The thing about a name is it won’t fit at first. The letters won’t settle around your shoulders until your muscles begin to fill in, until your bones have grown thicker and they can support the serifs of the appellative sounds. You’ll walk around and, at first, the name will slip off your feet; maybe you will even find yourself some years in, choking at the collar of consonants, desperate for release.
Don’t worry.
A name is neither a dinner jacket nor a straight one. It can expand and stretch quite a bit more than you might expect at first. You might not understand it, but time will shape your shoulders to the load. Certainly, the name will change and so will you. Someday, even, it might feel like home.
Benson wouldn’t know until much later the hopes his mother once held for him. As she carried him inside of her own body, she began to take notes. These were the hopes she wanted to write into his life, so she recorded them in the trees and in the stars. Her name was Inertia and she loathed it along with the hippie culture that inspired her parents to create such a burden. She felt categorized, like a lonely toy on a monochrome shelf. A high school dean once told her, in a spineless chuckle, “With a name like that, and with grades like this, it’s terribly uncertain whether you’ll go anywhere at all…”
Maybe she believed those words, maybe not.
They became a false vessel with a flimsy truth.
Inertia took the stumbles of her parents, the addiction and the apathy, and turned it into her engine. Everything about her attitude and aspirations was centered in her drive to be different than her parents. And she aimed Benson in that novel direction from her very first kisses on his tender, baby cheeks.
Once, when Benson was four, he noticed a man shouting at his daughter. From across the playground, Inertia watched her son approach, a teddy bear entering the shadow of a grizzly. At first the man didn’t notice the tug on his T-shirt, and neither did his daughter, whose eyes were glazed with apathy. Inertia thought she couldn’t have been older than five – though she looked like she’d been through three lifetimes of despair – and her rote acceptance of her father’s ridicule confirmed the banality of familial terror. Until she suddenly saw Benson, an interloper undeterred. When she did, when she saw his presence would alter the rules of the exchange, she was frozen in frantic worry.
Then, the beast looked down.
“What do you want?”
Inertia could hear the careful violence in his voice. Bloodlust. Some men crave the hurt. His growl brought her back to the dim memories of her own father, after a festival, when no one was looking.
“I want you to stop yelling at this little girl.”
And the man, for a moment, was transparent; his soul shimmered in confession and he almost knelt before the boy.
“Oh my God,” he whispered.
Have you ever caught that moment when the sunset becomes the smoggy dusk?
As suddenly as he had repented, the man took a step towards Benson and raised his fist. Thirty feet away, Inertia raised hers as well, gripping a baseball. It was an old trick her mother had taught her: carry a weapon that seems like a toy. In a single, practiced motion she arched her back, whipped her arm forward, and released, already running towards her son.
As the ball traveled below the monkey bars, Benson turned to look for his mother. She would never forget the whisper in his eyes, and it took a long time for her to see his perspective. He had something special, even as a kid.
It was conviction. It was faith. It was courage.
And the ball shattered the man’s nose.
Inertia leapt towards Benson and lifted him into her arms. Bending, she picked up the baseball. Then, she walked assuredly back towards the car across the grass as the giant behind her toppled and bled and blubbered tepid curses. His daughter stood stunned and Benson couldn’t help but wonder what she was going to do.
That kind of thing continued to happen and the colors continued to change. Inertia and Benson lived in a compact house – she would never use the word small. And the color? Cookies and cream. As a boy, he wondered if he might scoop a chunk off the siding during the summer months. He never did try it though; even as the other homes melted around neighborhood, their house stood as solid and bright as freshly fallen snow. Inertia watered the flowers, mowed the lawn, and trimmed the trees. She taught Benson everything. She gave him everything, from hugs to kisses.
Was it cold chance, then, that brought him to a bridge, in the rain? Was it destiny?
•••
“What’s your name, son?” Words in the mist, carried by a whisper shrouded in something. Anticipation? Dread?
“I’m not a kid.”
“You’re younger than me, I can see that much even without my eyes. Your voice is bent. Soft and full of struggle.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know you.”
Benson kept his hands in his pockets. It felt like the man sitting in the rain in front of him was also beside him and above and behind. Indeed, it wasn’t surprise that Benson felt at this revelation. It was a deep fulfillment of expectation, one he couldn’t grasp; had he been fearing this encounter, or longing for it?
The man began to rise as he spoke. “I know you. You wait tables at Lenny’s.”
“I need to pay for school.”
“I know you’re young, but you’re a little old for studying. I know that too.” Now the man was standing and Benson could see his full height, framed by exploding rain drops on a tattered jacket. “Most seem to stop earlier than you.”
“I’m going back to fix something I broke a long time ago.”
“Well, that’s what I’ve been waiting for. Do you see this flood of great waters from the sky? I don’t sit in this for nothing. I have a proposition.”
•••
Benson couldn’t see out the window of his mom’s Buick, but the laughter reverberated around the vehicle like arrows trembling after impact. Sitting in his seat, he couldn’t tell whether the sounds were giggles or guffaws – he felt defensive out of habit. Inertia turned and looked at her little boy.
“Are you ready? You still have about ten minutes before the bell rings.”
“They’re really loud.”
“So are you, at least at home. Don’t be nervous, you can just be yourself.”
“I’m only a little nervous. But not about them. I’m nervous about me.”
(Who will I become?)
Outside the air felt foreign and the laughter could have been a different language. In different corners of the schoolyard Benson could see the subcultures. Sitting on the cracked steps, gathered beneath a tattered basketball net, jumping rope in the sunshine.
(Who will I become?)
The thought wouldn’t let him go as he walked toward the double doors.
You see, the thing about a name is it won’t fit at first.
The letters won’t settle around your shoulders until your muscles begin to fill in.
Until your bones have grown thicker.
Benson was every different version of himself over the years, but the name settled well. By the time he met the man in the rain, he knew the ways to hurt and to be hurt.
(Who will I become?)