List of the Lost (2 page)

There are days of genuinely poor visibility when your sorry best is the most you can do, whereas a dry and radiant day expects more from you and is ready to catch you victimized by excuses. Well, either you can run or you can't, and no eloquent apologies are acceptable substitutes for hair-raising action. Somewhere alone within the hole of the soul it is known that the page is already turning, and the future is a time when you will only watch. Fully present in today, you will make the most of yourself as you dig deep to bring out whatever will save you, for isn't it true that we have within us everything that we seek outside, from others? Ah, the competitive spirit which would endanger its own soul if it accepted less. It is never enough to assume that it will right itself when your name is called, and you twist within such a burden of responsibility so that the concentration prods like a long-term agony. It is a power that needs more power – and here and now, in this world but not the next. The thrill is not the race, but the point at which the race successfully ends, for there are no consolations to be had at third or fourth place – your brake lights evidently mysteriously snipped. By chance, our teamsters are four wind-shot greyhounds, and nature bestowed as much, as each makes the same deadly quicksilver strike in his different way. Their jet-plane speed and their blue­darter health are fully equated with natural virtue, and once they step on the gas or flatten the grass nothing else in life has class. Backward flips motion without any thought; it is just there, always, without cautious planning. Their surfboard bodies came genetically, as fat fanatics gaze on depressively. Perfectionism is what few possess as raw instinct, and you might work as hard as you wish yet find yourself still remaining your true Sara Lee podgy slug. Vanilla runners such as Ezra and Nails have never known chemical adventures – their Hispanic backgrounds somehow unimpressed with letting the air out of optimism – whereas pale-faced Justy and Harri were briefly blue-eyed and round-eyed devils who very quickly found their way back before any serious habits and hooks took the last of their luck or led them knuckle to knuckle with the machete of justice. All of that doesn't matter now, because June looms with the most important day they shall ever have as a team, when national television cameras document a major track defeat for boneless Bennington and gassed Lakeview, our Priorswood tetrad repaid with paradise for all of their hard work. Nails didn't care too much about what he did in life as long as he did something well, scarred as he was by his scrappy social background of unrelenting parental disapproval, of the untouchable question of religion's fatal grip, of hate and hurt persistently bruising a harmless heart, whereas Justy had fared better in a rambling house full of upper-hand sisters (although they had always been they, whilst he would always be other due to whitewashed gender divides and separations that appeared to crop up hourly, and just occasionally with some meaning). Divine love had blessed Ezra, who had always won due to his physical and facial features – an amorously fixed gaze so sensually in place and all-American Alien strong that it would be commented upon time and again as if it were all he'd ever need. Nails had no family as such, having been abandoned and then discovered by a set of adoptive parents, whose methods of love were far too harsh to benefit the boy. Thus he assured himself that he was indeed as hard as nails, since life had insisted upon as much. He, too, had always been a desired one beyond the gloomy lair of the family home, and it would be forever assumed that his sharpened body accurately reflected his needs – which it did not; but at the same time he denied no bouquets that flew his way, and many there were. Touch came second to watching, though, and this troubled him without his understanding why, even though such shame was easily readable in a modern American society that worked very hard to keep sex out of commission. At a standstill, sexual experience became the one thing that most young people thought about, usually with worried countenance, and soon they would grow to fear it and learn to suppress it without finding out anything new about it – or about themselves in relation to it. If it worked it must only work one way … like most things in life. Parents approved only of sex within marriage, which also served as the ultimate threat to trying anything else with others. Conversely, Harri (a boy alone with his mother) and Justy opted for a certain less-educated mimicry, since they were romantically unsuccessful yet managed to keep such a truth unsaid, and simply made the most of what little they knew.

Sex was always there – everywhere photographically, in print, in film, so expansively thought about that almost nothing more could need to be said about it … yet … so difficult to obtain, not because of the appearances of Justy and Harri, but because of the atomic supremacy in the family values of their upbringing which, of course, circumscribed the sons' freedom to fly, since a certain sexlessness kept the grown child tied to the family, even if the impossibly constricted demands could very easily lead to a form of sexual cremation for the young child. The parental mind would allow the child time to develop political views, but there would certainly be no question of allowing the child time to choose its preferred religion, and, even more importantly, the grand assumption that all children are extensively heterosexually resolved at birth whipped a demented torment across the many who were not. Whether physical maneuvers were difficult or easy (and it is usually one or the other, and for eternity), our foursome found in each other a generosity of spirit and determin­ation that all other circumstances seemed blind to. Each would make up for the other's loss – so firmly they took their friendship into their own hands, and around it went. Only Ezra worried that four males had found each other to be so emotionally indispensable to one another, yet he could not argue in favor of a better situation. In fading light he had met Eliza – the similarity of their names! … that e and that z! – and she provided enough initial silence for Ezra to fill as he'd wish, even if her all-show-and-no-go banished Ezra's warmness for her formness to initially go its full distance. In such circumstances Ezra had only ever known sunlight, his thigh-blaster trophies easily acquired as he handled the female structure with an expertise that almost suggested aloofness – so speedily he knew, so speedily he unclasped, so confident his aim, like banking deposits.

“What are you doing tonight?” he asked Eliza.

“Seeing you,” she felt assured.

“That is the correct answer. Well done.” Ezra had been a beacon of light to so many females as there they lay, under the male, with nothing to lose. Up and into his eyes they looked, finding an almost primitively embarrassing meaning, finding that they finally had a name, and Ezra alone taught them to see themselves through their lovers' eyes. It wasn't easy, and the gift worked both ways, of course, but it did different things to different hearts. And why shouldn't it? Sameness meant that nothing moves on. Occupied by Ezra, the girl-woman somehow enjoyed the sensation of feeling oily and disgusting, and as Ezra flashed his ‘no biting' smile, he playfully bit her ear hard enough to hurt yet not hurtful enough to matter. It is rough with the boys, as Eliza will find, just as it is boring with the considerate gentlemen. For his part, Ezra was appreciative, but would never be the dazed underling, and neither would he ever be cheap enough to be cruel. Eliza, though, had caught him unawares, because although she awakened him, full gratification would not be quite so prompt. Of similar height (should these things matter), they amused each other daily with dilly-dally and doo-lally repartee, the kind which neither would accept from others.

“I have an old soul,” begins Eliza.

“I am a model of healthy humanity,” chops Ezra.

“Friendship is a waste of time,” lobs Eliza.

“I dream of a booze-infused orgy,” shoots Ezra.

“I am a booze-infused orgy,” is Eliza's reverse-twist.

“I have erotic curiosities,” topspins Ezra.

“I can take life as it is and leave it at that,” backhands Eliza.

“I slow down to inspect traffic accidents at the risk of causing another,” lies Ezra.

“You mustn't keep asking yourself why you feel what you feel,” is Eliza's dropshot.

“I am a flawless triumph!”

“I am a floored triumph!”

“I take myself very seriously,” is Ezra's sudden half-volley.

“… therefore I do not need to …” serves Eliza.

“I am a puzzle,”

“I, a solution,”

“I am flimsy,”

“I am whimsy,” the ground strokes went on, leading nowhere, for the tiebreak was truced and the play-and-serve love match was an even double.

“I am the perfect fiancée,” leaned in Eliza.

“I am the perfect fiasco,” advanced Ezra, headmanning a drop pass. Furiously paced, this private nonsense went on until at least one face cracked, not because any of the puck-handled dribble had been funny in the least, but because, well, what it must be to be in love.

At the ivy halls in dreamy central Beantown, the quartet warmed up beneath the contemptuous giant shadow of Priorswood, with its tower aloft like a snooty nose of supremacy, its historic standing being reason enough to glare down with full repulsion at the deformed modern world. Sprinklers on the football field and sunlight flooding The Great Library wheezed a privileged blow of warm air across the absorbed and collected students of intense expressions and processed formulations clanking about inside their spaghetti heads – so small and lost are they, so petty their actual blood-and-guts experience, yet oh so very ripe for clever positions within the judiciary or the media, and with their narrow historical views the students will become unbreakable in their steely assurances, and whatever the unreliable and self-serving shit story history books have left out does not matter, as long as their own life happens as designed, for it is all and absolutely only about money. Social consciousness and abnormal pre-eminence certainly take their little place at Priorswood, whilst naked life is elsewhere, and is irrelevant when pitted against the literary pretensions and superiority complex of social position. The catatonic magpies are called to and they line up, and the theorists theorize without ever getting their feet wet. Ezra whispers in warning to the other three. “It's here,” he says, as Mr Rims approaches. “Did he really part with money for that shirt?” murmured Justy.

“He found it on a bus,” smiled Nails.

“He found it down the back of a couch,” added Justy.

“I heard exactly what you just said,” came Mr Rims, jejune jesting ( having heard nothing ), and well aware of his clichéd self. “Even worse, I saw that last track attempt and I wonder what exactly you'd call it. Performance art … Community Theater? It's anybody's guess, of course. I at least had the benefit of watching you from the window and no closer. That's all that can be said in your favor.”

“We were just practicing,” smiled the Ezra of goodness.

“Evidently,” sniffed Mr Rims. “Now, as you know, complaining is all I have left in life, but I like to think I still have my finger firmly up the pulse when it comes to choosing track teams. You let my good name down and I'll probably kill you, and I'll gleefully assure the police that your sudden death was not an accident. This day is all about discipline, exercise, practice, preparation, conditioning … all the things that you lack.”

“We're on it,” affirmed Harri.

“You're certainly on something,” rocketed back Rims. “Now. You do know the date, the month and the year that we are currently in?”

The foursome didn't bother to answer or even to nod as this teasing twitter played out its daily dozen. Hamstring and tendon yakkety-yak backchats and gabs as the afternoon sun loses its edge and gentle music yawns across the lawns. There is shrill laughter from an open window, so ditzily unreal, and Ezra thinks of Eliza as she was – in a simple dress with a low neckline and no sleeves.

“I'm definitely having a baby,” she had said. Flustered, Ezra paused and fumbled, asking her to repeat what she had just said as Eliza marvelled at the richness of his gullibility.

“In Dutch or English?” she snapped with a scowl of power. She then explained that the baby was not currently within, but that the wish would one day certainly be fulfilled. “I'm not saying by you – necessarily. I'm just saying that … eventually … should I find myself in the Holy City … living in a friendly room with books, then I'd let myself go to one of the savage hordes … he of strong jawline and fierce gentleness … and hey presto … the process … such as has ever been the way.”

“The pro-cess?” stammered Ezra, looking all of ten very confused years of age.

“Oh, I see … linguistic expertise …” she has faltered. “Yes, that sounds like something I didn't mean at all. Life takes the stran­gest turns, and I'm not saying that you, pumpkin of my pumping heart, do not strike me as the perfect father … but we must just be … and not rely, otherwise I see myself crushed and bewildered and unable to get up again.” Eliza enjoyed overweening confidence at such times as these, because she knew she could inflame the dim light of Ezra's confusion which, in turn, re-shaped his face to an appealingly shy appeal for peace and mercy. Eliza was now on top with Ezra being entered with as much professional aggression as deemed necessary. Incitement to mayhem.