Wherein We Start at the Beginning

   Every adventure begins with exposition. Exposition is necessary for context. You can’t just tell people you started doing the Monster Mash without first explaining that at one point, you were working in the lab late one night. Otherwise, the target audience will say, in the immortal words of professional transvestite Eddie Izzard, “Quoi the fuck?”

   However, where most adventures kick off with the banal, “It was a dark and stormy night,” or the dramatically wrought, “This is the way the world ends,” or my personal favorite: “They who ascend to mountain tops, behold the sun in glorious majesty arise robing the distant mountain peaks with gold while still new prospects dim the dazzled eyes,” this particular misadventure starts with fear.

   Now, it is understood that heroes, by narrative convention and the aptly named Hero’s Journey, are heroes by virtue of protecting blank by conquering blank in order to save the blank all while evolving as a person. A princess, an evil king, a kingdom; homeland, invading army, freedom; living, dead, future; it’s possible to play madlibs with this all day and always come up with something viable. Point being that heroes are never self-serving myopic characters because there is always an element of something greater at stake, and they are completely aware of this fact. Tragic heroes have to suffer, destined heroes are birthed with sword in hand, which is mere coincidence, I’m sure.

   Just because he seems like an Oedipal character, doesn’t mean he has to stab himself in the eyes later. Sometimes a sword is just a sword.

   But not all stories are about heroes. Some are simply cautionary tales about ordinary people in extra-off-the-god-damned-wall-ordinary situations, where heroism is neither forced upon nor required for character development or narrative progression.

   Using that technique and a little literary algebra, it becomes possible to remove the first and third blank, while leaving only the second: Fear. Conquer or succumb. Eventually the first and third may worm themselves into the plot, but it really is a toss-up, they are generally pretty inconsistent.

   So, exposition for the exposition aside, this brings us back to the original jump off of the exposition: Fear.

   Rational fear is shaped by early experience. We, as a species, have lost instinctual fear. Most everything we know to be afraid of is learned at a young age. Spiders and bees are awesome until one bites us and we realize insects are horrible miniaturized death machines. Mustaches only belong on math teachers and firefighters. Vans that dispense candy are bad news. Basically, we don’t know what to be scared of until we’ve the opportunity for it to scare us. A horrible tautology that, though true nonetheless.

   As we grow, our fears become oddly specific with the knowledge we gain. Raccoons are cute until biology class, where we learn about rabies, the bubonic plague, transmission vectors, what have you. Rational fear, that fear of things that pose a tangible threat our lives, develops by external influence. Adults have rational fears that can be read like a three hour Wikipedia search. Oh, there’s a flesh-eating virus that you can get from sitting in the grass, guess what? There are also jellyfish in the South Pacific that can kill you within minutes. See: South Pacific killers in modern culture.

   Irrational fears are built from the same stuff with the addition of being products of unhindered imaginations. We have no constraints placed upon our minds as children, as such, our psychological fears manifest themselves abstractly. Darkness, claustrophobia, loneliness, amorphous monsters in the closet, all of these are molded by our own minds. It could be argued that these are instinctual fears, and thus perfectly rational. To that I say, if at some point in our collective history we possessed a racial fear of a three-toed sloth with the tail of a scorpion, seven eyes, a gaping maw of circular saw teeth and a hunger for child meat, then I’ll concede any debate for the rest of time. They grow parallel to the rational, but unlike the rational, they cease to bloom into anything further.

   Somewhere in there, during adolescence, we stop being afraid of the dark and instead start worrying about the real world.

   But the transition is so blurry that we don’t always lose that fear, we just forget to be afraid. Deep down, in the murky depths of our collective conscience, stuck between remembered episodes of cartoons secretly made for adults – under the guise of being children’s shows – lay dormant our irrational fears. What’s worse, they always pick the worst possible moments to bubble to the surface.

   I’ve never been afraid of the dark, though I do have a touch of claustrophobia. Sometimes when I go to the beach I stand on the shore, feel the hot sand between my toes, look off to the horizon and see the vast blue ocean carry off into the distance. Then I think, huh, the land just kinda stops right there. I’m literally out of land right now, there’s not enough of it. Then I look up and realize that our breathable atmosphere only extends out to nine kilometers, past that it’s too thin, and past that it’s a vacuum. Past that vacuum is the limits of our solar system, then our galaxy, and oh my god, what do they mean the universe is expanding? There are boundaries? It’s not finished yet? I don’t care if I’ll never live to see the edges, the universe is too small!

   Alright, so a fear of finite spaces more than enclosed spaces. Also, less a phobia than a mental condition.  Ignoring the batshit insanity of that example, it is still one of those irrational fears that can be overcome by taking a breath of fresh air and stepping into the water.

   There are two that have refused to leave me: The first being a recurring dream. I used to have trouble sleeping and there were nights where as soon as REM kicked in, my brain would say “No thanks,” and wake me up just enough that I couldn’t tell whether or not I was still dreaming or the room around me was real. The dreams would bleed over into my half conscious state, my room would be full of the shadows of people talking to each other, conversations I was never privy to because they never spoke clear enough. When I tried to interact with them, they would dissipate and I’d be left in my bed with a fuzzy brain. There were times when I wondered if that meant I was going mad, and madness became a terrifying prospect. A heavy weight for a tiny mind.

   The second fear is the most important. Subjectively I’d say it is the driving force behind this entire tale; Abandonment.

   My twin sister Marlin and I were somewhere around six years old at the time, not too long before our brother Soren had come into the world and dad’s belly had grown enormous (and mom’s butt had followed suite). The family was on a road trip through the American South West to visit grandma. She had moved to the lilliputian mining town of Tonopah, Nevada, for some ‘good old fashioned prospecting’ as she had put it.

   Mentally picturing my grandmother wading shin deep into a stream to pan for gold held a laughable place in my heart until I learned that grandma was kind of a slut. Prospecting did not mean exactly what I had thought.

   Ruined innocence aside, the deserts of the American South West were, and probably still are, unimaginably barren. There isn’t a damn thing out there save sporadic towns that scream, “Stop here and get murdered!” Stretches of sand and tiny towns that look like 50’s throwbacks to when they’d test them for nukes. So little activity you’d think the people who lived there had actually been replaced by mannequins waiting to be melted. Something about the whole scene screamed haunted and extra creepy with a side of meth because, it’s the desert, why the hell not?

   One can only go through so many bottles of beer on the wall before asking ‘MORE desert? Are you kidding me?’ We were out there though, to grandmother’s house we were a-goin. Determined to find out how many times we could get away with asking ‘are we there yet,’ before getting slapped.

   Not many, as it turned out.

   Dad pulled over mid-trip, late night, to relieve himself at one of the literally tens of gas stations along the route and grab himself ‘some goddamned coffee. I ain’t pulling over tonight for sleep. Probably wake up with fang marks and a car full of undead family members. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I let my kids become vampires.’ Safety first, that’s my dad.

   What he did not know at the time, was that I was awake not only to hear his muttered aside, but also that I had to pee something fierce, thanks to an all day ingestion of an unremembered soda and a consistent refusal to go when given the opportunity. I was six, stubborn was part of the charm. Whatever logic had compelled me to hold a full bladder throughout the course of the day also led me to believe that it was a fantastic idea to not get caught sneaking out of the parked car into the gas station behind my father.

   Imagine my surprise when I stepped through door, after having relieved myself in the tiny urinal – in which, on occasion, to this day, I still relieve myself in on the notion that every once in a while, I like to pretend I’m a giant – only to watch the tail lights of our weathered sedan grow dimmer and dimmer as it drove off into the night.

   There is nothing at that age to adequately express the completely awful feeling in my stomach. Absolute despair comes close, but without a frame of reference, which I didn’t have, it was and remains easily the worst emotion I have experienced.

   By the time our car had pulled back into the parking lot, I had been standing in the same spot, flabbergasted and shaking with the cold of the desert night. I was in such shock, it hadn’t even occurred to me to go inside and ask for help. Mom and dad were, naturally, panicking to the point of hysteria.

   It had been Marlin who discovered my significant lack of proximity. She had immediately noticed my absence upon waking to ask, “Where’s Marcus?” When my parents found me, I rushed past them straight to my sister and hugged her until she stopped crying.

   And shivering.