Citywide inertia

Howdy. I'm new here, so I'll just say my name's Luke and hope that ya'll can help me with this story I've got going. In a perfect world, it's going to be a novel, but I have trouble sticking with stories for a long time. Anyway, it's called 'Zero' and I've written the first two chapters so far. Here they are. I'm sorry about the occasional profanity. Enjoy.

Chapter 1

Zero, he named himself, as he sat in the bubble of light that extended from the lamp, separating him from the darkness of the apartment. The never-ending tick tock of the clock on the table in front of him, along with the arrogant glow of the knife in his hand, was scratching at his resolve with the short stabs of the second hand.
Tick.
Every tick is a defeat.
Tock.
Every tock asks for a rematch.
Tick.
Tock.
Indecision never killed anyone. It didn't do much for life either.
The apartment was filled with a new kind of darkness. It was hollow; emotionless. Normally the dark has feelings flowing through its ethereal body, but not tonight. It didn't care if there would be a suicide tonight, but then again, no one did. Maybe it was just jaded from all those long nights. The man on the couch would kill for that kind of apathy.
Tick.
I am Zero. Nothing to no one.
Tock.
No one ever made it to 10 without a Zero.
Tick.
Either way, I'll never find a 1.
Tock.
Then someone out there will never find their Zero.
He ran the blade softly across the skin on his wrist, following one of the blue lines that led to his hand. A practice run.
It’s down the street, not across the road.
The knife was indeed arrogant. It could take life away and not be blamed or retaliated against. The perfect murder only exists for the weapons involved. Zero put it on the table in front of him, to see if things looked the same without it in his hand. They didn't.
The clock kept talking.
Tick.
I'm alone and worthless. Twenty three years and nothing to show for it. A dead end job, an empty apartment and the only person I ever cared about is gone. Maybe this way I’ll be with him soon enough.
Tock.
So it ends here? Alone in your apartment with a knife in your hand and your last words are a line in your arm? You deserve better than that, and you know he would want you to stay here and live well. Maybe his end will be a new beginning for you.
Tick.
Or maybe I can’t live without him.
Tock.
You won’t know until you try.
Tick.
Maybe I don’t want to know.
Tock.
Then you’re a quitter and don’t deserve to live.
Reverse psychology.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock. The final rematch.
Then this ends here.
He picked up the knife from the table, and reached over to turn off the lamp. With one sharp motion he put an end to the indecision, and fell back into the chair he was sitting on. Then there was silence, and the last time darkness ever saw the man on the couch it knew so well.

The sun had risen into the dull grey sky long before anything in the apartment moved. The place was exactly as it had been the night before; scarcely furnished and rather empty, except for the faded green armchair with Band-Aids of duct tape covering its wounds, the coffee table in front of it and a few empty vodka bottles scattered about the floor. There was also the motionless figure on the chair, awkwardly propped between one of the large arms and the back.
There had been a death here last night.
Sunrise and silence greeted Zero as he found his way from a monotonous dream into the last place in the universe he wanted to be. His prison cell that cost $300 a month in rent. Not for much longer; escape was now a clear goal.
Leaning forward in the chair, he put his head in his hands for what felt like hours. "What is the time anyway?" he said as he removed his weary head from his hands and rubbed his eyes. He looked at the clock and then remembered the events of the night before in full.
The clock was his enemy for many reasons. A record of wasted time, a two-note song of tick-tock-tick-tock that Zero projected his indecision into, and above all it was just annoying. Now it was easier to live with.
It lay on its back, facing upwards on the coffee table, like a casualty in a living room war. In Zero's frustration the night before, he had plunged the knife that was to be his end into the face of his inanimate enemy. It had taken only one swift stab and the clock was silent.
No ticking.
No tocking.
No defeats.
No rematches.
He tried pulling the knife out, but his misdirected anger had been so great that the knife had gone through to the table below and out beneath it. "Fuck it then." He could definitely live without a clock. And a knife.

When you’re young, life seems like the longest thing you’ll ever do. When you get older, a day at work takes that place. The memories you have of how you felt in your childhood – wondering what life will be like, looking forward to whatever was coming, dreading the unknown things that may come – crash back to earth and become tangible; they’re not these untouchable thoughts of wonder and anticipation. Now you know what life will be like when you’re older. You saw what came and you saw it leave. The unknown miseries that you knew would come one day are all too real now. The future was replaced by the present and life got a whole lot shorter.
Now you’re stuck at work, where instead of having one constant reality like you have in life, you have two; at work and not at work. The reality that exists when you’re at your gravestone job, and obviously your mindset with it, lives for the hours when you’re somewhere else. Periodically, you’re a child and then you’re grown up.
I wonder what life will be like when things change.
Then things change.
From youth to adulthood.
From work to spare time.
From where life has meaning to where it doesn’t.
And that is what makes a day seem longer than life.
That being said, Zero was the child that never matured. He grew up and things changed, sure, but his mindset didn’t change in the transition.
In his childhood, at work, he had nothing to look forward to. In adulthood, hours spent at home, he had nothing to look forward to. A combination like that makes life, and the days, both unbearably long and depressing.
Superficially, anyone could see that working in a pay station at a parking lot would make for a long day anyway.
People drive up to the window and hand you their money.
You press the button to raise the gate.
They drive away.
You’re still there.
Repeat for the entire day.
Zero hated the job, obviously. The hate lived somewhere between the long hours and the fact that the hours were even longer at home. The only difference was that working in that fish tank he had 1: human interaction (albeit hollow and fleeting) and 2: a reason to be there. Home means loneliness and no reason for anything.
It was slightly better before Alistair died, but now it was just minutes melting into hours melting into lonely hours at home.
As soon as the neon numbers on the clock hit 6:00, it’s like a gate breaking open to let Zero free. He’s free to go home and drink himself into oblivion to make the night bearable. Sometimes he falls asleep on the floor – since he doesn’t have a couch – and wakes up with what could almost be a smile on his face.
Then he remembers where he is.
And who he is.
And everything that’s wrong in his life hits him in one moment. It’s like a waking up with a hangover after drinking sorrow all night.
One particularly long and futile day, when Zero spent the whole day insisting on bartering with the people in the cars, half out of boredom and half to prolong the human interaction involved, he came home to find an official looking letter on the floor. It laid there like some eerie message from beyond, sealed in an envelope. Zero doubted that supernatural forces could afford 40c for a stamp, or that they would even bother using the postal service. He picked it up and saw that it had been sent by Pickering, Conklin and Waters – a high-powered legal office on the other side of town. Very strange indeed.
He ripped open the envelope, since he was never the type to do things with care, and unfolded the letter from the lawyers he knew had a bad message.
They did indeed.
Zero had been summoned to attend the reading of Mr. Alistair Wintergreen on the 8th of March. Had he been aware that Al had anything of value to put in his will, he would have dreaded this day. Now that it became apparent that he obviously did have something he wanted to pass on, he was more anxious and curious than he ever would have been before. In truth, he didn’t want anything to remind him of that man. It would be too painful to have a physical reminder to accompany all the memories.
The man had nothing, but when that nothing was taken away it left one hell of a hole.

Citywide inertia

Sorry about the double post, but I couldn't fit chapter 2 into my first post (character limit). Here's chapter 2.

Chapter 2

Alistair Wintergreen was born in a small village near Paris that was untouched by Germany’s war, in 1941, to a pseudo-heartless British soldier and a fearful German woman. For the first couple of years, Alistair saw his father when he went temporarily missing in action to visit every couple of weeks. They would spend hours sitting on the edge of the valley, not saying a word, just staring out across the emptiness fused with green and brown blurs that was the countryside. For that simple presence, Alistair’s mother let that military man name their son. He gave him his last name, Wintergreen, and the name Alistair because it meant Defender of Men, and that was what he wanted his son to be.
When the war ended in 1945, the soldier by the name of Wintergreen left Europe without a goodbye to his child or the mother of that child, leaving her to raise Alistair by herself.
Few people knew the story of that French boy with an English name like Zero did. It was universal to him. Every time there was a problem in Zero’s life, Al could relate it to something he had been through, either as a youth or a grown man. The comfort was not in the message Al was giving him, but the fact that pain exists in everyone’s life, not just his.
Zero couldn’t pay his rent – Alistair had his toe cut off in Sicily for not paying a debt to a mafia Don.
Zero had varicose veins in his left leg from extended periods of standing at work – Alistair was prone to having strokes and could die at any time.
The good thing about Alistair’s stories was that they were essentially the same problems as Zero had, but they were taken to the extreme, making Zero’s feel less overwhelming; until the day he had the stroke that killed him. After that day, Al’s problems accentuated Zero’s problems.
Zero was lonely – Alistair was dead.

Getting to the other side of town was a bitch of a journey, especially without a car. The choices were to stay home or take the bus. Then another bus. Then another.
Bus rides are like waiting rooms at the doctor’s surgery: no one says a word to the other people that sit with bowed heads and stories to tell, that they won’t tell because they’re embarrassing and no one asks because no one’s talking. Forced to sit next to a man that looked like a hobbit and smelled of old shoes, Zero tried not to look at anyone, smell anything or think about why he was on the cross-town antechamber.
The town outside the scratched windows was bathed in lackluster mid-morning sunlight that shone through light grey clouds, the perfect vista for someone not wanting to feel anything. All colour seemed to be diluted by the clouds above. Vivid oranges, reds and purples in shop windows appeared crippled and weak. People walked around the drab scene in circles, even if they didn’t know it, leaving one place then going to another, soon to return to where they started. It’s a large circle, going out the front door and through many doors after that during the day, but it’s a circle nonetheless when you step back into your home. The circle is such an unproductive shape.
Waiting-room-on-wheels number 584 pulled to a clumsy halt and exhaled, probably choking back a cough, to open the doors. The passengers changed, not changing anything, and Zero was left at the mid-town bus station to watch the 584 disappear in a cloud of pollution like a motorized magician.
It was a fifteen minute wait until the next bus he needed showed up, so until then he had to endure the smell of gasoline and the cold steel of a bus station seat. The complex was a large emptiness in the middle of the city, but you could never see the city from inside the station. Since it was massive and therefore had a massive roof, it was dark inside. Since it was dark inside the place was lit with the neon-white luminescence you can only get with halogen lights on the walls and ceiling. Since the glow was so unnatural, juxtaposed to the sunlight around the edges of the area, it was all that existed; natural light was imperceptible to the human eye in such a condition.
The cavernous station was, like the buses it serviced, covered in graffiti, making it feel like some urban art gallery that no one appreciated. On a pillar next to where Zero sat, someone had written in intricate, winding letters the words ‘God Bless Atheism.’ It took a minute to consider it, and after reaching a decision that God needed atheism to separate the faithful from anyone he might not want joining him, he realized that the artist behind the masterpiece was either very stupid or very wise.
At least it’s good to see people putting thought into their defacement of public property.
Zero admired more works of illegal art that hung on the cement walls for the next couple of minutes, but the rest of them were just by sell-out artists trying to advertise themselves and the names they made up for themselves. Sooner than expected, but still exactly 15 minutes later, the 136 doctor’s foyer arrived to take Zero most of the way to his destination.
Every bus ride is the same. Destinations may change, the passengers may change, drivers and actual buses may change, but they’re still all the same. Sometimes you pray for a madman to have a bomb, or for a collision with a car, but that only happens in the movies. Like the day Zero was in a movie.
It was every bad movie ever made, with every budget cut and filming problem imaginable and the whole country was going to see it. It starred Zero as the insomniac and Alistair as your everyday wise man turned hero.
“You know, Al, I’m getting kind of edgy about that man at the front,” he had said, what felt like all those years ago.
“Why?” Alistair turned from the window to look at the jittery man that sat in the seat two rows forward and across the aisle from them.
“Every time he leans forward his shirt lifts up a bit, and I can see the gun he has hidden in the back of his pants. Anyway, just look at him. He doesn’t look like the most mentally balanced person here.”
That was true. The man was not able to sit still, always looking around with erratic movements of his head, grabbing at the railing of the seat in front of him with trembling hands, putting his head in his hands, sitting up again, putting on leg up on the seat under him, taking it away. He definitely did not look like a balanced individual.
“He’s nothing to worry about,” said Alistair with a knowing, calm smile. “He’s going to rob a bank or a gas station, and judging by the fact that it’s broad daylight, his intelligence, or lack thereof, won’t take him very far.”
“You’re probably right, as usual.”
Nope. The one time Alistair had been wrong.
Of course, it only felt like a movie to the insomniac, since that’s what insomnia does to the mind – takes it out of the body to view things externally, like a movie. There was a camera, sure, but it was only in the hands of another passenger who thought he could get some money for footage of a man that had gone crazy, hijacked a bus and tried to crash it, kamikaze style, into someone’s house. Luckily, Alistair remained calm in the situation and tried to be a hero. Standing over the unconscious bus driver that had been hit in the back of the head by an instrument Zero didn’t see and staring down the barrel of the gun that was trained upon him by the screaming nutcase, the old man had broken the wrist of the psychopath with a lightning-quick grab and jerk motion and wrestled him from the wheel of the vehicle. He yelled at Zero to take the wheel while he constrained the unbalanced man, despite the fact that they both knew Zero could not drive a bus. More luck came in the fact that they were not on a busy street, and Zero could simply brake without any danger.
Zero marveled at Alistair’s adeptness and ability to diffuse a situation and asked him about where he learned to do such things.
“You continue to surprise me, you know that?” Zero said to him between interviews with the media.
“Oh yeah, why’s that?”
“Well for starters you just saved the lives of a busload of people. The way you did it is also quite a surprise.”
“I simply did what instinct told me to do.”
“You broke a man’s wrist with the movements of a martial arts expert! You stared a man with a gun square in the face and never even flinched! You can’t tell me that was just instinct!”
“I can and I do,” he retorted firmly as another reporter came up to interview him. He told them the exact same thing about listening to his instincts.
After the story had gone from the front pages of newspapers and television news programs, no one ever heard about it again. It was never discussed again between Zero and Alistair, either.
Just another part of the enigma that was Alistair Wintergreen.

By the time he arrived at the office of Pickering, Conklin and Waters, Zero felt like it was the last place on Earth he wanted to be.
He’s gone.
This isn’t the most helpful thing for it.
“Hi, I’m here to see Mr. Conklin,” Zero told the receptionist at the legal office when he walked up to her desk. “I got this letter in the mail about the reading of Alistair Wintergreen’s will.”
The receptionist was a young woman with a smile that went beyond polite and into medicated. “Right through there, sir,” she directed Zero down a hallway. “Third door on your left. Mr. Conklin will be with you shortly.”
“Thanks,” muttered Zero as he began drifting down the hallway.
Mr. Conklin’s office was decorated in rich mahogany with a leather couch and matching armchairs sitting around a coffee table on one side of the room, and his desk on the other. Some certificates and other proof that he could lie better than other people hung on the walls. How very impressive.
The fact that this place was so lavishly decorated in leather, mahogany and credentials was just adding to the enigma of Alistair Wintergreen. The man lived in an apartment that was in about the same price range as Zero’s, and it definitely did not appear that he had an abundance of money. However, it was peculiar that he always appeared to have money, despite the fact that he was unemployed. Still, it was hard to argue that he was totally destitute, since there Zero was, sitting in the office of a high-priced lawyer that was in the service of Alistair before, and after, he died. He was certainly not giving Zero a whole lot of nothing, either.
Ethan Conklin was a man of about 35 who graduated at some university Zero had never heard of, and went on to become one of the many lawyers the nation didn’t really need. Wills weren’t really his thing – he generally gave legal advice to businesses that were in risk of going under – but he was the executive of Al’s estate nonetheless. He couldn’t have helped Al from going under, so Zero disliked him immediately in the same way he disliked himself. He had a robotically administered haircut and wore a business suit with a loud green tie that hung like a satin vine from his neck.
How I’d love to see him swinging on that vine from the rafters.
After shaking hands to prove neither of them had a weapon – the original point of the handshake – they sat down on the black leather chairs on opposite sides of the coffee table.
“Mr. Wintergreen was a wealthy man, Mr. Black,” Conklin said, sounding like he was selling something.
That’s not my name.
“No he wasn’t, you’re confused with someone else,” Zero retorted flatly. Al had mysterious financial support. He wasn’t wealthy.
“I’m quite sure I know what I’m talking about, Mr. Black.”
That’s not my name.
“I knew Alistair before he died and he was indeed wealthy. How else could he afford our services?”
“I don’t know.” Still flat.
“He came to me some years ago and asked me to be the executor of his estate. I know he was prone to having strokes, so I figured that’s why he wanted to get things in order for when the inevitable happened. I know this is hard for you, but we have to get down to business.”
“Al was unemployed and lived in a second-rate apartment! How can you tell me that he was wealthy?”
“Well now it seems like you’re the one that’s confused with someone else. Now, down to business.”
“No!” If a series of emotions was placed into a blender and then thrown off a tall building to splatter on the sidewalk below, that’s what Zero felt. “This is complete BULLSHIT!”
“Mr. Black-”
That’s not my name!
“I don’t know why you didn’t know about Mr. Wintergreen’s wealth, but I can assure you he had money. What will it take for you to believe me?” Conklin beseeched.
You know it’s there. Bite the bullet.
“I want to hear what Al said in the will. If I knew the man, which it’s starting to sound like I don’t, he had at least a few words he wanted to leave behind.”
“You’re quite right,” Conklin admitted with a solemn smile. “Let’s see what he’s got here.” Conklin started sorting through some papers he had put on the table while Zero sat back in his chair, preparing for the assailment of a dead man’s words.

Even sitting at home, on his chair fit for the king of the homeless, the news wouldn’t sink in properly.
I didn’t know a thing about him.
The clock was still impaled on the table before him, silent now that it had been brutally murdered. There wasn’t uncertainty or indecision now; only sheer disillusion.
No defeats.
No rematches.
Only a whole lot of money, a new house and no idea of the reason behind it all.
Alistair Pierre Wintergreen, a sixty year-old, unemployed Frenchman, left Zero with $6 million and a mansion somewhere up in the hills.
He half expected Alistair to appear out of nowhere and shout “Surprise!” but Zero would’ve punched him in the face if he did.
Lying bastard.

gary_wagner

Your writing is good, the tick-tock bit was fresh and clever, you actually know how to punctuate, and your grammar is correct. You had a nice pace going but...

Sorry, you lost me when he ran the knife softly across his wrist - a young man, feeling lonely, worthless, the love of his life is gone, has nothing left to live for, and he's going to end it all by escaping through the glory of suicide. The only twist away from a typical angst tale is that aparently, the main character is gay. I don't know, maybe that is part of a typical angst story these days.

Your writing is good enough to find a fresh opening chapter using a storyline that hasn't already been done several million times already.

__________________
Founding member of alliterationaholics anonymous.
Should you be a member too?