Part 1 (cont.)

"Megan, don't hang up, I need your help!" He urged clutching the payphone close to his mouth.

She did not obey. She actualy did not even hear beyond the don't hang up part. He didn't try back. There was no use in it, and the truth was he deserved it and he knew it. Another screwed up victim of the commitment conundrum.

Still, Megan made him smile. Even hanging up on him was perfect--she was always perfect. Megan always did the right thing. In reality, even when she made mistakes she made them so healthily and so passionately that you could hardly call them mistakes.

For a little less than a year, Megan was home to his wreckage. She was his spiritual comfort, his emotional harbor, his social opposite, his physical equal, and most of all her voice was like the morning mist burning off of a gentle river pouring itself centuries long through two patiently surging mountains--at once both pure and clean, but so fragile that if you listened too long you began to worry that she would break under its shimmer. But now, Megan was mad, and rightly so, and that was over.

Oh God, what now. He lit a cigarette--smoking was the one thing he had never been able to un-commit to...god bless addictions. Actually, he wasn't sure he wanted to quit--it reminded him of his mother. She used to sit in a rocking chair beside his bed and smoke long slender cigarettes and drift off into another world, maybe even channeling another voice or spirit, and tell him stories at night. These stories weren't bedtime stories; they were much more real than that. They had depth and pain and joy and angst so much greater than bedtime story fluff.

Once she told him about a young man who learned that he could fly but did not tell anyone. No one else knew about it, and he thought it best to keep a secret. Often he would dream of flying to the rescue of some person in trouble--being the hero of the damsel in distress, or maybe his brother falling off of a cliff, or a cop shoved off a building by a mobster...anything and everything. Eventually, of course, the young man went mad. He could neither share his gift, because of his fear of the spite of those around him--even his family, he feared, would resent him--nor could he keep it a secret because he knew he had a gift for a reason. As the story went, his sister ended up falling from the second story of their home, and the young man watched her fall and did nothing to save her as he was convinced that he was dreaming again. Having been so trapped, so special, and yet so uselessly special, he had lost connection with what was real, which him was even the real him, which life was actually alive.

He never learned what this story fully meant. She died before he could ask. But even if he had asked, she would have smiled and said, "Was it beauty or selfishness that makes you ask?" and then followed up with, "What does it mean to you? This is probalbly right."

This is no time for stories, now stop thinking. He threw down the half-finsihed cigarette and pulled his unzipped hoodie closed by jamming his hands hard into the pockets up front. As soon as he did it he realized that something was out of place. From his left hand pocket he withdrew a small envelope with something very hard in it. He certainly had not put it in his pocket. His mind was racing. Oh god, they 're following me. He looked closely at the small envelope and on the front was written a single word: HOPE.

What did that mean?

He opened the small envelope and inside was a newly cut, still on the cardboard shelf hanger, brass key. He took the key out only to see that on the cardboard backing was written: Jackson's #214.

Part 1

He half-ran half-stumbled out of the stairwell. What had gone wrong? His thoughts came in questions and never answers. The answers he did get were no answers at all. Why had he just stood there? Where was his courage? Who was he? What was he afraid of?

Sometimes, if he let himself get away with self-deception, which he supposed everyone did from time to time, he would conclude that he was afraid of people hurting him. But this wasn't really true. People hurt people. Everyday. That was normal. Such fear was irrational and escapist. It was weak, and more it was a lie. What he was more afraid of...and he knew it...was having to rise. His fear was not having others let him down, but that he would become the let down himself. He feared ever truly committing to anything--sports in highschool, a major in college, any number of failed relationships with women, every friendship he had ultimately sacrificed and ran from, and, of course, his family. The great fear was that if he committed, then he was hopelessly beaten.

To most people commitment was not really commitment. To most guys he knew commitment was something like love--a word used far too often, and most often used to get something for the user. It was manipulation. It was a tool to get what you wanted. And after you got it--a toy, a trinket, a one night stand, whatever--you were no longer necessarily committed. Once you got what you wanted--or thought you wanted--you could weigh it as an end against whatever means you construed to get to such an end--be it love or commitment or anything else.

But not so with him. He believed that life was rooted in commitment, and commitment was not manipulation...it was the manipulator. Commitment moved him from subject to object. Once committed, the commitment became the master and he the servant. And would he serve faithfully? Could he? Was he willing to commit? He knew he would fail. Sure, everyone fails, but this would be different. He knew better. Everyone else failed innocently, but he failed knowingly.

Sure, he thought, everyone else is either stupid or crazy, and they all need you to save them. You are the one right-thinking hope in a world of darkened idiocy. Nice thinking. He hated when his undeniable egotism.

But not more than he hated his father.

He needed to find a phone, and fast.