Misfit the Wanderer

By Patrick Barney

Drawing on a range of aesthetic sources, from Miguel de Cervantes and Friedrich Nietzsche to Albert Camus, Ingmar Bergman, and Cormac McCarthy, Misfit the Wanderer is a tragicomedy that explores fantasty, addiction, helplessness, and friendship in confrontation with an immutable power.

 

Pothead, drug dealer, and all-around loser Misfit looks out his window one night and sees a fire blazing across the city. With no means of escape other than his feet, Misfit embarks on a harrowing exodus over countless city blocks. As the night progresses, the lives of strangers and friends intersect with his own, and each of their stories challenges Misfit to confront his notions of a world that apportions suffering and reprieve by chance. When at last all places of refuge appear out of reach, he must decide if he should continue struggling for his own life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick Barney
• Release date: Apr 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781732045385

Book preview

Misfit the Wanderer

Patrick Barney

Published by Patrick Barney, 2020.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

MISFIT THE WANDERER

First edition. April 17, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 Patrick Barney.

ISBN: 978-1732045385

Written by Patrick Barney.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Misfit the Wanderer

Watch at the end of time a fire grow from cinder and spark into blazing wall.  Watch it rise over downtown, the river catching its red sheen and skyscrapers standing partnered with whorls of flame. Watch it spread north from downtown into Over-the-Rhine, its new bars and taquerias and nightclubs sitting adjacent tenement houses and boarded-up stores. Men and women approach the last of their time. Century-old buildings incinerate. One woman on Court Street breathes the smoke as she sleeps and her children shake her in her bed but she does not wake. They flee. The library on Vine burning as if doused in gasoline. Books alight. Microfilm liquefied. Chessboards on the upper story roasting to charcoal. Robed costumes in the playhouse on Liberty melting silken into the wooden sideboards of a wardrobe. Whole lives ruined by undirected chemical motion.

So watch—on Twelfth Street Misfit inhales a waft of acrid air, the night through his apartment window dark, the controller slick in his damp hands, the red-blue light of the game on his TV shining on his face. His headphones cover his ears like a pair of ear muffs. A line of smoke creeps through the crack in the window and Misfit coughs, chokes in the burning air. He looks up to the window from the screen, drops the controller onto his lap, and removes his headphones from his ears, tiny sounds of doom and violence contained in them. He chokes again and stands, takes three strides along the carpet, first sidestepping the coffee table (strewn with ashtray and cigarette butts, three empty beer bottles, a joint burned down to a nub), and peers through the window, all outside ablaze. He sees a wall of fire standing on the surrounding buildings, each one glowing as an ember at the fire’s core. The fire stands motionless on the buildings, segmented, engulfing them like a bright orange flower petal reaching up from the ground. As if bulbed from the concrete stem of the street the tip of the fire flickers in the wind. From eight stories up Misfit watches and counts the buildings, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, eleven buildings from east to west burning. The stars he should see above obscured by smoke as thick as mud, even the parked cars below in flames, tarfires hugging the street. Nothing moves outside, not one person visible nor sirens whistling in the distance, just tires burning and smoking to the vault of the sky. 

So—he’d heard a gunshot that morning, had fallen asleep an hour later at 4:18am after crawling through yet another muck-strewn goblin hole, slept until 1:02pm and gone out to find food. The little quick mart three blocks down sold the normal stuff, candy bars, potato chips, and corn puffs, but the owner, Shichiro (super decent guy) kept in stock several strange Doritos flavors from Japan. He’d been after the clam chowder ones when he awoke. He would have settled for the seaweed ones but he was really jonesing for the clam chowder, though Mrs. Pinderson, whom he should not have even known since she lived one floor up but who seemed to always ride the elevator at the same time he did, turned his stomach off of food when she mentioned that a little girl sleeping on her living room couch had in fact been killed by that very bullet he’d heard fired earlier. He got off the elevator at the next floor because he couldn’t stand that broken look on her withered face, like a stretch of arid craggy desert and her eyeballs huge behind square bifocals as thick as fiberglass. She couldn’t understand anything. He tried to tell her about the world sometimes but she couldn’t understand concepts like greed or corruption or planned failure. Still she talked about social problems and murders and shootings like a solution other than burning it all down could work. So he got off because he couldn’t meet the look on her face and when the elevator doors closed behind him he scrubbed his face with his hands, scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, his eyeballs as heavy as cannonballs in his sockets, his heart a quivering worm. The corrupt power-whores sitting around piles of money circle-jerking each other, oblivious to the blood on their hands. Half a million Iraqis dead in the last war, stolen water rights in South America, international trade agreements like vices squeezing Mexican peasant farmers, coups and puppet dictators around the world, one more kid in this city dead by gun. He couldn’t handle it. Forgetting made sense until people evolved and executed all the generals and presidents. But they wanted it this way. They all wanted the things countries have to commit genocide for: Nike sneakers, Adidas track pants, and clam chowder Doritos. One had to execute non-white mothers so that their sons would work in sweat shops to make the products with which Americans defined themselves. So after he stopped scrubbing his face Misfit climbed the steps back to his apartment and turned on Realms of Kristania, where he had the power to fight evil. He wished this for himself in the world but felt only an impotence derived from the weakness and fallibility of his body. He was not a great man nor would he ever be so he turned on the game and sat and sank into the hazy delight of weed smoke that took him into a far distant land where he had agency. This was the true world for him. This was the land to which he actually belonged.

Thus in Kristania—he girded himself with steel and dragonscale armor, a great mallet on his back, his hands full of magic, his belt fortified with potions and soothing oils. In the final moments when his health waned he drank them or rubbed them on his skin to feel his strength renewed. The tunnel rats and desert watchers and jungle wraiths and the recluses of the mountains all yielding to him or dying by his Warhammer. From the ruin of his couch just on the other side of the screen Misfit watched his avatar clear a way for himself in the world, the hero defiant, more than just a little man. With one hand he could lift the hammer and bring it down on monsters and evil-doers. With the other he could slow down time, reach across a thousand yards with streaks of lightning from his fingertips, or burn ten acres of land with jets of flame. From his couch Misfit watched the game and his nostrils smoked like a dragon and the long pipe curled up from his palm to his mouth like a wizard. These are the eldest days, he said to himself whilst he with his avatar slaughtered and protected. These are the centuries of renewal and heavenly birth in Kristania. If not for I, the wanderer solitary, then this land would know only sorrow and despair and a plague would be about it for all time, the leaves wet and rotten on their branches, the soil teeming with festering worms. I conquer the evil in the world in this armored and empowered form. So he nodded with dazed eyes at his TV screen and grinned through his beard like his gaunt face had become a hairy skull.

Inside the TV he would sit on the high promontories over the sea, white cliffs dropping a thousand feet to the water below and stretching to each side for seven miles. At other times he had taken boats across it to the other continent, Molekh, though its men propitiated their gods by cutting off their children’s hands so he left many bodies in his wake. Then he returned across the water to Kristania, leaving Molekh in his nightmares and hoping to never set foot on its ashen shores again. The seventeen realms (kingdoms, fiefdoms, counties, states, all called by claimants to the High Throne different names) chaotic and ablaze with civil war but its people, at heart, righteous, excepting those corrupted by the Subworld, its insidious and seductive pleasures, its promises of rotten delights, unlike the upper surfaces bathed in the Choir’s light. I, Misfit said, the wanderer solitary, will hold the land with my hammer and the truth will endure as long as I endure and here I am the greatest man.

So—on previous nights the streetlights outside his apartment building burst like stars in his face. He would walk to the quick mart or on occasion one of the bars. Two days ago he entered one down the street and ordered a beer just for the pleasure of going in a place and drinking and paying for it and asking someone to bring it to him.

The guy next to him said, I still can’t believe you can’t smoke in bars anymore.

Wasn’t that like ten years ago they passed that law? Misfit asked.

I’m still pissed though, you got one?

Misfit shook his head. Got one what?

Cigarette.

Misfit took his pack from his breastpocket and they went out to smoke. He said, I’ve never heard of this place before.

The guy looked at him sidelong. You never heard of Neons? How long you been in the city?

Misfit said, Like ten years or something. 

So now watching the fire leap on the buildings across the street Misfit pulls a smoke from his breastpocket and lights it and sighs when the smoke burns his throat. He coughs on the taste of the cigarette and blows the smoke out of his mouth and looks at the spectral reflection of his scraggly, black-bearded face in the window. He has not shaved for two years and in this time grey has begun to streak through his wavy, shoulder-length hair. His nose sits like a cocked arrowhead beneath his eyes and his eyebrows arc thin over them. Both of his ears are pierced with huge black saucers, though not the real gauges because those make him sick to his stomach. Then he opens the window and feels a radiance of heat. It blasts him back and his heart trembles in his chest like a decades-old rifle worn out and loaded and shot for the first time in fifteen years.

Holy shit, he says and stammers back, falling on his tailbone. Outside the blaze roars, even shattering glass to the street, timbers cracking and screaming. The night flaming and nothing visible but for fumes hugging the tops of the buildings. Though he would prefer not to go outside Misfit feels certain that the time remaining to him in his apartment should either be counted in seconds or not at all, that he will either exit the room and the building within a few moments or in days his charred body will be dragged out and interred and maybe those who have shunned him in life but wish to profess love for him in death will say words over his tomb. 

In front of burning houses and on wheatgrass plains alight and by smoking rivers—he has stood witness, either because he has come to raging battles on these lands and ended them with his power or has chased parties of vampires casting cinders from