MOTAC (prologue)

Pubs must have lost something along the way, in their evolution. Promises of grit and noir were bait-and-switched with plastic and sterility, each face and facet nauseatingly interchangeable. Such non-descripts were crowding the bar tonight, feverishly vomiting their frustrations onto the televised sport. It seemed to be the most important game of the day –the one with the ball on the field. The frenzy made suitable white noise, and even served to benefit Richard Shepherd, who preferred the booths in the back, where you’d have to exert an effort of some kind to actually see the television. He sat down and removed his coat with the larger-than-he-was-comfortable-with lapels, and pulled up the sleeves of his sweater. He could feel beads forming on his brow already. The winter outside couldn’t penetrate the fat American fervor that was Richard’s favorite (read: closest) pub. The waitress that had served him some thirty times—but still failed to recognize him—stopped by and offered to give him whiskey in exchange for money. He agreed, and pulled a medium sized notebook from his jacket before folding it neatly next to him and turning to the last written page. Tonight he was compiling a list of writers that he felt owed him something. It was the end of his resentment. It was the end of trying and failing at task after task, goal after obstacle, after end after end. It was the end. Again. Whatever that meant.

Upon returning home—to this dimension, at least—Richard’s life had swiftly fallen apart. Never once had an author ever prepared him for the return journey. Like all British children, he had grown up on fantastic tales of travelling betwixt dimensions to right wrongs, assert yourself, grow a pair, etc. When his father was transferred to an American branch of the forensic technology firm he worked under, little Richard’s fears of leaving behind all he knew was counter-weighed by an ephemeral portrait of Hollywood and New York, pieced together from fragments of film, novels, and other works of utter fiction; the spiritual successors of a proud British phenomenon: narrative analysis and experimentation. He was twelve then, and thin. Now he is twenty-nine, and barely tangible. The last time he was alive was around the age of nineteen. That was in 2016, which is relevant only in helping him to remember how old he is when filling out forms. When he was nineteen he wore glasses, and ran almost daily, and had a vaguely fetishistic attitude towards life. After all, he was a child, and the world was still largely theoretical. He could better contextualize the chaotic nature of life by haphazardly lumping its flecks of excremental beauty into one of two categories: sex, and death. It worked for him. It worked for America. America didn’t work, he thought—he had thought, but that only engendered resentment toward Britain for letting their supremacy slip away so easily –that was his favorite word once: easy. The problems of the world were simple ones, which even a cursory vein of rational thought could remedy in but a single generation of wiser, more tolerant and tech-savvy people. He was tragically nineteen.

Also nineteen, but to varying degrees of tragedy, were his mates Brad and Talia –the latter of which graciously gave herself to him in exchange for his patience and bespectacled compassion. Natalie Beatrix was his first American friend, love, and lover. She rescued him from that first year of public isolation and introduced him to Bradley Pencheck, who would proceed to fill many roles in Shepherd’s life: mentor, mate, comic relief, confidant, villain, etc. He’s dead now. Well, that’s simplifying it a little bit. It’s not so much that Shepherd’s best friend died when they were nineteen, as it is that Shepherd’s best friend stopped having ever existed at nineteen. For the past decade, up until tonight, it had been Shepherd’s all-consuming reason to solve this dilemma.

Having failed that, though, Shepherd had come to the decision that he had lived on enough borrowed time, and that a more permanent end was necessary. This was a few days ago. Since then, his last trouble to grapple with was whether or not to tie up his Earthly loose ends or to just simply die. His lists of writers, directors, musicians, and painters –they were just stalling tactics while he debated the pros and cons of writing letters to people, explaining one last time—to anyone whose patients he hadn’t depleted—why the last decade of his life was forfeited to a cause unique only to him. Now, there are no more books to read, interviews to watch, or leads to follow up on. What he and Brad and Talia had experienced was inimitable, and in his willingness to accept it, he had left the world behind, and could feel himself disintegrating –a fleck of ash from the end of the Earth’s cigarette. The people who’d caught wind of his story had long grown bored of even teasing him. He was just another manic citizen. He barely held down a gas station attendant job during the day, paid for what basically amounted to a broom closet with plumbing at night, but was still a bum, as far as anyone was concerned. His father was too wrapped up in his own self-inflicted money problems, and his mother was more or less dead already –his father’s financial ineptitude having got the better of them both until, when his mother took a sudden and unexpected turn into early Alzheimer’s, their existence became a balancing act of bills and processed food –not unlike his own situation, but he was in no position to help. The entire fiasco happened at the crest of his decade-long obsession with trying to rescue Brad and convince Talia to journey with him to this most unenviable condition.

Talia had gone into denial almost immediately. She disavowed Brad’s existence, insisting—even to Shepherd himself—that Brad was just a boy they knew in school, who’s fate had become only as obscure as every other kid they had gone to high school with and failed to find on the social network du jour. Rich refused to believe that her conviction was real –or even a psychological defense. She left him a week after the incident, when they returned to the here-and-now. He fought to keep her by his side, but the whole thing had been too big, and perhaps she knew that the only way to save her sanity was to forget. He no longer blamed her. After all, all he had to show for ten years’ worth of effort was alcohol abuse and an existence so thin that if pressed for proof of life, he could only point to the electric bill on his counter and the used tissues in the waste basket by his computer. Talia, on the other hand, was married. He knew because he had received an invitation to the wedding. It was preceded by three years of silence and must’ve been a hard decision for her to make. He considered going, to meet his replacement, but the wedding was early in the morning and he had slept in, having polished off a dangerous amount of scotch and whiskey the night before. Perhaps she had children now, or a career. Maybe she, in the universe’s infinite unfairness, had had a newer, grander adventure, comparable even to their shared journey into the collective unconscious of the world.

When the whiskey came, he ordered a second one, and set his notebook down. Three minutes later he was waiting for his second glass, and doodling a pornographic stick-figure scene atop his list of authors, complete with double-penetration and a cameraman torn between his filming obligations and having his anus licked by a stick-dog. It was supposed to be a razor-witted commentary on his disdain for the artistic community’s lack of responsibility taken for their radical expressions –or something, but was actually a drunken indulgence, fueled by his empty stomach and a sense of humor that—like the rest of him—had been denied its right to mature naturally.

After the second whiskey he stepped out to smoke, leaving behind his jacket and notebook. The rain had let up into the faintest definition possible, and the relentless gray of the sky deepened into the shadows of the city beyond. Clusters of store and traffic lights defined the horizon on an otherwise blank gradient canvas. Traffic noise supplanted the background chatter of the bar, but was far enough from the out-of-the-way tavern to retain an atmosphere of a passive resentment towards life. A bare-minimum effort to convince Rich’s drunken mind that he was still, in fact, on the Earth. The world had stopped caring for him ten years ago, and the shame of failure at that which he had gambled everything against was steadily growing heavier.

A faint rumbling travelled up his legs. A delivery truck was barreling down the road, about five seconds away. No one else was outside. The headlights were old, dim. Eight wheeler, thirty-ish miles per hour. Shepherd took a long drag, held it in, and stepped to the edge of the curb.