Time Steals All
Matthew Ryan Fischer
Darren told me that he would go around with his friends in high
school and they would try to tear down statues or plaques or anything that
commemorated something. It started in their school when the alarms were shut
off because of the construction on a new wing of the building. The alarms had
been sounding every night and the construction workers got tired of hearing the
noise so they disabled the system. But in doing so they disabled the alarms for
the entire building. Somehow one of Darren’s friends learned about it on
accident when he had tried to get into the school to retrieve a book from his
locker. No alarms, no locked doors,
nothing. There were cameras of course, but that simply added a little sport to
their efforts. Late late late, after the night crews packed it up, but there were
still hours of night before the first morning light. Winter was near and the
sunrises were later and darker and it only bought them more time. There was a security
guard at the turn in from the street to the parking lot. But they didn’t come
that way. They parked south of campus and made their way through the woods. Down
near the football stadium. From there they could track along the outer walls of
the career center until they reached the fencing around the construction site.
Over the fence and past the trailers and wood sheds and then it was through a tarp
or two and they were inside the old building. They found the doors that were
broken, and then it was inside to cause havoc. It began with display cases as
eventually they made their way to any class that might have won something. Band
and choir, debate clubs, math leagues, and finally back to the stadium to look
for winners of some spectacular sports moment. Vandals for no good reason. Other
than perhaps hate and jealousy. Darren told me there was a theory, a philosophy,
but it sounded like the sort of things someone makes up after the fact to try
to rationalize bad behaviors. The police got involved but no one was caught. Security
did get better at night though.
Why did he tell me all this? Darren was no Tyler Durden and childish
acts of disobedience were hardly Project Mayhem. But I think Darren wanted my
attention and perhaps admiration and possibly collaboration. Because the years
had passed but Darren hadn’t stopped being an asshole. My words, not his. He
might had called himself something far kinder.
I am reminded of a poem I read in high school that I misunderstood
at first. It’s a poem about a lost kingdom swept away by the desert and a king
who tried to immortalize himself by putting his name on everything. The statues
were gone, only the feet remained, the empire long since dead and returned to
the earth. The poem was about the futility of ego and the desperate fight
against time itself.
I never once thought Darren was raging against the machine in his fits
of rage against those that achieved and set out to record it. Their pursuit may
have been just as futile as some ancient king, but I don’t believe it was
Darren’s purpose to point that out. I think he was an agent of destruction,
angry and anything he could not do.
It occurred to me that some ancient Pharaoh might find it obvious
that we had dug him up and put him in a museum, memorializing him for eternity,
even if we couldn’t quite say his name right or say exactly when he lived. But the
point was, he was still famous. He might even mistake that for being worshiped.
Because if a Pharaoh was a man-god, then he would expect men five or seven or
twelve thousand years later to still appear before his and marvel at his
wonders. But he would be dead and would have misunderstood what a museum was
for, and his marvels would be just as worthless as the broken statue in the poem.
They say that the galaxies of the universe are speeding away from
each other, faster and faster, and that someday the sky will go dark as the
stars are too far separated. And then after another eternity the suns will all
burn out and the universe will go cold. And then maybe it will collapse and
start all over again.
I wonder about the broken statues on far away planets we will
never get to see. Structures and proclamations and the attempts to defeat time,
and no one will ever be able to travel far enough fast enough to even share in some
sort of mutual recognition of disgust at how little there was or what any of it
meant.
What terrible loneliness we all feel. What a terrible disservice
it is to destroy. If there is some meaning in the futility it has to be in the
ability to connect, not to destroy. Poor Darren and his inability to see such
things. A man set out to destroy the ego of others, not realizing their sad
solitude and pathetic attempt to overcome it. What a sad man, that all he could
do was break and leave more broken in his wake. A man who could never build a
thing.
But the truth is I remember. Inadvertently or not, he built that.
I remember the statue that I never saw. The poem that recorded it.
The empire that may or may not have been real or simply legend. A million
cities beneath the ground, under water, burnt and ruined, covered in ash or
snow. A million planets with a million possibilities and I believe in them all.
In clearing out a box of mementos in my parent’s basement, I
discovered an award for a project built in a class at the technical center. I
don’t remember the project. I don’t remember the class. But the award had my
name on it. So, I took it without asking, it was mine after all, and I proudly
placed it on my dresser at my apartment.
Maybe I’m yelling at clouds or maybe I’ve staked my claim against a
cold and uncaring universe, but for one second, I am proud.
I unlocked my window and left it cracked so I could feel the cool
air come in as I fall asleep. Somewhere out there is Darren, and I wonder if my
award will still be there when I wake.
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