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Inertia Creeps - Massive Attack
Lyra Nicole Hendrix is twenty-four-years-old. She is one of two children. She grew up in lower Harrisburg, one of Easton’s poorer boroughs. She graduated from Easton University with a Bachelor of Arts in Music and a minor in American History.
According to the state identification card she registered a year and a half ago (she has no license and can’t drive), she’s five foot three, a hundred and thirty-three pounds. Her employment history reflects many young adults in her tax bracket—a depressing ballad of struggle and poverty that seems never-ending. Thirteen jobs in five years. All minimum wage. None she worked longer than six or seven months. Several she worked at once, in between classes, running the gamut between cliché waitress positions and novelty gigs like Christmas elf at the local shopping mall.
She has seventy-five dollars and eleven cents in her checking account and a buck-thirty in her savings. In comparison, she’s sixty-nine thousand dollars in debt from the myriad of loans she took out to pay for her college education. Loan payments she’s since gone delinquent on.
No children. Darker complected. African American. Mid-back length hair she keeps in some sort of braided style (note to research at a later date). She has few friends and spends an inordinate amount of time online, tapping away on the keyboard of her decade-old laptop (so old the manufacturer no longer makes it, and she holds together with duct tape).
There isn’t a single detail about Lyra Hendrix that doesn’t inspire pity—oragitation, depending how I view the situation.
The girl was given an unfair hand from birth. She was born into an environment that left little room for success, let alone real wealth. Due to no college savings on the part of her ill-prepared family, she was forced to take out loan after loan. Forced to work menial jobs that were either insufferable or degrading (sometimes both). She graduated with thousands upon thousands of dollars in debt, and zero career prospects to her name.
Coming from a lower class family put her at a severe disadvantage from the start. Being both Black and female did not help matters. In the reality of the world we live in, she was already working against a strong current that pushed back against her at every turn. Doors were always closed for her that never would’ve been for someone like me—a Caucasian male born into a family that has a decades-long legacy in terms of wealth and power.
However, there’s many choices she’s made that have made her situation worse, demonstrating a lack of rationale on her part. She majored in one of the most useless degrees imaginable—music. She was an average student in most subjects, earning Bs and Cs and the occasional D. Her appearance likely turns away employers in professional environments. In particular, the nose ring she insists on wearing to job interviews and the dark lipstick she won’t let go of. The state of dress she’s often found in doesn’t help matters—tight-fitted t-shirts baring her midriff and worn tennis shoes or distressed-anything.
The girl lacks sense. She lacks logic and ambition. Worst of all,discipline.
It’s no wonder her life is a chaotic dumpster fire.
I dedicate a day to learning about my newest prey and am bored before noon. The fact that she wakes up a quarter after ten makes it that much more pathetic.
Two hours spent observing the girl, and I’m questioning if I’ve been subjected to some undiscovered form of human torture—following around a clueless, irresponsible young woman who eats Hot Cheetos for breakfast and has little more than ten cents to her name.
I heave an exasperated sigh as Lyra strolls down the street engrossed in her cell phone. I will give kudos where kudos is owed—one skill she’s mastered is the ability to walk down a busy city street with her eyes glued to her phone screen.
Other pedestrians come the opposite way and she dodges each one. She steps left to avoid the door of a dry cleaner’s swinging open, and she pauses just in time as the crosswalk light turns red and a slew of cars drive by.
Not once does her gaze leave the phone.
The stereotype is dauntingly true: “Generation Z” as they’re affectionately called by the greater society, are obsessed with their personal devices.
It’s their ultimate form of communication and socialization.
She’s texting. Her fingers fly over the screen as she waits for the light at the crosswalk. Instinctively, when the light blinks from red to white and others around her begin moving, she does too.
The girlcrosses the streetstill with her attention on her phone.
Either she’s a master at feigning obliviousness, or she’s a kidnapper’s nocturnal emission in the flesh.
Replace kidnapper with mugger. Rapist. Escaped convict on a killing spree.
Orme.
Common sense would dictate that, after an ordeal like Lyra suffered mere days ago, she’d be traumatized. Perhaps paranoid the secret ultra-rich club she escaped Friday night would be after her. An assumption that would be correct.
They are after her.
And though I do not, and will never, consider myselfone of them, I am also after her. More so for my own selfish motivations than any other why, but it still seemed to fit my usual set of principles.
Prostitutes are fair game. So are any other dregs on society.
The problem is, upon further research, it appears Lyra Hendrix isn’t a prostitute. If she is, then she’s a relatively new one with no traceable history I could find (and I am meticulously thorough when conducting research).
This means she no longer fits my criteria. Beyond being tasked to eliminate her by the Society and as pitiful as her life is, she does not appear to meet mywhy.
I force my observation to continue anyway.
