Chapter 05

Echoes of Little Stories

Shards — February 2019 — Brussels, Belgium

The rain pelted the Tiguan’s roof, each drop a sharp, impatient finger. Gabriel’s pulse thudded in his ears, a migraine throbbing behind his eye sockets. He tightened his grip on the leather-wrapped steering wheel, as chic and new as the gleaming car that was not his. The company owned his vehicle, his days, his freedom.

The clouds broke for a moment, letting the sun through. Belgian weather: rain at three, sun at ten past, clouds again by quarter past. Gabriel cleared his throat. “The Atomium’s looking good in the sun,” he said. “The way it glints always reminds me of a lake at noon.” The words sounded brittle, as if they belonged on a page, not on his tongue.

“Hmm.” His brother did not look up. The phone in his lap glowed, then dimmed as he tilted it away.

Gabriel swallowed, hand damp on the gearshift, accelerated too hard, braked too late. The wipers squeaked, small and stupid, loud in the silence that pressed them both against their seats.

“Nice ride,” his brother said, palm sliding across the dash as if testing for dust.

Gabriel’s shoulders crept toward his ears. “Thanks.”

“Quite the climb,” his brother said. “From a Polo to a Golf, and now this.”

The laugh escaped before Gabriel could stop it. “Took a few detours, but yeah.” He pictured the timeline. Polo, Golf, Tiguan. Each memory felt like a slide from a stranger’s PowerPoint presentation. He welcomed the silence’s return.

Fields the color of old pennies blurred past. As if by association, Gabriel tasted metal on his tongue, the migraine tightening its grip. Pages of his manuscript flashed behind his eyes. For two years, this latest project had been the sole focus of his free time. Three drafts. Rejection slips from agents and literary magazine editors now stacked several dozen deep.

He cocked his head, surprised at himself. “Next time you fly in, I’ll pick you up in a Touareg. And not a lease this time. I’ll buy my own.”

His brother let out a strangled sound, a mix of a snort and a sigh. “Buy it with what?” His head shook from side to side. “Your little stories?”

The words felt like an invisible fist closing around Gabriel’s gut. His foot slipped onto the brake before he could press the clutch, jolting the car. The engine, caught in gear, stammered, steadied, then resumed its purr. In the side mirror, the Atomium shrank to a miniature model, then to a cluster of pinheads, then to nothing.

“They’re not little,” Gabriel said, his voice barely making it past his clenched teeth.

His brother tucked the phone into his coat pocket. “You have so much potential,” he said, punctuating the point with a clap against his knee. “You have the languages. International firms would hire you in a heartbeat.” His head shook again, as if he couldn’t conceive of anyone seeing things differently. “Think of the stability.”

Stability. The word reeked of carpeted offices, lukewarm coffee, quarterly reviews. Gabriel squeezed the wheel until the stitching bit into his palms. The smell of wet concrete and exhaust rose around them.

He maneuvered beneath the departures kiss-and-fly canopy. “I’m happy where I am,” he said, wondering if he had ever mentioned how miserable his old jobs used to make him. When the engine died, the silence flayed the lie open.

His brother studied him, eyes narrowed. “Happy doesn’t pay rent, brother.” Before Gabriel could reply, his brother raised both hands, palms out. “I don’t want to fight. I just don’t want to watch you drown.” He let out a long, soft sigh. “That’s all.”

Gabriel popped the trunk. Cold air blasted into the cabin, and suitcase wheels clacked over tiles like typewriter keys. Gabriel turned the engine back on and left it idling while he stepped out to say farewell to his brother. Before stepping into the airport lobby, his brother paused and turned, a smile forming on his lips. “Just let me know,” he said. “If your writing thing ever goes anywhere, I’ll be first in line.” His brother’s hand on Gabriel’s shoulder warmed and burned him in equal measure.

Once the sliding doors shut, the thick glass might as well have been the Atlantic. Gabriel watched his brother’s navy-blue Samsonite snake through the crowd until he lost sight of it. He stayed on the curb a long while afterward. Raindrops beaded on the Tiguan’s hood, transparent pearls that rolled away and vanished. The metallic taste in his mouth spread and intensified, the way his migraines announced an impending siege.

One day, he thought, inhaling the misty air. One day you'll see.

Gabriel squared his shoulders and walked back to the car that still was not his. Back to his desk, to his pages, to his little stories.

If you knew me, you might call me headstrong or stubborn. It’s okay. Don’t feel bad. It wouldn’t be the first time, and my brother would probably agree with you on both counts. It took me countless sessions of rumination to shelve the hurt of that February snapshot… and the many others like it. After all, he believed he was offering advice to his beloved little brother that, by his own values, had served him well.

When I look back at the road leading up to this point, it’s funny to admit that nothing played as important a role in defining most of my principles as comic-book heroes. I’ll get to that, don’t worry. First, though, I’d like to go back to my brother’s words, their impact over the years, and a few words of my own regarding empathy.

You could equate headstrong or stubborn with inflexible. Right? But where some see inflexibility, I often see a will to question everything, then hold fast only to what survives scrutiny. The trouble is knowing when you’re exercising conviction and when you’re merely being stubborn. My brother’s dismissal forced me to confront the same unsolvable equation I’d already put before myself. Only, he did it with a sprinkle of contempt and the kind of condescension only those who mean well can get away with. If you boiled everything down to facts, he did have a point. Dreams did not, in fact, pay rent. Not only did my writing not support me then, but my hourly earnings from writing, viewed in terms of time input versus money output, would likely be counted in cents. So, yeah. You could say he had reason to worry.

Years earlier, I’d secured an agent at an established literary agency in New York, but that earlier manuscript had failed to sell. After parting ways with the agency, I was back in the query trenches. From my brother’s point of view, the result was the same. I hadn’t made it even when I had more time for myself. He measured success in conventional terms, and securing an agent was the closest I’d come, the brightest I'd ever shine.

I think he saw writing as a hobby, something to fit around a reliable career. He was questioning whether it could pay; I heard him questioning something I couldn’t set aside without losing part of myself. Becoming good enough to reach readers would take serious time and work. Time he thought I should dedicate to building what he viewed as an actual job or the credentials to reach for one. We were answering different questions, each in a dialect the other didn’t speak.

And regarding my literary aspirations? Forget the pile of rejections. Come on, that’s baby stuff. Any writer worth their salt would tell you that thickening your skin is step one, and mine was thicker than an African elephant’s. But one day is still twenty-four hours. Even if time alone were the issue, between a demanding full-time job and caring for two small children, where was I planning on finding any to dedicate to those little stories?

Could my brother have taken more care in how he wielded his words? We did have a pretty complicated relationship, after all, so couldn’t he have taken some ownership? Couldn't he have tried harder to make it work? Couldn't he just… just not have stepped on the tiniest bit of vulnerability I’d decided to expose?

Sure. His words hurt, and I could ask him to take more care with them. Wanting that care did not require me to earn it first, but I also should be willing to offer others the understanding I ask of them. And anyone who knows me knows how much stock I put in compassion and empathy. I wish I could say that I obeyed my own rules then and that I was grinning and healed by the time I left the airport. But what kind of friend would I be if I fed you that kind of bullshit at this point in our relationship?

No. It was only later, much, much later, that I realized I had asked my brother to understand me without first trying to understand him. Coming to terms with where I had gone wrong did not make his words any less clumsy, unnecessary, or hurtful. It did, however, allow me to separate the hurt from the intent behind it. I could look past perceived malice and try to understand a value system that wasn’t mine. As I understood it, financial security was the end goal. Dreams were something you were meant to outgrow. Why chart a course into a thorny forest when the proven paths were already laid? I could understand all this. And still stand tall, undiminished, and choose the path that was mine to travel.

To me, empathy rests on two things: understanding and imagining. Not only the other’s position but why they hold it in the first place. Huh! Pretty rich for the guy who declared himself a builder of worlds to fail to imagine, right?

In “Love at First Tale,” all those years ago, under that singular mango tree, as the golden rays of sun flashed ember glows against his closed lids, as Patrick’s voice, then Chantal’s, cradled him into a whole new world, Gabriel had that vague notion of belonging. Then in “Mon Papyrus,” the feeling, once a hazy sense, took form and became so real one could almost touch it.

I was on the path, horizon clear, destination in sight. Then something, whether school, friends, love, or… anything else, really, stood in the way. It matters little that said something was justified or expected or noble. What matters is that, as I said before, I let it stop or slow me down.

I talked in “One in a Million” about how every life matters but isn’t uniquely important. Thing is, when you have something drumming in the back of your mind, always on, whispering at you, it can be easy to confuse that with uniqueness, importance, and, if you’re not careful, that dreaded Chosen One complex. Writing, to me, has never been optional. No matter how many drafts I produced, I never managed to convince myself that the craft was something I could simply… put down. At the airport, I felt only the dismissal, the hurt, and the bitter pledge that, one day, he would see.

Only later, as time mellowed my interpretation, did I think: Look at the numbers. Is it that unreasonable to question why that outlier, that one in a million, would be you? Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t come to agree with my brother. We probably will never see eye to eye on this. But I did come to accept that his outlook was beyond my control. Blaming my brother would be unfair, an easy way to dodge the work only I could do. Words could hurt, but they had only as much power over my choices as I gave them. I could mourn the many years and tears it took me to acquire that frame of mind… or I could celebrate that I got there in the end.

Which brings me back to those comic-book heroes. Accepting my brother’s perspective without surrendering my own required a framework I’d begun building but had never completed. Without realizing it, I’d laid the foundations years earlier, when I’d read the Civil War comic storyline. In Amazing Spider-Man no. 537, a tie-in to that storyline, Captain America counsels Spider-Man, who’s struggling with where to stand. I’m paraphrasing somewhat, but the essence is the same: when the world screams that you are in the wrong, in the way, and demands that you move, your duty is to plant your feet and say, “No. You move.”

The audacity of the statement resonated because, despite his strength and shield, neither was what mattered when Cap took his stance. All that mattered was his purpose. He embodied the clarity of vision I craved, and the iron will not to cave to fear or doubt, or to let anyone's expectations come between me and what I felt called to do. I also envied the inner balance that, surely, let him not only hold to one side of a deeply polarizing issue, but be willing to fight the entire world for it. For years, including in early drafts of this book, I called that conviction or principle. Now I call it purpose, a dream, and on the days I’m feeling a touch melodramatic, a calling, a duty.

I once read of a carpenter or sculptor who, when asked how they produced such intricate artwork, said that they didn’t create the object or figure. It was always there, in the stone or the wood. All they did was reveal it. Beyond the humility of the statement, that described my relationship to those principles perfectly, principles I told you were forged with help from comic-book characters. Take the speech, for example. Under the right light, it could make defiance sound heroic. And yet, it felt right the moment I read it. Still did, years later, when the Civil War arc inspired a movie.

So, I tried to make it fit. People said I could be stubborn and opinionated? Well, there you go. That’s because, like Steve freaking Rogers, I too am so certain that I will not be moved. Of course, things aren’t so simple in real life. It’s hard to hold any controversial opinion with perfect certainty. If you’re as righteous as is required to plant your feet, you know that there’s a difference between a firm stance and a rigid one. The more awake to the world you become, the more you understand that you as a person cannot possibly be the reason you stand against the world.

And so, if you’re one sorry writer trying to explain the concept with honesty, you highlight the prose you spent hours drafting, days revising, maybe even months rinsing and repeating, and press the dreaded button. Delete. Until, someday, you’ve learned enough to understand that it was never about you. Like so many things before, this too was in service of your purpose. And it wasn’t Steve Rogers’s immovable certainty alone, either. All along, it was a dance, a choreography that required a little of everyone to pull off. To learn that dance, I needed to assemble my own Avengers, but unlike Cap, I could do the one thing that drives all geeks absolutely insane. I could mix franchises. Rorschach, from Watchmen, taught me the lure and danger of absolutes. As we just established, Captain America contributed his unyielding principle. Superman, with his unwavering compass, brought moral courage and the aforementioned empathy, since practicing the latter demands the former. Iron Man was there in the lows, with wit and bravado, to remind me how easily confidence could coexist with failure. And Batman, the pragmatic Dark Knight, was there to keep things raw and real, to voice the petty and the vengeful when the others failed, and to make me answer for them rather than let them rule.

The trick was to let them argue in my head. If I used this council of internal checks and balances merely to validate my own beliefs, it did nothing for me. At times, the council’s verdict was obvious. At others, their positions were outright contradictory. Who in their right mind would put Cap, Superman, Batman, and Rorschach in a debate, let alone on the same team? Its real value lay in the questions none of them could settle alone. It shone when I ran it against something real. Something like my brother’s little stories jab that I couldn’t get past, ignore, or rationalize for the longest time.

Batman wanted vindication. He demanded the private satisfaction of seeking and attaining literary prestige, accolades, prizes, and the cash that goes with them.

Superman, for whom honesty and kindness were never mutually exclusive, pleaded for grace. He conceded that dreams did not, indeed, feed you. He argued that the concern was genuine, as was the affection behind it. Captain America drew the line where I needed it drawn. Your duty is to plant yourself like a tree. But do it for the right reasons. Do it because the calling is yours, not to show him, not to bring him around. Iron Man reminded me that a calling did not create more hours in the day or cancel my obligations. None of them won outright, and that was the point. With each having said their piece, I had clarity about where I could bend and where I could not: schedules, timelines, and what success looked like could change; my commitment to writing could not.

I could keep Rorschach’s uncompromising honesty without letting it harden into inflexibility, no more hedging, half-truths, or platitudes.

But it could no longer be about my ego, remember? And once I removed my need to be understood and validated, my fears, and my pride from the equation, what remained, besides my dedication to the craft? Well, does something I envied in Steve Rogers ring a bell? That’s right: clarity of purpose, at long last, held in equilibrium with the rest of me. It had never been about making the world yield. It was about accepting what I could not change without letting it limit me, refusing to let the world drown me in conformity, and no longer needing to impose my will on it. I only had to keep answering the call without shame. Writing was not a fancy or a phase; it was my purpose, the reason I kept getting up, the thing I could not set down without betraying myself.

I won’t move. It doesn’t matter who or how many of you there are. I will neither try to prove you wrong nor convince you. But, whether through force or threat or pleading, if your aim is to make me stray… I will no longer let you.