This is called a stop-life.
When life ceases to function ordinarily. When what is expected is superseded by the unexplainable. When everything acts in reverse or improperly.
I am walking down a path—a bike trail or pedestrian walkway—with no foreseeable endpoint. I see trees swaying, but there is no wind. Humans in the background are communicating but not using words. The skies are clear, but the Earth smells like rain. I do not know where I am going and do not feel anything.
A stop-life. The opposite of how life should work.
Some say it is the product of the human mind, like a post-traumatic delusion or psychosis. They need a definable basis, a way to rationalize it. They need to locate the exact cause, so it makes sense and give it a name, so it becomes real.
Stop-life is just a word that I invented so people could identify with it. With me.
So when my mother finds me walking and tells me that my best friend, Chase, is dead, she isn’t surprised when I shrug and keep moving.
I know realistically what I should have been feeling right now. How my mother is wringing her hands together like she’s trying to rub the skin off of them, her mouth quivering so maniacally she’s nearly unable to speak, expecting my face to cringe sourly in remorse but my expression remains dead. My legs keep moving.
Sometimes, people die. That’s all I can think.
Before I can gain ten steps closer to nowhere, my mother forces obstruction and asks, “How are you feeling?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I don’t know how I should feel.”
My mother’s palm cups her mouth, and she blows a fit of air into it. She backs away quietly, relinquishing herself as my barricade. I want to tell her that I am sorry, but there is no use. You cannot explain lack of feeling to someone when all they do is feel. So I just continue walking, and I keep observing things as they aren’t. My mind is a puddle that ripples inward, a flower that wilts before it blooms. I am not interested in life, death, or the inevitability of incurring both. So I just keep walking.
My family has a long history of depression.
My father’s father was a twin, and both my grandfather and great-uncle suffered from severe bouts with depression. They were never married and both were dead before my father could crawl. From what I’ve heard, my grandfather overdosed on antidepressants and my great-uncle knocked over a candle and was too weary to remove himself from the house burning around him.
My father also suffered from chronic depression, but it never seemed as severe. When he came home at night from work, he was able to kiss his wife on the cheek and tell her that he loved her. He went to church even, and believed in God and hope. He played his part with impressive sincerity and was a loveable, positive man, but I could always see in his eyes that something was always not quite right, not quite there. I guess that was the depression I was seeing, but I always had a feeling that he was never interested in playing the part. It wasn’t hard to gauge that he was unenthused, perhaps even resentful. No one should ever have to be an actor, not to everyone. My mother was very surprised when she shook him off the bed one morning and discovered that he had lost the ability to be alive.
My mother refused to admit that I was like my father, like my grandfather. She couldn’t suffer through another loss of that magnitude, so when I displayed signs of depression, she willfully ignored them. I never questioned her either, because I believed that she was right. What I feel is not depression. But my mother finally caved. I guess my response to Chase’s death was the last straw, the fatal shove to conviction.
So now I’m in therapy, counseling, whatever. The doctor looks professionally wired, stapled with a knitted vest swelling from his unreasonably large sternum. His eyes look as hollow shells through the thick lens of his glasses. His face evokes no emotion, a learned tool in dealing with patients. Some therapists like to connect with their patients; other’s like to study them. This guy is a shameless professor.
He begins asking me questions, expecting answers. He has one leg crossed over the other and his brow is serious. I respond with something, but to him, it is not an answer. He thinks that every question must have an answer. I see that every answer is already in the question.
So he asks me, “Why do you think you are here?”
And I say, “I am here.”
And he says, “Yes, but why do you think that is so?”
And I say, “Isn’t the fact that I’m here make the question ‘why’ irrelevant?”
“Not if you are curious. Are you curious?”
“Why should I be curious?”
“Are you curious about your curiosity?”
“No. I’m curious about your curiosity.”
He frowns and closes his shells, and the thin skin between them crinkles inward. He begins writing something on the clipboard in front of him and flips through papers, scheming for a diagnosis.
“It says here a friend of yours recently passed,” he finally musters. “How do you feel about that?”
“He’s dead,” I respond, and I see his eyes twitch in response, like the wind just hit him.
“I know that, but how does that make you feel?”
“I feel like he’s dead,” I tell him. “I don’t know how else I should feel.”
The doctor removes his glasses and his eyes shrink to a grain of salt. He writes briefly again on his clipboard and resolves, “Yes. You are definitely depressed. No two-ways about it.”
I am peeling leaves and eating fruits with my back propped by a brick wall when I come upon a boy who is interested in me. He is perfectly blonde with light bangs feathering his forehead, his eyes blue with promise and his skin browned by the sun. I’m interested in him as well because he seems perfect, and I can’t comprehend perfection. Not in this world.
He grabs me by the hand and pulls me from the wall that had been supporting me. He drags me a few yards off towards the playground and smiles as he begins utilizing the machinery around him. He crawls to the top of a slide and looks at me beckoningly before swimming down with the tips of his toes guiding him. I follow his silent suggestion and slide down as well. I don’t enjoy it, but I want to see the boy happy, so I continue. I slide down a couple more times and then proceed to glide down a long pole rooted in the ground from the top of the playplace. The boy starts to do so as well and laughs in unison with the pounding of his heart, and I guess I smile as well.
When I come across the monkey bars, I can’t hold my grip. I get a third of the way across, and then fall to the chips below. Chase runs over to me and says, “It’s okay, Owen. You’re okay.” I look down at my knee and see splinters of chips gently nailed in, and above them is a large scrape and dead skin peeling off. “You don’t bleed, but it’s okay,” Chase says to me, his arms tightly bound around my shoulders. “I won’t tell on you. It’s okay.”
My body shrugs. Chase loosens his grip, and I pull myself up, brushing dirt and chips off of my knees. My pale skin darkens beneath the dirt, dimming the powerful glow emitting from Chase. I stopped paying attention then. I walk back to my wall and nail myself against it for another five minutes before our 5th grade teacher reports us back to the classroom. Chase doesn’t say a word.
I walk down my hallway, and I can hear my mother slicing onions in the kitchen. After dinner, she says, I’m to start my medication to subdue the depression. I tell her that it’s not depression, but she refutes that I’m only 17 and not in the right mind to make that call. As I walk, I brush up against the wall and inadvertently ram the family portrait, sending it spiraling down to the carpet and landing flat, facing upward. I go to pick it up, but I stop mid-lean. My eyes glean over my father, at how he’s smiling, standing upright, his arm around my mother, his fingers tightly clasping her shoulder’s tip, his teeth glowing. Everything seems normal—happy even—except his eyes. Even there, I can see how they do not match his disposition, how they never did. The way they sag when the rest of his anatomy exudes proudly, happily. Beneath them, he is growing dark pockets, digging deeper into his cheeks. His brow never creases, nor arches. His art is willing charm, but he cannot hide his eyes.
My mother calls from the kitchen, “Owen, is everything okay? I heard a noise.”
“Yes. It’s okay. I knocked down the picture in the hallway.”
I lift the frame back up to the wall and allow the nail to receive it. As the hook pins the eye, I look down and see a small, brown notebook, one that must have been placed behind the portrait and fell during the airstrike. The cover is irredeemably worn and the pages are stained yellow from years of abuse. I open it up, and my eyes grow wide. I do not know how one feels when they are shocked, but this is the closest that I have ever come to it.
Inside, I see the words of my father and my grandfather and my great-uncle. I see the gross handwriting of my great-great-grandmother, her sister, her uncle. I see the shoddy, abusive hieroglyphs of my great ancestors, all on my father’s side, spanning generations. Each entry seems to generate pages, with each author only contributing one entry to the entire journal. Their words—in all of their hollow conclusiveness—are poignant in a sad, detached way. They are devastating.
I read excerpt after excerpt, and I can sense my skin turning cold. Perhaps this is sympathy, but I can’t measure it. The way I am, and the way the pages describe these people, I can’t help but register a connection.
My great-great-great Uncle Reynolds writes, “The only way I know pain is that I don’t feel it. I can cut myself with the sharpest tool and never bleed. That’s the worst part.”
My great-aunt Melody writes, “I only know loneliness because I am around people.”
My great-great grandfather Randall writes, “Human emotion is not something that can be learned. Most people are blessed with it, and build their lives around it. It gives them a reason to live, to struggle. But what is the purpose of a cloud if it never rains? If feeling gives purpose, what does living matter to me?”
I skim nearer to the end of the text, to passages with relatives that I’m familiar with, and I read that they all felt the same way that I do now. Nothing. That everything seems backwards. That the only way they can experience anything is by not knowing how it feels.
A stop-life.
Each entry is signed and dated by the author. When I first began reading the journal I couldn’t tell, but as I come upon family members that are more memorable, I notice something else. The dates signed by my father and grandfather, my great-uncle, they wrote their entries the same day that they died.
I cannot help but know that I am doomed to be just another entry in this journal, another being without a sense of feeling, another life of contradiction, another stop-life.
My father wrote, “I tried.” That was it. That was all he needed to say. It was the shortest entry in the book.
Another endless street. Houses located on either side of the street are parallel, a symmetrical landscape. I squint hard to the horizon, to where the street just ends, to see if there’s anything beyond it. I’m convinced there isn’t. Chase and his girlfriend are walking next to me, holding hands because they love each other. My mother says that fourteen year old boys don’t know how to be in love. For whatever reason, that statement comforts me.
Chase knows, though. He once told me that he stopped finding other girls even remotely attractive the second he encountered Michelle, that he could imagine spending the rest of his life with her. I smiled and nodded, because I don’t know how else to react to an imbecile.
While walking towards the nowhere-horizon, Michelle asks me, “So why don’t you have a girlfriend, Owen?”
I don’t know how to react, so I tell her, “I don’t know. I just don’t want one.”
“Come on, Owen,” she retorts. “You are a fourteen year old boy, and you’re telling me you don’t want a girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Okay.”
“Why don’t you go out with Samantha? She seems interested in you.”
“She isn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t.”
“Ugh!” she exerts violently. “Chase, would you please talk to him? I think he needs help.”
In response, Chase takes the four points of his knuckles and slams them into my upper arm, forcing me to wince and fall back a bit. Michelle acts impulsively and relents her grip around Chase’s fingers. Chase grabs both of us by our forearms, as to keep us both from collapsing on either side of him. Then he grabs the sleeve of my t-shirt and pulls it up. He examines his target briefly before replacing the skin with fabric again.
“What did you do that for?” I demand of him.
“I wanted to test something,” he says, innocently enough. “It’s okay. I know now.”
“Test what?” Michelle briefs in his other ear.
“I wanted to see if his arm turned red if I punched it. It didn’t. I know now.”
“Is that strange?” I ask. “A lot of people don’t turn red if you hit them.”
“No. You’re right.” Chase says. “It’s nothing. I wanted to know and now I do. Let’s just keep walking.”
The next thing I know, I’m lying on a cot in an emergency room, my arm plugged up with tubes. Pumping fluid. Extracting fluid. I recall before blacking out, with minute sensitivity, feeling the manic desire to breathe contrasted with the overriding inability to do so. My mother is sitting next to me, her face flushed with emotion. She sees my eyes blink open and sighs heavily. Her pale arms thrust around my neck like two clamps around a pole, and she quickly pulls away as I start gasping for breath again.
“I’m so sorry, honey. I’m just glad to see that you’re awake.”
I don’t say anything. As soon as she notices that I’m awake, the ER doctor scrambles into my area and begins examining me. She asks me how I am feeling as she showers my eyes with a tiny flashlight. I tell her that I don’t feel any different.
“What do you remember?” the doctor asks as she molests my chest with a stethoscope.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I remember taking the antidepressants.”
“Yes,” the doctor responds. “We’re thinking they caused an allergic reaction, but we’re running more tests to be sure.”
Twenty minutes pass before the doctor returns to my quarters, her face flushed and crinkled. She pulls my mother aside briefly and whispers something into her ear before she is ready to speak with me.
“We’re not so sure that it’s an allergic reaction that caused this anymore,” she says hesitantly.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Have you ever been examined before?” she asks. “For school? For sports or anything? I don’t have records here that even indicate that you’ve ever had a physical exam.”
“Maybe when I was a child,” I respond. “I haven’t had one recently.”
The doctor takes out a file and begins skimming, her eyes nudging back and forth in a trance. She keeps clicking a blue pen in her hand. I was always told that this was a sign of anxiety.
“The problem is, your body is not structured like a normal human body,” she finally opens. “And not just irregularly—incorrectly.”
“What does that mean?” My mother whispers hopelessly from the sidelines.
“Frankly, it is amazing that your son has survived this long,” she explains, and then turns back to me. “You lack many of your major organ systems, including your circulatory system, digestive system, and immune system. However, your body has built-in supplementary organs and chemicals that have helped you to process foods in the past. That is why you haven’t had difficulty eating food. However, your system cannot process pills, or anything that hasn’t been chewed. For whatever reason, it requires solids to be broken down severely. Otherwise you cannot digest the material properly, and the substance closes your airway. The supplementary chemicals that I mentioned earlier have replaced blood cells, so you do not actually have blood in your body. That is why, when you rip or tear the surface of your skin or break tissue, your skin doesn’t turn red and you don’t bleed.” The doctor pauses shortly and turns to my mother, who is standing paralyzed to the right, her mouth gaping wide like a fish. The doctor turns back to me. “We also found abnormalities in your brain. You have all the proper systems for functionality, but not all of them actually function. Most notably, your limbic system.”
“What does the limbic system do?” I ask.
“The limbic system is the part of the human brain that dictates emotion and behavior. By not using this part of the brain, you are missing many vital structures that are required for most people to function, but those necessary for functionality have been corrected one way or another by your brain.”
“So what does this all mean?” my mother finally offers, her lips quivering mechanically.
“Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. There has never been a case similar to your son’s in the past. His anatomy does not compute with the structure of even the most basic human anatomy. We cannot treat him for anything, because he doesn’t seem to get sick. And even if he was to get sick, we wouldn’t know how to treat him. He has no immune system to combat any illness that he may encounter.”
Peculiarly stricken, I ask, “So I’m not human?”
She looks at me, her eyes sliding back and forth, her teeth gritting, and she responds, “Structurally, no. You aren’t.”
School buses aren’t often subject to nuisance by criminals, because robbing school children will get you nowhere.
However, children do make wonderful hostages.
Sitting next to Chase on the way to some school-enforced field trip, a maniac infiltrates our bus, and starts waving a gun around and screaming. My fellow classmates around me arouse in panic, wailing across the walkway, behind seats, shielding themselves with upholstery. The gunman grips his gun and nails it against the head of the bus driver, who begins pleading helplessly against the gunman’s barrel. The gunman yells at the bus driver to shut up several times, but the driver—bellied with fear—is incapable of cooperation. Resultantly, the gunman paints the driver side window with the insides of the driver’s head.
Children begin screaming. Unfortunately for him, the gunman cannot kill all of his hostages, or else he would be defeating the purpose, so he begins releasing shots towards the windshield until he fires through the entire round. The bus is silent now. The gunman reloads his gun and tells everyone to refrain from making noise, or communicating, or breathing. He channels the radio in the front and informs them of the situation, and how he wants to be flown away to some tropical island in a helicopter like Al Pacino in that one movie.
As he is talking, Chase nudges me and says through his teeth, “I think you can take him out.”
I look at him blankly and ask, “What do you want me to do? Kill him?”
“I think you could,” Chase says.
Chase motions down to his book bag and pulls out a boot knife, the same one he once showed me in his father’s room. He gives me the knife and nods assuredly, ducking beneath his seat to avoid notice. I shrug and begin walking stealthily towards the front of the bus where the gunman is shouting sweet-nothings to the man at the other end of the radio. The police are already outside, wailing on a megaphone for the gunman to release the hostages. I continue to creep ahead and—and through all of the background noise—several kids around me begin gasping in response. The gunman turns around and, seeing me with the knife, takes his gun and fires a shot at my shoulder. I fall back violently, bang my head against the side of a seat, and collapse to the ground. In response to the gun shot, the police stage a forced entry into the bus from all sides, opening the emergency exit in the back and begin filtering out the children still unharmed. I sit up quickly and run to the end of the bus, my disposition so regular no one outside seems to notice the bullet wound in my arm. Chase sees me shoot off to the side and heads in my direction. He reaches me and thanks me with a strong embrace. As he releases, he notices the gunshot wound, the small hole in my shoulder where blood should be flowing from, and he says, “You don’t bleed, but it’s okay. I won’t tell on you.” Then he takes his knife and pokes at my wound until he is able to rescue the bullet. All I feel is pressure.
Chase once asked me, “How do you feel knowing that someday you are going to die?” I thought that I should be afraid of death. That if I’m not, what else do I have to be afraid of? So that’s what I told him. He shook his head and grabbed my hand. I couldn’t tell if he was feeling sorry for me or if he doubted me. Either way, he was able to garner enough sympathy to say, “I don’t know how to be afraid of death without being afraid of life.” He closed his eyes like he was praying, and said, “Every second we live is deliberate, because it is impossible for us to let go of anything. Every second is also passive, because we do not deal with anything. For one, I’d rather be impervious to feelings than to be imprisoned by them.”
I didn’t say anything, because for once in my life, I knew what he felt. He didn’t feel pity and he didn’t feel doubt—those aren’t emotions that I can attest to. They only make humans vulnerable. He was jealous. The way his hand wrapped around mine, like he was trying to fuse our brains, it was all a front for envy. He opened his eyes and said, “I don’t think death is the worst part of life.” He said, “I think that living is the worst part.”He started to cry, then.
So I wasn’t surprised when my mother came up to me and told me that Chase had committed suicide. She was distraught. Most people didn’t see it coming. Chase left no residue of unhappiness; he was the model teenage boy. He was perfection wrapped in human flesh. But, for some reason, death unraveled his propensity for flaws. As if, in death, you are truly exposed.
So when Chase died, I knew what loneliness meant. I had lost the only person who knew what I was going through, how I had to live. And what’s more he accepted it. And although I couldn’t feel it, I knew that any trace, any tangible vestige of humanity that I held claim to had died along with him.
So I am writing this. You may ask me if it is worth it just to know that I am alive as opposed to being dead. But there is no escape from this.
Imagine if everything that you ever did never brought you an ounce of satisfaction. Reading the paper disinterested you. Saving a life didn’t appeal to you. The Good Samaritan Rule didn’t apply, because there’s nothing inside of you to trigger the desire to help other people. Any feeling you can conjure is overruled by emptiness. Even physically, you don’t feel pain. It’s all pressure. What would you do?
Chase died because he wanted to feel nothing. But if death is simply feeling nothing, what is it like to be alive?
Tomorrow, I will leave this place. All I have ever done is walk without direction. Every ending seemed either out of reach or inaccessible. So the question becomes, how do you end a life? The best way is to never begin it.