IMOGENE’S NOTEBOOK
Dead Men Don’t Always Fall Down
Fiction
I’ve seen a lot of people teetering on the edge of life. Just skirting along with one foot dangling above the void type of stuff. I’ve seen a lot of people stare up at me all bright-eyed and choked up, ready to throw their arms around me because I unknowingly entered the scene of a serious accident… or randomly happened upon a person missing for decades… or stumbled into a hostage situation the police weren’t even aware of yet.
I’ve walked into a lot of rooms on fire. Given a lot of people hope when I didn’t mean to. I’m always this involuntary hero. I just can’t seem to help it. I’m some angel to everyone even though I’m so selfish it’s unreal.
My name is Greg. Did I say that already? I can admit I definitely have a God complex, but I think it’s a little more important than that.
You see, it all started before I even knew what saving a person meant. I was saving people as a toddler, even as an infant. Even before I was born. My mom told me she didn’t have a reason to live until she was carrying me inside her.
She said that she could feel my energy in the womb, helping her overcome her urge to die. Another time I woke her up when she fell asleep in the bathtub. I knew something didn’t look right about her head slipping under the water.
And there I was, saving lives and I wasn’t even out of diapers yet. I guess I always knew I had a calling.
I can’t help but notice that every one of those people, those poor saps completely down on their luck, those lost souls standing at the tail end of their life, living in the moments they’ve probably had nightmares over… those people always thank God when they see me.
If they aren’t on their knees already from being chained to a wall or from having lost their legs, then they drop to them right when they see me and hug me at the waist, probably making sure I’m not some apparition, or even death himself. I’m tired of being hugged, though.
Sometimes I wish they’d fall right through me.
It can feel more like a curse than any blessing, as if either of those things could ever exist — and even if they could, to exist at the same time, in the same person, would be some sort of anomaly, wouldn’t it be? Probably not, though.
But it’s where my mind goes when I turn down an alleyway for a shortcut and save a little girl from being attacked by a Doberman Pinscher. You wouldn’t? Well, don’t take any shortcuts you aren’t prepared to save someone down.
I turn my head another direction and thwart a potential kidnapping. Everything’s a wild coincidence or the world’s spinning along to my head, not the other way around.
I don’t have any angel wings even though I’ve had at least a dozen people tell me I was for certain, no matter what I said, an angel of God come to save them. They really said… no matter what. I never say anything. I didn’t know delivering a pizza to a particular home would give a girl who had been missing for twelve years a chance to sprint out the door. I don’t know these things. They happen to me. I never set out to be a hero.
Is there a God sending me from supermarket to supermarket as I obsess over locating a certain brand of ramen noodles only so I can find it down an aisle where a man pulls a gun and threatens to blow a lady’s brains out? I literally knocked the gun from his hand with the box of ramen. I stopped a pointless killing and found my favorite noodles that night. Was there something divine going on?
The weight of it really drags me down, if I’m being honest. I’m scared to leave my home nowadays. I’m tired of making the news. I’ve had segments for years. Sometimes I feel like I’m the one in need of saving, really.
My feet have been dragging for years on these old sidewalks. I’ve been carrying the world for decades now and feel ready to put it down and go sit in a chair somewhere; go sulk for a little bit. They call me the Savior from the South, but I don’t feel like any savior at all. More like a phony.
You think you have imposter syndrome? You don’t even know the start of it. Imposter syndrome eventually grows into a full-blown identity crisis, which then, if ruminated on enough, gives birth to a complete and perfected case of depersonalization.
That’s probably when you’ll find yourself wandering down alleyways, finding the lost souls barely scraping by as they sit on the edges of the earth, wondering if the jump would hurt. Maybe. Or maybe they’re wondering if slipping under the water is as painless as it sounds.
I’m not sure if there’s a God or not. If there is, he’s definitely given me some sort of agency, some sort of mission, some sort of divine gift to stumble on the misfortunes of others; always placing me exactly where I need to be in order to save a life.
If there isn’t a God, then something very strange is going on, and I have some sort of weird magnetic pull inside of me, attracting me to terror, to feelings of pain, and torture, and shame, and guilt, and regret, and the stench of murder, and the aftermath of stolen innocence, and all the other horrible things that human beings do to each other.
One of them makes me feel like there’s at least a purpose to all of this. The other… makes me feel like I’m pulling people onto a sinking boat.
