“I often wonder what will happen to me in the next ten years, and where I’ll be, figuratively speaking,” he said insolently. “You ever think about that?”
The woman to the left giggled awkwardly, trying to hide contempt. “N-No . . . What do you mean?”
“Times are changing so quickly. When Daniel and his parents came along, I thought there’d be no hope. Let’s put it this way: they’re the types who believe that they’re special without ever having to sweat, suffer or work for anything, unlike me. I always knew I had to earn my way. I was just misunderstood, that’s all.”
The two women already looked bored.
“You guys aren’t listening, are you?”
“You always sound like you’re reading off a script,” the other one said, laughing.
“Nevermind, forget it,” he said disdainfully. After pausing and looking at the menu, he asked, “So, what’s for dinner?”
“I don’t want anything.” She yawned irritatedly.
“My appetite’s fading in and out,” said the other girl, avoiding his gaze.
Peter smiled in a vein that would look like wistfulness in ordinary people, yet in him it was peculiar and unpitiable. Daniel continued strolling for a while, until he reentered the metropolis down a sidewalk paved with ice. He detected a ghastly tension in the atmosphere, and heard distant bells and hooves. Every abrasive tone or gesture he noticed in the crowds, whether it was a sweep of the hand or loiterers’ loud exclamations, startled him in his vigilance. He soon heard a girl’s voice repeatedly screaming for help, from an alleyway between apartment buildings. Such cries had a grotesqueness that even surpassed melodrama, and through his head crossed a line from The Importance of Being Ernest, “We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place.”
Daniel then saw a girl a few feet away, about ten or so, in the alleyway as she struggled against a group of men who had seized her. Once he ran into the alley, he recognized them as some of Griffith’s accomplices, with their five-o’clock shadows and cavalier attire. Unlike Griffith, Peter and some of the others, these breeds of classism tried to appeal to the common man, through a pretense that baited the mentally unsound. Their plain t-shirts and pants, torn and filthy, flaunted cheapness and pathology. The girl’s owlish face and tormented gestures were the sole authenticity among them. As the rest ripped off her clothes, a man held her from behind while small shards of his broken glasses fell on her.
As another stepped in front of her and unzipped his pants, Daniel pulled a knife from his coat and, with a contorted wrath that surfaced all over him, he stabbed him through the back to his chest. In the vacuum of time leading up to this climax, during his adulthood but otherwise indeterminable, he had kept this weapon on him everywhere he went, in case these creatures interfered with him or others. Though this likelihood was low, he wished to prove his manhood by taking advantage of his own inadequacy, in all its sour aimlessness, though he knew it could never be truly redefined.
The man he defeated gasped horribly, as his callow features surveyed the sky and the world he had neglected with assumptions, and he collapsed as the girl fought more fiercely to escape. Daniel heard and saw onlookers opening their windows, showing alarm in silhouetted paralysis. The rest of the attackers ran at Daniel and one of them pushed him to the wall while the man in broken glasses gripped onto her, with a parental insistence in his pursed lips. Daniel dropped his weapon in this process, and was locked in by a stranger with a large, dark and straggly beard, on which tears trickled down as he held a knife to his throat. He said sanctimoniously, “You insufferable prick! Do you know how many years I’ve watched you strut around here?”
“Let’s just get this over with, you fucking clown,” Daniel retorted in a gravelly voice. “I don’t want any of your long soliloquys.” He attempted to point the knife at the lunatic’s throat, but it pricked him after being aggressively retargeted.
“S-See that girl over there? L-Look at her! Look at her! Just take a moment, and look at her.” Daniel complied and witnessed convulsions that he hadn’t seen before.
“What?” he said, perplexed and frustrated.
“This is what you’ve made!”
“You’re not making any sense. I don’t even know who she is.”
“This is what you’ve all created!”
“What the hell are you talking about?!”
“You know exactly what I mean. . . Meditate on it during your last moments.”
“I’m not meditating on anything, fuckhead. Make your point. I have a lot to do tonight, and I’ve gotta get up early tomorrow. You seem like you’ve got something to say, so say it. You have my full attention.”
In a dreary, nervous and inattentive way, the stranger changed the subject, “But I won’t stop loving her.” He tried not to sob as his lips trembled.
“That’s not an answer.”
The man was responseless as he carried a deep, calculating desperation, fishing inward with frenzy. He then tried to slit Daniel’s throat, but was overcome by his grip this time as the blade sliced his pasty, hell-worn flesh. He fell dead and Daniel picked up his own knife, proceeding to brawl and kill the rest as the girl stood transfixed. During the gang’s attempted crime, her life until then had seemed illusory and irretrievable, as if joy had been vanity bound to expire. The imminence of violation was a rite of passage, into a false humbleness that discounted all she knew and trusted, but her will for self-preservation had not become negotiable. Yet now, as the past became palpable again, her rescue brought it a unified coherence.
When Daniel was finished, he was breathless as he gazed at her with a mischievous smile. But her exhausted and reflective presentation, eventually dissolved his happiness. It inspired him to end his friendship with Dmitri, who was his noble and levelheaded mentor. His pleas and lectures tried to seize Daniel from his unhealthy path, yet Daniel’s anarchism misperceived his virtues, calling them supercilious. After the horrors he just experienced, Dmitri’s nagging voice would seem too petty to endure. Letting moral commanders go to their graves, pampered and unchallenged, was his second last refuge. What would follow he apprehended to consider.
The Specters of Tradition: Volume 1: Daniel Schroder 