Seven Square Miles
It’s been a while. Good to see you. Six days late, but I’ve decided I’ll toss my hat into the NaNoWriMo fiction ring. What follows are two brief narratives. They’ll be a part of a series of stories I hope to write. Read on, if you wish. And yes: his name is Gary Oldman.
Gary Oldman washed his face and peered at the schlubby figure in the mirror. Without his glasses, he could tell it looked tired. It was also 49-years-old, overweight, balding in the back of the head and living alone in the basement of an 89-year-old grandmother of four in the Outer Sunset district of San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
He didn’t mind any of that. What he did mind was last night’s events and what it may mean for his very near future.
He had a pet. It was named Francis. Francis was a robotic arm jutting out of a metal base with a single small suction cup functioning as a hand. Francis would fetch when Gary told him to fetch, sleep when Gary told him to sleep and play when Gary told him to play — so long as everything took place within Francis’s reach. Francis also had eyes and sensors and the pieces and parts and know-how to interact with the things Gary would place in front of him — he even knew how to play chess, though poorly. Occasionally Francis would throw pieces in simulated frustration.
Gary also had a bed, a dresser, a fridge, a television — all the things you’d expect one to have in today’s society — even a mini dishwasher. He kept memorabilia from the places he visited in past years and past lives. He kept a stone arrowhead from when he was a part of the Sioux Nation. Over his bed, he hung a picture of his favorite Mexican bar — Tommy’s. Next to his bed, he kept a stack of books by Evelyn Waugh, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll and — only because the author was exceptional amongst the French — Alexandre Dumas.
Gary also had a 3D printer which he won in an obscure online contest. In reality, the contest was a front for gangsters to fence stolen monies through an anonymized digital currency known as Greenbukx. Greenbukx was invented by a man in Tokyo, Japan, who wanted to discover the best method of transferring money anonymously. He wasn’t criminal in nature. He just puzzled over how to create an untraceable currency and kept to himself, much like our erstwhile gangsters.
Erstwhile because, in most stories, those gangsters would’ve foreshadowed a future conflict. Typical plots dictate the gangsters, at one point, confront Gary. Gary, then, would be challenged to overcome those gangsters, somehow. If the author was particularly depressing, they’d write on how Gary’s life was slowly deteriorating towards an inevitable death or suicide.
Gary’s story isn’t either of those — though another character will suffer this predictable arch. Under the guiding hand of this writer, however, Gary turns out swell in the end. In fact, he turns out so well that he purchases the home he’s living just so Marcie, the 89-year-old grandmother of four who currently acts as Gary’s landlady, doesn’t have to depend on Gary’s income to make ends meet. It’s a happyish story of a fatish man who’s awkward, isolated and pleasant enough for most.
If you really need a conclusion for the gangsters in Gary’s arch it’s this: they didn’t care about the $10,000 printer Gary won. They cared about the $25 million all five of them would take home after compromising one of the world’s largest banks through the simplest of methods: posing as someone else. They did this by sending an email to a banking executive’s secretary. They posed as the exec — Jeffery O’Donald — who will bear the brunt of our sad, depressing arch and who will have an extensive relationship with these gangsters. Anyways, hidden in this email was a malicious file that would swipe all the passwords belonging to Jeffery and his secretary along with access to accounts numbering in the billions of dollars.
The gangsters didn’t take much because they didn’t need much, but also because they didn’t wish to attract the attention of the authorities. After siphoning, anonymizing and laundering the money, the gangsters raided Jeffery’s personal communications by logging onto his respective messaging accounts online. There they discovered that Jeffery and the secretary — Susan — were having an affair. Sometimes they’d watch, laughing, as the two traded explicit texts. Occasionally, one of them would get excited and jack off.
It doesn’t turn out well, in the end, for poor Jeffery. After losing his job, wife and mistress he decided to jump off of The Golden Gate Bridge — a suspension bridge connecting Marin County and San Francisco. It was built as as symbol of hope in a depressed era. It’s currently considered a suicide hot-spot. Jeffery would hit the San Francisco Bay just shy of terminal velocity. His jump was witnessed by five people: a sheriff’s deputy who tried to talk Jeffery out of jumping, two lovers who were walking across the bridge from Sausalito, and two men in a fishing vessel who saw Jeffery’s body hit the water right in front of them.
The two men and their captain would fish Jeffery’s body out of the bay and contact the proper authorities. They performed basic medical procedures and were surprised to find that Jeffery had not, in fact, died. Jeffery was convinced he did. He was also convinced that he was reborn as a fisher of men. His first words after his rebirth were “sorry about that.”
Gary and Jeffery’s timelines do overlap at some point in our story. Neither of them will recognize each other. They don’t become friends, they don’t save each other and they don’t find some sort of solace in each other’s existence. In fact, they mildly inconvenience each other while waiting in line for ice cream at an upscale grocery store called “Bi-Rite.”
There’re a few other characters you should be aware of for the purposes of our set of stories, but they’re minor compared to Jeffery O’Donald and Gary Oldman. Their names are Andre Alavos, Jessica Wing, Harold Schumer, Jason Redwood and Bernie. They all have their own lives and their own passions and are just as real and complex as you and me. They all live within the seven-by-seven square miles of San Francisco though not all of them were born there. They’re all fairly nice people. Some of them will dislike each other. Others will get along splendidly.
They are, after all, human.
So that’s the situation as it stands: seven characters, a dozen or so stories and one city. Some of these stories will be absurd. Others, depressing with melancholy thrown in for good measure. Regardless, these are your stories as much as they are mine. For you, they may be meaningful or simply a throw-away read after browsing a half dozen webpages or so. For me, it’s a catharsis, an exorcism. Whatever it is, it’s aping Kurt Vonnegut and hopefully a few other admirable authors. Maybe some Tom Wolfe with a dash of Flannery O’Connor. Perhaps a pinch of John Gardner with a swirl of Joan Didion. Regardless, it’s not an original work though I can wholeheartedly promise I’ve created each story on my own. It’s a smattering of different things melted into a familiar environment.
And, really, that’s pretty okay. Scout’s honor.
