And so on.
There is no escape from the repetitiveness of The Loop. This is why the message intrigues me so – it is a true break from the endlessly recurring nature of my Loop-life.
~*~
Reading the message for the seventh time doesn’t give me any more clues regarding its origin.
And why does the person named Frances say I’ve returned for you? The only people that care about my condition are the ones keeping me alive in the real world; at least I assume there’s someone keeping me alive up there. For all I know I may be nothing more than an imprint of consciousness, a ball of neuronal echoes that has outlived my human body.
My dreams say otherwise.
Almost every night I dream that someone is waking me; that someone is tending to me and taking care of me. If only this were true. If only The Loop was as forgiving as my dreams. Still, my dreams are equally suffocating. I can’t wake up from them, no matter how hard I urge myself, no matter how hard I push myself forward in hopes of tearing from the virtual dream ether.
No matter how hard.
I raise my hand to hail a taxi. There are always taxis in The Loop, all sensuous curves and gaudy chopped and channeled black-and-yellow sheet metal, the cabs you’d see cruising the streets of 1940s New York City if R. Crumb had designed their taxis – except these taxis hover, just like the aeros vehicles in the real world.
A taxi always stops if you raise your hand in The Loop. They don’t have preprogrammed histories like most of the other things that occur during my day. They only come when I want them to come. Of course, there are more interesting ways to travel in The Loop. If I wanted, I could pull an NPC driver out of their car, kill them, and take the car, but it’s generally less hassle to travel peacefully. Besides, I’d like to make it to Devil’s Alley in one piece.
A taxi lowers to the ground, its engine kicking and thumping. I get in and the driver turns to me. A huge grin nearly splits his phizog; a grimy bowler is jauntily cocked over one eye. ‘Where to, buddy?’ He smells like motor oil and tuna fish sandwiches.
‘To the bowels of the city, Mac,’ I say. ‘And don’t spare the horses.’
‘Devil’s Alley, eh? You got it.’
The engine coughs and sputters, catches, and blows fumes as we lift into the air. It doesn’t need to cough and sputter and blow fumes, but everything here is designed to look old and beat up, scratched and dented, ripped and torn, used, abused, twisted, cracked and crazed. Blemished, pockmarked, and polluted – the attributive adjectives of The Loop are endless. One glance at the seat’s worn upholstery confirms this.
‘What’s buzzin’, cousin?’ the driver asks as he speeds along, weaving around other vehicles.
‘You jivin’ me, man?’
Sometimes I don’t know if the NPC’s are screwing with me or if they really don’t know that I’ve been living the same day for nearly two years. I think Morning Assassin gets it, but the others…
‘Jivin’? What choo mean, jivin’?’ he coughs, bangs his fist against his chest. The rain picks up and he flicks on his little windshield wipers; the digital water hits the windshield only to be whipped off by tiny wipers. There’s something beautiful about it, but I’m too distracted by the driver’s blabbering to really appreciate it.
‘Hey, kid, I’m talking to you. What do you mean?’
‘I mean I live the same day every damn day. Why are we still talking?’
‘If you want another driver I can dump you out here…’ He dips into a lower airlane.
I access my inventory list and snag item number 399 – a Taser. I press the button on the grip and electricity sparks and crackles in the back seat, a counterpoint to the lightning outside.
‘Jesus!’ the driver says, nearly swerving into another aeros in the opposite airlane.
‘Goose it it and can the chatter, Jack! And keep your eyes on the skylane you son of a bitch.’
‘All right, mister, keep your hair on – Sheesh!’
I enjoy the rest of the trip to Devil’s Alley in relative silence. Once we’ve landed, I transfer credit to the driver, who is still angry I threatened him. Credit is used for most transactions in The Loop and I have an unlimited supply, pennies from heaven. No matter how much I spend, my account resets itself to the maximum amount every morning. Too bad there isn’t anything I want to buy.
Devil’s Alley is a big place, but I’m pretty sure Frances Euphoria will want to meet me at Barfly’s, the most run-down, seediest, grimiest, blood-and-sawdust-on-the-floor gin joint The Loop has to offer. As I move deeper into the slum, NPCs gravitate towards me, clad in trench coats and fedoras, hiding their faces behind dark umbrellas. A streetwalker in a shiny red bomber jacket spins her umbrella behind her head like a tragic Madame Butterfly. A tranny diddles his ding-a-ling on the fire escape overlooking the entrance to the alley, while a cat hisses and a giant rat scurries through a mound of trash. Muscled kookies mill about shadowed doorways, cruisin’ for a bruisin’.
I step into one of the alleys, over an NPC fiend shivering in the cold rain. A hand reaches out and latches onto my ankle.
‘Hey brother…’ the fiend cackles. ‘Can you spare some cred?’
I transfer him half of everything I have. ‘That should be enough to buy some Riotous.’
The lights of the alley paint harshly contrasting diagonal stripes across his sallow, grimy face as he fumbles in his pocket. ‘You mocking me, smart guy?’ he asks, pulling a switchblade. He twists the blade in the air like a drunken conductor. ‘You think you’re better’n me, think you can just throw me cred like I’m some charity case!?’
The fiends in The Loop are vicious, unpredictable rat-bastards, a class of downgraded guttersnipes, slumdog tramps addicted to a drug known as Riotous. I press my finger into the air, accessing my inventory list. A drop-down menu appears in front of me; the bum freezes as I make my selection. Day 171’s item will do the trick nicely. A sledge hammer appears in my hands and I swing it into his chest like I’m teeing off at the Apple Grove. He slams into the wall with a satisfying crunch of bone and cartilage, and blows pixelated blood out of his mouth and nose.
‘Hey! You can’t do that!’ An even grungier fiend is on his feet, and I’m behind him before he can reach me. One swing of the sledge and he too Humpty-Dumptys into the muck and filth of the alley.
~*~
Barfly’s sign buzzes and flickers at the end of the alley, a neon floozie in a Martini glass, endlessly scissoring her legs, electric bubbles sequentially popping above her head. People move through the shadows leading up to the place, speaking in whispers behind cupped hands, breathing in each other’s cigarette smoke. Grit for breakfast, a kick in the teeth for lunch, home before dinner in a coffin carried by skeletal pallbearers, a .38 slug through your heart – welcome to my life. I’ve spent endless dismal days squatting in this dive, drinking to the point of faux-ossification and then fighting my way across The Loop, only to wake up back in the flophouse the following morning as if it had all been a dream. Being bored is an understatement.
‘Quantum.’ The doorman claps his arm across my shoulders. He is a chiseled guy, his face angular and rough like the Old Man of The Mountain’s used to be, before it collapsed. This guy would give the Old Man a run for his money in the rustic beezer department. Trust me, I know – I’ve dealt with Croc several times after things got dicey at Barfly’s.
‘I’ll behave,’ I say instead of hello.
‘You always do,’ he says with a flinty glint in his eye.
Maybe I’m spooked; maybe I’ve lived the same day so many times that there are surely things I haven’t noticed in the 545 previous iterations. It kind of makes me wonder how much I missed when the days weren’t on repeat, when The Loop (the name I’ve given it) was nothing more than the game-slash-entertainment dreamworld known as Cyber Noir.
‘You waitin’ on someone? Chippy, maybe?’ Croc asks, chewing on a toothpick.
‘You can tell? Some NPC you are…’
‘NPC?’
Non Player Characters never refer to themselves as NPCs, which only makes this place more maddening. Sometimes I think I’m the crazy one… sometimes.
‘Frail named Frances Euphoria. She here??’ I ask. A quick scan across the bar tells me the usual suspects are present – drunks and divas, lounge lizards and booze hounds, gamblers, grifters and bunco artists – no matter what the clock reads. Getting soused is the name of the game.
‘Frances Euphoria...’
‘Well, Croc?’
‘Don’t know the broad. Pull up a pew and maybe she’ll show. You never know, Daddy-O.’
The patience flows out of his face and I oblige – no sense in riling this one up unnecessarily. I sit at the same barstool I always sit at, on the far left hand side of the bar, facing the door so I can see who comes in. One can only have a pool cue upside the noggin but so many times before one realizes that it may be time to change seats.
Cid the bartender is a grizzled old bastard in a white shirt, black bow tie, and none-too-clean apron, with a sawed off, lead-loaded baseball bat behind the bar. He pulls me a pint in a none-too-clean mug and slides it to me. I catch it before it sails off the end, and the exquisitely rendered foam slops over my hand. I savor the first swallow. It’s cold-ish, and tastes sort of beer-ish, and if I pour enough down my piehole it’ll get me kind of drunk-ish.
It ain’t great, but it’ll do.
I nod my thanks, and Cid winks in return. His mono-brow dances like a caterpillar on a hot plate.
A dame walks in, and she’s the cat’s meow – stacked like pancakes, with cleavage down to there and gams up to here, and a tight black dress that looks like it came out of a spray can. Her hair is devil red, her skin whiter than the finest blow, and the triangular icon over her head is blue sky blue, cornflower blue, blue the color of life blue. She’s an actual person, not an NPC, and I’m not going to lie – I’m simply mesmerized by the color. Almost two years…
‘Frances Euphoria?’ I wipe the beer foam off my lips.
‘Three Kings Park, seven o’clock tomorrow night.’
She turns slightly and she’s all of a sudden sporting a Rambo knife with a wicked saw tooth spine. I’ve got one just like it – item number 4 in my inventory. She strikes like a cobra and slams the blade into my chest.
I’m dead before my pint hits the floor.
Reader,
The Feedback Loop is out now. The follow-up will be called…
And it will be out in September.
True fear is easily created and rarely destroyed. True art is always the opposite.
A serrated existence that runs from Austin to Mexico, New York to Tokyo, Boy versus Self is a disquieting journey into the mind of a penniless artist as he struggles with violent hallucinations that could kill him.
About the book: Writing this book took a lot out of me. I began Boy versus Self in 2013, writing by hand and finishing in the fall of that year. The terrifying nature of the book forced me to put it away for a while, in the proverbial desk drawer that Stephen King and others have made so famous. I decided to examine the book again in its entirety at the start of 2015.
One thing is safe to say -- the work still sends a shiver down my spine, but not as much for the ghosts or the various entities Boy encounters within the dark pages. No, it was the pacing of the book, its ups and downs, that made me feel as if I were going insane, both in the parts of the writing process and the subsequent read-through. Yes, but you're the author, you may think. In my defense, not reading a book for well over a year allows one to step away from the work, to re-examine its merit and its story with a fresh perspective. It was during this re-examination process that I was able to contemplate the very nature of this book, the nature of mental disorder as seen through the eyes of an artist and the resulting mayhem.
Boy versus Self is part horror, part psychological thriller; a work filled with artistic concepts and references watered down by the pages of time and years lost to mental decay. It is a book that gives new meaning to the title as the story unfolds, the work which I am most proud of and most frightened by.
Available here
Warning – this book is not for the faint at heart.
(Sample) BOY versus SELF
(A Psychological Thriller)
Harmon Cooper
Available on Amazon here
‘If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few.’
–Gustav Klimt
‘All art is quite useless.’
–Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Chapter 1: Glass Halfie
Boy’s Age: 18
It starts with small shards and memories on the dresser Girl shares with Boy. It starts with one piece, the bottom of a beer bottle with the numbers 247000143 pressed into it. The piece of glass is brown, uneven like the petrified jaw of an ancient shark. Girl runs her fingers along it, feels its dull edge push against her skin.
The only person that sees her do it is Boy, but she knows his secret too – she’s seem him up at night talking to no one.
He tells her to throw the glass away, but her collection has started, and there’s nothing Boy can do about it. He’s distracted with his art anyway. So he lets her keep the broken bottle on their shared dresser next to the Old Spice aftershave he uses as cologne.
Within the week, Girl finds a piece of stained glass leaning against the dumpster near their apartment. Nice piece, already red at the tip and blue on the wider end. Thick piece. Once pressed against the skin it feels more or less like a butter knife. Not sharp enough, but still beautiful, so she keeps it.
While Boy watches TV, Girl lays on their bed with her two pieces of glass. She holds the pieces over her head, drops them in close and peers through them at the ceiling light. She wishes she was somewhere else but she doesn’t know where.
Her ears perk up when Mom drops an empty glass in the kitchen. ‘I’ll clean it up!’ Girl calls out. ‘No!’ Mom says, ‘Stay back, there’s glass everywhere!’
There’s glass everywhere!
It’s a reason to come forward so she does, dips in quickly while Mom is retrieving the dustbin, palms a sliver of glass shaped like an icicle. The instant the piece of glass is squeezed it draws blood, fresh, beautiful blood.
She runs to her bedroom, opens her palm to see the cut. She licks the blood off her palm, carefully runs her tongue around the sliver of glass. Girl smiles at herself in the mirror on their dresser. Her teeth are vampire red, her eyes are black olives.
The red, the throbbing pain in her palm, the crimson contrast against her teeth, her fixed gaze. It was there, in front of the mirror, in their shabby duplex in Huntington, West Virginia, that Girl grew to love pain, its color, its sting, and its meanings both hidden and blatant.
A few months after her thirteenth birthday, Girl’s collection of glass goes from three to twenty-five pieces. Boy continues to let it slide because it seems to make her happy. Half-broken beer bottles with chunks of glass sticking out of their serrated trunks line their dresser like stalagmites. Brown, white, green, clear, yellow. They stand next to each other like wounded soldiers admiring each other’s injuries. War-torn courage. There’s something skin-tingling about its secondhand aesthetics.
A decision is made – the first word she will carve into her body will be glass. The second word will be halfie.
Boy’s reading a comic book on the couch. He’s read the same comic five times by now, Girl knows this, and he will read it several more times before he moves on to the next issue. Spawn. He loves the horrifying drawings, the grotesque figures, the big-breasted women. If he’s not reading them, he’s drawing them – an endless circle of self-gratification and figure study.
Girl looks at his X-Men comics too sometimes, wishing she looked more like Jean Gray than she did Storm. That’s her father’s fault; the dark Mexican Santiago who she’s only seen in photos. Two photos, actually. Mom keeps them hidden, but she knows where to find them.
No matter – Girl closes the bathroom door.
She takes off her shorts and sits down on the toilet seat. She spreads her legs wide. One more deep breath and she lowers the piece of glass. She chooses a spot on the inside of her thigh, a place no one will see.
Girl’s not stupid. She knows what people will think if her new cut is in an obvious place. She’s not ready to show her words to the world just yet. She smiles as the sharp piece of glass breaks the surface of her smooth skin. The initial pain spreads up and out until her entire leg is on fire. God it feels wonderful.
The blood trails down the inside of her thigh. She watches it fall, smiles faintly as the pain intensifies. Some of the blood gets on the outer rim of the toilet bowl as she finishes the word glass. She starts carving the word halfie across from it. Somehow, blood has gotten onto her panties. A few droplets hit the bathroom floor and she stands.
Girl pulls her panties off over the fresh wounds and the cotton fills with blood. She says a word she’s not quite able to say as convincingly as adults. Fuck! She’s not angry at the pain, she’s angry at her own stupidity in forgetting to take off her panties. She hates to waste clothing, was brought up that way. She can’t take many hand-me-downs from her brother so her clothing has to last.
She tosses her panties onto the bathroom floor and turns the shower on. A trail of blood leads from the toilet seat to the bathtub. It looks like someone was stabbed there because someone was stabbed there. Girl sets the piece of glass down next to the bar of Dial soap that resembles a hunk of melted candy corn.
The blood dripping down her leg swirls into the water. It’s mesmerizing, the little red and clear funnel against the yellowed bathtub. Girl pulls her shirt off, throws it onto the sink.
Tokyo Stirs: (Short Stories about Asia) Page 12
