by John Pelan
The temerity of the man to attempt to touch him.
Yet it was this very touch that proved it all real.
“Come on. No reason to be afraid of little old me. I'm just getting a little education. Just a little is what they said. I was smart, they said. I was salvageable, they said. Ha ha. That's why I'm here and not there,” he said, pointing a manicured finger at a muddy puddle beneath him.
Alvin shuddered, gripped his briefcase more tightly, and prepared to move on. He had wasted fai too much time dawdling with this clearly insane person. He had tried to help the hanged man, but it was plain that help wasn't part of the grand scheme.
“You know the pain isn't too bad, actually. I mean sure, I said before it didn't hurt. To tell you the truth, it hurts like hell, but you get used to it. And like they said, fro n this perspective the world looks different. And it is all a matter of perspective.”
Yes. Totally insane. The man had probably been an accountant who became too entranced by the numerology of prime numbers upon a balance sheet. Alvin turned to leave.
“Ahhhh. That's it. Just a little lower please.”
Alvin glanced back to see what had been ihe impetus of the strangely sensuous comment and felt his jaw strike the ground.
The hanged man had his hands interlocked behind his head and was smiling with an almost sexual satisfaction. His eyes were glazed, closed to mere slits. But that wasn't what was so shocking. What was irrevocably the most disgusting sight Alvin had ever seen was the tentacle teasing the surface tension of the puddle of piss and mud and urban sewage, rising and sliding beneath the white T-shirt. Green with brown splotches, it held dozens of pale blue eyes along its length. Several attended Alvin, their unblinking focus unnerving, while the rest appeared to be examining the hanged man. The claw-shaped tip of the tentacle could be seen nuzzling the man's left rib cage beneath the white cotton of the T-shirt, as if it was there to scratch an itch and not rip out a lung.
Alvin began to tremble and backed away until his back touched the opposite wall. He spun, bringing his briefcase up as a shield, but was confronted only by an empty brick facade. The man cooed behind him and Alvin spun again.
This was far too much.
Either an interactive insanity had become Alvin's new reality or the hallucinatory terrain he was presently traveling upon was the result of an imbalance of ingested chemicals or…
Alvin mentally inventoried the foods he had recently consumed.
Perhaps poison.
Maybe ptomaine.
Or botulism.
Or one of those mushrooms that are like LSD.
Or worse even.
Alvin reminded himself to immediately call the doctor for a checkup as soon as he arrived at his office. It would be the second time this week, but the persistent vision of the hanged man was proof that one couldn't be too careful.
Or maybe it was a reaction to one of the medications he had taken last year. Alvin had read in Woman's Day that more than half of the FDA-approved drugs produced unforeseen side effects —which, of course, was the main reason he had begun to see a Chinese herbalist.
No FDA.
No profit margin.
The Chinese had been working at their science for thousands of years and were the only experts he was willing to trust. And trust he did, even if some of their ingredients were on the low end of the Good Taste Scale.
Like brown bear liver…
… or rhinoceros horn…
… or dehydrated elephant urine.
His stomach tumbled twice as he thought what he promised himself he wouldn't think. He fought down a sliver of bile and returned his attention to the insanity at hand.
Alvin did allow himself a grin, however, as he realized that he had shown enough sense to not speak with his hallucination. Not mumbling like so many on the street. He had always been intelligent and hadn't been one to fall for the demented normalcy of his fellow human beings. It was one of Alvin's greatest virtues, and it had allowed him to elude the pitfalls that were apparently common to the masses.
Hurrying his feet into motion, he resumed his trip to work. He hadn't traveled a dozen feet, however, before he heard the voice of a woman speaking on his left.
“He may be a strange old goat, but he knows what he's talking about.”
The voice was slow, smooth, and filled with the sexy syllables of an expert. There was only a hint of the bourbon that had forever flavored her voice, and it stopped him in his tracks. Even though this new fantasy meant touching, Alvin felt himself becoming hard, his excitement lifting the tweed of his pleated pants. In a combination of dismay and interest he turned to the product of his strange desire.
Again, he felt displaced as the impossible sight that presented itself to him.
The woman was rigid. The tentacles of yet another unseen creature rising out of yet another putrid puddle had wrapped her in a state of statuesque stillness. Three, no, four of the green lengths wrapped and rewrapped themselves around her, pinning her legs and her arms until finally twining up to cover her eyes, the tentacle ends twitching above her like alien antennae. Where the other man's tentacles had eyes, this one had thorns and, at small intervals, rivulets of blood on the woman showed the placement of the otherworldly injections. These tentacles pulsated slowly, making him wonder if they were delivering some kind of strange sustenance or perhaps removing something critically human.
“Tell me, sir. What do you look like? Are you a blond? I do love my blonds, you know.”
She squirmed as the tentacles undulated. A sigh escaped her lips, tinges of pain and pleasure mingled and drifted across the space between them.
Sweat beaded upon his forehead as he noticed that the undulation had revealed the dark brown of a swollen nipple. His throat dried and his breathing hitched. He pulled his spare handkerchief out of a back pocket and wiped slowly at his face.
Alvin so much wanted to tell her he was a blond.
He could do it too. Just to see what she would do. What it would do.
What she and it would do.
His imaginings became too much. Alvin had never been a brave man. He forced himself to look away, shielding the side of his face with his hand in the event his eyes turned traitor. He rushed further down the alley, his distress and eagerness to return to the sanctity of his office evident in the clipped notes of his shoes against the alley floor. According to his watch, he was going to be late—something that had never happened before, and an event that would certainly send the others in the office buzzing around the water cooler, discussing his failure.
I bet they even have a pool, he thought.
The alley was a gauntlet, however, and Alvin did his best to ignore the sights and sounds.
He did his best to ignore the man held several feet above the ground. A tentacle had pierced his throat and by the bulging in the neck it was evident that the stomach was the destination.
What was at the end of this one? Was it a hook, raking the intestines? Was it an eye to examine, to see the internal man? Or was it a feather to tickle where no itch could be scratched?
Whatever it was, the round protrusion at the man's center moved as if a newborn something was about to hatch.
He did his best to ignore the man in the wheelchair whose legs were pumping at the instigation of the tentacles that ensconced the ankles as if he were competing in a marathon for one.
He did his best.
He did his best to ignore the many others that he hurried by.
He gathered speed and determination as he passed each, until Alvin was running pell-mell down the a. ley, the echoes of his retreating shoes lending an undertone to the moans and groans and questions from the tentacled proselytizers.
Alvin controlled the urge to vomit until he reached the end of his once-favorite shortcut and again entered the stream of commuters. He fell to his knees and retched across the milling feet of the masses. Screams and curses struct as the stench of his own vomit and the sight of the green oatmeal spew made
him sick anew.
He was a spectacle but he didn't care. Between heaves he laughed, urging forth the visions of tentacles and their impaled victims among the chunks of bile.
He giggled.
… and for the first time in an age he was i ctually pleased to have the company of strangers.
The air was filled with a buzzing. The sound was everywhere but refused to coalesce. Like the sound of a million bees, but wherever I turned, they seemed to be just out of sight. I couldn't turn fast enough. The air was liquid and my movzments were slow-motion echoes of what they should have been.
I was on a hill high above a plain. The heaviness of everything blurred my vision, but even with the vitriolic lens of this reality, I could make out the squarishness of buildings.
Of a city.
Distant mounds shifted in my blurred vision. Moving mounds of what could be people. Or bees. Thousands of them moving toward me. Toward the light.
I stared at my hands and allowed my vision to follow my arms and my chest. And then to the rest of me. I was naked. Completely naked. But that wasn't what had caught my attention.
It was the light.
The tremendous light.
I appeared to be at the epicenter of an unknown radiance. The pinkness of my skin had been washed out by the whiteness.
As if… as if I was the reason for the light.
As if the moving things were drawn to me like a swarm of earthbound moths.
I turned to flee and found myself in a slow-motion sprint to freedom.
It was then I realized the light wasn't coming from me. What had been behind me was brighter.
Blindingly brighter.
An oval orb of white that possessed luminescence beyond vision, as if my insides were as bathed in the brilliance as was my skin.
I fought to turn away, to spare my burning eyes. I felt as if my brain was on fire.
Melting my heart.
But the longer I stared the less bright it seemed. Whether it was dimming or whether my eyes were boiling, I couldn't tell. I felt heat but no longer any pain.
Just the all-encompassing light.
Just the persistent buzzing.
With the dimness came an eternal shape. It was a cross that rose high.
Higher than the hill.
Higher than anything.
The shape was the highest thing in the world, the pinnacle of all attention. With the coalescing of the cross came the shape upon it. A tall man, his legs pinned. His arms were spread as if he was waiting to embrace the world. His head was raised skyward.
I found that I had moved closer and I could make out that his lips were peeled back, the muscles of his neck bulging as if he was screaming, begging, crying. But whatever sound that might have emanated was smothered by the eternal buzz that thickened the air.
I wanted to reach up and draw his head to my ear.
I wanted to hear his words.
I wanted to listen to what he was saying.
As always, however, he was too high above to understand. Instead, I reached out my arms, begging them to elongate. Stretch those many impossible feet so that I could touch him. Touch him like the tentacles that were intertwining themselves around the wood and his bloody feet.
They rose from the pink puddle like living vines, their genesis founded within a commingled mess of blood and tears. But more than vines, they were limbs of a much larger creature—or creatures. Each an appendage with purpose beyond my imaginations.
Some with thorns.
Some with eyes.
Some with wicked, serrated teeth.
Each one different from the others as if created for a specific purpose.
All originating from someplace beneath the undulating surface tension of the puddle.
All becoming more and more frenzied, reaching higher and higher, until they were caressing the length of the crucified man's body.
Tracing the curve of his jaw like a mother would a wounded child.
I spun, seeking help.
I sought to save him.
Behind me, the blurred shapes that had previously been so far away had come upon me. All eyes were on the figure. Every mouth was open.
It was then that I realized what I had mistaken for buzzing was the murmurs of a thousand throats.
Voices, old and young, rough and pure all chanted the same strange words. Each person rapid-fired:
Gog-Hoor…
Gog-Hoor…
Gog-Hoor…
For the hundredth time in seven days Alvin awoke screaming.
He had dreamed again, and his body begged for respite. For seven days, since his trek through the gauntlet of the strange, he had been virtually without sleep. When his body was finally able to comply with the natural order of things, the inevitable dream followed, leaving him haunted by the visions and no less tired.
Visions of Christ on a cross with tentacles.
Inexplicable tentacles caressing, terrorizing the Man, the Son, the God.
The first three days Alvin had managed to actually go to work. The necessity and his obsessive compulsiveness still ruled his life. Yet on the third day, after he had fainted twice and fallen asleep in a conference only to awake screaming much to the chagrin of the young executive giving a presentation, Alvin had been ordered to take a leave of absence.
But the worst occurred after he had been escorted from the conference room, when his boss had commented, “You know, your work has been suffering lately.”
The words were daggers, cutting large swathes through his fortified confidence. The pain of it sent him shaking as he packed his briefcase with half a dozen unfinished projects.
With his chin sunk to his chest and his briefcase barely grasped in his weak hands he shuffled to the elevator. He pressed the button for the ground floor and with the passing of each level he became more and more depressed. He barely registered the pause of the car, the ding, the snick of the door opening, and the passenger who joined his descent. He felt the man's eyes upon him but was unwilling to look up and stare into the eyes of a successful person. He was afraid to confront someone who was descending by choice and not by order.
All his life Alvin had fought the chaos around him… within him. He had challenged himself and conquered every task until his life was the paradigm of order and perfection. People called him compulsive, but he merely smiled at their comments, knowing, as a dog could smell disease, that their very lack of understanding had already determined their fate, their destiny to die in the chaotic squalor that was everyone's secret challenge.
All yet with all of his perfection, he had been the one to fall.
“I've been where you are.”
Alvin's heart nearly stopped as the man spoke. The voice was firm, filled with the rigid discipline of confidence that Alvin had so recently known himself. It was a voice le would follow.
A voice that brooked no hesitation.
A voice he had heard before.
Slowly, his body quivering with an apprehension he had never anticipated, Alvin stared into the face of the man and saw confidence and concern and wisdom upon a face that had so recently been upside down, feet pinned to an alley wall with a railroad spike.
Alvin was saved from a reply by the ding ar d the snick of the door as it arrived at the bottom. Shifting his eyes back to his feet, Alvin hurried out the elevator door. He was almost able to ignore the words that rushed after him.
“Have they spoken to you yet? Have you istened to them? Have you listened to the Gog-Hoor?”
That had been Wednesday and he had believed it to be the worst day of his life.
Until Thursday, that is, when he ran out of furniture polish and found himself unable to leave his apartment for fear of what he might see … or actually encounter.
It wasn't that Alvin had never listened to the battalion of therapists he had engaged; it was just that he had never believed in their institutionally learned dogma. How could they possibly understand a person's wish to control?
&n
bsp; They called it a bad thing.
They called him obsessive-compulsive.
They said he was on the edge of insanity and needed a formulated, dedicated life of good therapy and better drugs.
What did they know?
Then on Friday, trash day in his building, he found himself unable even to open his door. He had sat the entire day with plastic-gloved hands in a kitchen chair, staring at the perfectly sealed, triple-layered white plastic that contained a breeding ground for an entire universe of bacteria, which left to its own devices would most certainly begin a plague. Drifting in and out of sleep, he fought his fear and begged his limbs to move the few feet, lift the bag, walk to the door, open it, drop the bag, close it, and be free from the impending doom. It was as if this simple task was beyond him, as if the bag was a ticking bomb that he was unable to disarm.
It was like his therapists had said.
“First it's the little things, Mr. Samovich. A clock in a perfect place, rearranging the silverware at every meal until the angles are perfect, continuous dusting, always ensuring that everything is in its place…”
It was like his mother had said.
“Yer a rare boy, Alvie. You'll be somethin' special someday. Somebody of means and substance.”
It was like his mother's boss had said.
“Who the hell do you think you are? A man? Someone who can beat me? Get the fuck outta my way, boy.” said Frankie the Fly, his mother's pimp, who continually stormed into their flat to batter his mother for holding out.
It was like his own boss had said.
“I think you need some time off to work out a few problems.”
Alvin's head hit his chest and he again succumbed to the dream.…
… I found that I had moved closer and I could make out his lips peeled back, the muscles of his neck bulging as if he was screaming, begging, crying. But whatever sound emanated was smothered by the eternal buzz that thickened the air
I wanted to reach up and draw his head to my ear.
I wanted to hear his words.
I wanted to listen to what he was saying.
As always, however, he was too high above w understand.
He returned from a swoon only to be assaulted by the vision of the bag. Standing shakily, he plodded around the five rooms he called home. At each surface he winced as hs saw specks gathering, one every second, piling up, until soon his entire existence would be covered in a thick blanket of dust.