• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 371 0

knows what’s going down but nobody will say so. We were all sitting around the kitchen after dinner. Showdown. The issue was why people didn’t dig Beowulf and what should be done about it. There were hours of half-completed sentences and pregnant pauses. There was talk about how feeling should be in the open. The truth setting you free. Honesty being the best policy. Nothing being bad as long as it wasn’t buried. Things you think are hard to say being much easier if you just try. About three hours of this shit, everyone waiting, prodding, edging around, teetering, teetering. It was mostly Sarah doing the leading. She was in the middle. Beowulf was her man. We were her friends. That there was considerable friction between Beowulf and the rest of us was no secret.

Beowulf’s name wasn’t the problem—lots of people were into strange name trips—but his attitude about it was indicative. It was twenty-four hours a day I’ve Got a Secret. He was smug about his diet, posture, breathing, and lots of other stuff too, but what he was smuggest about was that no one knew his real name. He guarded his birthday equally zealously and let on that these twin secrets gave him enormous advantage. Add the fact that the vibes were never quite right for Beowulf to do much work and that he never really talked with anyone except maybe Sarah and you’ve got friction.

Why me? It seems so pointless, so unfair. It’s not like I’m much more bugged by Beowulf than anyone else. I didn’t get my way with the shape of the windows or the roof. If everyone else was so hot to have me not be chief of this tribe why do I have to play the heavy now? Simon, fucking free spirit, perfect hippie, the windows went mostly your way. Here’s a chance to earn it. Or Virginia. You’re the one who says you can’t live here if he does. Or any of you other jokers who keep coming up to me and saying how Beowulf is bugging you.

More pregnant pauses, more pleading in Sarah’s voice, more looking at me, waiting for me to finish these dangling thoughts, waiting for Taurus to give some nice concrete example to all these abstractions.

“Beowulf, you give me a pain in the ass.”

I wish Sarah had been right. I wish I could report that after everyone leveled with everyone else, after everything was out in the open, all hostility vanished, everything was resolved and the whole room glowed with the good feelings of brotherhood.

Actually, I don’t remember most of what was said that night. It was so much exactly what I expected I had a hard time paying attention. Beowulf wasn’t the only target. But all the criticisms leveled at others seemed like weak gestures to make things look a little more even.

Beowulf had been saying he was about to leave anyway but he had been saying that for a while. Maybe that night made him decide to really go through with it, but all in all I don’t think that evening changed the tide of history one way or the other. Mostly I was just depressed that the whole thing hadn’t worked out as smoothly as we had expected when we left for my trial.

Within a week he was gone and Sarah had left with him, which was too bad. Sarah hadn’t been much of a worker but was a good friend and a general up for everyone.

LUKE. Sometimes I think maybe I liked Luke as much as I did to make up for how little I liked Beowulf. There were some superficial similarities, which made them easy to think of as a pair. They were the only non-Swarthmore people, they were both superfreaks. Freaks in different ways, to be sure, but neither could be accused of doing things halfway.

If I and the others disliked Beowulf because he wasn’t from Swarthmore, why did we all love Luke? If Beowulf didn’t fit in because he was such a superfreak, why did Luke, who was second to none, fit in so perfectly? The real answer was that Luke was warm and open while Beowulf was a tight-ass.

I doubt that there have been many who moved over the face of this earth as gracefully as Luke. I can’t imagine anyone or anything resenting his existence. He is probably as close to a saint as I’ll ever meet.

Move over the face