Earworm

by Aaron Thomas Milstead

  It read: I’ll always love both of you.

  And then I drove away from my home—with nowhere to go and Hell on my heels.

  A spirit climbs my spine to the brain,

  Following the rail-road tracks down again.

  I needed space with soul, maybe we can die there.

  Maybe we can . . .

  Stop.

  I’m already dead.

  Stop.

  I’m already dead.

  My-my-my mother—she said:

  “Heaven’s on one shoulder,’

  But, baby, hell is on the other.”

  —Deadboy and the Elephantmen

  12.

  A Distant Rumble

  I drove aimlessly through town, constantly checking my rearview mirror for flashing police lights. More than once I imagined a leering corpse was nestled in my truck bed, but it was just a handheld pest control sprayer and a rusty toolbox. The wind whistled through my door and my back tire beat out a tune on the concrete, but what I heard was the soft echo of a skull being crushed beneath my feet.

  Quit torturing yourself, kid. You didn’t do anything wrong. Dead is dead.

  Maybe, I told him. But if death can be measured in degrees then that poor bastard is extra dead.

  That poor bastard tried to put a pinkie up your wife’s bunghole.

  My wife? That led my thought process down an even darker path. At some point during my meanderings I stopped at a Whataburger and ordered four double cheeseburgers. As the soft flesh relented beneath my teeth I felt a mixture of pleasure and revulsion.

  Time to say goodbye to your old life, kid. Carrion-Six-Toe is going to go after you until we are both dead.

  I can’t just leave my daughter.

  Can’t you though? Let’s face it, you haven’t really been much of a father anyway. Your ex will find someone else, maybe an older guy who can give them . . .

  Pineapple!

  Don’t be like that. I’m just—

  Fucking Pineapple, motherfucker. I screamed. Outside it was quiet, but inside my skull my voice reached a decibel that would have shattered wine glasses.

  Silence.

  I drove around town and, for once, the silence was golden. How could I just leave everything behind like it had never existed? Abandon my daughter the way that I had been . . . I couldn’t leave her. I wouldn’t.

  It was dark as I pulled into the parking lot of Villa Claire, a small apartment complex populated by retirees and a single Gen-Xer—Fieldy. I stepped out of my truck, caught a whiff of myself and took stock of the gore covering my shirt, slacks, and particularly my pitiful dress shoes. I racked my brain for an explanation that Fieldy might believe: a broken sewer pipe, a bad case of SARS, an exploding armadillo . . .

  I saw the soft blue glow of the swimming pool and silently hopped the fence and stepped over to the edge. The swimming pool was so clean that I could see motes softly dancing across the flawlessly clean bottom. I stepped into the warm water and the dark filth flowed off me like the Venom symbiote from the Amazing Spiderman seeking a host, only in reverse.

  A shard of bone settled to the bottom and promised to frighten some oblivious geriatrics the next day.

  I climbed out of the pool and even though I was soaking wet I somehow felt lighter. The complex was quiet. Only the distant rumble of cars and a faraway plaintiff train whistle betrayed the illusion that civilization was dead and I was inhabiting a post-apocalyptic dystopian world like the fungal zombie-controlled nightmare in The Last of Us.

  I stepped onto the porch of Unit 8 and rang the doorbell. A full minute passed before I heard a chain being unlatched and then the door swung open. Fieldy was wearing a pair of tightie whities, a surprising gut hanging over the edge of his waistband. His hair was unkempt and his eyes were red. He stared at me perplexedly and finally asked, “Is it raining?” His breath reeked of alcohol and his words were slightly slurred.

  “No.”

  Fieldy slowly shook his head and asked, “Did she leave you, mate?”

  I slowly nodded.

  “Damn.” He reached out to hug me, but when I tensed up, he pulled back and gently patted my shoulder. “Come on in . . . take off your shoes and socks first.”

  I did as he said and stepped into the living room.

  Suddenly my temporary residence at the pool house didn’t seem so pathetic; his tiny living room looked like it belonged to a collection of frat boys and derelicts. I sat down on a leather couch that seemed to be held together by duct tape and the glass coffee table in front of it was covered with empty beer cans and empty McDonald’s bags. A glance into the adjoining kitchen revealed a trashcan that was overflowing and had spilled over to a checkerboard patterned floor that was desperately in need of a thorough cleaning. A huge lump of flesh that I had mistaken for an oversized throw pillow grunted at me and lazily licked at the air; it was Dante, Fieldy’s English bulldog.

  Fieldy caught my eyes and said, “I really do need to straighten up a bit, but I haven’t had much in the way of human company lately.”

  “Are you and Linda on the splits?” I asked.

  “Jesus, mate. We broke up almost three years ago.”

  “So this is what single life looks like?”

  Fieldy laughed. “It isn’t so bad really. You know I wanked off right where you are sitting not an hour ago?”

  I shifted uneasily. “Cool . . . ”

  “Damn straight. No one to tell me I can or can’t wank off.”

  I nodded and added, “But also no one around to wank you off either.”

  “Ripley,” Fieldy began, “Are you a glass half empty kind of guy?”

  “I wish,” I said. “My glass has been completely empty for a while now. Dry as a bone.”

  “It’s going to be okay, mate,” Fieldy said. “Are you sure it’s a permanent situation or is she just figuring things out?”

  “It seems permanent,” I said. “And I wish that was the worst part.”

  “What’s worse than that, mate?” Fieldy shook several cans and found a Boddington’s that made a gentle slosh and brought it up to his lips.

  Don’t tell him about me, kid. Sure as hell don’t tell him about the body that you stomped . . .

  Pineapple!

  “I’m dying.” Fieldy’s expression didn’t change a bit. I could have told him I had the measles or an overdue library book. “I mean it. I’m being completely literal. I’m dying.”

  “Aren’t we all, mate?” He slurped the last of his beer and crushed the can. If the gesture was meant to somehow punctuate his profound claim then it failed miserably.

  That was the moment I realized Fieldy was completely shitfaced and maybe also on something stronger than alcohol. Regardless, I had to tell someone else about what was happening to me—a verbal catharsis to go with the physical baptism I’d already experienced in the swimming pool. “I mean I’m dying. Quickly dying. The doctor told me I’ve got like a few more weeks if I’m lucky.” Dante eased over into my space and put his massive head into my lap. His eyes were red and wet.

  “What the fuck?” Fieldy’s British accent vanished and the reality of my statement broke his blank expression. “Why, man? Bloody hell, you are younger than me.”

  “‘I’ve got a degenerative brain disease. It’s causing all kinds of chaos. Imagine a series of dominoes quickly falling—that’s the cells in my brain.”

  “Ripley . . . ” Fieldy swallowed his emotions in the manner that all East Texas boys are taught and continued, “Is that why you’ve lost so much weight?”

  “Probably,” I said as I considered how far my catharsis could go; Fieldy was a good audience. Even though Bogart was remaining silent I could feel his unspoken angst. I realized I should weigh my words, but letting them flow freely felt so good. “Recently I’ve started hearing voices too . . . Well, one voice.”

  Fieldy’s eyes widened. “A voice?”

  “Nothing creepy or anything,” I said defensively. “It’s not telling me to kill people
or talking about Satan.”

  “What kind of voice then?”

  “It’s a fairly benign one,” I said. “Most of the time Bogart means well, I think.”

  “Bogart?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s his name. He’s a—”

  Don’t do it, kid. You can’t put this genie back in the bottle.

  “What is he?” Fieldy asked.

  I shrugged.

  Fieldy sat down on the couch and stared at the ceiling for what seemed to be a long time and then muttered, “I think I know why you jumped in the swimming pool.”

  “Why?”

  Fieldy stuck his hand between the couch cushions, floundered around and pulled out a zip lock baggy filled with round yellow pills. He dug a few out of the bag and swallowed them dry. Then he carefully resealed the bag and stashed it back away within the confines of the couch. His eyes widened as he turned to me and said, “You needed to be cleansed.”

  I nodded and said, “That’s what I was thinking, like baptized.”

  Fieldy frowned and said, “I gave up on all of that Christian horseshit long ago, mate. You know my parents practically raised me in a cult.”

  “Pentecostal?”

  “Worse even,” Fieldy said. “Never mind that. Sometimes different roads can lead to the same place. In my reckoning you probably felt corrupted . . . stagnant.”

  I nodded.

  “There is a Shinto belief that everything needs to flow. I figured you were trying to restore some kind of balance. If water doesn’t flow, then it stagnates. Becomes impure. It accumulates filth and things start growing in it, like bugs. I don’t mean in like a moral way, but spiritually. There is a real belief among some people that humanity is in a state of stagnation right now. You can look at how we are treating each other and the environment and even the animals around us. We live in a world where nothing flows anymore. We have basically all settled to the bottom of a stagnant pit of water. The human dregs . . . The dregs of humanity.”

  I continued to nod, but Fieldy was getting a little too esoteric for me. Probably the booze and oxy and God knows what else, all pushing his thoughts into frenzied motion.

  “I mean think about it, mate. What have you or I done? The way we live. We might as well still be teenagers. A whole generation of leeches clinging to the teats of our parents. And the generation below us? Infinitely worse. If we are guilty of complacently settling into stagnation, then they are guilty of never getting into motion at all. Their very existence is a façade. A series of selfies and self-gratifying Facebook posts about—

  “It’s an earworm,” I interrupted.

  “What?” Fieldy scrunched up his face at being pulled from his deep reflections. “What is an earworm, Ripley?”

  Don’t do it.

  “Bogart is,” I said. “He’s an earworm.”

  Fieldy shook his head and asked, “The voice in your head? You mean you can’t get it out of there? Like a mantra or a bad pop song?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “But it’s not just a voice. It’s a creature. He crawled in there and nestled into my brain.”

  Fieldy smiled. “Touché. I accuse you of being stagnant and you put it back in my face; bugs growing in still water . . . ”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re being literal?”

  I nodded.

  “Mate . . . Is your condition . . . does it . . . are there side effects?”

  “Tons,” I admitted. “Both from my condition and from the meds.”

  “Are delusions part of the side effects?”

  “They are, but this isn’t that. Bogart is real.”

  “Rip . . . You know how crazy that sounds, mate.”

  “But it isn’t just the voice.”

  Shut your trap, kid. If this goofball calls the cops and you get arrested . . . You won’t last the night in a jail cell.

  I knew that Bogart was right, but it was all too much for me to keep to myself. I told Fieldy to sit back and I told him most of the truth, starting with how I found Chaz’s murdered body and fainted when I was confronted by the white-faced giant with the blowtorch. I told him about the strange dreams and cravings and hallucinations, how I eventually heard Bogart and realized I’d been infested. I told him what happened with my mother-in law that night and what my soon to be ex-wife said to me afterwards. What I held back was the part about the animated corpse that I mutilated and wrapped in a sheet and sunk to the bottom of my stagnant swimming pool. That was the part that could get me arrested.

  I expected Fieldy to throw me right out of there, but instead he popped a few more of those yellow pills and asked, “Chaz Blackburn?”

  “Yeah.”

  He pulled out a laptop and furiously typed. After a moment he asked, “Is this the guy?”

  I glanced over at the screen and saw the familiar Facebook page. “Yeah, that’s him.”

  Fieldy nodded. “You were right, he looks like a real douche. He hasn’t posted in a few weeks, but he posted regularly before that. Pretty big Trump supporter. Jesus, his favorite bands are Limp Bizkit, Nickelback, and something called Daughtry?”

  “I think that was the bald guy who was on American Idol,” I offered.

  “Awful. He’s got like a dozen friends and they all look like they are auditioning for a movie about how meth was invented. If anyone knows he’s dead, they haven’t updated his Facebook account yet. His last update was: Ready to be raped? Jesus, mate.”

  “Trust me,” I said. “He’s dead.”

  Fieldy nodded and said, “Let me check the missing person’s report.” He went back to typing and said, “KTRE has a list of everyone that’s been missing in East Texas over the past month. There’s a twenty-year-old blonde woman who was last seen on foot after she got into an argument with her boyfriend. I’m guessing I know who the primary suspect is. There’s a sixteen-year-old girl who was missing in Baton Rouge, but the FBI suspects she was abducted, gang raped, shot, and fed to gators. Several other women and over a dozen young girls. A few young boys as well. The only grown man that has officially gone missing is a bald guy in his sixties who was five-feet three-inches and weighed over three hundred pounds.”

  “It could be that no one even knows Chaz is missing. Like you said, he wasn’t that popular.”

  “Maybe so,” Fieldy said. “I’ll admit I was hoping to find a recent Facebook post so I could prove that you are . . . Well, you know.”

  “That I’m nuts,” I said. “And I might be. That would actually be a lot easier to accept than the alternative. Symbiotic aliens and ancient evil and some kind of group consciousness out to destroy mankind.”

  Fieldy sprung to his feet and snapped his fingers. “That’s it, mate. There was something familiar about your story and that just brought it back to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve heard it all before,” Fieldy said. “The symbiotes and the Elders . . . all of it.”

  I felt a rush of hope. “Where? Who?”

  “There was a podcast that I listened to a few years back,” he said. “It was called the Eldritch Tentacle; a low budget one-man operation with low production values, but more laughs than the best episode of Rick and Morty. It was the horror geek’s equivalent of discovering Grumpy Cat. It was all the rage on Redditt and went viral. This guy with a wonderfully deep voice and a somber tone went on and on about how the world was doomed if we didn’t wake up to the malignant forces around us. I specifically remember him talking about symbiotes, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers type stuff. The best part is the guy was a professor at Angelina Jr. college—Bennie was friends with him for a while. I think they used to get together and have long intellectual discussions, probably about Lovecraft and Tentacle Porn. His name was River—or was it Brooks? Something waterish. And you are telling me you’ve never heard of him?”

  “Never,” I said.

  “You are usually up on the geek cultural touchstones. With him being a local I figured you’d be all about him,” F
ieldy said. “His listeners thought the podcast was this elaborate spoof like that War of the Worlds Orson Welles radio broadcast, but the chap first went to Twitter and then dedicated several podcasts to stress that everything he was saying was true. He was beyond adamant. That’s when the fan boys turned on him personally and trolled him so viciously that he had no choice but to shut the show down. I’m shocked you’ve never heard of this.”

  I shrugged. “Nope.”

  Fieldy laughed. “Towards the end there were several memes featuring the chap being raped by octopuses. Or is it octopi? The trolls found pictures of him and worked up some grisly photo shops. There’s no wonder he quit.”

  “And you’re saying that his podcast was reminiscent of what I told you?”

  Fieldy shrugged. “I don’t know, mate, I think so. I’m high as shit and this is all so nuts. No reflection on what you are going through, but Bennie seemed to think that he was schizophrenic. They had a falling out or something.”

  “I need to talk to him,” I said.

  “Sure, we can call Bennie in the morning, but like I said I don’t think he’s talked to the guy in a long time.”

  I shook my head. “Not Bennie, he’s a total fucking gossip. I like him, but he would tell everyone what’s going on with me. You are the only one I can trust, Fieldy.”

  Fieldy smiled. “I feel you. You’re right, too, Bennie is practically a woman. When Linda dumped me that asshole posted his condolences on Facebook for God’s sake. He’d probably go straight to Dare and fuck things up for you— Damn, mate, have you thought about getting visitation? The house?”

  “Have you got any beer left?”

  He shook his head. “You don’t want to do that, mate. I’m sorry, motor mouth. You don’t need to worry about all that shit. For God’s sake, you just found out. You just need some time to process. Get your head on straight. Are you sure you are . . . dying? And you don’t want to tell Dare?”

  “I’m sure, for now.”

  “You need help, mate.”

  “I saw a therapist.”

  “And how did that go?”

  “It was . . . whatever. I’d rather talk to this guy. Do you think he still teaches at Angelina?”