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Sketch

Take an idea and explore it into being. We have a man. Describe a man.

He's tall, in an unassuming way. People always remember him as slightly shorter than them, and it always shocks them to realize that he's taller. Not quite stupid, but certainly no genius, which fact is outweighed by his mechanical skills. He's a gifted mechanic, one of the ones they keep in back away from customers. He does it absentmindedly - not from the love of it, more out of a sense that if this is what he's going to do, he'll do it well. He sort of fell into the trade, and it keeps the money coming in, and that's enough. He had a dream, once. He really wanted to be an astronaut. He studied books on it obsessively, trying to find out every last detail of how spaceships worked, just on the offchance it might be necessary. Kept himself in something approaching top physical shape. Studied, and sweated, and tried. He put his heart and soul into it. And it wasn't enough. He just wasn't good enough. After that, he did what he did to survive, but the spark wasn't there.

He's married, just recently. Not out of love on either side, just that they had a comfortable relationship, one that had lasted about five years, and both sides had the feeling that the other was the best they could get. Her name's Janine, and she works at the local pharmacy, and expects to make manager in about six months. She's pregnant, though neither of them know it yet. It happened on the honeymoon - in Niagara Falls, no less. Another couple of weeks yet before Janine puts the symptoms together, gets scared, and gets tested. Another couple of weeks after that before she tells him. He'll want to keep it. Janine, claiming to be being "practical", will want to get it aborted. Really, the reason is that her mother died in childbirth, which still happens now and again, rarely. Janine is afraid of the same thing happening to her. Eventually, she will get it aborted without his agreement, and this will lead to their divorce.

He's got two siblings, one of each gender. He's very close to his sister, Tracy. She was born a year after him, but they never had the sort of confrontational relationship one is supposed to have in that kind of situation. That's reserved for his brother, Sam, two years older. Tracy lives in Wyoming now, and sends him glowing reports of how beautiful the scenery is. There's too little human life there for him, though - he may not be good at handling people, but he's not good at handling solitude, either. Tracy is probably the human being he's closest to, and he was secretly very depressed about her move. Sam still lives within 50 miles of him, both of them in upstate New York. Their parents died in a car wreck three years ago. Now and again he still tries to remember them, but his memories of them alive are being whittled away. The memory of the funeral remains strong, though. The feeling, not of sorrow, but of emptiness, a feeling that something that you had taken for granted as a permanent part of life had been taken away. Now, though, them being dead is a normal part of life, and he'd have that same feeling of a lack of support if they were to be mysteriously returned to him as suddenly as they had been taken. Tracy will comfort him when his marriage breaks up - he'll drive without warning to visit her the day Janine tells him she had aborted their child. Tracy will feel responsible, as she had been the one who had introduced him to Janine at a birthday party they had all been invited to. He'll spend a week with Tracy. The first night there, he'll break down crying, not knowing why. Tracy will hug him hard to comfort him. He will feel her breasts press hard against his body, and for the first time realize that Tracy is a very attractive woman. He will never say anything about this. After that, Tracy will be a part of his most shameful fantasies. His second marriage will be to a woman who wears her hair the same way Tracy does.

I can see him. Front to back.

In high school, he'd been mostly ignored. Quiet in class, quiet outside of class, he'd had a steady B average, due mostly to the fact that he'd studied really hard. He'd met his first girlfriend in high school - she'd tutored him in English. They'd gone out together for a year and a half. She'd dumped him for a nerdish guy who'd been at the top of the class, and he'd always wondered vaguely whether he should be insulted by that. In college he had actually been somewhat popular, due mostly to the fact that he'd inherited an extremely high alcohol tolerance from both of his parents, and once this had been discovered he used to get into drinking contests regularly with a bunch of people he'd sworn eternal friendship with and who he hadn't heard a word from since he left college. That habit had been mostly responsible for his grades having slipped as badly as they had. He blamed his low grades for his later failure to get into the astronaut training program, though actually he wouldn't have made it in even if he'd been at the top of his form in college. He was involved with a long string of shallow girls. Only one of them still remembers him, and she only does so because once, during sex, he had moved wrong, and accidentally punched her hard in the face (neither of them are sure to this day how it had happened). He approached sex the way he did many other things he enjoyed - with a great deal of concentration to compensate for his minimal talents.

He's 32. His last birthday had been well attended, mostly due to Janine's efforts. Janine had lots of friends. It had been intended as a surprise, but he'd overheard Janine talking about it on the phone the day before. He'd still pretended to be suprised, but Janine hadn't been fooled, and they'd laughed about it afterward. Janine had been able to hide her strange feeling that he'd betrayed her better. He did have a few friends of his own there, but not many. He has trouble making friends. He's unkempt and withdrawn enough that he tends not to make a good first impression. These days, he always looks like he's got about a five day beard growth, and grease permanently tatooed under his fingernails. A month ago, just after they'd gotten back from their honeymoon, he'd been wandering around town late at night, and some random woman also out then had taken one look at him and crossed the street to avoid him. This had simultaneously made him feel both proud and ashamed. He'd actually shaved consistantly for the week after that before letting it lapse again. He looks somehow disreputable even when he's properly cleaned up, though. Something about the eyes. What with his wiry build and jerky movements, many people are introduced to him and think, "thief". He's never even stolen a candy bar. He is capable of violence, but it's extremely rare, and mostly when drunk. He's usually a friendly drunk, but now and again he turns mean and wants to get in fistfights. He usually wins just due to his ability to keep taking blows and keep giving them without going down. He's got a very high pain threshold, which is part of it.

He contempled suicide seriously once. It was just after he was turned down for astronaut training. He went so far as to buy a sharp knife for the purpose of slitting his wrists with (he feels that suicide demands a certain ritual, and a kitchen knife just won't do). He spent a week sharpening the knife even finer, during which time he talked himself out of it. He still has the knife, and whenever something bothers him he still sharpens it obsessively and creates elaborate fantasies of using it to solve his problems either by killing someone else or himself. In about five years, he's going to happen to be carrying it when someone tries to mug him. He's going to pull it out instead of his wallet, and as the mugger gapes at him he will stab the mugger smoothly in the throat. He'll leave the body where it lies, go home, throw up, and surruptitiously dispose of the knife by throwing it in the river. Two weeks after that he will buy another one.

His father had been a doctor. Not the kind of doctor who makes huge amounts of money and spends all his time in hospitals yelling things like "Stat!" His father had been a backcountry doctor, back in the area where people where poor and it was difficult to get medicine and he got paid in food and services as often as money. His mother had worked as his father's nurse for three years before his father had gotten the courage to ask her out on a date. It had taken another two before they actually got married, and after that point they had never been apart for as much as a day. Everyone had made jokes that they would die holding hands. This wasn't actually the case - his father had died in the crash, and his mother had died on the operating table two hours later. They had both been somewhat confused by him. Raising the second son was supposed to be easier than their first, but it hadn't turned out that way. Sam had been more of a favorite, no matter how they had tried to hide this fact. In arguements, his father would always take Sam's side. His mother had always been slightly more objective, and would only take Sam's side if there was no evidence to the contrary.

One of the brightest memories in his life had been a trip to San Francisco when he was seventeen. It was to celebrate Sam's high school graduation. While walking down Haight street, he had somehow been separated from his family, and wandered the area for a time unaccompanied. Just about at the point when he was starting to wonder what he should do next, a brightly dressed woman in her mid twenties came up to him. She took him by the hand, led him to a nearby tenement, taken his virginity, led him back out again, and left, all without saying a word. He'd made his way back to their hotel room and gotten shouted at by both his parents, all without losing the pleasant haze he'd gotten wrapped in. He'd never see her again. Two weeks later, the itching in his crotch had gotten bad enough that he broke down and confessed to his father. His father had given him penicillin without a word of condemnation, and neither had told his mother.