Autumn in the Abyss

by John Claude Smith

  “Stop with the references to me as Coronado,” I said, my voice cracking as old crust. I struggled as my head filled with flashing images that rolled out memories that could not be mine. The implication of their words influenced my thoughts, or perhaps altered them, much as a hallucinogen could.

  Again, ignoring my plea— give me truths, damn it, not these impossible fictions— they persisted: “You in your ever vigilant hatred of your fellow humans chose to unveil the darkest words ever. Not purely because of content, but because of intent. This sequence of words was loaded, explosive, apocalyptic.”

  Dear God! I wondered as to their madness and for once felt strong, better than somebody else. My contemptible existence was perhaps not the most contemptible existence this world had ever witnessed. These people, this undefined we, these voices from the shadows, never revealing themselves this indefatigable storyteller crushed to gruel under my large feet and swallowed by the shadows it called home might be a more worthy possessor of the disgraceful crown.

  “You tire me, Randlebot, Randlerot or whoever you are. Show yourself or leave me to my meager existence. I may be repugnant, but you don’t even rate that unworthy distinction. Be gone.” I waved my hand, a plump pigeon taking flight.

  “Even after years of isolation, you still find the cojones to treat someone you think of as human and inferior with such brazen disdain.” They found the capacity to laugh— a coarse cough, a stern bleat—which really riled me.

  “Be gone or be seen, wretched one. Or the wretched many. Then leave me be. You’ve no information of worth. I have to get back to my real research and chalk this up as time wasted.”

  Shuffling sounds, something moving in the back room, my bedroom, the bathroom. Perhaps this puny intruder was looking to escape through a window. Perhaps—

  “As you wish.” Their voice echoed from the bathroom, a refrain that lingered too long, as if calling to me, insistent.

  “Come forth without any more games or stories. I’ve had enough,” I said, rising from the floor. Patting the dust off my pants, as if the action mustered merit when, really, the pants were already soiled. But I gained a sense of faux vitality in the process. A strange illusion, one of many to come.

  “‘Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man’” Quoting Borges seemed irrelevant, until I sensed the undercurrent of unease upon which the quote was founded. My unease. A nod to impossible disclosures.

  The bathroom with its bland wallpaper— water color blue gulls of no real distinction— and its stained porcelain, its slow leaking faucet, and the prevalent black mold coating the caulk between tiles of the shower, was the ambient manifestation of my genius loci.

  I sensed the obvious lie within the statement, within Borges’ words. The only mirror in this house had splintered into a shower of shards under my heavy fist what seemed eons ago. Why should the voice suggest something as ridiculous as the possibility of a mirror when there isn’t one in that shoebox sized room? Why should the thought of my reflection, after all these years, make me recoil inside, my intestines squeezed tight as sleeping rattlesnakes?

  Rattlesnakes awakened and moving to the meat of my heart, the muscle flaccid from years of inattention.

  Nothing made sense. This mad day was one to shove aside and forget, like all the rest of the mad days which, in retrospect, can only be viewed as insipidly normal days. All the rest of the days strung together as notches on a noose.

  I made the hallway in silence, except for the sloth-like dragging of my feet on the pockmarked carpet, worn to the hardwood floor beneath by thousands of tramps along this path, yet all I wanted was to avoid this one, but for the pull… the pull…

  Truths of this nature, they come on rare occasion in our lives. Facing them, perhaps we grow, gain a glimmer of wisdom. Move forward. Unless you are like me. The thought of facing anything outside of my dull parameters caused the rattlesnakes in my belly already craving my heart to beeline toward the head, my brain. Perhaps it would be a sweet mercy, their gorging.

  Nausea wrapped me in its sweaty fist squeezing vertigo from my head and bile from my stomach. My throat constricted blocking the uprising. Some squirted through, scorching my tongue, varnishing it in the vestiges of my escalating fear.

  Yet still, I moved forward or, rather, was being pulled, pulled…

  …when I made it to the closed door.

  A snigger of malicious joy, satisfaction escaped from within the bathroom. The smudged metal door handle rattled as I reached to open it. I hesitated, my trepidation omnipresent as a mule kick to my head. I felt faint again, yet braced myself on the wall, not wanting to touch the door.

  My agoraphobia was a profound thing, more viscerally present right now than when I had walked outside— if I had actually made that trek as the evidence seemed negligible. I suffered because of the voice of the many or the one, mumbling incoherently from beyond a simple bathroom door, one I’d opened thousands of times.

  I reached for the door handle again, my heart pounding in my ears, pounding so loud I expected it to either leap out of my chest as a marlin on a taut fishing line, or simply stop in the presence of such breathtaking fright and drop me as a sack of shit to the floor. Food for insects and rats, only to be discovered years later, stripped to the bone. Unknown. Never Known.

  As my fingers greased the knob, it continued its rattling, sodium-vapor shock, cockroach dance beneath them. I closed my eyes, turned it… and pushed.

  I stepped forward and into the room. The dank smell cut by the crisp, bitter taint of urine caked on filthy porcelain assailed my nostrils and brushed as a chilly breeze across my sweat-coated face.

  I opened my eyes to stark truths, absurd epiphanies, madness… chaos! Impossible lies…

  I found myself seated on a vast, cooling desert floor, all that empty space cloying, stifling. I hiccupped and vomit spilled out of my trembling lips, staining my shirt. I glanced down at myself, leaner yet still large. Confusion reigned. Yes, the implications were clear, yet the sense was lost on me.

  I was Henry Coronado.

  But I was not Henry Coronado. I couldn’t be.

  I shivered as the night crowded in on me, an invisible horde pressing against my chilling body.

  With my eyes I followed a scorpion until it scampered beyond my view and a figure ambled from its retreat. Were they one and the same? I watched the figure as it approached grow from fitting into my palm so I could easily crush it, to standing above me, looking down with a familiar face.

  He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket. His clothes, a dark suit, were indistinct, yet that face…

  “Jack Kerouac? Jack Kerouac?” My voice sounded different, more clear, yet still in need of tuning, as if scanning a radio dial for the perfect intonations or the proper timbres.

  He ignored my cries, my obvious surprise. His always intense eyes, an inner knowing threaded around the pupils suffusing them with fatalistic understanding— at least as seen in the photos and YouTube clips I’d watched— stared down at me, though his expression was one I could not read.

  “Wipe yourself off, Henry,” he said as he handed me a monogrammed white handkerchief with magenta trim.

  I took it from his pale fingers, neon pulsing from the phalanges. I wiped and did not hand it back to him, because of my revulsion for those glowing bones and tossed it aside. It sparked and transformed into a couple dozen mutant flies, preposterous and huge, extra eyes, extra wings. They puffed tiny cigars as they lit into the darkness, circled the moon, then radiated in swift flashes of light, shooting stars: make a wish.

  I wished I was anywhere but here.

  Kerouac lit a cigarette butt, a bloated thing. In the light from the match and his shimmering fingers, I saw movement beneath its lipstick-stained skin.

  “If I pinch myself, will I wake up?” A stupid question; an inane plea. Kerouac only smiled.

  “Sure, not that you’ll wake to a life of different circumstances. Just back to t
he same old, same old, Henry.” A wry smile, knowing. “Limbo in the land of Nod. You’ve been asleep for years, Rip Van. Your somnambulant existence was courtesy of your swelling ego and of the power of words you so flagrantly flaunted, man. You knew too much and decided to share. This, my friend, was your downfall, setting you on this unenviable path, Henry—”

  “I am not Henry Coronado!”

  “Believe what you want, Henry”—a smirk laced with scorn and a trace of sympathy— “but you are who you are, though in reality, in the world outside of the world you know so well, Henry Coronado fades a little more every day. Soon, maybe a decade down the line, you will be nothing more than rumor. A minor player in some fantasist’s repertoire. A blip. Or nothing. A never was, not even imagined.” He sucked on the cigarette and held it for the briefest moment, before exhaling a plume of mutant flies, relatives to those I had witnessed a mere minute or two ago. Though these whispered as they flew by my ears. Language, words… I heard their tiny chattering voices, nonsense ribbings of Henry Coronado. Of me.

  The light pulsing from within Kerouac’s fingers shimmered neon white and purifying.

  Facing one’s true self, denial no longer an option, can be an illuminating experience, if one understands the hows and whys of such a long denial, of such a dreary existence. My eyes welled but no tears spilled. Rivers left dry; dreams never remembered. Never dreamed.

  “You see, Henry, way back then, you were warned, man, you were warned.” He took a deep swig from a large jug of wine I hadn’t noticed yet. Expected, perhaps, but hadn’t noticed. “Oh, thanks, Henry. I much prefer the drink to, well… almost anything, at this point.”

  Resigned, I said, “Carry on,” my inflection rooted in a cold, calm defeat. A cold-blooded confirmation as the skin on my arms rippled as scales. A snake in need of a morsel; a morsel of information. A morsel of diamond hard truth.

  “Coming ’round, eh?” A forked tongue flicked between his cracked black teeth. “Some people, not even specifically creative sorts, purposefully or more often randomly, push the limits beyond a point that we deem acceptable. It’s dangerous.”

  “What’s dangerous? Succumbing to the allure of one’s muse—”

  “Muse,” he said, a mocking amusement caressing the utterance. “I suppose getting to the gist is paramount to cutting away the fat.” He shook his head. “Muse has nothing to do with what we are, my friend.”

  The universal “we” again, him and the voices in his head or perhaps the others, the unseen participants in this cruel game.

  He slapped his hand to my back. Not out of friendship, but out of condescending ire. “We enjoy speaking these things, letting ourselves roll out and the beauty of us. We are woven into the fabric of it all, man. Of everything. We are the common ground even if delivery is unfamiliar from one person to another. Ground zero. The thrust of alpha and ejaculation of omega.” His eyes went glassy. He seemed to relish the image, the words. “We participate at all times, even in silence. The ever screaming silence within your head and all those who breathe through the desperation and futility that dominates the earth.”

  Words collided in my head, brakeless cars converging on a freeway with no exits, no way out… and all leading to the same central destination: the gist, as he called it. I mentally flailed on the freeway, hands tied behind my back, blindfolded, the car motivated by a volition all its own. I was simply along for the ride.

  I broke the spell, this senseless meandering through the clutter within my head and asked, “Who are you? Not you, Jack. But the we you speak of?”

  He looked at me aghast, a clown with his make-up removed, the illusion blown. “‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’” Quoting Whitman as a dodge; then again, perhaps the truth was something I failed to consider. He continued, clarification or more obfuscation: “Why, Henry… We are words. The key aspect laced into every person’s life.”

  “Words? What do you mean, words? I don’t understand.”

  Kerouac harrumphed, annoyed, and took another seemingly endless swig from the bottomless jug of wine.

  “We are words, Henry. More so, we are the intrinsic aspect of words. We are that element that keeps them alive. Words are living things, you know?”

  “Words are living things?” My brain, a gray matter puddle of goo. “Words?” I said, my face scrunched into a question mark, an uninvited guest, yet one that adorned my countenance with dour regularity.

  “Yes, words.” The most powerful weapons in this world. You may have ignored how words have sentenced you to the lovely life you’ve lived since opening your big mouth at the Welcoming Chaos event, but they haven’t ignored you. You, the ultimate fool, my egotistical friend,” he said, his smirk a lethal weapon, “brandishing words as a tool of the apocalypse—”

  “The apocalypse? How could—”

  “Man, quit fucking about. Open your head. Dive inside and skinny dip in the facts. Aren’t you paying attention?” Kerouac, or whatever he really was— an illusion or perhaps a nightmare cast in familiarity, all seemed quite possible— started to pace about, not like a lion anxious to get out of the cage, but one awaiting the trainer to shove a slab of meat in the cage… and to latch on to the arm of the trainer to sink his fangs into the point he was trying to get across to me. “Some words, some sequences of words, are dangerous. Apocalyptic. You welcomed the dark legions that gorged on the possibility of annihilation. You see, we enjoy the suffering of mankind at its own hands, means, and stupidity, but not enough to allow the end games to be played out.” He shook his head enthusiastically, shaking a finger as well— no, no! “But some rogue members of our breed don’t care. Burroughs stated that ‘language is a virus from outer space.’ He didn’t realize how close he was to the truth. Some words are viral in inconceivable ways. Cataclysmic and suicidal fantasies are their method of spreading their nihilistic tendencies. The apocalypse would bring them euphoria beyond compare. We, the guardians, cannot allow this. We are a glutton for suffering and need the wings of torment and travesty to flutter eternally. Mind you, it’s not easy keeping man’s death wish quest at bay.” He paused, absorbed by his thoughts, or the thoughts of the hive mind we he spoke of. “Our patience grows thin as the skin of a grape at the idiocy of such a self-destructive race, but our passion for its suffering supersedes our annoyance.”

  His words heavy as a dead body I carried because I had to, my cross made of flesh, the words I’d employed, nefarious. I knew what I was doing. I knew on that New Year’s Eve what I was doing. I was opening doors. I was inviting the dark legions to take the reins and ride us into the sunset. My hatred for my fellow humans had peaked. I wanted them all gone.

  I was Henry Coronado. I am Henry Coronado.

  Impossible!

  “Your rebellious quest was deterred before completion; otherwise we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. As with the many before you who catered to similar anarchic ideals, you were relegated to an existence outside of the reality you knew.”

  “Outside of the reality I knew? Preposterous.” I shoved my resignation aside, a phoenix rising up to lay claim to my sanity. “I live every day by my own means. I—”

  “You call what you’ve been doing for over fifty years living? You’re not that stupid, Henry. We aligned your monotonous existence on a plain outside of the world you had so wanted to destroy. You are caught in an endless loop of amnesia, faint recollection, obsession, research, and ultimately, rumor made real, yet fading with every passing second.”

  “My life as rumor. What lies you brandish. What ridiculous improbabilities. I spit in the face of this nightmare, anxiously waiting to wake from it in my bed—”

  “In the cold, hard world of your deteriorating mind, your deteriorating memory; the world’s deteriorating memory.” As if on cue, under infinite black heavens— I heard the scrambling of large animals above, many in force, a cacophonous din of unrelenting primitive guile: a massacre.

  Yet, I fervently denied everything!

  �
��I will awaken and you will be nothing more than a pawn in Morpheus’s devious machinations. Nothing more than dream dust scattered to the cranial dungeons.”

  “So poetic, your denial,” he said, they said, the guardians. Making their point clear, Kerouac’s face morphed and melted as wax beneath a lit wick, his body inflated, grew bulky in uneven increments— a distortion of process. Even the clothing shifted from his dark suit to a dark brown leather jacket, the material cracking as it stretched, the dead animal awakened only to cry out in agony. When the melting face recomposed itself before me into an even more familiar visage, I gasped.

  “Randlebot!”

  “No, just a tool in order to help your understanding. ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ But heed my warning, as you refused to do when Randlebot was sent to correct your path. You are slowly fading into non-existence with every passing second. Soon, anyone who thought they remembered Henry Coronado and his poetry, specifically the ominous invocation that was Autumn in the Abyss, will have died. Ink in books will rearrange to recall nothing. Fade as you do, to nothing. You will have never existed. You will have never been thought. You—”

  “Stop. This nightmare must stop! I must awaken and forget it all.”

  Randlebot… the Randlebot thing, laughed, bubbles over the edge of the pot, dark red and bleeding as a punctured artery.

  “One last note. Your obsession is the Catch-22 of your personal hell. You see, my friend” —the words are laced with a trace of compassion, another lie, I was sure— “as long as you continue to believe in Henry Coronado, you keep the reality intact, no matter how parchment thin it is.” He rubbed his thumb and two fingers together. “The only way it will ever stop is when you let go and let it drift away, man. Learn to forget. After years poisoning the space outside of the reality you knew, you will eventually fade, never to wake from the limbo of staring at blank walls for days, months, years— forever, man. Forever.” He leaned forward and thrust his fist into his palm. That is the only way this will ever end. That is the only way you, Henry Coronado, will ever be set free.” He snorted, a cat teasing a cornered mouse. Confirmation of the lie his bogus compassion expressed. “Some of us don’t care whether you ever reach this realization. As mentioned, we thrive on mankind’s suffering. You being a man in between, a man stuck, oh”—he quivered, a ripple of bliss, a caress of pleasure unimaginable— ”your suffering brings such pleasure to us.”