Ellie pointed to the floor and a great chasm opened up in the floor. Adam looked down into the tremendous fissure, into the very earth itself, to see a great molten ocean that seemed to be filled with human bodies, their skin boiling off of them, liquefying into the same flaming effluence in which they were imprisoned.
“Go join the other rebels. That traitor down there has been waiting for you for a long time. He wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for his jealousy over you.”
“I won’t go. I’ll turn this whole world against you!”
“That will never happen Adam. They love me even if you don’t. Even with all the knowledge you gave them they’d still rather believe than think. He who increases knowledge increases suffering. My children don’t want to suffer. They want to believe in love Adam. They want to believe in me.”
“Please. Please. Don’t take my son.”
“You don’t have a son Adam. They are all my children.”
Elohim bent down by the side of Joey’s bed and kissed her son on his lips, breathing pneumonia into his lungs. She knew that even with his white blood cell count rising his immune system was still too weak to fight off such a cold. She hugged him tight as Adam’s screams raked her ears then she released his soul into the ether and moved on. The rest of her children needed her. She could hear them calling.
Adam rushed to Joey’s bedside and held his dying son, showering him with his tears. He watched Elohim leave remembering when just the sound of her voice and the sight of her radiant visage had been all he’d ever needed for happiness. He remembered when she had created a mate for him and when he’d disobeyed her and been cast out of the garden to walk the earth forever alone and unloved. Watching one lover after another give birth, grow old, and die, leaving him alone in the concrete ruins of Eden with his useless knowledge of the universe and yet another dead child.
“Münchausen by proxy!” He screamed, but no one listened. They never did.
Couch Potato
“Eyes are the window to the soul. Stare into an American’s eyes . . . Most likely there will be nothing but a mere reflection of a television glaring back at you.”
—Shelby Gull
“Sigmund Freud described the self as that part of ourselves that mediates between our own internal drives and desires and the outside world. Ego vs. Id = Self. Buddhists see the only path to enlightenment as the elimination of self in order to unite with the infinite. I’ve been trying, really trying, ever since Maria died, but I’m starting to realize the impossibility of this endeavor. I think it might be easier to destroy everything else and leave my own ego right where it is.”
He rose from the couch and began to pace again.
“See, existence demands a toll. That toll is the effort required to maintain it. And everything in life is poised to frustrate that effort. Everything in life struggles against everything else for the commodities of existence and survival means being a part of that struggle. Even the most ascetic monk sitting alone on a hill meditating for hours must eventually come down from that hill to find food, shelter, clothing, water. You can suppress the urge to eat and drink but eventually, if you would continue to live, you must consume and that’s when the frustration begins. Getting food means working to get money, or stealing, or begging, or forming and maintaining friendships or relationships with those who would provide you sustenance. It means being involved in life; being a part of Samsara. And each time you interact with the world you expand your Self. Buddha himself was imperfect by his own definition while he lived and breathed because he was forced to be a part of this bullshit. But I’m going to achieve perfection one way or another. I’m sick of this world!”
He had that violent look in his eyes again. When he’d first come in the doctor had difficulty imagining him doing all the violence he’d been accused of, but now he could see it. He could see all the mayhem that lurked behind his wild eyes, like a bullet looking for a gun to give it direction.
“They take away my car, my job, my wife, everything I considered to be my life and they expect me to just smile, praise Jesus or Buddha or Allah or some phantom deity or other, and just go along with it all? Fuck that! Living is the constant acquisition and accumulation of things that are all forfeited the moment you die. Even your memories of those experiences rot away in your skull while the rest of you is picked apart by vermin and digested by the earth. In the end they take everything from you! Everything!”
The doctor sat struggling to control his own creeping terror as the obviously paranoid and psychotic young man delivered his fanatical diatribe. Since the death of his wife the man had been involved in one violent incident after another. In and out of psychiatric hospitals and jail cells. He was currently on probation for attacking a priest at a confessional. If reports were true he’d raped and sodomized the man. When the cops asked him why he’d done it, he’d simply replied “Why not?” Therapy was part of the terms of his probation.
“Who’s ‘They’?” the doctor asked in his flat toneless voice, squinting over the top of his glasses. He was pleased with his appropriately clinical tone, impressed with himself for keeping his mounting unease out of his voice.
“They?”
“Yes. You said ‘They’ take away your car, your job, your wife. Who’s ‘They’?”
“They are Life; Life in general! The Creator! God! Shit, I don’t know! Fuck if I knew who ‘They’ were I wouldn’t be talking to you I’d be out killing the bastards!”
“Quite a morbid outlook you’ve got there. Your perception of life seems decidedly . . . uh . . . hostile.”
“Don’t I have a right to be hostile? After all the shit I’ve gone through in my life? After all that I’ve suffered?”
“We all suffer but, excuse the cliché, you must gather yea rosebuds while yea may.”
“Gather my what? What tha fuck are you talking about?!!” He shrieked with his face inches from the doctor’s. Spittle flew from his lips and speckled the good doctor’s glasses.
“Carpe Diem. Seize the day. I’m talking about making the most of your life while you can.”
“Yeah and what the fuck for! So you can just lose it all the minute your heart stops pumping hemoglobin to your starving organs? Death is the period at the end of the sentence that does not just punctuate or conclude but erases all that proceeded it. It’s the delete button on your computer and there isn’t even the option to save! Your whole life is just wiped out in its entirety! So why should we gather rosebuds or even our next breath?!”
The doctor watched his agitated patient wondering if he should hit the button for security or risk reaching into his desk for a little .38 caliber insurance. The man kept leaping up from the couch and storming around the tiny office flailing his arms madly as he continued his diatribe against existence. There was an insane animation in his eyes. They burned with the furious heat of total madness and the doctor had to struggle to maintain eye contact. The fanatical radiance bristling from the man’s gaze was like staring into an August sun. The doctor could see his tiny image sizzling on the man’s hard dark retinas.
“Why do you feel life has to accomplish something in order to be worth living? Why do you feel you must gain something from it?”
“Because life is not painless. It’s not one big endless party. It doesn’t come without a price. And after you’ve struggled so hard to maintain something, to hold onto something, and you face nothing but years and years of struggle ahead, what fool would not ask whether that which he is struggling for is worth the struggle? Life demands a price. Existence demands a toll. What fool would pay so dearly for something that had no worth? I mean, if it has no reward, if you lose everything, then it’s just cruel, evil!”
He glared down at the doctor again and this time he did flinch. His eyes were smoldering pits of madness and something in them made the doctor think the man would reach out and crush his larynx.
“Look at these Doc. These are the keys to one of the most beautiful cars ever made, a Lexus LS.
It was my pride and joy, but you can’t take it with you. The last time I saw it, it was wrapped around my wife and they were burning together. The whole twisted hulk just kept rolling down the street like it owned her now. They had become one, this perversely beautiful beast that spoke with the voices of rubber skidding across asphalt and steel grating against bone. And me? I had been thrown through the windshield like an unwelcome guest, like they didn’t want me interfering in their romance. Three’s a crowd pal. Hit the road. Ha ha. Get it? Hit the road! My own fucking car and it threw me out, left my wife to die alone in that burning hell. You can’t take it with you Doc. Not your car, your house, your job, your family, not your own wife who you waited all your life to find, whose eyes could make you forget who you were, whose smile made you smile. You can’t take it with you so what is the goddamned point?”
“Well then what do you want from me?”
“What do you mean?”
“It seems you have things well figured out. The world sucks. You’re convinced of that, and nothing anyone can do will dissuade you. So how do you intend for me to help you? Why did you come here?”
“I came here for you to show me how to go on with my life knowing what I know. I want to slip back into the illusion of life with a purpose; life with meaning, to forget that death exists as a contradiction to that illusion. If I could truly believe that the bullshit of everyday life actually has some significance then I could rejoin the rest of the herd, the mindless sheep, toiling in blissful ignorance with complete faith that in the end it will actually have meant something beyond mere senseless suffering. I mean, what good is knowing the truth when you’re helpless to change it?”
“Precisely. What good is it?”
“Help me Doc, please.”
“You know, at this point, most doctors would prescribe heavy dosages of anti-depressants plus years of psychotherapy for you. The anti-depressants of course would drug you into cooperation with the rest of the world; blind acquiescence to the human condition. The psychotherapy would be pretty much pointless in your case but it would help the good doctor pay off any outstanding debts.”
“Are you suggesting that I be drugged for the rest of my life?”
“Oh no, no. You are an intelligent man. You want the illusion. You realize the necessity of it. What would it prosper us all to realize that we’re in an infinite loop that does not progress or regress regardless of our input, that serves no obvious purpose but to continue eternally? Tell me, what would it gain us to know this? What you need is some help finding your way back to the fantasy and to achieve that end there are far more potent drugs than the pharmaceutical variety.
Hemingway once described religion, economics, patriotism, sexual intercourse, and radio as ‘Opium of the people.’ They lull the mind into a false sense of security and complacency, a sort of intellectual lethargy. They put us back in the dream world where lives are traded for scraps of rectangular green paper with pictures of dead presidents on them. Religion, patriotism, and economics, we’ve already discounted. Well, actually, we never did cover patriotism. How do you feel about your country?”
“I’m an anarchist.”
“Too bad, those were the three best. Anyway, that brings us to sexual intercourse. That won’t work. Number one because you can’t really do it that often and trying makes you too dependent on others. When firm breasts and tight asses become your only reason for living one lonely night could make you suicidal. We wouldn’t want you to go from depression to desperation. Desperate men commit desperate acts. Besides, the experience almost never equals the lust for the experience. You’d be disillusioned of that trip in no time.
Then, finally, there’s radio. Hours and hours of worry free entertainment. No thinking about life or mortality or the significance of the individual. No acting or interacting. Just you in your Lazy Boy gently massaged by radio waves ‘til your mind is passive and cooperative and ready to accommodate any illusion thrown at it. Whether it’s men in red and blue tights streaking through the sky or white boys singing soul music. After a few hours of that, the meaning of life becomes less of an issue as just going along with it, harmonizing with it and swaying to its rhythms with the rest of the sheep.
Now if radio is an ‘Opium of the people’ then television is heroin; uncut and China white! I suggest you take a vacation from your job and get yourself a big wide screen TV with a remote control, a satellite dish, a VCR, a DVD, a mountain of tapes, and lose yourself in commercial reality.”
***
Six years later . . .
He woke up that morning as he had every morning since his last therapy session, on the couch. He stared at the television screen for a while the way a teenaged boy would stare at Miss America if she were sitting directly across from him, then he got up and turned it off. He didn’t bother to shower or change his clothes or even brush his teeth. He walked into the bathroom, unzipped his fly, urinated into the sink (the toilet was broken) and smiled into the mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet.
“Like sands through the hour glass, these are the days of our lives,” he said.
He paused for a second trying to recall his name, who he was, where he came from. Images flashed through his mind and he tried desperately to grasp onto one and decipher it. His memory was now a kaleidoscopic montage of sound and video bites. He doesn’t remember mother or father though he assumes they were nothing like Claire or Heathcliff Huxtable otherwise he wouldn’t have turned out so maladjusted. He figures his family was more like the Bradys or the Partridge family; all wearing smiles chained to their faces, locked into their jaw muscles, forced to hold that unnatural position through entire episodes like some perverse bondage ritual. That is why he hates to see people smile and probably why he smiles so much himself. Runs in the family he supposes.
He doesn’t remember having a childhood, a young adulthood, going to college, bumming around the country, or any of those neat things they do on other shows. Perhaps those episodes were cancelled? Not enough support from the public or not enough funding from the sponsors.
He stared intently into the mirror.
They say eyes are the mirror to the soul (His gaze was unwavering. All expression bled from his face) but what if your soul is a mirror? What would you see when you looked into a mirror, into your own eyes? Nothing? Or, perhaps, nothing reflected back at you endlessly?
“How you doin’?” he asked himself, staring deep into that endless void.
He couldn’t remember a thing about himself. His identity had been slowly eroded, scrubbed away by an endless flow of commercials, silly sitcoms, soap operas, “B” movies and every other form of mental pabulum the idiot box could produce. His life disappeared somewhere between UHF, VHF, Cable, and MTV.
Maybe he was really Clint Eastwood “The man with no name” in that old Italian western “For a few dollars more.” Maybe he was no one at all; just another fucking couch potato.
He smiled and reiterated the words of the immortal Ernest Hemingway.
“Hail nothing, full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”
When he laughed it sounded amazingly like Vincent Price. His breath even smelled bad to him.
He walked downstairs into the living room where he scooped up several large knives and hid them in pockets all over his body. Then he grabbed a handful of shotgun shells and dumped them into his coat pocket alongside his trenchknife, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the one used by the Scorpio killer in “The Enforcer.”
He picked up his shotgun and walked out trying to remember all the ingredients in a Big Mac.
There was no method to his madness. He had no plan when he approached the house down the street. There was just the overwhelming feeling that something . . . that everything . . . was wrong . . . terribly, ridiculously, horribly, wrong . . . and he had to stop it. He had to make it all stop. All this sickening, absurd, pointless, living. It all had to stop now.
He walked around to the backdoor of the one story, cookie cutter, s
tucco house; painted in the mind numbing symbol of sameness known as “Swiss Coffee,” the middle class name for off-white.
He kicked the door in.
“Hello. Hello. Hello.” He sang in the voices of all three stooges.
Someone screamed and he caught a glimpse of a figure fleeing into the next room. He darted into the kitchen to head them off and spotted a little child in a high chair eating cereal. The child flung a spoon full of smooshed corn flakes at his feet.
“Oh! A wise guy!” he said in a frighteningly realistic “Curly” voice then he shoved his fingers through the kid’s eye sockets. The child died instantly. He continued into the dining room.
A woman stood there with a .45 in her hand, the hammerlock was still on and it probably didn’t even have a clip in it but she held it like she was determined to do business.
“Oh Lucy! Why don’ jou ever lis’sen to me?” he taunted in what was undoubtedly the voice of Desi Arnaz.
“YOU BASTARD!! YOU KILLED MY BABY!!!” The woman screamed hysterically.
“I saved your baby,” he whispered. “I saved him from the rest of his miserable life. You should be happy. Now he won’t turn out like me.”
He raised his shotgun and pointed it right between the ample swell of her bosom. She began desperately, and quite ineffectually, trying to fire her weapon.
BLAM!!! BLAM!!!!
Twin shotgun shells slammed into her chest and exploded out her back. She slumped against the wall and slid down leaving a long streak of blood and gore. Her eyes were glazed in horror, tasting her ensuing death. He walked out of the room already forgetting her.
“I’m so glad we had this time togetheeeeer.”
A young black man passed him on the street, as he left, and made a disgusting remark about how he may have gotten blood on his left hand. He whirled on the young man, grabbed him by the collar, and threw him against a ten-foot wooden fence.
The Book of a Thousand Sins Page 11