Goddamn Destiny
Chapter 2
Off-tangent
"Where is my mind?"
How the hell should I know, thought Melvis. What the fuck kind of question is that, anyway? Instead, he said, "How the heck should I know?"
The brother wasn't the sort to swear in front of, not with his parents around, since they swore off swearing as a sacred oath broken only when it was most convenient. Until the Ray children grew up enough to handle the abuse of parental disagreement, they rarely used the words deemed vulgar by the insufficient, awkward language you happen to be reading right now. In fact, even after growing up, and moving out, for even the second time, the brother never decided to swear, as it seemed unattractive to do anything the mother did during one of her cruel fits of cursing rage.
"Don't you dare," said the mother on a dozen tense occasions, shocked that her selfless plans for her family that happened to be entirely filled with everything she solely wanted to do were being violated by a previous engagement one of her children had with someone that wasn't on her favorite's list. "Don't you dare. Fuck no! Don't you fucking dare! No one fucking cares about me! I do everything, fucking everything..."
Of course, the brother wasn't thinking about those things. Melvis the agent, lucidly aware of the dangers of swearing in front of the nonswearing types, as he himself came from such a background in the middle-of-nowhere Kansas, refrained from saying such base terms, substituting milder terms that meant the same thing.
"Frickin' useless, kid. It's frickin' uselesss to try and figure it all out. I dunno where you mind is, but really, you don't need it. Just don't think to much, you'll be alright."
"What?" asked the brother, confused for a moment.
Oh yes, sorry, I forget to narrate, and say, you know, details like location or whatever. Sorry I'm so late. Traffic was bad, or something. Anyway, the brother was five-seven or something, which makes him about fifteen years old. The brother and the agent didn't know each other, and would never remember this chance meeting years from now when they meet again, when the brother asks the same thing---only, this time, that wasn't what he said.
"That's not what I said," said the brother, as I kinda told you he would. He explains why, to you curious readers, but mostly to the agent. "I said," he said, "if I take this---" he indicated a chair at the table that Melvis had taken as his uncomfortable abode for that morning's coffee that came after a night of delirious insomnia and crack and exploding two-liters Diet sodas, "---would you mind?"
"Uh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Go for it." Melvis was the only one still at the table, confused about the idiotic question of 'do you mind?' because, he was saying 'yes' you may have the chair, but 'no' I do not mind. So, to say 'yes,' he had to say 'no,' which is confusing as hell at that hour.
Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yes, narration. I'm not so good at this, sorry. I'm new, really. Annoyingly so, to be honest. I forgot to tell you, I'm dead. Oooooo. Spooky, right? No, no, I'm kidding, I just thought that'd make sense to say there, you know, because narrators usually are dead or in jail or something in these lame narration things. I mean, it's like those damn movies where the guy just starts telling you when he was born and about that girl he loved or whatever, like you asked or something. I mean, who cares that he was born in 1932 and now we get to see his gangster life unfold in Chicago or something. I mean, at least that way you get to avoid a bunch of stupid flashbacks or something because noone's figured out a smarter way to tell a story than to use stupid, slow motion flashbacks in black-and-white and all fuzzy with people shouting out in slow motion stuff like, "Nooooo! Character's naaaaaaaame!" and that's somehow supposed to mean something to you, like, oh, good, now that I've experienced that event in blurry, colorless slow motion, I completely understand why he would want to wreak revenge on the guy who he is going to kill in about five scenes or whatever, and the drawn out ambiguous voice really struck a cord there, and now I totally have a tear-jerking emotional connection to Bufftom Henry or whoever the hell is the hero.
I'm mostly irritated at the idiot writers that write that shit, like, ooo, look, I wrote a movie that's like the movies. I mean, most movies are shit, and you think you're good because you copied that idiot formula that for some reason is 'the biblical approach' to filmmaking, because no way can anyone be entertained by anything cleverer. But whatever, that's a movie, this is a book, and to reach this point in my logic you've had to been reading it, so at least you can read, unless someone's reading it to you, for God knows what reason---
ANYWAY, sorry, that was a tangent. I'm really bad at this, I keep giving endings away and try and tell who life stories in a sentence and, anyway, what do you care? What was I saying? Since I'm writing all this out, I can just read back. So, like, don't shout at the page or whatever---not that you were, you demanding bastard, reading and taking, not like I'd need your help or anything. I mean, you try writing a book.
Right, so, the brother was five-seven at that moment, because that's significant, and looked however the hell you want him to look. Yeah, so, he met the agent, ‘cause if you haven't guessed yet, all of the people are connected. I mean, probably. I dunno the fucking ending. I haven't gotten to that point yet. By the way, my name's Jorge.
Anyway, I dunno why my name should be attached to that paragraph. Man. I am way off-tangent here. Like, wow. I mean, I'd say off-topic. but like, I don't even know what the hell that is anyway, and I've spent the most time on some tangent, so I guess that'd make a great title for this chapter, since I'm one of those sorts who likes titles enough to put on every chapter I write. I also enjoy overwhelmingly long sentences, the epic length of paragraphs. Which reminds me, I’m forgetting to finish the story:
Despite the meanderings of the narrator, the brother went on about his life, returning with the chair to sit with his closely held family whose rulers were terrified of the world that they all would have to live in someday, despite lack of exposure, wisdom, or preparation. Eventually, when the brother began to dedicate his time to the experience of love and the sisters began to understand music and the exciting situation of dating and popularity that came with being the only beautiful girls in a school overwhelmed with boys, and the house filled with more and more people that the rulers didn’t understand because of their own disheveled experiences and their hard-earned distrust of both youth and their children’s ability to make right decisions, and a disbelief that any decision that the rulers hadn’t arrived at themselves was incorrect, the new barrage of opinions and obligations that suddenly occupied the children’s time was taken as a personal threat, and mistaken for a rift in the family’s closeness.
But not then, when the children were still children, and the adult’s pasts hadn’t begun their haunting, and the brother hadn’t yet met the attorney in training that would prove the meaning of friendship, and the celebrity was just an ordinary adolescent who knew more names of people that he didn’t know than people who he didn’t know knew his, all while the agent named Melvis sat back, relaxed, and sipped his coffee. Yawning he stretched his hands high above his head, when the handle of a baby’s carseat, complete with a cooing baby, flew into his hand from a severe collision between an ambulance rushing from another accident to the hospital and a topless beamer that had flipped and spun a dozen times in the air before landing on it’s wheels, unscathed with the exception of everywhere but the driver’s seat.
Melvis placed the baby seat on the table, and took a sip of his black coffee.
“Baby,” he took another sip, “you are lucky.”
Except for the Rays, with the brother sitting in the chair borrowed from Melvis’s table, the outdoor café was empty. The only Ray to see everything happen was the middle sister, who sat awestruck.
Melvis gulped his coffee, and walked off. The store owner, still staring at the wreckage, spoke to Melvis as he walked by. “That was amazing.”
Melvis shrugged, “Where is my mind?”
“I---what?--- I mean, that was the most amazing thing I have ever seen.”
Melvis shrugged, because he was used to it. Over Kansas, he was born on a Boeing 747, as it was crash landing into a field on which there was a massive meeting all two thousand murderers of pilots who flew Boeing 747s, who had amazingly convened by their own subconscious situations in that field by accidental membership in a club that didn’t exist because of a typo in a flyer that an exhausted teenager was too tired to proofread because her self-important chemistry teacher, who was also attending the nonexistent meeting, had given too much homework as a result of a severe inferiority complex because he was the only teacher that hadn’t traveled any further than the city he was born in because his father had died in a Boeing 747 accident.
The only person to survive the accident, a middle aged police officer, helped deliver the baby, and declared loudly, “June 5th is the most amazing day in all of time.”
“Time is an invention,” thought Melvis in the unspeakable language humans think in, while Melvis’s parents corrected the officer, “Today is June 7th.”
Melvis’s parents, always practical minded, decided to buy the field and the crashed Boeing 747 hull as their permanent residence. The moment he was born, he said his first word, “antidisestablishmentarianism,” and proceeded from nursing to learning how to read so he could figure out what that word meant. In one year, he had learned twelve languages, only to realize the word belonged to English, which was the last language he attempted, because he thought it was the most boring. At the age of two, Melvis had learned to play classical Sebastian Bach on the Piano, ancient Psalms on the lyre, modern Louis Armstrong on the saxophone, and hypnotic Spanish on the guitar. A year later, he developed a post-modern literary style for his eighth novel, independently reinvented algebra, calculus and geometry, and learned to play chess mentally without a board or pieces until he understood computer programming enough to create the world’s only invincible computerized opponent, which incidentally also united quantum physics to ordinary physics as the unstoppable force of Melvis’s chess-related intellect met the unmovable object of the computer’s invincible brilliance. He appeared in every magazine, journal, newspaper, tabloid and (years after he was dead) history book as the world’s greatest prodigy. By seven he had the physical maturity of a twenty year old gymnastic martial-artist track-runner, after mastering gymnastics, basic kung fu, and the four-hundred meter dash. By age nine, he had written an exposé on the meaning of death, drafted an ideal government, proposed a valid solution to peace in Africa, and comprehensively studied medicine well enough to save a bypass surgeon with bypass surgery on the ski slope the surgeon had suffered a heart attack on, while an avalanche cascaded down from the jealous mountain.
On his tenth birthday, he forgot everything, and returned to the normal intellectual value of a ten-year-old. With nothing to do but sit around, while every scientist and representative from every gifted student school in the country and government agent attempted to intervene on the tragic loss of talent, he also lost his incredible physical aptitude. Eventually, they performed a surgery, the purpose and result of which he never knew, and left him with an irreversible feeling of solitude. He asked his dad one day, while they sat together on the side of a river, after catching the largest fish ever caught in Kansas, what the surgery was for.
“You don’t have a brain.” Melvis’s father said, lighting his pipe, “Turns out you were so smart you didn’t need it to function normally.”
“Where is my mind?” asked Melvis.
“Probably wherever in Sam Hill everyone else’s brain has gone to these days.”
Secretly searching for Sam Hill, Melvis wandered into the police station two towns south from his home, and spoke to the police chief, who was the police officer that survived the accident and would later become the governor of Kansas, before leaving to California to pursue his secret passion to be a talent agent.
At birthday parties, Melvis would eat the entire cake himself, down five dozen pizzas, or bring gifts he happened to find on the way to the party. One time, he found a Lamborghini. Another time, he found the world’s largest diamond. Another time, he found a mechanical device that could read minds and turn the bearer invisible as long as he thought about what it would feel like to cease to exist.
The more amazing the things that Melvis did, the more popular he became, and soon sky-rocketed into the top circles of celebrities and politicians who learned the value of surrounding themselves with amazing people. Out of no desire of his own, Melvis became a people-person, because people were simply stunned with how amazing he was, ignoring his desperate questioning for the location of Sam Hill. Without fail, wherever he went, disasters occurred that ended with the dazzling conclusion of miracles, moments of spontaneous charity and love would break with such competitive frenzy that non-profit organizations had to hire the military to protect its volunteers from the leagues of Samaritans desperate to donate. Once the land on which the Boeing 747 crashed and became a home was discovered to contain more oil than all of the Middle East, Alaska and all seven oceans combined, Melvis suddenly was wealthy enough to eliminate the national debt and restore value to gold in such a way that all currency down to the penny could immediately be resold for more than the currency cost to create and sell for a profit. The entire nation was immediately rich with such immediate liberty that the Disaster of the Pennies overtook the country in week’s time, transforming it from paradise to hell and back again until everything restored to the way it had been beforehand, with the national debt now twelve dollars and eighty-one cents larger than it had been before.
Melvis changed his name twelve times, had fourteen facial reconstructive surgeries, and learned to speak twelve languages again all in the hope of avoiding the overwhelming popularity, so he could seek Sam Hill and find his mind again. It wasn’t until the emergence of the Celebrity, whose overwhelming popularity allowed Melvis to slink away for a final surgery and lifestyle alteration, settling this time for the position of talent agent, when he ran into the old police officer-turned-chief-turned-governor-turned-talent agent, who promised not to tell anyone else in the entire world who Melvis had become if he took over his job as an agent so that the old police officer could finally retire and raise a garden of watermelons as he had always wanted.
“Life is meant for watermelons,” the police officer declared on his way out the door, with a large smile, a huge hat, and an illegal cigar. “And even if it’s not, it’s better than any damn job I’ve ever done.”
Melvis sighed, and sat back, and relaxed, because for the first day in his life, nothing amazing happened. Shocked at the sudden realization, he shouted after the old officer, “This is the most amazing day of my life!”
“Well,” he shouted back, “Of course it is; it’s June 5th!” And then he left.
Melvis looked at the calendar on his new desk, and sighed. It was June 7th; anyway, Melvis didn’t care, because it really was the most amazing day of his life.
