An Excerpt from somebody else's life

Life is irony. And it was never more true than when an old crone told her preacher one day that the devil's shadow is always longest closer to the light. Never was this more true than with the preacher's own son, Don.

Don was an irreverent sinner. While his father spent his time in his study pondering life and the bible, Don spent his days feeding his numerous addictions, and worshiping a completely different, feminine shrine. Don was the kind of guy who couldn't get enough from life. Anything he wanted with a price tag, he bought. Everything else, he fucked the hell out of until he was bored. Five less brain cells, and there was no doubt that Don would've been a modern mongol, his genes so interwoven into society that everyone could trace their heritage back to him.

His father tried hard to imagine that Don's open nature about his misdeeds was somehow a kind of roundabout apology, but he could never get his son to see the damage his behaviour was causing. The two were infamous for their heated arguments. The first was when Dan arrived home late one night, practically beaming over the fact he had just deflowered a girl no older than 16. The preacher had wanted to skin his fornicating hide for that, but after a battle of words that lasted longer than a drunken tantra session, the two finally met amidst a foggy moral middle ground. Nobody knows what dark deals were struck between the two, but it was said that the love of a father came out ahead over a love of God's rule that day.

Of course, Don continued his lifestyle. A high paying job paved the way for a new car and ample funds to spend on near endless nothings, distractions and baubles to amuse his ever-shrinking mind, and whatever mind he was stealing bodily contacts from.

That is until one day, Don made perhaps the only intelligent decision in his life. With a full bank account, he decided that the best way to make more money would be to take a course at the nearby University. His father, for once, looked on approvingly.

But the lifestyle went on unabated through the first year of University. After switching courses numerous times - rumour was for reasons beyond academics - Don ended up in a philosophy course. The deeper lessons didn't penetrate the eternal fratboy's mind, and even then, the all-pervasive lifestyle continued. The preacher's son an eternal playboy. That is, until he met Terry.

Terry was a moody and disturbed individual, but there was something about him that was immediately likeable. He had deep, sunken eyes that seemed to pierce like javelins, and his apathetic swagger was accented by the fact that he chain-smoked harder than cinder block factory. Despite his often scathing outlook, Terry exuded a kind of aura that seemed almost comfortable. Like he was the most bad-ass god-smacking creature on the planet, and not to worry a bit because he liked you just enough to let you live.

For the first time in his life, Don found an uncompromising critic of his lifestyle. Terry was single, and so comfortable in the fact that he could practically scorn couples into submission by his mere presence alone. Don often invited Terry to parties and binge-nights. Terry would often take a long draw on his cigarette before answering.
"You know Don, those parties'll kill you. The people. They're not really people. They're vampires. They'll suck your soul out."
In the span of three clipped sentences, Terry would have drawn another cigarette to extinction and lighted another.

Don would often ignore his cynical friend. Sure things would get sucked out through the course of the evening, but Don never saw any vampires. All he saw was the same thing he had worshiped since he was practically old enough to tell the difference between a man and delicious, sexy women.

Of course, that all changed a few months later. Terry, who seemed to grow more disturbed - and all the more likeable - as time went on, developed a habit for disappearing for weeks at a time. When asked about his unexplained absences, Terry would often brush it off as "None of you're Goddamn business."

While he was never a social animal, Terry did have a circle of friends. Or rather, people who identified themselves as his friend, but he merely tolerated because they weren't completely retarded. Don was one of these individuals, and contrary to whatever alcohol-fuelled delusions floated in his head, it was Terry that kept him around, and not vice versa.

Terry was amused by such pursuit of carnal propositions. It was a neverending spiral. Once one acquired a hunger for sex and material wealth, it only grew. It could never be satiated, and as a result, Terry treated Don as both a foil, and a lab-rat style amusement.

Of course, whatever drama the two developed ended one shady September weekend. Terry had been gone for two weeks already before anyone thought to look for him. It was Saturday afternoon when Don rolled out of his bed to answer his expensive cell phone. The voice on the other end tore a ragged hole in his existence with nothing by a fine point of news.

Terry was dead. He had been found in a run-down apartment with three gunshot wounds to his chest and head. Somehow, in perhaps the greatest fuckup in the long, miserable history of human fuckups, the police listed his death as suicide. Either Terry truly was the biggest bad ass - so bad it took three shots to off himself - or an even bigger bad ass had gotten tired of Terry and decided to remove him.

It came out during the police investigation that Terry wasn't who everyone thought him to be. He'd been engaged once, but like all great cynics, Terry hid his powerful source of darkness. His fiancé had fought for years with a malignant tumour. In the end, Terry's vast family fortune and all the best doctors in the world weren't enough to save the girl. She died bald and practically skeletal in a hospital bed, robbed of both surface beauty and dignity by little more than a few pea-sized nodules.

Bankrupt, broken, and alone, Terry isolated himself from society for years before finally reappearing to try and make things work again. His life at the University was to be his last step back into the world of the living. However, Terry himself - at that point an avid smoker - wasn't destined to live. A coroner's report indicated that Terry had developed the early signs of lung cancer, and probably wouldn't have lived much past 40.

Life is Irony. It was the title of manuscript found at Terry's home address. He had been writing a book. Part memoir. Part melancholia-fueled fantasy. In it's quickly yellowing pages, Don found himself, and finally realized where he was and what he was doing. What's more, Don found what Terry had been trying to instill in him for their brief friendship. Purpose. And perhaps more, a sense of dignity. Maybe the guy had just been worried that one day Don would catch something and his nuts would fall off.

The eternal playboy woke up to find himself the son of a preacher and friend to a dead man. That sobering thought soured Don's taste for extravagance. And even then, so many questions were left unanswered. What had really happened to Terry? Why was he away from home when he died?

Fourth year rolled around without warning. A name consistently turned up in absence. Don disappeared for months at a time, and nobody really knew where he went. One day he just disappeared entirely. Strangely enough, nobody, save his father, the preacher, ever asked questions.

And how long had his shadow become by that point?
Ah, but life is irony. Even the preacher, so long in studying his bible, sat one night and couldn't find the answers.

And then one chilly December afternoon, he disappeared too.