Story: Brutus in the Park
Visions of a financial exile.
Wearing old, worn clothes that were two sizes too big, a homeless man sat on a park bench minding his business. For a stiff piece of lumbar support, he rubbed his lower back against the bench’s armrest, while his legs, fully outstretched, tattered, holed-up pants in total display, reached to the end of the bench, feet dangling above the other armrest. With the sound of pigeons cooing near his ears, he read a bent-up paperback of Shakespeare’s Caesar in near-tranquility. Only near, for his mind was seldom fully at peace. As his glum eyes scanned the page, vivid mental imagery of backstabbing senators faced with wrathful apparitions went racing across his fertile imagination with disconcerting reality. The Ancient Romans he read about in antiquated iambic were not at all dissimilar from the men he encountered back in his own days of wealth, youth, and excess. Those were quite the days, he slowly began to recall. All that capital, all that power. How it easily went as it came, and how it brought him face-to-face with more snakes than a reptile exhibit. As long as he made those sales, as long as he closed those deals, friendships came last, friendships and brotherhoods were a hindrance. To think that one could find them in the office was a childhood delusion. That’s what he said. That’s what he repeated to himself to sleep at night after the betrayal. The day he sold his own companion out and conspired to have him ejected from the firm. The rumors he milled, the seeds he planted. The doubt spread like a disease throughout every cubicle of that tower. It spread until the only thing standing before the success he so desperately desired was the door to the president’s office. The sounds it made, the vibrations it stirred, when he stood, ear pressed, listening against, while his best buddy was chewed out and eviscerated for an indiscretion he never committed. How good it felt then. Now he recalled his sin with chills. As he read across, from one act to the next, the homeless man wondered about the downfall he’d created for himself all those decades earlier. And though the battles had left him scarred, the trials were to continue, so said the soothsayer whispering in his mind. When night came and fell on that ice cold bench, a harsh wind moaned ghostily through the trees of the park. Shivering and afraid, he could not sleep for any moment. How long he’d come since his first commission.