Chapter 63: Sweeter After Difficulties
I’m very good at victimizing myself, at least in my own head. I’m very good at making bad things seem incredibly unlikely after they happen, such that I have an excuse to be irritated and aggrieved and generally pissed at the whole universe. Generic example from my human days: I make a Twitter post, eager for some reaction to it. I come back after five minutes and there’s a cluster of responses … for another message that I sent yesterday. These cocksuckers had all day but they chose to respond now so I could have a false alarm and get my hopes up for a few seconds.
This puts me dangerously close to being an unreasonable conspiracy theorist – I suspect many conspiracies to be true but I acknowledge that most of those theories are garbage, and that there’s a lot of victimizing, self-pitying thought that makes those theories so unappealing to normal people. The business with six hundred and seventeen, which distracted me into losing Elder Mother’s protection when I was still in danger, was a more recent example in which I wanted to accuse someone of being out to get me.
When I was in university a girl looked at me and smiled. This happened once, on my last day at university – but I escaped the black hole of conspiracy theory tantruming madness by realizing that I only saw the girl and her smile because it was the last day, because I had finally relaxed and stopped focusing on work. I had missed other girls and other smiles. I had missed other numbers matching up, or not matching up.
I had run down so many streets without getting mobbed upon, so this was not part of some conspiracy, not the universe giving me a middle finger – it just so happened that all the dog-loving Movember men in Toronto were right here. Not to the left or the right, where I could have tried sneaking or sprinting to get in and out unseen or fast enough.
Right. Fucking. Here.
A few seconds after learning that the tutelary Nocome had handled down at the bus terminal had been named Charlie, I let the Movember men have another curse. There’s a reason that word means both ‘profanity’ and ‘evil magic’.
“You inconvenient shits! Here?! NOW?!” I was about to get punched by the first one, a guy with a bushy ‘stache and a huge chest stuffed into a tight plaid shirt, as tall as myself with blond dreadlocks and a unibrow.
As his beefy arm pulled back I saw glowing wounds with trickling light on his wrist. And I suddenly realized why they all looked like younger men.
Of course. Each one of them offed themselves in life, so now they’re supposed to be protecting the men who contemplate suicide. Naturally they’d hate the hell out of me, the wandering euthanizer.
But they’re not doing their FUCKING job now! They know I’ve got a house somewhere around here and they know the night-kin are after me so they’re KNOWINGLY putting my family at risk!
I caught the beefy man’s first strike. He was definitely stronger than the male student vampire I had manhandled in Queen’s park. Maybe I could match him, but I was a few seconds away from being trampled by his buddies.
“Dirty Sanchez-looking COCKSUCKER! GET THAT CRAP OFF YOUR FACE!!!”
A burst of orange light puffed into the first attacker’s nose. And the charging mob lost its momentum for a moment, gasping and screaming and inhaling flames.
My curse had set all of their mustaches on fire.
And this just made them more pissed.
I was faster. And an unblocked hit from me would make them crumple, coughing out more green and white ghost-light matching the glow that came from their mortal wounds. But it was impossible to look in all directions at once, and I got leashed in about thirty seconds.
Their punches, which pushed but did not hurt before, started to amount to something. The dead dog’s leash ensnaring my left arm seemed to triple its weight, and it clung fiercely like the silk of the Iron Spider Woman. They were struggling very hard to see thanks to my little curse lighting up their mustaches, and a bunch of them had accidentally lassoed each other, and a few of the blinded and disorientated Movember men with heads fully engulfed in flames were rolling away in pairs, bouncing off the sidewalk and catching in the gutter, mashing up against suburban fences and telephone poles, rustling in the bushes, each convinced that they had me.
But a lot of people commit suicide every day. And men commit suicide more successfully than women.
“Put it out put it out!”
“He’s over there we can get him! He’s not down yet, get up guys!”
They were giving each other the shirts off their back, smacking each other in the face, trying to put out the fire – though none of them had kept their defining feature.
Such a supportive bunch for each other, I thought with annoyance, trying to rip off the leash and fend off punches and evade football tackles at the same time. With a right hook I mashed the face of a tutelary with a glowing noose-line around his neck, watched the undead eyes roll. I saw my reflection in them.
I looked pretty nasty. My eyes were flickering red, my hair was wild, and I smiled like I was having terrific fun. Not quite as bad as Mr. Bloor, but close.
I was distracted long enough to let a hand slip half-way into my pant pocket. That one was going after my elderberry, and that finally made me murderous. I didn’t screw around with weak curses anymore. One simple word can contain all the hate and venom in a black soul.
“Die.” My fist slammed down carelessly into the spirit who looked up at me suddenly, and I sent a thought
(die again, weak man)
that was contemptuous and cruel, a thought that I believed for at least this moment, a thought that made many of the souls in my inner crew gasp. Had I been hiding some of my feelings about their last choice?
I saw teeth, all by themselves. The tutelary’s floating teeth were now like a bracelet around my wrist, and the rest of his head was spreading out everywhere. The hand in my pocket went limp, sliding out empty. My meteoric strike continued down into the pavement, and the impact was loud. The windows of a nearby car shattered, and the car’s alarm started shrieking into the early morning.
The local tutelaries would have a lot of cleaning up to do, a lot of mind-wiping for the mortals. I suddenly had a lot of ghost-stuff over my body, as if some protester had attacked me for wearing fur, throwing fluorescent paint like liquid radium.
More leashes coming in, one Movember man trying to strangle me from behind with his cord. I headbutted backward and kicked forward, keeping that hateful thought in my head and believing it with each strike, hurting them far more. Now they didn’t just cough up some of their true body’s blood – now my touch was lacerating and corrosive, tearing out gashes in their hides. I rolled to a fire hydrant and broke it with the undead skull of the tutelary who rolled with me, feeling three leashes gripping at my body and burning, hardly caring, positively delighted by the crunch of skull. I had a chance of getting through these guys and planting the berry.
(if you want us to help you, you have to get rid of that terrible thought)
What?
(I don’t like seeing you like this, and if you don’t calm down I won’t let you on the property)
Who was talking to me?
But then I knew. I recognized the voice. It was my nana’s voice.
When I picked up the evil thought of contempt and hate for suicides, and gave it a toss over my mental shoulder, I lost the power that could affect the Movember men so terribly. The leashes on my arms and legs burned and my whole body grew heavy. I could barely raise my head to see the next attacker coming, and see that my grandmother’s house was just three doors away now … and see that they were coming out to help me.
(Dulcius ex asperis)
Not just my grandparents. Their siblings, most of them known to me only through photographs. And the old neighbours who were now all gone, the buildings still standing but the people fully changed over on this street. The next-door neighbour to my great-aunt that we’d known for years was a quite hefty woman with a skinny husband, and her ghost clobbered a Movember man with a gut-punch that made him throw up more of that radium-bile.
(get home and plant child!)
My great-aunt herself was even fiercer than me in spirit, sucker-punching another tutelary in the kidneys from behind and then elbow-striking into his neck when he collapsed and started screaming, rapid-fire cursing into his ears. A big callused Newfie sailor’s hand yanked on the scrawny neck of another tutelary trying to wrestle me to the ground, and my great-aunt’s husband threw the guy to scrape long and hard on his face down the road like a motorcycle accident victim. My grandmother’s father was a huge man, a man who had trained others in hand-to-hand combat for fighting in Europe, and his ghost handled other tutelaries two at a time, flat out making them disappear with a sudden yank backward, far quicker than his size suggested. His sons could fight too, even the one with one leg, and their sister helped my great-aunt elbow and kick and bite an ornery tutelary into submission.
The beefy Movember man with blond dreadlocks (now black) who had taken my hair-burning curse at point-blank range was still on his feet. He tried to tackle me as I made the final steps to my grandmother’s front yard, with most of his face black and blistering, just one eye left to see clearly – and then, with a swish of cool air skimming by my head, my grandfather’s ghost mashed him in the nose with a phantom golf club, dropping him into the gutter.
(hurry!)
That was the first and last word I ever heard from the man.
While my dead relatives and their neighbours helped the Movember men to remake the opening scene to Gangs of New York, I yanked out my elderberry and started overthinking for a few seconds. Then I sprinted to the back yard, where none of the mustached men could see for immediate uprooting, and found a corner to dig in like an animal. It was done in twenty-three seconds.
I ran back out front to join my family in the fight, a strange and silly smile growing on my face – just hearing them talk made me forget almost everything, and I had completely forgotten about Belie’s third student in this moment.
But when I came back out they were all gone, friend and foe.
For me the most important word is not ‘difficulties’, but ‘sweeter’. The motto is not ‘stronger after difficulties’, which would still be inspirational but misses a part of the original. It’s mundane for an adult, especially an adult man, to aspire to greater strength and power – but to be sweeter? Why is that the word, and the goal?
Because:
Strength for the purpose of more exercise and more strength and more exercise, and so on – in literal exercise or financial investments or intellectual achievement or anything else where you might have ‘power’ to grow and show – is not the end. It’s the means to the end of having an actual life, where you don’t have to be strong all the time, or mean all the time, or clever all the time, or on your toes all the time, where you can slip and fall and laugh at yourself. Where you can admit that a puppy or a baby or a girl is cute without a scowl or some cynical remark about picking up dogshit or mouths to feed or gold-digging whores.
But was I after my difficulties? For a few long seconds I felt like it, looking around and then just staring without really seeing at the old neighbourhood around this house that I would probably never see again, unless it was still standing sixty or seventy or eighty years from now.
Then I remembered that other problem, the ‘les-gyp bitch’. She was the one last thing: then me and Nocome could keep arm-wrestling back in the wilderness. But we were both getting used to each other and you never really confess everything, never really transcend your suffering or your hunger or your addiction. We’d live with each other.
The windows of the parked car down the street were still broken by the shockwave of my first serious hit, but that was all that was out of the ordinary on this street. Except for myself, and I fixed that with a furious run to the train tracks.
Chapter 64: Meeting the Third
Image credits: Londondrinker, Celtus, Peter Balcerzak