Day 199 - Upside Down - Chapter 35 - (1175 words)

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UPSIDE DOWN, BACK TO FRONT

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 35

Honestly even if he had the time and the power of god to stop and examine that moment he could not have said if he was going to hit the woman, or just try and show her who he was, what he was capable of. Maybe show her who she was, what she did to him and why she should stop. There were no noble intentions in raising his hand, any more than there were no noble intentions in her actions.
Not all of the possible outcomes were violent, not many of them at all.
Enough though.
His shoulder tensed and a fist formed.
Ivan could see it coming, knew and felt it.
One hand came to the side of the mans head, moving as it did, his body glided sideways to gve him the leverage, the torque to power his flattened palm.
He pressed down hard, as hard as he could and directed the man’s head in an unexpected trajectory and slammed it into the bar. He let it bounce and the man reeled and lost all momentum and sense of gravity. In that free floating moment when the anger and fear were replaced with a world turned inside out, he focussed his eyes on the man he recognises and too late understands there is nothing he can do anymore.
Except get hurt.
The slow motion fist is curling as one hand pulls back and the other punches outwards, moving so very slowly, but with no hesitation. Twisting and pulling synchronously to deliver force, a message without words and connecting with his chest. Air expels and he folds like paper to the floor, banging himself on the ground.
The woman is watching, shocked and still.
This was not what she thought would happen.
Ivan looked at her with contempt she could see plainly, and silenced any words that may have been forming. There would be no thank you, no recrimination and no questions.
Ivan took the glasses to the booth. His business deal was signed and sealed before those drinks arrived, this was just a formality. Their agreement lay on the floor in front of the bar. Ivan put the glasses down and raised a finger to his associate, indicating he needed to wait, as he turned and went back to he man, gasping for breath.
The woman took a few steps back. Involuntarily reacting to the lizard brain that saw a predator.
Ivan looked at the man looking back at him through watering eyes. No tears but a body in stress. Ivan holds out an arm and waits for the man to take it uncertainly.
As he pulls him to his feet and dusts him off, he can pull him towards him and grabs the back of the mans head and yanks forward, twisting it to find his mouth meeting the man’s ear.
“If you want to control your fucking woman.” Angrily violent assetion.
“Control yourself” Calmly assured reason.
Time for that drink.

After

His father was dead.
That was a fact.
One he could not control, one he could not alter and a fact that stuck into him, opening him like a wound. He felt exposed by it, raw and small like when he was left with his mother.
That was it, his father had left again, a fact out of both their control both times around.
This was a lesson, this was somethig to grow from and make you strong.
What was it?
All the plans you make are not going to matter when other people and random events. His mother conspired against his father. That family broke apart from the inside, becaue someone on the inside chipped away at it from the inside. Like an egg hatching, the chick burrows oput and into life.
No wait.
That’s the wrong metaphor.
Ivan is having trouble controlling his thoughts. He is waiting at the funeral parlour, the open casket of his father openly haunting him in broad daylight. He needs to be here, wants to be here but hates the reality of this particular moment.
He sees his father, he sees the body, the reflection of his appearance in the flesh there. Except that it’s not really it’s a relfection that is crumbling down like a decaying building. A once proud castle bowed by time and entropy. Now it’s the husk, the decayed skin of the cicada left to dry in the sun.
Justify as he might it’s still his fatherr there, reminding him of who he was and who his son is.
It’s too fucking unfair.
Thoughts of the money, Sam and James and even his impending child are out of his mind for now. He cannot concentrate and he would not want to even if that had occurred to him.
Am I an orphan now? Is that what you call it when you lose your parents? What if you are in your thirties already, are you still an orphan? Not an orphan like Manisha was, she was a teenager, still a child and able to process it in a different way than I have to. I mean she barely knew her parents, it was a dependancy, I knew them as adults, understood and accepted them.
He never had accepted his mother, he had understood her as far as he was concerned. He had that knowledge, reconnecting with his father had brought that alignment of his viewpoint. He had righted him again.
He owed so much to this man here. Who he was, how life works and where the lines are? That was all on him.
They both had coloured their lives outside of those lines, but they had that quality, that leadership that set them apart from the masses. Someone drew the lines for the masses, the laws, the accepted norms. There were alwayd people outside of the convention.
The mad, insane and unacceptable edge cases of humanity.
And the exceptional ones.
Exceptional people were rare, and he had felt them when he was around them. They were so hard to come by but instantly recogisable in their power and ability to rewrite the rules of life for themselves.
Not selfishly, but sensibly.
Was that what he needed to do? Rewrite the rules? Start again and reset the counters?
You can’t depend on anything in life, it can end at any point.
This is a lesson.
You cannot control other people, you can only control yourself.
This is a lesson.
You get others to give you what you need before you take.
This is a lesson.
You set the rules, you take what you need when you need to.
This is a lesson.
Life is short.
This is…
Ivan knew what he had to do. Or more rightly he knew what james had to do. James was the key and the problem. He had seen this early on and had not planned accordingly. Random elements crept in and changed the rules. Ivan needed to rewrite the rules.
Just because fate had intervened for James’s benefit, that meant nothing.