Goldbyrne - Chapter One

One

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There is no good in the world; never has been, never will be. The world is sick; the world is twisted; the world is, to put it in the simplest terms possible, downright messed up. But such is not a result of the state of nature; it is a dreadfully unfortunate and disgustingly putrid effect of the state of man. Thomas Hobbes once said that the state of nature and the state of chaos are both one and the same, and that the only way to dispose of the world’s evil ways, stemming from treacherous and unspeakable acts of violence and greed and lust, is to appoint a single deified and beneficent despot, or hypothetical political entity, to oversee the despicable affairs of men.

I disagree. It is not the state of nature, as Hobbes says, that is the chaotic and blasphemous state of humanity. I believe that it is the state of man that has brought mankind to utter ruin. If anything, I agree with Hobbes’ contemporary, a 17th century philosopher and political theorist named John Locke. Locke said that the state of nature is one of peace and goodwill, supporting a particular lifestyle that deserves comparison to how animals and creatures of the wild live today, in the ever-so glorious twenty-first century. The state of man, however, is one of cynicism and insincerity. It is as hilariously pathetic as it is detestable. It is a state of being that produces no good whatsoever and does nothing but create a sort of synthesized malice.

Once upon a time, the world was a splendidly beautiful place full of humans who lived in such a peace. Then along came the worst that has ever been created by man in the history of mankind: civilization. With civilization, which stemmed from the transition of the agricultural lifestyle into one of both culture and promise, came urbanization. With urbanization came cities. There is no place in this world that contains a greater amount of substantiated perfidy and utter insincerity than the city. Cities are what make the world a truly despicable place. The economic metropolises of commerce that plague the world like locusts in a blighted field of rye possess the capability of enthralling even the best of men, seducing them into a vibrant lifestyle of glitz, glamour, and greed. Because of the city and the cynicism of modern day society, men are born good, but die evil.

The city is alive. It has a mind of its own, a mind that enchants all who allow themselves to be sucked in by its urban magic. Although the city is beautiful in its own right, like everything and everyone, it has a dark side. The city drives the sane to the brink of madness, an incurable madness of anxiety and despair.

Maybe it isn’t so much that the world and the men who belong to it are evil, perhaps we’re all of us crazy. Yes, that’s it. We’re all just crazy. Everyone has their own little bit of crazy, whether he or she is a struggling author with an eccentric side, a beautiful woman with familial issues and deep, inner conflicts, a psychopathic marine who torments those whom he thinks he loves, or a billionaire entrepreneur with suicidal tendencies. The urban lifestyle appeals to the crazy, and the already crazy individuals end up contracting an even more severe case of madness. Once they surrender themselves to the urban lifestyle, it is then when they become whores to the jungle of urbanization and slaves to the concrete. Blame it all on the cities, for they are concentrations and manifestations of both phoniness and anxiety.

I was born to the city. As I boy I grew up in Washington, D.C., the capital of cynicism and the equilibrium of the world’s demented ideals of romanticized corruption. I take no pride reveling in the economic prosperity of the family to which I was born, but my father came into a great deal of wealth following the numerous government contracts awarded to his once-fledgling arms dealing company, which has since grown into one of the largest, wealthiest, and most trusted corporations in the United States of America. When my father finally allowed his company to go public, he sold it and made billions. Apparently, enough isn’t enough for my father; he still advises the board and holds a large share. I don’t complain, though. His money is what gave me the education of a lifetime, an education that only few are fortunate enough to receive. For that, I thank him.

We’re all of us liars, my family. My older brother is a politician, a senator for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and my younger brother is an attorney, both of them making a living out of lying and kissing up to others. I’m the biggest liar of all. I make a living out of writing stories I devise in my own head and selling them to the public. I am a writer. It is what I do. It is the only thing I am good at.

Ever since I was young, I’ve had this affinity for the pen. It was my best friend as a child, and it is my best friend today.

I love the city, and did even more so when I was a young man, the time in my life in which the tragedy I am about to recount takes place. In spite of such a deep and unconditional love for the cynical prison of insincerity and haunting industrial magnitude, I separated myself from the urban lifestyle in the fall of my eighteenth year.

It was nice, my four-year divorce, but at times I longed to return to my home. During those four years, I attended the College of William and Mary, where I double-majored in English and Political Science.

After university, I returned to the streets of my youth where I tried my luck at writing on a professional level, but all inspiration and kinetic talent was depleted. All I was able to produce was a lengthy anthology of ill-received filth. I thought Washington would serve as my muse, but I was wrong. It was then when I decided to attend Dartmouth, where I earned my post-graduate degree. It was immediately following my scholastic ordeal when I finally discovered where it was I belonged. It was then when I fell in love.

I’d been to Boston multiple times in my youth, but I never fully grasped the incomparable majesty of that metropolitan gallery of ancient knowledge, wisdom, and history that contributed to the sheer grandeur of the city itself.

From the moment I touched down at Logan, I knew I was finally where I belonged. I had finally found my muse.

Boston was a city that had always remained on my radar of possible places to live, but the prospect of such a seemingly unlikely situation never struck me as inherently plausible until the day I received a call from Sampson Trayer, an old comrade of mine from both preparatory school and college. At William and Mary, we were dorm-mates, Sam and I and bunked together for two years until he switched schools. At first, I found it a rather idiotic move on his part, until I discerned the reason behind his abrupt departure was the fact that he had been accepted into Harvard School of Law. By the time of his unexpected call, we were on the same academic tier, seeing as we were both Ivy men. I constantly joked from then on that I would one day outdo him by obtaining a PhD from Oxford, but just like the prospect of my moving to Boston seemed initially improbable, so did my hypothetical future of attending school at Britain’s oldest and most esteemed university.

Sam met me in the white zone of the airport with a bright smile on his face, a smile of both sincerity and promise. I smiled back at him before we embraced. I hadn’t seen him in God-knows how long, and the site of his friendly face immediately triggered a rush of returning bygone memories that suddenly flooded back into my head after being awakened from their deep slumber on the lowest level of my subconscious. We both exchanged fond and excitable greetings of good fortune and brotherly love.

Sam took my bags and loaded them into the trunk of his car, a sleek-looking BMW, the same car he had driven in both high school and college. The thought made me smile.

“It’s great to see you again, Finn,” Sam said once we were on the road. “It’s been a long time.”

“It has been,” I replied, looking out of the window. It was an overcast and foggy day in the middle of September, the kind of day where an intellectual and social misfit such as myself would much rather stay indoors and read a book, as opposed to venturing out into the seemingly infinite gloominess. “Six whole years,” I said again. I then felt slightly more inquisitive. “What have you been up to?” I asked.

Sam turned to me, his hands still on the wheel. “Working,” he said with a hint of foul disdain. “I’m at a small firm downtown. It pays well, but the hours are inconvenient, to say the very least.” He sighed and turned his head back to the road. “They’ve got me working weekends.”

“Well,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “That’s what Harvard does to a man. Intellectuals like you are high in demand these days.”

“Psh,” sighed Sam, waving his hand in a dismissive fashion. He said, “If anyone’s the intellectual, it’s you, Finn. I could never be a writer. People with your talent are a rare breed.”

I rolled my eyes and smiled slightly. “Why don’t you tell that to the Wall Street Journal? I’m sure they’d disagree with you.”

“You do realize that reviews aren’t everything,” Sam said. “I happened to really enjoy your book.”

I laughed. “You don’t have to lie to me just to spare my feelings. It was a total flop.”

“So what?” Sam remarked, turning his head back toward me. “You wrote it when you were, what, twenty two? So what if Love’s lustful Bane sucked. You got plenty of years ahead of you to write better material. Besides, I’m sure Dartmouth’s improved you.

I shrugged and scratched my head. “Thanks for the encouragement, but I highly doubt it. Writers are born with talent, they don’t learn it.”

“Come on, Finn,” my friend urged as he shook his head. “You haven’t written a single word in four years.”

“There’s a reason for that,” I said in a corrective tone. “I didn’t have time. I was at Dartmouth. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to get a master’s degree.”

“Yes,” agreed Sam, “but you got it in English and Literature. It’s what you’re trained to do!”

I laughed a laugh of bitter irony. “A good writer isn’t defined by his education,” I said. “You can teach a man everything there is to know about writing, and he still won’t be any good at it. What makes a good writer are important life experienced, something that I lack.”

Sam breathed heavily. “Then why’d you come to Boston if not to write?” he asked, thoroughly interested. “Why the hell are you even here?”

I shrugged. “I love New England,” I said honestly. “Simple as that.”

“New Hampshire is in New England. Why didn’t you just stay there?”

I shrugged again. “I don’t know,” I replied in a somewhat disconnected voice, lacking interest. “I just felt drawn here.” It was true. I felt like this city in particular was beckoning for my arrival. “I guess I just wanted a change.”

He smiled. “You’ll find that here for sure.”

We drove for a few more minutes in silence. It gave me some time to reflect. Why was I here? It was true; I had felt drawn to this city in particular, but why? Did I know that something was going to happen, and I would experience what I did? Perhaps I did, at least on a subconscious level.

I’ve always liked Boston, yes, but I never imagined falling victim to the ancient metropolis’ seduction. Was it here where I would find the life changing experience that I sought? Would I some how emerge a new man, shaped by the people I would end up meeting? I would ultimately change due to the lessons I’d learn from that one man in particular, the billionaire entrepreneur about whom this story is truly about.

But at the time I wondered if I would actually emerge a new man. Why Boston? I did not know, to put it frankly. I contemplated more on as to what these possible experiences could be as we drove through the depressing wastelands of industry and sorrow, the ascending pollution from the smokestacks becoming invisible as it climbed into the air, where it became obscured by the low-lying clouds of the late afternoon.

We talked more as we drove on, primarily discussing relatively unimportant topic pertaining to our respective childhoods. As we continued to drive, I became more and more dethatched from our conversation and increasingly aware of my bleak surroundings. As I became lost in the conversation, I began to notice the unique environment surrounding us and the ambient scenery that it held. It is a sensation that inhabits most cities, despite its location on the fringes of metropolis. It is the part of the city that the privileged dread, but the working-class adore, as the latter see it as their very salvation.

The unfortunate view this strange land as a bountiful garden of promise, offering a hypothetically bright future, such a future being the consistent insurance of being able to both sustain food, family, and an impoverished lifestyle. The place is dirty, polluted, and depressing. The smokestacks make all those who pass underneath feel like imps, and the dreary factories that line every corner appear to be gateways of Hell.

Randomly scattered throughout the gloom were crumbling apartments and burnt-out hotels, where the impoverished made their homes. This place is the breadbasket of the city it surrounds, ensuring its economic success as well as all other relating variations of prosperity. With its endless sprawl, like fields upon fields of wheat in the arable lands of the middle-west, where agriculture is God and farms are shrines, the refineries that lined Greater Boston kept the city alive, just as a mother’s breast does to a newborn infant.

What I describe is a place like no other, for it is a unique mix of gratuitous efficiency, agonizing labor, and grotesque industry. This steel garden of waste and refuse is a city within a city, a sprawl of semi-hellish proportions. It goes by many names. Dickens would refer to it as the bane of all human existence, an inhumane contraption. Rockefeller would see it as the bright future of American industry and autonomous efficiency. Fitzgerald would call it the Valley of Ashes. To me, it was a jungle.

That’s what it was: a jungle. The smokestacks and forges, upon which fires burned perpetually, towered above me, like a forest of trees. The factories and refineries were like thickets and caves of sheer bleakness. Only, there were no animals, save for the pigeons that circled the tall forges like carrion birds, ready to feed on the carcasses of the dead. The fires and smoke illuminated the sky, staining it a bloody red-orange. It was as if the devil ravaged this corner of God’s green earth and dragged all the hosts of Hades out from behind him. The sky was on fire, burning from the flames and pollution of twisted and demented industry itself. There were power stations and refineries for as far as the eye could see, like a million Batterseas lining the New English horizon.

I thought that the Jungle would go on forever, but I soon found out that the seemingly endless industrial sprawl had an end. It came as both a relief and an abrupt fright when the final factory passed by on my left. Suddenly, we were surrounded by old row houses that once belonged to middle class families when the suburbs were still this far in, but now they housed those individuals who were used to a bitter lifestyle where they live paycheck to paycheck, a lifestyle I could not bear to even comprehend, in spite of myself.

We finally got off at the next exit and turned onto the bypass, which passed directly over a small portion of the Jungle, now bellow us. Rising up from where the industry was bellow was a large billboard, advertising some new phone, or computer, or form of social media. On it was a well-known entrepreneur who I did not know much about. His name was Steven Goldbyrne, but I paid no attention to the advert at the time, and kept on talking with Sam. I continued to look back in the direction of the Jungle.

I shivered as the last visible vestiges of industry disappeared behind me, being reclaimed by the fog, like a ghostly apparition in the misty twilight. Just as fast as the putrid cesspool of tragic bleakness came into site, with all of its abrupt hastiness, it was completely gone, as if it were not even there to begin with.

But no sooner had I left one city than yet another came into view. Rising up from the fog, she appeared to me as if she were a vivacious tigress, a woman of beauty, skill, and wit. She gleamed with life and purpose, unlike the other city situated on the outskirt of waste and lost hope, which was disappearing behind me in the growing twilight. She was beautiful and vibrant, a glimmer of inspiration and orgiastic promise. She wore the coats and colors of six hundred thousand men and women, while ruling both night and day. She was truly a creature of the night. She was illuminated by both light and color and was capable of drawing men into her bed as to begin an illustrious affair; an affair that I wished to be a part of. Her name was Boston, and she beckoned for me to enter her, and I did so willingly and graciously. Once the orgasm of utter joy began, I knew that I was in love. Nothing could say otherwise. I had finally found my muse.

“My adopted city,” Sam said, turning to look at me, smiling. My face was pressed hard against the passenger seat window, where I sat in a state of complete memorized awe. “And yours too now, Finn.” I’d been to a town called Boston before, but what I was experiencing, the city that I was now in love with, was something new entirely.

“I think I may already be in love, Sam,” I said, turning back to my old friend and grinning.

Sam laughed a hearty and sincere laugh. “Just don’t take her away from me.” He gave me another wink. “So, what are your plans?”

“Until I can find a place of my own, I’m over in a hotel downtown.”

“Come on, Finn,” Sam jokingly chastised, shaking his head from side to side. “There’s plenty of room at my place. I’m sure Bea won’t mind either.”

I was surprised. “Wait, Bea is here?” I excitedly inquired, not believing what I had heard. Although she was Sampson’s sister by blood, she was as much mine as she was his. The three of us were virtually inseparable in high school. It filled me with immense quantities of joy when I found out that Beatrice Trayer was in Boston with her twin brother, yet I still somehow managed to decline my friend’s hospitable offer.

“Suit yourself,” he said, shrugging, not the slightest hint of disappointment in his voice. “Which hotel are you at?”

I told him the name of some swanky, upscale place right in the city and he nodded in acknowledgement, still a warm smile on his face. I picked that particular hotel for a reason; it was right downtown. What better way to immerse myself into my new city than to experience life at its heart for a couple of glorious days? There is truly nothing like being at the epicenter of something so special as Boston.

“Have you started thinking about looking for places, or is it still too early?” Sam asked me with a hint of enthusiasm.

“I haven’t really considered it yet,” I said as I stroked my stubby goatee. “You know this city better than I do. If anyone should have ideas, it should be you, Sam.”

“You’re in luck,” Sam said as we had just crossed over into South Boston. “I’ve started searching for places for you.”

“Oh?” I remarked inquisitively. “Pray tell.”

“An apartment over in Watertown, fairly cheap, but it’s still nice.”

“No,” I said smiling as I shook my head. “I’d rather be in the city itself. I want some place in Old Town or Charlestown. Maybe something in walking distance from the Constitution.”

“Places like that don’t come cheap.”

“Has expensive ever been a problem for spoiled rich kids like us?” I jokingly asked, mostly rhetorical.

Sam grinned. “I guess not,” he said, “but I hear you writers don’t get paid well, especially if all you write are duds.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at his friendly insult.

We continued out banter for the next few minutes as we continued to drive through the south end, but in the wake of our engaging conversation we decided to divert our course and loop around through Cambridge instead of going directly into the city. We crossed over the Charles River via the Harvard Bridge. Along the way we passed both Harvard and MIT, and neither Sam nor I could withhold a sigh as we witnessed the college-agers walking down the street. The sight seemed to drive us into a state of nostalgia in regard to our bygone college years.

There was very little traffic for some inexplicable reason, but I sure wasn’t complaining. It took us virtually no time at all to pass through Cambridge and finally cross the city threshold into the city proper via the Charlestown Bridge. As we did so, I finally realized that I was home.

We talked for a bit longer as we drove through downtown Boston, simply cruising along the various streets. We caught up and such. There was no urgency for me to get to my hotel. An hour or so after dark, Sam drove me to where I was staying and he helped me unload my bags and see me off, but not before extending unto me a kind invitation of sheer beneficence.

“Look,” he said, “Bea and I are having some friends over for dinner tomorrow, and we’d love for you to come. Plus, it would be nice for you to meet some real Bostonians and strike up some friendships.”

“Who are they?” I asked. “The friends, I mean.”

“They’re more friends of Bea’s than they are of me,” Sam replied. “Both girls.” He winked slyly.

“Anyone I’d like?”

He shook his head. “Just ditzy socialites if you ask me. Nobody particularly special or engaging,” Sam replied. “I know you prefer the nerdy girls, but these ones are fun. Who knows, you might get lucky.” I smiled and graciously accepted his kind invitation. He told me he’d text me the address, which he did later that evening after we’d parted ways.

I found a bronze trolley to put my bags onto and started to walk inside, when Sam suddenly yelled something at me before he drove away. “Don’t lose yourself to the city,” he said. “It changes people.” I smiled at the time, taking the statement lightly. Only now is it that I truly comprehend the gravity of his dire warning and what it truly entailed. “Oh, and Finn,” he said. I turned around. “It’s good to have you back.” He drove away, and I gazed up at the majestic skyline of my new urban home, so full of life. I found myself staring at it for what seemed like hours, but was, in actuality, a mere few seconds or so.

It seemed to speak to me, the city, through both whispers and echoes. It was the words of thousands of souls, offering me words of both warm welcome and foul condemnation. It was simultaneously haunting and soothing, the distant echoes. Nowhere had I ever seen a place so full of life. It was an ecosystem in its own right, offering me words of wisdom as to assist my new Bostonian status. I closed my eyes and felt the brisk, stinging bite of the wind on my face and heard the ambient sounds of the city through my ears. It wasn’t just car honks and the yelling of enraged Bostonians; to me it was so much more. It was the city itself speaking to me. Boston was speaking to me and me alone. It was more than a feeling. I belonged to Boston. She claimed me for her own.

The city enchants men and changes them, often into husks of their formal selves. It can cost any sensible man his sanity, but sometimes it is a fair trade, as the city is magical. The city can change a man for the better or it can bastardize him. I still don’t know which it did to me. Either way, when a man moves from the city, he is not the same man he was when he moved there.

I did not simply become a Bostonian that night; I had begun my love affair with the city. It was now mine. It was as if the city and I had a symbiotic relationship, she and I.

Boston had claimed my soul and me, but I was happy. I felt a part of something greater. I felt invincible. I felt like writing. That is exactly what I did after I checked myself in, grabbed a bite to eat, and got to my room. Once I opened my laptop at the desk in my suite, I began to write, allowing myself to be guided by my brain, my fingers, and the very words themselves. When I was finished, it was nearly two in the morning. I was hardly aware of what it was exactly I had written. When I look at the screen to see what my fingers and brain had simultaneously concocted, I nearly jumped back in sheer surprise, a surprise of both dread and anxiety. I had infinitely described, in ten pages, the Jungle, in all of its haunting vividness.