District 4 | Arden Pope | FIN
Dec 30, 2014 18:01:13 GMT -5
Post by Bishop on Dec 30, 2014 18:01:13 GMT -5
"But everyone knew that your gaze was my home."
Arden Aldous Pope
nineteen
district IV
nineteen
district IV
The tweed jacket dwarfed me, engulfed me like a whale might swallow a bluefin without a second thought; like a liar might tell his falsehoods so repeatedly that it becomes the swallowable truth. Still uncomfortable, the feeling of suffocation isn't too far of a grasp, but survivable.
"Was this his actual...?"
"Yes." she replied uneasily, watching me slip her father's watch unto my wrist and step into his large, faux-leather shoes. Years of wear carved foot-shaped trenches into the soles. Ronald Mulligan was a hefty man and I rattled about in his shell of corduroy and plaid. From the photographs his daughter gave me of him I could swear she only hired me because I'm cheap. Where he had brawn I had scrawn, hardly anything more than bone and marrow and blood kept running on nicotine alone. He was the color of a summer sun's last rays and I'm as pale as the whites of Death's eyes. He was a vision of health, I could be the poster child for some primary school's "SAY NO TO DRUGS" campaign. I've got lakes of silver leaking out beneath my eyes from all the 3AM thoughts keeping me awake at night. My nights are devoted to overthinking about the if's, and she's, and why's. and things I can't. My mornings are best spent oversleeping.
"Mom," his daughter, my daughter calls gently to the fragile sigh of the woman sitting in the hospital bed. She leads me into the room by the hand, "Dad's here."
I'm St. Augustine's Geriatrics Department's very own rent-a-lover. For the senile and senseless, I'm a weekly parting gift. Jeanine Mulligan looks up at me with teary eyes stained with smoky cataracts, "Ronald?"
I look nothing like Ronald Mulligan, Beloved Husband and Father. But for most women like Jeanine Mulligan, the entire world is seen through storm-colored lenses. I am nothing like Ronald Mulligan, or Terence McVoy, or Ewan Potter, or any and all of the long lost lovers I portray each week. All of the men so long gone the women I spend my afternoons with only identify me by pet names and references to dates on the pier and their favorite old songs. Tender words only John or James or Jacob could possibly utter. I am a professional pretender. I feed off of facade. I am Arden Pope, beloved by no one. Just a lonely bastard.
"Yes, my love. How are you?"
"Ronald! You stupid-- you stupid old boy you--! Why did you leave? How could you leave me alone? Here? I was so alone!"
Because if you tell a lie long enough it begins to become the truth. And the horrible, hideous, dirty rotten truth is, my dear Jeanine, that there are days I keep forgetting if it's our Emily that just got married this October or John Rigby's. Is our anniversary on summer solstice or is it mine and Dorea Hilton's? Coming to St. Augustine's everyday and living thirty different lifetimes has aged me centuries. I have three thousand new worries that aren't my own that I keep in the faults etched across my brow and THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T PLAY GOD. This is why we aren't allowed to resurrect past paramours from the dead because only in graves can troublesome minds be put to rest. I don't feel nineteen. I feel like Atlas, bearing the burdens of Hades' army. I feel ancient, and I mourn. Each. And. Every. One. Of. You. When you all pass on no one plays my false wife. No one gives me a single word of comfort because I'm fake and unfeeling. I'm never invited to the funerals. I'm the youngest widower I know, nine "wives" laid to rest.
"How could you leave me, Ronald?"
"Why do you do this to yourself, Arden?" Julia asked me, Norah Greenfield's granddaughter and my "granddaughter", as she started to put her shirt back on. I took a long drag on a low-tar, with one arm beneath my head, and rolled my eyes.
"It's easy money," I lied. She looked back at me over her shoulder as she shrugged on her jeans. "Liar."
"I'm sorry, Jeanine, my love, I'll never leave your side again." I lied. Lie after lie after lie. But I don't regret a single lie I've told, not a single shred of remorse. A mistake made twice is a decision.
My foster home gave me a cupcake the morning of my 18th birthday. They kicked me out into the streets with a blanket and a toothbrush at noon.
"Oh, Ronald," she murmurs into my chest as we embrace. Her bony, spindled fingers grope at the sides of the twee coat, "Have you been eating? You're so thin..."
"Doesn't it mess you up, Arden? Lying to all those faces, forging all that... all that love?"
"My sweet boy," Jeanine Mulligan and I rock gently in the center of her hospital room to the sounds of some scratchy ballad playing over the intercom about pretty girl.
I don't think people ever truly love you. Or maybe they do, but I've just been playing this whole game of life really, really wrong. People love interpretations of me. People love translations of myself I made up for them, editions of myself they construed in their minds. Nobody could ever love a liar, a professional pretender. Nobody could ever love a stranger, someone they don't know. And I don't even know myself 9/10 nights.
"I'm right here, my beautiful girl," I whisper into a head the color of the very clouds that filled it.
"I never said I wasn't messed up," I grin devilishly at Julia so that she crashes on top of me and doesn't realize I'm falling apart with her eyes closed and lips on mine.
People only want the easy versions of me, the easy parts of me to love.
codeword: odair
