When I was a young boy my father took me into the city to see a marching band.
We lived in the outskirts of the high rise buildings and our next closest neighbor was three miles down the road. But from my bedroom window I could see the distant outline of the city like broken glass hoping to cut the sky. And it was this view that had cultivated my dreams.
I wanted to venture into the heights and get lost in the damp streets. I wanted to feel the cracked asphalt beneath my shoes and I wanted to breath the dirt slathered musk of its atmosphere. I had lived in the country, away from so many stories and the excitement of living in the city that I felt boxed in and held captive. But the feeling never grew to such a strength that it overpowered my life and my work.
So when my father told me what he had planned I had to bite my cheek to keep my cool.
We arrived just as it began and it was beautiful. The city itself was everything I imagined it to be and more. Everything was a barrier but there were so many people and so many buildings that I was free. Nobody bothered to notice me. It was intensely intimate, like I could have the entire city to myself.
The colors of the city were like the silhouette that I had been gazing at. There were no bright greens or lush blues, no tan houses with white molding, there wasn't a single inch of ground that wasn't colored in the black or grey of street. I've heard stories of the city, of how the leaders had a strict rule over the people who lived here, but during the parade everything became myth and twisted story.
The performers came first. They were dressed in checkered white and black clothes and they danced through the air like gravity didn't apply to them. They destroyed my laws of physics in massive leaps and bounds, in pirouettes that lasted what looked like twenty spins a go, and when they stood on their hands and balanced others on their feet it was all too much. I was astounded.
Next were the machines. They were decked out with silvers and shinning blacks that reflected the faces of the crowd. Engines were out in the open and the gears upon them spun in sync with the rest of their parts. The copper faced men who drove them looked into the masses that surrounded them and I watched with awe as one of the driver found my father's face and nodded. My father returned his low gaze with a slow tilt of his head. My father knew someone who was in the parade!
"Who was that?" I asked him over the impending sounds.
"I would tell you that he was no one," he spoke, keeping his chin up and his eyes posted on the crowd. I could feel his palm rest on the top of my shoulder just as his eyes turned down to mine. "But everyone in this world matters. You need to know that." I nodded my head in agreement and turned back to the parade.
The noise was getting louder and it wasn't just the voices of the people who came to watch. There was music being filtered out of the commotion and as I pulled my head out of the barricade of bodies, turning my gaze down the street, what I saw was none other than a marching band.
They were dressed in black, every single one of them. From their hats to their shoes and instruments, everything was black and it was beautiful. There were faces among the sea of darkness and as they stepped in line with one another and walked to the sound of their beats, their faces seemed to disappear for the sounds were overwhelming.
The drums were enormous and the size of the marching conductor's hat looked like it would crush him being so tall and wide. He marched with his back arched and his nose pointed forward; he was a skinny man, looking as though he was sick, but the way he moved was the farthest thing from it. He marched with purpose and life and the way he held his baton made it look like he controlled the entire movements of the band behind him.
My father knelt down to me then, guiding my ear to his lips and I stared into his gray eyes ready to listen to anything he had to say. "Son," he spoke, "when you grow up would you be the savior of the broken, the beaten, and the damned?" His face was stern and I knew that this was serious. I didn't know what he meant, however, but I knew that this was dearly important to him. He went on as if I already understood and we was simply looking for consent. "Will you defeat them, your demons," he nodded and laid his finger over my heart, "and all the non-believers with the plans that they have made? Because one day I will leave you as a phantom to lead you in the summer in order to join The Black Parade. I will be there for you, Jameson, you will not be left alone. You are stronger than whatever will challenge you."
His eyes were hard over me and I felt the weight of his words, of the hidden meaning held within them, and I was sure I looked like the mirror image of him; expect less certain. My hair was dark but his was darker and he had always allowed the stubble of his cheeks to grow upon his face; it aged him and made him look tougher than he already was. I stared at him as he knelt there with me, suddenly surrounded by crowds of people towering over the both of us, and he watched as he waited for my response.
I could hardly find my voice let alone have it be heard over the beats of the band, so in his air of waiting I followed what he had done before and dropped my head in a single nod. A sliver of pride fell into his eyes and I knew that I made the right decision. He stood up after that and stepped back so that I could appreciate the marching band, so I could let their music carry me into a world of solitude where no crowd surrounded me and it was only I and the sound.
The marching band's beat was overpowering and it shattered the dimness of the city with every tune it blared through it. The drums changed the beating of my heart and my lungs filled with the music that they created. The trumpets sounded like they fell from the sky and the tubas sounded like they came from under the heavy ground. It was a clash of sound in the perfect demonstration of togetherness that absolutely shook the crowd. It created a philharmonic fusion that I would not be soon forget.
And neither would anyone else.
When the band director passed by my father, it was the only time he bothered to acknowledge the crowd, and just like before with the man in the car, he nodded to him and my father nodded in return. It was astonishing that my father new the band director, that the man had spotted him out of the crowd in the first place, but before I could ravish in how popular my father was, he pulled me from the ledge of the street and posted me close to his body.
His hands pushed against my shoulders in an awkward way that made me stand straight and my knees to strain in order to hold me at this position. "Don't move a single muscle, Jameson," he stressed lowly, whispering this into my ear so no one else would overhear. "Don't move at all." And as if his words were magic I willed myself to sustain a statuesque stance. My brow was furrowed and my blood rushed a little faster than it had before. I wanted to know if I was at fault for something. I wanted to know why he was telling me to do this. But as if it was I alone who was being listened upon and answered, the streets exploded with response.
It took me a moment to recognize that the beat of the music had stopped and transformed into a new musical endeavor. The sounds consisted of thunder and screaming civilians, of tinkering machines and remarking metal bullets. The marching band stayed in their lines but their instruments of music had been transformed into instruments of destruction and reaping.
The metal bugs flew from their holdings in the middle of the street and the bullets bit every moving object in the vicinity. I jumped and my eyes began to water, I was shaking and I wanted to cry out and scream but the only thing keeping me from completing these natural instincts were the rough calloused hands of my father. It was only now that I realized that he too had fallen still, save for how the muscles in his arms must have been bulging in order to keep me still. Even so, I fidgeted.
"Stay still!" he growled at me, only loud enough for me. I don't know how he accomplished it but he did. And my fidgeting halted as I shook in my shoes and my knees bent inward and buckled. I was terrified and tears fell slowly from my eyes as I watched people fall lifeless before them. Blood ran through the streets and the marching band marched on as if this was an ordinary routine for them. My father's fingers dug into my collar bone and he held me upright, making sure I didn't move or stray from his grasp.
When the marching band and the parade acts after them moved on, the chaos ensuing only as long as there were inhabitants alive to create it, my father's grip released but he was still able to keep me upright. Bodies lay at our feet. Blood crept toward my shoes and my father kept his composure through all of it. His gaze was forward and his height seemed to tower over me much more than usual. I was going to be sick and he let me hurl until my stomach was empty and my bones were shaking worse than before. He picked me up and carried me home.
We left the city that day. I haven't looked out my window since.