My goal in with this is to create a cruel world, where perceptions are almost always false. People are not defined by their appearance no more than they are defined by the car they drive
Some one dies in every chapter but the first. Henry starts noticing people and materials and this moves to more noticing people and becomes better reading them… is disgusted with humanity for all the wrong reasons Anthony explains….anthony dies. Man in celica tries to comit forgery and kills someone in collision, fat man works on cure for arthritis.
"Forgery is my only proficiency. Genuine does not describe me, as authenticity does not become me."
“We become what we may, and we may become what we are”, rambled Henry. Wearing a white T shirt over a blue long sleeve shirt, Henry Ulrich was on his hands and knees with his head between his shoulders. When he lifted his head to look around the room it appeared as if he had been crying and his eyes were still iridescent and glass like, reflecting the light produced by lamp in the corner of the room. He in fact had cried only a few minutes ago, although only for a brief stint. The room was foggy, and although one could see easily across the room, it was effortlessly noticeable that a haze hovered in the air, giving everything a pastel appearance and dimming the colors in the room if only slightly. Approximately 15 minutes prior to when we first met Henry Ulrich he had inhaled the smoke from a hallucinogenic plant called salvia. A glass pipe lay, still smoking on the floor next to him. Henry gathered himself and rose to his feet, the hallucinations were almost completely gone now and he dried his eyes with his sleeves. His friend Anthony was in the room, and was chuckling sarcastically, pulling the cigarette out of his mouth, after witnessing the quite embarrassing incident. Henry was not amused but managed to display a stubborn smile.
Anthony knew Henry well enough to know that it bothered him so he quieted himself. Although, he was neither book smart, nor very gifted in difficult or awkward situations, Anthony was surprisingly well train in the area of reading people. His trick was very simple and almost never failed him. Anthony would merely disregard a person’s actions, gestures and pay very close attention to his target’s eyes. He was very proud of his talent and would brag about it. Almost everybody around him already knew not to lie or be emotionally insincere around him. So Anthony made his talent well known, and explained it as if he were medically certified to do so. He would say that the eyes are connected directly to the brain, and although they can put on the same fake attitude as the rest of the body they are the first to return to the true expression of reality. He went on to say that only the greatest actors could maintain this facade for more than a flashing instant and that almost all normal people were incredibly obvious when they were trying to be deceptive. Despite his amazing ability and very high success rate, Anthony’s reasoning was not feasible, successful in replications by others nor accepted by any of those he told it to.
Henry returned from the bathroom, after washing his face and hands.
“Man, for a plant that is a gnarly fucking trip”, Henry stated slowly regaining his usual slightly arrogant posture.
“So did you like it?”
“Hell no”
“Then why do it?”
“Experience, I don’t know. To be able to say I did that thing”
“My dad dragged me to the statue of liberty and made me wait 4 hours in line to look out the itty bitty window at the top of it so he could say that we did that. Do you want to be like my father?”
“Common man, you can’t boil this down to that, this is interesting. Exploring the capabilities of the human brain?”
“At the same time destroying a piece of it”
“If you did it you would know. What about your cigarettes?”
“What about them”
“Those kill your lung, slowly but surely.”
“True, but I rather die of lung cancer with a fully functional brain than be able to breathe without the ability to think like I once could.”
“Screw it, you’ll never understand”, Henry was through with the conversation. To himself, Henry wondered if he had won the conversation, or if he had lost. He then spent a few seconds evaluating whether Anthony considered himself the victor. After a few moments of silence in the room, Anthony stood up from the couch, breaking the void, “Enough of this stuffy room, let’s get some lunch.”
The two walked out the door, and stumbled lethargically down the stairs of Henry’s apartment.
Despite both of them considering the other his best friend, Anthony and Henry constantly argued. Sometimes it was about Henry’s drug use, other times it regarded Anthony’s cigarettes or his disregard for school work. Often the two would not be able to resolve the conflict verbally and would break the gridlock with physical battles. By the time the two would halt the wrestling neither one would remember or care what they were originally fighting about.
Henry unlocked his car and the two got in simultaneously. Henry turn on some music, which was much louder than Anthony preferred, but he said nothing because the car ride would not last longer than 15 minutes. Henry pulled out of the lot, and sped away.
Two blocks away and elderly woman was being robbed. A tall man I a ski mask ran by her and grabbed her purse. Valiantly the old lady held onto the purse strap, even as the man pulled her off her feet. She tried to let go but her hand was now entangled in the nylon straps and fake leather or the bag itself, which only tighten with her struggle. The man dragged her along the street and into an alley. Concrete and loose dirt took layers of skin as they passed and two red lines began to form in her wake. Her legs were being worn down to the bone. Only seconds had passed, realizing the foolishness of her actions, the elderly woman began to slowly release her grip and relinquish her purse to the concealed gentlemen. Through the roar of screams in her head she thought, “For a stupid purse?”. She finally untangled her arm, but she had already come to a stop stop prior to releasing the vice of rough fabric. The man had dragged her deep into an alley and now stood facing her. As she lay bleeding on the ground, still disoriented, and scared. The man raised a gun from behind his back, pointed it at the back of the woman’s skull and released a projectile of silver metal that passed through her head, killing her instantly.
The man removed his ski mask, and searched the purse for anything of value. He found forty-six dollars which he pocketed, a pair of combs and 3 credit cards which were worthless to him. He left the credit cards and the purse with the still bleeding corpse.
She died because in life’s commotion she overestimated the value of what was in her hands. She died for 46 dollars and a pair of combs, 4 piece of paper and two piece of plastic. Emily Warrick was born April 13, 1935 and died November 2, 2008 (World War II, The Gulf War, The Korean War, The Iraq War)
Henry turned sharply onto the freeway onramp, and blasted his engine until he was going around 85 miles an hour, and was passing almost everyone around him.
Anthony leaned his head back in his chair and began a deep sigh of relaxation, until his body was thrust forward against his seat belt with the force of the car coming to a complete stop in only a few seconds. Anthony parted his hair which now hung in front of his eyes and took in the hundreds of cars which now separated him from his lunch. He leaned back once again to continue his sigh, only this time it had gained a bitter sound, “Traffic”, he sighed.
Disappointed as well, Henry didn’t have the luxury of relaxing in his chair. Inching the car forward every so often required even more attention than his usual high speed weaving. Nevertheless, Henry found his eyes wandering from car to car, observing the drivers in each window. One man looked so sad he nearly mad Henry cry. It wasn’t necessarily his facial expressions, nor did he look that depressed. It was a culmination of everything that Henry had learned about this man in his 3 seconds of viewing him. He was driving a 1983 Honda Celica, a car Henry estimated to be worth roughly 100 dollars. The interior of the car looked like a war zone , and the trunk was held down by several extension cords tied in crude knots. The man sat in his chair, which was protruding stuffing in several places, with slumped shoulders. His eyes slowly jumped from the horizon dead ahead to the corners of his dashboard, as if he was deceiving even himself that there was something he was looking for. His head rested upon his neck as if he was too tired to exert any energy to lift it and his arms hung at his sides. Drooping almost to his lap and then back up to the steering wheel, his arms created two U shapes, where one finger on each hand was stretched as far back as it could go keeping his hands connected to the wheel and holding them from falling to his knees.
In the car directly behind him was a rather obese man, who drove a 1996 Chrysler sea bring, a gross long white convertible number, whose style should have been scraped at the drawing board. Amazingly the car had sold well in the 90’s, and just as remarkably the man had squeezed into the front seat. Henry watched the man in the white car for a few seconds before returning his gaze forward upon the snails ahead of him in traffic. In that short time the obese man had picked up a fast food item and began to eat it. Disgustingly, he only appeared to get about half of the item into his mouth, with the rest dripping down his cheeks or on his t-shirt, which Henry now noticed had several other noticeable stains.
Henry shook his head back and forth flapping his lips as he rattled this disgusting image from his mind. A gentle snore came from Anthony’s side of the car, and Henry looked over at him to see his friend completely asleep in his car. Henry Turned down the music and continued the snails march.
On his mental screen, Henry tried to erase the images of the two separate men lay burnt and scalding in his mind. One made him feel depressed and the other disgusted. Anthony smiled from the passenger seat, and mumbled inaudibly.
Car Accident
Chapter 3
Henry was very intelligent. Often, he would suggest that his life would be much simpler if in fact he had been less mentally gifted. His mind constantly raced, and often he found himself thinking abstractly for hours. Meandering from time, to place, from thought to idea and back again, Henry could never really control his renegade creativity and quickness of thought. I
For example, if one of Henry’s friends were to mention that they biked back from class, an assortment of memories would rush into Henry’s mind. The first time he rode a bike, the day his brother bought a road bike, the time he got lost when he went riding with him, but it didn’t stop there. Each memory would branch out on its own creating new openings and more ideas would come roaring into the newly open space. Within a fraction of a second, Henry would be considering what color the frosting on his wedding cake should be, despite his lack of even a steady girlfriend.
Henry never really told anyone about his rouge mind, and it never really seemed to get in the way once he learned to control it. When he was little, many children though he was strange because he would blurt out random phrases, like “monkeys gone mad and little red riding hood got spanked”; phrases even he didn’t understand. Some children were amused by the absurdity, and other thought it strange and avoided Henry. Henry was also a very gifted writer, and when boredom gave way to creativity, he often kept a journal that documented the wanderings of psyche. He titled it “Electricity”, so that no one would know what it was.
The first entry opened,
“Dreams and fantasies never really stuck to their designated realms within me. I didn’t never had the luxury of confining my thought within the boundaries of a situation. I had this theory once that intelligence nourished outcasts, because society was flawed and only the most intelligent people saw this. They over thought things, and many artists gained inspiration that nonsensical genius that had to be released to truly gain ground breaking invention in their fields.
November 3, 2008
I couldn’t sleep last night, my thoughts twisted and turned and neither I nor any logical being sat in the driver’s seat. I wasn’t that I couldn’t understand the progression of my thoughts, instead I could not control nor halt that progression in any way. In my adventure, if it can be called that, I found myself at a crossroads in my life which was quite real and although trivial had existed in reality in my life. I was 15 and was finishing my freshman year in high school. The pivotal decision was whether or not I was going to continue my high school football career. I was a quarterback, a pretty good one, but had been fairly injury prone the entire season. My mind danced along all the possible outcomes of reversing my real life decision to stop playing. I remember one such scenario specifically because it seemed so outrageous looking back, although at the time it seem a very viable outcome to an alternate course of events. In this false timeline, I had become handicapped from a football injury the following year. The story unfolded, as I overcame depression, wrote a book and managed to live a normal life as a wealthy paraplegic.
