by Garrett Cook
Jeremy hasn’t been sleeping much. He looks sort of distracted and beaten. He looks like he might be ready to give up or else be aching to start. I’m aching to start now, I’m aching to recapture and control everything, I’m aching to make sure that the lost playground brawler’s in everybody’s head don’t get out and start wreaking havoc on the populace. The problem isn’t that violence is stupid; the problem is that it’s necessary. It’s necessary for them and it’s necessary for Jeremy. He always pretended that he didn’t like it, always seemed to turn away from all his killings and all the Reap stuff out there, but he needs it, as much, if not more than I do, or else he’ll explode. He looks like he’s about ready to.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked him today.
He took forever to answer. I know he had volumes to say, but I think they weighed down on the words he needed right then. I think that’s his problem in general. I’m glad that I’ve written this and examined myself, because I don’t know more about his intent than I do about me.
“What do we do when they start to get help and come after us, sending more and more of their best killers?” he asks.
And I answer what comes naturally to me. It sounded too familiar. “Then we beat them too.” I hope we will.
On the Mountaintop
The Stay-Alerts and the coffee are starting to fail me. I AM NOT A DISEASE YOU DO NOT GET BETTER I have tried so desperately not to let my eyes shut or my body give way to sleep, because sleep always does the same thing to me. When I close my eyes, I don’t see or feel the black behind my eyelids, the simple, comforting darkness, but instead a vast emptiness. It feels like prairies, tundra, deserts and steel towns that time forgot. It feels like being on some clump of ground that God neglected to create anything around. It is a blue-grey like a stormy sky, stretching as far as my imagination can. The big empty is all-expansive and if I don’t surrender myself to it, it will come to me, it will wrap around our apartment building and take Cass and my home and my neighbors and anything else it wants. It is only a dream’s emptiness, but I can’t believe that. It’s too present to dismiss as images from the back of my mind, scattered debris from my day and the feelings I’ve repressed. I wish that my gun or my briefcase could fight it off, but it’s too intangible, too indomitable. The only thing I can do is stay awake and not let it pull me in. Yet it does, it always does, stay alert capsules, coffee and willpower don’t stop it any better than my gun does.
I go forward into the empty, feeling no semblance of confidence or hope, even though it stops the void from taking Cass or eating my home, it doesn’t feel any better that I’m venturing out into it, regardless of what it might prevent. Something makes me twitch and I jump aside, not even knowing what made me do it. I always go out into the empty, I always look around and I always jump aside. It hurts that things don’t ever change and I can’t control my actions. It hurts that every time I don’t know what it is I’m trying to dodge.
The snakes. Thousands and thousands of snakes cross my path, stampeding like great herds of cattle. They make sounds like hoof beats and thunderclaps as oppressive as the stampede they are. I forget that snakes don’t make noise, but instead just feel shocked and horrified at the noises they are capable of. If I could wait for them to pass, I would, but they keep on coming. They are infinite. I walk alongside them and little gray patches of grass appear with each step I take, the only place in this wasteland that isn’t going to fill up with the snakes. My path is beside the snakes, but none so much as slither their way up to my feet.
As we move forward and my path builds itself, all the other nothingness miraculously fills itself up with all kinds of things. Giant plastic toy soldiers shoulder rifles, televisions project images of other televisions and televisions inside of them. Broken washers and broken dryers are stacked on top of each other, forming towers all the way up to the empty, gray-blue heavens. We are in a place now, a place where enormous junk passes for atmosphere. The snakes slither across it as if nothing has happened, but I have to stop and examine each of these strange set pieces, I must ponder the relevance of every object in this damnable dream and be terrified of the yard sale monoliths that are the only things that dictate where I am.
Between two towers of washers and dryers, I see a mountain path. I have to walk over the snakes, but they don’t notice, they don’t try to bite me at all. There shouldn’t be mountains here, though they seem of course more natural than the toy soldiers and all of the other junk. Given the choice, of course I end up ascending the mountain path. It isn’t long before I can see the summit. I don’t need to struggle to get up there, I barely need to walk the path. The summit seems to drag me there.
Up there in his raggedy trench coat and his piss-stained pants is General Lud, the old conspiracy nut who stood outside the mall, the man who showed me that the Dark Ones and the nanites and the end were all coming. The prophet of doom looks down safely at the snakes from his place on the mountaintop, watching with odd disinterest as they begin to coil around the junk and the giant toys. This concerns me very deeply, but he seems too distant to be worried about it. All the things that scared me about him are still there. All the things that frightened and endeared me to this lunatic.
“I came up here to wait. To wait until God calls down the lightning. When the lightning come, God will split the machines in twain. Inside they will be only light and it will shine the Dark Ones out of existence. I stand here and I wait and I hope he will finally call it down.”
Suddenly, Lud is different. This is one of the parts of the dream that scares me most, one of the reasons I’ve taken the stay-alerts and drank all the coffee to scare away sleep itself. Suddenly Lud looks animalistic. His teeth, as yellow and sharp as any dog, are bared and he foams at the mouth. He growls as he speaks.
“Empty your pockets!” he demands “Empty your pockets!”
I don’t argue. I look around in my pockets. I expect there to be only change and lint, and change and lint is what I find at first. Until I find it, a little glowing bolt-shaped squiggle like in the old cartoons when God or Zeus was punishing people. I pick up the lightning bolt, and then I throw it down. The one bolt zigzags into many. The lightning lights up the sky and rains down on the snakes, the junk and the blue-grey nothing below.
Lud laughs a cackling laugh that I don’t like at all.
“Whatcha wait for, huh? Whatcha wait for? Someday man, the serpent king lets loose the jackal and together, they feast on me. They feast on me and they shit me out into Heaven. The young, lured by songs of promise take up their blades and their guns and they join the war, but they cannot fight for God. Small hands won’t hold the thunder, and there’s only more blood, more chaos. Someday man, the serpent king let loose the jackal and they feast on me. It can’t be stopped. They shit me into Heaven and I am gone for good. Share my soul, and remember, ‘cause someday you forget and when you forget it might be too late. Don’t fear the beasts that eat me, don’t fear the night that takes me. Don’t fear the lightning in your hand, or your hands are too small as well.”
I tremble, trying to make sense of it. I look at the sky full of lightning, wondering whether I’m the one to hold it and make it rain down. I’m not sure I’d even want to be. I know too much. I know too much about how much there is to do.
“Are your hands too small? Are they too weak to wash up all the blood? Are you hands too small?” he asks. I look down at my hands and one is huge and the other tiny. I don’t know how to even begin to answer Lud’s question.
“I just sit here and I wait, til God calls down the lightning and he splits the machines in twain…”
The worst part of it all is waking up from it and finding that five minutes has passed. Even sleep isn’t sleep when that is in my head. Maybe it isn’t in my head. You do not get to flee. You cannot walk away, Jeremy. I pick up the free weights and I lift. Too little. More. Crush with your bare hands. Then I ask myself when it is I’m going to die from this dream, because even though this is
my last day at the pharmacy, there where four before it and I’m about to go in dead tired. How long before I do something? I can’t even think about what it is I would do. At seven o’ clock I crawl back into bed and kiss Cass goodbye to convince her that I’ve been there the whole time and I’m just heading off to work. She senses how tired I am, and I know she’s full of questions that she doesn’t ask me, but I don’t think I can tell her about this. I wonder what it is that I can do.
I’m glad that I finally gave my two weeks notice, because this job makes the sleeplessness even worse. Being a half-awake automaton is far worse than being a half-awake person. The customers start to grate and it feels like you’ve been treating the same couple people all day. It makes me want to show them that there has to be a better way than this, a better way than buying the pill to cure whatever it is needs curing.
I want to stand up on the counter and scream. Stand up and scream. Do it. Here is what I want to scream:
“Attention all customers, everything you’re trying to treat is just symptomatic of becoming a machine. It is only the feeling you get when your humanity starts to seep out. Don’t buy the pills, find anything else in the world to do about it, but don’t buy the pills. It’s all sugar; I promise you that everything sold to you in this pharmacy is nothing but a placebo! The trouble is inside you, the trouble is the emptiness you feel when you become a machine…”
But I can’t do it. I don’t have the energy to get up onto the counter and scream and I can’t show everybody what my gibbering madness is clearly. Gibbering, that’s the word, nice old word, gibbering. I tell myself that this is the last day and it won’t be too long, it will only be a few more hours. But whenever it’s only a few more hours, something, without fail, makes the experience worse.
A girl walks in, natural platinum blonde, and they’re ALL over her. The twisted little inhuman shapes are feasting on every part of her, body and soul alike. Breeders, lizard-like imps, tons of scouts and things I’d never seen before. Something like a big, black starfish is clinging to her thigh. She’s breastfeeding a baby too. I can only wonder what kind of poison they put in her, and what it does to that baby.
When the baby opens its eyes, I can see that it was itself a poison. The little eyes are the color of pink lemonade and they have huge, red pupils. I have to believe that I am not seeing this. There is no way I could be because Cass and I talked about this and these creatures are only products of my imagination. She lies! One of them! One of them! If I think I am not seeing them, then they’ll go away. Will not. Indolence. Complacency. Wrong man? Are you the wrong one? I’m thinking so hard that I’m not seeing it, and yet it doesn’t go away. I swear these things are not the Dark Ones, these are not the servants of ultimate evil, these are not the enemies of man and god, and these are not the eaters of humanity and the bringers of the end. But they are. No matter how much I tell myself that they’re not, they still are. Starting to listen. That’s good. Listening to me again. Maybe you have a shot.
She’s on antidepressants. I can see why. The child takes more than milk of course. It takes blood from her through her breast and it spits oil back in there. It’s taking her soul, and the seeds of another one are in there, I’m sure of it. The breeders nudge and nibble and caress her and the poor ignorant bitch doesn’t even notice them doing it. She is another one of them. Another factory to churn out more monsters. If Cass was right about the Dark Ones, why would I have such dreams? Visions? Why would General Lud be calling me if Cass were actually right? I memorize the address on the slip and while I still think about Cass’ larger goals, the psychopomps and the fat cats and all, I know that this cannot be avoided. There is no getting around the things that God needs from you. These are the monsters after all, the vampires.
When she leaves, the pharmacy spins. It starts to feel like it’s shrinking around me. I feel like this is the smallest place in the world, and if I can’t get out, it will squish me. I look longingly at the door, but I have to contain myself, to stay put and fill this poor woman’s prescription. Not like it will help, not like it will stop her monster child from sucking the life from her, but she thinks she’ll need it, and it’s my last day here anyway. I force a smile when she comes in.
“What a lovely child,” I tell her. I thought the lie would help ground me in reality here, but it doesn’t.
Breathe deep you son of a bitch, breathe deep and try your hardest not to act like an utter fool. Let me do my job. You don’t have to do this. I’m here. Pretend the air doesn’t taste like plastic. Do you correct this mistake or do you go home, try to relax and pretend you don’t dream about stampedes of snakes and messages from God? Too tough a decision. Not too tough. Obvious. It’s obvious. Towers of flesh cities of machine men big nothing is coming. Big nothing is coming and you need to be prepared. Listen to me. Relax and let me do my job. Shut up. I don’t need you. Wait, turn your mind off and then go and see what your instinct does. Maybe your instincts know better than you do. Let sanity and the workings of a cool head prevail. Sanity, yes, do the sane thing, Jeremy Jenkins. I fill my mind with music and visualizations, hoping to gain a serene, safe, meditative calm. The mountain in my dream suddenly comes to mind. I don’t know why I find this mountain calm. I would think there was too much going on there to find this place calm. But there is indeed something serene about the mountain. Maybe because it’s my place in my mind where I do what I feel is right. I ignore the fact that something is wrong with the skies above me. I do not think about the fact that a cluster of stars has formed a hand, and another cluster of stars right near it has formed a knife. The mountain feels so right that the convergence of the clusters isn’t important to me. Nor is the masturbatory fervor with which it jerks up and down constantly, pounding against the sky. It is important to be in a happy, safe place. One should not fixate on the negative. Those are shapes in the sky, visions of someplace else, someplace that is not important to those on sit on the mountain.
But suddenly, here I am in that place again. The place where I am overturning an armchair and pushing it and a coffee table against the front door of a house that I do not recognize at all. It is a little beige house with a fifteen year old TV and a sofa salvaged off the curb. A sofa that I roll a dead woman off of. Breathe deep you son of a bitch. This is just the negative place. This is not life. You don’t want to be here, so breathe deep, concentrate and get yourself out of here. There is only a corpse and cheap furniture for you here. This can’t be life. Life is behind all of this. Remember the dreams; remember what Cass told you about meditating when things get stressful. This place is stressful, find another one and do so quickly. Do not fixate on the negative; it will do you no good.
Scramble back to the safe place where the stars shine brightly above you. Close your eyes and enjoy it. There are no stampeding snakes and no Dark Ones that can get you here, this nonplace, and this dream place is good for you. Soon the mountain becomes a dream and I’m some place better. I’m at a sparkling, sweet, crystalline river in a little boat. There’s nothing on the boat, but a little basket and I. The basket makes the boat feel heavy. It might capsize if it isn’t abandoned. Don’t even think about what’s in there, Jeremy, it won’t do you any good. Just listen to me and get rid of that basket, because otherwise, you’re going to fall into that river and drown and your little starlit boat ride is over. That cannot be tolerated. You cannot lose your starlit boat ride right now. Life is too hard. I throw the basket overboard. It floats, but I know that I need it to sink. Do I want this basket to float? No, Jeremy. You do not. Something terrible is in this basket, and if it comes back to you, more than just your boat ride is ruined. It will destroy your life and your livelihood. I grab the paddle of the little boat and I smack the basket, which doesn’t look like it’s going to sink anytime soon, although I can’t let it float. A growling emanates from the basket and then a gnarly little clawed hand emerges from it and begins to reach out for me. I beat it more urgently, and it doesn’t sink. I can’t stay here
. You can. Let me do my fucking job!
Eyes suddenly open to the mountaintop. My eyes on the mountaintop suddenly open again and I’m in the bathroom of the little beige house. The very real bathroom of the very real very beige little house. There is no paddle in my hands here, but I’m drowning something alright. I am shoving little bits of baby into a toilet. The eyes of its little head are open, glowing with the same red. I’ve killed the mother and I’ve killed the little baby Dark One. There is no getting away from this now. You cannot meditate yourself innocent or meditate the dead alive.
I have to remember where I parked. You parked half a mile away, outside the Dairy Queen. Not bad. Good, discreet, park job. What am I saying? I don’t remember doing any of this. And half a mile away from the house outside the Dairy Queen might not be such a great park job after all. I douse myself in everything on this woman’s nightstand, but it still doesn’t take away the very suspicious stench. SOMEHOW I still reach the car without being discovered. I can’t figure out how, since somebody should have seen or smelled me, but people ignore me. Good for them.
By the time I get back to the apartment, my clothes are covered, absolutely covered in God-only-knows what kind of fluids. Green stuff brown stuff black stuff dirty inside bits nothing but dirty in there…there’s a rainbow of disgusting internal juices. I jump in the shower, still clothed and I stay in there for hours. Cass goes in, uses the bathroom, gagging at the smell, but doesn’t knock on the shower door or gear up for a confrontation. When I peel off the clothes, I wish that I could peel off the skin beneath them. Water and soap don’t get it all off. I wish I hadn’t forgotten my briefcase and raincoat. I toss my clothes into a garbage bag, empty out about a gallon of bleach, shake it up really hard, add water and hope the smell is not suspicious enough for the garbage man to get curious. I wish I could do the same with myself.