Ugh. I struggled like hell with these. Still not happy with them. Anyway...
Moby Dick Twitterature
Extracts: Call me Leviathan. Looming depth. Sea god of love and death and sperm and blood.
1. I, exile. Seaborne vagabond, I wander in body and mind. I am worthy only of this and my own destruction.
2. In Coffin I find rest. My bed is with savagery and I discourse with my primal.
3. In homage to the gods of earth and stone I find peace, my savagery reconciled in a lover’s bed.
4. Whispers form a figure, gaunt and determined, grim and set upon this unholy pursuit of a looming god of even grimmer depths.
5. Ye demon, brave Satan consumed by hunger, yearning for vengeance. Stir my savagery and bid him pierce your albatross.
6. Blade meets passion. Allow me passage with this collection of queer and fierce vagabonds. Entropy shall be our vessel.
7. Your god is in the seas, demon. Your god is the seas. Give chase, cry havoc, and loose blood and steel rain.
8. We set upon the black waters in search of the ivory tower. To beach our vessel upon this behemoth, to force his tongue upon the bitter curse of our being.
9. All manner of man seeks this god. From this maelstrom we will birth a fury of iron will and cold crimson hate.
10. The dreaming leviathan sends madness to our Entropy. This young damnation, young salvation.
11. Splintered albatross reforged, the demon narrows his sights on the frigid waters. Muscles cry in steel agony as we redouble our chase.
12. Bring forth your blooded passion and cold hate. Birth true vengeance, bring it to bear upon your most holy goal.
13. Summon the storm. Fire and sky meet the steel of earth as we set upon that bright darkling god of the sea.
14. Others stir us forward, but we find no succor in company. No peace in shared tales of woe. There is only the chase that bids us forth.
15. The demon senses the god he seeks. Our chase begins in earnest, here we win our mettle.
16. This strange white god eludes us, I bite back remorse for my lost savagery, bearing only cold against this beast.
17. He dives and surfaces, a ghost beneath glass, what majesty brings this god from the depths? What majesty makes him?
18. All things tend towards Entropy. We meet our god.
19. Our Satan falls in god’s embrace. We are all lost in the great black belly of the foaming white sea.
20. I, Exile. Exile from depth, exile from death. I remain to speak a story unbidden.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
As They Seam
Judith was in the passenger seat, drumming her fingers on the dashboard in an anxious rhythm, her eyes flitting back and forth across the road before us, sneaking sidelong glances my way like she was trying to coax me into a conversation. The runners of mascara had been wiped from her cheeks but her hair still hung damp, framing her face in two wilted curtains of pastel bronze. She moved like a rabbit two feet from the boiler, fidgeting and scratching at her head and behind her ear. I glanced up to the rearview mirror. A single drop of rain left a tail that reflected in the mirror as it treaded down my forehead, over the blade of my nose and fell. It had been six months since Isaac’s funeral, closed casket. We drove in silence, the snare of raindrops our soundtrack as the headlights of my impala cut flickering swathes into the oncoming night.
“We… we’ve just got to get the hell out of Jersey, you know? Just for a little while. Clear our heads,” she turned to me, desperate to break the silence.
I hadn’t told her that we had missed the last ferry of the day, but I think she knew.
My hand grazed over the controls to the car’s stereo, keeping my eyes locked on the road. Feeling for the knob, I twisted it and a distorted guitar seared out of the speakers. Judith flinched and covered her ears. The strained half-scream told me it was Nine Inch Nails. This was that cover they did of old Joy Division song. Not their best, but I left it on, turned up loud enough to discourage Judith from making another comment. Isaac and I had gone to see Reznor in concert a year or so back. We drove up to New York for the day, ended up spending the weekend in the city. Good time.
Isaac could always put up with her shit a lot better than me. Yesterday, in my garage, she spent at least an hour and a fucking half telling us about how annoying it was to sit and listen to her friend Anna complain on the phone for hours at a go. I could imagine that this wasn’t entirely untrue.
We’d met Judith and Anna after a show we’d played in some shitty dive bar in Jersey City whose name I can’t recall. We were packing up our gear and trying to clear the stage for the night when the two of them came up to talk to us, stumbling a little and giggling to each other in whispered voices. They said they’d enjoyed our set and Isaac and I just sort of smirked and nodded, going along with it, a little bewildered at the good fortune and trying not to fuck things up too badly.
Anna went home with me that night. I was a little drunk and I’m pretty sure she was stoned out of her skull, so I’m not even sure how much of it she remembers. We’d hung out a few times since then, but we didn’t really keep in touch. Last I heard, she was stripping at an industrial club under the name Anesthesia in Baltimore. Judith, though, she had stuck around. She followed Isaac everywhere, attached to his side twenty hours out of the day. I started to cherish the few quiet moments I had alone with my friend as time wore on. Not that Judith wasn’t a bright girl or couldn’t be entertaining at times; she just never shut the fuck up.
Judith said Anna had been talking about me lately, that she’d been talking to her more and more. She said that we should pay her a visit, that she’s going through some rough times and needed the company of old friends. I don’t know how attached I was to the label of “old friend” but I knew a few guys up in Baltimore we could stay with and I’d been looking for a weekend away to blow off some steam. Even without Isaac we still made some decent cash at shows and I had some to burn.
So I sat next to her, cutting through the darkness of the Pine Barrens, watching as she tried her damndest not to speak. It was a sweet gesture, really, but I think her jerky squirming might have been even more annoying than her constant chatter.
“Derrick, hey, you’re speeding.” She nodded towards the window; the trees were blurred together into dappled green and black.
I turned the volume down as the radio switched over to the forced voice of the DJ, easing my foot off the accelerator. Not that I really had anything to worry about, we took this road whenever we wanted to head into the city and there were never any cops. Why post anyone on this glorified Indian trail?
“We’re going to stop for the night. I hate this drive in the dark,” I said, never taking my eyes from the windshield.
“Are you sure? I mean, we could be there tonight if we just drive through.” She turned back to me and it was as though she had solidified in the world now that the speaking taboo had been dissolved.
“No, we couldn’t. The next ferry isn’t until daybreak and I’d rather stop. Less of a chance of an accident.”
“Accident. Yeah. Hah, right.”
It was another fifteen minutes before we found someplace to stay. The Reznor song turned out to be a happy accident, the radio station was shit, as were the scant other stations that cut cleanly through the static. I switched over to the CD player and the opening trumpets of Keasbey Nights had just begun when we saw the hazy red glow of the motel lights through the rain-spattered windshield.
“We’re going to stay here?” she asked as we pulled into the parking lot.
“I guess so, why?”
“Because all their rooms probably smell like shame and burnt hair…” she groaned, pushing the car door open, and pulling her overstuffed suitcase out into the rain.
“So I’ll pick up some Febreeze. I saw a little mall-thing a few miles back; I’m going to grab some groceries. Get a room.” I slid out my wallet and handed her a couple of twenties as I leaned across the vast plain of the front seat to pull the door shut.
The car turned out of the parking lot and I let the music take my mind to a blissful state of emptiness. Everything that existed, for a few moments at least, condensed to the road, the pines, and “Day In, Day Out” on the stereo. My eyes left the lines passing by the side of my car for only a moment as I pulled into the lot. An A&P stood on one end neighboring a tanning salon in the middle by the name of FauxRays and a concrete box at the other end with a large blue neon sign that simply read “Wine and Liquor.”
There was only one purchase I needed to make that night. I left the liquor store with a brown paper bag wrapped snugly around a bottle of ten dollar vodka. I stuffed the bottle in the ragged, stitched-together duffel bag that held the small amount of clothing I had managed to scrounge together during the fifteen or twenty minutes in between the time we decided we were going and our actual departure.
The drive back was uneventful, just another chance for me to lose myself in the music, for the lines of the world to disappear in the colors and shapes, pushing the glare of my headlights through the darkness. I pulled back into the lot of the motel, grabbing a spot near a rusted out old van with a mural on the side. I couldn’t make out the details because of the darkness and the whole lot had a brushed red glow. Tossing the strap of the bag over my shoulder, I walked out into the rain, raising my hand over my forehead in an attempt to keep some part of me dry.
The check-in office for the motel was actually a lot cleaner than I expected. The lights in the room washed it out in a dull orange haze, the wallpaper a muted brown with a forgettable pattern repeating endlessly across its surface.
“Sorry, can I help you?” came a voice from a short, stocky, balding man of about fifty. He stood behind the formica counter at the end of the room, black pen clasped between fat fingers and running over some sort of ledger.
“Yeah,” I cleared my throat, “I’m looking for a room rented by a Ms. Coyn. She should be expecting me.”
He nodded, looking back down to the ledger as he spoke, apparently finished with this conversation, “She’s upstairs, room twenty-seven.”
“Thanks.” I turned and shouldered my bag again, giving the desk clerk my back, making my way out into the rain.
The room was upstairs, sitting in the middle of the face the motel offered to the highway. It was easy enough to find, the single window that overlooked the parking lot was the only one lit on that side of the building. I leaned against the door, tired in ways I couldn’t articulate as I brought my knuckles up to the painted wooden surface and knocked. The reply was long enough in coming that I thought I might have somehow gotten the wrong room, perhaps the desk guy had told me the wrong number to fuck with me, but eventually I could pick up the soft, lilting tone of Judith’s voice over the rain.
“Come in… it’s open,” she said, slurring the last two words together where they met.
The door opened onto a room that didn’t smell of burnt hair. It was clean, if a little sparse. Up against one wall was a single large bed with a floral comforter that dominated the floor space, off to the side stood a desk of some dark stained wood, and against the wall opposite the bed was a low, wide dresser of the same material. A large mirror hanging on the wall behind it and a simple white vase of flowers in the center; the walls were painted a dull salmon that helped channel the warm glow of the lights.
Judith was sprawled across the center of the bed, lying on top of the covers. She had already changed into her underwear and a tank top, both a faded black. The top had a rip that started near her stomach and crawled up seven inches towards the neckline held together by a handful of safety pins. It didn’t seem like the safest thing to sleep in. In her left hand she held one of the flowers from the vase, a hyacinth I think, trailing the edge up and down along her stomach. The right clutched what looked like a bunched up sandwich baggie.
“You know,” she said with a soft giggle, “All those anti-drug PSAs and lectures always show something like a bag of skittles… a whole rainbow, different strokes for different folks… but the white ones are always the most fun… like snowflakes,” she laughed again and I caught that hazy, somehow faraway look in her eyes. Like the middle distance was suddenly the most interesting thing in the world.
I dropped my bag next to the door and brought out the plastic bottle, unscrewing the cap and bringing it up to my lips.
“Should I be worried?” I asked before taking a long swig.
“Call me Goldilocks. I always aim for just right.”
My throat went off like napalm, the burn rolling like a wave into my stomach. My eyes watered and my nostrils flared as I wiped my lips with the back of my hand. I turned to face the window, looking out into the Barrens, the clear, sharp vodka sloshing in the bottle at my side.
There was a ringing silence. In a few minutes she started again.
“So there’s this woman, her name’s Leeds, right?”
“Alright,” I took another mouthful. The burn came with less vigor this time.
“She’s got twelve kids and she’s pregnant with the thirteenth. You’d think that they’d be walking right out without even having to stoop at this point, but it’s in labor with number thirteen that she’s really having a rough time.
“Understandably,” she took a breath, eyes fluttering closed, almost nodding off for a second before going back into her story, “Understandably she’s not having any of this. So mid labor, she mutters some deal with the devil. Says she’ll give this kid’s life to have her youth back, to be free of her marriage.
“Apparently, somebody takes these half-mad whispers seriously, because the kid’s born but it has wings and fangs and claws and the face of a jackal. It kills the screaming midwife and bolts up the chimney. It’s been roaming the Pine Barrens ever since.”
I throw back another shot, “So?”
“How lonely is that kid? I mean he never asked for that, it’s his bitch mother’s fault. But because of her, he can’t ever have a normal life. He’s stuck in the woods all on his own for as long as he lives …”
I sighed and rested my head against the glass. It was cool and smooth, lightning forked through the sky between the choking shapes of the towering pines.
“It’s my fault,” she said, somewhere behind me.
“What?”
“I told Isaac I was leaving him. That’s why he was so drunk that night.”
Her voice wavered. I turned and brought the bottle back to my lips, taking a bigger swallow, clearing my throat as it burned its way down to my stomach, “What? Why? I mean, you couldn’t leave him alone.”
“I could, it’s just he was kind of,” she looked up to her fingers, spinning the stem of the flower between them, “Paranoid. Didn’t want me out of his sight.”
I shrugged, took another drink, I was nearing the halfway point of the bottle. “I can imagine that would be difficult to live with.”
“He used to get angry,” she looked away, “When I didn’t want to go over. Really angry. Some of the things he said,” she laughed, this time with a wry tone, no humor in it. “I just couldn’t stand to be around him anymore. He criticized everything from the clothes I wore to my goddamn tone of voice. He was convinced I was hell-bent on cheating on him.”
I capped the vodka bottle, the world spun beneath me and a new blurred mural asserted itself in the pinks and yellows of the hotel room, “You should probably go to sleep.”
“I can’t.”
Tears started just beneath her lashes, blurring into obscurity as they rolled down her cheeks, “I should have been with him. Hell, I should have been driving.”
Judith used to flake off on these painkiller binges before. I couldn’t remember if she had the night Isaac died. If she had, she would have been in the same position, only Isaac probably would’ve been thrown from the vehicle. It would’ve been Judith pinned to the seat with a steering column in her chest like some kind of NASCAR cenobite.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and felt her shift behind me. My hand made its way up to the side of my face, rubbing along my cheek to try and straighten out the wrinkles in the world as she crawled around next to me.
I knew as soon as I walked in that I would regret letting Judith book a room with one bed but I thought that would fall more along the lines of a sore lower back from sleeping on the floor. Now I began to doubt whether we would make it down to see Anna tomorrow.
I closed my eyes and was not met with ice or flames but with a whimper and a kiss and her weight, slight but insistent in my lap. I let out a tired sigh and felt the press of her lips on my neck, laying there, her body on mine, surrounded by the warmth of the hotel room and the starless, moonless black of the sky outside. I fell back against the floral print as she slid the shirt over my head, feeling the cold metal of the safety pins pressing against my side.
“We… we’ve just got to get the hell out of Jersey, you know? Just for a little while. Clear our heads,” she turned to me, desperate to break the silence.
I hadn’t told her that we had missed the last ferry of the day, but I think she knew.
My hand grazed over the controls to the car’s stereo, keeping my eyes locked on the road. Feeling for the knob, I twisted it and a distorted guitar seared out of the speakers. Judith flinched and covered her ears. The strained half-scream told me it was Nine Inch Nails. This was that cover they did of old Joy Division song. Not their best, but I left it on, turned up loud enough to discourage Judith from making another comment. Isaac and I had gone to see Reznor in concert a year or so back. We drove up to New York for the day, ended up spending the weekend in the city. Good time.
Isaac could always put up with her shit a lot better than me. Yesterday, in my garage, she spent at least an hour and a fucking half telling us about how annoying it was to sit and listen to her friend Anna complain on the phone for hours at a go. I could imagine that this wasn’t entirely untrue.
We’d met Judith and Anna after a show we’d played in some shitty dive bar in Jersey City whose name I can’t recall. We were packing up our gear and trying to clear the stage for the night when the two of them came up to talk to us, stumbling a little and giggling to each other in whispered voices. They said they’d enjoyed our set and Isaac and I just sort of smirked and nodded, going along with it, a little bewildered at the good fortune and trying not to fuck things up too badly.
Anna went home with me that night. I was a little drunk and I’m pretty sure she was stoned out of her skull, so I’m not even sure how much of it she remembers. We’d hung out a few times since then, but we didn’t really keep in touch. Last I heard, she was stripping at an industrial club under the name Anesthesia in Baltimore. Judith, though, she had stuck around. She followed Isaac everywhere, attached to his side twenty hours out of the day. I started to cherish the few quiet moments I had alone with my friend as time wore on. Not that Judith wasn’t a bright girl or couldn’t be entertaining at times; she just never shut the fuck up.
Judith said Anna had been talking about me lately, that she’d been talking to her more and more. She said that we should pay her a visit, that she’s going through some rough times and needed the company of old friends. I don’t know how attached I was to the label of “old friend” but I knew a few guys up in Baltimore we could stay with and I’d been looking for a weekend away to blow off some steam. Even without Isaac we still made some decent cash at shows and I had some to burn.
So I sat next to her, cutting through the darkness of the Pine Barrens, watching as she tried her damndest not to speak. It was a sweet gesture, really, but I think her jerky squirming might have been even more annoying than her constant chatter.
“Derrick, hey, you’re speeding.” She nodded towards the window; the trees were blurred together into dappled green and black.
I turned the volume down as the radio switched over to the forced voice of the DJ, easing my foot off the accelerator. Not that I really had anything to worry about, we took this road whenever we wanted to head into the city and there were never any cops. Why post anyone on this glorified Indian trail?
“We’re going to stop for the night. I hate this drive in the dark,” I said, never taking my eyes from the windshield.
“Are you sure? I mean, we could be there tonight if we just drive through.” She turned back to me and it was as though she had solidified in the world now that the speaking taboo had been dissolved.
“No, we couldn’t. The next ferry isn’t until daybreak and I’d rather stop. Less of a chance of an accident.”
“Accident. Yeah. Hah, right.”
It was another fifteen minutes before we found someplace to stay. The Reznor song turned out to be a happy accident, the radio station was shit, as were the scant other stations that cut cleanly through the static. I switched over to the CD player and the opening trumpets of Keasbey Nights had just begun when we saw the hazy red glow of the motel lights through the rain-spattered windshield.
“We’re going to stay here?” she asked as we pulled into the parking lot.
“I guess so, why?”
“Because all their rooms probably smell like shame and burnt hair…” she groaned, pushing the car door open, and pulling her overstuffed suitcase out into the rain.
“So I’ll pick up some Febreeze. I saw a little mall-thing a few miles back; I’m going to grab some groceries. Get a room.” I slid out my wallet and handed her a couple of twenties as I leaned across the vast plain of the front seat to pull the door shut.
The car turned out of the parking lot and I let the music take my mind to a blissful state of emptiness. Everything that existed, for a few moments at least, condensed to the road, the pines, and “Day In, Day Out” on the stereo. My eyes left the lines passing by the side of my car for only a moment as I pulled into the lot. An A&P stood on one end neighboring a tanning salon in the middle by the name of FauxRays and a concrete box at the other end with a large blue neon sign that simply read “Wine and Liquor.”
There was only one purchase I needed to make that night. I left the liquor store with a brown paper bag wrapped snugly around a bottle of ten dollar vodka. I stuffed the bottle in the ragged, stitched-together duffel bag that held the small amount of clothing I had managed to scrounge together during the fifteen or twenty minutes in between the time we decided we were going and our actual departure.
The drive back was uneventful, just another chance for me to lose myself in the music, for the lines of the world to disappear in the colors and shapes, pushing the glare of my headlights through the darkness. I pulled back into the lot of the motel, grabbing a spot near a rusted out old van with a mural on the side. I couldn’t make out the details because of the darkness and the whole lot had a brushed red glow. Tossing the strap of the bag over my shoulder, I walked out into the rain, raising my hand over my forehead in an attempt to keep some part of me dry.
The check-in office for the motel was actually a lot cleaner than I expected. The lights in the room washed it out in a dull orange haze, the wallpaper a muted brown with a forgettable pattern repeating endlessly across its surface.
“Sorry, can I help you?” came a voice from a short, stocky, balding man of about fifty. He stood behind the formica counter at the end of the room, black pen clasped between fat fingers and running over some sort of ledger.
“Yeah,” I cleared my throat, “I’m looking for a room rented by a Ms. Coyn. She should be expecting me.”
He nodded, looking back down to the ledger as he spoke, apparently finished with this conversation, “She’s upstairs, room twenty-seven.”
“Thanks.” I turned and shouldered my bag again, giving the desk clerk my back, making my way out into the rain.
The room was upstairs, sitting in the middle of the face the motel offered to the highway. It was easy enough to find, the single window that overlooked the parking lot was the only one lit on that side of the building. I leaned against the door, tired in ways I couldn’t articulate as I brought my knuckles up to the painted wooden surface and knocked. The reply was long enough in coming that I thought I might have somehow gotten the wrong room, perhaps the desk guy had told me the wrong number to fuck with me, but eventually I could pick up the soft, lilting tone of Judith’s voice over the rain.
“Come in… it’s open,” she said, slurring the last two words together where they met.
The door opened onto a room that didn’t smell of burnt hair. It was clean, if a little sparse. Up against one wall was a single large bed with a floral comforter that dominated the floor space, off to the side stood a desk of some dark stained wood, and against the wall opposite the bed was a low, wide dresser of the same material. A large mirror hanging on the wall behind it and a simple white vase of flowers in the center; the walls were painted a dull salmon that helped channel the warm glow of the lights.
Judith was sprawled across the center of the bed, lying on top of the covers. She had already changed into her underwear and a tank top, both a faded black. The top had a rip that started near her stomach and crawled up seven inches towards the neckline held together by a handful of safety pins. It didn’t seem like the safest thing to sleep in. In her left hand she held one of the flowers from the vase, a hyacinth I think, trailing the edge up and down along her stomach. The right clutched what looked like a bunched up sandwich baggie.
“You know,” she said with a soft giggle, “All those anti-drug PSAs and lectures always show something like a bag of skittles… a whole rainbow, different strokes for different folks… but the white ones are always the most fun… like snowflakes,” she laughed again and I caught that hazy, somehow faraway look in her eyes. Like the middle distance was suddenly the most interesting thing in the world.
I dropped my bag next to the door and brought out the plastic bottle, unscrewing the cap and bringing it up to my lips.
“Should I be worried?” I asked before taking a long swig.
“Call me Goldilocks. I always aim for just right.”
My throat went off like napalm, the burn rolling like a wave into my stomach. My eyes watered and my nostrils flared as I wiped my lips with the back of my hand. I turned to face the window, looking out into the Barrens, the clear, sharp vodka sloshing in the bottle at my side.
There was a ringing silence. In a few minutes she started again.
“So there’s this woman, her name’s Leeds, right?”
“Alright,” I took another mouthful. The burn came with less vigor this time.
“She’s got twelve kids and she’s pregnant with the thirteenth. You’d think that they’d be walking right out without even having to stoop at this point, but it’s in labor with number thirteen that she’s really having a rough time.
“Understandably,” she took a breath, eyes fluttering closed, almost nodding off for a second before going back into her story, “Understandably she’s not having any of this. So mid labor, she mutters some deal with the devil. Says she’ll give this kid’s life to have her youth back, to be free of her marriage.
“Apparently, somebody takes these half-mad whispers seriously, because the kid’s born but it has wings and fangs and claws and the face of a jackal. It kills the screaming midwife and bolts up the chimney. It’s been roaming the Pine Barrens ever since.”
I throw back another shot, “So?”
“How lonely is that kid? I mean he never asked for that, it’s his bitch mother’s fault. But because of her, he can’t ever have a normal life. He’s stuck in the woods all on his own for as long as he lives …”
I sighed and rested my head against the glass. It was cool and smooth, lightning forked through the sky between the choking shapes of the towering pines.
“It’s my fault,” she said, somewhere behind me.
“What?”
“I told Isaac I was leaving him. That’s why he was so drunk that night.”
Her voice wavered. I turned and brought the bottle back to my lips, taking a bigger swallow, clearing my throat as it burned its way down to my stomach, “What? Why? I mean, you couldn’t leave him alone.”
“I could, it’s just he was kind of,” she looked up to her fingers, spinning the stem of the flower between them, “Paranoid. Didn’t want me out of his sight.”
I shrugged, took another drink, I was nearing the halfway point of the bottle. “I can imagine that would be difficult to live with.”
“He used to get angry,” she looked away, “When I didn’t want to go over. Really angry. Some of the things he said,” she laughed, this time with a wry tone, no humor in it. “I just couldn’t stand to be around him anymore. He criticized everything from the clothes I wore to my goddamn tone of voice. He was convinced I was hell-bent on cheating on him.”
I capped the vodka bottle, the world spun beneath me and a new blurred mural asserted itself in the pinks and yellows of the hotel room, “You should probably go to sleep.”
“I can’t.”
Tears started just beneath her lashes, blurring into obscurity as they rolled down her cheeks, “I should have been with him. Hell, I should have been driving.”
Judith used to flake off on these painkiller binges before. I couldn’t remember if she had the night Isaac died. If she had, she would have been in the same position, only Isaac probably would’ve been thrown from the vehicle. It would’ve been Judith pinned to the seat with a steering column in her chest like some kind of NASCAR cenobite.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and felt her shift behind me. My hand made its way up to the side of my face, rubbing along my cheek to try and straighten out the wrinkles in the world as she crawled around next to me.
I knew as soon as I walked in that I would regret letting Judith book a room with one bed but I thought that would fall more along the lines of a sore lower back from sleeping on the floor. Now I began to doubt whether we would make it down to see Anna tomorrow.
I closed my eyes and was not met with ice or flames but with a whimper and a kiss and her weight, slight but insistent in my lap. I let out a tired sigh and felt the press of her lips on my neck, laying there, her body on mine, surrounded by the warmth of the hotel room and the starless, moonless black of the sky outside. I fell back against the floral print as she slid the shirt over my head, feeling the cold metal of the safety pins pressing against my side.
Friday, October 2, 2009
You Were Gone When We Found You
I
It’s the old road that draws Kendra down. She’s always liked those twisting back pathways in the forest, the way they hint at things that very slightly (and only very slightly) were not. Her car rumbles over the trodden path and for a moment she questions the wisdom in coming. She had no idea what lay beyond this twisting old road, unpaved and studded with those iron gray rocks that jut up from the clay. If she were to scrape bottom on one of these, she would never hear the end of it from her father, he hated it when anything happened to the car.
She stops then and locks the car against merry men in the forest around and steps out into the really real world. Behind her windshield she can convince herself that the trees and the path and the clouds and the sun are a movie playing before her, inside she controls the score and the air conditioning is more than cold comfort.
Out here she is an actor, the winds tug at her hair in a playful way and she wraps her coat more tightly around her body because winter’s bitterness still ensconces spring like a shroud yet to be cast aside. She bows her head and walks into the wind, making her way up the winding path as it twists like a crawling serpent upwards.
The trees begin to thin out and she knows that a clearing is coming. It slowly opens before her, the bare branches giving way to an open field of swaying yellow grasses. In the middle stands a cabin, abandoned, a dark brown more in common with the forest behind her than the vibrancy of the grasses that surround it.
It has no roof, the charred beams that push up from the frame claw black at the clouded sky, struggling for purchase amongst the white. Fire took this home from the world and she can imagine it: flames loving this place intensely for one night before casting it aside.
The sun has moved higher in the sky and she turns to leave. She promised she’d meet her mother for lunch; they have a lot of planning to do.
II
Shaun is not a sentimental man, that’s why it’s been so long since he’s been to the cabin. He isn’t even certain himself why he is going. When his wife asks him whether or not he has a particular destination in mind for his walk that autumn afternoon, he tells her no, but is convinced that he will be seeing the cabin before nightfall. As he walks up that country road, his thoughts should perhaps be upon trips with his father along the selfsame trail, parking his truck at the base of the mountain and reaching the clearing around the cabin in the darkness before dawn.
Instead, he thinks about how much his back has been hurting him, how walking wasn’t helping, no matter what the doctors said. He thinks about that dull ache and the way he needs to be especially careful on this odd little side road because he could slip up on any one of these rocks and twist an ankle and then he’d really be in a jam. He wonders whether he’ll miss all of this, the trees with their curled red and brown leaves and the slight chill in the air that worked at the back of his throat. He’s not sure, and it’s odd for him to have a thought that isn’t certain.
When he reaches the cabin there is no flood of warm memories, although perhaps there should be. Instead he sees a rotted out old husk: an old log dinosaur eaten by fortune’s fire from the inside out, leaving only a shadow of what it was standing in the world.
He sighs as he stands there in the chill, old wool jacket hanging off his bones. The sun glows low and red in the cloudy sky but he’s not worried about making it back before nightfall. He’s made this walk plenty of times in his life and he’s certain he’ll do it again.
At least once.
It’s the old road that draws Kendra down. She’s always liked those twisting back pathways in the forest, the way they hint at things that very slightly (and only very slightly) were not. Her car rumbles over the trodden path and for a moment she questions the wisdom in coming. She had no idea what lay beyond this twisting old road, unpaved and studded with those iron gray rocks that jut up from the clay. If she were to scrape bottom on one of these, she would never hear the end of it from her father, he hated it when anything happened to the car.
She stops then and locks the car against merry men in the forest around and steps out into the really real world. Behind her windshield she can convince herself that the trees and the path and the clouds and the sun are a movie playing before her, inside she controls the score and the air conditioning is more than cold comfort.
Out here she is an actor, the winds tug at her hair in a playful way and she wraps her coat more tightly around her body because winter’s bitterness still ensconces spring like a shroud yet to be cast aside. She bows her head and walks into the wind, making her way up the winding path as it twists like a crawling serpent upwards.
The trees begin to thin out and she knows that a clearing is coming. It slowly opens before her, the bare branches giving way to an open field of swaying yellow grasses. In the middle stands a cabin, abandoned, a dark brown more in common with the forest behind her than the vibrancy of the grasses that surround it.
It has no roof, the charred beams that push up from the frame claw black at the clouded sky, struggling for purchase amongst the white. Fire took this home from the world and she can imagine it: flames loving this place intensely for one night before casting it aside.
The sun has moved higher in the sky and she turns to leave. She promised she’d meet her mother for lunch; they have a lot of planning to do.
II
Shaun is not a sentimental man, that’s why it’s been so long since he’s been to the cabin. He isn’t even certain himself why he is going. When his wife asks him whether or not he has a particular destination in mind for his walk that autumn afternoon, he tells her no, but is convinced that he will be seeing the cabin before nightfall. As he walks up that country road, his thoughts should perhaps be upon trips with his father along the selfsame trail, parking his truck at the base of the mountain and reaching the clearing around the cabin in the darkness before dawn.
Instead, he thinks about how much his back has been hurting him, how walking wasn’t helping, no matter what the doctors said. He thinks about that dull ache and the way he needs to be especially careful on this odd little side road because he could slip up on any one of these rocks and twist an ankle and then he’d really be in a jam. He wonders whether he’ll miss all of this, the trees with their curled red and brown leaves and the slight chill in the air that worked at the back of his throat. He’s not sure, and it’s odd for him to have a thought that isn’t certain.
When he reaches the cabin there is no flood of warm memories, although perhaps there should be. Instead he sees a rotted out old husk: an old log dinosaur eaten by fortune’s fire from the inside out, leaving only a shadow of what it was standing in the world.
He sighs as he stands there in the chill, old wool jacket hanging off his bones. The sun glows low and red in the cloudy sky but he’s not worried about making it back before nightfall. He’s made this walk plenty of times in his life and he’s certain he’ll do it again.
At least once.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
30 Pieces of Silver
We drove in silence, the snare of raindrops our soundtrack as the headlights of my Impala cut flickering swathes into the oncoming night. I flexed my fingers on the steering wheel, the leather still damp and a little slippery, but thankfully those shivers, that unease was trailing further and further away the closer we got to the state line. Cold gray eyes stared back as I glanced up to the rearview mirror, a drawn and angular face between wet black. A single drop of rain left a tail that reflected in the mirror as it treaded down my forehead, over the blade of my nose and fell. Judith was in the passenger seat, drumming her fingers on the dashboard in an anxious rhythm, her eyes flitting back and forth across the road before us, sneaking sidelong glances my way like she was trying to coax me into a conversation. The runners of mascara had been wiped from her cheeks but her hair still hung damp, framing her face in two wilted curtains of pastel bronze. She moved like a rabbit two feet from the boiler, fidgeting and scratching at her head and behind her ear. I knew it had been hours since she’d had a smoke but I didn’t have any on me and I wasn’t exactly feeling charitable.
“We… we’ve just got to get the hell out of Jersey, you know? Just for a little while, cool down and think, get our heads on straight, you know?” she turned to me, desperate to break the silence.
I didn’t reply. My hand grazed over the controls to the car’s stereo, keeping my eyes locked on the road. Feeling for the knob, I twisted it and a distorted guitar seared out of the speakers. Judith flinched and covered her ears. The strained half-scream told me it was a Nine Inch Nails song. Isaac and I had gone to see Reznor in concert a year or so back, we drove up to New York for the day, ended up spending the weekend in the city. Good time. This was that cover they did for that movie with Bruce Lee’s kid, the old Joy Division song. Not their best, not better than what we heard live, but I left it on, turned up loud enough to discourage Judith from making another comment.
Isaac could always put up with her shit a lot better than me. Yesterday, in my garage, she spent at least an hour and a fucking half telling us about how annoying it was to sit and listen to her friend Anna complain on the phone for hours at a go. I could imagine that this wasn’t entirely untrue, but Judith was the kind of girl who heard that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones so bought a Desert Eagle.
We’d met Judith and Anna after a show we’d played in some shitty dive bar in Jersey City whose name I can’t recall. We were packing up our gear and trying to clear the stage for the night when the two of them came up to talk to us, stumbling a little and giggling to each other in whispered voices. They said they’d enjoyed our set and Isaac and I just sort of smirked and nodded, going along with it, a little bewildered at the good fortune and trying not to fuck things up too badly.
Anna went home with me that night and we’d hung out a few times since then, but we didn’t really keep in touch. I was a little drunk and I’m pretty sure she was stoned out of her skull, so I’m not even sure how much of it she remembers. Last I heard, she moved to New York and was stripping at some industrial club under the name Anesthesia. I always said I’d pay her a visit one of these days and, considering the circumstances, now was probably as good a time as any.
Judith, though, she had stuck around. She followed Isaac everywhere, attached to his side twenty hours out of the day. I started to cherish the few quiet moments I had alone with my friend as time wore on. Not that Judith wasn’t a bright girl or couldn’t be entertaining at times; she just never shut the fuck up.
So I sat next to her, cutting through the darkness of the Pine Barrens, watching as she tried her damndest not to speak. It was a sweet gesture, really, but I think her jerky squirming might have been even more annoying than her constant chatter.
“Derrick, hey, you’re speeding.” She nodded towards the window; the trees were blurred together into a dappled green and black Matisse.
I turned the volume down as the radio switched over to the forced voice of the DJ, easing my foot off the accelerator. Not that I really had anything to worry about, we took this road whenever we wanted to head into the city and there were never any cops posted. It just wasn’t cost effective, there wasn’t a good place along the whole road for them to sit and they’d be far better off on a busier thoroughfare than this glorified Indian trail through the Barrens.
“We’re going to stop for the night. I hate this drive in the dark,” I said, never taking my eyes from the windshield.
“Are you sure? I mean, we could be there tonight if we just drive through.” She turned back to me and it was as though she had solidified in the world now that the speaking taboo had been dissolved.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure.”
It was another fifteen minutes before we found someplace to stop. The Reznor song turned out to be a happy accident, the radio station was shit, as were the scant other stations that cut cleanly through the static. I settled on switching over to the CD player, and the opening trumpets of Keasbey Nights had just begun when we saw the hazy red glow of the motel lights through the rain-spattered windshield.
“We’re going to stay here?” she asked as we pulled into the parking lot.
“I guess so, why?”
“Because all of their rooms probably smell like shame and burnt hair…” she groaned, pushing the car door open, and pulling her overstuffed suitcase out into the rain.
“So I’ll pick up some Febreeze. I saw a little mall-thing a few miles back; I’m going to grab some groceries. Get a room.” I handed her a wad of twenties as I leaned across the vast plain of the front seat to pull the door shut.
The car turned out of the parking lot and I let the music take my mind to a blissful state of emptiness. Everything that existed, for a few moments at least, condensed to the road, the pines, and “Day In, Day Out” on the stereo. My eyes left the lines passing by the side of my car for only a moment as I pulled into the lot. An A&P stood on one end neighboring a tanning salon in the middle by the name of FauxRays and a concrete box at the other end with a large blue neon sign that simply read “Wine and Liquor.”
There was only one purchase I needed to make that night. I left the liquor store with a brown paper bag wrapped snugly around a bottle of ten dollar vodka. Fake identification has its risks, but it never really bothered me. There’s a reason they call it a “confidence” game: half of it is looking like you know what the fuck you’re doing. I got back into my Impala and the engine awoke with a throaty roar, drowning out the steady beat of the rain for a few moments. The drive back was brief and empty, same as the drive there.
I stuffed the bottle in the ragged, stitched-together duffel bag that held the small amount of clothing I had managed to scrounge together during the fifteen or twenty minutes in between the time we decided to get the hell out of dodge and our actual departure. Tossing the strap over my shoulder, I walked out into the rain, raising my hand over my forehead in a futile attempt to keep some part of me dry.
The check-in office for the motel was… actually a lot cleaner than I expected. The lights in the room washed it out in a dull orange haze, the wallpaper a muted brown with a forgettable pattern repeating endlessly across its surface.
“Sorry, can I help you?” came a voice from a short, stocky balding man of about fifty. He stood behind the formica counter at the end of the room, black pen clasped between fat fingers and running over some sort of ledger.
“Yeah,” I cleared my throat, “I’m looking for a room rented by a Ms. Coyn. She should be expecting me.”
He nodded, looking back down to the ledger as he spoke, apparently finished with this conversation, “Yeah, she’s upstairs, room twenty-seven.”
“Thanks.” I turned and shouldered my bag again, giving the desk clerk my back, making my way out into the rain again.
The room was upstairs, sitting in the middle of the face the motel offered to the highway. It was easy enough to find, the single window that overlooked the parking lot was the only one lit on that side of the building. I leaned against the door, tired in ways that outstripped physical as I brought my knuckles up to the painted wooden surface and knocked. The reply was long enough in coming that I thought I might have somehow gotten the wrong room, perhaps the desk guy had told me the wrong number to fuck with me, but eventually I could pick up the soft, lilting tone of Judith’s voice over the rain.
“Come in… it’s open,” she said, slurring the last two words together where they met.
The door opened onto a room that didn’t smell of burnt hair. It was clean, if a little sparse. Up against one wall was a single large bed with a floral comforter that dominated the floor space, off to the side stood a desk of some dark stained wood, and against the wall opposite the bed was a low, wide dresser of the same material, a large mirror hanging on the wall behind it and a simple white vase of flowers in the center; the walls were painted a dull salmon that helped channel the warm glow of the lights.
Judith was sprawled across the center of the bed, lying on top of the covers. She had already changed into her underwear and a tank top, both a faded black. The top had a rip that started near her stomach and crawled up seven inches towards the neckline held together by a handful of safety pins. It didn’t seem like the safest thing to sleep in, but I’m not one to judge. In her left hand she held one of the flowers from the vase, a hyacinth I think, trailing the edge up and down along her stomach. The right clutched what looked like a bunched up sandwich baggie.
“You know,” she said with a soft giggle, “All those anti-drug PSAs and lectures always show something like a bag of skittles… a whole rainbow, different strokes for different folks… but the white ones are always the most fun… like snowflakes,” she laughed again and I caught that hazy, somehow faraway look in her eyes. Like the middle distance was suddenly the most interesting thing in the world.
I dropped my bag next to the door and brought out the plastic bottle, unscrewing the cap and bringing it up to my lips.
“Should I be worried?” I asked before taking a long swig.
“Call me Goldilocks; I always aim for just right.”
“Great.” My throat went off like napalm, the burn rolling like a wave into my stomach. My eyes watered and my nostrils flared as I wiped my lips with the back of my hand. I turned to face the window, looking out in the Barrens, the clear, sharp vodka sloshing in the bottle at my side.
There was a ringing silence. In a few minutes she started again.
“So there’s this woman, her name’s Leeds, right?”
“Alright,” I took another mouthful. My brain still screamed at me, asking why I was trying to down a bottle of drain cleaner and paint thinner, but the burn came with less vigor this time.
“She’s got twelve kids and she’s pregnant with the thirteenth. You’d think that they’d be walking right out without even having to stoop at this point, but it’s in labor with number thirteen that she’s really having a rough time.
“Understandably,” she took a breath, eyes fluttering closed, almost nodding off for a second before going back into her story, “Understandably she’s not having any of this. Life has run her ragged, so mid labor, she mutters some deal with the devil. Says she’ll give this kid’s life to have her youth back, to be free of her marriage.
“Apparently, somebody takes these half-mad mumbles seriously, because the kid’s born but it has wings and fangs and claws and the face of a jackal. It kills the screaming midwife and bolts up the chimney. It’s been roaming the Pine Barrens ever since.”
I throw back another shot, “So?”
“How lonely is that kid? I mean he never asked for that, it’s his bitch mother’s fault. But because of her, he can’t ever come back to a normal life; he’s stuck in the woods all on his own for as long as he lives …”
I sighed and rested my head against the glass. It was cool and smooth, lightning forked through the sky between the choking shapes of the towering pines.
“It’s my fault,” she said, somewhere behind me.
“What?”
“I told Isaac I was leaving him. That’s why he was so drunk last night.”
Her voice wavered. I turned and brought the bottle back to my lips, taking a bigger swallow, clearing my throat as it burned its way down to my stomach, “What? Why? I mean, you couldn’t leave him alone.”
“I could, it’s just he was kind of,” she looked up to her fingers, spinning the stem of the flower between them, “Paranoid. Didn’t want me out of his sight.”
I shrugged, took another drink, I was nearing the halfway point of the bottle, “I can imagine that would be difficult to live with.”
“He used to get angry,” she looked away, “When I didn’t want to go over. Really angry. Some of the things he said,” she laughed, this time with a wry tone, no humor in it, “It’s thanks to Isaac that I met the god in the cutlery drawer.”
I capped the vodka bottle, the world spun beneath me and a new Matisse asserted itself in the pinks and yellows of the hotel room, “You should probably go to sleep.”
“I can’t.” Tears started just beneath her lashes, blurring into obscurity as they rolled down her cheeks, “Every time I close my eyes I see Isaac standing there with the steering column hanging out of his chest like some kind of fucking NASCAR cenobite.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed and felt her shift behind me. My hand made its way up to the side of my face, rubbing along my cheek to try and straighten out the wrinkles in the world as she crawled around next to me.
I knew as soon as I walked in that I would regret letting Judith book a room with one bed but I thought that would fall more along the lines of a sore lower back. Sleeping on the floor never seemed to bode well for me. As it stood, I began to doubt whether we would make it up to see Anna tomorrow.
That is how the world ends, not with ice or in flames but with a whimper and a kiss and her weight, slight but insistent in my lap. I fell back against the floral print as she slid the shirt over my head, feeling the cold metal of the safety pins pressing against my side. I closed my eyes with her lips on my neck as I laid there, her body on mine, surrounded by the warmth of the hotel room and the starless, moonless black of the sky outside.
“We… we’ve just got to get the hell out of Jersey, you know? Just for a little while, cool down and think, get our heads on straight, you know?” she turned to me, desperate to break the silence.
I didn’t reply. My hand grazed over the controls to the car’s stereo, keeping my eyes locked on the road. Feeling for the knob, I twisted it and a distorted guitar seared out of the speakers. Judith flinched and covered her ears. The strained half-scream told me it was a Nine Inch Nails song. Isaac and I had gone to see Reznor in concert a year or so back, we drove up to New York for the day, ended up spending the weekend in the city. Good time. This was that cover they did for that movie with Bruce Lee’s kid, the old Joy Division song. Not their best, not better than what we heard live, but I left it on, turned up loud enough to discourage Judith from making another comment.
Isaac could always put up with her shit a lot better than me. Yesterday, in my garage, she spent at least an hour and a fucking half telling us about how annoying it was to sit and listen to her friend Anna complain on the phone for hours at a go. I could imagine that this wasn’t entirely untrue, but Judith was the kind of girl who heard that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones so bought a Desert Eagle.
We’d met Judith and Anna after a show we’d played in some shitty dive bar in Jersey City whose name I can’t recall. We were packing up our gear and trying to clear the stage for the night when the two of them came up to talk to us, stumbling a little and giggling to each other in whispered voices. They said they’d enjoyed our set and Isaac and I just sort of smirked and nodded, going along with it, a little bewildered at the good fortune and trying not to fuck things up too badly.
Anna went home with me that night and we’d hung out a few times since then, but we didn’t really keep in touch. I was a little drunk and I’m pretty sure she was stoned out of her skull, so I’m not even sure how much of it she remembers. Last I heard, she moved to New York and was stripping at some industrial club under the name Anesthesia. I always said I’d pay her a visit one of these days and, considering the circumstances, now was probably as good a time as any.
Judith, though, she had stuck around. She followed Isaac everywhere, attached to his side twenty hours out of the day. I started to cherish the few quiet moments I had alone with my friend as time wore on. Not that Judith wasn’t a bright girl or couldn’t be entertaining at times; she just never shut the fuck up.
So I sat next to her, cutting through the darkness of the Pine Barrens, watching as she tried her damndest not to speak. It was a sweet gesture, really, but I think her jerky squirming might have been even more annoying than her constant chatter.
“Derrick, hey, you’re speeding.” She nodded towards the window; the trees were blurred together into a dappled green and black Matisse.
I turned the volume down as the radio switched over to the forced voice of the DJ, easing my foot off the accelerator. Not that I really had anything to worry about, we took this road whenever we wanted to head into the city and there were never any cops posted. It just wasn’t cost effective, there wasn’t a good place along the whole road for them to sit and they’d be far better off on a busier thoroughfare than this glorified Indian trail through the Barrens.
“We’re going to stop for the night. I hate this drive in the dark,” I said, never taking my eyes from the windshield.
“Are you sure? I mean, we could be there tonight if we just drive through.” She turned back to me and it was as though she had solidified in the world now that the speaking taboo had been dissolved.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure.”
It was another fifteen minutes before we found someplace to stop. The Reznor song turned out to be a happy accident, the radio station was shit, as were the scant other stations that cut cleanly through the static. I settled on switching over to the CD player, and the opening trumpets of Keasbey Nights had just begun when we saw the hazy red glow of the motel lights through the rain-spattered windshield.
“We’re going to stay here?” she asked as we pulled into the parking lot.
“I guess so, why?”
“Because all of their rooms probably smell like shame and burnt hair…” she groaned, pushing the car door open, and pulling her overstuffed suitcase out into the rain.
“So I’ll pick up some Febreeze. I saw a little mall-thing a few miles back; I’m going to grab some groceries. Get a room.” I handed her a wad of twenties as I leaned across the vast plain of the front seat to pull the door shut.
The car turned out of the parking lot and I let the music take my mind to a blissful state of emptiness. Everything that existed, for a few moments at least, condensed to the road, the pines, and “Day In, Day Out” on the stereo. My eyes left the lines passing by the side of my car for only a moment as I pulled into the lot. An A&P stood on one end neighboring a tanning salon in the middle by the name of FauxRays and a concrete box at the other end with a large blue neon sign that simply read “Wine and Liquor.”
There was only one purchase I needed to make that night. I left the liquor store with a brown paper bag wrapped snugly around a bottle of ten dollar vodka. Fake identification has its risks, but it never really bothered me. There’s a reason they call it a “confidence” game: half of it is looking like you know what the fuck you’re doing. I got back into my Impala and the engine awoke with a throaty roar, drowning out the steady beat of the rain for a few moments. The drive back was brief and empty, same as the drive there.
I stuffed the bottle in the ragged, stitched-together duffel bag that held the small amount of clothing I had managed to scrounge together during the fifteen or twenty minutes in between the time we decided to get the hell out of dodge and our actual departure. Tossing the strap over my shoulder, I walked out into the rain, raising my hand over my forehead in a futile attempt to keep some part of me dry.
The check-in office for the motel was… actually a lot cleaner than I expected. The lights in the room washed it out in a dull orange haze, the wallpaper a muted brown with a forgettable pattern repeating endlessly across its surface.
“Sorry, can I help you?” came a voice from a short, stocky balding man of about fifty. He stood behind the formica counter at the end of the room, black pen clasped between fat fingers and running over some sort of ledger.
“Yeah,” I cleared my throat, “I’m looking for a room rented by a Ms. Coyn. She should be expecting me.”
He nodded, looking back down to the ledger as he spoke, apparently finished with this conversation, “Yeah, she’s upstairs, room twenty-seven.”
“Thanks.” I turned and shouldered my bag again, giving the desk clerk my back, making my way out into the rain again.
The room was upstairs, sitting in the middle of the face the motel offered to the highway. It was easy enough to find, the single window that overlooked the parking lot was the only one lit on that side of the building. I leaned against the door, tired in ways that outstripped physical as I brought my knuckles up to the painted wooden surface and knocked. The reply was long enough in coming that I thought I might have somehow gotten the wrong room, perhaps the desk guy had told me the wrong number to fuck with me, but eventually I could pick up the soft, lilting tone of Judith’s voice over the rain.
“Come in… it’s open,” she said, slurring the last two words together where they met.
The door opened onto a room that didn’t smell of burnt hair. It was clean, if a little sparse. Up against one wall was a single large bed with a floral comforter that dominated the floor space, off to the side stood a desk of some dark stained wood, and against the wall opposite the bed was a low, wide dresser of the same material, a large mirror hanging on the wall behind it and a simple white vase of flowers in the center; the walls were painted a dull salmon that helped channel the warm glow of the lights.
Judith was sprawled across the center of the bed, lying on top of the covers. She had already changed into her underwear and a tank top, both a faded black. The top had a rip that started near her stomach and crawled up seven inches towards the neckline held together by a handful of safety pins. It didn’t seem like the safest thing to sleep in, but I’m not one to judge. In her left hand she held one of the flowers from the vase, a hyacinth I think, trailing the edge up and down along her stomach. The right clutched what looked like a bunched up sandwich baggie.
“You know,” she said with a soft giggle, “All those anti-drug PSAs and lectures always show something like a bag of skittles… a whole rainbow, different strokes for different folks… but the white ones are always the most fun… like snowflakes,” she laughed again and I caught that hazy, somehow faraway look in her eyes. Like the middle distance was suddenly the most interesting thing in the world.
I dropped my bag next to the door and brought out the plastic bottle, unscrewing the cap and bringing it up to my lips.
“Should I be worried?” I asked before taking a long swig.
“Call me Goldilocks; I always aim for just right.”
“Great.” My throat went off like napalm, the burn rolling like a wave into my stomach. My eyes watered and my nostrils flared as I wiped my lips with the back of my hand. I turned to face the window, looking out in the Barrens, the clear, sharp vodka sloshing in the bottle at my side.
There was a ringing silence. In a few minutes she started again.
“So there’s this woman, her name’s Leeds, right?”
“Alright,” I took another mouthful. My brain still screamed at me, asking why I was trying to down a bottle of drain cleaner and paint thinner, but the burn came with less vigor this time.
“She’s got twelve kids and she’s pregnant with the thirteenth. You’d think that they’d be walking right out without even having to stoop at this point, but it’s in labor with number thirteen that she’s really having a rough time.
“Understandably,” she took a breath, eyes fluttering closed, almost nodding off for a second before going back into her story, “Understandably she’s not having any of this. Life has run her ragged, so mid labor, she mutters some deal with the devil. Says she’ll give this kid’s life to have her youth back, to be free of her marriage.
“Apparently, somebody takes these half-mad mumbles seriously, because the kid’s born but it has wings and fangs and claws and the face of a jackal. It kills the screaming midwife and bolts up the chimney. It’s been roaming the Pine Barrens ever since.”
I throw back another shot, “So?”
“How lonely is that kid? I mean he never asked for that, it’s his bitch mother’s fault. But because of her, he can’t ever come back to a normal life; he’s stuck in the woods all on his own for as long as he lives …”
I sighed and rested my head against the glass. It was cool and smooth, lightning forked through the sky between the choking shapes of the towering pines.
“It’s my fault,” she said, somewhere behind me.
“What?”
“I told Isaac I was leaving him. That’s why he was so drunk last night.”
Her voice wavered. I turned and brought the bottle back to my lips, taking a bigger swallow, clearing my throat as it burned its way down to my stomach, “What? Why? I mean, you couldn’t leave him alone.”
“I could, it’s just he was kind of,” she looked up to her fingers, spinning the stem of the flower between them, “Paranoid. Didn’t want me out of his sight.”
I shrugged, took another drink, I was nearing the halfway point of the bottle, “I can imagine that would be difficult to live with.”
“He used to get angry,” she looked away, “When I didn’t want to go over. Really angry. Some of the things he said,” she laughed, this time with a wry tone, no humor in it, “It’s thanks to Isaac that I met the god in the cutlery drawer.”
I capped the vodka bottle, the world spun beneath me and a new Matisse asserted itself in the pinks and yellows of the hotel room, “You should probably go to sleep.”
“I can’t.” Tears started just beneath her lashes, blurring into obscurity as they rolled down her cheeks, “Every time I close my eyes I see Isaac standing there with the steering column hanging out of his chest like some kind of fucking NASCAR cenobite.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed and felt her shift behind me. My hand made its way up to the side of my face, rubbing along my cheek to try and straighten out the wrinkles in the world as she crawled around next to me.
I knew as soon as I walked in that I would regret letting Judith book a room with one bed but I thought that would fall more along the lines of a sore lower back. Sleeping on the floor never seemed to bode well for me. As it stood, I began to doubt whether we would make it up to see Anna tomorrow.
That is how the world ends, not with ice or in flames but with a whimper and a kiss and her weight, slight but insistent in my lap. I fell back against the floral print as she slid the shirt over my head, feeling the cold metal of the safety pins pressing against my side. I closed my eyes with her lips on my neck as I laid there, her body on mine, surrounded by the warmth of the hotel room and the starless, moonless black of the sky outside.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Waking Draft (Footnoted)
“I don’t get that show,” Todd lay on his back on my bed, tossing a hacky sack(1) up toward the ceiling, letting it drop in a lazy arc back to his palm. “It never made any sense to me how the hell it’s supposed to be funny.”
We had been talking cartoons(2) for about an hour. The sky was overcast and the afternoon sun had stained the sky a deep, soupy orange fading to purple near the horizon line. The weather said it was supposed to have rained today and I sort of wish it had.
“There’s nothing to get. It’s surrealist(3) humor, it’s not supposed to make sense,” Emma rolled her eyes at him.
She sat in my computer chair, lit cigarette(4) hanging limp from her lower lip like it didn’t want to be there. It wasn’t often that I saw her in any kind of formal clothing so the black dress(5) she wore looked out of place. With her face turned towards the window and her eyes on the sunset it looked like she could have been getting ready for a night out on the town. When she turned back, though, I could see the white patch of gauze(6) stuck to her cheek, covering the long, thin, stitched(7) slit, keeping it from getting infected. She had bumped it earlier that day and a dot of red soaked through the middle of the white. It made her terribly beautiful.
“You say that like it’s over my head or something. Every episode I’ve seen is basically fifteen minutes of retarded jokes about moon people smoking grass or a talking meatball going on a diet.”(8)
Todd tossed up the hacky sack again. He lay on top of my comforter, his black shirt and pants(9) blending with the fabric until it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended. There was a slight glint where the sunlight that managed to peak through the clouds and find its way through the window met the gold of his belt buckle. His usual spot was on the floor; on the bed he looked out of place, almost alien.
“Whatever…” Emma shook her head, ashing the cigarette. She tucked a stray fringe of her straight, caramel(10) hair behind her ear before returning the cigarette to her lip.
“You guys want to go out or something? Like go get something to eat?”
“Not terribly,” my voice was a croak. I had been letting Emma and Todd do most of the speaking over the past few hours.
“No,” Emma stared at the wall.
“Jesus fucking Christ…” Todd said under his breath. “So we’re just going to sit here for the rest of the night in silence? That’s what we’re going to do?”
“Yes.”
There was a finality in Emma’s voice that left no room for retort. Todd sighed again like a petulant child denied his ice cream(11) for the evening. The light that came through the window was warm, orange, more welcoming than the sterile light of noon, like the edges of the world had gone soft. Time seemed relative; it stretched on in an infinite ribbon before us as we sat in my room, surrounded by our own wordlessness. There was nothing more to say, really. A lot of talking had been done earlier but now it seemed that everything had been said. It was a time that was right for silence.
“What is it with you and that surreal shit, anyway?” Todd asked her. The sound was violent in the wake of the quiet.
“How do you mean?” her tone was dismissive, like she couldn’t care less about the answer to the question but saw it as her duty to ask for it anyway.
“Like, that movie that you made us watch the other night. What’s it called? Some kind of street or something, wasn’t it?”
“Mulholland Drive(12)?” I offered.
“Yeah! What the hell was up with that? The fucking thing didn’t even try to make sense. I felt like I was halfway through a bad acid trip(13) and kept blacking out every five minutes or so. How can you enjoy something like that?”
She shrugged, “I just do. Do I really need a reason?”
“No, it’s just weird is all.”
“There’s nothing weird about it. It’s like a poem made of images. There's something deeper there, the surface is frightening but there are things underneath.”
“So you’re calling me dumb and lazy now?”
“What? No, don’t get so defensive, I’m just saying that it’s more work than a regular movie, it takes more effort to enjoy them.”
“Why bother?”
“You know what, never mind. You just don’t get it and you refuse to try.”
“Just another one of the things I don’t fucking get, I guess. I’ll add it to the list. We could probably write a book about all the things I don’t get, can’t we? All the shit I’ll just never understand,” Todd said.
Emma’s eyes seemed damp as she stood and left. I heard a door in the hallway slam. I turned and kicked Todd in the shoulder from my position on the floor, but my sock slid across the surface of his shirt and the ball of my foot hit him in the cheek.
“The fuck, dude?” he turned to me. “Not on, man, not fucking on,” he rubbed his cheek.
“Get out of here,” I said as I turned my back to him, “Go take a walk or something.”
He left without a word, but I heard his footsteps moving down the stairs as Emma walked back in. Her eyes were red and puffy and she blew her nose into a tissue as she entered, wadding it up in her fist and pitching it into the wastebasket. She had ripped off the gauze while in the bathroom and the stitches crawled across her cheek, jagged and irregular like something out of a cheap horror movie. A line of cherry plotted a lazy course down porcelain(14) towards her chin.
“I hate autumn, it’s murder on my allergies,” she said with a sniff.
“You want an Allegra(15) or something?”
“No, it’s alright. Your room looks bigger.”
“Yeah, I’ve moved some stuff around,” I lied.
“You think it’s going to be alright?” her voice wavered a little with the words.
I thought about lying again, wanted to, but said that I didn't know.
She sat next to me on the floor, sighed, and put her head on my shoulder. We sat there in the quiet for a long time.
Footnotes:
1 - A small, round bag filled with dried beans. Introduced in 1972, it was often used in a recreation game involving standing in the circle and keeping the bag aloft.
2 - Animated television broadcasts, usually humorous in nature and aimed at a younger audience.
3 - Surrealism was an artistic movement characterized by a distinct lack of regard for traditional plot structure and suspension of disbelief. It often exploited disturbing and unsettling images and concepts in order to disquiet its audience.
4 - A product consumed by smoking, a slender paper cylinder filled with cured and fine cut tobacco. This is unusual behavior, as it was seen as a breach of etiquette to smoke indoors during this time period.
5 - It was common for women of the day to wear what was referred to as a "little black dress" to social events, as it was said to match any accessory they would choose to bring.
6 - A piece of sterile, thatched white linen, used to protect open wounds from infection while they heal.
7 - A primitive means of medical treatment involving threading the two sides of a wound together in order to hold it in place to heal properly. Often resulted in noticeable scarring.
8 - The show Fiorilla refers to here is "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a surrealist comedic animated series presented in 15-minute episodes with little continuity and little regard for rules of standards and practice of the day.
9 - During this period it was an unspoken rule that one was to wear black or other muted tones when attending a funeral.
10 - A sweet derived from melted, or "caramelized" sugar. Here it is used to establish color.
11 - Frozen confection made of dairy products, a common dessert during the time period, hence its use to characterize Todd as a child.
12 - Award-winning film directed by noted surrealist David Lynch in 2001. Famous for its use of fragmented, non-linear storytelling and use of several viewpoints and plot inconsistencies to unsettle its audience.
13 - Refers to an occasional side effect of the recreation use of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, a hallucinogenic compound used for its psychotropic effects that would sometimes subject the user to a series of horrific, nightmarish hallucinations as opposed to the more desirable, fantasy-oriented episodes.
14 - Ceramic material common in dishware created by heating raw materials (usually clay) in a kiln. Used here as imagery to illuminate the contrast between blood and skin.
15 - Common antihistamine for the time period, used to suppress mild allergic symptoms.
------------------------------------------
Footnotes strike me as a necessary evil. They're a key to understanding a text when removed from its contemporary time period by the vast gulf of time, but they also violently tear up a layer of the subtext and lay it to bare on the surface. When I read a book and I know some tiny obscure fact about synapsid biology or the mating habits of great pacific octopi and the author gets said fact right, I feel a special bond with the text. I feel that footnotes, in their quest for perfectly egalitarian literature, remove a good deal of the fun of puzzling out what things mean.
For instance, it's never supposed to be said that the characters in this story are returning from a funeral. It should be inferred (and I know I've made it much, much too difficult to tease that out, I'm trying to make it work better in the next draft) and bringing the bones to the surface in this instance, I feel, weakens the short. That's actually why I chose this one in particular. I think Emma dislikes footnotes as well.
Granted, I'm thankful for them in Gulliver's Travels, but what fun would life be if we couldn't exercise our inner hypocrite every once in a while?
-F
We had been talking cartoons(2) for about an hour. The sky was overcast and the afternoon sun had stained the sky a deep, soupy orange fading to purple near the horizon line. The weather said it was supposed to have rained today and I sort of wish it had.
“There’s nothing to get. It’s surrealist(3) humor, it’s not supposed to make sense,” Emma rolled her eyes at him.
She sat in my computer chair, lit cigarette(4) hanging limp from her lower lip like it didn’t want to be there. It wasn’t often that I saw her in any kind of formal clothing so the black dress(5) she wore looked out of place. With her face turned towards the window and her eyes on the sunset it looked like she could have been getting ready for a night out on the town. When she turned back, though, I could see the white patch of gauze(6) stuck to her cheek, covering the long, thin, stitched(7) slit, keeping it from getting infected. She had bumped it earlier that day and a dot of red soaked through the middle of the white. It made her terribly beautiful.
“You say that like it’s over my head or something. Every episode I’ve seen is basically fifteen minutes of retarded jokes about moon people smoking grass or a talking meatball going on a diet.”(8)
Todd tossed up the hacky sack again. He lay on top of my comforter, his black shirt and pants(9) blending with the fabric until it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended. There was a slight glint where the sunlight that managed to peak through the clouds and find its way through the window met the gold of his belt buckle. His usual spot was on the floor; on the bed he looked out of place, almost alien.
“Whatever…” Emma shook her head, ashing the cigarette. She tucked a stray fringe of her straight, caramel(10) hair behind her ear before returning the cigarette to her lip.
“You guys want to go out or something? Like go get something to eat?”
“Not terribly,” my voice was a croak. I had been letting Emma and Todd do most of the speaking over the past few hours.
“No,” Emma stared at the wall.
“Jesus fucking Christ…” Todd said under his breath. “So we’re just going to sit here for the rest of the night in silence? That’s what we’re going to do?”
“Yes.”
There was a finality in Emma’s voice that left no room for retort. Todd sighed again like a petulant child denied his ice cream(11) for the evening. The light that came through the window was warm, orange, more welcoming than the sterile light of noon, like the edges of the world had gone soft. Time seemed relative; it stretched on in an infinite ribbon before us as we sat in my room, surrounded by our own wordlessness. There was nothing more to say, really. A lot of talking had been done earlier but now it seemed that everything had been said. It was a time that was right for silence.
“What is it with you and that surreal shit, anyway?” Todd asked her. The sound was violent in the wake of the quiet.
“How do you mean?” her tone was dismissive, like she couldn’t care less about the answer to the question but saw it as her duty to ask for it anyway.
“Like, that movie that you made us watch the other night. What’s it called? Some kind of street or something, wasn’t it?”
“Mulholland Drive(12)?” I offered.
“Yeah! What the hell was up with that? The fucking thing didn’t even try to make sense. I felt like I was halfway through a bad acid trip(13) and kept blacking out every five minutes or so. How can you enjoy something like that?”
She shrugged, “I just do. Do I really need a reason?”
“No, it’s just weird is all.”
“There’s nothing weird about it. It’s like a poem made of images. There's something deeper there, the surface is frightening but there are things underneath.”
“So you’re calling me dumb and lazy now?”
“What? No, don’t get so defensive, I’m just saying that it’s more work than a regular movie, it takes more effort to enjoy them.”
“Why bother?”
“You know what, never mind. You just don’t get it and you refuse to try.”
“Just another one of the things I don’t fucking get, I guess. I’ll add it to the list. We could probably write a book about all the things I don’t get, can’t we? All the shit I’ll just never understand,” Todd said.
Emma’s eyes seemed damp as she stood and left. I heard a door in the hallway slam. I turned and kicked Todd in the shoulder from my position on the floor, but my sock slid across the surface of his shirt and the ball of my foot hit him in the cheek.
“The fuck, dude?” he turned to me. “Not on, man, not fucking on,” he rubbed his cheek.
“Get out of here,” I said as I turned my back to him, “Go take a walk or something.”
He left without a word, but I heard his footsteps moving down the stairs as Emma walked back in. Her eyes were red and puffy and she blew her nose into a tissue as she entered, wadding it up in her fist and pitching it into the wastebasket. She had ripped off the gauze while in the bathroom and the stitches crawled across her cheek, jagged and irregular like something out of a cheap horror movie. A line of cherry plotted a lazy course down porcelain(14) towards her chin.
“I hate autumn, it’s murder on my allergies,” she said with a sniff.
“You want an Allegra(15) or something?”
“No, it’s alright. Your room looks bigger.”
“Yeah, I’ve moved some stuff around,” I lied.
“You think it’s going to be alright?” her voice wavered a little with the words.
I thought about lying again, wanted to, but said that I didn't know.
She sat next to me on the floor, sighed, and put her head on my shoulder. We sat there in the quiet for a long time.
Footnotes:
1 - A small, round bag filled with dried beans. Introduced in 1972, it was often used in a recreation game involving standing in the circle and keeping the bag aloft.
2 - Animated television broadcasts, usually humorous in nature and aimed at a younger audience.
3 - Surrealism was an artistic movement characterized by a distinct lack of regard for traditional plot structure and suspension of disbelief. It often exploited disturbing and unsettling images and concepts in order to disquiet its audience.
4 - A product consumed by smoking, a slender paper cylinder filled with cured and fine cut tobacco. This is unusual behavior, as it was seen as a breach of etiquette to smoke indoors during this time period.
5 - It was common for women of the day to wear what was referred to as a "little black dress" to social events, as it was said to match any accessory they would choose to bring.
6 - A piece of sterile, thatched white linen, used to protect open wounds from infection while they heal.
7 - A primitive means of medical treatment involving threading the two sides of a wound together in order to hold it in place to heal properly. Often resulted in noticeable scarring.
8 - The show Fiorilla refers to here is "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a surrealist comedic animated series presented in 15-minute episodes with little continuity and little regard for rules of standards and practice of the day.
9 - During this period it was an unspoken rule that one was to wear black or other muted tones when attending a funeral.
10 - A sweet derived from melted, or "caramelized" sugar. Here it is used to establish color.
11 - Frozen confection made of dairy products, a common dessert during the time period, hence its use to characterize Todd as a child.
12 - Award-winning film directed by noted surrealist David Lynch in 2001. Famous for its use of fragmented, non-linear storytelling and use of several viewpoints and plot inconsistencies to unsettle its audience.
13 - Refers to an occasional side effect of the recreation use of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, a hallucinogenic compound used for its psychotropic effects that would sometimes subject the user to a series of horrific, nightmarish hallucinations as opposed to the more desirable, fantasy-oriented episodes.
14 - Ceramic material common in dishware created by heating raw materials (usually clay) in a kiln. Used here as imagery to illuminate the contrast between blood and skin.
15 - Common antihistamine for the time period, used to suppress mild allergic symptoms.
------------------------------------------
Footnotes strike me as a necessary evil. They're a key to understanding a text when removed from its contemporary time period by the vast gulf of time, but they also violently tear up a layer of the subtext and lay it to bare on the surface. When I read a book and I know some tiny obscure fact about synapsid biology or the mating habits of great pacific octopi and the author gets said fact right, I feel a special bond with the text. I feel that footnotes, in their quest for perfectly egalitarian literature, remove a good deal of the fun of puzzling out what things mean.
For instance, it's never supposed to be said that the characters in this story are returning from a funeral. It should be inferred (and I know I've made it much, much too difficult to tease that out, I'm trying to make it work better in the next draft) and bringing the bones to the surface in this instance, I feel, weakens the short. That's actually why I chose this one in particular. I think Emma dislikes footnotes as well.
Granted, I'm thankful for them in Gulliver's Travels, but what fun would life be if we couldn't exercise our inner hypocrite every once in a while?
-F
Sunday, September 20, 2009
So...
I was told this evening that I apparently come off as a person who's used to being alone. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. I strive for self-sufficiency, so I suppose (hehe, alliteration) that this is, in essence, the ultimate realization of that goal. The label itself, however, is problematic.
It's impossible to really know someone. No matter how close someone might claim to be to a loved one or a cherished friend, everything they think they know is a simple combination of what the first party wants to see and what the second wants the first to see.
We are strange creatures. Solitary flock animals. We like to be alone together.
Am I simply being too fucking pretentious for my own good?
Is this question a little too personal to be posing to the faceless anonymous of the interweb?
Ah, well...
F
It's impossible to really know someone. No matter how close someone might claim to be to a loved one or a cherished friend, everything they think they know is a simple combination of what the first party wants to see and what the second wants the first to see.
We are strange creatures. Solitary flock animals. We like to be alone together.
Am I simply being too fucking pretentious for my own good?
Is this question a little too personal to be posing to the faceless anonymous of the interweb?
Ah, well...
F
Friday, September 18, 2009
Here we have a word out of control.
Mephistophilis is a name in the popular vernacular often used for the Big Bad or at least the Dragon of a particular piece of media. It's come to denote a conniving, callous, scheming, and devious character. He could be described as Machiavellian, implying the absolute worst of human nature, however the word transcends the Machiavellian definition in many ways..
While someone described as Machiavellian may construct convoluted plans to further their own goals, the schemes of someone Mephistophelian would appear like Rube Goldbergs constructed of porcelain, glass, and string. They're Xanatos Gambits to the highest degree, intricate and delicate. Even the tiniest divergence from the prescribed course will send the whole thing crashing to the ground.
In Kit Marlow's Dr. Faustus, however, Mephistophilis hardly evokes this impression. Instead, he is one of the few redeemable and sympathetic characters in the whole story.
To begin, he's hardly a tempter. The first conversation between Meph and Faust goes something like this (in more elegant terms):
-----------------------------------
F: So, yeah, been looking to pawn a soul here for some ultimate temporal power.
M: Right. Can't even tell you how much of a not awesome idea that is, my man. Like, that's one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever heard. Stop.
F: Why? Come on, I'll lay mad models and shit while here on earth and I get to be a total death-metal demon when I die. How cool is that?
M: Not cool at all. Zero cool. Complete null cool factor. Being in hell sucks.
F: So? I can def escape hell, you're not even in hell right now, so it can't be that bad.
M: I am in hell right now.
F: No you aren't, you're in my kitchen. I made this pentagram out of soy sauce on the kitchen table and sacrificed my General Tso's and you totally came out of hell to greet me.
M: For a supposedly smart guy you have no understanding of metaphysical concepts. Hell is a state of mind. I'm in hell all the time you stupid douche bag.
F: So what? Hell cannot be all it's cracked up to be, there's no way.
M: No way? No way? Imagine the most pain you have ever felt your entire life. Now the most shame, and the most sorrow. Combine those into one event and multiply that by ten and you know what you have? You still have no idea how much hell sucks, you pedantic mortal prick.
-----------------------------------
Despite being a demon, supposedly a manifestation of evil incarnate, Mephistophilis actively tries to stop Faustus from selling his soul. He isn't even apathetic, eschewing the whole "Yeah, sell me your soul, what the fuck," routine in order to actually try to stop the entire process in the hopes of redeeming the good doctor. That isn't evil at all, so how the hell did his name take on such a frightening context?
Throughout the entire play, Mephistophilis isn't responsible for an act of evil that Faustus or his followers don't bid him to. Even at the end, he simply reminds Faustus of his debt before dragging him off to hell.
Of course, the term Faustian Bargain has a very apt meaning, referring to an idiot selling a part of themselves for material gain, so how did Mephistophelian stray so far from the path?
Finally, as an ending note, any version of the Faust legend which ends with Faustus repenting and the very end of his life and being saved is complete and utter bullshit (I'm looking at you, Everyman). Faustus is an asshat and has certainly earned the eternity of suffering visited upon him.
While someone described as Machiavellian may construct convoluted plans to further their own goals, the schemes of someone Mephistophelian would appear like Rube Goldbergs constructed of porcelain, glass, and string. They're Xanatos Gambits to the highest degree, intricate and delicate. Even the tiniest divergence from the prescribed course will send the whole thing crashing to the ground.
In Kit Marlow's Dr. Faustus, however, Mephistophilis hardly evokes this impression. Instead, he is one of the few redeemable and sympathetic characters in the whole story.
To begin, he's hardly a tempter. The first conversation between Meph and Faust goes something like this (in more elegant terms):
-----------------------------------
F: So, yeah, been looking to pawn a soul here for some ultimate temporal power.
M: Right. Can't even tell you how much of a not awesome idea that is, my man. Like, that's one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever heard. Stop.
F: Why? Come on, I'll lay mad models and shit while here on earth and I get to be a total death-metal demon when I die. How cool is that?
M: Not cool at all. Zero cool. Complete null cool factor. Being in hell sucks.
F: So? I can def escape hell, you're not even in hell right now, so it can't be that bad.
M: I am in hell right now.
F: No you aren't, you're in my kitchen. I made this pentagram out of soy sauce on the kitchen table and sacrificed my General Tso's and you totally came out of hell to greet me.
M: For a supposedly smart guy you have no understanding of metaphysical concepts. Hell is a state of mind. I'm in hell all the time you stupid douche bag.
F: So what? Hell cannot be all it's cracked up to be, there's no way.
M: No way? No way? Imagine the most pain you have ever felt your entire life. Now the most shame, and the most sorrow. Combine those into one event and multiply that by ten and you know what you have? You still have no idea how much hell sucks, you pedantic mortal prick.
-----------------------------------
Despite being a demon, supposedly a manifestation of evil incarnate, Mephistophilis actively tries to stop Faustus from selling his soul. He isn't even apathetic, eschewing the whole "Yeah, sell me your soul, what the fuck," routine in order to actually try to stop the entire process in the hopes of redeeming the good doctor. That isn't evil at all, so how the hell did his name take on such a frightening context?
Throughout the entire play, Mephistophilis isn't responsible for an act of evil that Faustus or his followers don't bid him to. Even at the end, he simply reminds Faustus of his debt before dragging him off to hell.
Of course, the term Faustian Bargain has a very apt meaning, referring to an idiot selling a part of themselves for material gain, so how did Mephistophelian stray so far from the path?
Finally, as an ending note, any version of the Faust legend which ends with Faustus repenting and the very end of his life and being saved is complete and utter bullshit (I'm looking at you, Everyman). Faustus is an asshat and has certainly earned the eternity of suffering visited upon him.
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