Strike Fiss’ Manifesto
March 2005
My uncle was a bitter man.
He was huge and rough from life and what spare fastballs it threw his way. He caught a few. Got hit by a few. Some would say it fair, but not my uncle for he was simply a bitter man.
I’m certain that luck, fortune, or whatever the tiny packets of reality mentioned above are all, fundamentally the same object. I, for example, have been both good and bad luck for my uncle. Before he was a bitter man, I’m sure I was the kind of lucky fastball that he felt he hit out of the park, or caught with a lovingly well-oiled catcher’s mitt. To be named a Godparent must have been quite an honour for this old engineer and factory worker when he had been younger…hearing his sister was pregnant and having me with one of his best friends who she had married not a year before.
But I can still remember the look in his eyes as he stared at me. Freshly delivered in my rumpled clothes at his door-step. The car of the social-worker speeding away with the paperwork stating that he was to be my new legal guardian.
He was retired by the time I came to him. It was never an issue of money. The government had a tidy sum delivered to him every other week to assist with my feeding, clothing and schooling. What was left contributed to equal parts whiskey and the Escape Jar.
Now, because it’s not important at this time, I shall simply describe the Escape Jar to you. For you see, it will become important soon, but for now, it is simply a huge, barrel-like pickle jar on the upper shelf of a tall, foreboding bookshelf in my Uncle’s study. There is a sealed top with a narrow slit cut in it, and the epoxy-resin patchwork from a historic single break that had emptied the jar minus twenty nine pennies that still lay in the bottom, squished under more pennies, then dimes, then quarters and dollar coins, until finally fading into a multi-layered and multi-coloured mosaic of bills stretching back in time to the point that they seemed to form layers in the earth where dinosaur fossils were discovered. Even with the multitude of legal tender within, the jar, when I arrived at my Uncle’s home to live, was barely half-full.
Now that you know a bit about the Jar, I can tell you more about my Uncle and myself.
First, myself. If I were me, and I am me, I wouldn’t really know what to make of myself. Other people, however, seem to think I’m some kind of savant. Some kid genius because I can read people’s actions to such a silly degree of accuracy that my parents had sent me to be tested for ‘powers’ three times before they died in a car-crash I knew was going to happen. It wasn’t that I predicted it. I just could see my dad was done with life. This led to years alone with a social worker, who, for several of those years within those years, began to believe I was Jesus. Now, I know better, but try telling someone with blind faith that when she’s seen you ‘read her mind’ when really, all I was doing was listening and watching. Still, I guess I do pick up on things quickly. That’s all one needs to do to be exceptional in this silly world. Be one step ahead of the others.
Now, eventually, my social worker became so convinced of my heavenly connection that she began to plot my crucifixion. It took a great deal of pain, gauze and running to the police with the wounds received to convince anyone that it had gone too far.
They finally decided that a relative would be best, and my Uncle had just become available due to retirement.
Truth be told, I had no problem with the man. Still don’t. Just, I always questioned the logic of putting a savant with stigmata-wounds with a retired aerospace engineer stuck in a wheelchair and mostly paralyzed. Not that I couldn’t help him, and he certainly would be a good choice for a guardian. But then, part of what I saw in his eyes on that first day, me at his doorstep, confirmed my fears that I would remind him of all the things he couldn’t do. Every moment of every day.
Trying not to tread on the toes of my uncle’s ego was about as easy as avoiding a devout Catholic with a nail-gun.
Sometimes, I almost preferred the nail-gun.
He was one of those uncles who had done everything, knew a lot, and had seen more than ‘you could ever imagine in a million years, little whipper-snapper’. And I liked that part of the deal. But a few years before me showing up to darken his doorstep, he had improperly welded a high-tension spring to a propeller, which had snapped and severed a neat line of muscle, spine and nerve tissue in his lower neck.
This was right after the Historic-Break-In-The-Jar. Every month, at least once, I would hear him tell himself that if only he emptied out those last few pennies, fate wouldn’t have been so cruel to him. It made no sense to me, but then again, he was a bitter, jaded man, and I was too kind, and liked the man too much, to dash what little control he had left. His own bad mood.
He had emptied the jar to buy most of what resided currently in his workshop. Machine tools and sheet-metal. Pipes and tubing and wires and cutters, welders and torches of nine types. He also purchased a gun and one bullet. Long before the accident, he knew he would kill himself with that gun.
You see, the other part of what I saw in Uncle’s eyes when I showed up was simple. Pure. And it said: “Oh crap. Now I have to keep living for something.”
I think that’s what really hurt both of us. Deep down.
Regardless, it was a happy time of my life. With my Uncle keeping mostly to himself, he didn’t mind me going through his entire library between school-days. School was boring but manageable. That’s pretty good for schools these days.
Some days, I would actually try spending time with Uncle. It was usually on those days we both felt we should attempt more of the ‘family’ thing. Despite some successes, the failures were memorable. For every laughingly made chicken-gumbo in the kitchen, there were three or four arguments stemming from our generation gap. From our ability gap. From his ego and my inability to pretend I was a stupid, weak and helpless child.
Still, there were good days, and the best day was my eighteenth birthday, in which I was allowed to drink with my Uncle for the first time. In which, the day was a gumbo-making day, and the government cheque was not late, so there seemed to be a perpetual good mood about the day
I learned more about my Uncle that day than all the other years combined.
I learned that he had been in the army and fought for Canada, the United States, and even Russia. I learned that he spoke French and Italian and Russian without ever hearing a word from any other language but English from him before. I learned he has killed a man with his bare hands, and it still haunts him in his nightmares thirty years later, and the only reason he hasn’t killed himself is to honour the poor S.O.B. by living out his life with useless, harmless hands. I learned he had a son once, but his wife liked to drink and drive and one day took him to pre-school after downing a fifth of gin. Seeing the wreckage haunts his nightmares the other times. I’ve learned he saved an orphanage in Russia once. That he’s pulled twenty nine people from their deaths in his short career as a life-guard at the beach. That he had the largest crush on Miss Piggy when he was a kid, and that one of his aircraft designs was so amazing…so classified…that nobody ever saw or heard it, but he’s told it prevented World War Three.
As the whiskey is hitting me hard, and he is clearly near the end of his run of talking for the night, he pours me another drink despite my protests, then lifts what is left in the bottle to his lips in a toast.
“They say that the world is round.” He tells me. I agree, stupid and drunkenly missing the lead up to a phrase that haunts me to this day. “The world is round, and that means that if you keep going one way…any way…for long enough, you will come full circle and be right back where you started.”
I nod, letting the words sink in as he looks up at the Escape Jar.
“I want to see if this is true. I want to fly around the world. Then, if I see that everything is the same, I will kill myself with that gun.” He says plainly. “And if it is not, then I will shoot that bullet into the pure, blue sky.”
He died a year later, but not before explaining what the Escape Jar was for, and filling it up with hundred dollar bills until it threatened to burst.
And now you can be told what the Escape Jar is for.
The money is for an escape, yes, this is true. An escape from the omni-present knowledge that no matter how far you go, you will one day come full-circle and be right back where you started.
My Uncle was a bitter man, but it was because he saw the truth in that statement. After sixty years of life, he believed he had simply returned to the start. Helpless. Dumb. Unable to walk. Unable to do anything but exist like a newborn baby. I know that sounds pessimistic, but his words rung true in my head. Everyone always talks about leaving a bad place. About traveling to see the world. And yet, no matter how far you travel, you will come back to the same place and it will be like you never left in the first place and the only thing to prove you did anything were the dreams and pictures and things you collected on the way.
So, one day, after going through my Uncle’s possessions, preparing to pack up and leave on my own, I came across his blueprints.
The blueprints to the Escape Craft. What the Jar had been collecting for…had always been collecting for. Even it’s brief emptying simply made room for the workshop that was to build this craft. Even if the jar had not been full, I would have had enough to finish the craft, with my modifications.
I had Uncle cremated.
Now, as I fly over the Earth, with the slipstreams around me, every day, I release a small part of my uncle into the air over the ocean. Or a city. Or a desert. Or wherever I am when the sunrise reaches me in this cockpit.
I’m almost done. A full circuit of the globe. And I think the heaviest baggage is that damn gun that tempts me to fulfill my Uncle’s promise to it to claim a life or to herald in a new world not bound by gravity.
My Uncle is now everywhere on earth. He has escaped, somewhat, the fact that one will always return to one place by being in all places at once. And as I fly over the coast, following the mountains to Uncle’s home, I know the promise was passed onto me to fulfil.
I really don’t want to kill myself, but at the same time, I’ve been thinking more and more about his words as I fly. That, even I were to do this every day for the rest of my life, I would still simply just be in the same place. A place I have been before. The place where I started.
I can see my Uncle’s house now. A small speck in the middle of a billion others.
What the hell.
I land in the yard, nearly inch-for-inch where I took off from a year and three months ago. As I step out onto the grass, I shoot the gun into the sky.
I can’t believe everything is the same.
Not after seeing what I’ve seen. Circling the globe. Seeing the stars and the oceans and the deserts and the forests. Still, I know that isn’t the right answer, and as I walk by the empty Escape Jar, I throw in the two bucks I have left in my pocket.
My Uncle started with pennies.
But there has to be more out there. Past this silly little globe.
My Uncle started with pennies.
But I’ll need more if I’m to build the rocket I need to truly escape.
Strike Fiss, Studio Shinnyo 2005. Khattam-Shud, EOF.
Posted under Manifestoes, Short Stories
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