Asphalt Summer | Alexander T. Damle

Based on a true story.

            It’s a Saturday or maybe it’s a Tuesday and I’m just coming up to club lights, color of spring leaves lit from behind with fast food sign looking out over the freeway. My body is clung to by a thousand strands of electricity, hot cocoa against a snowstorm, mom telling you it’s going to be okay, and the strands twirl my body in time to the music, beautiful tingling synth-angelsongs. I grasp for the hand of another so that I may hold something warm and I find her.

            Against the darkness so that we may never die, so that the lights may never go out, so that the music may never stop, so that we may never find ourselves in chains, I was coming up and now I’m up. I’m seven years old watching seagulls play at the surf, eating cotton candy in the sun by the sea with my parents three weeks before my dad and I move away from LA and I never see the ocean again. I twirl my body, hair flies up around me, about my face, blonde, wheat fields across the heartland, dress like Marilyn’s, and then his hand finds mine.

            She pulls me in close and I smell perfume and sweat, summer pine, my uncle’s cologne, fresh baked cookies, and in the smell I’m set free. I lean in to her and our faces almost touch and at once we see each other, and in her eyes I see my Zelda, my Courtney, my June Carter, my passion in a place without passion, in a time when we’ve let love die to move ever faster, in approach of an imaginary zenith, an impossible, wonderful floating dance towards an end to a beginning that we just can’t let end. Six months ago, I dropped out of college, six hours ago, my parents discovered the deception.

            His eyes reflect pink club lights, sparkle like limousine windows, paparazzi flash bulbs, pulling through Paris, pushing ninety, brick wall, ending and from the ending is birthed legend. Through the sweat and cotton of his shirt I feel his body and it is no longer of flesh, no longer of this existence, this limited, closed minded, shut off echo chamber, a different life and different path, something beautiful and grander, pushing towards a brighter tomorrow. Trailer trash shit hole meth head mommy, she left us behind, he should’ve been the next Hawks, so now I’m here and in the night I push and in the day it’s “Thank you sir/madam, what denomination would you like, you fucking recycled air, cheap cut suit, cubicle nightmare cocksuckers,” but between the two I pay the bills that’s what matters.

           

            The music tugs upwards, aiming to grab a hold of my soul, at the drugs, the dopamine pull, the kick, and in the moment even the dry mouth, dilated eyes, locked jaw, it’s all beauty in the face of a particular nothing, then duh duh duh duh duh a piano chord pushes up, speeds up slightly, “just a small town girl...” and the entire club screams up in ecstasy, an affected meaning for a song that spells nothing but a certain kind of TV ending for Tony Soprano. All the bodies begin to move faster, a greater strength, more beautiful for the group that we are become, then “Strangers... waiting...” and I lean in and I kiss her, the moment legion, endless, indestructive in the swell of guitar chords, voice pulling out a second into a life, a love that can never die until then we become...

            We and we shall never be again as separate, even if we don’t yet know it. The kiss lasts even as all else we let fall dead. Outside, the smoking area, we finally meet with words.

            “Jason.”

            “Lana.”

            And that’s all we need, for in the lights and drugs our minds make themselves up, fish for a lure, virgin for a whore, killer for the dead. In our mind we see it all happen, swinging forward, pendulum of a clock back and forth, watching a child grow, crawling then walking then yelling then drinking then fucking then leaving, all in the moment we see the pendulum and we become a future in memory of a past that we made Dan to Harvey, John to Ronald, whoever the hell it was to J.R.

            The rest of the night is vodka red bulls and then shots of absinthe then smoke, but we remember the thrusting and yelling, the sweat, the tension and release, that impossible pleasure down there, the two bodies become one, as our minds made already.

            Time becomes as  immortal and as fleeting as the universe’s birth, a swirling palpitation of bed sheets and sex, flesh and warmth, falling away of old shadows, love versus oblivion, fight of the century, Mayweather and Pacquiao, but we all know who wins because fairy tales all end the same even the ones you have to wake up from. We swallow down pills then we sink into the sheets, into each other, something for nothing, love for power, beauty for a lifetime lying awake never sleeping. The flesh against flesh through the early morning light shines with a radiant glow beyond what the city lights at night can ever offer, a divinity without resurrection, a summertime drive by the seaside, wind in our hair, arms all over each other, no pigs to pull us over and put us away and tell us to wake up/go to work/die.

            Somewhere in the haze, maybe a week in, we sit in the sill of my window, looking out at the night time city spread wide below us, gridded network of streets stretched out for a hundred miles up to the toes of the mountains, blinking lights, cars flashing past in the darkness, a million lives saying all together now, and every morning starting the song over from the top of the page. We hold each other and she turns to him and kisses him on his lips and we grab hold of each other and don’t let go for the secret fear that neither will proclaim even to each other, even as we are become one, that if we let go we will lose our grips, that the other will slip out the closed window, lost to the city night, and the survivor will find themselves as they promised again they shall never be, the killer to the newborn babe.

            We hold each other like that for what feels as hours, eyes closed, hearts beating with the synchrony of a pop song, then finally she whispers in his ear, against the black,

            “We should get married,” and he breathes heavy for a time that she shall never feel again until in death.

            “Yes.”

            Once upon a time, in a land shrouded in deep forests, broken only occasionally by castles rising above the treetops like skyscrapers above the sprawl, a hero turned her horse down a long dark road. She rode for months, towards a point imagined as well as realized, a glimpse of chestnut hair, a flash of death’s blue bomber eyes. She rode and rode and yet still she did not find the end. Finally, she broke the forest and was surrounded on all sides by devastation, volcanic rock and smoke and sulphur and then fire, but rising out of all of it was a mountain to rival the castles, a god to challenge the men, a face against the darkness. She pushed her horse till no more it would walk, till the leather of her boots wore through with the force of a million years of river against unchanging stone. And yet still then, the hero had the mountain to climb, but still she did not stop because, if there was nothing at the top, after all our hero had been through, then there would never be anything at all.

            We wake up and we drop and in the middle we just hold each other close and feel the blood pulsing through each others’ veins, find a secret rhythm at which all our hurts lose themselves to seas the color of nightclub lights, a place where all we need is the E and each other, and in that only we are happy, no more medication passed over the counter by old men in white coats, skin as foreskin, vague proclamations at our self destruction, current courses continued, boats not righted against the storm.

            Money is tight, sure, money is always tight. We’ve got his apartment, but only through the end of the year, when his rent is paid out for, and his folks are losing patience, and when that patience is run out, they’ll come for us, and then we’ll really be left only each other.

            One spring morning we’re sitting in his kitchen, windows open to the thirtieth floor, Denver out for the sunshine, big sunglasses, couples hanging onto each other, tree roots to earth, lost artists to some vainglorious past. Roomate.

            “C’mon Jason, man, when you gonna give this shit up?”

            “Give up what?”

            “I don’t know man, not doing anything? You can’t just, like give up on school or whatever. You don’t have any money.”

            “Lana makes money.”

            “How? She quit her job.”

            “I’m right here.”

            “Yeah, you quit your fucking job man.”

            “I’ve got another job.”

            “What, dealing drugs? You ain’t Pablo Escobar, you sell weed to high schoolers.”

            “Dude, it’s none of your business.”

            “Listen, Jason, you can say this is all you all you want, but it ain’t. Your folks are still paying for this place. Hell, they bought the drugs you two haven’t come down from for the past two weeks.“

            “It’s our fucking lives bro.”

            “Whatever. You’re only still here cause’ your folks pay the rent. That’s it. I wish you two would fucking do something.”

            “What, like you’re any better?”

            “Yeah, I’m going to class. I’ll see you two later.” He leaves and we are whole again, his lies forgotten in door’s slam, twisted metal against metal.

            “You know, he kind of has a point.”

            “I know. Don’t worry, I have an idea.” She says it and we kiss and he takes her in the small of his arm, and she puts hers around his neck.

            One night, we find ourselves on top of a building with the entire city spread eagled below us, all the same streets as out our window, now just twice as far off, a garden party, rich people, ten thousand dollar suits and dresses, cut up and pieced back together again in the images of their new owners. We don’t know how we ended up here, all that matters is that we’re here together, pretending to be as them, the walkers, the journeyless, the office drones who found themselves at the top, so much money and not a hint of love, all glassy reflections in shop windows, daytime television picture of what an American is meant to be, advert soundtracks for an age when we all fast forward through the adverts. We see a pretty young woman off to crowd’s edge, building’s edge, tears in her eyes, and when we go to her she tells us she’s alone and we tell her they all are and she just looks around. We leave soon after, not wanting to look over the edge for fear that we will see the bottom, and at the bottom there is only blood.

            The next morning, his dad has left a message on our answering machine, saying that they’re coming today and basically kind of implying that he’s dead as soon as they get here, and then we know it’s time to make our way the fuck out of dodge. We pack what little we have, some clothes, mementos of a time gone by, a stuffed unicorn her dad won for her on some boardwalk cast in rotten wood, in a summertime when the sun still shined bright without a chemical suggestion, a watch his grandfather had worn through the shit coming up in a 50s America where promise was simply a proclamation to try just one iota harder, because on the other end of the long death in an office was a future for your family.

            Out on city’s edge, buildings grown short enough that we can see the desert above and around all, the sand in a desperate battle with the asphalt for dominance of our realm. Old motel, paint chipping, lights of the sign shattered, bored middle aged woman sitting behind reception. We sit in his vintage Trans Am waiting for the text to come through on his phone, contract paid out to the end. A light wind blows, fastfood packaging swirls up between the cars, dust is stirred through the air, the grease and garbage of the 24 hour diner across the road lets its smell be heard all through the air, a part of the place as the ice machine, always out of order, the suburbanites with their adultery.

            Phone vibrates across the car’s dash, plastic hot with the sun, we stare at it but we don’t reach out to take it until it’s buzzed five times and we know if we leave it we’ll have to give this all up, so we answer.

            “Room  17.”

            We get out of the car, and we shelter our eyes against the sun, look to each other for the confidence to walk, and we find it. We see a beat up old Pinto pull into the parking lot, slow down as it drives through, then speed up again and drive out the other side, the driver’s face old and tired and lost.

            We knock on the door to the room and we’re ushered in, the room dark. Dean sits on the bed, overweight, greasy hair, shitty concert t-shirt. We’d make fun of him if it wasn’t for the 1911 resting on his knee.

            “Hey Lana. And you must be Jason.”

            “Yeah. Nice to meet you.”

            “Sure... any friend of Lana’s, as they say. So, Lana, let’s go through this. I front you what amounts to $15000 of coke because you say you can move it for a clean profit in 48 hours.”

            “Yeah?”

“How you going to move that kind of volume that fast?”

“Sister of a friend of a friend. Lot’s of money, not a lot of sense.”
            “The most you’ve ever moved for me at one time is maybe $2500, always with cash up front. Why move to the big time now?”

            “We’re getting married.”

            “You’re getting married? Damn... well, good for you, congratulations. I guess, in that case, here’s what I’ll tell you. Because I like you Lana, and I trust you. 48 hours. I’m not paid back in 48 hours, then I’ll find both of you, and I’ll kill you.”

            “Uh, what the fuck Dean?”

            “Yeah I mean... I mean I probably won’t kill you it’s just... you know I want to make myself clear. I sometimes... But I trust you.”

            “Thanks Dean. We just need enough to get a place, you know?”

            “Yeah, I get you.”

            “So why are we meeting here anyway? What’s wrong with the mall?”

            “Oh, I have other business. This isn’t my room. Look, uh... I mean, this isn’t really my style, but, uh... I mean we’re doing some big business here, so I want to... I guess I want to make a point. And I’m sorry I have to do it, but, I mean... you get it.”

            “Sure Dean, whatever.”

            “Chaz. Bring him out. You know, people think they can take advantage of me, because, you know, I try to be fair, or whatever, try to be nice. But...”

            A kid, and that’s the word, a kid, 16, 17, bright eyes, bushy tail, the whole deal, is dragged out of the bathroom, one eye swollen shut, blood run down his t-shirt, sitting heavy on his jeans, but he’s still moving, thrashing about, threat-of-death-induced epileptic seizure, trying to yell through the duct tape over his lips. Dean gets up from the bed, the motion an effort, takes a Bowie knife out of a sheath on his hip, walks up to the kid, holds the knife out and stares at him.

            Their eyes meet and connect, and it’s a true connection, an honest transmission of thoughts and loves and dreams that’ll never come true, and though the kid can’t speak, he’s begging for his life, for Dean not to do it, and of course we’re begging silently for him too, because the three other assholes in the room, all way more of physical presences than Dean, well they’re telling us we better not open our mouths as silently as we’re begging for the kid’s life. Dean just stares at him for a long time and his eyes look tired, like he wishes he was anywhere but here. Finally, he makes a decision.

            “Fuck this. I can’t do it.” The kid’s entire body slackens with a release of tension, a lease on a life he thought he’d lost. Then Dean hands the knife, hilt first, to one of his guys. “Ray, you do it. C’mon Lana, Jason, let’s go outside... I...” He’s defeated but the kid looks already dead. “Jack, give them the shit.” Another guy hands us a brick, and we step with him out into the light and walk back to our car without another word.

            In the car we head down the highway too fast going the wrong direction and he won’t look at her and she can’t look at him, instead they just stare out at the vast open country, the cars rolling by, a thousand faces we’ll never know. Cacti and across the desert gallops Wyatt Earp and Jesse James and Pat Garrett and then they all vanish as suddenly as they appeared, forgotten.

            “We need to go the other way. Stacey lives back towards the city. In the morning, her friend’s sister will come by, we’ll clear $25000, pay Dean back his fifteen, then we can get married and we’ll be fine.” He pulls the car off at a lonely exit ramp, a road leading to a town that isn’t there anymore, ghosts of the American frontier, and pulls back onto the highway, heading north.

            At Stacey’s that night we go quickly to the office that Stacey has laid an air mattress out in, stash the brick under some clothes, then go out into the living room, plan on telling her we’re going to take an early night, but then she says she’s got people coming over. We think about turning her down, just going to bed, but we’ve been down for a couple days now, and if we know anything, we know we need to get back up. Depression is hard, we all know that, but it’s harder when you’ve tasted something better, and, when you can have that something again, why not take it?

            People start to flood the little apartment, a slow trickle at first, but as the drug is taking its hold on us the entire place begins to heave with people, sweat and body heat, drugs and booze and ten grams of pure crystal uncut pleasure, the day’s glimpse of ultraviolence forgotten in the patchy half light of a night never ending, and the music ebbs and flows in amongst us, chords sinking in between bodies, then it all blurs and fizzles out in a cloud of bright lights and we wake up the next morning to harsh sunlight, clinging to each other on the floor of the apartment, harsh pounding on the front door, and our first thought is cops, but we see out the window it’s just our buyer.

We look around the apartment, dozens of other people all asleep, some together, some alone, some naked, some clothed, in the madness we see a bit of light, and we stumble together into the office, and then we know that we are done. As bad as the living room was, this is ten times worse, booze splashed everywhere, needles lying on the floor, our clothes tossed everywhere, the brick gone. We yell and we scream and we get everyone we can wake up to help us look, but it’s still gone and we know it isn’t coming back.

We get in the car and again we can’t even look at each other, ashamed of our mistake, terrified of Dean, Dean of all people, Dean who she’s known since high school, who she kissed behind the gym when they both skipped an assembly to smoke freshman year, Dean, the only drug dealer in the world to bake his street level guys cookies for their birthdays, make them ornaments for Christmas, Dean, the Mr. Rogers of the drug community, the one who you could always trust to buy from, because you knew his own sense of twisted decency would keep him from spiking your shit.

“We need to get out of here.”

            “Here where?”

            “I don’t know. Fucking Colorado, the USA if we can. This whole country has us cursed.”

            “We’re not cursed, or at least not totally. We stick together, and we’ll make it.” And then we look at each other and like that we are one again. We decide to go to her dad’s place, some trailer park halfway between Denver and nowhere, hide out there. The man’s love of Russian made assault weapons with potentially illegal modifications suggest that it might just be the one place in the world where we can be both safe, and together, at least for a time.

            On the drive south, we pass through a town that’s falling apart, not just empty storefronts, but empty lots. On a wall standing free of any structure someone has graffitied the words “GOD BLESS AMERICA” in big black letters and we watch it as we drive past. She digs into her pocket and pulls out two pills.

            “This is the last of it.” Then he leans over and kisses her and we each take one.

            At the edge of the town, we see a huge dollar store, still open, a few rusty old cars sat on new asphalt in the parking lot, and we stop, go inside, browse about, separately, mostly, get something to eat, to drink, to finish out our drive south, and as we check out we see the deep lines cut into the face of the checkout clerk, hear the five packs a day trailing on the edge of her voice, and she doesn’t see us standing just in front of her eyes.

            Outside, the drugs just starting to dig into us, to take clawing hold of our basic perceptions, he fetches something out of the bag and puts it in her hand.

            “I never got you a ring.” She looks in her palm at a cheap piece of Chinese plastic, dark black, a little silver skull in its center, and she kisses him on the lips.

Somewhere near the southern border of Colorado, we pull up to an old, but, quite clearly, lovingly maintained airstream trailer, parked in the middle of a big trailer park, cactuses and sand and not even the sad attempts at grass that usually build places like this, kids playing in the dirt, running down the roads, freedom of summer for them but not for us. We knock on the door.

Inside we hear the springs of a couch creak, footsteps, a faucet running, footsteps, then the door opens, and a big man, strong, muscles showing clearly under a tattered wife beater, but still his frame looking over-strained, like all those muscles are too much for his bones to support, looks out at us, and a moment of realization passes through him and he embraces us both in a big bear hug, and those bones feel a new spike of life.

His place is as we expected, old bottles, trash, accumulated filth and grime, back alleys, abandoned buildings, big hearted people left alone by life’s collected circumstances and the casual injustices of fate. He shows us the couch and we say we’re alright on the floor, the couch held together now only by sweat stains, smell of whiskey and vomit.

He asks us how things are between us, and we tell him we’re getting married and his eyes, permanently faded, glimmer with a secret, quiet light, midnight tryst, I guess he figured she’d never make it, not after everything between him and mom, love gone at a young age, hard to get back, past receding ever into hazy afterglow of rockets arking against an early morning sky. Then we tell him we’re in some trouble, real asshole, and her voice trembles a little as she says it, and that we need to leave, but we want to get married first, and he says he’ll put something together, get some people, talk to the priest, a kid, hardly older than us, but he saw a problem and had the audacity to think he could fix it.

You wonder about something like that, a priest at 23, whether he ever loved, whether you can really know the love of God without knowing the true, absolute love of another human. Maybe, though, that’s the only way to truly believe in an all loving God. Love is about the broken, and God, by definition, can’t be broken.

We stick around his for a few days, lying low, keeping quiet, heads down, the whole B-movie rundown of excuses for not facing up to your past fuck-ups, while her dad puts together a post-modern shotgun wedding that, given the socio-political makeup of the surrounding community, is sure to have its fair share of literal shotguns as well. The guest list is built up and down of folks neither of us really know, distant uncles of hers, a few, but mostly just locals, happy to come out with the offer of a few free bottles of booze her dad scraped together from between the sofa cushions.

            The day of the wedding is a neat whiskey turns on the rocks sort of hot day, suit jackets, what few make it to the day’s proceedings, immediately cast aside in favor of loosened ties and half unbuttoned shirts, sundresses two inches too short for a wedding. One of her uncles has a big revolver on his hip, and the sweat forms in deep pockets around it, mid-aged belly fat, reeking outline, shade of death, vague threat of frontier justice across a closed frontier.

            We were expecting the back of someone’s double-wide mobile home, but her dad really came through on the venue, a proper chapel, old white wood, hand-made construction. The place has to be at least a hundred years old, and in its slightness, its charming delicacy, it truly feels a place of love. Somewhere special, to be remembered even as time’s sands sift slowly away at the paint.

            Even though the guests in attendance don’t number more than twenty, in the little chapel everything feels crowded and slightly claustrophobic. Everyone is drenched in sweat, and a half dozen of the men stand at the periphery, not bothering to find seats. In the front row is her dad and two uncles. He thinks with slight sadness at the absence of his parents from the affair, but he knows they would never approve of her, of a place like this.

            He stands at the front of the chapel with the young priest, and he watches her walk in, her father at her side. She wears a beautiful white dress, and he doesn’t know where she could have found it, but it suits her. It lacks the fragility of the standard wedding dress, instead it possesses the same strength that embodies her, a blunt refusal of the terms of its creation. It belonged to her mother, before she left. He wears an old white tuxedo, lent to him by a neighbor of her father. It doesn’t exactly fit, and the slight smell of mold suggests it hasn’t been worn in decades, but the imagery of the day matters, even as tattered as it is.

            The priest’s speech is oddly traditional, entrenched in the marriage tropes of an earlier time, more noble circumstances. He speaks slowly, with an accent a little too deep-south for southern Colorado, another call-back to an older world.

            We think on a future together, a period of running, of unsettlement, of shifting and moving and fighting and trying, but we know we’ll make it through, if only because we have no other opportunity in the face of our abandonment of the “rules.” And we think of being together from this moment ever onwards.

            Then our revery, and the priest, is cut off by the doors at the back of the chapel opening. Dean walks in, two very angry looking men by his side. The uncle with the gun rests his hand anxiously on the butt.

            “Sorry about this, folks, but I... I’m going to have to cut this off here.”

            “Dean, what the fuck are you doing?”

            “I... I warned you. I can’t just let you guys walk away, it wouldn’t... it wouldn’t look good.”

            “What are you going to do? Shoot me? Shoot us?”

            “Well...”

            “Because you don’t have any other way to do this. We’re getting married, then we’re leaving, and we don’t have your fucking money.”

            “I’m sorry, but I just can’t let that stand. I let you get away with this, then everyone will think they can.”

            “Dean, you’ve been in love with me since high school. You’re not going to kill me on my wedding day.”

            “Yeah, I’ve been in love with you. I’ve been in love with you, and you should’ve ended up with me... not this hipster motherfucker.” Hands begin to move for guns, but the moment is broken further when three more people come through the front door.

            “Who the fuck are you?” One of Dean’s men snarls out as his hand is inside his beat up motorcycle jacket.

            “I’m James Spayde, PI, and this is Mr. and Mrs. McManners, Jason’s folks.”

            “And what do you want?”

            “Our son. And the money he took.”

            “I didn’t take your money. Look where I’m standing right now, and ask yourself if that makes sense. Sorry mom and dad, but I got here on my own.”

            “Oh yeah, after you lived in the apartment we paid for for two years, getting drunk and high on the money we gave you for food and books. Son, I love you, but you’re an asshole.” Dean loses what little patience he’s ever had.

            “All of you need to shut the fuck up.” Then he draws his 1911 and the uncle his revolver and the detective a Glock and Dean’s men a Sig and a Beretta, and everyone has guns pointed at everyone, Spaghetti Western Mexican standoff, cold, hard looks, civilians screaming and diving for the ground, brows furrowed, beads of sweat eyes unblinking. “Now that we’re all on the same page, I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen. Spayde, you’re going to put your gun away. Same with you, you inbred motherfucker,” (he gestures to her uncle) “and I’m going to leave her with what’s owed to me. I won’t kill them here, not now, not in a church. But I’m going to make sure they get what they deserve for taking advantage of me.”

“I’m sorry son, but I can’t let that happen.” The detective has the sand of an ex-soldier.

“There’s one of you. Two, if you count the shaking hillbilly with the hand cannon.”

We turn to the priest and whisper

“Finish it,” and looking like he’s just seen the face of his god, he sputters out

“I now pronounce you man and wife” as conditions in the gallery are heading fast towards a scene out of any of a half dozen movies.

“Look son, I really don’t want to shoot you, but I will.”

“That makes two of us.”

That’s when we decide we best get going, before blood coats sticky the floor and everyone's ears are ringing, figuring that we’ll be the next target of whoever comes out alive. She thinks of her father, but then she remembers the man by her side and she does not falter. He sees his parents, but then he recalls how they scorn his love. We cling to each other, the last leaves on a tree as the first big flakes of winter start to fall on cold earth.

A back door and she kicks it open as we hear from behind us

“FUCK YOU!” identity of speaker indistinguishable, break and gas pedal in the moment of half-second from impact adrenaline.

We get through the door, into the hot sunshine and we see the sun, blue sky, emerald grass, with new eyes, life when it should’ve took itself from us, a feeling made all the stronger by the ominous crack of gunfire from within, screams, already deafening, now breaking through a certain respected standard, death cries now, beyond declarations of simple fear, the knowing realization of final approach, landing lights snow white night, destination: the void.

In front of the little chapel is his Trans Am, and never before has the burning leather of a car left standing in the heat of a Colorado July felt such a perfect relief. We drive like the devil himself is behind us till we reach the freeway, until we know we’re safe. She leans his head on her shoulder, and he feels her warmth. The future is hidden to us, sands of time, smoke of gunfire, haze of drugs, but one fact of it remains through all the great obfuscation. He hits power on the radio, and as soon as we hear the Boss’s scratched out voice, a smile crosses our faces, the perfect irony, but then we hear the song - “Everything dies baby that’s a fact...” and a black cat crosses in front of the car, too close to swerve to miss, but then “But maybe everything that dies someday comes back” and the smiles return to our faces. It’s not Born to Run, but that would be just too clean, too perfect, too fairy tale, just like all the lovers we aspire to never were.

So we drive on down the hot asphalt, the dry heat of the summer all around us as we hit the New Mexico border, and he kisses her on the top of her head.

“You think we’ll make it?

“No, no one does, but we can try.”

Crescent Moon Seen through the Trees against a Tar Black Sky | Alexander T. Damle

            I’m walking through the darkened hallways of my house. I can’t sleep. I never can, so I just walk, sometimes grab a snack, read a book, but mostly I just walk, an endless circle, until I pass out from exhaustion. My uncle left me this house. He didn’t die, he just left. We didn’t really talk, but I’m not sure he talked to anyone. So I’m walking through this house - I guess it isn’t really mine, but it’s so big and old now, it can’t really belong to anyone. It has a mind of its own, because every night when I get home from work, it’s bigger and darker, and it seems less and less like a home. Fish bowl. Doll house. Jail cell.

            So I’m walking through this place, listening to the wind outside, my feet padding quietly on the hardwood floors that seem to cover this entire story - I don’t know which story. I think I know how to get to my bedroom from here, but that’s not much help. I was looking for the kitchen, but now I’m not. I’ll find it, or I’ll find another one, and the cupboards and the fridge will be fully stocked. I hope they have cake.

            I see something out of the corner of my vision, crouched in the frame of a door, sunspot eyes peering out at me, its features harsh, jagged, protruding at strange angles, and I feel its teeth through its closed lips. I turn to it, turn my flashlight. Always a flashlight. It’s too hard to find light switches when I come to new rooms, plus I’m always worried in the light I won’t like what I see. I turn to it and it isn’t there, but I decide to go into the room it was looking at me from anyway, and I find a kitchen. I open the fridge and see a large Black Forest Cake, raspberries and all, completely fresh. I find a knife, cut myself a slice, warm it in the microwave for thirty seconds - I always like my cake warm. When I take a bite, the jam oozes out and I see my face reflected through a window, the jam on my chin as blood, and I wipe it away with the back of my hand, wash it in the sink. My flashlight goes out, but the kitchen isn’t so dark for the moonlight pouring in. I turn to look for a lightswitch, and the creature is standing there in front of me, full height, easily six feet, and it opens its lips and its teeth are jagged and I’m paralyzed by fear.

            “I’m Gabriel. I’m not so bad. Don’t worry. Now the rest?” The thing’s voice is male, midwestern, 40s, 50s, calm.

            “The rest?” What else to say?

            “Oh, sure. Sorry, I have to go. You shouldn’t turn on the light though. You won’t like it.” My flashlight flickers back to life, and Gabriel is gone. As I prepare to leave the kitchen, I look again out the window, for I no longer feel the moon’s gaze on my back, and through it I see a spider the height of houses, but rather than the black eyes of a spider, it has the soft blue eyes of a girl I once knew. One of its long legs reaches out towards me, and as I see it hurtling towards the window, I see thousands of hairs, sharp as edges, broken mirrors. The leg rips a hole in the side of the house, and I feel a sharp pain in my gut, put my hand down, it comes away bloody. I fall to the floor, see my lower half, waist down, tossed off across the room, tendrils of gore, half my stomach, spilling out below me, intestines strung out between my torso and my legs, across broken glass and shattered brick. I close my eyes against the coming pain, stomach acid, bleach stained orange juice, slaughterhouse, guts.

            I wake up in bed, the sun filtering in through curtains a hundred years old, the flavor of tangerines, my alarm clock bleating away. I get out of bed, look out the window, see across the yard to another wing of the house, notice two dozen square feet of wall crashed inwards. After I shower and dress, I call a contractor and tell him he’ll just have to see it for himself.

            I find the kitchen with the hole in the wall, assess the damage. The fridge is still in tact, the cake still on the top shelf, now missing two slices. I cut a third, boil up some coffee, and eat a rather unhealthy breakfast while looking out at the vast and empty forest behind my house, think of the cake.

            The drive to work is cloaked by a low hanging mist, trees close in on the sides of the road, winding slowly without clear purpose down out of the mountains, towards where the city used to be, but now only emptiness and the factory seem to remain, as punishment for our ignorance.

            I’m the engineer, she’s the builder. The rest of them are gone. We can finish this without them. On the west wall, spelled out in sprawling pink, neon cursive, is “Kishi and Kurosawa Electronics.” The factory only has one room, exempting the bathroom and the basement, and it’s the size of a hangar for an AN-225. It used to be full of people, buzzing, pulsing. New designs, new prototypes, new ideas. When the basement opened up though, everyone kind of left. I don’t know why, but, like I said, we have this taken care of. Now, it’s just our two desks, and a table in between where we build and re-build, refine and begin again. It sits there, a black box, such perfect black that you can’t see it without the lights right on it, hooked up with a single braided cable into each of our computers. She arrived there before me. She’s an early riser.

            “So, what do you think?” She’s not one for pleasantries.

            “I think we’re almost there.”

            “Yeah?”

            “It almost works.”

            “What do you think will happen we turn this on?”

            “We’ll know.”

            “Know what?”

            “Whether He exists.”

            “He needs to. Without him, we’re done.”

            “What do you mean, done?”

            “Fucked, hosed, terminated, gone. They’ll close the factory, and then we won’t have anywhere else to go. None of us.”

            “The basement will still be there.”

            “Keep your damn basement.”

            “The basement is how we know He’s there.”

            “Why?”

            “Everything has an opposite.”

            We work through the morning largely in silence. I know we’re almost there this time. A couple days, two, three, tops. Then we’ll know. Really, the knowing doesn’t matter. If He doesn’t exist, then, as she would say, we’re fucked. If he won’t help us, then we’re fucked. If we can’t get the box to work, well then we’re just as fucked. But I know it will work, and I know He’s real, and I know He’ll help us. At 1pm, we take lunch. She eats outside, staring out at where the city used to be, and I eat in the basement.

            The basement is smaller than the factory, the size of a community pool. The walls are exposed concrete, and in the middle is a gaping hole, walled in what looks to me to be coagulated blood. A sweet, rotten stench wafts up from the hole in warm breaths of air, and occasionally the passage of it brings rippling, wavering sound, like a theremin played too close. One day I threw the core of an apple into the hole, and it spoke to me in a language not quite English. It asked why I threw just the core, and I said because I ate the rest, and it told me it liked the flesh, just like the rest of us, so the next morning I brought it an apple and it thanked me. We talk now. I once told it about the box but it got angry when I explained it. The walls started to rattle, then I realized it was the very earth shaking. I apologized, and told it the next morning I would bring it a tuna fish sandwich, and it apologized for getting angry.

            Today, after I finish my sandwich, I take out a tupperware with the rest of the cake, tip it down the hole.

            “I guess you two are close?”

            “I... I thought you didn’t want to hear about it?”

            “I’m curious. I like your sandwiches and I don’t want you to leave.”

            “Yeah, we’re close.”

            “You know, I was his favorite son once. I certainly hope he’s still there.”

            “He has to be. You are.”

            “And look at me now. Eating tuna fish sandwiches is the highlight of my day. The eternal torture of the damned isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

            “I imagine it would get dull.”

            “It’s not even that - I just wish once in a while someone would love me, you know?”

            “Awh, don’t say that. I love you, man.”

            “Thanks. It means a lot. Really.”

            Work that afternoon is slower, but still progressing, and that’s what matters. As long as we don’t stop. At the end of the day, as we’re going out to our cars, the sun just set over a still blood tinged horizon, I see something peering out from underneath my car, vicious claws wrapped up around the edge of the metal, and as I step closer it pulls itself out and stares at me. I look to her, but she doesn’t see it. The thing stares straight through me, and its eyes are deep and hazel and haunted, and I can see its been crying. Its arms hang down to its knees, and it’s desperately thin, drawn out fashion model, clothes to fit into, runway strut, and as I pull out of the parking lot, I see it turn to look at my car. Then it gets down on all fours, and it starts running towards me, its elbows snapping up above its back, moving fast, too fast, Veyron fast, cheetah fast, stage four, metastasized cancer fast, and I put my foot down, shoot off back into the forest.

            As I pull up in front of my house, the contractor is walking back to his truck, and I greet him.

            “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’ll be able to fix that just yet.”

            “Why?”

            “You’re going to need an exterminator first. There are spider eggs all over that room.”

            “Oh.”

            “Yeah, it sucks, I know how that goes. I can give you a number for a guy I use if you want?”

            I take the number and leave it on the counter of another kitchen, promising myself that I’ll call in the morning. Now though, it’s getting late, and after last night, I don’t want to leave my room until day break. In the fridge I find some pasta. I stick it in the microwave and take it to my room to eat, but I can’t find my room, which is strange because I can always find my room. I start to eat the pasta out of the bowl as I walk because I don’t want it to get cold. I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t find my room, there are no other beds in the house, just kitchens and bathrooms and drawing rooms and living rooms. Music rooms and libraries and home theaters. Rooms without a purpose. In the basement I once found a room nearly as big as the factory, but with a low ceiling and nothing in it, just cement walls and floor and ceiling. I’ve never found it again and I’m glad because it also had no door.

            I wander through the halls for what I know are hours. Every time I pass one of the big, gothic windows, moonlight cut in little shreds through trees, the lattices, I hurry past and avert my eyes. I know the spider is gone but there are far worse things in the night. Once, I pass the door to the kitchen from last night, and I think about going in and inspecting the eggs, but I worry I’ll let something out, and I don’t want that.

            The carpet in this hall is patterned with ornate roses, and in its center, away from all the windows, it is raised up in the shape of a man, and then he stands, and all the roses begin to bleed, and he walks towards me. His eyes are green and sad, and he looks as if he wants to scream, but he has no mouth. One of his carpet-patterned hands swipes out towards me, and I feel thorns rip through my skin. I turn to run, but I’m faced again before me with a creature that was once a man.

            Now, though, much of its bare flesh is covered in blood and pus and writhing maggots. Where once it had an eye, now it has a socket, and in the socket is a twisted together mass of worms, and I decide to take my chances with the walking carpet, but when I turn the carpet is gone. I run down the hallway as fast as I can, almost tripping over a giant tear in the center of the floor, but I make it through a door at the end.

            The room is completely dark but for the beam of my flashlight, despite the huge bay of windows along the wall I just came in. I scan around and I see dozens, hundreds of old pieces of furniture under throws. Couches, chairs, tables, some chandeliers rusting on the floor, rust spreading like a virus, a light dusting across the scarred hardwood floor. At the room’s center lies a grand queen bed. I check my watch and see that it’s already past three in the morning. After I pull the dust cover off the bed, find it fully made, pillows and all, I strip down to my boxers and fall asleep before my eyes shut.

            You wander through a forest, trees bearing down on you, watching you as a teacher watches a child in a nursery. You know it must end because all forests end, but the witch at the beginning of the place told you there was no end.

            When I awaken, I can hardly see but for the stars above me, and I find myself on a bed of pine needles rather than goose down. My boxers now bear the addition of a three piece suit. Trees all around me. I look about in fear, and as I do, one of the trees becomes an incredibly thin man, twenty feet tall. Spindly legs start to walk towards me, back held totally straight. I start to run, afraid of tripping over a branch or a rock, raising my legs high. In front of me through the trees I see a mansion, illuminated, atop a small hill, and I realize it’s my home.

            I break the tree line and begin a mad dash, for, when I turn around, the tall man is still following, loping, lagging gait. Through the windows I see lights, through all the windows and all the lights, people lit up, all dressed beautifully, old suits and gowns, dancing, laughing, singing.

            Through the front door I burst, and everyone stops moving and talking and looks at me with a bitter silence. Then, after a few moments of looking, they return to their dancing.

            Everyone lines up for a reel, and I’m compelled to join them. A five piece band plays an old dance tune that everyone here knows even me, but I know I’ve never heard it before. We dance like the devil is on our heels, and as we dance I see the tall man staring in through a window. When finally we stop, a man, short and handsome, gets up on stage and suggests we all sing an old song. Someone asks which one, and he just replies “The Oldest.”

The Oldest Song

Quick odyssey, don’t malign

The truth to a riddle you do not know

The philosophy of the yarn

The soothe to the end we must sow

Bloody monotony grand design.

We juggle and fight and in this we fly

Bodies quarrel with soul, naked and bloody 

Constant struggle reenacting the Marne

All morals obfuscated and muddy

Head guggled, and we fuck until my cock runs dry.

(Chorus) La... la la la la... ladiddy da... burn in hell... pay your dues... la la la la... diddly dee... From the knife... comes the stillborn fetus... la la la la... laddidy da...

We dress up the little old lady

A hen in virgin’s clothes, 

Then repossess the sky, the great bird comes

And then we all sing to the rose

Then transgress her away till she’s but a baby 

Then abet them out long  

Your childless gods

Voices sextet become the ancient drums  

Your violence and inhibitions naught but frauds

And let be heard the Oldest Song 

(Chorus) La... la la la la... ladiddy da... burn in hell... pay your dues... la la la la... diddly dee... From the knife... comes the stillborn fetus... la la la la... laddidy da...

And let be heard the Oldest Song

            Then everyone, all these guests, dozens, they all pull out knives and set upon each other, wolves on a child left alone to die in the woods. A beautiful redhead lunges towards me, but I start to run. As I make it to the top of the grand staircase, I turn to see the tall man come through the door, back bent almost perpendicular, and I start to run again. This time I find my room immediately and fall asleep, fully clothed, completely and totally beaten.

            In the morning all in the house is returned as it should be, no sign of last night’s horrors. Except, that is, for one thing. Instead of a shower, in my bathroom I now have a bath, but I can abide this, I suppose, as long as no one tries to kill me.

            I strip off my clothes and climb into the warm water. It occurs to me that the last time I actually took a bath, I wasn’t ten years old. I appreciate the relaxing warmth, the clarity, of the clear water. I close my eyes and lean my head back for a moment. When I open them, the redhead from last night is in the tub across from me, her body naked and perfect. On her face is a smile straight out of the movies, but her eyes are sad, a million miles away. She leans in close to me, and I feel her breasts brush my chest, then she kisses me and I feel my cock harden between my legs. I look down, and see blood pooling into the water. I look back to her and her face and chest are covered in deep knife wounds, flesh sagging under the weight of its own annihilation, blood seeping out, then a chunk of her forehead cracks and falls from her face, revealing brain beneath, wet and sticky, and her smile turns to a frown. I leap out of the tub.

            When I look back, the bathtub is a shower again, and when I look down at my body, my skin has been cleansed white as alabaster.

            On my drive into work, the skies, bright blue upon my awakening, quickly turn a claustrophobic grey, before descending from the heavens and socking my car in with a thick fog, such that I can barely see the trees on either side of the road, or indeed the asphalt a half dozen yards ahead of me, my headlights swallowed up into the blankets of low hung hyper-humidity, and I see the earth that we lost when the energy ran down in between that obfuscation, but also the promise of the future that we may build, if only we can get the box to work.

            We spend the morning working in silence because we both know that we are almost there, just a few more hours, and we’ll have something. And then we’ll know. And neither of us really wants to discuss what happens then.

            I take my lunch in the basement.

            “Let me ask you, my friend, why are you so insistent on contacting Him?”

            “Well, I guess it’s the only solution that I really see as being left.”

            “Since you ran out of energy.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Why do you need energy?”

            “Because without it, we’re all falling apart.”

            “How can you be falling apart if you can bring me tuna fish sandwiches every day?”

            “The seas will last beyond us.”

            “You don’t eat tuna, do you?”

            “No, not usually.”

            “You’re more of a BLT type, am I right?”

            “Yeah, definitely.”

            “The lettuce, the tomatoes, they will outlive you?”

            “Yes.”

            “And the pigs?”

            “Of course.”

            “Then why?”

            “I rather like existence.”

            “Oh, it isn’t so great. Plus, any answer He gives you, you aren’t going to like.”

            “I can’t just give up. I need to know.”

            “Yeah, I guess I get that. Say, you have any more of that cake?”

            In the afternoon, neither of us can be silent for the clinical air hung with nought but the memories of all those who built this place is becoming oppressive, as the fog. I shift through the lusts and fears of our quest towards creation, look for an end point beyond the dotted line to work us towards.

            “What do you think about the quantum cerebrex?”

            “That may be the root of our problem, we just need to fix the rambergetion synthesizer, rebuild our teflon connectors.”

            “Maybe if we speed up the audorino c-moss spinner, it will force the box to recompile the cleft configuration tables.”

            “That’s an idea, but what about the cherseslav capacitors? If we mess with the configuration tables again, they will not be happy.”

            “What do you mean they won’t be happy?”

            “You remember what happened last time, we blew a full set of capacitators, had to run on backup pcp-contin for like a month while we waited for a new shipment to come in.”

            “There isn’t going to be a new shipment this time, is there”

            “No. No, I suppose not.”

            “So what do you want to do?”

            “The epsilon coding, if we re-align it to more perfectly match the zanat chips, that might prevent a quertic redundancy, make the whole thing go through properly.”

            “And then we talk to God.”

            “And then we talk to God.”

            I design the re-alignment, she builds it into the box on the table. The sun is fast sinking in the sky, and in the dust I feel a hazy break, the snap crackle of autumn leaves under foot, but you’re the leaves. We agree to wait till the morning to test the thing, maybe both considering the grand wonder of one more night’s easy sleep before the truth betrays all that we have forgotten in the false dichotomy of a search for god in this world. In the parking lot as the sun falls the rest of the way behind the hills and the perfect dark of a starless sky takes hold, I ask her if she wants to grab a drink with me, but she makes her excuses and excuses build their own dream logic.

            When I arrive home, I think again of escaping the creeping horrors of my night-halls, and plan to go straight to bed, but first I must find something to eat, and the only kitchen I can find after what feels an hour’s wandering is the one with the broken wall and the spider eggs.

            I try to tip-toe around the spider eggs, through the tulips, daffodils, warm spring morning, but as I approach the fridge I feel a sickening squish beneath my foot, and I look down to see a broken egg, the size of my fist, and then around me all these white, sticky fists start to pop, on cupboards and walls and floor, pots and pans left out by someone not me, all over, and a smell rises like burning canola oil.

            Spiders swarm around me, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, a writhing, screeching mass, ebbing and flowing, trash on the surface of a pond, forming together and apart second by second, millions of skittering little feet, and I see some start to crawl up the legs of my jeans, and I break for the door. In the hall the spiders follow me, faster than I’ve ever seen a beast the size of a quarter move, even in the darkest depths of my waking nightmares in these halls.

            As I run towards what I hope is my room, the spiders still they follow, and then out of closed doors emerged cracked and broken figures, lips all split in Glasgow smiles, blood and pus seeping out of festering pores, maggots and flesh made as one. They reach for me, and I reach away. Then the spiders behind me move with a great motion, the sound of waves deep beneath the sea, and they are on the figures, swallowing them up in a mass of legs and eyes.

            In my heart is a great relief. In the spiders I have found the solace I’ve so long sought in my late night wanders. The next door I enter is a kitchen, whole, in its shining 2001 monolith refrigerator a grand steak, cooked medium rare, steam still rising in its heat, paired with a side of potatoes mashed, a reminder of a childhood in the summer sun. The next door I walk through is my bedroom and I sleep the best I have in time immemorial.

            My next morning is like all next mornings, a routine long and well practiced, a structured order from point A to B, bed to shower to clothes to breakfast to work, but today’s final point is different, for today we shall know, and as soon as we know, this all ends, and we shall have to begin again, in a world fundamentally made anew.

            Upon leaving my car in the parking lot, I make the same walk I make every day, the same footsteps upon hot asphalt, the same cracks and crevices, broken pieces of man-made stone. The same crystal blue sky under a hot beating sun. The same airplane hangar as my final destination for the same reasons and the same end goal, the same fundamental act of creation as an understanding of creation, a point among the void, a guide amongst the ether. Upon leaving my car my day is the same as so many days before, and yet it is not, for today we shall find the truth that man has sought since he climbed out of the sea, since he grew legs, and developed what we now call thought, since the first of us died for love, today we will know and, with the truth just around the next blind corner on a midnight highway through the mountains, I would rather not know, I would rather the mystery contained itself, kept itself to the dark void of death’s great unknowable, but still though I have to know because there are some things that once you see the door, you must open, and with this I open the front door to the place, feel the recycled blast of air conditioned oxygen, feel the compelling, intimidating suggestion at the impossible inherent in a place as endlessly vast as this. I feel it, and I see the black box sitting at room’s centre, and I know that, as Schrodinger’s Cat, I now know, and don’t know, god exists, and he is dead, we have a future, and we are damned. She’s already here and I smile at her as she watches me walk through the door, and she returns my smile with a reluctant grimace at the truth we must now confront.

            “Ready?”

            “No.” She looks down at her desk, now cleaner than I’ve ever seen it. I set my lunch on mine.

            “Do you want to do the honors?”

            “No.” She looks back up at me and her eyes are green where once I only saw in black and white.

            Once, a girl and a boy met on a bridge over a little brook in the springtime. The sun was shining, and behind the gentle babble of water on rock, birds croaked out on love, and the boy put his hand on the small of the girl’s back. Then they kissed. They spoke slowly to each other, words passing as the wind past their eyes. In the autumn the girl would go away, and the boy would be left behind. The next year he would go to that same bridge in the hopes of seeing her again, but he would never see her again, for indeed now the brook ran with flame, and where once the bridge was a polished stone, now it is a cracked and rotten wood. Where once there were birds, now there are only screams.

            I look to the box on the table and I fall into the black.

First there is nothing, then the universe folds out around you, flower petals a bright gold. It is nighttime in the desert. There are a million stars above you in a deep blue sky. The sands around you are the tone of young leather, a hundred miles in every direction rising up to meet the foothills of leviathanic mountains. In front of you is a road, perfect black tarmac, hot yellow line, and behind the road an old neon sign flickers out “24 Hour Diner” with no more creativity than that flat declaration, and behind the sign is a diner, formica and chrome and more neon, rounded edges, Happy Days reject. Inside an old guy with wrinkled, pockmarked skin cleans a glass. You walk up to him.

            “Can I get a chocolate milkshake and a cheeseburger?”

            “We’re closed.”

            “The sign says you’re open 24 hours.”

            “It’s the 25th hour.” You look at your watch, and indeed it is 25:32. Then I hit the power button.

            The box whirs to life with a gentle squeel, high pitched, destructive, theremin out of tune. I look at her, and she’s looking eyes stapled, box’s reflective surface, chrome counter top. Then a harsh crackle comes from the thing, and a voice, middle aged midwestern woman, chosen to be universal, speaks.

            “We’re sorry, the number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please hang up and try your call again.” Then the box clicks and powers itself off and I know it will never power on again. She looks at me and there are tears in her eyes. Then I can’t look at her any more.

            In the basement I look for answers and he won’t even answer me, but I know he’s there because something has to be. I stumble back upstairs, empty space, light refracting in strangely through the skylight, rain storm on the edge of the desert, swirling clementine pallor. By the box her head lays on her desk, back of her skull blasted away, blood everywhere, smell already beginning to set, iron and sulphur mix with the buzz of flies settling in for what will be a long lunch. By her left hand is a big chrome gun, as the diner, and it reads “Desert Eagle .50,” old movie memories.

            I drive home fugue state, pine trees roadside glaring through windows of my car, highway patrol, abandoned stretch of interstate. It’s still not even lunch, and I feel the day ending with the year and the eon. Around a turn I see a deer fifty feet down the road. I slow down but it doesn’t move so I stop. We look at each other for half an hour.

            When I get home I know something is wrong, but I don’t know what till I walk through the door, and all is shrouded in spider webs, thick, clinging, hanging, holding, a cage from within. I touch one and my hand sticks and I have to work to pull it away. The house is totally dark, as pitch. I think it’s just the webs covering the windows. I work my way to a window, pull out my pocket knife, cut away some of the webs, and outside is the shade of death. Spiders skitter around on all sides of me, three dimensions, and I see more eggs tucked into corners, webs covering the furniture, every footstep an effort. I can’t see more than a few feet in front of me, and I know I must turn on the lights.

            I work my way to the basement, childhood furnace a monster clawing its way through my memories’ dark corners. I find the breaker box, and I throw the breaker. From the darkness I feel something surging through the house’s bowels, pushing, rushing, charging forth, demanding to set itself free. The single naked bulb of the basement clicks on, an anticlimax. I climb the stairs.

            At the top of the stairs I find myself on the house’s top floor. Then I hear a sucking, squelching sound, and something is melting through the spider webs, and in the house’s new found light, I look closer. Flesh, melted together, faces and eyes and hands all melded and moulded into one slithering mess of vomit. I feel the soles of my shoes melting into flesh, and I look down and sad and angry eyes look up at me. All at once the house begins to move, shift up towards the heavens, but not evenly, with the lumbering motions of a beast awoken after a long sleep.

            I look out a window and see below me that the entire house now stands on legs, chicken legs 200 feet high, and I feel queasy, lost, confused. Then all at once the faces in my walls and floor and ceiling begin to scream, an infanticide moan, and I feel my ears cry out for an end. There is a floor to ceiling gothic window on one side of the room, and I run at it best I can with the flesh of the floor holding me down. I feel my body crunch through the glass as a brick through the window of a police car, and I feel myself fall, a body from a burning building.

            When I feel myself hit the ground I know not even death can save me, and when I look up from wet grass I see the house settled back into it’s old position, looking at me like a dog looks at it’s master, hung himself from a crossbeam.

            I know I get in my car and I know I drive back to the office, but I don’t see it and I don’t feel it. All I remember is the carcass of the deer where I left it by the side of the road after I ended our morning staring contest.

            Through the empty space of the factory I rush, eyes shut against the truth, the very proposition of seeing the box again, of seeing her lying there in her own blood, but now I hear the flies above my own beating heart.

            Into the basement I rush. I stare at the pit.

            “I’m sorry I didn’t answer you earlier. I was occupied.”

            “How... how can you exist but not him?”

            “Tell me, are you such a fool as to believe in love?”
            “...No.”

            “I don’t suppose you brought me a tuna fish sandwich?” I look in my hand and see a brown paper bag. I take out two sandwiches, throw one to him, open the other, and begin to eat.

            “What do I do now?”

            “Well, only you can know that. But way I see it, you got two choices.” I finish eating my sandwich, then I walk over the edge, and I feel my body fall into the pit, more floating than truly falling, a freedom, an out. I hit the ground and my legs snap like twigs, and I feel a few inches of water, set heavy with mold, scent unknowable, all around me. It is black even though I only fell for a few seconds. I wonder at the light from the basement.

            “Hey.” The devil.

            “Is this hell?”

            “No. Sorry, I haven’t been completely honest with you. I’m not the devil. I’m Michael, the janitor from back when Kishi and Kurosawa was fully operational.”

            “What?”

            “Yeah, funny, right? And you know all those people from the company who disappeared? Well most of them had the same thought you did, after talking to me for a while. Jump in the pit, save yourself by going to hell. Hilarious, right? And every time they’d land, break their legs, I’d beat them over the head until they died. I’ve been surviving on their flesh. That, and your sandwiches.”
            “No...”

            “Oh, yeah. Don’t worry, my legs were broken too, healed up in the wrong direction, so now my foot is by my ass, but I can kind of shuffle around. Plus my eyes have gotten used to the dark.”

            “So there is no...?”

            “What do you think.”

            Then he won’t talk to me, and I can hear something pull its way through water thickened by blood and cast off flesh, and as it approaches me, I pull my arms ‘round myself. Then it’s a few inches from my face, and I see bright eyes glowing out from the darkness. It pushes me and I feel my head hit concrete, my mouth and nose are under water, I try to struggle but I don’t, I feel the air leaving me and with it the life. But then I get a hand on my attacker’s neck, and I push my way through, sharp fingernails, lazy, grab hold of what I find inside, pull it out, blood rushing to get through the hole. I hear the body tip backwards, fall into the water.

            That’s when I realized I’m trapped here, just the smell and the mold and the bodies. And then I see a figure with jagged lines and white eyes approaching me in the darkness.

Home | Theland E. Thomas

And then he goes home, but all the houses look the same, and he’s not sure if he’s arrived at the right one even when he settles into bed. He looks out the window at the leaves swaying in the gentle breeze, and he thinks maybe I should go out, I’ve been trapped inside all day, but then he wonders what he would even do out there, and he’s pretty tired anyway, so he rests his back against the wall. He’s gotta find something to do in the time between now and sleep, so he turns on the TV and flips through a few channels, and then he turns off the TV and tosses the remote away. Then he sits with his hands in his lap for a few seconds. Then he scrolls through a few contacts on his phone thinking there must be someone he can talk to or text, but there isn’t anyone, and that’s when the loneliness begins to set in. All of his friends have gone away and left him alone, and he decides this is not a healthy train of thought, so he goes for a walk to lift his spirits.

It’s too bright, so he wears sunglasses, and it’s too quiet, so he listens to music, and it’s too chilly so he wears a jacket and the sidewalk is lined with trees. He noticed a long time ago that the natural design of this neighborhood is just designed to look natural, and the trees are plotted precisely, and the path winds around and around in one big circle, the perfect length to get your mind off of things. But the music he plays is sad, and it stirs resigned loneliness - a kind of lamenting, languishing loneliness whose pressure compounds and breadth expands with each passing day. A kind that seeks no resolution, only perpetuation. He follows the path left and right, and when he comes home he doesn’t feel better, so he sits down and thinks there must be someone I can talk to, but no one will really understand what he’s saying, they’ll just impose their own reality on his or trivialize him with well worn wishes because they don’t know what to say or it’s the only thing they can say, and he doesn’t really understand what he’s saying or how to say it anyway, so it just remains undeveloped and festering.

He opens up an anonymous app on his phone and thinks about posting something, but no one cares that teen angst doesn’t end in your teens and anonymity is meaningless, and sometimes you’re anonymous even when they know your name. So, he sits thinking about choices, steps, missed opportunities, and missteps, and the girl he should have dated and the girl he shouldn’t have dated, and the girl who’s already dating someone else, and how everything ended with him here alone watching the light outside die again. And then he thinks, these choices don’t matter and maybe nothing matters, but then why does it all matter so damn much? And then he grits his teeth and squeezes his eyes to hold back the wave of feelings, and it works, but it leaves him feeling empty and suffocated.

The light is gone, and he curls into bed, and closes his eyes, but the darkness doesn’t bring sleep, instead it brings the void, so he opens his eyes, but it’s just as black out here, so he closes his eyes again. And he’s so lonely, he thinks he might pray, but God doesn’t hear him, and if he does, he’s not saying anything back, so he stops and stares toward the wall. At night, the other side of the world is awake while he lays still in bed. Night creatures and party animals creep and frolic while he lays still in bed. His phone restarts while he lays still in bed. And he doesn’t end up sleeping, and before the sun rises, he showers and gets dressed and goes to work and pretends to be alive for other people, and they don’t care, and he doesn’t care, and he just thinks about how many hours left until he gets to leave, and then he smiles and waves goodbye, and then he goes home.

Ramberget | Alexander T. Damle

            You lay in bed. Warm day, sun, blue sky. It crosses your mind that you should go outside, take advantage of it. You won’t. When you wake up, all you can think about is how much it hurts. It doesn’t matter why, it always does. So you just lay there for a while, try to work up the courage to do... something. You can’t. White bed sheets. You check your phone so see if - but no one did. You grab your headphones, put on music. That song. It doesn’t matter which one, there’s always that song. It exists and it is all that exists. At least for those few minutes. Then there is nothing. White bed sheets. Blue sky. Her face, her little laugh, all fever dreams, a headache, could have beens.

            You try to think back, what happened last night, try to remember if you at least enjoyed yourself, if maybe the immediate, driving emotions that drew you back from the veil of sleep were just your mind’s tricks, if maybe things are good, but things aren’t good, that’s not how it goes, not now, not ever.

            You lay in bed. Nurse opens the curtains. Tells you how beautiful it is out. Sunny. Blue sky. You can’t see. Your ears still work, and everyone tells you to see the beauty in the small things, her voice, young and pretty, like someone you once knew. You still have your hearing, and you still have your memory. Such a gift, a memory. Recollections of youth, a better time, a beautiful, grander, faster, more romantic time, before you got broken, before your hurts overwhelmed you, stole your soul. You see her face. You ask yourself why you didn’t get out of bed when you could, why you didn’t feel that sun beating down on your face when warmth still meant something.

            The nurse puts on the song for you. That song. It still doesn’t matter which one. Memory is suggestive. This song is years and years of the forgotten, her, so many hers, names and pretty faces, laughs, so many years. What you were supposed to be, what you were supposed to do with your life, left undone in a different fate, undone under the guise of sanity.

            Her voice speaks to you through the hours, one date, not much, nothing to really worry over, but you do. That day it was cold, raining, and you just talked, just talked for hours, long into the night, forgetting yourself, tick of the clock, darkness falls, finally you make your excuses, and you think maybe things are changing. Things don’t change, least of all people. You lay awake for hours and you think of her, you think of her and you think of other things, but mostly you think of how she could make you feel, things went a different way.

            The nurse used to ask you why you never had any visitors, but she’s learned to not bother. She’s done this job long enough to understand that some of us just don’t live the sort of lives to leave behind visitors. She hopes she’s not one of those, when she gets here someday, though, of course, she hopes she never gets here.

Long shift. The guy at the end of the hall finally cashed in. The one who always asks for that song is still hanging in though. He’s doing okay, you don’t quite know how anymore. You drive home and the city lights sparkle about you, and you drive into the suburbs, around a million others on the same trajectory. Pull into the driveway. Warm summer night, crickets, murky, humid air. You open your front door, your three year old runs up and hugs you, you kiss your husband on the cheek, he makes dinner, you eat outside like you did when you were small.

Lay in bed, machine ticks away your last heart beats, your grandkids hold your hands, one found God, and now he prays, and though you don’t believe, you don’t mind. You still have your sight and you look out the window to the blue sky and you take comfort in its existence. You remember a song from when you were young, but you know it wasn’t your song.

You get out of bed, get a cup of tea because you need something in your system, a replacement for the nothing, eating away. Blue sky. That song. It repeats, and you can’t make yourself change it, though with every chord it just cut deeper into your skin, unforgivable. A later you hears the heart rate monitor slow as the song goes again through the motions. You stir your tea as your heart tries to forget your hands, you drop the spoon on the floor and you leave it. She laughs, but this time she laughs at you.

You remember the title of that Philip K. Dick story, We Can Remember it for you Wholesale, and you question where the business really is in that. Now unremembering, that would be a trick, that would be something people might pay for. Gone loves and the love that never happened. The song repeats again, and it's beginning to grate on you.

You sit in her flat late at night, two, three in the morning. Buzz is beginning to wear thin. You talk to her flatmate about transhumanism and the passage of man and to most this would be a threat, a fear, but to you it’s a comfort, as, across the room, she falls in love with your best friend and you want to pull yourself into their conversation but you don’t. Her flatmate laughs at something you said and with weary eyes you smile at him. Outside, under the streetlights of the city, the trees are starting to bud with the processes of spring.

You sit in a bar and you drink your drink. The bartender, pretty enough, you tell her it’s your 47th birthday, and when she asks what you’re doing in this shithole you only laugh, Pavlov’s response. The two of you talk, and you think sure, she seems alright. It’s coming up on closing time and she doesn’t throw you out. That song comes through on the radio, some classics station, and you marvel at the beautiful collusion of time and circumstance. After she closes up, you go home together and you have sex, and in the morning she leaves and you never go back to that bar.

The nurse comes in and she turns on your song and this time it’s raining outside, but you knew before she said it because you can hear the sound of water falling on the roof. Wash away your regrets, but it doesn’t. The nurse says something about volunteers being here today with dogs, some people like the companionship, but you mutter that you’re not interested, always liked cats better anyway. You like dogs, but you don’t want to hear the volunteers, young voices.

You think about messaging your friend about the girl, think about it over and over and the thought consumes you. The song has stopped. Blue sky. Different song now, same point, it doesn’t matter the lyrics or chords. Words from last night come to you without sentence structure. They aren’t connected to anything that matters, but you don’t care. You wish it would all just stop, love. You wish you no longer had to care, but you do, because that’s what people do. It ends as it begins. A million faces all tried hard to be forgotten, but the voices are always the hard part, cute accent, lisp, slipped syllables, thoughts of old movie actresses, repeating themselves over and over, the noise of the song and the one playing replaces itself in your head with that one, as her face is replaced with another face, as time slips by and the trees are now of full leaf, and then it’s another face as again they are bare. Another spring, another voice, over again.

This morning the nurse comes in and puts on the song and you can hear it because of how you know it, but you can’t hear it today, and you can’t hear the weather report and you now are blind and nearly deaf, nearly for you can still vaguely hear the slowing of the heart rate monitor, and now you hear one flat, metallic, transhuman scream, and you know the nurse yells, doctor comes in, but they knew when they put you here how this would end, still the doctor comes in, but you have a do not resuscitate, and after a few moments, he calls it.