Foreword
It occurred to me at that point in time that not everything was going to turn out for the best. Had it been under a different set of circumstances, maybe, but not here, not now. For the life of me, I couldn’t really have done much else different in the way I got here. But now I was stuck, and I wanted to get out. I wanted to get to a new place that would let me be somebody else. I wanted to live the life that so many people only dream about, present company included. But it’s times like these when I realize that all the pretty girls are taken.
Now, don’t think me superficial. I don’t mean pretty as in just outwardly attractive. I’m talking the whole picture here. I mean the ones that are cute, but are also good people that you can relate to and don’t have to worry about them screwing you over in the long run. Girls like that don’t come along everyday…and the few of them out there are already taken at this point. I guess maybe I should have shopped around more my freshman year instead of biting at the first piece of bait dangled before me (we all know or can guess at how that one turned out). But I guess I’ll be a freshman again here in a few months, if you can call a graduate student a freshman, and that opens the door of opportunity.
But here I go again, waxing sentimental. It’s hard to really sit down and write something not relating to your life. I’ve never really written anything, ever, that wasn’t at least loosely based on my life experience. But then again, I guess you really can’t control that sort of input. That’s why Hemmingway has a different style than Faulkner has a different style than Bradbury. We are, in the scheme of things, that bundle of experiences that gets us where we’re going. And I’m no different. My friends have me convinced that I could write something some day. They tell me that they wish they could write like I can. To tell you the truth, I don’t claim to have some superior command of the English language. I really don’t know that many fancy words, and it’s but very seldom that the better writing I do doesn’t feel forced to me. I’ve written poetry for the most part up to this point. But I want to make a story. I want it to be involving and interesting. I need it to be realistic (as in not overly idealistic), but uplifting (although knowing me, it probably won’t be). I’ll make it funny. But the one thing that’s most important is…and if I ever teach a creative writing class….(which probably won’t ever happen, unless for some reason chemical engineering fiction is in high demand)… this is what I’ll tell my students…it needs to be fake. I need an escape.
To me, writing this story will be a departure from many things. I will be free of depression when I’m in it. I’ll be free of stress. I’ll be free of duty. And I’ll be free of having to find love here in the real world. Once I’m out there, it will be so much easier to look back in, and later on, when I write my next story, it should be easier to incorporate those personal experiences into a tale that other people might also like to read. I don’t even know where to begin, or what I’ll talk about. I know that I will have to draw on some personal experience or I’ll never get started… but I promise to be completely fake as soon as I can. Other people in the world right now seem to enjoy being fake… and I can’t understand it, and I hate the way it makes me feel. But then again, being real all the time in a world of fake people isn’t the easiest thing, either, and sometimes the desire to let go and sink back into the unraveling fabric of society is too strong to dismiss with a wave of the hand. I guess maybe that’s a good place to jump off.
As one last note, I feel it’s appropriate to borrow a little bit from Vonnegut here, in reference to the goals I have just laid out, and inform you that the following story was a failure before it was even begun.
The Story
There once was a real little boy who more than anything wanted to be fake. He couldn’t stand not being like the others he saw everyday: wooden, held up with strings, and stricken with glossy, glazed-over expressions on their faces. Always happy or sometimes always sad, or sometimes even always mean…. but at least they were always something. They didn’t wake up each day wondering how they’d feel as they lay down at night to go to bed. They just kept on existing, right through the day, same old expression, same old look. During the day, the real boy worked at the various factories in his town (he was usually very busy, because everyone else at his job was fake, and they never took the care to make sure things were running smoothly). Every so often, he’d save up enough money to buy a fake boy out of the window of one of the shops he’d pass on his way to and form work. He’d take it home with him, and set it up across his table. He’d ask it all sorts of questions that bothered him.
“How should I invest my stocks, Chester?”
“Chester, how do you feel about the general malaise that society is working through right now?”
“Say, Chester, do you ever wonder what I’ll be doing ten, or fifteen years from now, when I’ve saved up enough money to leave our little town and try to find another real person to live with?”
The boy always took the care to call his fake friends by name, even though they never referred to each other as individuals. They were all just there, staring off into the distance, always looking at each other but never acknowledging that they could see. They just sat there at the factory, pretending to do their little jobs in life. The boy would go home and come back the next day to see them all in the same place as when he left.
But these were the times when the little boy was growing up. He couldn’t do much else but learn to work with all the fake people out there, and take on himself all the jobs that he wanted to get done. There was no way around it, if he wanted to get things accomplished. And he did, of course. That’s what drove him—he was a finisher. He always had been. He couldn’t very well have been a real boy at this point and in this day and age without being one. He was different from the rest of his fake friends. He cared about them. He cared about all of them more than he cared about himself. He’d often sit at home with Chester or Toby or James, or any of the other friends he had brought home, and wonder why he was so different. While he was always proud of his accomplishments, and of the things he could do because he was real, he still felt sad sometimes. He felt like less of a person because he couldn’t be fake like the rest of his friends. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t let go of making sure that they were all safe and would be ok if he had to leave for some reason. He knew that he’d never get an acknowledgement or vote of confidence out of any of them for anything he ever did, but he needed to do things to try anyway, he just couldn’t help it.
It never helped much that he was the only real son in a family of fake brothers and sisters with fake parents. He couldn’t ever figure out how that could happen… to be so different from not only his progenitors, but also from the other members of their progeny. And no one else in his family could explain it either…not, of course, that they ever tried. Keep in mind that they were all fake, and couldn’t really care about anything but themselves. That is all they were, just themselves, alone in this world among all the other fake people. In a way, this was the main similarity between a fake person and the boy. They were both alone in a sea of many others. The difference was that the boy knew this.
And it drove him mad, after a while.
He’d been working in the factories for some time now, and the weight of the fake world was just too much for him to handle. He couldn’t keep coming in every day, knowing that it would all be the same each place he went, and that he had to take on the burden to get things done on time. He tried explaining the situation to his coworkers, but they just stared back at him, seemingly mumbling back the same words the boy had just said in a sort of muffled echo.
He thought maybe some of his friends might secretly want to become real, and if he could help them to do that, then he would have a real friend. But none of them showed interest. And after a while, he realized that there was no way to pursue that quest any further. And, of course, the boy knew that what he really wanted was to be fake like them.
The more he thought about it, the more the allure of the fake life pulled him in. At first, it just stemmed from the desire to want to have more friends that he could relate to and that could relate to him, if they wanted to. Now, as has been said, the fake people generally didn’t acknowledge anyone else anyway, but the boy tended to suppose that if they were ever going to reach out to someone, it would be to another fake person rather than to a real boy that they couldn’t even begin to understand. As time went on, the boy began to see more of what the fake life offered. He’d be free of worries. He’d be free of stress, guilt, and that overriding sense of duty to take on all that was left undone. He could finally relax. He could let go of the weight of the fake world and take a vacation. He could find some solace, for once, in his long, lonely life. He wanted to change.
He wanted to change so much that it was soon all he could think about in his free time. When he wasn’t working, he was sitting around thinking up plans to become fake. Finally, he had an idea. He spent several hours working on a disguise. He made a fake-person outfit. It had a wooden-textured mask and stiff, ultra-starched clothes. It had a designer hat that a real person would never consider buying, because the money could easily be put to use someplace else for a real purpose.
It was still several hours until work began, but the boy was already dressed and ready to go. Staring at the clock, he was unsure of what exactly this day might bring. But he tried not to think about that. He tried to let go of worry. He soon realized that his efforts were all in vain. The hands of the clock finally told him it was time to head to work, and he did. When he arrived, he marched straight to his workstation…and just sat down, staring at the controls in front of him. He sat and sat and then sat some more, but after only 30 minutes, he began to sweat from the worry brewing in his mind. The glue he had so carefully applied to hold his wooden mask to his face began to lose its stickiness. The façade peeled away, and fell at his feet. The starch in his clothes was quickly replaced with perspiration, and they quickly looked used and necessary. He couldn’t stand it. He jumped up, threw the hat from his head, whirled around, and ran as fast as he could down the catwalk to the other stations near his, violently flipping the dials, checking the gauges, and seeing that the production lines were all running as they should be. He fixed all the problems and had the factory up and running in tip-top shape in no time at all.
Reflexes kicked in and a smile came to his face, signifying a job well done. But as he stood in the midst of his latest accomplishment, the smile quickly vanished, and he fell to the ground, tears streaming from his eyes. He had failed. He was still real. Groveling and sniveling, he poked his eyes out from behind his hands and cautiously peered around the factory. No one was looking at him. They were all still as fake as ever, glued to their tasks, working alone, and not accomplishing anything of real value.
This failure was the last straw. The real boy finally cracked. He ran to the fire station and broke open the fire axe cabinet, and went to town on all of his fake, wooden coworkers. Splinters flew and wooden faces fell, still staring, to roll about the metal grating of the floor. His rage only grew stronger, and after he had finished at the factory, he scoured the town. Late into the next day, he worked, relentless. And finally he sat, satisfied. Bewildered. Scared. And in the distance he heard something that he couldn’t quite place. It was like the noise some of his toys made, almost like a whistle, but louder. And he saw lights on the horizon, many different colors, flashing, and swirling.
That was the day the real people came.
They arrived on the scene nearly 48 hours after it had all begun. They found the boy sitting alone at home, among the sawdust and splints of wood that used to be his fake family. His face was weathered from the crying he had done, and showed the signs of the solitary hour of sleep he had had.
One of the real men stooped down low, and took the boy’s hand.
“Come with us, son, it will be all right. We’re going to take you out of this place.”
“What a shame. What a damn shame.” One of the other real men said.
They took him out of his little fake town, to a beautiful, real city. It was a spectacular sight to behold, and was like nothing the real little boy had ever seen before. It was adorned in lights and the trappings of society that are only possible when the people in it work together to make real things happen. It was magnificent.
But the real little boy didn’t notice. He just stared silently, with a glazed expression on his face. The doctors at the real hospital couldn’t make much sense of it. They carefully removed the splinters from the boy’s arms and legs, and patched up the cuts and blisters left from his bare handed chopping spree. He made no indication that he felt anything. After a few hours of rehab, they moved him to the pediatric ward, so that he could be with other real little boys and girls. He still sat in his chair, with a half smile on his lips and a sort of dull sense of accomplishment lingering in his eyes.
As the day went on more and more children stopped by to say hello and to invite him to play games. But he just sat in his chair, staring. After many confused attempts by the children, and many hours of their stealing glances at him from across the room, one little girl with an especially cheery disposition crept up to his feet.
“Hi little boy” she said. “Please come and play with us. We need another friend to come and play our game.”
He just stared back at her, as her words echoed off of his stolid face.
“I don’t know,” said the little girl, turning back to her other real friends, “he’s still just staring. Almost like he’s fake.”
And, without looking back, she returned to her friends, and started playing the game. The little boy heard her, though…but he did not move. He was right where he always wanted to be. Alone, free, and happy.
And as he continued to stare at the wall in front of him, a tear started to roll down his face…but it stopped half way down, and slowly disappeared, like water droplets vanishing on the trunk of a tree.