liked it that way. I didn’t like to know about the men I served. After awhile, you don’t want to know about the people you’re poisoning. It was unfamiliar was territory I didn’t explore with any customer, much less the one I had to serve every day. Maybe I should have listened to him though.

“Now come on Harold. Just drink your whiskey.”

“Murph,” he whimpered unnerved, “I can’t seem to fight for anything. What good is someone who can’t fight?”

“What do you need to fight Harold? Hell, the fact that you’ve never spilled a drop of blood in my bar may be the only reason I like you at all.”

“Fighting and being able to fight are two different things my old friend, and that’s the problem I have today. How can survive if I can’t fight? It’s like that overpass graffiti on 7th and Point. The teenager who loved so much she climbed a skyscraper to ask for someone to ‘find a cure.’ Now it’s one thing to not understand words like manifest destiny, but I’m dealing with something completely different.”

Philosophical discussion was par for the course for Harold, but this was far more personal than anything he had ever said in my bar. I still hadn’t put the pieces together when the door to the street swung open so the morning light could sprawl.

“What’s good Murph?” I pulled away from Harold to fix Karl his drink.

“Harold here is having a tough day.”

“Already? But it’s only 7, now whatsa matter Harold?” Karl slid off his long overcoat and hung it on the tree next to the booths. Harold sniffed the air lightly to gather himself.

“Well, Karl, the world’s out to get me, and I don’t think I’ve got a chance.” Karl wrinkled his nose in sympathy and mystery.

“Sounds rough kid,” he sipped his gin and we both listened while the ice shifted and clinked. Karl was old and sage-like, the epitome of success. He hunched over his drink in his tailored suit with his white halo of hair, and he thought:

“This world makes you shit diamonds sometimes, you know? But no one ever said hard work and pain is untouchable, no one I’d trust anyhow.”

“What if I can’t shit diamonds Karl?”

“Then you ought to start learning how.” Karl took a hard sip of his gin.

“I’m having some real trouble finding motivation today, I can’t shit diamonds, I can’t shit coal, and maybe I just don’t want to shit rocks to begin with.”

“I suppose you should count your blessings that your line of work doesn’t require any motivation then.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I thought too.”
Harold resumed his inspection of his whiskey shot as me and Karl exchanged confused looks.

“Harold, what’s going on?” I could hardly believe that the words came out of my mouth. Harold was surprised too and suddenly he was rejuvenated, if only a little.

“I don’t think you’ll believe me, but I’ll tell you both anyway to get it off my chest. My freedom is at stake and some suits are looking to make me a patsy; they’re old friends if you will.

“But that’s not the problem even. Motivation has always eluded me, you two can attest to my apathy I’m sure, but now that it’s all at stake, well, who am I to not give a shit? There’s the conundrum, here’s my life defining moment and I’m spending it sober in a bar.”

“You know, I never quite understood you Harold. Everyone’s gotta pick battles, but you don’t seem to pick any do you?”

“I guess were on the same page then.”

Suddenly then light was everywhere, fumbling in, drunk off the fumes of old men and alcohol. Harold paled, and slowly the dull din of the morning drunks calmed to silence.

Silhouettes of black nothings liquefied gradually into wholes. They emerged from behind the sun but still ahead of it the entire time; they denied it. Circumvented the only godforsaken sun.

The two brown men stood motionless, and maybe they were there the whole time. It was like they condensed out of thin air. Their features were hollowed out as the door set itself back in front of a horizon.

I don’t recall their features as remarkable, but Harold sped his lackluster heart. He readjusted himself and took his shot before raising two droopy fingers towards me. I brought him two more.

He forced me to ignore the two men as I poured more whiskey, and I was grateful. Something about how the suits on these men didn’t stop to be hung up on their pegs bothered me.

The one stood unremarking, but the other slanted his lip in a perplexing uncertainty.

More shots were poured, for Harold, and he took them slowly. He sipped his whiskey once or even twice before the last fatal throw back. He would slam each down with a 'tap'.

Harold got drunk in the limelight of the bar. Every man regardless of sobriety focused on the electricity in the air.

"Harold, you mother-fucker the jig is up for good.”

I think for a second we all doubted Harold. For a moment we didn't recall the last distraught of a man half its size, and seven years is a little too long to know any one man.

It only made sense to be discouraged; it only made sense to act off-guard.

At least before Karl pulled out his noose and tied the John up by his neck. It was Karl in his tailored suit, his arms wrinkled and tired but now bulging with muscle and vigor, it was Karl with a unsuccessfully gasping man between his elbow and ribs who jarred a deep seeded hatred from all of our respective bowels. The absolute reality of this surreal moment shook us to our very cores and the finale commenced.

His eyes bulged sympathetically.

“Leave Harold be,” he said plainly and absurdly. The suit was wrinkled under Karl’s elbow now, and the trance subsided. He was a man after all. When Karl let him down two alcoholics and a man who was laid off the week before stood up in warning. I think the suit got the message; he sat collecting his breath and losing his posture while his partner stood with his mouth ajar.

Neither felt the need to threaten any sort of power, whatever power they had been appointed had been stripped.

Things never were quite the same after that. Harold didn’t talk as much, and soon after disappeared forever. No one knew what had happened to him, but everyone was sure the suits had nothing to do with it. In the end I didn’t stick around to figure out how the city finally got Harold.

The contentment that the city had once given me and then brutally took away from me, I just didn’t think I’d ever get it back. The week he disappeared was the week I moved to the ocean. Sailors didn’t like to talk about complacency when they drank.

When I think back to the city though, I don’t think about the bar or the men in suits, I think back to the leaves on the only willow in the city that I passed every morning. I think back to their sad take on the ordinary, and I think of Harold. Maybe it’s pessimistic, but I think Harold had it right. You need the empty to make the glass whole.

This is the big one, the one I worked on all semester. I have countless drafts (though this the only whole one), countless notes and pages with different directions, different characters, completely different plots and ideals. It started as a dream (like most of my pieces actually) and then became a two page introduction for one of the first assignments of the course. It was good, I liked it, but it had no direction. It never really found it.

Ideas coursed through my head and I let it sit. When I sat down to write, I wrote a paragraph for this story. Harold never came into light though, and neither did Murphy. They were cardboard cutouts lacking depth. Outlines of something beyond what my imagination could concieve. They never became real people for me, and in the finality of deadlines, I had to go with the one plot I had concieved months earlier. My inability to advance plot and my inadequacy with dialogue is really persistent here.

Even so, there are successes here and there, there is something truly awesome in these lines, and I intend to find it one day.

I'm not sure what my obsession with fighting power for the sake of fighting power is. There's no doubt that I'm discontented by the thought of tragically unfair abuse of power, but if I can't even portray it well in writing, then what am I so scared of? In many ways Harold encompasses my directionless dillema. If only he was more than just a cardboard cutout.

-Dan