The Cancelled Man

He talks to no one. To him, the world feels empty, post-apocalyptic, a variation of Hell, an occasional feeling of Heaven whenever he has enough money for two coffees and McDonald’s. He doesn’t believe in the afterlife; he believes everything is right here on earth, the best and worst of it. He moves through his days and nights feeling like a ghost, dead but not completely invisible, inconsequential. He doesn’t have a phone. A court order bans him from using social media. He never claimed to be innocent, even when he was. He feels like he’s guilty of everything. He never eats salad or vegetables. He lives on Diet Coke and gas station food. He gets news from the New York Post, The New York Times, The Daily News, and any other papers he finds lying around. They all feel the same to him – grim, full of comedy and dread. He lives with his grandma, in a small apartment, but he feels like he lives alone. He has a make-believe pet dog named Rick. Some days Rick’s a poodle, other days a Great Dane, but he’s always there. He carries around a large backpack full of notebooks. The notebooks contain his life story. Over 1000 handwritten pages. He calls the book The Survivor Scroll. He walks around in the woods harboring bleak feelings and dark thoughts. He sits on benches, on the edges of parks, and his presence scares people, or at least he thinks it does. “There are others like me out there,” he thinks, “other survivors.” He tells himself he has no control over anything. Sometimes he tells himself he hasn’t done anything; it’s all been done to him. 

And sometimes he remembers things. The memories come back like muscle spasms. He remembers his mom hitting him. He remembers his mom hugging him. He remembers his father not saying much, long-faced in his chair with the TV on. He remembers the secret email account he used to correspond with his grandfather who was doing a life sentence. He remembers the day the cops came and confiscated his computer. He doesn’t like to remember the months after that. 

He makes up memories too. He has a memory of a friend he never had. They grew up as neighbors. They grew up in a town that doesn’t exist. They grew up without parents, religion, sin, or guilt. He imagines them climbing trees, walking through forests, playing sports. He imagines they’ve been friends forever, but in all his made-up memories of them they are twelve maybe thirteen years old, and they never grow older. He was thinking of this friend the other day. He imagined them riding bikes through a graveyard laughing. He was sitting on one of his park benches when the memory came to him. He was sitting there unsure what day it was. The leaves had changed from green to yellow to orange. He never liked how the season is called Fall. He prefers his own world, where no one and nothing has a name.