Session Five: “Complaint and Answer”
October 31st, 2014 by leonpan**NOTE: Short story can be found if you click “Read the rest of this entry.” It’s also attached to this following link: “Short Story”
“Complaint and Answer” was interesting to me because I had some trouble determining what I thought was the general theme of the poem. On one end, there was the complaint – the narrator of the poem addressing God about his frustrations, accusing God of betraying him and his people and going against His promise of giving them salvation and blessing them with protection and fortunes against their enemies – and on the other end, there was the answer – God telling the reader that he had no right to complain, as he and his people had long lost their true identities as believers of the faith and weren’t deserving to receive whatever promise they were hoping for, let alone have the right to challenge God himself. At the same time, there was a general idea that neither of these sides was more favorable than the other; rather, the poem was about misunderstanding and misconceptions between two sides. When trying to figure out what the theme was and how exactly to portray it in the form of a creative response, I took a slightly different route. I wanted to focus more on the idea of a child feeling as if he were deserted by his parent, someone whom he admired deeply, without being given an explicit reason and left broken and confused. This was a concept that I found really heartbreaking: that a child could be left alone with no where to turn to, no role models to follow, and no clear path to journey through, all the while struggling with his or her identity during a time of crisis. I’m definitely not saying that the relationship between believers and God is like that, but I know personally that there are moments in the walk of faith when you can really feel as if you’re not worthy of God’s love and blessings, and that maybe God really has deserted you because of who you are. I don’t think this is true, but it’s definitely something that many believers struggle with.
I kind of went on the riskier side and decided to write a short story, an allegory of sorts that revolved around this theme. I haven’t explored any creative writing since the sixth or seventh grade, so it didn’t really hit me until around ten minutes before I started writing that I was finally about to sit down at my laptop and start writing a piece of fiction again. Having the opportunity to do this again really brought back some strong emotional connections to the past for me; I really love writing and I haven’t even thought about creative writing since the end of middle school, I believe. My untitled short story ended up having a sort of interesting synopsis. An unnamed boy, presumably a high school senior, attends his last meeting with the school guidance counselor, an unnamed woman who’s known the boy for the past four years and can read him like a book. Throughout the majority of their meeting, silence fills the room and they play a game of chess, a tradition that they continue at every meeting with each other; the length of the game determines the length of the boy’s story for that particular meeting, and thus the length of the meeting itself. As the story continues, it’s clear why the boy sees the guidance counselor so often; he’s plagued by issues with his family, primarily his father, who just recently left the house for no apparent reason. The boy believes that it’s his own struggle with identity and his own self-image as a disappointment that causes his father to abandon his family, although the counselor disagrees. Before the reader is able to tell why exactly the father left or whether or not a resolution can occur, the chess game is announced as a “stalemate” – there is no winner, no loser, and the game has been defeated by a never-ending loop of pointless chess pieces being placed here and there and back again. The boy feels as if he’s driven his father away, and this crushes him to a certain extent inside. If there is a parallel between the short story and “Complaint and Answer”, it is this: sometimes, a child misunderstands, and the absence of a parent can imply many things to such a naïve, insecure soul. —————————————————————————————————————————
Today’s meeting would mark the thirty-sixth, he thought, his feet treading across the crimson carpet. Thirty-six weeks spread out over the course of four years. Nine weeks a year. One week a month. Thirty-six months. Thirty-six weeks. Thirty-six meetings. He calculated it again, this time in reverse. Thirty-six meetings. Thirty-six weeks. Thirty-six months. One week a month. Nine weeks a year. Four years. Thirty-six meetings. The walk from his fourth period class to the Office of Student Health was a rather lengthy one; he had to walk from one side of school to the other, essentially, and over the past four years he had memorized this walk from start to finish along with everything in between. He memorized every crevice in the gray, concrete walls that had been standing for decades, he noticed every flickering lamp from the ceiling up above and every spot of dispatched color on the worn out carpet below. Nothing changes here, he thought. It was comforting. Everything is supposed to change. But the only things that changed in this hallway were the art class posters on the walls that cycled through year after year, alternating as each round of students passed by, come and gone. Come and gone as all things ultimately are, he thought. The hallway is never the same when it’s empty, he realized. Not the same when the lunch bell rings and the students come shuffling out of their classes in clumps of personality, not the same when one or two of his fellow students pass him by and give him that half hearted wave that all humans give to each other, that children give to children, that grown men give to grown women, and fathers give to their sons. Fathers and sons.
He finally turned a corner and reached a wooden door, the sign nailed to its façade glowing with the words, “Student Health.” He walked in, stepped forward eight paces and turned another corner to the right before walking down another hallway until reaching his destination. “Guidance Counselor.” He knocked once. Pause. Then twice. Pause. Then thr –
“You’re early,” the door swung open, revealing a woman of forty or fifty, her hair already a crisp and sparkling white from years of living her own life and years of dealing with others’. The boy’s hand was still in mid air, his fingers still in the gentle curl that was meant to be a fist.
“Couldn’t wait to get out of class,” he sighed, walking straight past the counselor and sitting down on a wooden chair that was placed right in the middle of the room, its legs forming the corners of a square that acted as the epicenter of all activity within the confinements of the office. Whatever activity that was, anyway.
“Tell me,” she said, taking her own seat directly across from his and folding her hands over her lap. “Black this time, or brown?”
“Black.”
“You did black last time.”
“So?”
“So, you always switch it off.”
“So I have to be brown this time?”
“No, I’m just saying you always switch it off.”
He stared at her for a few slightly unnerving moments and sighed. Things change. Everything changes. “Black.”
She blinked. “Black it is,” and reached behind her for the box, always conveniently placed right behind her seat whenever she knew the boy would be coming. She set the box on the floor between them and opened it. The boy reached in and took out the pieces one by one. Pawn, rook, bishop, knight, the like. She reached in and pulled out the board before setting each piece in its proper place, the brown pieces on her side and the black on the other. This was tradition. Chess was the tradition. Every time the boy stopped by, this is what they would do for virtually the entire meeting. As soon as the pieces were in their respective positions, the game began. The boy always went first. He played his first piece and sat back in his chair, crossing his arms and furrowing his eyebrows as if that first move set the stage for all that was yet to come. She played the second turn and the game continued. For ten minutes, the game continued in silence, and the only sounds penetrating through the stuffiness of the room were the tiny wooden clicks of the chess pieces being set on the board and picked up again for their next turn. Down. Up. Up. Down. And so it went, every single meeting. One week every month. Nine weeks a year. Nine months a year… – The meeting would start out in silence with only the chess pieces making their moves, until finally –
“My dad left again.”
Her stare immediately left the chessboard and settled on his face, which still looking down intently as if he hadn’t said a word.
“Again? Do you know why this time?”
“There was no reason. That’s why it’s so…” He took his eyes off the chessboard as well and started concentrating blankly on the wooden wall behind her. “It’s weird.” He started breathing a little faster and rubbing his fingers. “Last time, he said it was because of work, remember? And the time before, he said – ”
“He was visiting your grandma, if I remember right.”
“Yeah. Yeah. But this time…I don’t know. I was sitting in the living room and didn’t bother looking up until I heard the door open and close. And I looked out the window just in time to see him getting into his car and driving away. He hasn’t been back in…three or four days now,” he mumbled. Although the counselor’s hands kept the game going, her eyes were on the boy.
“And what did your mom say?”
“I asked. But you know she never wants to talk about him even when he is home.”
“Right.”
“So I might as well not bring it up at all.”
The counselor was silent. She had been seeing this boy for so long that she knew the right thing to do would be to let him just say whatever he needed to say. She could always tell how long the meeting was going to last by predicting how long before the game ended. Checkmate meant that the story was done, that the meeting was over. This time, however, there didn’t seem to be a clear ending in sight.
“I feel like it’s me.”
“You have to believe that it’s not.”
“It is though.” He set his piece down onto its intended place, this time with a little more force than usual. “Ever since I told him, it’s been…”
“You have to believe that it’s not.”
The game continued in silence for a bit.
“He had this image of me. This image of the kind of son he wanted me to be. I crushed it.”
“You did nothing.”
“I crushed it.”
The guidance counselor looked away, her hand still holding onto the chess piece that she had been alternating back and forth with for some time now. She looked back at the boy and found him staring at her, a look of solemn and steady regret in his eyes.
“I feel like this time he’s not coming back.”
She set the piece down.
“Stalemate.”