You’re going to make yourself sick, Logic, Defense, and Neutral all agreed. You’re going to make yourself sick, and probably puke your insides out until you die.
Good, I thought, no longer certain which part of me I even was anymore. At least I’ll be in the right place.
Black pepper, citrus-lime, and teriyaki flavored beef jerky washed down with lukewarm cotton candy flavored vodka…
The groundskeeper at the cemetery was in for one hell of a mess if I didn’t survive this.
****
“Hey, Anne,” I finally said.
I’d been standing in front of her grave long enough that I’d come to lose track of how much time it had been. It felt like hours. But, even being crazy, I knew that time had a funny way of moving in places like this; had a funny way of moving in situations like this. Death had an especially strange way of warping time. Caught up in the throes of death, either in its grip or witnessing somebody you cared about wrapped up in its clutches, it could creep by so slowly you were certain you were being tortured by each second or it could be over so fast that you’d never come to fully know what happened.
In a single night—not long ago and yet somehow too long now, it seemed—I’d experienced both versions. I’d watched my entire world rolled out as though somebody had replaced my eyes with monitors playing the slow-motion footage of the scene, and I’d been certain I could leisurely walk beside the ambulance as it drove off. I’d have dragged each foot along, pacing myself against the inching tires, and run my fingertips along the cold, lifeless siding of that vehicle in a mockery of how I used to trace her form when she lay beside me. Then, only moments after that, a man had pulled a gun on me—meant to put me in an ambulance all my own—and put a scalding-hot reminder of what a dumb, worthless fuck I am right over my heart. And, looking back on that now, that part was all a blur. Everyone else had seemed to move with superhuman speed—like everyone had stepped out of a Flash comic book and wanted to act out the entire scene with their powers.
Introducing The Incredible Adventures of Mister Sixty-Three! In this issue: Mister Sixty-Three Versus the Crow Killer in… “T-BUILT SENDS HIS CONDOLENCES!”
Also featuring Jace-the-Too-Slow-Joke…
Yeah, death had a funny—fucking HILARIOUS!—way of warping time. Death, and places that remembered death, celebrated death. Places like this: a cemetery. The cemetery, as far as I was concerned. A farm where people planted corpses, watered them with tears, and slabs of concrete grew. A forest of dead names where not even the flowers left in their memories sustained their vitality for long. Worn paths from decades of dragged foot traffic scored bald spots on the surface of the ground as uncertain and random as the lives of those buried beneath it.
It was a place where the grass grew in grayer than it would in other places.
It was a place where the songs of birds sounded hollow and wrong.
And now—for this one miserable and stupid son-of-a-bitch, at least—it was a place it was a place where time didn’t want to make sense.
For who-the-fuck-knew-how-long I stood there, silent and time-warped as death itself, before a smoothed-out chunk of etched rock. Standing there and resenting it. I resented it for everything it was and everything it was supposed to represent. And, along with it, I resented myself.
And then the cycle began.
It was a cycle that I’d come to know quite well, but one that I’d thought—I’d hoped—that I’d gotten over; one that had numbed and, I’d thought, fallen away like a rotted stump from a healthy body:
Pain led to resentment. Resentment to bitterness. Bitterness to anger. And, of course, a few yaddah-yaddah-yaddahs later, and—you guessed it, class—we reach hate. Self-hatred, to be precise. It was a speech that anybody from this century might have been able to recite back, and in a certain ever backwards-talking muppet Jedi’s voice, no less, but it took a true master in the art of hatred to know it in their hearts rather than just in their brains. It was a Padawan’s hate that shot only forward and never back. Only a Jedi master of the deepest and most vile of scorn knew its true form, not of an arrow pointing at others but of a tangible ozone that all-but surrounded anything and everything. It was in all things and cycling back to its owner until they knew nothing but that hate. And then, hating everything like they did, it came back to them. Like a sort of echolocation, the process of hating—truly hating—wasn’t complete until it bounced back and came home.
It wasn’t enough to just hate the rock, the master knew, the journey wasn’t over until you hated yourself for hating the rock.
Hello, hatred, my old friend…
Thinking of that tombstone and the bones buried beneath it stirred up a fresh gumbo of hatred in my guts. Two-hundred-and-six adult bones, plus another two-hundred-and-seventy that would never fully develop. Those numbers had been a part of me for a long time. In a morbid fit of desperate curiosity, eager for some dark trivia to rub like some form of mental ash into the open wound of Anne’s recent death, I’d taken to Google to find out how many bones had been carted off in the ambulance that night. Two-hundred-and-six. The adult body contains two-hundred-and-six bones. Interesting and painful as that thought was to me at the time, Google decided to twist the knife. I type in “how many bones are in the human body” and out comes the simple answer… and then a secret prize you didn’t know you wanted.
Two-hundred-and-seventy bones at birth. Google told me, its bold, all-knowing script still somehow clear despite how blurred with tears and drunkenness I’d been at the time, that the total number of bones decreased to that aforementioned two-oh-six by adulthood.
Thanks, Google; so my dead pregnant wife represented—what?—four-hundred-and-seventy-six bones? As though the pain of losing a mother and unborn child wasn’t bad enough, the number of bones they represented had to serve like some sort of cosmic taxation for just how terrible the whole fucking mess was.
Fuck you, God, I remembered thinking after consulting my cell phone’s calculator, what gives you the right to take an extra sixty-four bones from my life?
There was a lot of hate in those times. I hated my family and my gang for getting us roped into that shit, of course. I hated T-Built and the rest of the Carrion Crew for taking it to that point. I hated the cops, the medics, the mortician—Who gave him the power to declare that a dead person was dead? I’d thought, followed sickeningly with, just because they’re no longer alive. And, of course, I hated myself for not being able to stop it; for not being able to just die alongside them. I blamed God—any one of them, who was I to theologically judge at that point—for any of the other points of hatred I’d already made, and I also blamed him-her-them-it for not just taking the extra sixty-four bones from me.
If a tax was so desperately wanted; so absolutely needed, I’d thought, why not just take it from me and leave me crippled physically for it? What good does it do to break my mind and leave the rest of me in tip-top order?
Fuck…
I really thought that I’d left all that behind when I started feeling for Mia.
But now…
So it was that I finally—finally!—after staring at her tombstone and reminding myself how to truly hate all over again said, “Hey, Anne…”
And, go fucking figure, Anne’s tombstone said nothing.
Or maybe she’s just taking her own sweet time, a thought chimed, though I couldn’t bring myself to decide if it was Logic or Defense. Eerily enough, it seemed like something either would say.
I muttered “fuck” and then smashed the top off the vodka bottle over the top of a neighboring headstone. It was sloppy and loud and probably a good way to wind up with a throatful of glass, I knew, but there was a million-and-a-half miles between knowing and caring. Jason Presley had covered enough miles that day, I decided as I started to chug from the broken, jagged mouth of the bottle; no way I was gonna try to cover one more, let alone a million-and-a-half. Besides, my throat already felt like I’d been gargling with razorblades—I’d caug
ht myself in the middle of a few screaming fits on the road, and who knew how many I hadn’t caught myself in between there and here—so what was a bit of broken glass?
Realizing I truly must have been cursed, I swallowed a full gulp of room-temp, sugary-sweet liquor with no shards of ouch to distract from the taste.
“O-oh sweet merciful god of fuck!” I coughed around a disgusted retch that decided halfway through to turn itself into a dry heave—my guts refused to give up the payload, though; so I simply lurched over my dead wife’s grave—until I finally managed to stave off the fit. Then, wiping off my trembling lips with the back of my chapped hand, I took another pull, shuddered, and whispered, “Never will I ever wonder what a clown’s cunt tastes like…”
Anne’s tombstone still said nothing, so I said “fuck” again. This time, when I moved to drink from the busted bottle, the motion of tipping my head back sent me into a half-spin. Worrying that I’d either cut my face or fall (and then probably cut my face), I opted to sit down and did so promptly against the marker that was supposed to represent Anne and our baby. Then, wrestling blindly in the other saddlebag—because it was just classy to park one’s motorcycle across a row of graves, wasn’t it?—I yanked one of the bags of beef jerky and tore the top away with my teeth. I braved another pull of vodka, imagined an orgy of drunk pixies dragging their assholes across my tongue, and then pulled a strip of dried steak free of the mystery bag with my teeth.
Teriyaki.
I puked on myself before I’d even gotten a chance to try chewing.
Then, washing down the remnants of sick with a splash of the vulgar vodka, I said, “How’d it ever get this far?”
I’d been meaning to ask Anne’s grave, talkative as it had been so far, but realized I was extending it to whatever might listen. Three non-existent hands raised from three non-existent bodies in the non-existent classroom of my painfully existent mind. Rolling my eyes, I stayed any possible out-loud responses my subconscious personae might care to offer with a mouthful of dreadfully salty meat.
My stomach toiled, tightened, and gurgled something that I was certain translated to “FUCK YOU!”
I clenched my teeth against the threat and told my belly that it’d take the abuse or I’d let the whole machine drown in puke right then and there.
Realizing that—HOLY SHIT!—I meant it, my stomach settled and took what was coming, no doubt crossing itself and reciting some gastrointestinal rendition of the Lord’s Prayer.
There’s no stomach-god up here, I taunted, dumping another cluster of jerky into my open maw. Just diarrhea-inducing devils!
I started laughing at my own thoughts, but I lost track of the mess halfway through and realized too late that I was crying. My hand tipped and sloshed cotton candy vodka on the grass. It occurred to me that the jagged corner of torn plastic from the jerky bag was digging into the exposed skin at the base of my throat, where the bag had come to rest after I’d let my hand fall across my chest. I did nothing to save the alcohol or relieve myself the discomfort.
“How’d it get this far?” I asked again, sobbing around the words. “God-fucking-damn, Anne, what… what am I even doing?”
I let my head fall back, slam painfully into my dead wife’s tombstone, and then just forced myself to stare up at the sky. It was clear and peaceful up there, and a part of me felt like if this were a book or a movie there’d at least be clouds. The weather always reflected the hero’s mood, didn’t it? Wasn’t how this was supposed to work?
You’re no fucking hero.
Stories don’t follow the lone soldier, cowboy; there’s no chemistry there, no motivation. Even Tom Hanks got a volleyball.
“Least I had you, baby…” I said, surprised at how my tongue seemed to drag on the words, slurring them already.
Fuck me… how could I already be so—
I eyed the bottle and, despite the decent splash I’d lost in the grass, realized I’d drank more than half the contents already.
Well, I mused, momentarily self-aware to a debilitating degree, that certainly explains this!
The thought was punctuated with another wave of vomit, tasting every bit as toxic as my words to Mia had been earlier.
I deserve this, I thought, letting the seemingly unending projectile stream of throat-destroying bile tear past my lips. And THIS!
I finally slapped myself again. I was overdue.
My hand came back sticky and wet, and I saw blood on my fingertips. Captivated by the sight, I studied it. I realized after a long, confusing moment of gray that I was falling in love with my blood, and I pressed my thumb into it, relishing in the tacky way it seemed to cling to me. It made me feel alive and wanted.
I puked again, shorter this time. Finished, I wiped with the back of my hand.
That, too, came back sticky with blood.
Blinking, confused, I wondered where the red was coming from. After a long moment of inner debate, I tested my lip and discovered a decent gash along the bottom corner.
“Well,” I said, letting my chin sink into my chest and whispering at my sternum, “the broken bottle giveth and the broken bottle taketh away.”
Then, collecting a fresh smear of blood on my thumb, I rolled it across the sweating, liquor-streaked outer surface of the glass bottle. A morbid mockery of a thumb print stared back at me, deformed and already streaking.
“Littering is a crime,” I muttered, then threw the bottle into the distance. I flinched a little as I heard it smash in a chorus of enraged tinkles against some distant slab of resented concrete. “Public drunkenness is a crime,” I went on, feeling a fresh wave of sick coming and feeling it would be an ironic statement to precede the puke. No puke came. “Figures,” I whimpered, kicking out at my motorcycle, feeling that some act of violence might ease the pain in my heart, and having my boots flail harmlessly short of the chrome. “M-mur-der is… a crime,” I drawled on, beginning to thud my head rhythmically against Anne’s stone and appreciating the pain and growing headache for what they were. “And… and…” I began to giggle to myself, “and prostitution is a cri—”
The vomit finally came.
The force was enough to have me scrambling onto the my hands and knees. Pain and suffocating nausea had me certain that the only way to not choke to death on sickness was to practically slam my face to the very ground my wife was buried under while frantically waving my ass up at the sky.
Here I am, God, I thought, still sobbing and puking all over myself. If ever you truly wanted to stick it to me then there’s no better time than now.
But the hand of God—or the dick of God; whichever—did not come down upon me. Instead, the puke-stream ran dry and I hurled the unfinished bag of jerky into the distance to be mulled over by cemetery critters at a later time.
“Anne!” I sobbed, finally turning back towards the stone and throwing my arms around it. Never had I been made more aware of what a piss-poor representation it was to its source. Hard, jagged, and unfeeling; I craved a warm, understanding body and this was what I got.
It wasn’t what you had.
“I know…” I stammered, “I know. I fucked up! I… I always fuck up, but—”
Do you believe?
“Do I…?”
Mack’s words, dipshit? Do you believe there’s truth in them? Do you believe Mia was using you? Manipulating you? Do you think that’s who she is?
“I…” I stumbled, feeling my drunkenness target my equilibrium, and I toppled back, away from Anne’s grave. I more heard than felt the remnants of broken glass crackle against the back of my leather jacket. Stupidly, I let my head fall back with it, later realizing how thankful I should be that I didn’t bury a shard of cotton candy-laced liquor bottle into my scalp. “I don’t…”
You don’t know. You never know. Never bother to know. This isn’t another stereo, Jason; this is Mia! Now stop asking yourself what she thinks of you and start asking yourself what you think of her.
“I… I love her,” I admitted, s
uddenly wondering who I was admitting this to. “I fucking love her so goddam much.”
Then why should the rest matter?
Why?
I blinked at the question.
Why should it matter if Mia loved me? What sort of stupid nonsense was that? What good was loving somebody if—
“—if they don’t love you back?” I finished aloud.
You were happier loving her; happier with her beside you; happier with her.
“But if it’s not real then—”
What’s real to you, Jason? You’re crazy, remember? You still make yourself happy with digitally remastered shitty sci-fi flicks and anything to do with vampires despite thinking sci-fi’s for geeks and being scared shitless of vampires. All because your dad loved those shitty flicks and because your mom loved anything to do with vampires. Does that mean those things aren’t real to you either?
“That’s different,” I grumbled.
Why?
I said, “Because I want her to love me.”
And you’re so certain that she doesn’t? Just because some douche-nozzle claiming to be her brother says so? And so what if he is her brother? Why were you so quick to believe what he said?
“Because it makes sense,” I said matter-of-factly, certain I’d just won this bizarre debate with…
Makes just as much sense that he’s wrong if you don’t look at facts like a whiny little bitch. And, again, who cares? If you feel happy having her around and she’s willing to stick around because you’re rich and safe then aren’t you both winning?
“Not… what I want…” I drawled, suddenly feeling very, very tired. Even with sleep dragging me out of the moment, I found myself struggling to identify the other end of this strange conversation.
You’d think you’d be used to not getting what you want by now, dipshit. Would it be so wrong to take what you can get? Assuming, of course, that this all isn’t complete nonsense? Assuming, of course, that Mia doesn’t actually love you back?
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