Richard Leise - Fiction

Just Like Jude and Mary

Mary was smart.  Jude was, too.  While the siblings read widely, they favored speculative fiction.  That which was presented in abstract seemed, to them, especially true.  The popularity of a book-made-movie (the story’s protagonist, pitted against a dead civilization, armed with only her wits and a simple weapon) led to the creation, and mass production, of toys like AimZing, a realistic set of bow and arrows, advertised as safe for children.           

Their parents had been divided.  Mom (who prohibited games like Jarts) wasn’t okay with the toy.  Dad didn’t mind.  By this point the couple had been for so long agreeing that disagreements rarely amounted to much, as neither knew how to properly phrase their feelings, articulating, within, the certainty that nothing warranted discord, and anything other than harmony was an unnecessary obstacle as organic as birth control.  When faced with dispute, both were so quick to acquiesce that one point bled into another, and logic, rendered circular, was pointless, no longer meaningful.  Because Mary and Jude pressed the issue, June and Richard discussed, rather than debated the issue, after dinner and before bed, somewhat casually, if not abstractly, working less to win than ensuring they did not wound the other.  If asked, neither could say, with certainty, who permitted the toy into their home.  Neither understood how the other had arrived at a decision.  This was one of a few ways the couple expressed love.  Quietly.  One.  To the other.  Often saying little, to nothing, at all.      

Endwell did not know what happened.  All its people knew was that a little girl died.  To the extent Endwell understood anything, they only wondered:  How could this be?  And to the degree they assigned blame, they worried:  What sort of parents would create a climate where children inhabit so wide a space that such violence, however accidental, has the space to take place?  They didn’t need to know everything.  But they would not allow confusion to override understanding. 

Naturally, this sort of truth does not exist.  Jude.  And Mary.  They were alone.  And so after reading the story beneath the headline above the fold (FREAK ACCIDENT KILLS LOCAL STUDENT) Endwell’s collected questions, driven by, if anything, speculation—subject to, and intensified by, other questions—become, in the absence of proof, a lesser form of truth, one tier above answers. 

Ideas. 

Speculation. 

This is what they learned:  The rumor that the boy had killed his twin sister?  That the siblings, armed with their bow and arrow, were playing a sort of William Tell?  Fake news.  There had been an investigation, though.  After police arrived on the scene, the EPD, in service of its citizenry, offered two detectives.  As far as the people knew, that is where inquiry both began, and ended.  What, Endwell asked, about a social worker?  Or:  What of family?  Friends?  How about family friends?   Endwell remained unsure.  

Nothing became, even among people in positions of authority, popular opinion.  Of course the detectives were suspicious.  Of course every record was examined.  But what if patterns, like certain verbs, are intransitive?  How to identify as having happened something that has never before been?  Because there was never an arrest, let alone a trial, there could never be conviction. 

This invited conjecture.  Questions leading to more questions.  These, in the absence of answers, lead to the wobbly, the uncertain theory that sure, maybe the death hadn’t been intentional, but this wasn’t the same as saying it had been accidental.  I mean, Endwell mused, look at what happened.  It doesn’t matter how old he is; we can’t forget about Jude.                      

Nothing forgotten, everything noted, the circumstances surrounding what happened certainly were strange.  Why was the girl outside?  And when it came to her brother ….  Or, perhaps more interestingly—if not more importantly—what sort of Mother created a space wherein—  Oh, wait—  They’d already been over that.  It was along this line of thinking that sympathy yields to suspicion.   

There were many inconsistencies.  At first—following the flashing lights and phone calls, coupled with chaotic Endwell innuendo—information spread.  A small, cloistered community.  A city where people first pride themselves on being.  And then on being from Endwell.  News of the Freak Accident, like a great fire, spread from home to home.  The fire roared, and rumors, as if thrust by great wind gusts, leapt from West Hill to find fuel within city blocks, alighting upon the rooftops of distant neighborhoods.  Parents inured with their own hardships welcomed the distraction and texted one another at first timidly, warily, almost with genuine concern -   

Did your Alex know this Stephen? 

before organizing the great shows of grief displaying how Stephen’s death affects us.  Like Meta walls smeared with memes like missing-person papers on light posts, monuments and testaments not so much updated as consulted like tarot cards, as if the right web of information would not so much heal, but reveal some kind of truth, this word of mouth. 

With Mary being dead, no one except Jude knew everything.  After the news broke, and on into the following days, it became clear to even Endwell’s most ardent socialites that while much had been spoken of, nothing had been revealed.  There had been a Freak Accident.  An area student was dead.  And, for a while, that was that. 

But there is nothing if not time.  And, in Endwell, there is not much by way of news to fill it.  Above that fold, and beneath the headline, certain words—like accident, like category—assumed other meanings.  Diction was not being read as intended.  Syntax was skewed.  And so those assuming vested interests, like perverted philanthropists, misinterpreted intent, as if meaning had been exhumed from agenda’s cemetery.  

Anyways, the problem wasn’t syntactical.  Or grammatical.  What affected the community was a lofty, an almost elevated sort of ignorance.  Words, employed to report, or to convey news, were not questioned to carry a fuller meaning.  With everything being open to interpretation, the reporter’s purpose was immediately denied distinction, and the reader assumed meanings’ full weight.  Sometimes what the author said as statement of fact was questioned.  Usually, though, readers defined not what any given word meant, but focused instead upon the emotion, or sentiment, which they felt should be inferred.  There’s a word – or words – for this, but most of us don’t know it.  The result being that inference was deemed more moderate.  Supposition became the more plausible meaning.  Very rarely did the opposite hold true.  But more often than anything it was neither.  In the end there was nothing.  There existed no sufficient testimony in anything merely verbal.                                    

Most people have trouble understanding information presented as column.  They find this difficult to consume.  Like early readers, texts absent pictures mean nothing.  Consumers of images, here was a readership for whom black and white as adage wasn’t a thing (how could this be when there was, for them, nothing by way of reality?) and language, like a photograph left in a vat for too long, bled to blur into a bloom of confusion.  A world where it wasn’t possible to introduce concepts like over- and underexposure without the corresponding images. 

What does it say of Endwell that a positive of society was that it felt less badly and more intrigued?  That victimhood presupposed a new sort of victimhood?  One  person—it doesn't matter who, she spoke for the city—tried to explain how she felt.  She wrote The Endwell Standard.  She was right.  She was wrong.  She was neither.  In perception’s frame, matted with the ignorance of long-held superstition trussed as belief, The Freak Accident should have incited compassion.  And it did.  But ignorance is as blind as justice.  And offsetting compassion was a small, virulent, anathema.  Jude was guilty, Endwell thought. 

Of what? 

Of disrupting their lives.  For becoming a part of their lives. 

What if it hadn’t been a Freak Accident?  What if, as many came to believe, investigators, in the absence of evidence, left Jude, left the decision of what next to do, with his parents?  

While this was, more than less, true, no one could say that with certainty.  Had they, a faction of the community would have grown incensed.  And the core contingent of these agitators would have become even angrier, and this at a much faster rate, leaving, ironically, the second, and subsequent tragedy, without enough time to unfold. 

At least probably. 

Because backlash.  Because an immediate public outcry would have blasted what remained of the family into some other position, into some other posture whose form would have assumed resignation.  It being true that Mother and Father—and one of them, specifically—would have become far less comfortable leaving home until, after some particularly virulent threat, real or imagined, they opted against leaving their home altogether, the family then deciding to leave Endwell not as a means of forgetting, of starting over, but as a practical measure ensuring protection. 

And there was the funeral.  All throughout the service, when those in attendance thought Jude should be doing something reverent—like praying—and wondered how it could be he wasn’t crying, Endwell, horrified, was waiting to speak, to say ….    

The truth was, Jude had never seen a dead body.  Following the freak accident, what happened had been so intense, what later happened had been so  dramatic that even had Mary, as a gentle ghost, visited Jude the day of her death, he had no way to deal with Mary’s coffined corpse.  He had done so little yet had exerted so much energy answering questions, and performing, and had received so much assurance that, strictly speaking, he had done nothing wrong, and had (even then) eaten so very little that it became possible for him to conceive of nothing other than getting away from Mary’s dead body.  And so what happened then, his face mashed against a bed of roses, his arms wrapped around the casket, was a  heady portent. 

And so before his sister’s coffin Jude remained motionless.  Inert.  He had last seen Mary alive.  Or what he thought of her as being dead.  This was much too different.  A corpse was in the casket directly before him, but that casket was like a mantle arranged in place to support Mary’s portrait, Endwell thought.  A perfect likeness of Mary and framed exclusively for this purpose.  And how Mary seemed not animated, ready to speak, but dead.  Fake.  A flower inside a fallen tuxedo.  A metaphor without comparison. 

Not so much lost in thought as absent process, Jude, too tired to realize that he was tired, has back and his abdomen sore from being so stressed, so tightly wound, wants only to be somewhere else, to be left alone.  The city misreads him.  Endwell ever looking, and wondering, searching his expression for something, for anything, as if his face were not so much a map but a meme, offering nothing by way of direction but an element aligned with a culture currently constituted, proof of a behavior all can read and understand absent ambiguity or the requisite energy that accompanies thinking. 

And his mother.  Dressed as if ready for a wedding.  For some other ceremony.  Endwell already deep in its understanding that she is guilty of creating this atmosphere.  This sadness within her son.  This uncertainty.  And who enjoys feeling uncertain?  What do we make of others who force us to question our beliefs?  Our convictions? 

Ultimately we think very little.  We think next to nothing. 

And how June appears before Endwell.  Pretty as a casket.  Head straight, hair perfect and falling to her shoulders with conditioned iridescence, her blue eyes made bright by mascara, by a sort of emotional indifference.  For her face—and Endwell has been watching—fails to register the agonies of her mind.  Like Mary and Jude, her beauty and pain are separated from one another. 

This enterprise upon which Endwell, together, would soon endeavor had no precedent.  There had been no before.  Once complete, there will only be after.  Their purpose?  To display, in every way, in every possible manner, both conceivable and true to nature, a child.

A child named Mary. 

Like you—like Rousseau—Endwell is simply itself.  Only it knows not its heart.  But that is okay.  For they understand one another.  They are made like every other person ever made.  There are Endwells all over the world.  They think they are better than most, but they are no different, any more than they are the same. 

Did Endwell do well or ill in casting the mold by which it would form Mary ….

This is the question.

What follows is a resolution.  Which, almost certainly, is no revelation.