Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-1186783-20140817151538

''Author's notes: I'm unsatisfied with this story, but I figured I'd put it in the workshop because I've been saying I had a plan for a Spin-off of In the Circle for a while. My biggest problem is getting all of these events, that take place over such a period of time, to come together as a coherent narrative.''

Whenever I tell my story, people always ask if I've heard of Peter Dawson, or the supposed events at the showing of his last movie. The answer is yes, I have the internet just like you. But, Peter Dawson is not what this story is about.

Last year I was living in a cheap apartment near my college. It was the kind of place where the landlord really didn't care how miserable his tenants made each other, because if we had any other options we wouldn't have been there in the first place. So, I had an elderly upstairs neighbor named Mr. Wiseman. The man seemed to have some kind of super-hearing, because whenever I raised my voice above a whisper, or played any music without headphones, he would start banging his cane on the floor and yelling for me to shut up.

Now, this wasn't just him banging the end. His cane was wooden, but with a fancy metal head. He'd flip the cane upside down (I guess he braced himself against a wall or something), and bang the head of the cane against the floor to make as much noise as possible. All I could really do was try to be quieter so the jerk would leave me alone, and sometimes go to the school library where I could use a normal speaking voice.

For Christmas Break of 2012 I was eager to go visit my parents, and I ended up returning late on New Years Day. I arrived to find a man carrying boxes from his car upstairs. The man was large, and muscular. He had long hair, and a long beard, both of which were graying. He appeared to be in his late thirties.

He gave me a friendly greeting, and I decided to offer to help him with the boxes. He agreed, and I grabbed two boxes full of his clothes. I was surprised when he led me up to Mr. Wiseman's apartment, let me in, and told me to just lay the boxes down anywhere.

“Um, Sir, isn't this Mr. Wiseman's apartment?” I asked.

The man coughed, then took a swig of a coke from his kitchen counter before answering. “Oh, yeah, Harry. He's a friend of my Dad's from back during the War. He's going to be away for a while, and asked me to apartment sit for him.”

I'd never known Mr. Wiseman's first name, so it was strange to hear him called by it. I looked around the apartment, and I could see that it was already beginning to change dramatically. While I hadn't been in it, I could tell that everything had been especially clean, and well-organized, and this man was just pushing things randomly aside to place his own boxes there. I didn't get the feeling he'd be organizing much.

I politely introduce myself.

“I'm Michael,” he said. “Michael Dawson.”

We talked more as we brought more boxes up. At the end, Michael explained that he would be interested in paying me to do grocery shopping for him. He said that he was agoraphobic, and didn't like doing the shopping himself. I agreed, and we negotiated what I considered a fair price for a college student's work.

I'm not sure if I ever truly thought of Michael as a “friend,” but neither of us really had anyone else to spend time with, so we kind of fell together naturally. Every Saturday afternoon I'd take his list and get his groceries, and every Saturday night we'd drink beer and talk about whatever bullshit happened to be on our minds.

Most of it was nothing important. It's kind of strange, knowing what I know about him now, just how normal he was. He looked intimidating, and he always seemed to be in good shape even though I never saw any sign he worked out. But, he drank beer, he watched porn, and he maybe dusted once a month, as much as he could with all the crap built up in his apartment.

It wasn't trash, mind you. Not like bottles and cans, he threw all that stuff away. And he did his dishes every night, at least. No, this was old books, and vinyl records, and statues, and a ton of nick-knacks. It reminded me of when my grandfather died, and we had to go into his house and clean everything out. The way so much stuff had build up over an entire lifetime.

He didn't talk about his family a whole lot, but over the time he was there I started to get little bits after a few beers. I first found out his father was a film director named Peter like that. He just mentioned it off-the-cuff. He also mentioned having a sister, although I never heard him give many details about her.

The family, or at least Michael and Peter, were apparently still in contact. The fact that Michael never seemed to do much or leave his apartment (as I'd come to think of it, after Mr. Wiseman had been gone a few months), I gathered that because of his agoraphobia his father was still supporting him. I also could gather Michael was resentful of this arrangement.

One day, while I was coming back from his bathroom to the couch we sat on, I knocked over some boxes, and found some old film reels. I saw that they were labeled Blood for Michael. I asked Michael about them, and he explained that it was a movie his father had made a while back. His father had named it after him, and gave him the original reels after the film had been shown.

I asked if we could see it, and was surprised when he said yes. He actually seemed a little proud, and got a momentary goofy smile before he rolled an old-looking projector out of one of his closets, and moved his TV out of the way so it could project on the blank wall in front of the couch.

I was surprised by how high the quality of the film still was. The reels had looked old, but the image didn't seem degraded at all. The movie followed the title character as he left a small cottage, telling his mother that he had to go and do something to “become a man.” He drove a beat-up old pick-up truck to a lot of places, where he killed people in a variety of graphic ways. We saw the police in the aftermath, but they were never in the same place as him. At the end of the movie, he came back to the cabin. We didn't see his mother again, I don't know if she was still supposed to be there. But, he just sat down in a rocking chair on the porch, and rocked there for the next five minutes or so, until the credits rolled.

There are a million other incidents from our Saturday Nights that still stand out in my mind, but there's really only one more that I think merits mention here. Somehow the topic of math came up. I'm not a math major, but I had to pass my standard classes. He had never really mentioned it before, but Michael was apparently something of an aficionado with math. He knew all the great mathematicians, and so forth. But, he also seemed kind of resentful towards them. He kept insisting that they were great only because they discovered something that already existed, and that it was the math itself we should venerate.

This was particularly true of the Fibonacci sequence. He called them the “Holy Numbers.” He said that naming them after Fibonacci was like calling the moon “Armstrong.” They were there long before Fibonacci.

He then began telling me why he thought certain numbers in the sequence were significant. It was a mixture of weird math tricks, and numerology.

One, Three, Twenty-one, and Fifty-five were the only triangular numbers, splitting the first nine into a group of four triangular numbers, and a group of five non-triangular numbers. But, he asserted, both sequences (triangular and “Holy”) actually began with zero, splitting the first ten evenly in half.

He mentioned, somewhat irritatedly, that One-hundred Forty-four was his father's favorite. He seemed rather annoyed by this, as if the number was somehow high-brow. It was Twelve-squared, or Three times Four times Three times Four. Three was the number of creativity, while Four was the number of discipline and strength. So, his father had always said that the number was necessary for great works.

Then, he started talking about One, and his eyes went wide. He said that people tended to not think about one, but it was an important number to “those who indulged.” It represented sacrifice. It meant taking just enough to remind yourself of what you could have, and then nothing more. To demonstrate he reached forward, and took exactly one small piece of popcorn out of the bowl we had on the table, and ate it very slowly.

Things went on, pretty much like this, for the entire year. Mr. Wiseman was forgotten, and not particularly missed. I don't recall ever asking Michael when he would be returning, because I really didn't care, beyond the occasional dread. And, I was happy for the extra income Michael gave me.

That year I decided to stay at my apartment for the Holidays. My parents were off on a cruise, and I had no one else to visit. So, I talked with Michael the weekend before Christmas, and we agreed to hang out Christmas Eve. Around 5:00 I went out to buy the eggnog, and various snack foods. I got back to the builing at around 6:30, and went straight up to his apartment. He'd left the door unlocked, and I could here him showering.

I came in and laid the bags down, clearing a space on the counter by pushing random junk aside. That's when something caught my eye. Michael had placed some bills he'd been doing on a table on the far side of the room, with what appeared to be an oddly-shaped paperweight holding them down.

I probably wouldn't have paid it any attention had Michael been there to keep me distracted. But, I was bored, and automatically I walked across the room to look at what it was. When I got there my eyes went wide, because I recognized it as the broken-off metal handle of Mr. Wiseman's cane. I picked it up, and turned it over in my hand, as if trying to find any other explanation for the wooden, splintery mess sticking out of the polished, crude cylinder of various metallic colors.

Then I was on the floor. I don't know if he just happened to walk in, or if he somehow knew what I had found, but Michael was on top of me, water dripping from his nose to mine. He had a towel wrapped around his waste, but nothing else. I hadn't even noticed the water had turned off.

Michael leaned close to me, and began whispering. “My father believes in sacrificing what you've taken. That's not real sacrifice to me. To me, it's denying yourself the right to take. So, I take one. I've taken my one for this year. So, I'll give you a head start...”

I ran from that apartment, and just kept running. I withdrew every cent I had in the bank, and just kept cash since then. It's been enough to keep me going this long. I just keep running, place-to-place. I know he'll find me. It's just a matter of time.

''Alternate Ending: Basically, there are two possible endings I've considered for this story. One, the one you just read, is that Michael can't kill him before New Years Day, or it will invalidate his sacrifice, so he gives the narrator a “head start” of a few days, and then he's going to hunt him down. I, obviously, put Michael on a different cycle than his father, because hunting the protagonist for four years and never killing him makes Michael seem far less intimidating.''

''That said, my alternative would be to put Michael on the same cycle as his father, and imply that he's spent the last four years toying with the protagonist, having fun. The ending would be the protagonist being sent a ticket to Peter Dawson's next film, with the implication that if he can make it 6 more years, he'll have a shot at being unkillable, which would amuse Michael even more.'' 