All the Lasting Things

All the Lasting Things Read Free Page B

Book: All the Lasting Things Read Free
Author: David Hopson
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from nearby Route 4. Nothing but a drunken blood gush pulsing in his own ears. A few stars winked through the broken lattice of branches, and it was under these fair lights that Benji’s stomach staged its revolt. In one great heave, up came what remained of his lunchtime spree. It splashed over the railing and coated with vile chunks the leaves of a small, dry bush.
    This was not the life he intended to live.
    As quickly as his tuna melt rushed out, a stream of regrets rushed nastily in. Benji had no trouble making himself the subject of his own entertainment television interviews, speaking at length—in the shower, in line at the bank—about the movies he had yet to make, the theater he had yet to do, the awards he had yet to win, the accolades that had yet to be bestowed upon him and that would, by some strange alchemical process associated with fame, be transmuted into contributions to the world that mattered. What would he be remembered for? What would his legacy be? What of him, beyond the movies and performances and awards, would last? Saving the children. Saving the ice caps. Advocating clean, available drinking water across the developing world. Condemning industrial farming. Condemning violence against women. Condemning war. Condemning fossil fuels and marriage inequality and elephant poachers on the Kenyan plains. But here he was—more or less halfway through life’s journey, with what to show for it? The question came in his father’s voice: What the hell is your plan?
    Whenever Henry Fisher accused his only son of aimlessness (or worse), Benji’s mother swept in with the word “unconventional,” brandishing it like a shield to cover him from dragon’s fire—Benji isn’t flighty or feckless or retarded, he’s unconventional —but it was exactly the lack of the conventional trappings of adulthood (at least the kind most often clung to by straight, middle-class, white American males) that so often made him feel worthless. He had no wife, no children, no savings account or stock portfolio, no house, no car. He didn’t have a BA. He didn’t even have a cat. His filmography read like a joke. His credit cards should have melted from overuse. And what had his recent forays into theater, into more serious (and, he’d wrongly thought, more easily had) work, earned him besides two DUIs and, outside a small dinner theater in the Catskills, a charge of disorderly conduct? He could forget about Ophelia kissing him.
    Now, with the floodgates of self-pity opened wide, he saw the stupidity in abandoning a show in which he’d gotten a (minor!) part only because his doubtful and already fed-up agent had pulled enough strings to make Pinocchio dance. And even though Hamlet offered parts that were more minor, it must be said that no one in the cast was more expendable. Even poor Gary Jeffries, whose Bernardo, according to the arts section of the local Gazette , seemed no less wooden than the battlements he stood upon, would be missed more than Benji.
    There would be no ghost? On the contrary. By this time, Kay and her clones would have grabbed Benji’s concave-chested understudy (a boy half his age and built more like reedy Gertrude than King Hamlet), dusted his face with powder, and, working around the missing armor, cinched him improvisationally into the murdered monarch’s nightshirt from act three. And all this before Gary could mumble, “Who’s there?” Of course there would be a ghost.
    No sooner had these thoughts raced in for another round of pummeling than a second seismic heave doubled him over. This one, though dry, brought Benji to his knees. Tears rolled from his eyes as he retched and spat and wondered at the gaping black space on the other side of the railing. To jump or not to jump, that is the question. He pulled himself upright, stood with his hands on the moss-furred rail, and, hanging his head, allowed himself to sink deeper into the darkening thought. But, no. His aversion to diving off a

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