The Labyrinth.
It’s impossible for me to convey just how important Gandge Tarker was to me -- to all of us, really.
Benedict just stared for a moment, arrested by the form long since made iconic by insensitive media outlets and celebrity fetishists. He had accepted this, he had reckoned. There was no denying that there was not going to be any more NeRfHeRdeRz records, just as the last decade and change had illustrated.
But it never seemed so real. It was always in holovision, in holographs. Light, not flesh. Not spirit.
The wars were on, as they always were. We’d grown up in it. We accepted its inevitability, and our facelessness in the process. An airstrike here, a ground war there. Corpses, corpses, everywhere. The powers-that-were, the powers-that-be had levied our futures for a little extra terrain; a handful more of the natural resource d’jour. No karking decency, as if the entire universe was their battleground, their karking toilet. What’s the sodding point?
We were all just so terrified; so miserable and alone. He saved our lives, Emperor Plague-Us and the NerFhErDerz.
The gravity pulled his face into a frown…dragged his body to the ground, kneeling to inspect the fallen Emperor – no, God – of Spunk Rawk. Of Hope, of Life, in the Pit.
Like any messiah worth a damn, he was born in Hell. A delinquent from the Tarisian Undercity with a bad attitude and a sloppy three-cord progression -- for the truth is often simple, ennit? A scream, a whimper, and a sneer.
It was him. There was no denying in the eyes, that wounded look that, despite all the spitting and the cursing and wishing of ill-well, still broke all hearts wide open. They twinkled with flecks of
blues?
Purples?, offering consolation in the fact that whatever he had been in life was transcendent and ever-lasting and could never die.
So we were dead anyway, he told us. Kark ‘em. We look like ants to all of ‘em, but we can’t exactly tell them apart, neivver. Nobodies in ivory towers – sad, long-haired clowns. Bollocks to their wars, their fear machine. Throw your bones upon the gears and kark it up. Kark it right up.
Benedict smiled weakly and caressed the fallen King’s ruined cheek.
“And you must be Anahata,” he muttered, taking special comfort in the words.
That was Gandge. He was our heart.
The Guttermage stood from the corpse, venturing yet still deeper into the maze. But it was different now. Less tangible, bodily-tension subsiding as his nerves simply let go. Emotional content drifting namelessly in the maze as it caved into abstraction. Quietly, the memories of his purpose had disappeared, the names of his friends, his loved ones, his sins, all vanished. Even Mnggal-Mnggal had grown silent, the fat of Benedict’s deeds boiling off.
Leaving only his essence.
He wandered up to a group of ghosts, but it wasn’t really that. It was a defining moment, frozen in amber. He had kept it safe, treasured it. Where everything changed.
The remnants of the fight with his dad, stolen money, running away (but always coming back). The girl he followed –
who was it?
Benedict couldn’t even see her face in his mind anymore. But he recognized the club, the crowd, the band on stage.
“Lords of Dorkness! Go, Go, Go!”
Those three cords, the shriek of feedback. The sweat, the stink; the fists in the air, the water bottles full of piss flying overhead – and Emperor Plague-Us, flailing so madly on stage, the notion of him actually trying to play that damn guitar seemed impossible. Young Benedict was lost at first, stumbling through the crowd, steeping in the anger of similarly disenchanted teenagers, oppressed and worn Gungans, and all other colors and shapes of the miserable and unappeased.
He was moshing before he knew it.
Cyborg mouths and infected faces,
Goth Rejects and Jedi Disgraces.
Got salted in High School, now bitter and sour
Tell me again why I should fear your Dorkside power?
It was the words he was looking for. The truth he couldn’t express. All at once, the baggage slid off, abandoned at a subway station for a life adrift. There wasn’t no crowd-surfing with a suitcase.
They’ll Sith! SITH! SITH ON YOU!
SITH! SITH! SITH ON YOU!
SITH! SITH! SITH ON YOU!
And what makes me sick is you’ll karkin' let 'em!
But, then, the lightness of his pockets. His wallet was lost. His credit, his identification, his cash. Stark terror of his father’s reaction, of the potential for humiliation.
Why was being a victim was always so much more embarrassing than the harm of the actual crime? Benedict worried, lost, suddenly so beholden to the world he wanted nothing more than to forget.
“What’s wrong?”
Benedict looked confused, darting around, searching the floor as people jumped up and down upon it in the dark, stepping on his fingers.
“WHAT’S WRONG?”
“MY WALLET,” he stuttered, afraid to tell him, afraid to make it a target for thieves….but what choice did he have?
“I’VE LOST MY WALLET.”
We wore him like armor. He protected us, made us better. I’d even nicked his accent, like. He’d given the Ministry of Culture a reason to tremble, somefing they’d long since forgot. Rightly so, too. His message was a dangerous one to give to us victims of their ambition:
“HE LOST HIS WALLET.”
Suddenly, everyone made a hole in the pit and searched with him. Within seconds, a squib in combat boots waddled up to him and placed the wallet back into his hands,
“There you go. Lighten up, man.”
Benedict stood there, baffled. No grief. No thieves. No harm. No foul.
And the party marched on.
"In chaos this dense, a new tomorrow was just as likely as an old one."
They’ll Sith! SITH! SITH ON YOU!
SITH! SITH! SITH ON YOU!
SITH! SITH! SITH ON YOU!
He would come home to his father, angry and at the end of his rope, as usual, for his mother had, despite all the hard work, all the time at the office, all the energy healing, did a backslide into the madness.
He wondered if mum would remember his name this time. He wondered how dad thought he’d enforce his being grounded while at the hospital. He wondered if Avalore would presume to lecture him on how he made things so hard for everybody, and his responsibility to the family.
And then he wondered why he cared at all. This was not his home.
It never was.
And God, if we didn’t need to believe that more than anyfing.
So,
finally, he left.
It weren’t long before that Skylark bastard at Minicult had seent the band co-opted, stripped of meaning and absorbed into the cultural malaise you lot consume with whorish devotion. Force forbid there be somefing that could exist wiffout being summed up by a picture, by a bloody shop in the mall.
The memory slipped from his thoughts, from his mind, and Benedict was left standing in the maze with nothing, save a general sense of direction and a warm-hug to his well-being.
I remember the last show they ever did. Packed, packed stadium – Uni jocks, karking blondes, it weren’t the scene anymore. You’d have these twats popping in with washout green dye in their brohawks, muttering utter bollocks like, “Yeah, I’m a Spunk, but I don’t really agree with the politics, y’know? Besides, I’ve got a business meeting tomorrow, and you can’t hold down a job with inorganic hair, right?” They were just there to hurt people, really. Punch kids in the pits, grope girls crowd surfing. Just one more sweaty extension of the Sith.
From his vantage on the 15 foot stage, he saw the whole fing, Gandge did – and it was finally enough to shake him from the drugs, the booze. He refused to play music they could dance to anymore…Brought out the acoustic, sang about the Undercity; slow, terrible, heartbreaking. Hahah…He was such a miserable musician, too, it hadn’t ruddy well occurred to him he’d strung the strings too tight, and they tore into his fingers, blood pouring down the front of the guitar. The tourists didn’t know what to make of it, started booing, demanding refunds and that, while the rest of us just grinned. While the violence could always be co-opted, the sheer humanity of the whole fing never could. Up the spunx.
A week later, he was dead.
The labyrinth had broadened, no longer twisting and turning, but a straight shot to the end of the path and the bright abyss beyond it, where a man stood before the exit, radiant, alive.
These days, it’s a bloody t-shirt. An iconic image of just what a tortured soul Gandge really was, and how he was too fragile for this harsh world, blah karking blah. An argument for his being a rock martyr rather than just one more spur of the moment suicide.
“If y’see the Buddha walking toward you, murder him.”
It was Emperor Plague-Us himself, at his best, wearing a t-shirt just like Benedict’s with the words “No Future” scrawled across in black marker.
It killed us, it did. We tried to shield ourselves from it with conspiracy theories about the Empire, his girlfriend Tara, assassins and murder…but that was all rubbish. I mean, poor bloody Tara…she had gone to CPR classes just so she could resuscitate Gandge before shows, nights spent in the quiet of their own home – he was ODing all the karking time, there in the end.
Benedict made a pistol with his fingers, leveling it at Gandge’s unmarred face.
And pulled the trigger.
“Wishuddha.”
Once again, the Spunk Rawker’s mouth caved in on itself, and he dropped lifelessly to the ground…only to reveal that there, standing behind…a little boy with blue eyes and black hair.
The cruel fact is that Gandge was exactly what we always knew he was. A junkie, a depressive, an unfortunate sod prone to self-destruction, and ultimately, just a bloke, same as you or me. But we didn’t want that, did we? We wanted to believe he could be better, and by proxy, we could maybe be better, too. He couldn’t die so pitifully…We couldn’t. If he could look around at all he had built and give up hope, what chance did we have? What did that leave for any of us?
“My mom is sick,” he said, he eyes wet with tears.
“I know, son,” Benedict said, kneeling down, scooping the kid up in his arms.
The only fing we ever really had, like.
Each other.
“Is she going to get better?,” he asked as Benedict lifted him up in his arms.
“I’m afraid she isn’t,” the Guttermage confessed, carrying him off beyond the gate.
I don’t know how we ever forgot that.
“I’ll figure out something…”
And onward they stepped into the great white abyss.
