Character

CHARACTER

BEN SHADOW EXCUSED HIMSELF from the table at the restaurant where he’d been dining with colleagues and walked to the restroom. He stood at the urinal, about the pee, when he changed his mind. He changed his mind because right there at eye level against the wall above the urinal was a framed newspaper clipping with the day’s date. The headline was about the NBA playoffs, with an accompanying photograph. Another article featured a major league baseball game. Another, a track meet. Ben Shadow could have read more, but he did not. He did not want to read more. After a moment, he began to pee. Done, he zipped up, cleared his throat, and then spit on the newspaper that hung on the wall above the urinal.
He returned to his table and said nothing to his friends about what he had just seen--and done--in the bathroom.
That evening at home, trying to express his true feelings, he wrote in his journal. He wrote in his journal because he had hoped that the writing might help him to understand the feelings he had, feelings that he sensed were searching for an outlet, an identity. A name.
The memory of the incident in the bathroom stayed with him for the rest of the week, at which time he again tried to write in his journal. Once more, the memory–-and the writing--agitated him, and so he got up and drove down to the restaurant, walked back to the restroom, and looked at the space above the urinal. A different front page from the sports section, with the day’s date at the top, hung from the wall. This time, however, rather than spitting, Ben ripped the page down and threw it on the floor.
Ben Shadow did not think of himself as a writer, but at home that evening he sat down and began to compose a story--in the third person--about a young man who walks into the restroom of a restaurant and sees a newspaper on the wall above the urinal. His character, whom he had named Adam Small, spits on the paper and walks away. The story ends there.
* * * * * * *
Ben Shadow knew that he was not a writer, but he found a great deal of satisfaction in writing that story. He liked not just the recording of his own feelings, but that sense of fulfillment that comes from having put one’s words onto the page and into a story: the satisfaction one finds in placing certain emotions on a page--perhaps even inside another human being, imaginary though that human being might be.
* * * * * * *
A month after having completed his story about Adam Small, Ben was at another restaurant, this time with his sister. At the end of the meal, he excused himself and walked back to the restroom. Stepping up to the urinal, he noted that this restaurant, too, had clippings from the sports page of the local newspaper, each one tacked up and framed at eye level above each stall. He also noticed that each of these clippings had either been torn down and ripped apart and thrown down onto the floor, or had some writing scribbled across the page in big, bold marker pen letters: "JOCKS SUCK!" or "WHO CARES?" or just the one word: "WALL." Ben Shadow peed without incident and then returned to the front of the restaurant where his sister had been waiting. Walking back to the car, they talked about how good the food was.
* * * * * * *
One day Ben Shadow walked into a bank and saw a television monitor hanging from the ceiling above the tellers’ stations. He also noticed–-again, hanging from the ceiling--three surveillance cameras, in a row, on either side of the central monitor. Every five seconds a different image--a different angle of the different customers at each window--flashed across the screen. Another day, walking into a Wal-Mart, he saw himself on the television screen that greeted him at the entryway. He looked to his left, toward the pharmacy, and saw a camera fastened to the ceiling above an aisle display of prophylactics and pointing directly at him. Later that same day, at the dry cleaners, he noted another small camera hanging from the corner above the doorway. He looked down toward the opposite side of the store, above the cash register, and saw yet another camera looking down on the customers there. On the street, at intersections, he noted the many rain-proof, weather-sealed cameras attached to the overhanging poles next to the traffic signals--several on each pole, each one pointing in a different direction, each one looking for something to detect, something to report: for violators of civil law and community order, each camera recording the guilty--and the innocent alike.
Ben Shadow wanted to shoot out every surveillance camera that he had ever seen. He wanted to take a b-b gun--or a slingshot, or even just a wooden mallet or a stone--and break every single intrusion--every single voyeur that pried into his own private--and now public--self. He went home to his typewriter and began writing a story about a character named Adam Still and how he had done just that: At the mall, at the super-store, the gas ‘n go, the convenience stores, the bank--everywhere--he’d walk with his concealed b-b gun and, in those private, inspired moments that were his, he’d pick off each camera, one by one--all with great pleasure and enormous satisfaction. And premeditation. At intersections between home and work, sitting in his car at a signal, he’d reach over and grab his b-b gun and shoot out every camera on every corner. His aim was precise, his target was accurate, his work was correct. No camera was safe. At the huge shopping malls downtown, or next to the even bigger government-corporate buildings, or at the institutions of higher learning--the university–-everywhere–-Adam went about his business, his art, his work, his need: sneaking up behind the rotating cameras at the big multi-level underground parking lots and clubbing each one of them to death with the small wooden mallet he’d bought at the import store over on Grand Street. Then he’d reach down and pick up a shard of glass from the broken eye and slip it into his coat pocket. Later, he’d place it in the large wooden bowl he kept above the hearth of his fireplace in the living room. Later, he’d take it over to the post office and drop it into the mailbox. Later, . . . later was Now.
* * * * * * *
Ben Shadow cared little for symbol and metaphor, although he knew that his work was, for anyone who might one day read it, little more than symbol and metaphor. He himself preferred to think of his writing as literal.
He’d had that impression even before reading in the papers about the man who’d been arrested for destroying public property at the mall: smashing surveillance cameras with a miniature, child’s baseball bat; or the guy who’d been tackled at the bank after shooting out both the cameras and the monitor above the tellers’ stations. Or the woman they were unable to catch and who had snipped all the wires on all the cameras on every level of the downtown high-rise parking lot. He read these accounts in the newspaper with mixed feelings: with admiration, and with jealousy.
* * * * * * *
There is a new car wash on the main street of the town where Ben Shadow lives. There is a large electronic billboard in front of the car wash that flashes messages to motorists twenty-four hours a day. These lights can be seen from eight blocks away. Its glow brightens an area more than half a block in every direction. At night, standing across the street from the sign, Ben can read a newspaper. The light is that bright.
The next story he writes reveals the activities of a small group of individuals of mixed ages and gender who, early one morning, heave rocks and bricks through the large electronic billboard in front of the carwash in their hometown. Working together as a team, they complete their task with a rare speed, and the police arrive long after they have already left.
* * * * * * *
Three weeks later, a man is arrested for throwing rocks through the large electronic billboard that sits twenty feet above the front of the new car wash on the main street of town where Ben Shadow lives. The newspaper identifies the man as Adam Small.
* * * * * * *
Ben Shadow wrote nothing for two months--no stories, no journal entries. Nothing. But he kept thinking. He kept thinking about the stories he would like to write one day, the stories he knew that he would write when he was ready.
Two months turned to three months
Finally, at the end of those three months, he sat down at his typewriter and began to write a whole slew of new stories. He wrote about a character named Adam True, whose entire life was a metaphor. He wrote about a character named Annie Now, whose entire life was literal. He wrote about a woman who spent an hour each day going around to the different supermarkets in town, de-magnetizing bar codes with a little contraption she had invented all on her own.
There was a story about a guy named Joe Pancake, who began a highly successful campaign to provide guns for the homeless. He--Joe--had argued that although these people may not have a constitutional guarantee to a roof over their head or food in their belly or adequate health care, they did nevertheless enjoy the Second Amendment right to bare arms.
He wrote about hackers; he wrote about Christians; he wrote about people with cell phones; about people with addictions, people with passion, people without passion. Once he even wrote a little children’s story about a pair of wire-cutters and all the places they’d been, all the things they’d done--illegal things; necessary things: moral things. He wrote about a blind man who loved french fries, about a ghost who had syphilis, a mayor with no shame, a dog that wore no clothes. He wrote about a woman who filled the Coke machines at work with wooden nickels and plastic quarters, and slipped play money into the stamp machines at the post office, poured sand into the pay phones, threw sawdust on the floors of the university. She slept on the roof of her house. She drank carrot juice twice a week. She ate a sandwich every day.
He wrote about a little advertising man named Cholesterol, about a cleaning woman named Heidi, a child named Same, a dog named Complicity. And a forsythia plant that everyone just called, for laughs, Leviticus.
Lots of stories; dozens of stories; scores of ‘em. And he’d only begun.
He wrote one about a man who had no name who’d go to the public park across the street from the public library and just sit there under a tree. Occasionally--randomly--whenever he felt like it, he’d howl like a wolf--until he was arrested one day and taken into custody. He wrote another story about a woman with no name who would climb up into the lower branches of the huge sycamore tree in the same park and perch for hours, motionless, and then suddenly screech like an eagle--until she too was arrested and taken into custody.
He wrote about a character named Adam Soon who went to the polls on Election Day and then, suddenly realizing that voting for the President of the United States had nothing to do with voting for the President of the United States, he made a quick bee-line for home, tossing his little crumpled, stolen ballot into a dumpster in an alley beside a 7/11.
Then Ben Shadow took a break from all of his writing and lay down, exhausted, and went to sleep for three days without getting up, not even to go to the bathroom.
* * * * * * *
It was more than a month before he started to see the results of his stories: shopping for food one day at the food market, he watched in awe as the store manager hopped about in a panic, trying--unsuccessfully--to turn off the piped-in muzak system that someone had doctored up with a play list that included Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten, Ani Difranco, and Trent Reznor. He heard on the radio about a flash mob taking over a Wal-mart for ten minutes; he read in the paper about the removal of a church steeple; he saw--and then joined--a Critical Mass; he ate mushrooms; he smelled a rat; he read the news (oh boy!); he saw a white man who walked a black dog. And in the park, during his lunch-hour, he heard wolves and jackals and hyenas and eagles--and people--screaming, drowning out the sounds of the street traffic and the police sirens.
Then, two days after the November election, he heard people on the street talking about a guy who had been arrested during the night, in his own home, for allegedly writing on his ballot the name of Saddam Hussein for the office of President of the United States of America.
A week later, Ben Shadow packed his bags and typewriter and split, just hours before the police came to get him.