Losing Character

I destroyed a man and became famous.

People call me Steven Hill. 

They didn’t always.

     My room at St. Jeremy’s Assisted Living smells pungent, like hand sanitizer and that smell old people give off because their internal organs are slowly starting to break down. I recently came to the shocking realization that it was me giving off that old person smell. 

I hadn’t planned on living this long. The average person lives for 40,471,200 minutes. As of today I’ve overstayed my welcome by 1,051,897.  My uncontrollable will to live ruined everything.

Article clippings cover my room in a thick coat of newspaper font and an ever growing layer of dust as the edges of the expositions disintegrate and fall into the blue fibers of the carpet. The women who help me shower and shave keep trying to clean it up, but I won’t let them. That’s my dust down there.  That dust dates back to 1922 when a young Steven Hill first arrived on the crime scene.

“…lost both of his parents in a car wreck”, “Bridges Police Force is excited to take him aboard.”, “…a quiet and withdrawn boy.”, quote the early articles.

Leave it to Bridges, a small town in a big town’s shadow, to have made that into news. Later articles started to make my character into a mystery.

“Who knows what’s under the rim of his baseball cap, a hero, or just another Chicago fan hiding his face from his team’s terrible season?” But by then a case had already been assigned.

Walter DeFranco. 

No one had ever seen this kid.  They knew he was doing big time arson deals, burning down government businesses here and there, occasionally targeting the households of judicial officials.  His ashy trail meandered all up and down our state, and had landed itself in Charsdale, Bridge’s big city neighbor. The papers refused to specify how DeFranco had been identified, but those who saw the scenes first hand said that he left a small engraved stone at the source of the fire. 

A few mimics had popped up, but none had burned the buildings so completely, none had matched the stone, and none had met the passion with which the task was done. Walter DeFranco was a man possessed, a man wronged by his government, and a man with more than just his own interests on the line.

Walter DeFranco is the reason for my fame. I can almost see him hidden amongst my own wrinkles when I look in the mirror.  But this was all a very long time ago. Walter DeFranco, then Leonard Bernur, lost his daughter in a hearing in late spring, 1921. He ran down the courthouse steps as Sophie’s tiny fingers waved goodbye and a driver took away the last family he would ever know. He couldn’t bear to blame his ex-wife for what had happened.

     Walter DeFranco had been the handsome detective in the fedora hat that Leonard had made stories about for his daughter before bed. It was his alter ego, the hero that had begun growing inside of him ever since he first became a father. It was his last connection to a now forever lost daughter, the name letting her know that he was thinking of her.  The flames were the result of irrationality and desperation. He would later try to rationalize the arson by saying it was a clever play on his real last name. I knew better though. He was a man who had lost everything, and while he was never physically violent, even the calmest heroes try to go for the biggest boom every once and a while.

     According to the articles, DeFranco had escaped the police but “…Steven Hill, baseball hat dipped down against the flames, charged after him into the burning building.”

     From there the journalists only speculate.

     I read articles berating DeFranco:

“Crazed arsonist attacks courthouses…” “…malicious intent…” “…brought to justice by Steven Hill.”

I was enraged. He was a father, and these would be the last words his daughter would read about him.  The daughter he’d been trying to reach for one last goodbye, through his legacy.

Immediately after emerging from the building’s smoldering rubble, I locked myself in my house for weeks.  Swallowed whole in my misery I shied away from the letters in the articles.  They watched me from their scattered places, disappointment emanating from their yellowing paper.

            I became obsessed with giving this man one more shot.  I dreamt of conversations I might have.  In some of them I interviewed him, but in most I told him my story, the story I’d nearly screamed to reporters early after his death.  The story of Steven hill.  How I’d run into the fire to save DeFranco, to give him a second chance, to erase what he had done and reconnect him with his daughter.

     I wanted to tell him that I had come out of that building in tears over his loss, that all I wanted was his forgiveness.

     These interviews have consumed my life.  They all end in the same way.  I’m jotting down notes, and I look up from my papers.  There, sitting in the chair across from me, is my own face staring back.  He, me, I’m never quite sure anymore, looks at me and says, “Only one of us knows what really happened in that building.”

     I say “We were both there, you shouted your daughters name, you fell to your death, you stared me in the eyes when you did it, ask the press, it’s in every major paper.”

     He shakes his head at me. “Steven Hill,” he says “Was dead before he saw me.”

     “NO!” I hear myself shout out loud sometimes.  “I’m Steven Hill! You have been dead for decades, haunting me, following me.” My voice trails off because I know he’s right.  Know that I’m right.  Tears well up in my eyes.

People call me Steven Hill.

They didn’t always.

     I ran into the building because I didn’t want to live, because my life had caught up with me, because I was never going to see Sophie again.

 I turned around when I heard part of the building collapse and found a kid, looked like a reporter of some sort because of the baseball hat, dead or dying under a pile of beams.  I relished the feeling of smoke in my lungs.  I felt the tiny oxygen grabbing particles shriveling, my skin blistering, my arm moving towards his hat.

The rest is black until a pain shocked through my body.  Fresh air exploded into my system like fire bolts.  Everyone was calling me, “Steven” they said, “Steven Hill”.  It took a while, and a lot of calm to keep my mouth shut and refrain from asking questions, but I began to get the picture.

   To my knowledge I am the only person in existence who’s witnessed the results their own suicide. I’ve killed myself but I’m not dead.  Leonard Burner, Walter DeFranco, I disappeared with the ashes of that building. Coping with the loss of myself was like wading into the pool of self pity I had only ever dipped my toes into before.  The surface lapped against my skin in waves of reality, closed over my head, cold, dark, and with a raking pain as my lungs burned for air a second time since the fire.

   I suppose it’s ironic that my will to live killed me. That the innate need to save my particular arrangements of molecules and particulates was more important than saving the product which they came together to make.  None of my particles are in a different order than they were those fifty or so years ago and yet everything about the way they interact with the outside world has changed.

   When people say Steven my left ear wiggles and I turn around. Every part of my body is tuned into this second shot at life, this unwanted reincarnation. I keep my fingers crossed that in the next life I come back as a cat, or salamander, or a bufflehead duck. No one deserves two lifetimes as a human.

   My name is Steven Hill, and I’ve lost more of myself than you could possibly know.