SINEDIE (Tesə): the Deathkneel Complex

By Henry Marnes

“So, for all of your technological superiority, the missing piece of a three-thousand-year old puzzle is something as mittelmäßig as the answer man, in particular, a minor, and, specifically, this guy,” I joked.

Demian Friedrich is an eccentric yet apathetic, harmonica-playing, teenage reader who prefers to keep to himself and remain on the fringes of things. Yet after the mysterious deaths of his girlfriend and favorite teacher, he stumbles into a conspiracy theory and soon finds himself in the middle of a secret war between two groups of descendants of an ancient civilization. Both groups, the J’lares and the Nevels, each practice different hermeneutics toward a vague prophetic utterance that states that Demian is a key figure in ending their three-millennial conflict, a conflict revealed later to be one of supra-cosmological significance. But as the J’lares and Nevels struggle for control over Demian, they will all play into an unforeseeable type of threat, which none of their worldviews could anticipate.

A stage-setting Entwicklungsroman (and first-ever anti-YA novel) filled with commentary on high and low culture, dips into metafiction, encounters with mysticism, existential concerns, and quasi-philosophical debate (and Notes for the uninitiated), SINEDIE presents an unprecedented, introspective, character-driven narrative about a quirky teenager coming to terms with death, the novel’s primary theme, and yet a theme that is counterbalanced by how the protagonist creatively internalizes his secret and unrequited love for an older woman, one who answers for him the age-old question who is the woman at the center of your existence? and who culminates in the novel’s surprising and unconventional (hidden) love story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Jun 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642376814

Book preview

Book I

In the Beginning

Inever really wanted much else, so why couldn’t everything just continue as it was?

I was quite warm, quite content, yet realize that for those on the outside looking in, my former existence had little life and was far from bright, exciting, or even desirable.

Personally speaking, sure, there may have been moments when the usual workaday pattern of school-work, school-homework, school-work, school-work, school-homework, left a little something to be desired, but I wouldn’t have gone so far as to call it even a sense of adventure; if pressed, the closest thing I could’ve been complacent at identifying with would’ve been a kind of mountain-man retreat experience—an intensified solitude, more than anything else: just me in a dark mountainside cabin; maybe, I would’ve found a dog who I would’ve just name Dog out of a kind of lazy, manly-man mentality, and we would hunt for our food; I’d clean our kill; I’d read only cheap paperbacks; we would eat beside a fireplace, and sleep; of course, except for the naming of the dog, reading, and sleeping, I couldn’t do any of those things, but something like that would’ve been nice to think about, not actually performed—we create an idea of how something, such as a mountain-man retreat or being with the person of our dreams, should be, but are we willing to be prepared for how it’ll actually be?

Not that you should just settle for less, but it’s just something to keep in mind.

Many people wish their lives were more exciting but always on their terms; that is, people want to be the lead stars and writers of their ideal adventures, with their dream girls or dream hunks as co-stars, and while they may get a few scratches or pains mid-adventure to help them appear all the more rugged, it’s never them or anyone else they really care about who gets hurt or dies.

Seriously, cinema and television have been around a while, yet people remain entirely insensitive to the fact that in order for their dreams or escapes or fantasies to progress, whether imaginary or in real life, other people (eventually) have to die—well, I suppose they suppose that as long as its other people, whether imaginary or real, it’s okay—and this is especially true of romances and specifically of lovers: for what would a good love story be without death?—but I’m getting ahead of myself; let me set the love story aside for a moment.

It usually begins with the fourth or fifth person and downward on the closing credits list who get killed off, rarely the main character or, closer to home, the characters who the main character feels are the main characters; so, the next time you wish your life could be more exciting and you feel the need to complain about it, keep in mind those of us who didn’t have a say in any of it, much less who we would lose mid-adventure as a result.

Be careful what you wish for because you may get it becomes, Be careful of what others wish for themselves because you may get it, from out of nowhere, anyway, and I happen to be the guy who got the exciting adventure when I was honestly fine being left alone.

If I sound aggrieved, it’s not in my nature.

—Believe me.

I’m remembering the past with the pain of the past—I won’t even start in on the pain of the present on the past—a pain that I didn’t get to fully, or, even, adequately, come to terms with because it all picked up rather quickly once the first few bodies were buried or cremated.

I didn’t get to mourn fully or properly for either of them (and the others who would follow).

We mourn too quickly nowadays.

It takes death, a personal death, for you to notice such things: one minute the realization of the death of a beloved is only just settling in, and the next you’re being asked and expected—in a word, forced—to return to the world of the living, to move along now; even at my job, a job at which I helped attend to the dead, although for the sake of the living as my boss said, I didn’t realize this; seeing how someone else deals with losing someone isn’t enough: some things we can only realize for ourselves.

In some cultures, mourners either wear black or mourn, or both, for years after they have lost someone, but why wouldn’t I be surprised if those same cultures didn’t have words such as expediency and professionalism in their vocabularies—not that I didn’t feel alone while with those whom I lost, but I certainly felt myself feeling that way after they were both gone.

—What happened to them?

It wasn’t intentional; It was a side effect; It won’t happen again; and We promise—that’s what I was told.

Without them, my parents were all that I had.

—Oh, and my car: a 1987 Mountebank, or the absolute-unaesthetic-become-concrete; thankfully, it’s black, so if you squint your eyes hard enough and under the right (lack of) light conditions, it does look stylish, but it also looks like something the M.I.B. would roll by in.

Cath loved that car.

It helps you look like a ‘90’s gumshoe when you get out of it in your work clothes on, she would say, or, used to say; I would wrap my arms around her waist and say, Detective Friedrich, Ma’am. I need to ask you some questions (cheesy, I know, but girls can get turned on by cheesy stuff like that, even someone as nonconformist as Cat wasn’t immune; while guys, well, we don’t care what we’re told, as long as it goes somewhere); we would begin to get frisky after that and, under the right lack of light conditions, sometimes very frisky, so despite its appearance, the car had been surprising dependable, in more ways than one—I wonder whatever happened to it…?

I’m in a dark place right now, figuratively and literally, the kind of darkness that leaves you with nothing but your thoughts, and in that kind of darkness, you don’t think about the present because the present is darkness and, after being in that same darkness for long enough, you can’t project a future that isn’t darkness as well.

What’re you left with to think about?

The past, which is anything but darkness; although if you think about the past for long enough, you’ll eventually arrive at what got you to said darkness; hence, in the beginning there was narration, and after that, my death—no, not in some general or easily vague prologue sense, but literally.

—No, I’m not being histrionic.

I’m in a dark room, which is also very deep underground, so deep I think people stop measuring it after this point and just say, It’s really deep.

I didn’t have many bright spots in my life but lost those nonetheless.

So, this planet has gone exo- again, no longer sharing orbits with the multiple stars in its system, now just being pulled by distant forces beyond its control, maybe inadvertently toward distant lights, but for the present and for future projections, seemingly toward oblivion.

Again, no pathos: I’m just stating the objective and subjective facts of my present situation—far from peachy, I know.

The next time some people force my involvement into a conflict that predates Western civilization and extends well beyond the walls of this universe, assuming I were to somehow survive my current dilemma, I hope I can step up enough to do something that deep down I’m starting to get the sense that I should’ve done a long time ago, and not just for my sake.

The Model and Living in Adam’s Shadow

Although the adventure that follows is typical, my life wasn’t a typical one, or, rather, it lent itself to the a-typical, and, perhaps, the story of my life, not the story of just another easily invented/deceiving/pleasing so ultimately congruous cookie-cutter kid as certain authors and readers want him to be, but of a real teenager, who while of flesh and blood, isn’t about flesh and blood so much as ideas and dreams, will make itself at home only in a certain few.

In fact, I believe this to so much be the case that the honesty held by this narration can be put as follows: the smaller the number of persons that it affords some pleasure to, the more in line with whatever spirit it has will be, and the more genuine that pleasure stands to be; or, if this is a narrative that you can easily (mis)understand, then you can see how little it offers you (especially in comparison with the greener pastures it (hopefully) points toward).

I’m not heralding novelty though: I’m sure others have thought similar narrations, even better thought out, yet such narrations don’t easily come into being; and when they do, their thoughts often go unread; when read, just as often misunderstood; and when misunderstood, well….

Proposition: certain, or most, authors produce books for people; most people want extraordinary lives; extraordinary lives are lived by most characters from most books—but let’s shift focus to narrators: I’m thinking of those pretentious narrators in particular who, among other things, claim that they don’t want to have an extraordinary life, yet (secretly) they still want something extraordinary in their lives, like, say, a love story; at least, they don’t reject the extraordinary as its coming into fruition.

I think that that’s rather Janus-faced and while psychologically satisfying for most is also psychologically distasteful and, ad rem, existentially dissatisfying—in other words, simply inauthentic.

Don’t you?

Verily, the only persons you can believe who want nothing to do with the extraordinary, so will do their best to meh it away, are the apathetic, those of us who, like a bird that not so much breaks out of the egg but shrugs and flies away from the flock, are on the outskirts of the radar of things; yet, of those, there are some who despite indifference, which is well enough up until a certain point, each experience our agonous, lonely hour of responsibility, the presence that we try to flee from yet can no longer hope that the stream of the world will bypass us, and when we have to drink fate’s bitter cup down to its very dregs and to come to terms with that avoided, internally precipical question: what good was it to have broken away from the herd if I had yet to break out of my own shell?

But don’t take my word for any of it; really, unlike most narrators, I invite you to be suspicious.

So, how can the typical-yet-a-typical compete with the extraordinary or the expectation of (being compensated with) the extraordinary or being along for an amazing adventure?

Hopefully, by being weaned off of it because if it’s adventure you genuinely seek, you wouldn’t care what form it took or about any terms: adventure takes you where it takes you, like all of a sudden finding yourself climbing a dangerous mountain, but not reading, this or anything else (although you can also climb figurative and more perilous mountains while genuinely reading).

There’s adventure; then, there’s the word that I’m avoiding using: escapism, a charge that I would have to be guilty of as well because I’m escaping the only way I can; but unlike most who do this, it’s an escape into the past—not to something fictive outside myself—and of most of those who do this, it’s an escape into the past within myself, not a desire to escape back to a literal past, so credit me with a little provisional distinction.

While the imaginable, material universe, which, even with technological paraphernalia that we don’t have, is much easier to traverse, the immaterial journey within is all that I can hope to offer (to compensate you with) because I know that comparing my former life against the adventure, or whatever it is that one could get away with calling that, that followed is an unfair comparison: most people will still choose the latter hands down (with revisions, of course).

All of it may make for an entertaining book but not necessarily a better (narrated) inner life, but as one of my T-shirts says, Turtles and Problems.

Name: Demian Friedrich, the not-so-usual forename from my maternal grandfather (though his was spelled with two A’s, like the martyr), whose birthday, the same as his death-day, I also share (I was born moments after he died, apparently); I was never crazy about the name, but since I also share a birthday with Gandhi, I figured it could be worse (not that I have anything against Gandhi); I just would’ve preferred a name that, when heard, doesn’t only bring to mind that kid from The Omen: sure, our names kind of sound the same but aren’t spelled the same, but that doesn’t help deter people who don’t know any better or just don’t care.

Father: astronomy professor at a local community college whose only claim to fame would lead to everything that followed; if only he hadn’t look up at the stars that night or had chosen some less fatidic-invoking occupation, like, say, a pizza vendor, or a forensic accountant, or an amateur jazz player, or a story-boarder, or a photo technician? or why not a life coach, a freelance translator, or what do you call those engineers who create the extravagant jumbotrons for wrestling pay-per-views?

But it was foretold, so any anger that I could rouse would be misplaced to blame him.

Mother: yoga instructor who has published two books on her profession, The Practical Principles of Primary Yoga and Yoga for a Younger You: Fact and Fitness! the first of which winning an award, the second being a bestseller on multiple lists—if that means anything—for quite a while.

On the second book’s public success, it almost surely had less do with its content and more to do with the drop-dead gorgeous, busty model my mom used as the book’s model, who has since gone on to become a semi-recognizable but mediocre B-movie actress, the type of woman whose movies you don’t watch, but if you happen to do so, you would rather search for images and scenes of her than rewatch the movies themselves; additionally, the book’s popularity might have been based on a misconception: I think women were under the impression that if they did yoga, they would look like the model or, at least, get breasts like hers; while men were under the impression that if they did yoga, they would get women who looked like the model or, at least, get a woman who had breasts like said model.

Girlfriend: Cath (sometimes, Cat), intuitively suspicious of that yoga book on my shelf (not without good reason) but since it was devoid of any pages stuck together, she gave me the benefit of the doubt.

Despite her exhibited, gorgeous figure, the model’s face always appears very classy, distinct, and elegant—in short, not without this layer of sophistication (so not like she had the brain of an American beauty pageant contestant); she appears so tranquil that later I’d marvel how in our age of limitless distractions, she could, even for a moment, shed so much that was artificial, surface, unnecessary; yet, I sometimes got the sense that buried deep within the sophistication, the initially-only-solely-exotic, and tranquility, which was always too still, was something far-back-reaching and unpredictably mysterious; an other-worldliness, a real feminine presence that darkly contrasted with the bright, aesthetic layer qualities, a presence that couldn’t so distinctly be pinned down, only evoked, as it often was by certain objects: ancient ostrakon and broken Greek sculpture; the night; the Milky Way; magic and, even, sorcery; the sea, especially at night and during storms; secret underground passageways; certain birds, such as nightingales and owls; sphinxes; and deep sleep; but all of that was a piecemeal-intuition-to-ideation; still, she could evoke so much though shadowy motifs from so little that it almost felt as if many things I didn’t have were just natural to and even completely culminated in her.

Has a woman ever done anything like that, even by small degree, for you?

Also, her face was beautiful but also calmingly so; her body would drive me to the extremes, but when I looked at her face, the lust would subside as if she was just a pretty girl; however, she was from Europe, spoke four languages, and was photographed while doing yoga, and so, maybe there’s something to mind over matter after all.

Her outfit, something noticed well before her face, was rather skimpy, maybe deliberately so—who knows, or who cares, right?—but her lack of clothing definitely showcased just how fit yet lean her body was all over, with the only body fat, as if by granted wish from a genie, collected in those beautiful, healthy, large, life-affirming, youthful, and swelling breasts of hers, which had this discernible and unique yet subtle, by which I mean just-barely-not-overdoing-it, quality of out-and-over-pouring rather gravity-defyingly well beyond the confines intended by the designer of that quasi-leotard; and with those poses—some of which I’m convinced have very little to do with yoga—illustrating just how flexible she could be… it was the Spanish Inquisition, 24/7 in my heart.

While I’ve long been hopelessly Eros-driven over the physical images of her beyond perfect-10 body, which would haunt my mind during the day and torture my body well beyond sleeplessness at night, the model has meant different things at different points in my life up until now, but it was only in looking back later that I could identify them as such: during my single digits, I saw her with a kind of wonder; during preteens, with a kind of wonder and as desirable; and during initial teenage years, with a kind of wonder, as desirable, and with lust, but in the later years up until the present, I haven’t come across the right word to describe the latest predicate to the phenomena—of course, I still use words such as wonder, desire, and lust, especially in instances where one dominates more so over the others, but as to what the additional word to join the family is, I can’t say; so as the model became a part of my world during the latter part of my most formative years, she has become something else, something more, which can’t be dismissed as just another, simply base object that is so common to everyone else and how each of them feels about their dream women, plural; and my experience of her wasn’t just limited to the yoga book: there’s how I saw her there, and then how I experienced her through her movies (to be touched on later).

Despite how the model made me feel, I never felt that way for any other woman, certainly no girl; little did I know that I was participating in what was just a common coming-of-age but ancient tradition of the Eternal Tease of the (Still) Young but Older Woman, that special dream woman who one’s irreplaceable affection for and thus whose body are unaffected by time and who comes to haunt the desires and wet dreams of every adolescent male.

My first dreams about the model were a little uncanny.

It was around when I was eight or nine years old, and had absolutely no concept of sex, that I started having those kinds of dreams about the model, but the closest thing to me as intimate connection, even before kissing, which didn’t seem gross but still too somewhat foreign, was how people hug each other and how mothers breastfeed; so, in my first dreams about the model and me, I simply hugged her until she produced milk; then as I got older, it was somewhat of the other way around… somewhat.

She was the earliest woman who impressed herself on me (mom aside)—my first impression of woman, so naturally, she was the first woman I had a crush on, my first and only crush, a hopeless crush: aside from her being twelve years older than me, although a yoga student, she was more of a model than yogi, and whatever relationship she and my mom had, it ended with the book’s completion.

Besides her unattainability, the only thing that made the tease worse was her being single, if she was single, which I had no way of disproving, despite extensive internet searches (she was rather low profile)—sure, she had social media, but all were set to private and I didn’t have social media—you see, when a woman is as desirable as her, it’s unbearable, but oddly enough, if she has a boyfriend or husband, it’s satisfyingly less so: let’s say, if I imagine the model as taken, it’s like being a salmon, one among several, in spring and seeing a single salmon swim upstream and successfully pass the threshold; while it doesn’t feel great to be among the ones who didn’t make it, that doesn’t stop us from thinking, At least one of us made it! and similarly, some guy made it to the model, but even if it’s not me, that’s okay because her being with some guy is more bearable than her being with no guy (largely because in my mind, I could be that guy).

I discovered this in having spoken with Cat about her crush—well, she had several crushes, categorized: Eddie Constantine (European crush), Martin Cummins (Canadian crush), Albert Camus (literary crush), and even a female crush (the identity of which, probably as a tease, she refused to reveal); on the topic of Constantine and Cummins, I asked if they were married; she cried out that they were, demonstrating a startling jealousy (very uncharacteristic of her), and I joked about what difference it made even if they weren’t, especially with first one being dead, to which Cat declared, That doesn’t matter: if I can’t have them, then no other woman should! I chalked it up to it just being a spur-of-the-moment feeling (although she would later reply similarly), but when I said that she sounded rather petty, she told me to get used to it as all women felt the same way; so, possible moral of anecdote: guys and girls just don’t think on the same wavelengths, with guys being more radio, while girls, apparently, unforgiving gamma.

Anyway, my mom does well for herself—for us, really: with the studio that she owns in the ritziest part of town, she’s the breadwinner and socialite of the family, while my dad ventures off by himself at night to collect and measure the figurative dust of distant stars.

As my parents are so different from each other, it was difficult to imagine what brought them together and, more to the point, what kept them together, with my dad being the rigid scholarly half of my parents, and my mom being the flexible people-person of that other half.

My dad keeps to himself; if he hangs out, it’ll be only with a select fellow professors, most of which are almost always older, and although he does keep up-to-date with his astronomy news, I’ve yet to see him get excited over anything; my mom, on the other hand, is very vogue and surrounds herself seemingly only with the beautiful, the wealthy, and the young, or, younger, urbanites; she’s very critical and while not shallow can seem that way at times; apparently, she’s a very good yogi but if so, I suppose yoga has more to do with stretching than attaining enlightenment, inner harmony, or spirituality.

I get along better with my dad than I do with my mom.

Originally, I thought it was because he was just being cool in leaving me alone; later, what I understood as him letting me do my own thing might really have been him leaving me alone so that he can do his own thing or simply be left alone; after all, we don’t have any common interests, and both he and I know it, but this isn’t to say that I don’t have a good understanding of physics and astronomy: as I kid, I couldn’t get enough of books, but at first the only books at home were physics and yoga-related, and as you already know where I stand in regards to a particular woman from a particular yoga book, my dad’s astronomy books were the first half of how I initially began to construct the world, so while not having any passion for science (or anything in general), I have an undergraduate understanding of core concepts, an understanding that is more than my dad, as my dad but not professor, could hope for from someone who doesn’t share his passion.

With my mom, it’s a different story.

She’s constantly critiquing my attire, my grades, my habits, my lack of a social life: Why can’t you be more stylish like the other boys? Why settle for being an A and B student when you can be an A student? Why don’t you ever spend your money? and Why don’t you put some effort into making friends?

All I can do is shrug my shoulders and say, I don’t know.

I don’t mean to be world-weary, but that type of response gets me out the door quicker than being honest: I don’t go out of my way to try to be like people that I know, and people know, I’m not, not because it’s too much effort but too much wasted effort (and while I am kind of different, it’s not because I have any ambition to be so); simply put: I wear what’s practical, comfortable, and what can easily be worn a few times, so plain, dark colors; school is easy because I’m educated in a lowest common denominator education system, but that’s no reason be a show-off, especially with that kind of foundation; I’m not a miser (I just rarely have a desire to buy anything); and while I don’t mind putting up with acquaintances, I don’t care for putting up with friends: if you change your mind about the former, you can easily drop them but the latter, unfortunately, aren’t as easily dropped.

Maybe when I was out of high school, things would change, or, I would feel that a change was necessary, but at the time, I would’ve rather just cruise-controlled my way through school; plus, that’s what I’d been doing for the past two and a half years, so why alter speed so late in the voyage?

I have no siblings.

I would’ve had an older brother, but he died of SIDS sometime before I was born.

It’s hard to tell now, but my parents didn’t take it well: my mom became a shut-in for almost two years; my dad took to drinking, so much so that he almost died more than once, didn’t finish his Ph.D., and lost his job—twice; family friends kept them afloat by paying their bills and buying groceries, but the bills got smaller and the piles of food only got larger; I actually revere how much they let that loss affect them: too many of us are forced to grieve too quickly, but when you lose someone you care about, a part of you also dies, or it should, and so it makes sense to me that you should almost lose yourself in that loss; plus, I think that loss keeps them together more than anything, more than even love, for each other or me.

My mom bounced back as if nothing had ever happened; when I was younger, I once asked her when she was in the kitchen making lunch, if she ever thought about Adam, but she acted as if she hadn’t heard me; I mean, she didn’t even react; sometimes, I think that I’m too critical of her person in that regard; maybe, she uses the superficial to keep the memory of that loss at bay—an odd thing to say—but that experience nearly killed her, and I don’t want her to die after all.

My dad is harder to peg; he always has something (else) on his mind and would rather keep it to himself; sometimes, he looks decent in his silence, other times only sad; he’s still coping with it in his own way, not every day, but when he’s out three nights a week with a six pack of Zeitgeist and his astronomy equipment in the backyard, it’s not just to look at the dark void that’s out there.

I don’t think about Adam a lot, but that’s not to say that I don’t experience something in his not-being-there; I can’t think of Adam as a brother, or, even, a lost brother, in the same way that my parents think of Adam as a lost son: for me, he was never alive; instead, he’s more like a dead relative who I was told about but never knew.

I was eight or almost eight when I went up to my dad with my mom’s second yoga book, or the book about my mom and the woman I didn’t know, and asked why there weren’t pictures of mom in this book as there were in the other book; my dad didn’t say anything; rather, he gave a sideways glance for a long time before telling me that it was because my older brother named Adam died; he then got up and left the room only to come back and hesitatingly pat me on the head before leaving me alone again; I pieced it all together then and there but only later when I saw my first movie of the model had I realized that it was only because I had a brother who died that there was the model from my mom’s book.

Cat and I have spoken about Adam more times than I have with my parents, combined: the first time, she wrote a poem about my family and how she interpreted our experience, and while I don’t remember the poem, I remember the imagery of my mom, dad, and I being likened to some abnormal breed of plants who struggle to find ways to grow, individually and as a family, in the shadow of Adam; the second time is more of a longer story for later.

So, with myself being neither an amateur astronomer nor yoga-enthusiast/socialite, and with no siblings to teach me anything or to care for, I get left alone to play the harmonica and read books—nothing practical, I know; though relatively recently, I got a chance to fiddle with solar panels—don’t ask me why—and shocked myself pretty good thinking that I knew more than I did: I had gone to this first come, first serve smörgåsbord a few streets down (set up by the matriarch and son, who came home just to whisk the mother off and create a setup for neighbors to get rid of the patriarch’s stuff) with the intention of snagging a few classics (the recently deceased was an ancient Greek scholar); even though all of us there were neighbors, once the garage door opened, it was like bedlam around me for the last unirradiated breadcrumbs on a nuclear winter Earth; anyway, some giraffe beat me to an entire box of Loeb’s, and as he made his escape, shoved into the only thing left worth taking: the solar panels, a box of trinkets (which included some fancy morion crystals that were sharper than they looked as I later stabbed my hand pretty badly on one), a movie poster of Under the Volcano for Cat as she was a fan of all things English (though she wasn’t as happy with it as I’d thought she’d be), and a cropped reproduction of Matisse’s Le Rêve, which I guess I should have given to Cat as she was also a fan of all things French, but I kept it for myself and hung it above my bed.

Everything else is trivial.

Education: ugh, truth be told, I don’t really care for my high school or the rabble that resides within the walls of that ugly building that, with its alternating brown and yellow, horizontal-patterned brick walls, has the aesthetic appeal of a multilayered baloney and cheese sandwich that was left in the sun for too long; and even though the teachers don’t care because they’re overworked and underpaid, and the students also don’t care, but not for the same reasons that neither the teachers nor I don’t care, there were two persons who stood out: my English teacher, Mr. Mahoney, and Cat, both the closest I had to friends and both of whom are dead.

The how and the why, you ask?

I’m not in a hurry to relive the experience of losing them through narrativity, and to start on them now would make it difficult to continue, but I’ll get there.

Occupation: receptionist at a funeral home.

—No, I don’t have a particular fascination with the macabre: I needed a part-time job, just like anyone, but didn’t feel like working in either the retail or restaurant industry, both with their ridiculous uniforms and having to deal with the masses; in contrast, the funeral home requires profession dress, is very quiet, pays fifteen an hour, consists of little work (relatively speaking), and I don’t ever see anyone I know—well, except when….

I also volunteered.

—No, not out of the goodness of my heart or anything, but my district requires all high school students to have completed a hundred hours of volunteer service by graduation; a hundred hours isn’t asking for much, so I conformed.

Community service: non-profit online tutoring organization that helps struggling students, including adults, with homework; I never cared for the work, nor did I find it rewarding in any way, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t go through my obligation; and even though I knew I had already completed my hundred hours by the winter of junior year, I kept going back; I think I wasn’t told because the non-profit may have thought that if I knew, I wouldn’t have returned; actually, I got into a, well, I wouldn’t call it a habit, more like a groove in providing that service, like moving your head in a particular way to a particular song whenever it’s on the radio, but that’s not a habit because unlike habits, which are usually unpleasant, a groove isn’t unpleasant, and if there’s anything harder to kick than a habit, it’s a grove—try it, if you don’t believe me.

Besides, if I could continue to help others significantly despite a lack of a rewarding feeling for doing so and with minimal output of my own, why not?

That Kid with the Harmonica

Yeah, I’m not a what’s my motivation here? kind of narrator—virtually, a dying breed.

But if you’re still thinking, That doesn’t sound like much of a life, I would disagree, especially with the equivocation going on with the word life.

No, a riveting story being lacking, what you want to hear about is my eventual role in a three-millennial rivalry between an ancient civilization’s two groups of still-kicking-it descendants, neither group really caring about me, much less my feelings for the persons around me who mattered most—but hey, when there has been a secret war going on for that long, is it reasonable for either side to stop to consider the existential well-being of a twenty-first century, teenage nobody?

Probably not.

But before getting to that, let me get to something that’s really important yet is always missing in teenage narratives, regardless of plot: I’m talking about music; yes, even the apathetic have something approaching passion when it comes to music, so I’m sure that it’s just an oversight on the part of the non-apathetic narrators community, even when music is clearly and universally the most important thing in any teenager’s life.

For example, I played the harmonica.

My dad happened to be watching a Western called Once Upon a Time in the West when I (about ten years old) heard the harmonica for the first time, and when I came inside to investigate, I saw a cowboy playing a harmonica (it and its music being his leitmotif); my dad was about to change channels, but I demanded that he didn’t, so he gave me the room to watch it; for most, I think the film itself would be the takeaway experience; however, I didn’t much care for the movie; now, this isn’t to say that it wasn’t good: it’s a damn near perfect film, but I could never get into revenge plots; instead, it was the music, the music of the harmonica, and that leitmotif, as it reached out to me like the song of the Sirens, causing me spontaneously, for the first time in my life, in all seriousness to beg, to be on my knees and beg for a harmonica as I felt that there was no option but for me to have one.

The next day, my dad got me a simple, black and silver 10-hole.

My parents didn’t think much of my practicing, probably assuming that it was just one of those hobbies that most kids pick up but soon abandon; yet much to their and my surprise, I stayed with the harmonica and could even play it without sheet music (I can never remember the term for that); however, my first harmonica didn’t last too long (I think I overextended it by playing with it so much), so in as subtly as an almost-ten-year-old could’ve put it into words, I told my dad I wanted another and better harmonica (the one he got me was from M.I.C.-Mart, so seemingly on the cheap side); yet still convinced at the time that the harmonica was just a phase, he asked me if it could wait a few days.

I told him that if he didn’t take me to a better store for a better harmonica, very soon, I would go walking to get it myself; my mom, who was in the next room doing yoga, not breaking her pose or calm, had my back with,

Oh, Fred, go get him his toy, so you can also stop by the Tipsy Sphinx to see if anyone turned in my phone on your way back.

Soon, a Hohner Marine Band (Key of C) was in my hands and bought or replaced by the same model about every two years after.

Last year, when I bought a replacement, he asked me why the German brand was the best.

I don’t know. Except for the cultural-political-social currents that lead to Nazism, Nazism itself, and the horrific consequences of it, aren’t the Germans always doing things the right way, or, rather, better than most, I should say?

I wish I had worded what I had said more considerately (even though he didn’t take any apparent issue with it) as one couldn’t go back to using except so naively after 1930’s-40’s Germany—but my dad was a man of physics and therefore a man of science, so he could hardly argue against or see past the outpouring of breakthroughs made possible by and contributions from German geniuses in the form of scientists, theoreticians, engineers, and mathematicians.

Yeah, my dad continued hesitatingly, Germany has produced more geniuses than any other country. I wonder what their secret is….

It’s gotta be in the breast milk, I thought—quickly, my eyes widened at the possibility of also having said as much aloud.

I turned to look at him, but no: he wasn’t looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

The best song I can play is the Man with a Harmonica theme, which is this beautifully haunting song: death has something to do with it another cowboy had to say; the rattle of bones is what Cath, quoting Eliot, had to say; death isn’t the opposite of life, rather within life is what Mr. Mahoney, paraphrasing a German philosopher, had to say; but I can also play less existential but just as Western themes from 3:10 to Yuma, High Noon, Lonely Are the Brave, The Wild Bunch, Shane, For a Few Dollars More, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; and other less deathly but just as iconic themes, like those of Law and Order, The Godfather, 24, Twin Peaks, Indiana Jones, Night Court, Knight Rider, King of Queens, Jurassic Park, The Great Escape; and a few other pieces from contemporary composers.

But when it comes to music qua music, I have to start with and harp on the following: Der König in Thule, parts of Der Tod und das Mädchen, almost all of Winterreise, Der Erlkönig, Der Dopplegänger, and Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh; Boogie Wonderland; Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime; Send Me an Angel; Carolina Blues and Run Around; Moving in Stereo; Ein Deutsches Requiem (second movement); Danny’s Song; Fade to Black, No Leaf Clover, and Nothing Else Matters; She Knows and Smiley Faces; Eye in the Sky; Drowning Man; Totentanz; Isn’t She Lovely and My Love; Don’t Forget Me; Green Onions; The Way; Moonlight Sonata; Stacy’s Mom; No One Like You; Tango, and parts of The Rite of Spring; Stomp! Route 66; Rendez Zu; almost all of New World Symphony (a must for any twenty-first-century-er); Your Woman; Prisencolinensinainciusol; Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe, Never Gonna Give You Up, Just the Way You Are, and Let the Music Play; 4’33 (all three movements); Return of the Mack; Hotel California; Seven Nation Army (the song doesn’t age, I swear); Paint it Black, Start Me Up, and Gimme Shelter; 67840 – You’ve Got My Number; All Along the Watchtower; Dumb and The Man Who Sold the World; Space Oddity; Give, The Switch, and It’s All Good; Wind; In Lonesome Dove, Yakety Sax; Danse Macabre; Heaven Beside You and Again; (Don’t Fear) the Reaper; Galaxie Express; Simple Man; Feeling Good and Shrinking Universe; Got to Give it Up, Inner City Blues, and Ain’t No Mountain High Enough; Liebestod; Dead Man’s Party; (Every Day is) Halloween; Irish Blood, English Heart and Now My Heart is Full; and Disarm, Mayonnaise, Today, Tonight, Tonight, Where Boys Fear to Tread, and Zero."

(The above and other such songs make up about 70% of my oeuvre).

I mostly played for the ghosts but occasionally for Cath and Mr. Mahoney, both of whom were genuinely impressed by the harmonica and my performances, yet aside from being part of my grove, I can’t exactly say why I took to and stayed with the harmonica, but I did.

Besides being incredibly portable—well, recorders are portable too but does any cool or respectable person ever whip out a recorder?—the harmonica is such personal instrument; guitars and saxophones are personal instruments, and pianos can be very sublime instruments, but those instruments more so because you pour your soul into them; whereas with harmonicas, unlike the previously aforementioned instruments, you don’t have to sacrifice yourself or your life for them: harmonicas become a part of your nonmusical and prosaic life, probably because they’re so portable and all kinds of things that don’t have to do with your soul also get poured into them; I have one with me at all times, and I can’t help but feel that, as a result, my good and my bad energy—my harmonics, if you will—has also transferred over into it; so, in a way, I don’t have to pour my soul into my instrument because so much of it is already there: the heights and the depths, such as the heights of Der König in Thule and the depths of The Man Who Sold the World; as well as the human condition and the mundane, the human condition of, again, Der König in Thule, or, perhaps, Sycamore Trees, and the mundaneness of the Seinfeld theme.

At least, that’s as far as I’ve ever thought it out.

My first harmonica, which I had carried around for its personal value, was stolen (it was pretty upsetting) from my backpack during freshman year, so since then, I’ve always kept a Lee Oskar in a pocket and which I later hooked onto my car keys.

In the early days of our relationship, Cat once insisted on borrowing the Lee Oskar 10-hole, or 10-H as I called it, or ten inch as she pronounced it, even though the harmonica was well under ten inches, for a weekend; personally, I would’ve preferred her not to call it the ten inch—I don’t need that kind of pressure.

Are you going to try to play it? I asked.

I… no, she hesitated, seemingly carefully, then finished clearly (she didn’t add anything else).

I was hesitant at first but not because I didn’t know what she wanted it for: I was uncomfortable with her, someone whom I hadn’t known for very long, taking it from me and even mildly anxious that she would, worse, lose it somehow or break it; but she brought it back the following Monday, without damage or incident, much to my relief; whatever she did or didn’t do with my harmonica, she definitely cleaned it afterward, so I didn’t ask, and she didn’t tell.

It was only after that that she asked I play for her regularly.

Once, she did try to play my harmonica with me present—I had to pinch my forearm, producing a bruise that lasted for two weeks, to keep from wincing at Cat’s attempt to play a song that I couldn’t begin to decipher: the noise sounded like a loop of a strung-out cat being run over, so awkwardly hurdy-gurdy; I knew her performance was bad, and she knew her performance was bad, and yet she didn’t think it was as bad as I, or any sentient lifeforms who were unfortunate to be close by, thought it was.

You make it look so easy! How do you do it? she asked, somewhat irked.

Even though it’s one of the easiest instruments to learn how to play, as well as simply (begin to) play, I did have to provide her with a condensed introduction of the harmonica, more of a collection of helpful/random facts to know about harmonica-playing, which I’ll repeat here:

1) The harmonica, also called a harp, is the only instrument that produces music by breathing out as well as breathing in.

2) When you breathe out, you blow into the harp, but when you breathe in, you are said to draw and not said to suck.

3) It actually takes very little air to play a harp.

4) But it’s important, much as with yoga, scuba-diving, and smoking, to breathe in slowly.

5) Whenever you breathe in, be sure to also breath in through your nose at the same time (this makes the whole process so much easier).

6) There’s a part of your lips called the vermilion border: this is the invisible line on your lips that divides the dry and wet part of your lips, and in order to play the harp, the harp has to pass the vermilion border.

7) Don’t worry about getting saliva on the harp (this actually helps it move around more easily).

In explaining this, it occurred to me to have some fun (or, at least, why not?): Cat, who while undoubtedly the most intelligent female, student or otherwise, at our school, was still struggling with conceptualizing those facts of harp-playing into her practice; so, much like a high school football coach, I just began (intentionally) yelling statements at her until she corrected herself.

No, Cath, you have to blow harder; No, cup your hands around it, like you’re holding onto a real snake (not an actual piece of advice, and she raised an eyebrow and eyed me, but my ability to keep a straight face and my voice completely deadpan didn’t let her suspect a thing); There you go; It’s gotta go past those lips; You need more saliva on it; No, don’t stop breathing; just breathe through your nose; No, don’t slacken on drawing in; No, blow harder; Need more drawing action; Harder! Harder! Hard— I choked on my laughter before I was able to keep it going any longer.

She, very much not amused, responded by slowly getting down on both knees and with a quick strike of her forearm, struck me down there; apparently, she held back—although it didn’t feel like it—and it was more quick than forceful, but as I had never been hit there before, the sensation was as new as it was painful, causing me to produce a muffled whimper and lower myself to the ground; staying where she was, she leaned over me and spoke into my ear in the kind of luscious voice a guy always dreams of hearing, yet she said in a tone laden with feigned sexuality,

"Oops. Cela a été trop dur pour toi?"

Of course, she apologized later—much later, like weeks later, and on some random day for some reason; however, she wasn’t deterred from playfully wiggling her forearm in the air whenever I was less than eager to go along with her suggestions for an excursion; 95% of the time, if she wanted something, I would’ve naturally complied; but when I didn’t, she began to gesture slightly her forearm up and down; the first time I saw this, I didn’t know what she meant—I thought she was suggesting something else entirely!—but then I felt a residual pain down there and remembered and understood (naturally, I learned to comply 99% of the time).

While Cat had requests, she always appreciated anything I played as long as I played it for her, even if she didn’t necessarily enjoy the particular song being played; Mr. Mahoney, on the other hand, while he enjoyed any song because he liked the sound of the harmonica, had requests that surprised even me, and most of which I couldn’t play no matter how hard I tried, usually songs from punk rock bands from the ‘80’s through ‘90’s; rather than soul, I thought it took a certain kind of attitude or energy, which I just didn’t have or couldn’t muster up, in order to play his requests.

I thought you’d be requesting something by Mozart or Stravinsky, I confessed.

No, he replied, with books, it’s only classics, but when it comes to music, I’m a gutterfish just like everyone else (Gutterfish being his way of saying lowbrow). "Mozart and Stravinsky are nice for background music, but everything else requires rock, especially the treadmill."

So our music interests didn’t exactly converge, and I couldn’t play most of his requests with any clarity, but his taste in music made him more of a teenager than an English teacher in my eyes.

No one else I knew cared about the harmonica, so it meant something that Cat and he liked it, and they were the only two persons who did before they died.

And at My Back from Time to Time I {Will Always} Hear….

Iknow what I’m about to say may go against that which only ostensibly goes against genre conventions, but I can honestly say that the story of Cath and me is neither one of star-crossed lovers just because we were a young couple who weren’t together long due to one of us having an untimely death nor a story that’s just for us (we’re not selfish) any more than it’s for everyone (we’re also not the (secretly desirous of the) spotlight types).

And, actually, her name wasn’t Cat, Cath, Cathy, or even Cathryn, but Amy.

As neither of us were crazy about our forenames (hers being so average, mine being rather unusual), when I brought to her attention that our surnames have a literary precedent in the great love story of "Der Frieder und das Catherlieschen," we experimented calling each other by our surnames for fun, and while it was slow at first, we never stopped once it sunk in (though I could call her Cath or Cat for short, she tried calling me Fred a few times, but it wasn’t the same for either of us); but when we started reading A Farewell to Arms later, we became self-conscious because it felt as if we were caught having fun with two standards, What Didn’t Have to Be Taken Seriously and What Did Have to Be Taken Seriously, and as our relationship was neither strictly one nor the other, it felt as if we were playing in a no man’s land; yet later, we returned to facetiousness, and in the spirit of "Der Frieder und das Catherlieschen," she asked me what was the first line of poetry that I associated with her and our great love story, to which I answered with, "But at my back in a cold blast I hear, the rattle of bones and chuckle spread from ear to ear," which she liked (she had The Waste Land memorized, and we were still going through our Eliot phase at the time), so much so that she started jeering me with variations of the line: "as I crawl on my hands knees I hear, the sound of the baby rattle from what might as well be last year; and at my strong, erect back I begin to hear, the catcalls from women as soon as I’m no longer near; but behind my cracking knees from time to time I hear, the disembodied tap-tap-tap of a cane as I walk towards the mirror," etc.

I first met her at the funeral home where I worked.

Cat and her family had to use the services of the funeral home for her paternal grandmother who died the same week that she and her family had moved from somewhere in the South—but previously from Canada—to Lear’s Field to be closer, and although her father also getting a promotion might have had more to do with the move, for Cat, it was being closer to her grandmother whom she adored and said she felt closer to than even her own parents.

"Mes parents sont tellement immatures et curieux," she would later tell me. "But my grandmother, she’s both mature and like a child. We conversated like adults, but she wasn’t above passing over the stuff children wondered at, stuff most adults no longer give a second thought to, from silly philosophical questions like What is the soul? to plain observations like seeing a rabbit in the garden and not seeing it as a pest, hearing a mockingbird’s song but being unable to find the mockingbird, or wondering what book the person in the booth behind you is reading. A lot of people found her uninteresting, but probably because she wasn’t hollow. Do you know what I mean?"

Yeah, I think I do, I told her.

My very first impression of Cat was virtually nonexistent: she was just another girl with her family mourning the passing of an elderly family member.

I expressed my condolences to the family as, even though pressed through the artificiality of professionalism rather than sincerity, I hadn’t been working there so long at the time that I didn’t actually mean a condolence as much.

Cat’s mother, who wore these ridiculous high heels (not even going to say what she looked like with them on), asked me rather chidingly if I wasn’t too young to be working at a funeral home.

I put my hands in my pockets and forced a professional smile.

The family stayed in the parlor, but Cat’s father occasionally appeared in the lobby to take business calls (I never heard him once say that he was at his mom’s funeral), while Cat preferred to be away from her family, even her grandmother.

The funeral home had a secret Zen garden, which can only be accessed from outside, located in the center of the building; I think it was there for business consultations or grief counseling, but my boss never used it for business business; however, we (the staff) did use it for breaks and lunch; I decided to take my break at the garden only to find an agonizingly crying Cat already there (I didn’t know it at the time, but she had withheld from crying until that very moment); even in seeing her alone, I didn’t notice she was pretty, at least, not right away; with only svelte feminine curves and at an inch taller than me (I was five and nine at the time), she was all legs, and as tall as she was, her professional dress made her look taller and strangely older, yet she was hunched over, making her look smaller, and it was then that her image reached out to me, beyond my professionalism, and I found myself sitting down beside her.

I didn’t say anything but just hunched beside her while looking straight down with clasped hands; when she finally looked over at me, I was handing her a handkerchief; she took it but still cried, however, much more softly (her now being on my shoulder); eventually, my boss appeared, surprised to find her there and me with her; I mouthed that I didn’t know how she found the place; another employee and I had to run an errand, so when I returned, the family had left.

The rest of my shift was uneventful, and when over, I walked over to the bus stop and waited; not long after, a motor stopped at the bus stop, followed by the sound of a blasting horn; I looked into the car and saw that it was Cat.

What’re you doing? she asked, but as if I was some stranger walking across her backyard.

I thought it was rather self-explanatory but told her that I was waiting for the bus since I had a license but no car yet.

Get in the car with me, now, she ordered, still sounding somewhat rude.

Wait, so are you offering to take me home or—

Don’t be an idiot.

This was my real first impression of Cat: the voice of some girl, who I couldn’t see very well, ordering me around; still, while she made an impression, I told her I’d pass, thanked her, and brought to her attention that she was holding up traffic, but without mentioning B.G. in the honking hearse (the same hearse that had taken her grandmother), two cars behind her and waiting to return to the lot; she still wasn’t keen on leaving, but I told her some other time, and she burned rubber.

I didn’t think on ever seeing her again, but to my surprise, she appeared from out of nowhere, curtly sitting down in front of me during lunch the next day; I had been reading a book, and the people who I was sitting with were only acquaintances, so they hardly cared about what I was reading, much less who the girl was; I put the book away and unplugged my earbuds; soon, silence gave way, and the sounds of a world full of loud chatter and smartphone noise, disembodied voices calling and hurling attention spans, returned and demanded attention.

Smartphone Noise: ♫ So, then the bro-ken lifejacket t-old the priest… ♫

I strained my voice to speak up and asked her how she was doing.

Pretty lousy, she said depressingly but then, as if I was an idiot, added. My grandmother died.

The day before, she looked really depressed; today, however, while she still looked sad, she also had a barely registrable poutiness on her face; as the weeks passed, the poutiness would become more the norm (this pouty face was actually Cat’s neutral face, a fact confirmed when she told me that her nickname was Pouty Spice).

Sorry to hear that, I found myself saying.

We didn’t say anything to each other for a few minutes until I asked her,

Why were you offering me a ride yesterday?

"My mom left her phone there and said she just had to