He didn’t want them to go to work like this, to leave and start the day on bad terms.
“Hey,” he offered, as she came back in the room. Her chest jiggled a little when she stopped abruptly, and, absurdly, it made him feel bad about himself and what was becoming of their relationship. He hadn’t seen her chest bounce of her own accord (or his) for quite some time now.
“Hey, what’s going on with you?” That didn’t come out right, at all, and it was dreadfully obvious.
No response. She had left the room. He heard the refrigerator door close. “Nothing is going on with me,” she huffed when she came back. She was eating Fage Greek yogurt, the one where you mix the honey and yogurt. He could see the clump of honey on the spoon as she mixed it in.
“C’mon, something’s up.”
She positioned her shoulders defensively and sucked the honey off the spoon in a desperate, rushed way. Funny, he didn’t know there could be so much emotion conveyed through yogurt-eating.
“C’mon, I don’t have time for this shit. I need to go to work. Can we not talk about this now?” She usually didn’t curse in reference to their relationship.
“Well, I’d normally let it go, but this has been going on for a while. You just called our relationship ‘shit,’ for one thing.”
“Just … don’t. Let’s just not talk about it now, okay?”
“Okay.”
She put the half-eaten yogurt down outside in the kitchen and walked to the closet to resume looking for a top.
He felt an intense, burning sense of aggrievement that manifested in his chest and shoulders. “Look, I want to talk about this. We always stop talking about things when you say so. We always go by what you say. You are important to me, this relationship is important to me, and I don’t want to spend the whole day worrying about what’s going on with us, I want to talk about it now.”
“Look —” she started, her arms up as if she was literally stuck between a rock and a hard place and needed to wedge herself out. “I have a lot to do today, you know my boss has been a major bitch recently and I have a lot on my plate, and you can’t stress me out this morning, and you can’t make me late! Don’t you understand that? Don’t you get that? If you cared about me, you would not fuck up my work or make things so difficult for me!”
Oh no, here she was, getting worked up. She had a subtle way of shifting blame — now he was morally responsible for her inability to control her emotions and what effect that may have on her work day. And why was it that she could call her boss a bitch, but god forbid he say that she was acting bitchy?
“...and you always make me late, I make breakfast for you and wait for you to leave with me, but no more. I can’t do that anymore, you need to wake up earlier, or let me wake up earlier and leave without you.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, extending his fingers out in a soothing, deescalating way. She was right about that, at least — he had made her late a couple of times, but he couldn’t stand it when she made him feel morally responsible for stuff that was not his fault.
She was fully dressed now. He knew this was fucked up, but he had felt more sympathetic to her when she was half-dressed.
She turned back to him, last bite of yogurt in her mouth. Her expression wasn’t good — it was largely frustration with a sprinkling of the heavy sorrow inherent in carrying out a dreadful but inevitable task, like taking the cancer-ridden dog to the vet for the Big Sleep.
“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t do this anymore.”
“Baby, don’t be silly.” This was going nuclear. He’d thought about it ending, too, and there was excitement and freedom there, he knew, but no, he didn’t want it to end, not like this, not now.
She shook her head, her eyes were closed and there was a streak of wetness along her cheek. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just, I can’t. I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just, I don’t, I just don’t feel like this is going to work.”
“Baby, c’mon, let’s just go to work and we can talk about this later.”
“No. I’m sorry. I … I just don’t feel like I’m in love with you anymore.”
“Baby!” he shot back like she said something wildly offensive and uncalled for. “Baby, you’re just stressed, I’m sorry for bringing this up before work, it’s my fault. It’s my fault, you did nothing wrong, I’m sorry.” Usually, taking the blame and appearing plaintive was enough to escape long enough for her to calm down so he could live to fight another day.
“No,” she shook her head, eyes still closed. “I’m serious. I’ve been looking into getting another apartment. I have one picked out already. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I should have told you before. I’m sorry, but I’m serious. I’m just not in love with you anymore. I’ve fought it, I’ve pretended otherwise, I kept telling myself I loved you. You are a good person, and I appreciate what you did for me —”
“What I did for you? You mean, saving your life? As in, I literally saved your life.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Look honey, let’s just talk about this later, okay?”
“Bryce. Look, I’m sorry, but this has to be done. I’m sorry that this is the wrong time. But, it’s not working out. I’m sorry, it’s not working out. I need to go to work now, I’m sorry, but it’s not working out.”
“Baby, c’mon, you don’t mean that.”
“I know what I mean. I know what I am saying.”
“You can’t possibly. We love each other. I’m your hero. You say it all the time, why, you said it even, like, just last week, when I fixed that cabinet for you.”
“Bryce … I shouldn’t have said that. I like to make you happy, I’m sorry I … have been leading you on for some time, I suppose.”
“I quite literally saved your life. I quite literally am your hero. There were magazine articles written about us. I’m a fucking hero. I literally did everything I could to —”
“I know, Bryce, I know. I appreciate everything you did for me, and —”
“Everything I did for you — you mean preventing you from being raped and brutally killed. That’s what you mean, right, when you say that?”
“Bryce!”
He didn’t know what angered him worse — her breaking up with him, or her pat formality in doing it. She was like an executive getting through a difficult but predetermined business decision.
“You have to … we have to be able to work this out.”
“I’m sorry, Bryce. I’m … I’m sorry.”
“I literally saved your life. I fucking saved your life.”
“I know. I know, I feel terrible about this, but … I’m sorry. I, just don’t feel … think I’m in love with you. I mean, I know I’m not in love with you. I’m sorry, I just, I just know I’m not in love with you —”
“You can’t do this, after all I’ve done, after all we’ve been through — “
“It’s not — it’s not a judgment on you. I can’t, I can’t weigh the pros and cons of what you do or don’t deserve based on what you did for me. This isn’t a formula. I’m telling you, I’m telling you, I’m sorry, I have love for you, I so greatly appreciate everything you did for me—”
“Saving your life. Let’s be clear about what I did. I literally killed a maniac for you, literally killed monsters — can you believe this, literally killing fucking monsters, risking my life to kill monsters to literally fucking rescue you, and this is how I’m repaid for it.”
“Repaid? My love for you isn’t a gift that you earn by achieving something for me—”
Of course it fucking is, of course it all is, his mind screamed in protest.
“ — you don’t win me. I’m not the prize —”
“You said you’d never be able to repay me. Do you remember that? You said you would never be able to repay me, and that you would always b
e there for me. So I’m asking you, please — please — don’t leave me. Let us work this out.”
She breathed deeply, as if quibbling with someone pointing in vain to a contract technicality. And in a sense, he was, and he knew it.
“For everything I’ve done for you, for everything we’ve been through together, please, we have to work this out. I’m a good person. I’m a good person and I’m sorry, I try, you know I try to be good.” He was crying, unmistakably and unabashedly.
“You said it — you promised me — that you’d be eternally grateful to me. That you loved me, that you’d never be able to repay me. So please, do this for me, repay me this way: don’t leave me.”
She didn’t respond, not verbally at least, but she ploddingly shook her head.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. We can talk about this later, but I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I — I’m not trying to be mean, but I’m not in love with you. I’m sorry. It’s not a thing I can work out. You are nice, you are a nice person. You will find someone else to be nice to, someone else to love. I feel like I could be anyone. You just want to be loved so badly, I feel it has nothing to do with me. You just want me to cheer you on, to hug you and treat you – almost treat you like a dog or something, like you are my son or something and I’m your biggest booster, your biggest fan. I just … I just can’t. It’s not … “
“I can’t fucking believe you —”
“Don’t! I can’t do this now. I’m late for work, we can talk later.”
“I can’t fucking believe this is how you … how you treat me. How you repay me —”
“Fucking repay you!?”
He made a strategic mistake, he knew. Whatever welling of sympathy he’d evinced within her was gone. The course was now irrevocable. “Again, I’m not your princess that you rescued from the castle. You don’t own me. You didn’t win me, so just stop it! Just stop it and act like an adult. And if you want to get all technical with me, and bring up every fact and detail from the past instead of focusing on how I’ve fallen out of love with you, then if I never met you, I’d never have even been in that restaurant to begin with.”
“Okay, whatever,” he turned around to head back into the bedroom. “Whatever, I can’t believe you, I can’t fucking believe you.” He plopped back into the bed, the vertigo of sadness and uncertainty overwhelming him, seeping into the cracks of his rage. It felt better when these emotions were converted into rage, into indignation.
“I’m a fucking hero, you know that. A literal fucking hero. I saved your life, I literally saved your life, from god knows what, from getting eaten, from getting raped, from who knows. You had a different tune back then, let me tell you. You’d have been begging for me back then, and now, look at you.” His conflation of pity and anger was mismanaged and received poorly, he could tell, and while he talked, she hedged, torn between consoling him and just storming out. She finally made a face of hands-in-the-air disavowal, packed up her work things, and said she was leaving and they could talk tonight. He noted with some inner sadistic glee that she dotted her eyes a bit as she left.
He didn’t want to move out or have her move out. Things weren’t perfect, far from it, but he liked the life he had with her, liked the feeling her had with her. He looked at her and saw the best of himself.
“I’m a fucking hero,” he told himself again, this time into the pillow, in a sulking way he’d perfected throughout his life, in a type of self-pitying performance art. It felt good to repeat that, and what he had done for her was undeniable, it could never be taken away. It was an assurance into Heaven, into sainthood. He had always stayed faithful to her, even when the hero-narrative went full blast following the media blitz.
It felt good to be indignant and hate. People forget that. There was something soporific about it, anesthetizing. Bad feelings sunk inward and were expelled outward, leaving him cleansed. “I’m a fucking hero,” he consoled himself again, burning up into the pillow. “I’m a good person and I deserve better than this. I deserve to be loved and treated better. I deserve to be with someone who appreciates me.
“This isn’t how things are supposed to end.”
Cthulhu, Zombies, Ninjas and Robots!; or, a Special Snowflake in an Endless Scorching Universe
The words and wisdom of H.P. Lovecraft are best enjoyed alone. Nay, they can only be savored when alone. “What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world’s beauty, is everything,” Lovecraft had written. His was a mind sensitive to rare and gentle things, an armament against the frothy nothings of the hour. An escape from machinery and modern inventions, an escape from the dictatorship of the uncultured, to paraphrase John Cowper Powys.
Yet, knowing all this, here was Malcolm. Here, of all places.
Malcolm walked among the crooked timbers of humanity in the vendor room for the redundantly-named Con of Cthulhu Convention. The closest vendor booth was SICK ‘N PSYCHO, a horror-themed apparel line which had a whole corner display to itself. The booth was staffed by two white girls in their mid-twenties, both attractive in that gothic way, one with dark black hair streaked with purple, the other a red pixie cut. Their outfits were tight-fitting, form accentuating, and leg-exposing but were also black and featured nods to the occult and scary imagery, so they were completely and totally not beholden to the patriarchal fashion of the day. The furtive glances at their tits and asses were so totally unlike the same furtive glances afforded to other attractive girls who chose to or were forced to highlight their physical attributes at Hooters or other breastauraunts, but because here the male gaze also picked up flecks of the dark and gothic, their outfits were transgressive and challenging rather than tawdry and typical, of course. Lovecraftians who spoke the game of black abysses and cosmic futility gravitated around them, warming themselves on their false affections like Outer Gods to distant suns.
Malcolm perused the vendor’s wares. CTHULHU, ZOMBIES, NINJAS & ROBOTS!, promised one book, which had a cover image featuring zombies being crushed by Cthulhu’s tentacles, robots firing plasma cannons at the roaring beast and a ninja swinging, Tarzan-style, across the protrusions of Cthulhu’s face.
“What more could you ask for? I mean, zombies, ninjas, Cthulhu. Shit’s got robots, too. Shit’s got it all!” the red-haired saleswoman offered.
“Check this out!” one potential customer took the book and showed it to his female friend, both of them festooned with bric-a-brac buttons and accessories declaring their allegiance to Cthulhu and his large marketing empire.
Malcolm scanned some of the other books on display. High Seas Cthulhu; Heavy Metal Cthulhu; Cthulhu Lives!; That Which Should Not Be, But Inexplicably Is; The Queef of Cthulhu: Transgressive Erotica; World War Cthulhu; I Fucked a Shoggoth; Cthulhumon (Gotta Release Em All!); The Horror From Bedford, Massachusetts; Pickman’s Cable Modem; Aliens vs. Cthulhu; West Coast Cthulhu, Cthulhu-bunga!; Bunga Bunga Sex Party Cthulhu; Cowboy Cthulhu; … shall he keep going?
Yes, you piece of shit, he shall keep going. C is for Cthulhu: the Lovecraft Alphabet Book … Crimson —, no the mind stops at C is for Cthulhu.
A Lovecraft alphabet book for young children? The mind reels.
On to the other vendors.
A t-shirt of a slumbering monster dreaming of earth, emblazoned with “Teach the Controversy!” (Malcolm could admit, that one made him laugh); the perennial Cthulhu/Dagon political stickers (Why Vote for the Lesser Evil?, which of course makes no sense because Cthulhu isn’t evil in any terrestrially understandable sense, Cthulhu represents that which is outside our understanding of good and evil, but ha-ha-ha who cares about that?), another t-shirt that inexplicably read Eat- Sleep-Cthulhu (with green, vine-like tentacles around the word Cthulhu, natch!), a green Che Guevera shirt with Che’s fashionable mug branching off into the type of tentacles that are redundant for anyone who’s seen the Davy Jones character in Pirates of the Car
ibbean II: Dead Chest Boogaloo. There was other junk, too, like a Cthulhu ski mask or Elder Wear Panties, for the sexy minion in your life.
And don’t forget the baby minions in your life! Why not a Hello Cthulhu onesie, with the iconic white kitty now green and tentacled; or a My Little Cthulhu, with an adorable pastel-green Cthulhu riding a rainbow, fluttering about with cartoon hearts; a Cthulhu Crossing sign, with the black outline in the diamond yellow symbol having a tentacle or a wing or some such; a Charlie Brown parody with a winged, cephalopod-faced Snoopy looking up at the sky atop a black, symbol-specked dog house, with a gothic, anxious kiddie Lovecraft as the Charlie Brown stand-in.
There were more. There were many, many more.
Cthulhu Fish, Pewter Cthulhu pins, Old One Sigils, Fighting Fishes logos for fictional sports teams. Approximately five trillion shirts identified with Miskatonic University, The Esoteric Order of Dagon, Dunwich, R’lyeh or Innsmouth.
Don’t forget that gift for the practical Lovecraftian: a Mi-Go Crustacean claw-cracker, which did not even have the dignity to make Mythos-sense.
“Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist—that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process. Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is—both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology—of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.” – H.P. Lovecraft
All throughout the weekend, Malcolm sat in on conferences on cosmic horror and indifferentism, the agony of existence, all these scholars and readers and writers praising — nay, advocating — for this man Lovecraft, for his insights into the true nature of the universe and his fiction’s power to articulate the philosophy of cosmic indifferentism, and yet … and yet … somewhere in between cosmic indifferentism and the inherent futility of all organic life was room for children.
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