The Cynic by Woodruff Laputka

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Heres a short story I recently wrote for the Kenyon Review. Would enjoy some feed-back, from those of you who are interested in giving it.

Cheers.

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The Cynic

By Woodruff Laputka

Left alone in the unseen corners of the world, where darkness seems endless and nature runs a muck, did I first learn what it means to ruin your own life. It was by no hand of fate; mind you, or accident that this happened, as I am well aware that the progression of my unintentional, though unavoidable demise was created solely by my will alone and none other. How could a separate interest, contained by anybody of intelligence foresee the coming events as so strikingly delicious and considerate to its own endeavor? How could there be anything on this earth that can truly account for such cruelty?

No, there is no great devil that lurks behind the trees in the heath after the sun has set, walking among us in garland shroud and waiting to dance with witches and sorcerers at midnight. No, there is no god who looks down from the throne of a limitless grace and foretells the empowered angels of his choir the unwritten story of the universe, by his say as he has willed it to be so. These things are mere theology, trifle to our everyday lives and predominant in the minds of only those whose convictions run away with them, feeding on a need for answers and prostrating beneath an unexplained power that presents itself only in allegory, a symbol to be interpreted by either faith as good or as evil. And certainly does that ware more masks that any shaman, magic man, politician or whatever you call them of our time.

The only power that besets us, whether we choose to recognize it or not, is the spiraling chaos of the cosmos, and our seemingly infinite infantile attempts to embrace it in our understanding, to welcome and to greet, and later to shackle as our decided, unequivocal slave, lower than us by all our decided standard and able to be used for foundation, like so many ideas that had been discovered before it. How else could you explain a picture as plainly sinister as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, whose glorified man, out reached and intent on touching his glorified God, wants nothing more than to meet and become and replace the thing which had made him a man? How else can we explain as fickle a concept as a merchant aiming for great, untold wealth, gaining and empire of influence and capital, only to die in his bed muttering “Rosebud”, a thing all so trivial, to be buried like everyone else, with everyone else, and left there to be met by everyone else who will quickly come after him.

A man’s life is, by nature, his own. A starting chance that we all are given to embrace the short moments we have before buried, intended merely to be taken, absorbed and forgotten in a constant, high-speed rat-race for success, a reason to replace the glory of before-mentioned titans who had come before us. Those men who were “great men”” were “true men” were “awesome men”, who made their lives the way they were by decisions, by actions and by convictions all able to withstand even the test and time of a life-span. For those men who will come and surely plant a flag atop old burial grounds of before-mentioned titans of men there is no difference, save to be their own legends, and leave their own legacies, and to be replaced by those who come after. And all the while, when life moves along, slowly at points of reflection, quickly at points of intent, the goal is to make that one footprint that surely will last through the ages as “mine!” and “no one else’s, for who could compete with that, huh?!”

It’s in the same token of life changing power, whether to be rich or to be poor, to be happy or to be miserable, that brought me my destiny one autumn afternoon, in a churchyard in old, dilapidated Edinburgh. A place where the grasses had all grown quite long, and the headstones had long lost their markings, to where the whole lot seemed at times like gray ghosts, all standing at odd differed sizes at perfect salute to the living who may well pass by. “Here we are” they echo to us, we people who take care to walk by and listen to them. “Here we are, still living as always, to be remembered, as always, for all we had been, for all we had loved, for all we had done as the living.” It is in such old and decrepit back alleys, though, where “Urban” has replaced the will of “Romance” that such echoes, such pledges to not be forgotten by the living, more often than not go unheard. But they are sometimes heard, and most likely by people like I, a man who simply listened.

For, though you yourself may not find it at all quite a joy, I do so much love good soft music. Not music, perhaps, as you immediately think, with whiny old woodwinds and clinkering bells and obnoxious percussion and horrendous brass horns, nor that of a chamber, with long, shrieking strings that play on a man’s sensibilities and emotions as if he were the keys on the piano the pianist sits at. One might ask that pianist, after one of his “phenomenal” performances, “who is really performing here? You? Or, might I suppose it’s the instrument that the audience was applauding at earlier? Could it be that, you might say that instrument might just play you?”

No, I have no relation to that petulant taste that dulls out mans pallet for cheap crafted magic and mechanical parlor tricks. Instead, I sit in the softer, uninhabited lands of the city, and instead sit quite happily, listening carefully to the sounds of natures whirling world around me. To the music that, if carefully procured past the noise and the fervor of the human-kind fanfare, plays at unceasing, unhindered capitulations of tremendous beauty, uninhabited by unnecessary gestures from far less developed tears on the tonal scale. Not singing birds, mind you, as they make me gag, but the rushing of wind as it plays through the leaves on the chilly tree branches on late autumn days. The sound of a rain drop, striking the earth with its thunderous speed from unmeasured altitudes, stampeding the world as one of a limitless horde of humid-grown missiles.

I have often had holidays where, alone in the country, I would sit all the while by a river bank, lying about with my eyes to the sky and my ears full of beautiful babbling. Mesmerized by wonderful currents of liquid completely enamored by the greater regime of earth’s gravity, moving as ordered, falling as ordered and flowing as ordered by nature, to drown all that cross gravity. Oh, how those beautiful, wonderful, dreamy-like times had made rouges in my cheeks and my heart, with every experience all the more enticing, all the more addictive and chemical than the last. So was I drawn, a mere chemical addict of nature, to the graveyard that day in late autumn, when all life in my life would change then and there, a mere ending to my road and my story.

A long stroll had I taken through the weaving gray headstones and decidedly took a short rest, humbly perching my limbs on a stone-carven bench and closing my eyes for a time. When I opened my eyes, after what felt like seconds, the soft rays of once amber-autumn sunshine had been chased off by gray, dull dilution of cloud cover. The once crisp and warm, homey air had now turned to a bone-shaking chill, and frost had quickly developed all over the grass, paths and head-stones. No one else had been present in the graveyard that day, a certain tribute to what actually attracted me there, but I could feel that some where off, in the expanse of the rows there stood silent, some figure that had not been there before.

I watched with intention, unmoving, non-breathing, strangely, if not mortally shaken by the strange turn in weather and in company. “Must have drifted off for some time longer,” I thought to myself, “person must have slipped in while I was resting.” What astonished me though, beyond these comforting, if not peculiar observations, was this horribly thick fear that set knotted, like a ball, deep in my stomach. It was something I had felt before, back when I too held convictions and I too held “odd-oaths” and had marched off en-arms to fight war. That feeling, a totally human experience, when one feels like death is quite close to him. A feeling that, what might be in seconds or less, the earth beneath you will open and your body will fall six feet under, for earth to close around you and devour you. I found myself muttering in those strange, war-torn times “oh my god, please don’t let me die before my time.”

After what seemed like hours of waiting, of soft, half-lung filled breathing, when dimness over daylight grew darker and not once had I heard or even seen the new patron who shared the graveyard, I decided it best to depart. My hands moved with the greatest of age-old stone slowness, and my muscles felt like they were mortar, leaving my face as a mess of white gargoyles, a cathedral of fear for some unseen thing that wasn’t there. “Death wasn’t there.”

I assured myself of this several times, thinking it repeatedly while glancing from my left to my right as if some unseen phantom were trying to come up my flanks. Slowly, practically as still as frozen jelly, I gathered my cane and my hat, beginning my ascent to stand up, feeling all the marrow in my poor, long aged bones freeze with the cracks of my old, decayed joints. Pop, echo. Pop. Crack. Pop. Pop, like a strain on dry wood planks, or the loss of your safety on ice frozen lakes when winter decided to leave early that day and didn’t tell you. I stood silent and still like the angels and Marys and markers of the grave-yard itself, a moment of irony for this place of old dead things, now contributed to by me, the obelisk of a living mausoleum of memories.

Still as the air that enshrouded it, the graveyard made no noise. Not a whisper of wind could be heard in the tree branches, or dapple of rain-water on the cold earth. Surely then, to my comfort, could there not be a stalker of any magnitude within the rows of that cemetery. In all my years, I’ve never encountered such silence, such vigilant patience as to make a thing stone cold and wait for its prey like that. Nor could there be, again to my comfort, such a thing in old Edinburgh, less it already be dead itself and forgotten to be buried.

I managed to eye from my place in the rows a quick exit path to the street side and angled my body to launch in a sprint for the door and then out to the city, leaving the cemetery and its would-be predator far behind even the spotted legs of a man of my elderly vigor. I took aim, held taught my cane and my hat and could feel my blood boiling with adrenaline, amped and prepared to let not a thing come between me and my growing, fear ridden need to be free of this place. It was in this last second perhaps, as I look back and think, that I could have saved everything had I but waited a little longer. Had I but not allowed the spooky, spirited chills of child-hood nightmares to encompass my whole of rational reasoning. Had I but waited just a single second more and had noticed the small, unmarked gravestone before me, hidden in the tall grass, I could have changed angles and made a better attempt at my foolishness than to give in to illusions that silence and shadows did play on me.

I heard a noise. A sudden, loud and startling noise, like that of a scream that thundered and clawed out from behind me. I launched my old body not up but strait forward, the knot in my belly exploding through my throat and vomiting out my mouth in the form of a tragic, moribund scream like had never been heard to be uttered from my vocal chords ever. My mouth was wide open and my eyes shut-closed fast, leaving me blind in the perilous venture to exit the lair of the monster. My foot caught the stone in the launch, my old body, full of blood and vigor was quickly grasped tightly by the talons of gravity, slamming my top-end quite sharply and firmly to the ground. My scream had been muffled, my mouth full of grass, my eyes made quick witness to an explosion of trauma-induced starlight. My ears however, took to receiving nothing that finalized my position in the matter. It wasn’t that I could hear the quick crack, but could feel it, rupturing fast from the back of my head down my spinal cord. I could feel all the nerves in my body exploding like ten-thousand powder kegs all ignited at once, blasting my body into such sensational fanfare as to rival any firework-throttled celebration.
Of the pain that came over me, there is no description to be found anywhere. Neither medical book, nor bible could describe the sheer mind-splintering totality of such suffering, nor should anyone ever think that those who have experienced what I went through there and lived be able to actually reproduce what the sensation felt like. If they do, they are liars. What I can say is that that pain was so great that my ears were too muted, too numbed and disarrayed to have heard the minimal, disbelieving gasp escape from the lips of the young school boy who had tricked me. Whatever joke he felt he had secured in the terror of a napping old man, in waiting just behind the fear ridden body of one so many years his senior for so long, of inducing the various sensations of terror created by the sheer change in the most perfect, storybook setting of a cemetery, ended at the moment he saw what his little white-prank had done to me.

I know he was a little boy, perhaps of ten or less, because I could hear him yelling for help as he ran to the exit. The near-eternity of explosive pain did not drown out my ears for that long. Short enough to permit me at least a vague echo of his fading cries for help and forgiveness. “Oh god! Oh God! Please help me, please help! Oh, god oh god, hes been hurt. Please help!” So easy is it for such a young child, such a new addition to the human race, to lose what everyone defines as the hereditary “innocence”. If he believes in Hell, he certainly will spend the rest of his life being penitent. Even if he doesn’t, and grows out of that “god” faze that all children go through, he still will never forget the crime he committed on me.

During my life I had spent so much time trying to learn and understand the world we lived in. When I finally did feel like I understood the world, I realized that it wasn’t the world “we knew”. It wasn’t the world that boy “knew”, but rather the world he now knows, or the world that I knew after going off to fight as a soldier, after quickly stripping a man’s life from his body, inch by inch by the measure of a cold and calculated bullet. I realized, as I watched that man fall to the earth, vacant, that there was no “knowing” the world. There was no “understanding”. There was no “truth” to be had by great travels, by great fortunes and long-lasting love-affairs. There is no book and no language that can teach you the ever-working nature of the universe, and those that claim to do so are nothing more than fabrics for the seamstresses of dogma and social irresponsibility. It’s in nature that our convictions ultimately fall and shatter like polished-fine crystal. It’s in the face of the whirlwind of ever-changing, ever-reforming possibilities that bring the beliefs of a predictable, understandable universe to their knees, slitting its throat from ear to ear, inch by inch like the cold-calculations of a bullet. Like the foolish, thought-innocent prank of a child who noticed and old man napping in a cemetery.

The pain has long since faded into cold, uninterrupted numbness, while my eyes, no matter how much I will them to, do not open. With the boys quick exit left my hearing as well, so it’s peaceful here in this end that I’ve made by my choices in life. Those choices that blindly brought me towards something I had foolishly created for myself, knowing better, and all in hope of just enjoying a beautiful, crisp autumn day. I wanted to hear the wind in the trees, and the plummeting spatters of raindrops. I wanted to walk amidst the cold, silent grave stones that all stand up-top at attention, and to listen to all the beauty of the world that I believed only came to those who would hearken to it. I wanted to re-live those times in my youth where my ears filled with beautiful babblings of running rivers in the country-side, where I would lie with my back to the cool, gentle earth and absorb the serenities that it offered me.

That’s all I can honestly say that I wanted for myself, and all I can say I ever lived for once returning from being a soldier. It certainly took no devil or god to take that life from me, and I certainly have not escaped this unfeeling, unsensing body that, with the pain, also lost its ability to taste, to smell, to touch, to see and to control any faculties, save to lay still and leave me in quiet contemplation. I suppose I should be surprised that I am even able to think anything in my state right now, let alone form curious postulations as I do and reflect on what was done to me in the end. But I am humbled in some manner by the fact that I am still thinking and thus am still alive in some sense, leading me to believe I should stay like this, at least until someone chooses to cremate the remains, as I recall I had willed to be done, ultimately assuring myself, now that I think of it, that I am the complete destroyer of my own life.
What poetic irony, if only I’d be able to grin.