Construction Boots

*This story contains implied sexual violence and physical violence.*

One of the first things you learn about as a writer is the importance of openings. They should be compelling, hook the reader, make them care about something or someone enough to want to read on. Well, if this is any indication, it shouldn’t be too hard to see where I’m at with this whole writing thing.

Yes, that’s me, the struggling writer. Now, before you pull out your tiny violin and derision and tell me to figure it out, tell me that nobody cares, that there are real problems in the world like farmers who can’t harvest their crops, fishermen without any fish, workers who have been replaced by automation, just think for a second. Art is important, right? Surely you agree with that. So, the story of someone who is struggling to create the art that you care about must be important. Right?

Back to the writer’s block. People like to throw around the phrase idiomatically without really thinking about it - what is being blocked? Some would say the ideas. But that can’t be true. No one is truly bereft of ideas. I think it’s more about confidence. See, when a writer can’t write, they mean that they don’t think what they are doing is good. I’ve done a lot of soul-searching on this. My ideas are there - I’ve got too many to count. It’s just that I don’t know which ones are good enough. And so I end up in a state of paralysis. I’ve even read all the great books trying to make myself into some kind of a conduit only to come up empty. Hell, I could plaster myself with pages from Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Morrison and Woolf and the ideas that find me would never be the right ones. So what is there to do?

Well, recently I was at a writer's event. If you haven’t had the pleasure, it’s basically like a mixer, but instead of desperate men following women around, it’s a bunch of desperate writers following around successful writers and those who are involved in publishing like they have some kind of silver bullet to writing something that will sell. After the presentations - contrived, if you ask me, all trite nonsense about telling your truth and how to market yourself - it hit me: I don’t have a truth to tell. I won’t bore you with any more backstory, but suffice to say, there is very little interesting about a kid from Southern Ontario who grew up in a very much middle-class life and is supply teaching to fund his dream of becoming the next Stephen King. Where was my life of experience that I could shape into something profound?

It was about an hour later that I met Lorenzo. I was propping up the bar and feeling sorry for myself when he stumbled over - we’d both had a few. We started talking and I told him a lot of what I’ve just told you. He worked for a big publisher and was about to launch into the same old shtick I’d heard a thousand times when he stopped. It must have been something about me - maybe it was the frustration in my eyes. He inched closer and told me about an experimental new program he’d heard about. I nodded, the dormant part of my brain coming back to life, and told him I was interested. What can I say? I was desperate. We exchanged numbers and someone called him from across the room. And that was that.

The next morning I woke up to a hangover with a side of despair. I grabbed my phone and saw a message. It was Lorenzo. There was a link and I clicked it. There was an overview of an Interactive Writer’s Retreat. Basically, you go to a house in the country and wear this VR headset-thing and it transports you into a story based on some prompts you fill in beforehand. The fine print said that the company, Magnus Scriptor, wouldn’t be liable for any emotional aftereffects, trauma or other consequences that may be caused from being in this virtual reality. I guess it was a bit too intense for some, and so they had to protect themselves. I balked at the cost but knew that was what my savings were for, and signed up.

*

It was a quaint, unassuming house. Bedrooms upstairs with pastoral art and a living room with neutral coloured rugs and a small TV and a recliner. On the chair there was a piece of paper and something that looked like a mask.

We recommend completing your journey at night and with no intoxicants of any kind in your system. Complete the prompts sent to your email immediately before you engage the system by placing the unit on your face. You will return to ‘reality’ when your story has reached a logical conclusion.

I shrugged, lay down on the couch and scrolled on my phone until it started to get dark. I knew there was a well-stocked cupboard and fridge, but I always liked to write on an empty stomach.

The sun had set and the only light in the room was from a standing lamp in the corner. I sat down in the recliner and felt my heartbeat thumping in my ears. The prompts were quite general - what do you want to write about? What kind of a story should it be? I didn’t overthink it: I want to write about a person who has to make a decision that will alter the course of their life. It should be a story that makes people question what they think is right and wrong. I dunno, it sounded good in my head, okay?

I picked up the mask and looked at it in the dim light; it was sleek, angular, not quite Batman and not quite Phantom of the Opera, but somewhere in between. I waited and let my thoughts cycle: was this stupid? Probably. Should I be doing it? Probably not. Was I still going to? Probably. I slipped the mask over my face and felt the sensors inside of it that were roughly around my temple. They whirred gently and I closed my eyes.

*

Heavy construction boots caked with mud thud up the stairs in the apartment. He takes the stairs because the elevator is always broken. (Inside his mind, a new resident. His eyes open but they are not physical eyes, they are the eyes within. He sees what the man with the boots sees, feels what he feels. It is as if his own consciousness has been dripped into the cracks of this man’s - he is aware of a new awareness, a new history, a life that has been lived, but only in the slivers that we are normally aware of, of memories pulled from a drawer in the mind, of moods and feelings and things to do and worries and fears. He can ‘move’, so to speak, peek around at different things, see the mother, from El Salvador, having brought her children to Canada for a new life and now dead, stricken down by cancer. She lingers like a sepia-toned photograph in his mind. His grief is thick like hot breath on glass but he isn’t thinking about that now. He is thinking about ordering a pizza and falling asleep on the couch because he is tired.)

He gets to the door and reaches for his key, and stops. Something is wrong. He opens the door and calls to his sister: ‘Nancy? Are you okay?’ The apartment he shares with his sister is dark save for a light under the closed door of a bathroom. (The eyes within watch intently, noting the conflict that is being established. It helps that he can feel what the man feels, a liquid uncertainty the stomach produced in the mind. He watches.)

The boots thud on carpet as they approach the door. There, in the shower, is his sister. She is 21, only a few years younger than him, and is fully clothed. The water pours onto her and she cries silently. Her dress is ripped and the water that has flowed over her body runs red into the drain. (The mind that is within the mind panics - he didn’t expect something like this. It is too personal. Too horrific. He shouldn’t be there. He wants to leave. A few beats pass and he calms himself. Reminds himself that these people are computer generated. They aren’t real. They are a part of a story that he can write. And he should write. It is compelling.)

He shuffles towards the bathtub, words clinging in his throat, tears welling in his eyes. He asks her what happened and she won’t or can’t respond. There is pain in her eyes and he reaches out to touch her. She recoils from his touch. He asks her what he can do and she manages to say nothing. Just to please leave her alone. He stumbles into the living room and sits down. The whirling emotions in him are anger, fear and hatred for whoever did this to her. (He notes these, tries them on like a new shirt, feels how they cling to the mind of the brother, how raw the emotion is, a wound that is open, bleeding pain.)

He takes his phone from his pocket and opens Instagram. Finds his sister’s page and looks at her feed. There is one photo from that evening. It is her and her friends and a bunch of guys he has never seen before. They are all holding drinks and laughing. A man has his arm around his sister. He wears a ring. When he looks at his eyes, he knows. It isn’t clear how he knows, perhaps some things are just deeper than thought, more cerebral or visceral or biological, but he knows. (Ah, yes. Plot development. Raising the stakes. He likes this.) The brother slips the phone back into his pocket and goes back to the bathroom. Brings a towel for his sister, offers to help her out of the bathtub. She accepts, moving gingerly as he wraps her in the towel. Holds her. Feels her heaving chest, the sobs escaping. He thinks about telling her to go to the cops but doesn’t know if he should. He starts to tell her and she cuts him off. Tells him she doesn’t want any cops involved. That she can’t handle it. She looks at him and holds his gaze, tells him not to do anything stupid. He nods. Leads her to the bedroom and helps her lie down. Puts dry clothes on the bed and closes the door. Sits for half an hour, staring at a television that isn’t turned on and feels the anger (taste it now, it is in his(their) throat and it is metallic and cold) rising in him. He opens the door a crack and hears the soft breathing of sleep. He closes the door gently, grabs his keys and leaves. He takes nothing but his phone; he won’t need anything else. He checks three times that the door is locked before he goes back down the stairs.

*

It is dark outside the club; one of the letters in the sign flickers. (Very nice change of atmosphere. A good transition to build the tension. Very noir, he thinks.) The brother stands and smokes a cigarette. He sees a skinny guy and is pulled by memory - he was in the photo. (How lucky!) He breathes deeply and walks over. Holds up his phone to the now screenshotted and cropped photo, explains that he is looking for this guy, they used to go to highschool together and he heard he was in the neighbourhood. The skinny guy looks around and says no. The fear of cops is written in his eyes. (A tightening now, of fists and of inside, and there is molten anger that rises like bile.) The brother grabs him by his shirt and pushes him against the wall, tells him that he needs to know where the guy lives. The respondent asks if he is the cops; the answer is no, just tell me and you can walk away from this. Fists tighten, eyes blaze (simmering, a brilliant faux climax, scintillating) and the respondent mutters he is my dealer. We were with some girls tonight but I haven’t heard from him. I swear. A shove with the promise of more to come. Resignation. You can’t tell him I told you. There is a promise made and it is meant and the address is given. A fist releases and the empty echo of shoes down an alleyway rings out.

Outside of a different apartment block, his face is obscured by the smoke of a cigarette that is inhaled with urgency. (He feels the burn in their throat but there is no satisfaction. There is only hunger.) Someone goes into the apartment - the door buzzes. The brother slips in behind them and they don’t look back. People mind their business in this part of town. He shares an elevator ride in silence with a woman in a nurse’s uniform in her 50’s. (I wonder if she can sense me, he wonders. Or is it as real for her as it is for me?) She gets off the floor before him and when he gets to the door, he stops. Thinks. (Self-reflection. A deepening well of emotions is he. Or we.) He raises his fist to knock but stops himself.

His thoughts whisper, bypassed for the moment by the other more vocal parts of him (screaming) taking control. His foot, in the construction boot, lifts and kicks the door. He does it a few times until the door is loose and after one more, the door is on the floor. He runs into the dark apartment and sees a shadow move as a hand holding a kitchen knife lunges at him from the shadows. He ducks, the body attached to the hand loses its balance and there is a seismic body blow that crumples it in half. The knife scatters across the floor and brother is on him, raining down blows (how visceral, how graphic, a true climax of moral ambiguity) that start to make the face frozen in fear look like pulp. He stops punching for a second as the thoughts get louder. The rational thoughts that beg him to stop, to run, to save himself. That it isn’t worth it. (Bargaining. But what next? He can barely watch but he has to, wants to, needs to.) The look in her eyes comes back to him - the pain and fear and humiliation. What comes next is deeper than anger; it is buried below where anger lives and it is pure and primal. (He can almost smell the blood and it makes him sick and he loves it.) When the man on the floor stops moving, the brother stands. Alarm bells are ringing in his head and he runs. He doesn’t look back. In the hallway, an older woman is standing in a nightgown looking frightened. He stops. They stare. He runs. There is a camera above him. He takes the stairs.

Outside, the cool air rushes over him. He can hear sirens in the distance. As he runs into a nearby alleyway, the heavy sound of his construction boots echoes in the stillness of the night. (The voice that has lived in the head doesn’t speak now. It is gone, too.)

*

I opened my eyes to darkness. It took a few seconds for me to realise where I was until I felt the mask on my face. I slid it off; my hands were shaking. I could have sworn that one of my knuckles felt sore and that if I looked at it, I would see a bruised and mangled mess. But it wasn’t. I caught my breath and looked around the room. Everything was the same. Quiet. Still. A little creepy. My heart was still racing and I tried to process what I had just seen. A voice inside my head said: Don’t process it. Just write. And so I did. I grabbed my laptop and went at it. I’ve never been that ‘in the zone’ in my life. It’s funny, they say that writing, when it's good, is like a high. I disagree. It’s more like taking a shit. Hyper-focused, some straining, a bit of sweat and urgency. But afterwards?

What a sensation.

I was spent, so I closed the laptop and went to bed without even eating dinner.

The next morning, I woke up feeling new. Refreshed. Accomplished. I opened my phone to scroll for a bit before rereading the story I had written and felt a chill run through me.

‘Hamilton police are reporting that a man in his 20s was murdered in his downtown apartment last night.’ I didn’t need to read the rest of the statement or the witness report with what he was wearing when last seen. I knew. I could hear them still, those boots. How heavy they were. I even described them in my story.

I sat up in bed and looked around. Everything felt cold. I expected him to walk in at any second, to tell me I was as much to blame as he was. He didn’t. I expected the police to show up, to bring me in for questioning. They didn’t. I expected the room around me, this house and the bed I was in, to slip into the ether because there was no way any of this could be real. It didn’t. There was just me, a laptop with a new story on it and a quiet house with a mask downstairs. Well, there were those things, and something else: a realisation that formed in my brain like a slowly opening cocoon.

Reality really is the strangest fiction.