The Gingerbread Boy

I'm going to tell you a story, now. It's a nice story, filled with juicy twists and even one or two lines that you can play back in your head later and chuckle. It's a bildungsroman, I suppose. Or - if big words aren't your thing - an adventure. What this story really is is a tale with a moral. And if you sit tight and listen well we might even get to it, in the end.

Are you listening? Good.

It begins like this:


There was once a gingerbread boy. He was a normal child, very much like you or me, made of the same rosy skin and jet-black hair and razor blue eyes. The same slightly-pudgy arms and legs and the same sparkling teeth, the same self-conscious expression. A flesh and blood boy.

A normal child. Except deep at his heart - in some lonesome dank corner that lay at the end of too curved a path for even him to see - he was also a gingerbread boy.

Now the boy lived and worked and grew like normal children do. He went to classes, tried his hands at debating, worked like a heathen charm upon the ladies (for he excelled at athletics and had the broad shoulders to answer for it). He was respected by all, feared by none, admired by quite-a-few. People nudged each other to watch him pass in the corridors.

And then one day the dank thing lying at the end of the curve reared its head - and it was a head made of molasses and cinnamon and ginger and flour.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

It must be the diluter, thought the gingerbread boy. All those fumes.
He was standing in class, trying to make sense out of the words in a file. The file was lying on the desk in front of him. It was filled with a brief assortment of rumpled papers. The words were on the papers.
They were in his own handwriting.

Not the diluter. It is the walls, thought the gingerbread boy. The walls are sneaking about when my back is turned.
He whipped his neck so fast there was a dry crack. The kid dozing behind him started.

"Are you ok?" the teacher's glasses had slipped a quarter inch. The fan periodically made a sound like somebody's face being slapped against sand.
Someone in the back sniggered.
They're in on it, thought the gingerbread boy. They're all in on it.

There was a dull clicking from the front of the class. People were beginning to turn away from the whiteboard, where a projector was shining the closing slides of a presentation on the mitotic cell division observed in carbide batteries. The kid conducting the slides (and now the verbal cues as well) was tapping  the screen with a Westwood School Wooden Chalkboard Pointer with Plastic Tip (36") in his desperate bid to regain the attention of the class (which was focused on his teammate) and the attention of his teammate (which had long since wandered away).

His teammate was the gingerbread boy.

"In conclusion, when a pseudonymous receptor and a shot of pure energy in the jugular love each other and wish to procreate-"
"They give birth to a gingerbread boy," said the gingerbread boy. Every eye in the room turned back to grab at his face. "I'm a gingerbread boy."

"This is highly irregular," said the teacher. "I demand an explanation, Mr-"
The walls are closing in, thought the gingerbread boy.

I better get out of here.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

And so the gingerbread boy ran. He ran to the window, first, out through the glass like it was a brittle sheet of water, and then he was off.

He ran and he ran until his cheeks puffed blue. He ran as the shadows darkened and grew.
That's the stuff, thought the gingerbread boy. I was born for this.

On the way he ran past a stalled DTC bus, a busted transformer. He ran past a couple fighting playfully in their car, a balloon seller trying to weed out a stray green balloon out of a host of red ones.
 This is a good high, thought the gingerbread boy. Better than eau de acetone, at least.

He wanted to keep running but there was a sharp smell from an alleyway. An overripe smell but an inviting smell, an enticing smell.
Maybe I'll stop a while, thought the gingerbread boy. Rest my legs a bit. 

He stopped and made his way inside.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

Somebody had set up shop there.
It was temporary shop, at best. A tent nailed up inside a dead-end alleyway. Row upon row of wooden planks nailed up inside the tent. Green glass bottles sealed up with pieces of cork and blobs of wax.

"What is this place?" asked the gingerbread boy.
"The Watering Hole," said a voice in the distance.
"Destination Unknown," said another.

A carrion bird flew up, up, up till it was nothing but the fading blue silhouette from an oversized pair of wings. It flew too close to the sun and was roasted alive.

This is where the animals drink, thought the gingerbread boy. I shall drink with them. 
Across the sky, the moon licked its lips in anticipation of a fried vulture dinner.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

There were six of them at one headcount. At another point they were four.

A friend of his stayed throughout. It wasn't necessarily the same person, but his friends all had refreshingly similar views on practically everything; he sat and basked in their conformity, their lack of lateral thinking.

I am different from them, he thought as he took another sip and the seats around him emptied and filled, emptied and filled. I am the gingerbread boy. It is my lot to run.

There was an exciting exchange at one point.
"We're currently escaping from reality," declared a sloshed friend in brown muttonchops and a dhoti. "We're wasting ourselves. Into oblivion."
"Probably," replied the gingerbread boy and took another swig.
"I'm s-serious, man." The dhoti was dishcloth green. The muttonchops were three weeks untrimmed. The level of sobriety was Not Even Slightly. "We're n-neglecting our duties. Well, not anymore, I say."
"What do you suggest?" asked the gingerbread boy and took another swig.
"I'm  turning over a new leaf. Starting today."
"Is that right?" The world kept floating in and out of focus.
"Yeah, man. No more smoking. No more betting on horses. No more hanging down at the arcade all the time. No more gali cricket in the afternoon."
"What about drinking?" The gingerbread boy could feel his head travelling down in a soft, loose arc to settle upon his forearm. He felt the same thing over and over at least a dozen times before his friend responded.
"You serious? Nothing is ever the booze's fault, man. In fact, I'd strongly recommend using it as a vacation for when things get really bad."
"Whatever you say, pardner," the gingerbread boy slurred, and then the ground was coming up to meet him.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

When he left it was late afternoon. The pylons all threw heat in squiggly waves that collected under the tin blanket that served as the roof of the world. There was an infernal screeching from the cosmic kittens as they  hotfooted their way across the metal, leaving pawprint indentations from the other side.

The gingerbread boy felt on top of the world, too. The world tilted inexplicably to either side on random intervals, but that was okay.
I feel boy, thought he. I am the gingerbread fine.

There was a clatter from somewhere down the road. The gingerbread boy cocked his ears in a passable imitation of a dog. Steady as she goes, he thought to himself. Then the clatter repeated itself and he was off again. "Just one foot after another," he called out to nobody in particular.

On the way he ran past an upturned car. The doors were open and a brief trail of blood and snot led off to where the passengers had managed to crawl before being picked up by somebody (he hoped it was the paramedics). The windscreen wipers lay crumpled below the spiky glass shards of the windscreen. The cumulative effect was like staring at some giant mechanical bug in the few seconds between its swatting and the last exhale of its oily breath.

The clattering came closer.
I will see the source of the noise for myself, thought the gingerbread boy. I can outrun trouble, should trouble find me. I am, after all, the gingerbread boy.
He turned a corner and came upon the manhole cover.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

It was around thirty inches across at its widest, and then it tapered away to nothing in all directions. It was a round manhole cover, of the sort handed out quite freely by the Government on roadways.
The gingerbread boy had seen nothing like it in his life.

"Is there anybody out there?" he called out. The road pulsed in an intense burst of aquamarine light.
A merman poked his head out of the gap where the light was coming from.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

I will stop here, for a moment. You do know what a merman is, don't you?

Imagine a creature just over five feet tall, standing on hind legs that have webbed feet at the end. Imagine fins on the side of its knees, behind its elbows. Imagine spindly arms that would end in webbed hands, too, except the creature slit the membranes down the middle and wrapped each individual finger in a thin strip of cloth (the webs would grow back, given a chance). Now imagine a thin layer of scales on the whole thing.

Done? Good.
The key word here is imagine. There is no such thing as a merman, not really.

The merman who peeked out of the manhole that afternoon was called Fathead. He spoke on behalf of five other mermen, three merwomen (they'd stopped being maidens a long time ago) and a boy in a green shirt.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

It was a breathtaking moment, history in the making, the landmark first interaction between two completely alien species (nobody remembered the first thing they'd said to the green shirt, and he wasn't even a part of the narrative yet). The gingerbread boy even stopped jogging in place for a while, leaned in closer to listen.

"You wanna come join our party, bro?" declaimed Fathead.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

Of course the gingerbread boy acquiesced - you haven't been listening at all, have you? He followed the merman all the way down the rickety ladder, past a bunch of grimy-looking pipes through which the river Yamuna flowed sometimes, through a revolving door that looked rusted shut (but wasn't), and through a secret door in the back of what seemed like a padded cell.

The gingerbread boy continued to walk, spellbound. There was a gigantic cavern under the sewage system (if that's where they still were - he found it harder to tell directions without the sun standing in the background hemming and hawing) and they seemed to be near one of its walls. The dull grey stone rose up in front of him and faded into black somewhere high above. Peering closely at the darkness, the gingerbread boy realized it was made up of clouds.

Trees grew near the wall, at irregular intervals. The soil felt warm and crumbly in his palm - a little stale, but still more than potent enough to whelp trees that went up a good five-six storeys themselves.

They were all sitting with their backs to the wall, the mermen and the merwomen, a boy with a green shirt tucked away somewhere in the middle. They watched him with genuine curiosity as Fathead went up to one of them, took the gnarled and elongated wooden pipe they were smoking and handed it over to him.

"This is our peace pipe," said Fathead. "Would you like to share?"

The gingerbread boy looked carefully down the stem. He felt the roundness of the bowl against his thumb and forefinger. Then he dipped his finger into the bowl, scraped some of the powdery residue with his nail, and sniffed it.
He smiled.

"I am the gingerbread boy," he said to them all, as one. "Let's get baked."

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

They sat there for a long, long time.
The walls turned purple for a while but nobody really noticed. Jagged forks of foliage bored through the ground and shot up towards the sky (The roof, Vermivore said it was the roof). Lightning flashed occasionally and by its light they could make out the gigantic tree painted upon the ceiling. The air was heavy with branches falling back to the ground utterly spent and the sound of rain.

"Is it safe to be sitting here?" the gingerbread boy said. He wanted to stand up to lend his statement weight but his legs were jammed against the ground.
"Yes," said one of the merwomen. "You sit where you are and you pull with everything you got. That's all."
"Shut up, Saffron," said Fathead. "You're a woman. Go fix us some worms or something."

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

The gingerbread boy followed the motions of the guy in the green shirt. He seemed to flow from one state to another - sitting leaned back against a rock, then neck craned to see where the pipe had gotten, then jutted forward like a monkey going after a jar of cookies as he received the pipe, then cross-legged, shoulders hunched slightly, the bowl of the pipe a smoldering orange against the greenness of his shirt.

"He makes me slightly uneasy," whispered the nearest merwoman to the gingerbread boy.
"Shut up, Saffron," said Fathead. "Didn't I ask you for something to eat? Get off your fat arse now!"

Saffron stood up.
Everyone stopped talking. The green shirt forgot to hold out the pipe to Fathead.

Saffron left.
Everyone slowly started talking again. Fathead snatched the pipe from the green shirt.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

The green shirt waited for the pipe to go out before getting off his perch and going to sit with the gingerbread boy. "Got bored of crushin'," he said affably.
The gingerbread boy coughed a little and nodded. He had no opinion of the guy in the green shirt. He didn't need one. He could run whenever he felt like it.

The pipe was refilled.
"Good shit," said Fathead. A couple of mermen raised their index and little fingers at him.
In some cultures that is taken as a sign of respect.

This is perfect, thought the gingerbread boy. I have never felt more inclined to stay in one spot.
The rain came down harder now. It ran down his cheeks and his throat. It drenched his shirt in a matter of moments. Small bits of light snaked in through far corners of the cavern and the rain got at them, too. Great gobs of water smashed themselves up around them and depending on the light the pieces that fell were either a deep purple or a bright green.

The green shirt had to light the pipe again when it came his turn. The gingerbread boy leaned forward to hold the flame to the cup and saw that the other boy had an even set of clean, white teeth.

Halfway through the second round Saffron walked back into the circle, pulled a saucepan from somewhere in her dress, and smashed it upon the titular fat head of Fathead.

The green shirt watched the pipe sail over his head and smash against a tree. Then he turned to the gingerbread boy.
"Let's get out of here," he said.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

So this time the gingerbread boy didn't have to run alone. The guy in the green shirt did not offer any conversation beyond what was necessary. He just kept pace with the gingerbread boy as he made his way back to the rubber room and then out towards the surface.

They ran over the crest of a hill and then skirted down the smooth pavement on the other side.

The gingerbread boy squinted back in the direction he'd come from and saw the irresponsible fizzle of fireworks above a dead town. He thought he saw rainwater pulling on the sides of the road like some long-delayed shutter. Occasional forks of lightning framed them against the backdrop; the image of a green shirt squeezing between cars at an intersection burnt itself into the retinas of the gingerbread boy.

He's got some balls, thought the gingerbread boy, and Ow.

"Where do you live?" asked the green shirt.
"Nowhere," he replied. "I belong on the road. I am the gingerbread boy."
"Are you, now?" the green shirt grinned in the darkness. "What do you run towards, gingerbread boy?"

This was a new question. The gingerbread boy pondered and pondered.
"A place where things keep happening," said the gingerbread boy, finally. "A place that does not sleep."

"Great way of inviting yourself over," said the green shirt. "My house is not far from here. You can meet some of my friends. Sound all right?"
"Yes, it does."
"Unless you have somewhere to be getting to, I mean."
"Let's just shut up and sprint already."

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

The green shirt lived in a dilapidated old house halfway between the University and the Transit. The gingerbread boy had passed it often, back when he was a human child and had to go to distant corners of the city and make people listen to his speeches.

"Is it safe to live in there?"
"Better in there than the road, man," the green shirt grinned. Somebody finally opened the door on the third knock.
It was a girl.

"You should've told me there would be guests," she said to the green shirt, eyeing the gingerbread boy up and down. "Decent-looking ones at that."
"It's no use," said the green shirt to the girl as she followed them inside and surreptitiously sniffed the back of her guest's neck. "He's a runner."

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

Once again, there were anywhere between four to six people in that room. Nobody got up and left but they all looked so damn similar it was difficult to say whether there were three girls and two boys or two girls and three boys or two girls and two boys and one incredibly gifted master of disguises.

The gingerbread boy looked for his friend but it was difficult to tell which of the two boys play-wrestling on the couch was the one who'd come in with him - was it the one on top twisting the other's ankle or the bottom bitch yelling in pain and reaching slowly for the cricket bat lying a few feet away from them?

There were no more shirts. The guys and girls all wore blue shorts and white vests. The guys all had chiseled physiques. The girls were all incredibly easy on the eyes. The gingerbread boy had taken off his own tattered school blazer when he entered the room but he felt self-conscious in the presence of what were obviously underwear models who'd gotten bored of hanging on the billboards.

"Wanna try something mindblowing?" the familiar clap on the back meant it was his friend formerly of the green shirt.
"Always," said the gingerbread boy.
A thrill of anticipation went through the gathering.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

"Like that?"
"Yeah. You managed not spill any. That's good."
"Does it usually come in droppers?"
"No, it has to be extracted and put there. Delicate process. Sorta."
"And what does it do?"
"It's a really intense high, man. Puts you right in touch with the other side."
"The other side of what?"
"Everything, man."
"Oh. What is it called?"
"Got a weird-sounding name. Biological shit, man. I'd tell you but your eyelids are getting red. It's hitting."

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

It was a strange sensation.

The gingerbread boy found himself floating, floating, detaching from the body splayed awkwardly on the couch, from the circle of spectators (definitively proven to be three girls and two guys apart from the green shirt - one or the other person was always in another room, hence the confusion), from the green shirt (whose turn it was in the other room), from the room itself, from that giant depressing bitch of a tether everybody likes to call the ground. He was...

... Not just a gingerbread boy. He was the gingerbread boy. And running was for retards, especially when one could fly...

...Back to the days before his trip to the condemned building, to the days when the fumes from the peace pipe went straight up his nozzle and into the slot machine that was his head...

...Back to the days when he first met the peace pipe, in a gathering of familiar faces who only surfaced when there were green stalks and murk in the sky and a clean surface to crush on...

...Back to the days when his world was populated by locked rooms and empty faces and liquid fire that you drank straight from the bottle to burn the demons scrabbling in the recesses of your soul...

...Back to the day years and years ago when he first saw that there was something damaged irreparably in the workings of his mind, some blighted short circuit that would light up a neon arrow if ever he got within a mile of an open road...

...All the way back to the day he was born, a few moments after all the blood and slime and bits of his mother's womb had been washed away, the moments of utter quiet when every eye in the disinfected white room stared at him, the moments when he could be anybody, any random miracle of chromosomal interaction and evolutionary progress...

This is who I am thought the gingerbread boy and I better tell them my name.
So he did.
He finally cried out his name.
And it resonated across all the disparate strands of his story, unifying them under a common umbrella that would grant them form and context and meaning and purpose and cohesion.

This was the gingerbread boy's finest hour.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

And this is where the story ends. No, seriously. It's a positive note, right? Everything turned out okay. The hero gets his moment in the sun, and there's always the vague promise of sex in the distance to spice things up for the more mature audience (subtext, folks, all about the subtext!). All is right with the world. Except..

Except there's no moral yet. I mean, come on! We don't want empty words like closure, do we?
We want a teaching. And we want it drilled into somebody's head (foreshadowing alert).

The gingerbread boy's story could be over.

Except it wasn't.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

The green shirt walked to the other room, the one where somebody had to be present at all times. It wasn't a hard and fast rule, of course, but it would be decidedly impolite to leave the other occupant of the room alone - especially since he was sponsoring their trip, so to speak, and also happened to be tied to the bed.

"P-please let me go home now," sobbed the man in the bed. He was hardly a man, what with crying in front of somebody out of sheer helplessness.
He also didn't have the required number of limbs.

"We'll be done soon," the green shirt reassured him. He checked on the swathe of tubes and cables attached to the base of the other's neck. He checked on the clear receptacle - half an inch of fluid remained, enough to fill in at least five more droppers. He finally checked on the man's body. The right leg and left arm both ended in bloody stumps, wrapped in rags that had barely stemmed the bleeding when first applied a couple weeks back.

"Please. It really hurts..." the man wasn't crying anymore. He'd tried everything already.

"I'm telling you, man. We're almost done with you." The green shirt checked to see if the scalpel was still on the tray where he'd placed it on his last shift.
It was.

"We've found a new lamb, you see," he said, and then he walked out of the room.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

The gingerbread boy was still falling over the edge of the sofa.
He'd been falling for over twenty minutes.

"Human body. Beautiful thing, ain't it?" green shirt fondly stroked the boy's hair. "Creates hormones, regulates their presence, knows how to hold a party. Shall we get the last formality out of the way?"

The female on her way out mock-bowed. Green shirt grinned as he turned to their guest.

"It's getting really late," he said. "We're thinking of adjourning for dinner. You good?"
"Mmpff-fine," said the gingerbread boy. "S'really good stuff."
"I know. But," he asked casually, the third and final time, "don't you have to be getting home?"
"No home, nowhere to go. I am the gingerbread man," said the gingerbread boy.

"Good." green shirt stroked his hair again. "We've been having takeaway for ages so we decided to cook in. You're welcome to join us whenever you want."
The gingerbread boy lolled. Green shirt got up to leave.

"Just the one thing," he called back from the door. "I almost forgot. You don't have a problem with non-veg, do you?"
The gingerbread boy didn't hear, but that was OK.
Green shirt hadn't really waited for an answer.

       *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *        *                

...And that's the real ending. The gingerbread boy is safe and sound, the butt of a few jokes perhaps but in good care. The lost boys and girls living at the condemned building look out for their own. Drug abuse aside, look at how beautifully they tended to their invalid friend until he succumbed to his injuries.

It is things like these that give me hope for humanity.
Anyway. You have made it this far, haven't you? And I promised you a moral.
I didn't think anyone would make it this far.

I guess I'll have to freewheel, then. Here's me casting a look about my room for inspiration: a grimy, boarded-up window, a hole in the wall where I can press my ear and hear the rambling of the stretcher-bed's current occupant (he's been babbling nonstop for the past ten hours. This story was restructured out of the more coherent parts of his soliloquy) and, right next to the cot I currently share with one of the girls (there are no restrictions here. There are six of us and five different partners is more than enough for anyone), a slightly-faded but crisp green shirt that I wear when I am outside.

To return to the issue at hand. The moral of this story is, always try to be like the gingerbread boy. Take chances and allow life to surprise you, every once in a while.
You never know where the culmination of your travels shall find you.

Now if you'll excuse me, I believe I left something in the oven.