by Garrett Cook
“How have you lived so long?” it asked him, more a being and less a condition than ever, “how have you lived so long without feeling this? Without being it? How can anything call itself human without knowing? Take it Bernard. You are this.”
I am not. You are. I am Bernard. NO! I am Bernard. The Objectivity rebutted, “You are not a Suburbanite, but you are this!” The dust tunnel would not spit him out if they got him here. He would never see Archelon Ranch and know the end of suffering. Sooner, or later, he would end up as one of them or food for one of them. He had no choice. I am the Mud.
No you are not. I am the Mud. You cannot be. I am the Mud and you are not the Mud. I am the Mud. The puddle of active mud fought hard for its beingness, but Bernard and the Objectivity hungered so much more deeply for it. You are not the Mud! I am the Mud.
He was confused at being a gilawalrus snatching a child from the top of a lamppost. Then he was confused as he screamed, “No outside food!”, pulled a trigger and shot a monkey for eating a grub off itself in the line at the Mall. He was the Mud, wasn’t he? The Slaughterer undulated on the stage unloved. A tyrannosaurus gnashed upon a school bus, unmolested by a group of apathetic policemen. There was a strange, old timey street where a fat twenty-something walked home, screamed at by people in passing cars. Two fat middle-aged men argued over a pile of boxes. Homeless people on the street held out empty guitar cases for change that would never be filled. He was the suffering, bubbling to the surface and eating the earth, eating the minds that couldn’t understand it.
“Understand,” said the suffering, “you must understand.”
Archelon Ranch is calling. Archelon Ranch is calling from the center. He reached out for the center as the Objectivity reached for all the suffering around him, all the experiences it could take in and comprehend. I am Bernard and I am at the center. I understand. I am Bernard. The Objectivity had pulled him completely away from the suburbs and the world of places and it yanked him right into the center.
X
This wasn’t an adventure. This wasn’t a hero’s quest for glory, a man’s ascension to something greater. This was short, this was ugly. This book killed the man who had the most faith in it and let the one who had the least survive. As I looked on a sign that declared the dull nothing-place past the suburbs “North Enonshire” in bland, Courier font, I realized just how small the book really was. There are people with six hundred pages to count on, six book epics with twists and turns and magnificent vistas, but I wasn’t in one of them. I was in a short, ugly, metaphysical mess, by a young author who didn’t write big heavy novels nowadays. A bloody tear streaked down the cheek of the sad virgin mary statue that was the closest thing to a person on these dull, silent streets, the closest thing to beauty that rewarded my cruel short trip through the suburbs.
She stood guard over a red, cobblestone path which led up to a white, derelict house. At the end of the path a puddle of gray slush lay on the ground melting, slightly yellowed by the urine of the black and white dog in the front yard. It was smallish but fat, roundheaded, sunken-eyed, tottering on weak legs, begging to be permitted death. It stopped, walked to the same gray slush pile and pissed on it, yellowing it a tiny bit more and then let out an anemic bark. It was joined by a pack of dogs of different breeds, all in similar shape; a pack of beasts bearing only the slightest semblance of life. There was a muffled cry in the distance and they perked up their ears, dutifully following it.
The front lawn didn’t look as big as it did from a distance. Spaces were different here, wrong. When I got there it was the size of a small city block. A small blonde child sat there playing with dinosaurs.
“Hello, I’m Clyde,” I said, holding out my hand. He didn’t take it. A few feet away, a fat, bland looking teenager with dark brown hair and glasses was swinging from a noose tied to an ancient apple tree. The branch collapsed under his weight, he fell right beside the child, who didn’t notice at all, then got up, dusted himself off and tied the noose once more. The branch grew back instantly to accommodate him. The front yard should have been enough to tell me not to come closer, but I couldn’t resist. If this place could do what the Reverend said it could, I needed it to happen. I walked toward the front porch.
An old man sat there on an overstuffed orange chair. His hair was dark grey, his face gnarled but elfin and his eyes a piercing and judgmental blue.
“Uh uh,” he told me, “you don’t wanna go in there.”
I ignored him and opened the front door, which had a cardboard skeleton awkwardly taped to it, mocking its actual potential for menace, guarding the threshold of this “Narrativist Sacred Site”. It didn’t look particularly sacred. It looked like I was walking not into a shrine but into a museum of torment. Considering the crappy world around me, I wondered whether Cook spent a lot of time here because if he did my hatred of him wouldn’t matter much since he’d beaten me to the punch. I almost tripped over an orange cat in the foyer. It rubbed against me, dripping leaking guts onto my shoe. Cook must love this thing for it to be here, kept in a state like this, so I kicked it as far as I could, giving back a fraction of the pain he’d given me.
When I passed the foyer, suddenly I was nothing, or maybe I was not myself. Objectivity, terrible, virulent Objectivity took over. My ego was lain low by the impression that there was no Clyde. The world was vast and there were many things and many people in it but there was no Clyde. I could not comprehend my hands, my feet, my past. The last feeling that I could say for sure was my own was sympathy for Bernard’s struggle with this, the worst of all ailments.
I was choking. There was air around me, but there was none to breathe. The sun wasn’t for me, the grass wasn’t for me, the moon wasn’t for me and the stars only pitied me. Nothing in the world was meant to be enjoyed by me. I loved the beauty of the earth, but it refused to love me back, to say that it was alright to enjoy it. My body was heavy, my face pale, pockmarked and ugly. I had no business here. In spite of myself, I tied the noose to the branch, even knowing that it would simply snap under my weight. The noose didn’t matter anyway. Whether I hanged or I didn’t, I was still choking. The air smelled of summer strawberries that I would never eat and in the distance I heard laughter at some perfect joke that I couldn’t hear. I knew people danced and kissed and cared for each other and I would never have it. Choking, everything was choking, so I had to be done with it. I had to be done with this… I wandered…
Something was wrong with me and I could not tell what it was. I knew that there was supposed to be people around, but I could not find them and it did not concern me. I had my dinosaurs. Shoelaces are hard to tie. Big cars cannot be driven. Sharp things will hurt you. I will stay here where it is soft and comfortable and it doesn’t matter what they say about me. It doesn’t matter if I draw the pictures right or what peg goes into what hole. It doesn’t matter that I don’t wash the dishes right or that I can’t keep my things in order. I am not stupid. I am special. I am different. I was a poisoned little self playing on the lawn, ignoring all the things that people said about me. I drifted inside the house, glad to no longer be the little boy on the lawn.
There is nothing underneath my skin. There is nothing in me. I am huge, fold upon fold. The flesh, the fat, it covers my eyes and I cannot quite see. I have a mouth leading down a vast hole to another vast hole, a cauldron of empty. I am heavy but I need to be filled. Big round nothing in the middle. The walking zero strains its fragile wobbly meat legs, shuffling on feet I can’t even see. The folds grow and grow but there is nothing within. Blob won’t even get through the archway. Soon it won’t even move. So sweet, but all of it is nothing. The flavors of dust and air are countless but they will never sate. The stomach hangs over my knees and the hole rumbles more. Holes open in the fleshy folds on the side of the head. They call out for more and I oblige them. I do everything they tell me, but they’re just holes. Big round nothing. Something else again, please, something else!
Crawling like a snake I ask, �
��Where are my legs?” There is something in me that makes me stiff and numb. My lungs have no wind, my body has no purpose, no strength. I crawl and crawl and crawl and crawl but I don’t know where I’m going. I hear the footfalls of runners, the crack of baseball bats as homeruns scream toward the stratosphere. My nose runs, my throat burns and I’m ready to throw up, rid myself of this poison. I want to get healthy but I’m sick sick sick sick. Even if my legs grew back, even if my posture straightened out, there would still be only sickness in me. Mr. Pandemic, victim of the Me virus. Sickly nothing. Worthless, broken down cripple. This shell is not me, but it defines me. I am just as sick. The snot, the vomit, the molecules of self evidence of the medical waste that I am. Don’t fart, don’t sneeze. Enough of you exists already.
Floating in water, I am now three pounds of eelish Cook stretched into the shape of a question mark. Why did you do it? For attention, for love? To make somebody sorry? No water, no tears. I wish I had hands to touch, hands to cut. I wish that I were more than this. There is no future for the drowned, no body for this casket. There are no attendees for this funeral. There are no readers for these poems. The question mark is still not sure it has failed, still not sure its mode of being is the wrong one. It wants the answers it can’t get. It wants to hear you’re loved, you’re famous, you’re surrounded by friends. We will accept you, sad or not. It wants the things it cannot have, as all people do, it being want. Answer me, answer me true: do you love me as I love you? Answer me, answer me true: do you love me as I love you?
I try to hold onto myself harder. I cannot stand this. This is not a sacred place. Only sick people could think that the Sad House is sacred and keep it from crumbling. You’re sick, Garrett Cook, you’re sick! It reached for me and I resisted, and I don’t know if I was confusing or strengthening it. The selves interbred. The child rode the question mark and they took off into the air, soaring through a bleeding sky. The fat, having absorbed its arms and legs completely, tried to squeeze under a bathroom door to shit out the poisons in the cripple. This was not poetry. This was not beautiful. The Reverend called this Garrett Cook lord and master, but he was not. The child, on the ground again for some reason, struggled beneath a carpet of fat, the teenager tied the question mark around his neck to hang himself. The dead cats and dogs lap up a trail of the cripple’s vomit. The teenager smiles, as if he might make it now. As the question constricts him, he calls out, “Answer me, answer me true, do you love me as I love you?” I had to differentiate. Like the child, I was struggling under the weight of the author’s twisted selves, the temptation to give up on life. I cried out, glad to still have a mouth as the abominations absorbed each other.
“Is this sacred to you? Beautiful? Funny? Righteous? Think of what you’re doing! Think of what’s going on here!”
The selves halt. The question mark lets the teenager breathe, the fat gingerly rolls the little boy onto the lawn, the dogs nuzzle the cripple’s face to give him a moment of comfort. This could not be all there was to Garrett Cook. There had to be more. They whispered back and forth and then approached me.
“Nothing fills me,” said the fat.
“I am sick,” said the cripple.
“I’m not dumb, I’m different,” said the child.
“I don’t deserve this,” said the teenager.
“I’m confused,” said the question mark.
“Where are you?” I shouted, “Where are you, Garrett Cook?”
I felt a hand on my shoulder and out of thin air, Bernard appeared beside me. I considered reaching for my gun, but something stopped me. I hoped it wasn’t the plot.
“This isn’t him,” Bernard explained, “not all of him at least. The rest is someplace else. These things are like the mud, they’re filth that devours everything.”
I hated him even more when he said that, hated him for being here and having answers. These were my questions, I had been forced to live with them and suffer with them as he was named center of the universe. I hoped it was Garrett Cook that held me back, because I wanted to put a bullet in him for every time the Reverend told me I was nothing, every time I thought about Bernard attaining Archelon Ranch while everybody else was trapped in that nightmare jungle of a city. But Garrett Cook wasn’t here, so I hurt Bernard instead, the only way I knew for sure I could wreck him.
“He doesn’t know how to get there, Bernard. That’s why you’ve had all this trouble, that’s why you’re here instead of there. There is no Archelon Ranch. He didn’t write it and he doesn’t know at all where to find it.”
Each word wounded me just as much it did him. This world he’d made was one without answers, one where the question mark was king, undisputed, and the Protagonist, the greatest hero there was, couldn’t even be himself.
“It’s at the center,” said Bernard, “I’ll find it at the center. You can come too, Clyde.”
“I can’t and you know it, Bernard. Wouldn’t want to because there’s nothing to find there.”
“Don’t say that, Clyde. It’s out there, I promise.”
I went crazy. I was tired of Narrativist myths and shattered personas, tired of the unfairness of existence. There was nothing but red before my eyes as I screamed. I felt like I was screaming for my whole fucking world.
“Bastard! You fat, depressed, self-loathing bastard! How dare you do this to me! How dare you build a world just to torture people! Who could read this? Who could enjoy this? It isn’t fair! Come out and answer me you fat, gutless coward! I’m going to kill you! I’ll kill you worse than these things kill themselves! I’ll kill you and make it count, too!”
I reached for them with the Objectivity the Sad House had bestowed on me. I wanted to absorb them, bring them together and make them really explode on each other. I think I would have really enjoyed that. But the Objectivity and the mutant selves didn’t comply, they simply moved out of the way as the writer Garrett Cook emerged from the doorway of the Sad House. He didn’t look as bad as any of those things, nor did he look particularly impressive either, even with the gold tophat he wore for no good reason. He petted the dead black and white dog without fear or disgust, even stopping to hug the pathetic creature.
“I’ve missed you, girl,” were the first words I ever heard out of the mouth of the writer, Garrett Cook. I reached into the backpack for the last of my guns and pointed it at his head.
“Finally! Finally you make yourself accountable! I’m going to love doing this!”
“I came because Bernard called me,” he said, looking at me as if I were nothing. No, scratch that. He didn’t look at me, he looked through me. Sickening. The Deus Ex Machina had come and he was ready to reward Mr. Bigshot-fucking-Protagonist with passage to Archelon Ranch.
“You’ve been through so much, Bernard. I’m truly sorry.” Garrett Cook’s head hung in shame.
“He’s been through enough? What the hell is wrong with you! He hasn’t been through shit! You’re dead!”
“I’m not,” he replied and yawned for dramatic emphasis. The author was apparently a whole different entity from the thing these creatures made up.
“And why is that?”
“Because you’re holding a poodle.”
My gun was gone and as he said, I was holding a toy poodle. I felt like I was in an Abraham the Jellyfish cartoon.
“I still hate you.”
“No, you don’t,” he retorted with an arrogant smile and apparently tried to do something about it. I say apparently, since in spite of his attempts to rectify it, I still hated him, utterly and passionately, burning with the fire of a thousand exploding stars. He broke a sweat concentrating on his magic trick and as he did, the selves all snickered. The little boy laughed particularly hard. Garrett Cook, puzzled and irritated, shrugged his shoulders in defeat. I felt slightly vindicated.
“Let’s go, Bernard,” he huffed, taking Bernard’s hand to lead him down a gilded road that materialized as the words were spoken. The road seemed to stretch on for miles, in fact it looked
as if… I knew it. I laughed derisively.
“That road doesn’t end!”
I laughed harder. Squealing like a satisfied monkey. I fell to the ground and rolled around in my smug laughter like a movie tycoon in his money. Garrett Cook ignored me, but Bernard was finding it difficult. Dense as he was, my brother understood. There were tears in his eyes and his face was vermillion. Garrett Cook turned around, retracting the road with a gesture.
“What are you doing?” he screamed at me.
“Nothing,” Bernard answered, “he isn’t doing anything at all.”
“You’ve been through so much,” Garrett Cook repeated, “I’m sorry, Bernard.”
I had grown tired of hearing that.
“What about me? Do you know what I’ve been through?”
There was a peculiar sensation. I felt like somebody was dusting my chromosomes for fingerprints. I felt turned inside out. I thought at that moment that he was going to tear me apart and delete me for being insubordinate. I was ready for it, though. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to watch my unmaking. There was nothing to look at when the feeling went away. No comeuppance, oblivion, dissection or tentacle rape, no wild dogs or Suburbanites. Then for a moment, I was not there at all. Completely not there, completely consumed.
Bernard was hugging me, eyes still full of tears. I got the feeling that he was about to do something wonderful, a true act of heroism. And he did. It sticks with me even now.
“I’m sorry, Clyde,” he said, “it wasn’t fair. I’m sorry for what I did to you.”
Bernard became me. He understood me and it was too much for him to bear, too great a strain upon his sheltered conscience. Apologizing was the last thing he ever did before fading into Total Objectivity. I don’t miss Bernard much now, since he’s omnipresent. I talk to him through my desk lamp sometimes. But right then, my rage toward Garrett Cook erupted worse than ever.
