Defining Ryan Hunter

Author's note: In defense of my retirement, I'd like to point out that this piece has been one that's been floating around in my head for months, so technically it doesn't count, right:) I'm really not happy with how this piece turned out, but I still think it's an interesting concept and it was interesting to see if I could get inside Ryan's head. Please tell me if you have any suggestions. I don't own JoA nor do I agree with Ryan's sentiments on God. Oh, and no offense to any Yalies reading this.

…

If you could blame anyone, you might just blame your parents. After all, had they not met, they wouldn't have had you. If they didn't have you, they wouldn't have gotten married. If they didn't get married, they couldn't have gotten divorced. If they didn't get divorced, you won't have met God…

….

Back when you were a kid, divorce wasn't that common. None of your friends were going through it; they couldn't sympathize at all. They tried at first, sure, but in little half-hearted doses that you soon realized didn't really matter at all. So you did the resourceful thing, the thing that would later make you a millionaire: you filled the void.

You never really named him, but you pictured him in your head quite clearly: a boy with floppy brown hair and hazel eyes who wore a baseball cap and blue jeans everywhere. If you had been anything like an artist, you would have drawn him, made him more real. But alas, you were not an artist, so he lived on only in your head, a figment of your imagination when you were far too old to have imaginary friends. You would talk to him as you walked down the street or in the comfort of your bedroom, making sure to keep your voice low enough so that nobody real would hear. You were not crazy; you never thought he was real. That is, until you found out just how real he was.

…..

You knew He was God when he told you that you hated chocolate. He told you lots of other things too-spouting off information about your family, your friends, and all those wistful seventh grade girlfriends that never really materialized-but it was the chocolate thing that stuck with you. You had never told anyone you hated chocolate because, really, what other kid goes home on Halloween night and throws away all his Snickers and Baby Ruths? Sometimes, you choked down a piece or two just to look normal, but you always thought it tasted more like rat poison than some sweet dream confection. You had told this to nobody, not even your imaginary friend. And that's how you learned what omniscience meant.

He told you to join the debate team. You did, and you were good-really, really good. You went to state and then to nationals and became one of the most feared debaters in the debating community. You lost only once, to a kid who would go on to graduate from Harvard at age 20, summa cum laude (God told you something about humility then, but you've since forgotten it. If you don't remember what he said, you don't have to agree with it.) By your junior high graduation, you had been featured in the local paper; by your junior year of high school, you had been featured in the New York Times. That's how you learned what "power" meant.

He taught you through debate. He would send you off to strange places for research and give you instructions for when you went. Once, for example, he told you to go to a stable when the topic was animal abuse. You watched and listened, and you ended up saving a kid from child abuse. Sometimes, He taught you in indirect ways like the thing with the Harvard kid, showing you the virtues of man, but you seldom talk about those. You don't want to remember the good. This is how you learned what "catalyst" meant.

….

In February of your senior year, you were driving home from a tournament one night with a bunch of teammates. The road was slick and hard to maneuver as was, only to be made worse when a shot through windshield. You would learn later that a couple of not-so-sober 20-somethings had been using the side of the road for target practice and that their bullets had veered off course and hit you. But you don't remember their faces, and they were never caught. You only remember the burning pain that shot through your arm, the shouts of your friends, and the feeling of the car swerving wildly beneath you. You remember asking for Him as the black closed in on you. This is how learned what "mortality" meant.

You woke up at a local hospital. You remember the smells of antiseptic around you, the sounds of beeping monitors and bustling of nurses and doctors about. There was a lot of crying and screaming, too, but you could never tell from whom. You looked up and saw an IV snaking up your arm and a thick white bandage on your upper arm. This is how you learned what "hospital" meant.

The doctor came in and checked the bandage on your arm. He looked tired and downtrodden, the face of man who had lived a million years in three hours. He told you that your car had flipped when it spun off the road, that three of you were injured, two of you were dead, and he was giving you a sedative to help you get through the night.

You nodded, empty of feeling, and waited for the potion to put you to sleep. This is how you learned what "shock" meant.

……

When you woke up the next morning, the shock wore off. You were mad, furious, almost violent. You were mad at the idiots with their guns and alcohol, mad at yourself for losing control of the car, mad at your stupid friends for going off and dying on you, mad at the doctors at once for not saving them and again for saving you. But most of all, you realized, you were mad at God who at that instant came walking through the door.

Free will, He explained, a lecture you had heard a million times plus one. A good invention of His but one occasionally misused; people who had thrown stones in all the wrong places, created bad ripples. You could create good ripples, he said, and they could create bad ones just as well. It was all about counter-balance, trusting that all of it will turn out okay in the end. It was having faith in Him, seeing the world behind your eyes.

But you weren't really listening. You just wanted someone to blame and who better to blame than the Creator Himself, standing right there in front of you in the same outfit he had worn the first time you met. So you blame him for free will and ripples and all of that. You blame Him for alcohol and guns and the slickness of the road. You yell at Him about nights made dark so that you could not see. You mock His world, hammer His creation. You curse Him for giving you friends and for taking them away. For what seems like eternity, you railed against Him and all that He has made. He stood there quietly and listened with a certain gentleness of thought you chose to ignore.

Outside your door, hundreds of people moved past, too busy with their own lives to notice a boy screaming his soul out at God.

This is how you learned what "desolation" meant.

……

When they released you after three days in the hospital, you took up your school's homebound program, supposedly to recuperate from injuries but really because you didn't know what else to do. You kept up with the coursework well and had a sympathetic enough story in your "why-I-don't-have-any-new-tournament results" letters that you had acceptance letters from six prestigious schools come April 1. You mulled over it a bit and finally selected Yale without much enthusiasm. You figured the name "New Haven" had a bit of irony to it compared to the "new hell" you were in. Of course, you never told people about your selection criterion. You just said you liked the colors.

God came by often to see you, but you rarely spoke to Him. Part of it was still rage, but part of it was fear, too, fear of wrongness and retribution. Sometimes, He quoted stuff to you, out of great books and poetry texts or occasionally what you took to be the Bible. You pretended not to listen. Sometimes, He didn't talk at all, just sat there and looked over your shoulder at whatever work you were doing. You knew He was waiting for you to jump back into the water again.

You pretended you didn't learn any new worlds.

…..

Yale might have been a good place to be from, but it wasn't a good place for you to be at. Your new withdrawnness didn't win you friends, and you dropped debate without ever going to a single meeting. The topics seemed irrelevant and meaningless compared with the questions you had shouted at God, and you were not willing to look for the ripples.

Your only refugee for the six months you spent in Connecticut was your philosophy class. It was like debating the universe-like debating God. You read your assigned texts with near maniac fervor; when you were finished with those, you holed yourself up in the rich and luxurious Yale reading room and raided the philosophy section for all your $35,000 tuition was worth. You joined a grad student discussion group, pointedly ignored the actual members, and soaked up all you could about philosophy. And slowly, you began to talk to Him again. Not to obey him, mind you, but rather to fight Him-to pull out Plato and have the Lord God Almighty argue it with you. He always won, of course, but you didn't want to see that and so you didn't. It's a type of perception, selective sight. It was your free will, wasn't it?

….

Alas, your one brilliant class couldn't make up make up for the mind-numbing rigidity of the others, and you dropped out second semester when a friend waved an incredibly risky business venture in your face. It got you out of writing a perfectly inane essay on fuel economy, so you agreed. Long story short, within three months, you were worth $10 million on paper; within nine, you were worth $15 million in cash.

Restless, rich, and desolate, you took to the life of 20 year-old retiree. You moved every six months when the buying off City X's council members got old and staging "heroic" events for the sake of influence got older. People are not very hard to grift if you know how to do it right, and practice soon made perfect. God, of course, didn't like this. He talked a lot about bad ripples and argued your justifications with you. He would stop by the bookstore when you were reading and hand you a book or two to look through with passages highlighted and pages dog-eared. Sometimes you read them and sometimes you didn't, but you never went back. The anger that had hit you that day in the hospital now ran far too deep in your veins for you to imagine life without it. You did not want to be wrong.

…..

You found Arcadia by stabbing at a map with your eyes closed. Having read a library's worth of books on wildness survival and living in a barren snow cave for two weeks, you considered yourself done with rural Alaska. So you packed your bags and headed down to Anchorage for your flight to Maryland. On the way, you learned that Arcadia was a semi-suburban city with a crime-ridden police department. It sounded like this could be fun, so when waiting for your connection at O'Hare, you picked up a couple of books on crime watchdog groups. By the time the wheels of your 747 hit the runaway, you were enough of an expert to pass as one.

God met you at the gate in the form of a pilot. "Go hiking tonight" was all He said. And just to try and mess with his mind, you decided to. You headed straight over to book store and bought a copy of Hiker's Guide to Maryland and wondered why He had waved at you as He walked away. Usually, he just turned his head back at you nodded.

….

The rain poured down around you, a torrential storm, sudden and swift. You made your way across the soaked ground and tried not to notice the how much the rain reminded you of that night years before. You rubbed your arm self-consciously and stared ahead into the black curtain of water. All your memories came rushing back so strongly that the seemed almost to overpower you. Just as you opened your mouth to curse Him for the millionth time, you heard something that stopped you. It was another voice, just barely audible, screaming for help. You turned your flashlight toward a thick patch of forest just in time to see a figure come stumbling out of the woods. It was a boy, probably a teenager, you guessed. As he got closer, your light beam caught the hints of a hoodie and a flash of brown hair. You called toward him and waved your flashlight so see could see it. It must have worked, for he came running toward you, shouting. Thank you, he said, he'd been lost for a while. Didn't have a flashlight, he explained. You asked if he was okay in your best guidance counselor voice and after a minute's contemplation, he nodded. You stared at the boy with a critical eye. Was this what He wanted?

As you walked out, you got the kid to talk. It was a pretty standard rescue technique, using chatter to get the victim's mind of the situation at hand. It worked especially well on Adam; he seemed to want someone to talk to anyway. At first, you weren't too interested in what he had to say. He was an artist, a junior at Arcadia HS, used to have an internship at a design studio until he screwed up and got fired. You listened with the appropriate sympathetic ear and thought about how saving Adam Rove would translate into community standing. It was not until he mentioned Joan Girardi that you really started to care.

Joan was odd, he said, very hard to get a handle on. She was always throwing herself into new things without much of an explanation and throwing himself right back out of them. She kept secrets from everyone and danced around much of her life. She got involved in huge controversies and even put herself in jeopardy a few times. You quoted things to people, odd things but right none the less. She was sporadic, flightily, and a bit self-centered, but he loved her anyway-until he killed it all. He had cheated on her with a girl he didn't even really like, had been tired of the distance and the lies. But she was special, he said, and then stopped in mid-sentence, bit his tongue, and refused to say anything more despite your prodding. It was really no matter of importance, though; by the time, you and Adam walked out of the woods, you were sure Joan was a God talker. When you saw her looking at God, you knew without a doubt that this was what you had been waiting for: Joan Girardi would be the battlefield on which you would fight God.

It never occurred to you that she just might fight.

Or that you might lose.

Joan Girardi was how you learned what "unexpected" meant.