Hope you enjoy,
Quentin
Go West, Strange Man
“So, where are you headed?”
That was the last thing anyone had asked him before he got in his car, pulled out of the drive, and sped away. It was his neighbor. The slightly obnoxious man with a swollen gut and a comb-over had just gotten home from work and had seen him exiting his own house, dazed, numb, in a perpetual dreamlike state. The neighbor had called out to him.
“Hey there, stranger! Seems like I never see you any more! How are the wife and kids?”
“Fine” he replied automatically with the precision of a machine and the enthusiasm of a ghost. He had become so used to giving this answer that he still gave it, even though it was no longer accurate, and never would be. He then went back to ignoring the neighbor and walked up to his car, opening up the driver side door.
“So, where ya headed?”
The neighbor’s voice pierced his eardrums and just barely pulled him to the surface of reality. He processed the question that was just proposed to him and realized at that moment that he had no idea. Where was he headed? There was only one place that truly made sense to him anymore, and that, still, was barely any comfort at all.
“I’m…going west,” he muttered, just barely over his own breath. If the statement were any more lifeless, it would have been six feet under the ground. With that, he got into the car, buckled his seatbelt, turned on the car, and pulled out of the driveway. He could see the neighbor out of the corner of his eye. He could only make out a perplexed look on the neighbor’s face. He thought he heard the muffled question, “just want to see the sunset, huh?” but he couldn’t be sure. He slowly pushed down on the gas pedal and began to move forward. After he had pulled out of the neighborhood, driven down a country road, and finally pulled onto the highway, he heard something, something he’d heard before in a dream, perhaps. It was a small, stern voice calling out from the back of his brain. It was not friendly, yet it was not angry, just simply accusatory.
“Where are you really headed?”
“I’m going west. To see the sunset.”
“Why? It’s just a sunset. It won’t change anything.”
“It might.”
“You know it won’t. Where are you really headed?”
“I’m going west.”
“Why?”
“To see the sunset.”
“Why are you really going west?”
This voice, it was coming from reason, his conscience, or everything about himself that he hated. Regardless of where it was coming from, it was starting to drive him a little crazier than he was already feeling. Every answer he gave could not satisfy the demands of the little voice. It was hungry for something, but he could not figure out what. Maybe if he couldn’t answer the voice, he could at least escape it. He began to retreat into his memory, thinking he could lose the interviewer inside his brain. The car was being driven, yet he wasn’t the one driving it; it was somebody else. He ran as far as he could into the confines of his memory, hoping he could escape the question he didn’t know the answer to. Unfortunately, he was only greeted by even more questions, some of which he knew the answer; others, he still didn’t know.
“Do you know what fusion is?”
His gaze passed over the blank expressions of the students in his classroom. He was a lighthouse of enthusiasm shining over a sea of lackluster faces. With his arms spread wide, he began to fervently tell the mass of students all about fusion, the dangers of fusion, and how people still haven’t found out how to keep fusion going. He was a science teacher at a prestigious boarding school going on 10 years now. He had become a part of the school, yet in the last couple of years, the school had tried to distance itself from him. Many believed that he was slowly losing his mind, but that wasn’t true. He had simply found his calling in life, to teach the youth of the school all about the mighty power of the sun.
He lectured with fevered passion, day after day, about everything that had to do with that great ball of gas floating in the sky. The sun had become his life. He could not explain it. One day, he looked up at the sun, and suddenly realized how important it was. He lived his life by everything that even remotely had something to do with the sun. It was important that these students realize that their entire existence depended on whether or not that giant star stayed in the sky. Faculty members at the school began to question his sanity, and a rumor about his termination began to trickle through the halls like noxious gas. But he did not give into these rumors. He knew he could never lose his job over something as trivial as a matter of opinion about the sun. Besides, whatever happened to him, as long as he had his wife and children by his side, he would not let fear of losing his job stop him from teaching what he believed.
That morning, after the disinterested students had flooded back into the hallways of the school, the principal strolled in, with a grim look set upon his face. Without ever changing his expression, he informed the man that the school had to let him go, they no longer saw him as fit to teach at the institution. He could finish out the rest of the week, but after that, the school expected him to be completely moved out. Even though he stood completely still, in front of the chalkboard, he felt like the floor had sucked him up and hurled him into a dark abyss from below. His insides had been sucked out with a vacuum and all of a sudden he had this chilling feeling of being completely numb. As his broken eyes filled with hurt, the principal could not even manage any sympathy. He simply looked into the man’s pupils and said:
“I don’t think you can blame me. I really don’t. I tried to warn you.”
There was a brief pause as a cloud of despair filled the room. The principal turned on his heel and walked out of the classroom. The man stood at the front of the classroom, staring into space for what felt like hours, yet was merely seconds. He then moved swiftly from his classroom to his office. He found a few boxes and began recklessly tossing everything he owned into their cardboard walls. He knew he could stay for the rest of the week, but he couldn’t bear it now. He had to get as far away from this place as possible.
“Where are you really headed?”
He was going straight home, even though he didn’t want to. He knew he would have to face his family with the news, but he also knew he would have to tell them eventually. He also knew that they were his last true hope on the planet, and if he couldn’t turn to them in a time of need, whom else could he turn to? When he got home the first thing he noticed was that the door was kicked in. He was still in shock from what had happened to him that morning, but he was still present enough to know that something was very wrong. He bolted inside to find his family.
The second thing he noticed was that the television in the living room was missing. Obviously he had recently become the victim of a robbery. He didn’t care about this though. Just as long as he found his wife and children safely hiding away, he didn’t care about anything else. He jumped halfway up the flight of stairs in what felt like a single bound.
The third thing he noticed was his wife’s feet lying at the top of the staircase and the bloodstained carpet leading down the steps. He stopped dead in his tracks. He was completely frozen in place. Then he fell like a giant tree back down to the ground floor. When he came to, he looked up and could still see his wife’s feet at the top of the stairs. He had found his wife, and now he was too afraid to look for his children. Somehow, in the back of his mind, he knew their fate already.
As he stared up at the feet of his dead wife, everything he believed in began to melt out of his brain and trickle down his ears. All of a sudden, everything was meaningless. There was no value in anything anymore. Literally, anything could happen, and it would not faze him at all. He used to have a dream in which he drove westward toward the sun, and he reached out to touch that ball of gas that he had always loved. Now that dream was nothing more than a pile of sand. What good was the sun? Suddenly, he stood up. He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew that he had to get out of that house right that instant.
“Where are you really headed?”
The question finally brought him back to the real world, and he suddenly became aware of the fact that he was swerving through lanes. An insensitive driver behind him blared his horn for a long time until the man finally regained control of his vehicle. The voice at the back of his head continued to nag him incessantly. The man cried out in desperation. He began to think of a million different questions he could ask himself.
“Go west to find freedom?”
“Do you know what fusion is?”
“What are you planning on doing if you ever make it to the sun?”
“Do you know how dangerous that is?”
“Do you know what the problem with fusion is?”
Yet no matter what he did, he could not put out the fire of the one question he simply could not answer.
“Where are you really going?”
The man repeated the process of asking himself questions from his past, knowing they wouldn’t do anything to make him feel better. The numbness of his pain would never leave him, even if he finally found the sun. He kept asking himself the questions until they became tattooed in his mind, until he knew of nothing else to do. He forgot the answers to the questions. He simply asked them to drown out his past. He had been driving for hours now. He pulled off the highway onto a secluded road going nowhere and continued driving, muttering the questions to himself over and over again until he had built a completely structured routine. Suddenly, he heard a question he hadn’t heard in what felt like ages.
“So, where are you headed?”
This time, he had an answer ready. It was simple, yet it was the best he could come up with.
“I don’t know.”
