Mark Falkin - The Late Bloomer

Please, God, don’t let her die. [1] Kevin Gabriel March (KGM) utters these words in whispers. Another sound appears here, a wheezing, emitted from another person in the room—Kodie Janine Lagenkamp (KJL). While these words are unintended for inclusion in the overall purpose of the recording and are wholly disconnected from its structure as depicted in the following transcribed pages, as such is specifically mentioned on page 172, they are included herein by reference.

So, prologue . [2] Transcriber/editor attempts to indicate and include dramatic pauses, sighs, various vocalizations, obvious emphasis (wherein italics are employed), and paragraph breaks like this one. Editor places the entire prologue in italics, as such was common in old-world literature.

Mr. E, you’d like that I’m trying to do this. Instead of videoing everything and narrating over it. I couldn’t have done that anyway. There was no time to be a reflective documentarian. Now that I’ve got some time, maybe I can process all this and tell you what happened.

In fact, doing it this way is how I process it.

I know you’d prefer this to, well… you were such a supporter of my writing, a mentor. And so telling this with the intention of writing it down instead of filming it… I know you hated the world of screens we’d come to live in. I tend to agree with you now, though at first I thought you were being a crabby old teacher who didn’t get it and stubbornly didn’t want to. Referred to yourself as a Luddite. I had to look it up.

But it’s me who gets it now. I was getting it then, the way you saw things, which wasn’t negative at all. I got that you were trying to show me that through storytelling I could show readers that the world is a beautiful place, that life is a beautiful thing, even when we’re scared and we don’t understand what life is and who we are and why we live and what happens after we die. “Don’t let anybody tell you they know, because they don’t,” you’d said. When I repeated this at the dinner table to my stepdad, Martin, he said, “Sounds like your typical liberal school teacher who can’t hack it in the real world so he teaches, warping minds with his embitterment.” Pretty poetic for an asshole like Martin, I have to say. I remember offering him a brittle smile when he said that, nodding my head, and muttering to myself, “Embitterment, hmmm.”

And what you said about stories. I really get that now, too. You’d said they weren’t just about filling time, entertainment. Not that that’s wrong, a story can be both meaningful and entertaining, you’d said, should be both for it to resonate. You told me that stories connect us, make us understand ourselves and each other a little better. That stories make the world a better place because they are empathy engines.

I like that. Empathy engine. Vroom vroom.

It’s a noble cause, storytelling, you’d said. Noble work.

So, here I go with being noble.

This is for you Mr. English, probably for you more than anyone, except that it’s really for you, dear reader . [3] Section breaks such as this indicate that KGM has stopped recording. The next passage or paragraph indicates his resumption of recording.

Okay, so, even more prologue. Of the housekeeping ilk.

I’m using a little handheld digital micro voice recorder [4] Olympus WS-822 Digital Voice Recorder with Intelligent Functions, mfg. China 2017 to talk this book into being. I took it when we broke into RadioShack. The box [5] Photo of box attached as Exhibit A. it came in said Capture Your Stories with that circled R trademark thing next to it. So, that’s what I’m doing: capturing my story. I’ll shape it later, if I make it.

I hate that I even have to say that. If I make it. God. I want to unplug that part of my self. Got to keep my spirits up. I know that part of me is the least Kevin. I don’t know. He’s the one just trying to survive. To tell it the way things are. The reason… why things are what they are. Heh.

I’d sit and write it properly, this book, a narrative non-fiction they’ll call it, because even though it’s got a novelish, fictiony feel to it, it’s all true. Or maybe it’s a memoir. A memwah . That’s what it is.

Whatever. Point is, I can’t just sit and write it all down because if I don’t keep moving… well, I don’t know what they’d do. But she’s waiting for me, so I can’t stop. And doing this keeps me company. This and Maggie here. Isn’t that right, girl?

I mean, I always wanted to be a writer. Here’s my chance. Maybe my only and last, but.

In case I don’t get too far along doing this, I have to say that although I’ve got my reasons for going down there, I can’t say I feel like I’m truly going to save them. But maybe I can help them. It’s all a big fat maybe, as it has been from day one. They seem to think differently. Kodie says they do, at least. But I don’t know. We’re just too different now. There’s something, what? pernicious about them. Sure, because of what they did, but mostly it’s in the way they move, the way they flock…

If I repeat myself or if this sounds clunky sometimes, just know that this is raw raw raw. I’m going to really write this someday. I need to ‘capture my story’ now because I don’t know about tomorrow. Tomorrow is so far-seeming. After all that’s happened, it would be foolish to say you’re going to know what happens next.

But I think this book will be important because I think I may be the only one left. It certainly feels that way. Unless she really is there waiting for me like she says she is.

Oh, duh—got off track there. Let me get this out of the way. Okay, I’m Kevin Gabriel March and I live in Austin, Texas. I’m not sure what day it is, the day I start this recording, November something, but all this started the morning of October 29, 2018. I’m a, I was , a high school junior and I’m seventeen years old. Birthday’s December 24. Always hated that timing. We get the gift-shaft, we who are born so close to Christmas. You just don’t get celebrated. You get overlooked.

Dreams and visions swirl. They’re heavy and seem important. Not just my brain firing, my mind reacting to conscious life. So many feelings, sights and sounds, but this one’s been a repeater—a beach; a big sound of something rubbing up against an object in the water, a wooden pier, maybe; nightfall and fires in a row, dancing silhouettes; in midmorning light, a blurry presence perched on the sea’s horizon.

They can do the jobs of armies. Odd thing is, they don’t seem to act at the behest of a leader. They move as quicksilver, like one organism, a massive flock of birds abruptly lifting into the air, undulating, twisting, graying the sky; or like a school of fish winding and turning all shiny in shafts of light knifing down through the water. A content and contiguous group, a single entity moving and working and living en masse, seeming to move toward a moment. Moving inexorably toward it.