Over the Rainbow (work-in-progress)

Tim was born and spent the majority of his life in the perfectly 90 degree square municipality of Ranson. Like most during their pre-pubescence, he had tunnelled banal delusions of adventure, which often found their way into the real world through scrapes, bruises, ripped curtains, smashed windows and bottles and lightbulbs, and burn marks.  As he grew older, though, along with most other boys, he came to the conclusion that participating in any outside activity besides sports was “really, really gay” and took to other things.  Due to his aversion to soccer, which became the only permitted sport on the schoolground after someone broke their leg doing pull-ups on the basketball hoop, he took to playing video games with the other undesirables in the detached portable behind the school.

Tim mixed in well with the others, until the program was cancelled after two students were caught using the drawing tools on the game consoles to draw sex organs.  Tim and the other undesirables remained friends for a little while, but as they walked around the yard and saw all the bigger groups around them, all aside from Tim gradually fanned-out and began to bad-mouth one another in an effort to gain the favour of the different groups.

Inspired by his classmate, Fyodor, Tim took up reading fiction.  Moraless pulp paperbacks at first, but eventually to deep, explorative works of literature, where the covers were bare, he could only understand about half the words, and the authors’ names were bigger than the titles themselves.  This interest, like every one of his others, didn’t last long either; since Tim’s neighbour, Mrs. (or I guess Ms. now) O'Donahue, a woman from the gated neighbourhood four miles uptown who had been cut-off from her affluent parents for her choice in husband, adopted a pitbull after her said husband skipped town.

“You fucking men, all you fucking think about are your fucking selves, you never have any fucking compassion for any-fucking-one fucking else!”  She jabbed her long neon green nail into the fleshy bridge of Tim’s nose, “I’m sorry my and my fucking daughter’s fucking safety is disrupting your patriarchal bullshit!”

Tim, his eyes crossed upon the nail, said flatly, “Ms. O’Donahue, you have my deepest sympathies. I understand your concern for your safety— I really do— I simply ask you try to keep an eye on the dog. It’s barking all day and snarling and running at us whenever it’s outside, and it’s constantly walking in the middle of the road…. And nobody on our side of the street has received mail for weeks.  It’s only natural for you to have Abby’s safety on the mind.  Just please be aware of the dog.”  

“… Fuck you.“  Mrs. O’Donahue forced her nail down the fleshy bridge of Tim’s nose, leaving a 1/16-inch deep crater.  Tim released an effeminate blitz of detached expletives, undulating in regular decibels appropriate to the pulsation around the new oblong of raw flesh. He cupped his hands over the wound as he dramatically fell to his knees as someone with a generally low pain tolerance would dramatically fall to his knees at the slightest bit of pain and then fell backwards down the porch steps after Mrs. O’Donahue slammed the door against the top of his head. 

For a while, he read in the park.  Then one day while on his way home, as a series of low-hanging black clouds made their way over Ranson, the unnamed pitbull panicked at the distant cracking of thunder and latched onto his leg.  He spent two months on crutches, but when he was out of the hospital, 3 days later, the O’Donahues had vacated the house and put it on the market.  Fiction kind of lost its touch after that.

It’s very easy to look at somebody like Tim and think of him as cowardly, or ignorant to the world around him.  But Tim was perfectly aware of himself and the actions of others.  You see, Tim was not an airhead, but a devoted follower of the Golden Rule and cursed with an antagonistic foresight.  For example, while debating on whether or not to call animal control after the nail-nose incident, he imagined the van pulling into Ms. O’Donahues driveway, he knew yelling would ensue, but taking Ms. O’Donahue’s current funk into account, he couldn’t ignore the possibility of a scrimmage breaking out, and then Ms. O’Donahue would very likely be detained and possibly charged.  And while that thought in and of itself was rather incentivising, he couldn’t just 86 the image of the 8-year-old he used to babysit being left to her own devices or being placed inside a foster home.  It didn’t sit right with him.

Throughout highschool, he tried new things when the opportunities became available. He took an interest in colonial history, but the books were eventually pulled from shelves in stores and libraries, and many websites found themselves heavily edited by cultural advocates who claimed that much of the original texts were insensitive.  He went on walks of considerable lengths in the forested areas of town until a new suburb was developed in the way of his route and a tall wrought-iron fence was mounted around the perimeters.  He purchased a guitar from a pawn shop that fell apart after he learned “Smoke on the Water.”  

In mid-April of his senior year, he and his classmates were marshalled into the school’s gymnasium for the annual college/university fair.  He flippantly swiped a brochure off the foldable table in the entrance and intermittently read the columns out of order as he did an oblique walk around the room.

He was taken aback when an unfamiliar small fuzzy spot began to develop in his stomach.  All of a sudden, he envisioned himself gleefully tapping his way down the hall of some mediaeval probably Oxford esque building riddled with like Roman pillars laced with construction-papered posters for glee clubs, student council, slam poetry nights, tutoring gigs, amateur bands at the dry clubs adjacent to campus; people sitting on the marble steps in the foreground in threes, speaking with rigorous conviction and moving their hands about like how he thought intelligent people do.  He had that childlike giddiness where your mind says: maybe I could be like that too, but avoids any forethought into the challenges that you would have to go through to be like that too.

He pulled a 180 and walked with a latent sense of vigour to the recruitment desk.  This was gonna be a fresh start for Tim: he’d be in a whole new environment, he could meet new people, he could grow a ponytail, give himself a nickname, wear man-rings, experiment with bisexuality, wear feathered hats on odd days, wear denim everything, do intravenous drugs– not like a crazy amount just enough to know what it’s like–, nobody there’d know him and he could completely rework himself into the idealised version of himself previously thought unreachable.  But as Tim got closer to the recruitment desk, he remembered that he was in the real world; and all the hassle and finances he would have to manage to just maybe get in seemed frivolous. And he wasn’t even completely sure he’d like the courses, maybe the teachers would be incompitent and ruin what fun could be had, maybe he wouldn’t be accepted into a dormitory and then he wouldn’t be able to even attend, and if by chance he happened to fail a course he’d have to pay to retake it. 

Calling bullshit on that, he pulled another 180 and scooted his way through the girdled booths to the navy recruiter edged into the far corner. 

“You realise you’ll need your parents permission if you wish to enlist now?” The recruiter said as he tried to dig a particularly nasty splotch of black stuff out of his left thumbnail with the clasp of his pen. 

Utmost conviction: “I can get it, sir, that’s no problem.”

With his elbow, the recruiter reached for a sheet of laminated line-paper and read from it.  “Now, you are aware that you will be required to go through a medical examination, extensive and strenuous training, varying from each position of course, and that you will likely have little free time?  This isn’t like the movies.  It ain’t just a free hand out to delinquents.”

“I am aware sir.  And like I said, no problem.  I choose the navy because…” Tim faked an incoming sneeze, and during those precious seconds he soldered a biography, new principles, and humble bullshit into a response that would harden the nipples of any low-libido’d recruiter: “all my life… I’ve always felt like I was meant to do,,, something.  Something meaningful.  Now, I could go to college or university, a trade, or any of the other places the people my age are flocking to… but I just don’t see the point.  Sure, I might be able to help a few people here and there, but if I get in here I know–” snicker “I… I know I can help people.”

The recruiter looked up from his nail.  “I like the sound of that.  Is that from something or did you just think of that?” 

“That was all me, sir.”

“Really?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, well, well.”  The recruiter fetched one of the forms he’d been using to balance the leg of his chair and handed it to him.  As Tim was filling it in, he asked, in faux indifference, “On a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate your overall competence in literacy?”

Tim didn’t look up from the form.  “Well… I don’t really read much anymore.  Maybe about a 6 or a 7 if I’m being completely honest.”

The recruiter’s loose face muscles contracted inward, forming a chapped, sharp-edged, toothy smile.  “Holy god.  You actually know what literacy means?”

“Yes, sir.” 

“Well gee…. Now, how old did you say you are again?”

“17 ½.  I’ll be 18 in September.”

The recruiter snatched the form from Tim and crossed out the D.O.B box. “Did you mean 18 ½ and that you’ll be 19 in September?” 

“... Sure.”

“Beautiful.”  The recruiter vigorously filled in each of the small boxes along the form, tore off the perforated bottom half of the sheet and handed it to him.  “Okay, okay, okay! Tim, my friend, you are to be transported to Camp Ochikiwana July 14!  A preliminary thank you for your service.  The service needs more people like you.”

“… That’s it?”

“That’s it!”

“... Thanks.”

And that was that.