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”It won’t be long from now,” I thought to myself, “That my head sinks back in again.”
Atop the hill I’d found perhaps three or so miles from the stream one could still see the freeway. Police were still combing the countryside and I could see their vehicles from a distance maneuvering down the dirt roads that wove through the incidental copses and groves of trees decorating the underlying sweep of the land. The hills rolled free and green where trees were lacking. In the far distance there were horses tan and black, which reminded me of my daughter’s room. I clung to the memory with an iron grip: at first it was just the concept of “room” and “daughter” before filling out to form the image of an asymmetric place bathed in certain colors such as pink, light blue and the gray color of mid-day shadow. I held onto just these things for a long time, because there was both nothing else to do and further details were less than forthcoming. The room lingered still as the bright and omnipresent sun moved entire degrees, the horses marched from one hill to another and then back again, and then out of sight. A police roadblock was erected at the same bend of the freeway where I had plowed my way through and into the foliage. They were stopping everyone, in both directions, and then letting them go on their way. At some point a police search team, complete with dogs, passed by the foot of the hill I stood upon. The dogs didn’t notice my scent or didn’t care and the police scanned the area searching for hiding places. I may have climbed the tree I stood beside at one point, but I can’t remember because the room was my only need at the moment. By mid-day I had assembled the smell of the room, a scent both human and significant. It resembled that of Kraft mayonnaise. The room was literally coated in Kraft mayonnaise for some time, shining in the sunlight I had recalled could at times shine in through the windows, but this was replaced by painted-white furniture of cheap aluminum tubing. The floor became strewn with toys and a bookshelf with bare top and 3rd row shelves rose from the floor. A closet manifested, tucked away behind the entry door, and within it were nothing but blankets, thin books with a gilded binding and yellow buckets full of painted bricks. Somebody lived in the room but they were still out, not-at-home in my mind-house. It was day, birds were singing, the air was napping.
At times the memory threatened to leave me, overshadowed by a sense of urgency about something very important I had to do and a sensation not unlike a headache under severe medication. The images gave way to a grey haze and then that tall thing I’m calling “Red” now which is indistinguishable from dumb desire. I clenched my body and refused it to give in to this, snatching all the sensory reconstruction of that room back from the border of obscurity and thrusting it ahead of even my immediate senses. I now sat in the room on a chair far too small for myself. Every moment in the memory happened, to me, in real-time but in retrospect it had gone very slowly, every blink of the eye occupying whole minutes. The chair was made of plastic, colored red, and there was a house full of small plastic people beside me. I looked at them: there were two tall ones and two small ones: husband, wife, daughters. The husband was standing in the kitchen with his hand in the sink and the wife was upstairs sitting on the bed with her arms outstretched towards … nothing, perhaps her closet. Many objects were strewn about the little house: some toothpaste on the couch, a hair dryer on a bookshelf and a cat turned upside down on the coffee table in the living room. The daughters were both in the bathroom, which I realized was completely devoid of objects and they were lying flat on top of one another on the floor, their arms and legs stretched stiff and their heads twisted around to face opposite sides like Janus.
”I’m KIIIIING of the FOOOOOOREST,” belted out the bigger one, stomping away and the other one followed yelling, “Okay so I’m the prince of the forest” and they became smothered by trees. Their voices continued on towards the creek and I followed close behind using their uncontrolled bleating as a guide for distance. They shouted about ruling the forest and being kings of it, or a king and a prince: at this they argued as they continued for the smaller seemed to think that he would be king one day due to being a prince and the other argued “Once a king, always a king.” When their voices went silent all at once I froze, uncertain, and then fell to my belly in order to crawl closer out of sight. As I approached them they were staring at the ground.
”Gotta tell mom!” the smaller one was yelling as the larger held him with both hands at the arms, suddenly in the role of father. The little one just couldn’t stop shaking: his voice warbled and his hands were grasping at his brothers’ shirt, smearing mud all over it.
”Jus’ stop, jus’ stop. Mom can’t do anything about it okay it’s dead. It’s just a dead dog.”
”But its HEAD.”
”Hey man hey. Look, hey. Jus’ wanna look at it, jus’ stop okay? Don’t piddle, bitch.”
”I’m not a piddle bitch,” the little one pouted a bit, the insult actually stabilizing his panic, before glancing again at the creek and stumbling back shocked anew. His nose ran with snot which he wiped across his arm and he warbled out,
”It’s not gonna go to heaven ‘less we get mom to get dad’ta bury it.”
”Shut it up. Dogs don’t go to heaven, ‘member?”
”Yes they do! They do! I don’t care what you think! I don’t care what dad said! We gotta bury it!”
The tall one moved from staring at the dog back to his brother in the mud, kneeling down to take him by both shoulders.
”It’s like cats, like mouses, like birds, like uncle’s iguana, okay? It’s okay. Dogs don’t go to heaven.”
”Yes they DO!” screamed the little one, starting to cry.
”No they don’t!”
”He’s right,” I said, crawling to my feet, “Dogs don’t have souls. It’s all right, he’s just a simple beast.”
I stood before them without my makeup and in full daylight covered in mud and dog’s blood. As soon as their eyes fell upon me they both made a noise impossible to replicate or feign. I hated it, it was horrible and as soon as I could I began to apologize to them, comfort them, but it was difficult with my mouth full of blood and my teeth bound together with skin.
”I swear, no, this is not me, I love children, I love them, I’m sorry I’m doing this,” I said holding the boy up by one wrist as he thrashed and kicked. His brother fled from what I’m sure would be the defining memory of his natural life, that of his younger brother screaming and screaming as a man bit pieces off his arm off clear through to the bone while mumbling through the mouthfuls, “This isn’t really me, I’m not like this at all. I swear I’m not this person,” and then more things that he didn’t hear and that are lost to my memory completely.
I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t in Hell. I was still on this Earth. I was nearly broken in two. I’d left the car far behind. I’d crawled on hands and knees, my body at a ninety-degree angle. I’d slumped within a crevasse in the earth. I hadn’t slept: I cannot sleep and I cannot tire. My arms had done the work of many men hauling my shattered body through the forest floor in all absence of light except for a slight glow both sourceless and nameless. It defined the shapes of objects but not the objects themselves: tree, plant, branch, ditch. I’d rolled into the ditch and thumped around in it until I was covered in dirt and twigs. From high above me droplets of hours-old rain pattered down through the needles and leaves until they hit me and drizzled off of my waterlogged clothes. My left leg bent forwards at the knee and the right half of my ribcage had collapsed. As I felt around my body I found my ear in my coat pocket although I hadn’t remembered losing it. I tried to put it back on and it just stuck there. I wasn’t bleeding, of course, but it stuck there anyway. Maybe it was the mud. As they searched the woods with flashlights and their dogs I still lay there, staring up through the branches as the sky turned from night to day to night again. I didn’t want to move; there wasn’t anywhere to go.
Now at peace I tried several times more to remember myself but I needed blood. I figured that I just needed some time to think, that I could manage by myself, but thinking was too difficult. A gentle whine, like the compressor of a refrigerator at night, stirred in my consciousness. Mud, water, the gentle caress, the color of hair and my mother, my father, tendon, the arc and then curl of a fallopian tube, mud between my toes, I am surrounded by leaves isn’t that something new, Lois’ body with mango-shaped breasts and stubble-coated vagina, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Ghost again, still the Holy Ghost and the spectre of a spectre which was Liliana’s blasphemy Christ, Liliana’s corpse spilling with wasted blood her belly slashed open like a man’s idea of a gaping vaginal canal, everything leads back up into the uterus, the Holy Ghost pleads with me to confess all sin so I do but nobody can hear them so I promise to myself to confess later when a priest is in attendance but first I have to find a church but before I find a church I need to stop being a criminal, can’t be caught they’ll see me if I’m caught, they’ll try to poison me to death in Los Angeles but I won’t die, they’ll try to gas me to death in Nevada but I’ll breathe it in with a confused look on my face and say “Marzipan,” they’ll drag out the electric chair in Texas and maybe just maybe that could kill me just by shaking me to pieces that I can’t put back together, and then once they’ve hung me on a rope shot me and beheaded me they’ll set me on fire and when the ashes blow back together into the shape of a man I’ll crawl from the dirt and look up into a circle of unsympathetic faces and ask them “Can I just throw up the apple and forget everything all over again?”
The last thought I truly have before I get up and try to devour a stray dog is that the little girl who is my daughter in my memories her name starts with an “L.”
I swore the city was on fire when I arrived in Lois’ neighborhood. It was blazing with orange light and all around me were sounds, images, impressions of forces converging on my invisible trail. I had to kill another driver just to get to where I was. I managed to stuff him, mostly concealed, into a dumpster some blocks from a restaurant under a bridge that I remembered visiting at some point named “Montage.” The police had followed me but I’d lost their trail somehow in the last hour or so, probably due to the switching of cars and the fact that nobody knew who I was. Did they even have a name to my face? I was amused by the idea that they were essentially chasing a ghost thinking they might have a man. I could still hear sirens everywhere buzzing through the air. Ambulances, police cars and above me I could see a low-flying airplane with all of its lights blinking. colored like Christmas. A helicopter was hovering around downtown. Clueless as to where I might be, they seemed to be just covering the entire city with eyes for a white male aged something six-foot-who-knows brownish-blackish hair and I’m sure nobody really caught my eye color. I had blue eyes, I think. The heat of scrutiny, the heat of the knowledge I was wanted: both of these things formed the metaphor for fire which coursed through my mind as I licked the taste of the man whose car I had stolen off of my lips again and tried to think about doing something besides standing in the middle of the road staring at the city as if it were some kind of accidental work of art.
My mind was coming down off of a boiling flood. Blood and memories now were synonymous. Hunger and memories were also a close pair: but which were which?
I had devoured Liliana and seen myself in a strange house with a familiar girl, my daughter, a little blond child who I had felt an extreme need to warn her about something or tell her something, teach her something necessary to our wellbeing. After that the memory had faded into a nonsense fog: lips, eyes and hair, steel rods hammered into concrete, the lines of a book and the black skin of its binding stretched over my hands.
On the street in front of the chapel I had felt the presence of Christ, my lord and saviour, overcome me and I was greeted by a horde of teenage girls who needed my stern hand to guide them through the coming apocalyptic times: these times of desperate need and omnipresent war and victimhood. I had been croaking for blood then, and a sensation not unlike memory had flooded me still. The taste of all that I had recalled about myself still rolled about on the surface of my dead and somehow preserved brain. It was stronger than my memory of yesterday, of how I had even driven home to Lois. I clung to those blood and hunger-fuelled moments and took with me up the sidewalk towards her screen door the comfort that within her walls I could stop, reflect and rearrange my memory towards the goal of reconstructing myself. With that complete, I might be able to come to a conclusion about who or why I was what I was and … and then I’d know.
I just needed a little blood first, and some peace of mind.
In the moon the face of a child still hovered. My ears, deaf to the people trying to help me to my feet, only heard a faint humming sound slipping into my ear that seemed to originate from outer space above and beyond the clouds. The only significance this sound seemed to resonate with was that it was beautiful beyond comprehension and it sounded like it came so far away, so utterly beyond all hope of travel or transcendence, that it echoed with the true depth of my isolation. Eventually the sound, which to my ear resembled a humming tune or note, faded to become the rush of a taxi cab that I had apparently hired which was stopping two blocks away from a club lit in bright hornet yellow named “La Luna” and when the cab driver asked me for money I gestured for him to roll down his window and when he did so I reached into my pocket and pulled out my empty hand which I used to smash his face against the steering wheel over and over until the air bag blew and he tumbled out, shoved aside by its billowing bulk, onto the sidewalk. From there I mounted his back and hammered his face against the curb until he could no longer speak or scream. Feeling exposed, as he sat sobbing and gurgling, I reluctantly left his blood in his body and fled towards the club which had no line and was, in fact, deserted. There wasn’t even a doorman. The dance floor, pounding with not music but just a single repetitive synth beat, was an Antarctic wasteland. Every so often the colors in the room would shift from green to blue to red to orange to yellow and back again. I scouted the balcony and found it deserted so I fled into the empty kitchen down through storage and into the basement which was just a concrete bunker lit by a single bulb hanging on a wire. In there Cannard stood over a table which was smothered by the body parts of a very large dark-skinned woman. Blood spilled over everything and I fought the urge to begin slurping it all up as I observed a nurse’s uniform flopped over a folding chair.
“This was going to be a present,” he said glaring at me, “I took the effort to find her.”
“Wh-who … Cannard, I’ve got to tell you … Cannard, I need to stay here for a while.”
“But of course, with the police are after you. You’d need someplace to hide.”
“Y-yes, but who is this? I mean, Cannard. I have to tell you-“
“That you overbled Liliana? I’ve already figured that out by watching the evening news.”
I stood in silence, amazed at my own inability to think straight.
“I took the trouble of finding you this,” he gestured to the woman’s corpse, “But it was a mistake.”
“This … who is this?”
“The woman who gave your description in your police sketch. You’ve been wanted by the police since before I even knew you. Did you know that?”
”I … yes,” I lied. The police wanted me for … what? I hadn’t *done* anything illegal … except drink some blood. I hadn’t done anything illegal except kill Liliana. What more could they have possibly wanted me on?
“Then you already know how big of a mistake it was for me to bring you this … present. This enormous present.”
“Cannard, I … something is wrong.”
“Indeed,” he said, “You’ve a perceptive eye.”
“You see it too!” I shouted, relieved, “You’ve noticed it too! I … Cannard, do you remember who you … are?”
He stared at me with the expression of a mountain.
“You can’t, can you? You don’t remember! Who were you before you died? Tell me one thing about yourself before you died. Tell me one hard fact.”
Cannard seemed to freeze in place. His facial expression did not change but something in his eyes did but for a moment. It may have been his pupils contracting, expanding, something so subtle I couldn’t perceive it. He said nothing. Drops of blood fell from the table onto the concrete floor sounding as if it had begun to rain underground.
“I remember that I had a … daughter,” I started before being interrupted by Cannard shouting as loud as he could. It was a hard warbling sound, a yell drawn out without tone. He shouted until his lungs shuddered with a lack of air, his diaphragm straining against his guts.
“I’ll be calling the police,” he wheezed as air refilled him and my mouth fell open.
“Because of … Liliana? No, you *told* me about how they’re cattle. She was … nothing. Why should you …”
“You’re a risk to me. People knew I knew Liliana. I might lose my club. I’m done thinking about it all.”
“Your club?!” I screamed, “Have you even been upstairs?! Cannard, listen to me, your mind …”
I trailed off as he grabbed one of the woman’s arm segments and began sucking on it as if it were an oversized lollipop.
“And I don’t like your questions. I … don’t like them,” he plopped down on a stool and folded his arms together, “Just see yourself out, Daniel. I don’t particularly like you anymore.”
“I’m hungry, but I can’t eat because I despise the cook.”
when you punish children you create liars
if you don’t like children, stay away from children
do not complicate their lives any further
your life is already too complicated if you’re an average human being:
you don’t know what you’re doing half of the time
if you do know what you’re doing, you don’t know why you’re doing it
if you know why you’re doing it, you don’t understand the full depth of the implications of it
if you think you understand the full depth of the implications of it, you don’t.
it is possible to have the body of an adult
and all the hallmarks of autonomy
with the appearance of self-reliance
and be incapable of doing anything for your own good.
you will die wanting, selfish, desolate inside
all of your clockwork stuck ticking at the fifty-ninth second.
Today I fully realized exactly how carefree a first draft is. There is nothing that should not be done when writing it. It is essentially an outline with bountiful flavor and done primarily in the active voice. Its quality should not just be disregarded, but not even remotely considered. Quality and a first draft need not touch: it is a welcome guest should it randomly stumble into the work but it should never be called upon or invoked. It’s not needed yet.
I figured I had about an hour before they realized I’d stolen a vehicle. I spent it driving the police car into the river near a section of a warehouse district that most closely resembled post-war Dresden, Germany. Afterwards I found a-college student who’d taken a shortcut through the deserted streets and clubbed him over the head with a brick. I threw him into the river too, eventually. I spent most of the hour relishing my newfound delinquency: the freedom to spray his blood all over my face and suck it down like a man masturbating in public. Murder was one of the capital offenses against God, one of the holy commandments, but I remembered what Cannard had said about “predators and prey” and made the compromise that what I was doing wasn’t necessarily a *sin*-sin. I preferred his human comparison to livestock than my unfounded and yet persistent need to conform to the will of the almighty. I wasn’t being a very good Christian lately, but then again I couldn’t even remember why I had the urge to be one in the first place. My bizarre memory in Liliana’s house had given me an insight into the fact that I had … probably been a preacher before I died, but with the blood-daze circling my head making the lights of the city form trails like multi-coloured ribbons. I moved my head in circles around and around and watched the trails form circles, and then moved my head up and down and side to side and watched as they formed a rainbow collage of neon crucifixes. I just couldn’t help myself to it: I ripped this guy’s head a bit more off of his shoulders and tried to extract more fluid out of him but he was dry and I was staring into his bearded face. He had a full and fluffy beard which at present was matted around the base with blood but otherwise was very soft and taken care of. His cap still perched on his head, clashing dark blue against the light shade of his eyes defocused as they were. Towering above both of us was the mid-city bridge and as I stared into his face the pulsating flashes of fifteen police cruisers arced across it.
“Alath poor …”
I dug in his jeans pocket for a wallet. With an inexplicable lisp I read out loud, “Poor … Sthumacher. Alath.” On the shore of the river some pigeons were tearing soggy bread out of a plastic bag and I shouted to them “I knew him … explithitly. I’m plethently surprithed at hith hethitanthy to thhhpeak.”
I stared into his glassy eyes until I forgot where I was and began to gesture to the pigeons,
“Come hither, Horathio.”
They ignored me, preferring their bread.
After disposing of Schumacher’s body I changed into his burgundy vest and jeans that I had to buckle tight to keep from plopping to the ground. As I cut through the neighborhood towards downtown I kept catching the scent of sulfur, probably from washing all the blood off of my face in the river. Police seemed to be everywhere I looked but they weren’t looking for a guy dressed like me, yet.
this holiday makes me uncomfortable and i’d prefer to ignore it.
