Fic: Parallel (Great Gatsby)
Jan. 1st, 2017 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bookishwenchThis was my second and final treat written for Yuletide 2016, this one as a gift for Failsafe set in the world of The Great Gatsby.
No profit is made from this work of fanfiction, and no copyright infringement is intended.
I left them all: Daisy with her selfish little heart, Tom with his inability to realize his life has already peaked, Wolfsheim with his shadowy empire, the endless parade of partygoers with their crazed pursuit of pleasure, the whole lot of them. I even left Jordan, though really she’d done nothing but be only an echo of what I actually wanted. A lot of people were chasing echoes in West Egg.
The only one I couldn’t leave was Gatsby. No matter how fast I drove away from the coast, his ghost kept pace with me, his voice in the hum of the engine and the sound of tires on road.
I hated that he’d died for Daisy. It was a stupidly noble thing to do, the tactic of a knight in shining armor who, finding his sword broken, throws himself to the dragon to save the maiden fair. But the maiden fair watched and said nothing. I don’t know if she loved him. Maybe she did as much as Daisy is capable of loving anyone, but it wasn’t enough. Maybe it never is.
They found Gatsby in his pool. It was horribly fitting that he died surrounded by water, floating, not touching either side, a perfect portrait of a life where he’d never quite belonged in one place or the other. He never reached the green light reflected each night in the bay, and oddly, I think he would have preferred to die in the attempt than to succeed only to find it was just a green light, nothing more, no promise of life as it should be. It was the wrong body of water, but the right place. Nowhere.
So Gatsby haunts me. I remember the sound of his voice, quietly intent, a sound that people listened to, leaned in to hear, a subtle form of control. Other times I remember the look in his eyes, the one that made that idiot girl believe he’d killed a man, possibly the only smart thing she’d ever said. But just possibly. For me, even as the scent of the piles of oranges and lemons from his parties drifts in the air as I drive through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, I don’t know who he really was. He was like one of those Russian dolls that you open only to find another doll entirely inside, one with a different face, and then another and another until the tiniest one opens to reveal nothing at all. His essence was both as real and as insubstantial as the mist over the bay at dawn.
I miss him. I wonder if another person alive misses him. I wonder if anyone, even himself, could even say with complete honesty that they knew him. I think I would have liked to, if that were possible, but I’m not even sure anymore if it’s possible to know anyone. Gatsby has left me with a long list of possibilities and uncertainties. I am filled with the nagging sense that in the story I have written of Gatsby and Daisy and the others in and out of their lives, perhaps the person who is least known, the most amorphous in character, is one Nick Carraway. I’m not sure I know who I am anymore.
Gatsby still whispers to me in my sleep, talking of realities and banalities and a thousand tiny trivialities of life, puzzle pieces that never quite fit together to create the picture of the man I almost knew. As I listen to nothing at all but my own memories, in the depths of the foreign night in another motel room in another city where I am endlessly a stranger, I remember the expression of longing on Gatsby’s face as he looked at that light on the dock. It was longing so deep that it could never really have been fulfilled, and in truth, I don’t think that’s what he wanted.
I remember Gatsby’s face, bathed in the soft, green light from his own dock as he stood and looked across the bay. He never realized the same color diffused his own features, that the bulb that hung so near to him was identical to the one that was further away than he could ever travel. And I realize with a shock, with a physical jolt that makes me sit up and gasp, alone in bed in whatever town I have reached, that I had been looking at him in the same way as he had looked at that unreachable light. He had been my impossible dream that was never to be touched without shattering like glass.
The next day, I kept driving, but I knew one tiny particle of bittersweet truth. I knew no matter where I went, whether to California or Japan or the moon or back to East Egg, I would never escape Jay Gatsby. He would always be there, indefinable, unreadable, untouchable, a sphinx of a man, and I would always remember whatever scattered bits of him I knew.
No profit is made from this work of fanfiction, and no copyright infringement is intended.
I left them all: Daisy with her selfish little heart, Tom with his inability to realize his life has already peaked, Wolfsheim with his shadowy empire, the endless parade of partygoers with their crazed pursuit of pleasure, the whole lot of them. I even left Jordan, though really she’d done nothing but be only an echo of what I actually wanted. A lot of people were chasing echoes in West Egg.
The only one I couldn’t leave was Gatsby. No matter how fast I drove away from the coast, his ghost kept pace with me, his voice in the hum of the engine and the sound of tires on road.
I hated that he’d died for Daisy. It was a stupidly noble thing to do, the tactic of a knight in shining armor who, finding his sword broken, throws himself to the dragon to save the maiden fair. But the maiden fair watched and said nothing. I don’t know if she loved him. Maybe she did as much as Daisy is capable of loving anyone, but it wasn’t enough. Maybe it never is.
They found Gatsby in his pool. It was horribly fitting that he died surrounded by water, floating, not touching either side, a perfect portrait of a life where he’d never quite belonged in one place or the other. He never reached the green light reflected each night in the bay, and oddly, I think he would have preferred to die in the attempt than to succeed only to find it was just a green light, nothing more, no promise of life as it should be. It was the wrong body of water, but the right place. Nowhere.
So Gatsby haunts me. I remember the sound of his voice, quietly intent, a sound that people listened to, leaned in to hear, a subtle form of control. Other times I remember the look in his eyes, the one that made that idiot girl believe he’d killed a man, possibly the only smart thing she’d ever said. But just possibly. For me, even as the scent of the piles of oranges and lemons from his parties drifts in the air as I drive through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, I don’t know who he really was. He was like one of those Russian dolls that you open only to find another doll entirely inside, one with a different face, and then another and another until the tiniest one opens to reveal nothing at all. His essence was both as real and as insubstantial as the mist over the bay at dawn.
I miss him. I wonder if another person alive misses him. I wonder if anyone, even himself, could even say with complete honesty that they knew him. I think I would have liked to, if that were possible, but I’m not even sure anymore if it’s possible to know anyone. Gatsby has left me with a long list of possibilities and uncertainties. I am filled with the nagging sense that in the story I have written of Gatsby and Daisy and the others in and out of their lives, perhaps the person who is least known, the most amorphous in character, is one Nick Carraway. I’m not sure I know who I am anymore.
Gatsby still whispers to me in my sleep, talking of realities and banalities and a thousand tiny trivialities of life, puzzle pieces that never quite fit together to create the picture of the man I almost knew. As I listen to nothing at all but my own memories, in the depths of the foreign night in another motel room in another city where I am endlessly a stranger, I remember the expression of longing on Gatsby’s face as he looked at that light on the dock. It was longing so deep that it could never really have been fulfilled, and in truth, I don’t think that’s what he wanted.
I remember Gatsby’s face, bathed in the soft, green light from his own dock as he stood and looked across the bay. He never realized the same color diffused his own features, that the bulb that hung so near to him was identical to the one that was further away than he could ever travel. And I realize with a shock, with a physical jolt that makes me sit up and gasp, alone in bed in whatever town I have reached, that I had been looking at him in the same way as he had looked at that unreachable light. He had been my impossible dream that was never to be touched without shattering like glass.
The next day, I kept driving, but I knew one tiny particle of bittersweet truth. I knew no matter where I went, whether to California or Japan or the moon or back to East Egg, I would never escape Jay Gatsby. He would always be there, indefinable, unreadable, untouchable, a sphinx of a man, and I would always remember whatever scattered bits of him I knew.
