I am a brainy kind of guy, so I decided to have brain cancer. I thought life was tall and I would climb it. I've always been writer of Paris, tree, sky and me somewhere else in inside. I braved my brain every day, because it is a difficult scary thing to do.
Why not give it a real test and make me have five days to live. No one would be harmed, everyone would be a maze I could run through with no problems. It was hot, deep Summer. You could barely stand it, it was that hot. I said to my dad's chauffeur, take me around the block to the dairy cream bar. Alfred, not his real name, but I, being Bruce Wayne, made it so. I was licking up the last of the parfait as we got back to our townhouse on the upper East side of Manhattan. Now, I, tummy full, sat at my expensive walnut desk. I will go now to my demise, I thought, as helpless as all life around me.
There are brains everywhere, and they know what they are faced with. If a brain can be faced with anything. And I can't say it's not a weird concept.. I opened my Blue Horse notebook next to my comp. I did some mathematical schematics on the paper with my blue ink pen, and the computer will come and take my brain away. I had a medical textbook I was stumbling through. I had the medical words right, the terminology, the amount of time it takes for brain cancer for permission to create itself and to eventually kill me, the thought of which made me laugh, as I looked at the bright blackness of my walls as if they were the walls of outer space. At night, with today gone from my open windows, it was as if I was sleeping in a deep dark nothingness black hole somewhere around, perhaps, the Andromeda galaxy.
I liked the bending hello of space and said rabbit me into their wonder, where I do not need gravity or sunlight. The moonlight was an amusing conceit in the night hours as though the blackness could ever be fully conquered. Therefore, I and my brain wanted the beginning of the end of me to make sense. And to fit into that giant thoughts of gray wrinkled ugly looking world to conquer, growth of cancer, the clattering of it in the silent, simply asking for it, chewing gum brain. That just sits there and lets itself be ravaged. I worked on paper and on screen and online until late afternoon and the Sun was himself dying, I mean strongly grasping in death grip on the skyscrapers of silver rocket ship forms out my window; curious words, son, sun, and the way words lay with us in play, meaning us, meaning then, nothing. I took off my Harry Potter glasses, put them on my desk,. My dad downstairs was laying out in their specificity words that had the shed wood compliance of terminology that encapsulated somewhere in the vicinity a definition for the device as I was known. As well down farther I called to dad, I will be there in a few minutes. It took me a grand total of seven hours to finish my deadly plan..
The plot, every word chosen in calibration of the ending of one small life before it had…. everything of it, complete. I head down below this stands of “honest” me, and make a new boy, terminally ill. I, of course, would have to send these to friends of some sort, far away, who not had seen me for some time. As to reason for this, I really had none. I was not lying. The Sun told me that as it died in the sky and the ground. I might not die of brain cancer, but I would surely die of something. The people I mail these to will be my first childhood friend. When we lived in Farmington, Indiana, his name was Peter.
The second person was a teacher I had had in the fifth grade, with the funny name of Miss Ida Onyx. I had no idea why I remember her. She was then incidental, a non-important. The other three were even less memorable. I had to scratch my memory deeply to think of them. And I have a very good memory. And a very good turbine engine mind for its state-of-the-art computer technology for tracking them down. This was not in the form of a prank. It is highly serious, and I went about it without bleeding or glee, for I felt numb to the entirety of it. It somehow did not involve me as I am, David at fame and fortune soon to be, for o brain cancer do not take me first.
For all I know, one of them might be dead, or dying, themselves. It was five in the morning when I had everything ready. I would be quiet, not awake my father or the help, among whom I sometimes listed father. Our townhouse seemingly velvety black this time of morning, and in the mourning of something dead. I had the envelopes, letters neatly folded inside each, addresses artistically written, as were course the letters themselves, the stamps attached perfectly, geometrically, straight up, straight down. As I descended the staircase of thick velvet I thought. I'm now going out to mail these letters that will announce my death to people, who, if themselves alive, won't remember me, not because I am not memorable, for I am, it is just they think they know everything. And they don't, and they forget instantaneously, because their brains cannot help it.
They are to be pitied. New York and dark. I love. It seems the pores of my skin drink it in. It is because in my heart, it is deep autumn. Because I am younger looking in my teenage years, and inestimably cute, I am seen as different, but it is my heart and it is, what I do sometimes, like this, without reason. It's even hot, at 5:30 in the morning. It's baking. The asphalt melting. The skyscrapers of all size and the lower tall buildings, as well, as the smaller buildings, as they go along passing by rich and poor and neither huddled side by side. It is a city of geometrics. It is a city of large economy. I am small boned. I could be easily killed. I have no doubt there are people in alleyways and hiding in doorways who would do me the honor of severing me from this small cluttered world, I think, at the same time, totally not wanting bad at all to happen to me. I am not a bored Richie Rich. I will be CEO of the company as my father is, perhaps the same company.
New York blocks are long and shadowy now, as I perspire, wishing having money could make you not have to perspire. I stopped in front of a gray brick building with no windows in it. I feel as if I am in an airless world with the towers of things man-made growing closer around me as if gigantic toadstools, though what I know about toadstools I have no idea. I feel my neck, hot. I look at the shadows as they seem to crawl from the buildings that they had been attached to, and like panthers, what I know about panthers, I have no idea, only that these slinking life beings of the lightness and litheness, smelled somehow of roasted peanuts, as often this means products like the streets not away from him now formed a puzzle. Around him. There was himself as the last piece of the puzzle. He had long before, without noticing, dropped the envelopes that he gathered together in a manila envelope.
The streetlights were dim gray. The Dawn had just pushed in that moment of his heavy muscle pains, as David fell to his knees, scraped his forehead on the sidewalk, that very filthy sidewalk, and he thought about Autumn, and Thanksgiving and early snow and Christmas and being able to breathe, the sheer wonder of the ability of the concept of the law of his lungs attaining air and expelling it. He felt a scream, in his face that had nothing to do with his mouth, as he tried to draw every cubit inch of hot sweltering New York City air into him. He never got the letters mailed. And if a writer may be allowed to observe, no, they would not have remembered him. Because he was unmemorable. Because he was of no value to them. Because he was just a boy who had a bad heart, who was never told so by father or doctors, protecting him all the way, who knew somehow this was his last hour. As a conscious intelligent boy, who denied what he knew with all his heart about his heart, he tried to mail immortality. He tried to connect with people. He remembered, but who did not remember him. He was a boy who appreciated irony.
But as he lay dying, not remembering the florid deathbed scene in his letters, not knowing, that he had lifted his letters and their scenario from his favorite book, I AM THE CHEESE, the parallels between whom the boy met and their real counterparts and the heartbreaking conclusion. But, there were too many melodramatic movies that he saw late night on TV that diluted the strength of what could be. Had he mailed the letters, as he knew, there would have occurred nothing. If anything, a mild confusion concerning why he had died of a bad heart, instead of brain cancer. But David was beyond irony. He was in his room dark Knight and dark boy of sad number of years alone. And then to die, in his room at the dark walls of space, he floated, beyond gravity, beyond form and void now, of himself. A small boy on an early morning New York sidewalk, lay dead. As someone called for help.
The boy was taken away in the ambulance, sheet over him, as later on, after examination and identifying him, his father was told. By that time, daylight had held the sweltering city in its hot jungle grasp for some length of hours. By then, somebody had found that manila envelope, had taken the letters out, and had later on, dropped them in a dented blue postal box on the corner, for no reason other than it is was the city in the middle of a hot sweltering summer, and it was just something to momentarily do.
