The Desolation of Smythe

Gone.

Every last vestige of my treasure.

There is nothing left of my life’s work.

The scorched and blackened emptiness before me mirrors the terrible void opening up within me. 

“You shouldn’t go in there…”

I ignore those words. How can I not go in? This is my place. A place that I made. A place that became more and more special to me over the span of my life. Little by little and piece by piece I filled this space with the very best of things. This was as much me as anything else in this world. An extension of my self. A part of my very being. 

The ash and dust is everywhere. A sad, dark powder that I walk through as though I am being afforded a reminder of my imminent fate. All good things must come to an end. This was not in the script though. This was my legacy. I was to leave something of myself behind and now I will fade into nothingness knowing that all my efforts came to nought.

Here and there are the carcasses of my collection. Tragic remains reaching up out of the dust. They are twisted out of shape as is the stark reality of this place now. I stop at what was one of the highlights of my collection.

The Black Lightning reminds me of a whale carcass we found on the beach one childhood Summer, long ago. By the time we discovered it, it was rotting and it was the awful stench of it that drew us to the stricken sea beast well before we caught sight of decaying corpse. It did not take long for that carcass to be stripped of all its useful parts until all that remained was it’s skeleton. Only, the Black Lightning’s skeleton is charred, a small negative of the sun bleached bones that reached out of the sand to point the whale’s spirit in the direction of its next adventure.

These book end memories sadden me. Once, I was a small boy full of hopes and dreams and I saw so much good in the world. Now I stand in hell and I can’t help think that this is a hell of my own making. A final lesson for me to learn.

I look around me, and already I am struggling to remember how this place once looked. I have not been here for several weeks. Busied by a life that has slowed down all around me, stifling me and whispering to me of my last days. My bones have ached for such a long while, and today, in this ruined place, that ache has permeated my heart and my mind. 

I slowed down, but in my desire to keep going, I forfeit my time here. This place grounded me. Here was where it all made sense. 

I did this.

That was what I would think to myself as I wandered this space. I would touch my collection and something about that touch conveyed a sense of peace and a sense of belonging. This was home more than any other place.

This was a place of memories.

Never mind the fog that surrounds my recollection of how this place looked the last time I was here. Each and every piece I had brought here contained a bank of memories. I had a connection with everything single item in my collection. 

I once thought that everything I brought here was a prompt. A symbol of a time in my life. But they were always so much more than that. The memories themselves resided within my collection. I imbued each and every item with a piece of myself and now they are gone.

Slowly, I turn around. My feet shuffling on the spot. Slow and awkward, but still I kick up the dust. Even as that dust reaches my eyes, I do not cry. I cannot. There is nothing left to cry for. I circle and I survey the devastation. The erasure of history, not just mine, it goes far, far beyond that. Everything I collected had a significance even before I met it. I was never into the provenance, it was more the story. I gravitated towards objects that had been centre-pieces of lives well lived. I would not buy something unless it had experienced life to the full and I could always tell when it did. Even before I placed a hand upon it and felt its history, the very echoes of its existence. 

I don’t care what some people think. There are objects in this world that have a soul. If you take a moment to listen, and to really listen, there is more in this world than we will ever know. You might feel it in a house. Echoes of another life lived in that place. I sense it whenever I run my fingers over the bark of an old tree. Forests and woodland call to me, but I cannot linger in amongst that preponderance of trees, the noise they make in my mind threatens to undo me.

But now I am undone. Undone in the most unexpected of ways. This was never supposed to happen. This goes against everything. 

Something must be done.

I don’t just hear these words. I feel them. They rise up from below me and fill me. The utter desolation that had overcome me is banished in this moment and I am renewed with fresh purpose. I am under no illusions. I am approaching the final act. I am being gifted a moment and with that gift comes a surge of energy I have not possessed in an age.

I crouch down with no thoughts about the ramifications of such a simple act. It is true what they say, youth is wasted on the young. Old age creeps up on us and a dread bell tolls when we first experience the worry of how we will get back up from a crouch, or even from a seat. 

I gently push my fingers through a pile of undisturbed dust and it is only as I do so that I understand what it is that this once was. This is all that is left of my humble Mini. The first car I ever owned. The car I drove to Emily’s parent’s house to pick her up for our first date. This was where we had our first ever kiss. This car made so many things possible, including the six loving years I had with that wonderful woman. 

Something about the feel of the dust that I rub betwixt index finger and thumb affords me the memory of my first ever car and also of my beloved wife. There is a residue of what once was. But it is already fading. 

I rise with very little effort, as though the great maker has oiled my joints and given me an overhaul for one last ride. I step deeper into what was once my sanctuary. An old warrior who returns home to find his castle sacked and in ruins.

I crouch again and again, my hand is blackened by the dust I lift from the floor and rub into my skin, each time receiving an echo of what once was. The pallet of memories is broad and vibrant. I gain strength from each and every spot that I visit. Gathering up what is left and bringing it with me, I make my way around and as I come to the end of my pilgrimage I double back to a place that I missed out and saved for the very last.

Now I know, and in knowing, I know what I must do. 

“Father, you can’t be in there, it’s not safe.”

He says this as I straighten up for the very last time, rubbing the dirt and ash into my skin. Absorbing it. He says it when it is obvious that I am already done. Typical of him. He wouldn’t even join the battle to bayonet the wounded, instead he would wait until the darkness shrouded the battlefield and he would desecrate that ground made holy by the spilling of warrior blood. He would steal from the fallen, taking what was not rightfully his, and he would keep on taking well beyond his needs.

I have not looked this man in the eye for decades. I could not. He is disappointment embodied. 

He is not my son. 

Oh, I know that he is my blood. That he was everything that my dearest Emily had ever wanted. It is a blessing of sorts that she did not live to see what he became. 

The most significant thing this creature has ever done is to take from others, but then, is it any surprise, when he killed his own mother on the day of his appearance in this world?

I walk out into the last of the day and I stand before the only significant and lasting mistake I ever made in this life of mine. I look him in the eye and it hurts me to see such an absence, when all I ever wanted was to see something of Emily there. He should have been our legacy. He should have been the best of both of us, but instead he is only the worst of me, if even that now remains in this husk of a creature.

“Take my hand,” I tell him.

He looks at my right hand. The hand that is covered in the honest dirt that is all that remains of that which I once loved. He looks at it and I see the revulsion he has for good, honest muck. I toiled away for my entire life. My hands were always dirty. Even as success came to me unbidden, I could not help but lift the bonnet and tinker. My hands were the connection I had with this world.

“It’s dirty,” he says.

My eyes remain on his as he comes out with this pathetic and childish reply. So I give him an out. I provide him with the easy and spineless option that he constantly seeks. I raise my left hand. This hand is clean and there is something apt about my son rejecting my right hand and opting for my left.

This time he has no excuses, and he has to take my hand. The first physical contact of our adult lives.

That is when I know.

Of course, I already knew. My gut instinct is legend. That’s what they call it, anyway. I’ve been happy to put it down as that, but it has always been more than that. I have a connection with the world around me. We all have it. It’s just that I attend to it. Our factory settings are tame and inane. We are supposed to customise ourselves and find out what we’re capable of, but few of us make this our project. I suppose that we’re easily distracted.

Now I have his hand, I see all of it and none of it surprises me. None of it. And yet it still crushes me. There was no need for any of this and what he has done is utterly pointless. But then that is in keeping with the man he chose to become.

Was he the price I paid?

I always thought losing Emily so early was the price I had to unknowingly pay. After she died, I threw myself into my work and I put myself out there in the world and everything unfolded before me as though it was always meant to be like this.

I managed to make something work even when I was broken from the loss of the only person I ever truly loved. I kept going. For her. Always for her.

Now we are here in this scorched place, and I have been robbed of all that I had. I stand before this absence and it is with no pleasure that I even the score.

That is the gift that I have been handed. To know and to have the opportunity to do something about it before I end this journey of mine.

“I know,” I tell this person who is not even a man, let alone my son.

“Know what, father?” he says in his wheedling and obsequious voice.

His persistent use of the word father is a poison dart of his making. He is mean-spirited and vindictive and he knows his saying father stings me.

“Insurance…” I say the word as though it tastes vile in my mouth.

He flinches and tries to pull his hand away from mine, but he cannot and I see the fear in his eyes now. I may look frail, but I am stronger than him. Always have been. I have a strength alien to him.

That one word reveals that I know what he has done. He may not be the one who struck the match and lit this building alight, but it was him all the same. He wasn’t stupid. He knew I would open up this collection and give it to the world. That wasn’t just the best thing to be done, it was the only thing to be done.

He is a greedy and weak creature though. That is my fault. I used my strength and I created easy options for him. I earnt that strength and I used it to live. He has never earnt anything in his life, and he never will. He wanted the money that all my cars and motorbikes would fetch on the open market, but they were never going to be sold. That was never my intention. So he torched it all. I can’t give away the dust, ash and charred metal that remains of my collection now, but he can inherit the money the insurance will pay out for the fire.

The worst of it was that he saw the expected effect of his treachery as a silver lining. He knew how much I loved everything I collected over my life time, and by burning it all away he thought he would remove my reason for living another day. 

Kill what I love and you kill me.

How little he knows his own father.

I am a warrior and my father was before me. My father used his hands and he used them to end lives. That is my heritage, and that is who I am. My father fought in the War and he distinguished himself in battle. As the War went on, he was forged in the flames of conflict and he understood his art. He was feared by one and he was feared by all.

When he returned from the War, he was a very different man and the world around him was also changed. He never quite adjusted, or maybe it was the world that was maladjusted. The distinction he earned as a soldier became notoriety in peace time.

Not everything in my collection was loved. There are a great many ways we can be connected to the complex world around us. I left one spot until last. That was the spot that my father’s last car occupied. The car he used during his prolific past time as the Midnight Killer. 

There was a body in the boot of that car when he was pulled over by the police for a defective rear light. They found traces of other bodies when the car was gone over with a fine tooth comb, but most of the bodies they never found. Without a confirmed body count, he will never take his place as the most prolific of killers. But I know more than most, and even the highest estimates of his kills fall short of the reality.

That car should have gone to the crusher, but there are always ways and means. I wanted that car. My father’s car was my last connection to him. That car contained something of my father’s deeds and something of the pain and madness that compelled him to do what he did, a pain and madness that he shared with each and every one of his victims. 

Now it is time for that pain and madness to be shared for one last time. Shared by an old man who is has nothing left to live for barring this one last moment.

“What are you doing?” he cries as I bring my right hand up and press it to his temple.

His first reaction was revulsion at the dirt on that hand of mine, but then my fingers found the flesh of his temple and the connection was made. The first meaningful connection this father and son have had in their adult lives. 

I gaze into those empty eyes of his and I see the madness and the pain flood in.

Nonononono!

He unravels very quickly, but before he is lost I speak to him for the very last time.

“This is your inheritance. You’ve earned it.”

I lift my hand from his head and it feels inexplicably light. I stare at it curiously as it floats before me. That lightness seeps down and into my chest and with it I feel joy. A joy that brings to the fore all the best moments of my life. All of them together at once. This was what it was all about. I see joy and I experience joy and there is nothing else as I tumble to the floor never to rise again.

*

As the old man crumples to the floor, the other, younger man, falls to his knees and for a moment it looks as though he is grieving for the loss of his father, but then his hands go to his temples and he squeezes his head as though he wants to break it open and pull the nightmares from inside. 

Then he begins to scream a scream without end.