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The cooling twilight fell over the valley of ashes, a whisper of a breeze curling the dusty grime into lazy spirals. The sun had just begun to set, kissing the horizon and casting a blissful yellow tint on the ashy ground. It almost made the desolate wasteland seem beautiful in a backwards, dystopian way.
When the sun melted into the jagged skyline perfectly halfway, a car came tearing down the ashen pathway, like a gold nugget thrown in the mud. Daisy Buchanan held the steering wheel tightly, her knuckles as pale as her light hair whirling in the wind. Then the white whirl of Myrtle Wilson’s dress flew from the garage and into the street, like a chalk smear against the broken asphalt, crying out to someone who was not there. The hurtling car, so lustrous its yellow may have just been a reflection of the sunset, struck Myrtle Wilson. The body which once held an impossible vitality rose skywards, past the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg, and once more returned to the forlorn earth.
Daisy gasped, and for a brief moment, could have made the decision that would preserve Gatsby’s life, but nonetheless, she sped off into the sunset. And Gatsby, turning back for the last time, quietly murmured, “I thought that advertisement looked familiar.”
***
T.J. Eckleburg had always watched Gatsby’s life with great interest. There were too many examples in mankind of such intensely ambitious people that ended up in failure. Hamilton, the mastermind behind the American Revolution, was shot in a duel before he had reached the impossible legacy he desired. Danton, the French revolutionary who wished to turn France to republic — but was killed by his own comrade, Robespierre.Yet the way they pushed against their fate like boats against the current was strangely respectable.
A fiercely hopeful boy stared at the back of his father’s newspaper with the same intensity as the eyes in the advertisement. They seemed to look past him, their gaze piercing through his head to look at something further away. The boy followed their gaze to the window, where the endless yellow fields stretched into eternity.
He followed the eyes’ gaze outside, towards the unyielding horizon that never came closer despite having run for miles. Abruptly he stopped, feeling sickened by the revolting monotony of the lifeless, deflated fields. This was James Gatz’s home — the home of a nobody, of someone destined for eternal insignificance. Even his name was bland and tasteless, ugly and reeking of unimportance.
“Jay Gatsby,” he said out loud. “Jay Gatsby.” That was a name that belonged in a land of prospect, a land where anyone could grasp the light of success if they worked hard enough. Jay Gatsby would not live out the rest of his days pleading his crops to grow so he could put food on the dinner table, instead he would watch the sun settle in a white silk suit while drinking the finest wine.
***
Gatsby sat down on the coarse sand, palms throbbing and raw from pushing the oars of his battered rowboat. He had spent the past year taking odd jobs so he could eat and sleep, and it just happened that he was salmon-fishing when he saw the tiniest foothold to climb the precipice of life. The gleaming silver yacht of Dan Cody, each glint casting back a spark of hope into Gatsby’s aspiring eyes. This was an opportunity that James Gatz would allow to slip through his fingers, but one that Jay Gatsby would seize like a starving animal after its prey. If he did not reach for this shimmering boat of hope, he would remain a lowly fisherman, the stupid boy who ran from home, illusioned by his fantasies of success.
He pushed his rowboat into the lake and made his way to the edge of the yacht’s low deck, where a man about fifty gazed emptily into the distance, his face stoic but radiating such a glow that immediately drew wonder to him. Gatsby stared up at him, his mouth slightly agape in intense hope and awe.
“How’s the fishing, old sport?”
Gatsby smiled at him, the smile he had practiced for years in the rusty mirror in North Dakota. It overflowed with the hope he possessed, a smile that told people that this young man would someday be close enough to brush his hands against the mists of heaven and receive its blessings. “Not bad,” he said back. “I would watch out for the rain. It seems there's a storm coming in about half an hour.”
“Thank you for the warning, old sport. You’re a keen young man.”
“What’s your name, anyhow?” he asked.
“Why, it's Cody, old sport. Dan Cody,” he said.
“Ah— nice to meet you. Mine is Jay Gatsby.” As he spoke the name, it truly became his, for Dan Cody would be the man who finally killed James Gatz and buried his name, just like it would be forgotten if Gatsby had stayed on his father’s farm.
“Gatsby,” Cody said. “How would you like to stay on my boat? It gets quite lonely sometimes, you see. And you’ve got that — that twinkle in your eye.”
Gatsby smiled again, his heart racing as his mind began reaching for the green sparkles on Cody’s yacht, knowing that this was the threshold that would bring him to success.
***
“Got the rent money, kid?” the landlord asked.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Gatsby proclaimed, then added “—old sport.”
The landlord cocked an eyebrow at him, then returned to the monotony of his work.
On his last night in the inn, Gatsby stared out the window, watching the lake glitter green under the dazzling moonlight. Cody’s yacht, bobbing lightly, flickered with all the hope in the world, a vessel that would carry Gatsby to an emerald life of spirit and vitality.
***
A few days later, Cody took Gatsby to Duluth and bought him a blue coat, six pairs of white duck trousers, and a yachting cap. Gatsby had left all his old torn clothes in the inn, disposing of the last remnants of his past. And when Cody left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast, Gatsby followed — for five years and thrice around the continent.
Gatsby learned how to pilot a yacht before he learned how to drive a car. Whenever Cody indulged in his supply of liquor, which was quite often, he reposed his full trust in Gatsby.
“Come here, old sport,” Cody said one day, when the Tuolomee was drifting in the Pacific, “I’ve got something to show you.”
He led Gatsby to a leather chest that Cody unlocked with a gold key around his neck. Inside was a nest of newspapers — in which Gatsby briefly saw an advertisement for yellow spectacles — shaped into a pedestal that held a golden crown adorned with emeralds. Each vibrant gem glistened like a green beam in the darkness that Gatsby desperately wanted to hold in his hand and keep forever.
“Why don’t you try it on, old sport?”
With a trembling hand, Gatsby reached for the crown and gently set it upon his head. The cooling metal rested against his forehead, and he knew that this crown was what he was born to achieve. The boy who was once destined to till the land endlessly could now wear a king’s crown, his hands that were once soiled with dirt now held gold and green riches.
“This will someday be yours, old sport,” said Cody. “That, and along with twenty-five thousand dollars. I suppose it’s the least I could do.”
Gatsby smiled, euphoric and hopeful, but the oculist’s eyes, crumpled in the chest, saw only isolation and delusion.
***
They had taken a brief stop in Boston to replenish their supplies, and Gatsby obliged when Cody suggested they stay in the city for a few nights. By then, Gatsby had become so well-versed in the manners of the high class, he was almost indistinguishable from the affluent, haughty young men who spent their lives idling and eroding away.
After Cody had gotten himself tipsy on Bostonian liquor, Gatsby took him back to the bay, unexpectedly finding a woman on his yacht.
“I’m Ella Kaye,” she said, as if under the assumption that Gatsby knew her. “The newspaper woman,” she added when he stayed silent.
“I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid we haven’t been acquainted.”
Her thin eyebrows raised slightly. “I’m surprised Dan hasn’t mentioned me yet — I convinced him to buy the yacht and travel the world,” she said gaily.
Cody coughed and exclaimed, “Ella! I haven’t seen you in a long while. Why don’t you come aboard for a drink?” Then, privately to Gatsby, he whispered, “We were good friends when we were younger. Here, old sport, have some of these bills and come back in an hour.”
With an effort, Gatsby left the bay and Cody. As he meandered the evening streets, he thought he passed by a store with the same advertisement for an oculist in the window, but he didn’t turn back, swallowed up in his imagination of the future.
A week later, Cody inhospitably died, and Ella Kaye had already taken all of his millions the night in Boston. Gatsby watched, tears flowing down his face, as she carried the trunk containing Cody’s golden crown out of the yacht.
“He promised that to me,” he told her quietly.
“Really? He never said anything about that to me,” she said, adjusting her newly-bought fur shawl. “I suppose you could buy it, if you really wanted.”
Gatsby thought of the money Cody promised to him. “Would twenty-five thousand be enough?”
“Do you have it now? I’d possibly sell it.”
“Cody promised me…I suppose he didn’t say that to you either.”
“I’m sorry,” Ella said, although she didn’t mean a word. “You could have that painting of him. I doubt it’s worth much.”
Gatsby reluctantly took the portrait of Dan Cody, watching the emerald crown — and the advertisement for the oculist balled up inside — disappear.
***
“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.
Ceaselessly, T.J. Eckleburg watched on, knowing that this was the culmination of Gatsby’s life, when his hope would finally lead to his demise. He had already seen James Gatz, the creation of Jay Gatsby, and the hopefulness he carried his entire life. He had seen Gatsby reaching for his green light, a hope that resided across the bay, too far for him to ever possibly touch. He knew that Gatsby wanted to change — to escape his life and bring himself justice. And Gatsby wanted to show God how he could usurp his destiny of being an infinitesimal farmer. But Gatsby was wrong.
Gatsby reached for a fantasy — a naive imagination created outside the realms of reality, a heaven that no mortal, even one as hopeful as Gatsby, could reach. He was doomed for failure from the moment he boarded Cody’s yacht in fruitless pursuit.
Framed for adultery, his life reduced to a word or two of gossip, Gatsby died a nobody. Only his father, Meyer Wolfsheim, and Nick attended his funeral. In his desperate scramble for Daisy, the freedom from monotony he craved, he was killed and demonized by the same public that attended his lavish parties.
Gatsby was a revolutionary, a youthful, highly ambitious, believer of the future. He wanted to change his future, to scream in the face of God that he refused to live a life set in stone. James Gatz, oppressed by the future that dictated him to be a farmer, broke his way out to freedom by using everything to his advantage. He suffered under the monarch of fate, so he flourished when Cody’s shining yacht of hope brought him the ability to reshape himself and determine his own destiny. Gatsby was Hamilton, he was Danton — an intensely hopeful bringer of change that built himself, brick upon brick, from nothing to the heavens. But a brick tower, no matter how precisely stacked, will fall upon itself.
As the last drop of sunlight left the lonely dumping ground, the dark of the night bleeding into the bleakness, the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg watched the lives of aspiring young people, believing their hope could lift them out of the futile world, as they failed over and over.
But they beat on, building staircases skywards, unaware that heaven had never existed at all.