The Interpreter

Fictional Character

Cigarettes not the only gloom in the room, besides his mood, but maybe his only friend. The destructive talon reached long into his lungs. He embraced it, his manhood and all wouldn't allow otherwise. Squinting at a drink of whisky he was not supposed to take he tried to size up the situation the best he could but only half-heartedly. Not because he didn't care but he didn't have all the details, therefore, he lacked the where-with-all to figure it. “How do I get out of this,” was his only plan. He shut the television news off.

There were issues. Women, as always were at the heart of things. One had turned up dead, it said in the news, and the other soon to be found out. The mystery was already winding through the city. Imaginary keepers he could now count on one hand. He looked outside the window for a sign of God, none so far.

He was a thug, no more, no less and he simply could not figure his way out of this. So, he passed the buck. In order to do that he had to figure out the next moves of everyone, at least that what he thought. That was his decision that cold November day.

The room was warm against the damp forthcoming. The wind had picked up before the freezing rain would arrive. Grey patterns between leafless trees matched the shadow on the window pane. Strangely, there were people walking around outdoors. Slickers jackets, scarves, got out of cars, or walked down the sidewalk, all eyes forward. He noticed casually the semblance of human nature taking steps outside his reality. The heat blasting kept him in two zones, one for comfort and one in which to think by. Everything was old and worn in the room and cosy, from the carpet to the furniture, to the shelves. Another drink would warn him of nothing, so he had one and then nestled in to drift to sleep in the armchair.

The man was a low man from the beginning. He far overstepped his bounds from the start. There was nothing for him to get into when he got out, because he was never in, in the first place. No rules applied. There were no rules anyway and if there were rules to life he didn't believe in them. The rest was all a fairy tale. Illusions not needed. That was his philosophy. He created his own paradigm, a self-serving one. The ploy was to attract attention, but who's ploy and what role did he play. Did it matter? You bet it did. Because he had a fixation with what was not his property. Not desire, a fixation, that's different. That was his first block.

A false sense of realism to keep things controlled. To allude to a problem that didn't exist, not on his end anyway. But there it gets far more complicated. Call him a lone interpreter, a renegade, a rebel with an imagined cause. All he was, was a sociopath, not a criminal, a shit disturber.

The few actions he had taken to unwind a circumstance had resulted in events widening. The problem with a gas lighter is that they don't care about the cause and effect. Therefore they become victim of their own faulty thinking because there is no truth to their lies. Extenuate that. The other problem is that self-serving pursuit, they usually end up stepping on toes. In this case big ones. That's Problem Number Three. First comes problems numbered one and two, neither of which he was sure of, or was that part of the ruse? At this point in the story hard to prove which was a relief.

I hate to begin in the middle of the tale but as an interlude, I must. The thug would soon cross paths with innocence and inadvertently deconstruct the whole story. He would soon not have to worry about a plan.

Excerpt from the Novel: Unravelling Atlas by Lisa Lachapelle, copyrighted and pending release in 2025.

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