death was coming. it was coming as inevitable as a car crash turns to silent high-pitched slow motion film reels, voyeurs intent on every spinning wheel and lost gyro and tailpipe flying through the air. it was coming and no one could stop it.

walking around the streets, hovering near the open pores of the sidewalks, galvanized grates pouring out the smells of the city. it’s really death. god damn smelly death.

when death arrives, it’s as if a pollen has been borne in upon the breeze. unseen, sometimes smelled faintly, a whiff of flowers or honey or the bloom of sickly-sweet, bile and nectar together in familial scents. car exhaust that doesn’t dissipate. diaphanous and elegiac. death is as nebulous and familiar as germs. decay, commonplace as air. the urgings of biology conspire secretly, plotting and shaking foundations gently as living, breathing beings live, survive, thrive. like an earthquake that rattles vital members and structures, the incursion is incurable, the sensation undetectable, the arrival completely and utterly inevitable. death, whether in a flash or over a span, is the undeniable truth, and stands next to life as the dark half, the potent prince who watches in the shadows as its failing brother preens, gadding about while sun shines. but even suns have their deaths.

this was what occupied vincent’s mind as he step-stepped purposely, finally over cracks. sidewalks, cemented and solid, were only temporary, their structures a finite matrix of slow defeat, diminishing into crumbling obscenity. he watched the ground for signs of life, for where there was life, death was sure to follow, though to vincent, death wasn’t really following. it was right along side, the shadow again, connected and alive and unchallenged. life was mercurial. fleeting. spastic. death, on the other hand, was bigger even than monuments, bigger than planets, than the universe itself.

how the fuck had death become so powerful? was there any force or power bigger than death? vincent didn’t think so.

feet pass. clop clop clop. stepping on cracks, home to insects and microbes and the bestial, useless cravings of seedlings and spores. you can try to get by, you can try to defeat it, but in the end, even you will succumb.
vincent had just left the meeting where twelve members of the board had voted to suspend one of the departments. his department, in fact. they’d called him in, grave and certain in their suits, he clad in jeans and a light blue button down and a striped yellow-gray tie that was five-eights of an inch too short, making him feel that fucked up inferiority complex fashion and business conferred upon those who possessed neither the acumen nor the financial structure of success. he had cheated it a little putting it on, giving the thin side less top room on the loop around the half-windsor (a knot, he knew, of the lower classes, of the pedestrian crowd too dumb to learn the full-windsor and too lazy for the andrew kingshead knot, which even if he’d worn it, would have instantly betrayed his station, its bourgeoisie elegance clearly contrasting with his faux urban chic sophisticate-wear, a deadly combination in the eyes of his better-threaded colleagues); this meant that in reality, the tie denoted an even worse condition, like a pancreatic cancer patient, or the economy of the eastern bloc, kept alive like a false idol, perpetuated beyond reasonable means.

yes, vincent was just miserable. beyond miserable, he was lazy, and he knew it. twelve years had passed. twelve years since the patent had hit gold like a fuckin’ meteor, the coins had fallen down like chocolate rain, and he and victoria were set for life. ohhh boy, that was the biggest ball-busting myth since man ate the apple and the gods booted us out of olympus and the first president of the united states killed a cherry tree and then lied about it. guess what, kids? not true. it was an ugly frame-up, a bitter twisted stepchild of the lies he told every day.

see, the money had been there in the beginning, and that was when vincent and victoria were there, man, they were there. they’d gone the whole way with it, the life, the business and accountants and lawyers and investment bankers, all professionals telling them what to do, how to make themselves into the image of golden people, the social molding they’d wanted their whole lives, and now with the million point three five coming in every year for, well, what he’d thought would be for life.

victoria’d wanted kids, he wanted something living and breathing and small, though he was more inclined to make it a dog rather than a child. but she insisted, and once they had the means, the way seemed clear. money made the process go by faster. they were able to grab themselves a kid within ten months, a swift time line passed by with little preamble.

the kid.

for a while everything was going swell. the kid was just fine, a cute little nine year old, some trouble back home for something, a reported attack but a kid like that was probably the victim, not the aggressor.
vincent thought that was the beginning of how things started going downhill. pretty soon after the kid started exhibiting strange signs, i mean, weird signs like lingering in the girls’ section at the department store at macy’s, running his hand through the bras and other unmentionables. kudos for early development, but even that was like laughing at a comedy show where the comic was bombing. didn’t feel right. vincent had caught him in victoria’s walk-in closet pulling down a silk negligee and preening with it in front of the mirror. that first time vincent had thought nothing of it, but he had spent enough time on communes to know the signs.

the kid was clearly gay. so what, right? they were reasonable people, tolerant people. they didn’t want him turning into a weirdo, and so they picked up what would turn into over two hundred and forty thousand dollars in medical fees, mostly paid to sexologists and experts in psychobabble whatsit nonsense for them to ultimately diagnose him with what they called acute sexual orientation disorder, prescribing meds and bi-monthly formula therapy with a licensed certified psychologist.

what was it then, almost two years with the kid and the result was the a bummer. the experts said there wasn’t much that could be done, and recommended he and victoria simply accept who he was and try and encourage him into being the most vibrant person he could be within his own chi or karma or bounds of his universal truth or some bullshit like that. vincent was never sure when the science ended and the mysticism began, and he’d know, again, having spent enough time with hippies out in nature who knew nothing about science but could tell you shit loads about crystals and zodiac symbols and star charts aligning to form a cosmic destiny. such fucking b.s.

eventually, victoria realized it was going to be harder to explain to her friends about the oddity living in their regal house. vincent himself was not overly opinionated about it, but when it came to victoria, the things inside the house were her domain.

so the pushed some more dollars around, talked to some state officials and got a good friend of theirs involved. lots of lawyers. what kind of foster family doesn’t want the foster kid? it did happen, but it didn’t really wash with them as they had initially spread a lot of money to make the foster thing happen faster than the usual channels allowed. i mean, this was a child, a growing person, and apparently a scarred individual needing good healthy family dynamic and strong parental figures who weren’t so clearly capricious in their regard for their new roles as parents. vincent knew he wasn’t the greatest father figure one might want, but he imagined he and victoria were loving people, were the kind of people one might want to have as parents if one were unfortunate and in a bad way, and secretly, vincent rather thought of himself as a new kind of daddy warbucks, a good luck charm for whatever kid they would land in their new status as gentry.

but wheels turn whether they are muddy or clean. the paperwork went into reversal, the adjudicates judged and frowned disapprovingly while the state examiner and court-appointed social worker presented the people with the straightforward proposal to return the child into state foster care until such time as another family more suited to his needs as an individual be found. the documents were all form-factor legal briefs and affidavits elucidating the troublesome medical problems, the lack of identification between parents and child, the numerous essays published as a result of psycho sexual scientists probed him from the safe confines of the couch, gleaning the simple fact that this, like a marriage gone bad, was a union not to the benefit of the child, and more unspoken but just as true, not to the benefit of victoria burdette.

and two weeks later, a social worker came and took robert camus cantor (burdette) away for good. victoria had bought him a teddy bear and vincent had given him a baseball glove, hoping it might find a warm hand to hold it some day, but figured that all it would do was take up space in his small collection of belongings that was doomed to travel to one more family.

but that was all in the past. now it was the beginning of the end, vincent reflected. those fees paid back to the state were astronomical, not to mention the bad faith this put them in with their rich friends. there was a gas shortage a few years back that was still having an effect on the economy, or so jimmy carter tried to tell them. so their stocks weren’t seeing the huge increases their investors had promised. so the real estate holdings had tanked. there was still that check coming in, right?

wrong again. vincent learned, by proxy through a series of harried managers at the investment bank, that his own money manager was now thoroughly involved in a rather ugly scandal involving the mysterious and secretive sounding “insider trading” which was apparently illegal and punishable by up to a decade in prison for a full conviction. but that wasn’t the worst news.

he’d been using the burdette’s money to capitalize on the secret insider trading knowledge he had gained to score impressively successful purchases and quick downloads within the stock market. this, of course, was an sec red flag and easily identified as part of a series of illegal transactions with the same signature style. like in poker, even insider traders had tells. nathan milham’s was a computer algorithm, and once the math nuts down at the the sec figured out the numbers being run were too calculated to be calculated guesses, they traced the lines all the way to nathan and the burdette money.

so nathan went to jail and his assets, vincent and victoria’s money, was all tied up now in a gordian knot of unfuckably convoluted government regulations and stone-faced investigators. gone, the house. gone, the friends. like those would have ever lasted. vincent was at least not that great a fool. he knew their friendships had been bought like the rest of their flaming shit, like chattel at a colonial beach town.

that was… oh, well, lots of time had passed. vincent was now the former manager of a now defunct department in an insurance aggregation company, and he’d just been told he was now a man on the streets. jobless, friendless, and only god knew if their house would still be standing. those mortgage payments that used to be laughably simple and outside the realm of comprehension now stood as the primary indicator of their total worth. the fact was, with the insurance policy victoria had, she was worth more dead than alive. vincent, who’d declined to make such a blunder (did he love her that much? he didn’t think so.) wasn’t even a blip on an accountant’s ledger of assets. liabilities—now that was another story. vincent was a huge fucking ink spill on that side.

was it worth it to pursue the remainder of life? not if vincent continued on his current path of thought. because as grim as things were, vincent still had to go home to face victoria. and that was starting to wear on him as well. this would be the final straw, the last bit of the play before the curtain closed and maybe a humble narrator would spew forth something pithy, something sad and really loaded about the human condition and the way men go mad when the stakes of the world get driven in too tight and there’s nowhere to go but round and round.

vincent could have sworn things were more gray and hopeless now. even his tie seemed to be missing some vital hues. he supposed it didn’t matter too much anyway. after all, life was fleeting and memory was more than just instincts and history jumbled into some bubbling cauldron of personality, but was actually a living breathing testament to the works of man. with memory, fire burns warm, soup fills the bones and love courses through muscles and blood with acuity.

vincent realized all the memories he had were ones he either didn’t care about or were ones he’d built up in his mind as more than what they really were. somehow, memories were, or had become, the things of legend rather than fact, and the strange twisted retelling of events made him more of a hero, and for this, vincent knew he was a magnificent liar and his true self a coward and a leper to decency.

the knot slipped down and he drew it tight against his neck. the connection was strong, the beam strong and straight, and the chair, a beautiful straight red backed brno chair with strong chrome lines, like an automobile not yet driven, stood like a sentinel under his feet as he adjusted the knot and loops, and with a final jerking orgasmic spasm, his leg kicked the chair away, leaving a muddy footprint half-traced along the bright shining metal arm of the chair and a shadow running straight down, a declination of life from birth to death in a single suspended moment.

death had arrived.