The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [123]
As of then, Simon did not know who or what he was, nor had any notion of the events of the first few years of his life. His only sense of self-worth lay in the confused selfishness of his endeavors to realize it, to find it and to find himself, and to try his goddamn hardest to mock the world as surely as it seemed very clearly to mock him.
Life for him never appeared to be the way life was for anyone else.
If he only knew how he came to be this way, of the answers to the riddle of his own existence, he might rediscover peace in the knowledge that it wasn’t all his fault. We all make our own decisions, yes, we make our own choices, but in the end we all have inherited countless pieces of somebody else’s pie, which amounts to who we came to be and to why we did the things we’ve done. Simon was merely a complex work-in-progress, a thousand components of an erector set still under construction by a power that was beyond him with a blue print in mind.
And this power wasn’t the power of God....
***
Simon BoLeve was escorted down the carpeted corridor by an indomitable Chinese woman five times his age, past on occasional child or children younger than he scampering about playfully until the Chinese woman barked a command for them to disperse to their classes. She led Simon past several doors both open and shut, the shut ones either silent or permeating with muffled voices, the open ones disclosing a room of children or teens or darkened rooms empty but for shadows of rows of metal folding chairs. Simon was at once curiously aware of how, while in passing, the younger groups of kids required more time for the teachers to tame than the older, for the older teens’ rooms were ordered and quiet as the younger kids were still running around being rounded up. Simon figured that this was because the older kids knew what they were there for, and were bored with it, while the younger children didn’t yet know what their parents had gotten them into.
The Chinese woman and Simon rounded a corner to yet another endless corridor, and upon doing so Simon spied a sign baring a white and blue plastic generic imprint of a stick-figure man upon one of the doors. He was led several doors past it, until something caused him to glance back in its direction and halt momentarily. It was as commonly simple as an abrupt, premonitional impulse. But whenever he’d known himself to experience this particular impulse, it would always mean that what he would see when he turned around was...
...was...
...was the little black boy.
For each time this sort of premonition took place in an average nine-year-old’s life, for each time any single child had looked over its shoulder because it was afraid of the dark or fearfully apprehensive that the bully or abusive stepfather or that horrible unknown thing was swiftly gaining ground as he or she fled from it in the waking world or while asleep, Simon always found the little black boy there. Somewhere, there, beyond the efforts of his reach to find him, to touch him, to discover whether or not that little boy was real.
No one else ever saw him and Simon had grown weary of asking around. No one ever believed him, of how the little black boy would oftentimes come to him in a daydream or at night while in restless slumber and tantalize him with suggestive proposals and dares, mischievous dares, atrocious dares, subliminal manipulations when he was most susceptible and easiest to persuade. If that wasn’t enough, Simon would at times awaken to find manifested at his bedside the tools with which to oblige those dares.
Along with the motivation.
While the Devil made other people do it, to Simon it was the little black boy.
And, over a few years’ time, he realized the