The Saddest Thing

yeah, so if I’m depressed i guess i might as well take it out on some fictional characters instead of my friends or myself

this story is inspired by this comic

The Saddest Thing
it would have been a compliment to call the place a dive. it was a bar for vagrants and criminals. the sort of place you’d think you’d only see in a movie. bartender all keeping a shotgun behind the bar, chairs rickety from being broken in fights and then glued back together, guy sitting out front to watch for cops. henry had spent many an evening in a dark corner of this place, trying to get drunk. he knew all the regular patrons, though they didn’t know him — no one really knew henry. and not many people came to the bar other than the regulars. it was a place that people avoided.

so when the door swung open and a waif-like young woman walked in, people noticed. many eyes were on her as she walked to the bar. inevitably, one of the drunk thugs she passed reached out and grabbed her. immediately, a move like lightning, a quick glint of metal, and a cry of surprise and pain. the drunk held a napkin to the cut on his cheek. several people laughed; a few applauded. she was very quick, and they were impressed.

at the bar: “what can i do for you, missy?” / “just a shot of tequila. whatever you have. and a place to sit where i won’t be bothered.” / “four-fifty. and you can sit over by that weirdo in the corner. he don’t talk to no one.”

her voice was surprisingly deep and raspy. henry briefly considered that she might be a sex-changed man, but dismissed the thought. she came over to him and sat down. he saw that she was carrying a small white suitcase. it looked like a little kid’s suitcase. she drank her shot. he took a swig from his bottle of whiskey.

some time later, three men approached henry’s corner. one of them was the drunk who had grabbed the girl earlier. henry recognized the other two; they were friends of the first guy. one of them spoke: “hey lassie, looks like you hurt my friend here a little while ago. we’ve got an idea for how you can apologize. why don’t you come follow us out back?” / “fuck off.” / “i’m sorry you feel that way.”

the guy took a step forward, but henry stopped him. “you boys just forget this and leave her alone.” / “this ain’t any of your business, you half-wit drunk motherfucker!” the girl was also incensed. “i can take care of myself, thank you very much!”

the big guy laughed at her defiance. henry told her “no one else in this bar is going to stop them from raping you. they just won’t care.”

she was unimpressed. the big guy moved toward her. as he reached out to grab her, again her arm moved like a striking snake. the man didn’t even try to avoid the knife. she left it buried to the hilt in his right biceps. he laughed at her again and grabbed her by the shoulders. she struggled, but she couldn’t break free of his grasp. “help!”

henry laughed. “changed your tune, eh?” he stood up. “put her down.” / “don’t make us hurt you too, little man.”

thirty seconds later, the three men lay sprawled on the ground, unconscious. the bartender emerged from the bar and dragged them each in turn to the door to throw them out. henry returned to his seat. he didn’t even look at the girl. he drained his bottle of whiskey.

“you drank half of that bottle since i came in here.”

he nodded.

“it started out full this evening.”

he nodded.

“that empty bottle on the floor — that’s yours too.”

he nodded.

“that’s impossible. you drank two liters of whiskey in one evening and you don’t even look drunk.”

henry laughed.

“i’m cursed.” / “cursed?” / “yeah. cursed. just like you, but worse.” / “just like me? you mean … ? but how did you know?”

henry didn’t answer this.

“but my arm isn’t a curse! it’s wonderful! i’m so much better off with it than i was with my natural arm!” / “perhaps for you it is not a curse.”

she looked at her arm for a minute.

“i still don’t understand.”

henry sighed. “you couldn’t possibly understand. people in this place, they can’t understand. you know what it is to suffer. i can see it. you know what it means to have nothing, no possessions, no hope. but i have seen much worse. i have had everything. all i ever thought i wanted, i earned for myself. i achieved all of my dreams. and when i had finally climbed the last peak, when i stood atop the world in glory, at last i realized that i was no better off than when i started. all those things, they meant nothing. i realized the terrible truth: in my quest for perfection i had lost all connection with other people. i had turned myself into a soulless machine. i had everything, but i had nothing.

“in anger and despair i threw it all away. i hated myself. and no one was there to help me. no one to care for me. and now i am one of you. i have nothing. nothing but the ability to beat the crap out of wise guys like them, and the inability to drown my sorrows in booze.”

in jest, she replied, “sounds like a good case for suicide.”

henry laughed again. “that’s what i thought too, back then. but i can’t kill myself! in my infinite youthful folly, i clung tightly to optimistic dreams. immortality! and not the dreadful immortality of jonathan swift’s struldbrugs, but eternal youth! who could resist the allure? but on that day, the day when i achieved that which i thought was the greatest thing a man could ever achieve, the day when i realized that i had thrown my life away in pursuit of things of no value, at last i recognized the horrific extent of my curse. little miss wanderer, i am not simply cursed. i am cursed for eternity!”

“are you serious? you can’t die?”

“oh, i suppose i could die. you probably couldn’t kill me if you tried, but there are certainly ways that i could die. hell, i could go hijack a space shuttle and fly myself into the sun!”

“but you said you can’t kill yourself…”

“right. i can’t. there are some things i can’t do. i can’t kill myself, i can’t kill other people, i can’t rape. and it’s pretty hard for me to hurt people or damage other people’s property.”

“you say you ‘can’t’ as if you have no free will.”

“it’s kind of like that.”

she didn’t reply, but she obviously wanted further explanation. however, instead of giving any, henry went up to the bar. the bartender handed him a bottle of whiskey. henry returned to his seat and took a swig from the bottle.

“don’t you pay?”

“i paid in advance.”

“do you drink this much all the time?”

“pretty often. if i drink fast enough, i do get a bit drunk, and then sometimes i forget how much i hate myself.”

“but… that’s a lot of booze! isn’t it expensive?”

“money is nothing to me.”

she laughed. “you’ve overcome all of the basic problems of life. but instead of relaxing in comfort, you spend your nights in this hell-hole and waste your money on cheap booze?”

“i’d be no happier on a comfortable couch in front of a huge hd tv with a glass of dom perignon in my hand than i am right here. being around other people whose lives suck is a little bit comforting, in a perverse way. misery loves company, right?”

“well if you have everything you want, why not share some of your wealth with people like us!?”

“that was my original intention, actually. i thought, ‘i’ll become rich and powerful so that i can help others!’ such an idealistic fool. too bad i never met bill gates when i was younger. he could have told me that even if you’re the richest or most powerful man in the world, people still don’t care about you. they’ll appreciate your money, sure. but they don’t really care. and i realized that i had spent my whole life up till then, i had given up my humanity, just so that a large number of people could think of me as useful. i thought i’d transcend the limitations of the human form — and i was right! i transcended the human limitation for self-hatred!”

the girl rose and returned to the bar. she handed the bartender her glass and another 4.50. as he poured her
drink, he said “you been talkin’ to that dude for a while. never seen him talk to anyone before.” / “he’s weird.” / “i’ll say! he really beat the shit out of those three guys. i didn’t even know it was possible to kick someone like that! like a in fuckin’ jet li movie!” / “yeah.”

she returned to her seat with the drink.

“you’re ridiculous. you say you achieved everything you wanted, realized it wasn’t what you wanted after all, and then what? you give up? and you say that people like me can’t possibly understand your pain. what pain? of getting everything you want and then wanting more?”

henry didn’t seem perturbed by her accusation.

“You think I didn’t try? For years I tried. People always wanted to know me. They pretended to like me. But they just wanted to take advantage of my generosity. It’s just like I said before. I succeeded materially. Emotionally? I failed miserably. I couldn’t figure out how to get people to view me in that way. I tried keeping the truth about myself secret, but this didn’t work either. Then almost no one had any interest in me. It was virtually impossible for me to make friends. And when I did, they’d inevitably find out the truth, and then they’d be horrified and disgusted, or they would start to view me like the others, a source of wealth and power, or they would be upset that i had kept the secret. Nothing works!

“And no. My pain isn’t about getting what I wanted and then wanting more. It’s about playing the game of life, thinking I had won, and the finding out at the last move that I had in fact lost miserably. It’s about expectations. If you’ve been losing since you were little, losing more is nothing new.”

The girl scowled. “You’re an ass. You think it hurts more to throw something away and then realize you threw it away than to have it taken from you? You think you hate yourself more because you’re directly responsible for what you’ve become than if you, you, oh! I can’t put this in words, but you don’t know what has happened to the rest of us so you can’t say that what happened to you was worse!”

“What happened to you, then?”

“When I was seven years old, I came down for school one day. My parents were both at the breakfast table. I still remember the words they said to me. My mother said, ‘Sarah, you’re an ugly little girl. None of your classmates like you. You’ll never be pretty and you’ll never amount to anything. As far as your father and I can tell, you’re absolutely worthless.’ Then my father took me by the hand and led me to the front door. He opened the door and my suitcase was on the porch. He led me out, and he said ‘Goodbye, Sarah.’ Then he went back in and closed the door.”

Henry sat for a moment in thought. Then he said, “that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” He stood up and walked out of the bar.

Sarah contemplated her experience for a few moments. Then she noticed that Henry hadn’t taken his bottle of whiskey with him. She picked up her suitcase and looked through her meager possessions as she finished the half-liter of drink. When she was done, she rose. She didn’t pack up her bag. She left it on the table as she walked out of the bar. No one stopped her to tell her that she had forgotten it. She drifted across the parking lot and toward the superhighway. She used her mechanical right hand to rip the barbed wire which prevented people from getting onto the road. Cars and trucks whizzed past at 150 miles per hour. She didn’t have to wait long before a big freight truck came barreling along in the rightmost lane.

It was years, however, before Henry finally found a loophole in the computer program that forbade him from destroying himself.

————-

im tired. i’ll probably write something else tomorrow morning. maybe i’ll write another installment of the ol’ Darius & Hyacinth story, or maybe I’ll write something new. maybe it won’t suck either. right. i wish.