2. Theo Griffin
Theo Griffin
Silence is Power
T he news hit hard — on every channel, on every screen, every department store window I passed, and every tweet that bleeped and annoyed the ever-living shit out of me until I tossed my phone to my assistant and told her to take it away.
Half a year has passed since the day that rocked my world, again , but I remember it as clearly now as if it happened only this morning.
Colum Bishop — that mother-murdering bastard — is dead.
The news was both freeing and annoying. Satisfying and oppressive.
It made me giddy with relief, but then it sent me into the kind of funk I hadn’t experienced in decades; I wanted to be the reason he was eliminated from this world.
I wanted to own the bullet that passed through his brain, and I wanted to control the finger that gently massaged the trigger of a gun.
I’d planned for it to be me; for two long decades, it was a promise and a goal. But not everyone gets what they want, and life has never hinted that I would be one of the lucky ones.
At least he’s dead, at least he’s gone. It shouldn’t matter to me who did it.
I remember the Breaking News banner that relentlessly slid across my screen. It played all day and night, an unending reminder that interrupted every commercial, every show, every news piece. His name was every-fucking-where as I tried to go about my day.
It’s not like I wasn’t busy with my work, and it’s not like I didn’t already know everything the journalists were crying about.
I knew more than they did, I knew it earlier, I knew the facts, but like vultures on a carcass, they took whatever scrap was offered, even knowing it was shitty intel and lacked the very thing they as journalists promise — facts.
Colum Bishop was taken out in a police standoff, and the bullet that passed through his brain belonged to a small-town cop from a town in the back of nowhere.
Apt, I suppose. I possess a deep loathing for the police, but that one dude might have received a Christmas card and gift from my company last year.
I used to be a boy who slept behind dumpsters and raided the trash from fancy restaurants.
They knew a child lived in their alleyways, so where they once callously tossed their leftovers, they began leaving them in foam containers.
Those containers still had to go in the trash – something about workplace policy – but when you’re hungry, you don’t give a single shit about where the food came from.
When it’s still lukewarm and smells of garlic and spices, you’re willing to eat the damn foam to get to it.
That was my life from eleven to seventeen.
I ran away from a dark club after watching my father and his friends murder my mother, I ran into an alley, and I didn’t leave again for a long time.
I had nowhere to go. I had no one to run to.
I didn’t have keys to access my apartment, and even if I did, I didn’t have transport to get there.
Hitchhiking the three hours’ drive didn’t enter my mind until I was older, and by that point, my mom had already been buried and the ‘army guy’ — Colum Bishop — had moved on.
My apartment would have been packed up by the first of the month when the rent wasn’t paid, and that sweater, that stupid fucking red sweater with little white dinosaurs, was a symbol for everything I wanted in life but could never have again.
It was just a sweater, but to me, it was symbolic.
It was the theft of my childhood. The murder of my family.
The scars a boy had been given, and the nightmares that same boy had to endure.
Night after night, a child’s brain played on repeat the last seconds of his mother’s life. It was a steady stream through my conscience, just like the ribbons of Breaking News on my television screen.
My mother was nothing more than trash in Colum Bishop’s eyes. She was worth less to him than the foam dishes were to the restaurant staff who periodically fed me.
My growth spurts, those spurts I was kind of proud of and showed off to a short, chubby girl with cute hair, slowed.
You can’t grow the way I had been when you have no food or a safe space to sleep.
You can’t maintain that kind of growth, and though my body wanted it for me — my body ached, and my eyes drooped — food and sleep are instrumental in that process.
I had easy access to neither.
That was more than twenty years ago, but that boy is not the same as the man I am now. That boy died long ago, eliminated in the dark and reborn again as someone else. Gunner Bishop was murdered the same day his mother was, deleted from this world. His medical records just… stopped.
Schooling, stopped.
Dental, stopped.
Even the after-school program where he could play ball with counsellors, or draw in the quiet rather than be home alone seven days a week, it was all gone.
The news spoke of the missing child. They considered it foul play, and really…
wasn’t it? It seemed pretty fucking foul to me.
Watching your mother’s rape and then her murder, sleeping in the freezing cold and wishing for your sweater more than you wished for your mother or a meal, it was all symbolic of a pretty fucking foul life.
Gunner Bishop died when he was eleven years old.
That child was nameless for years. He was voiceless, because he had no one to talk to, no one who would listen if he spoke. Selective mutism? I think that’s what those with the important degrees call it.
For six years, he literally didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. And when you do something for such a prolonged period of time, or in my case, don’t do something, it becomes a way of life.
When you lose one sense — for me, that was speech — the others become stronger.
I was able to hear the footsteps of a rat in my alleyway.
I was able to smell salmonella when science says it’s impossible.
I was able to ignore the heat and cold, effectively turning my body into one giant callus.
Weightlifters and laborers have callused hands.
At first, they get blisters, it hurts and makes a man miserable.
But eventually, those hands toughen up, they become hard, and nothing can hurt them again.
Spending the tail end of a winter living in an alleyway; that’s all it took for me to harden the fuck up.
Fuck that sweater, I didn’t need it. Fuck my mom, I didn’t need her either. Fuck Colum Bishop; he would eventually die at my callused fucking hands. I just needed time. I needed patience. I needed to use what I had; my brains.
My creative side wanted to draw, but the logical side knew drawing would get me nowhere.
So I channeled my creativity elsewhere. I drew pictures at first, because a smart man uses the tools he already has.
I drew, I posted a For Sale sign at the end of the alleyway, I hawked those images to sympathetic passersby, and with the money I made, I rebuilt broken down computers, because that was another skill I possessed.
I sold my drawings for between two and ten dollars apiece. I sold refurbished computers for a hundred.
It took my eleven-year-old brain only minutes to figure out where to focus my attention.
I made my way to the old computer store, three blocks up, as often as I could, stole what they considered trash from their dumpsters, purchased the parts I needed, or made them myself, if they were too expensive or simply didn’t exist yet.
I rebuilt, rebranded, and sold those old machines to people who wanted a good computer for a tenth of the price.
And that’s how Griffin Industries was born.
I didn’t call it that back then. I didn’t call myself anything.
I just sat in my silence and let my brain keep my body afloat.
I needed food, so I earned and purchased it — or more often, I stole it.
I needed a blanket and a mattress, so I earned enough to purchase. In reality, I stole that stuff too.
I enjoy stealing.
To buy something I earned feels sweet. But to take it feels a thousand times better.
To take it from a big corporation making billions, who could afford to float a kid’s basic needs, was the sweetest flavor of them all.
Now I’m forced to talk to people on a daily basis, though I keep it to the barest minimum. I eat and sleep in comfort, though I still steal as often as the opportunity presents itself. Why? Because it feels good.
Griffin Industries is a technological empire on the cutting edge of innovation.
It started as a hungry boy in an alleyway, and now boasts innovative divisions that beat out almost every other bidder in the mechanical division.
We bid lower than everyone else. We under promise and over deliver.
We take perverse pleasure in undercutting the competition, sending their businesses into the ground, then reaping the rewards of a market that is almost exclusively ours.
We continue to quote low, despite the lack of competition and the option to gouge money from clients. We could fix prices and completely fuck the industry, but that would screw all the little guys.
I only take pleasure in ruining those bigger than me. There’s no point picking on those smaller. That’s not a victory at all.
Those that are smaller come to me when they can’t keep up, they beg to be swallowed up by Griffin, I pay them well and above their asking price, and bring their owners and executives in as part of my executive team.
If they were smart enough to establish themselves in the first place, then they’re smart enough to be part of my team.
I pay my executives high six-figure salaries to ease the pain of losing control, plus bonuses every time we win a contract and sweep it out from the bigger tech companies.
It’s stealing, and I fucking bask in it.