Theodore Decker had never, ever thought of himself in terms other than Theodore. This Decker thing, now heading every document that marked the dreary end of his unfulfilled existence, seemed to place him in the third person in his very own story.
Doctor Sayed had been kind enough, after his stayed fashion, far kinder than the editor at the Urban Times had been after his last submission. The hard part was not the fact that he had composed 116 increasingly better human interest pieces, but the fact that the only two he sold where those that he had shamelessly written as a woman. Fine, he could self-publish…but that would take time that would not be his to use.
Advanced prostate cancer—apparently his reward for saving himself for the right woman, the woman that had never stumbled into his smallish life—had claimed everything that was left to him except his mind. He would not leave a child, not even a trace…
The sun did kiss him though, rather warmly, as he sat outside the hospital on 33rd Street and regarded the squirrel that collected acorns so diligently against a distant winter.
His ears began to ring, his glasses flying from his face, a strong hand shoving him into the pavement before the bench as a sneaker-sheathed foot kicked him in the stomach.
“Yo, give it up, yo!” Screamed the large, blubbery brown face, seemingly gestated in a gelatin vat to house offensively spewing lips.
His phone, wallet, Saint Michael’s pendent, even his paperwork, were taken from him.
They, the sneaker creatures, were gone, just like that.
His elbow bled on the sidewalk.
The old lady looked at him worriedly, afraid to touch him as he bled, recoiling from the sight of him as if he carried a plague.
The armed security guard was looking at him directly from the doorway he had just quit, expressionless, as if he did not exist.
He propped himself up against the base of the bench and reached for his keys—gone, everything was gone.
Two Baltimore City Police cruisers were stopped in front of him—thank God! he thought.
The officers were walking towards him, then past him, toward the main entrance.
What? he thought.
Am I already dead? he mused as he limped to his feet, the pain and pressure in his groin and bowels worse than normal—but what was normal anymore?
He stood up and looked down at the older black woman in her dress and sun hat, kind of indignant as to how she regarded him. She snapped in her own defense, “Well, y’all white junkies should have your own hospital, should be with your own kind.”
Shaking his head in an unsuccessful attempt to clear it of her ignorance, he recoiled, as if stabbed. As the distant sound of the proximate traffic merged with the roaring waterfall descending from an un-guessed place above and within, Theodore Decker, now one with the noise of the world, walked away, slowly, recalling vaguely that he lived off the Alameda, in a nice, multicultural neighborhood…
Sounds like a white boy in Atlanta Ga.
Native Son lyrics
Take your wife, take your family take your guns.
Running through the burnt out neighborhood looking for someone.
A warrior of your tribe, a place you can hide till the war has begun.
In the field before the flood you'll be spilling blood like a native son.