“Whazzaaaaaaap?” he drawled as he reached into his pocket for the bowie knife.
“You are the weakest link. Goodbye!” he said in an astringent monotone before puncturing the man’s throat with the twelve-inch bowie knife and leaving it sticking out of his Adam’s apple, nailing him to the fence.
Eight blocks down the road he found the home of his former psychiatrist. He swooned remembering their very last conversation.
The doctor had come to visit him several months ago. Apparently some of his relatives had been concerned about the disappearance of their estranged relation and had tracked down the doctor hoping he would have a clue to his whereabouts.
“My God man! When was the last time you got out of this apartment?” The doctor had exclaimed.
“Time is an illusion. I am learning.”
Quickly, the doctor slipped into his clinical mode.
“What exactly are you learning?”
“How to respond to life. At first I thought I wanted distractions. I thought I wanted to avoid the question, pretend it didn’t exist, that it was unimportant, that just living was the important thing.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. What question?”
“The question everyone wants to ask but we are all so afraid of. Not how do I cope with life, but how do I conquer it? How do I overcome it? Subjugate it? And this…” he said, pointing to the gigantic television that now filled an entire wall. “This is going to show me how.”
The doctor turned to look at the huge screen as his deranged young client flicked through the channels. It wasn’t until then that he noticed it. Channel after channel of pure nihilistic violence. The cartoons, the commercials, the comedies, all singing the song of the flesh, a mournful dirge, a war cry. Death and destruction literal, symbolic, metaphorical, endless. All those beautiful people spiraling down into a pit of merciless doom. You could see it in their faces. They had all died a dozen times and would die a dozen more. If not in this movie or this episode then in the next but they would all die because that was the lesson they had to teach; that life must end. You could see it in their faces, in how they lived, the huge monuments they built to themselves and called houses, mansions, estates, they were all just great headstones; the mausoleums in which their memories would lie inert, captured in stone until age eventually took those away too. This was the lesson they had to teach.
“Horrible,” the doctor said backing away from the screen, not seeing the gleeful giant standing behind him.
“The answer,” the man said as the shrink backed into him and turned to face his maddened eyes. “The answer is that the only proper response to existence is VENGEANCE!”
He raised his arms above his head and drove two radio antennas into the good doctor’s cranium.
“We must revenge ourselves against life for the agony it has put each of us through, for the hopelessness of our plight. Learn, Doc. Learn.”
He spun the doctor back around to face the television and absorb its wisdom.
Eventually, even this memory was battered from his mind as he stood gawking at the deceased’s weather beaten house, swallowed in a maelstrom of cathode ray images.
He continued walking down the street until he approached a house that appealed to him; an apartment building actually.
He opened the door and stepped into the large vestibule. A young boy, no more than about fifteen, stood there fumbling with his keys. He wrapped a hand around the boy’s throat and threw him against the locked security door. The boy began to yell for help when the man produced a long tanto knife.
“Hi, I’m Casey Kasum with this weeks top ten hits!” he sunk the knife into the boys lower abdomen.
The boy rained punches down upon him and more than a few knees landed in the man’s groin but he didn’t appear to notice.
“At number ten on the list we have Usher with ‘Confession’,” he pronounced gleefully as he began slicing upwards with the knife in a surgically straight line.
The boy’s screams were terrible. He stopped punching and began trying to pull the blade out of his gut but the man held it in an unshakable grip and the blade continued to ascend. He gripped the man’s wrist with both hands. His efforts were useless. Blood was everywhere.
“At our number seven spot we have Lil’ John singing ‘Yeah!’”
The blade was now up to the boy’s rib cage.
“At number five Brittany Spears with ‘I’m Not That Innocent’,” he said, Casey Kasum’s voice brimming with excitement as he neared the number one hit and the knife carved through the boy’s solar plexus.
The boy’s young body convulsed furiously. He was already dead. It would just take him a few more minutes to realize it. The knife yet moved upwards.
“At number two we have Jay Z with ‘Ninety-Nine Problems’ and for the fourth week in a row, a song made popular by Stephen King, at number one, Larry Underwood singing ‘Baby Can You Dig Your Man?’.”
He slashed the knife from the middle of the boy’s chest to just beneath his chin in one swift stroke and finally allowed the lifeless thing to fall at his feet. He searched the boy for the keys to the security door, splashing around in the terrific pool of blood that now filled the vestibule. He found the keys by the door where the boy had dropped them and let himself through. He knocked at the first door he came to.
A young woman, with bright red hair (dyed), wearing a warm-up suit and sweating profusely, answered the door. Dance music blared from somewhere inside her apartment. She was chewing gum in that obnoxious way that sluts do.
“Good efening,” said the voice of Bela Lugosi, “My name is Count Dracula.”
He seized her chin and jerked her head back exposing the pale, virgin skin of her throat.
“I vant to suck jour bvlod,” he continued and before she could struggle or let out so much as a squeal, he ripped her throat out with his teeth.
As the woman slumped to the ground, coughing and choking on her own blood, her lacerated throat making bubbly gargling noises, he said, in the voice of the little boy eating a mustard sandwich in the French’s Mustard commercial, “Ith’s dewicious!” and then swallowed the huge hunk of flesh he’d tore from her throat.
He went on to an upstairs apartment and chased a “Waskiwy wabbit” around a table before he finally caught the old man and severed his head from his shoulders. He placed the disembodied head carefully in the oven on a greased cookie sheet (after all it was “Time to make the donuts”).
He left the apartment building and flagged down a cab. Imagine catching a cab at the height of the day while dripping in blood from head to toe. Only in New York. The taxi driver pulled away from the curb and, as if on an afterthought, yelled back over his shoulder.
“Hey were you in an accident man?”
“An accident? Yes, an accident. A terrible accident. I was sitting in the car drinking. That’s how I used to deal with life. I’ve found a better way now, a much better way. Maria, my wife, was driving, complaining that the glare from the oncoming traffic was blinding her. Then there was a long screech and then a loud crash as we slammed into the meridian. I looked up to see the front of the car crinkled up like dirty laundry and spraying chunks of concrete as we crashed through the meridian and went sailing into the opposite lane. All I could see were hundreds of headlights rushing towards us. We collided head-on with a little Toyota and I was catapulted through the windshield. Sparks erupted from beneath the little car and then it exploded, dislodging itself from our car and propelling it into the embankment on the side. Our car caught fire too but it was still rolling. It whined and screamed and hissed angrily at me while it did things 40,000 dollars worth of automotive genius just shouldn’t do, you know? I could smell the tires burning and another smell like frying pork. Maria was dead and in a drunken nod I had missed her death. I just sat there watching her empty body bounce up and down in its seat and whack its head against the steering wheel again and again as the flaming vehicle rolled away from me. I could hear the b
rakes squealing like she was still trying to stop the car.
My ears were filled with the angry sound of grinding metal and I can remember thinking, to the car, “She did it. Don’t scream at me. I wasn’t driving!” After it was over, I walked down the road to where the car had finally succumbed to inertia and sat down with my back to it, and Maria hated it when I turned my back to her. I picked dirt and glass out of my face and wondered what happened to all the distractions. All the wonderful distractions that put distance between you and any notions of death, made you think you were too young or too healthy or too important to die. I can’t die. I have mortgage payments to make. I haven’t raised a family yet. I haven’t saved the world yet! Where were all those distractions? Those petty obsessions that seemed so important, that took our minds off our insignificance, our utter meaninglessness, our mortality. I turned and looked at Maria’s dead smiling face. Her lips had been burned off and what was left of her eyes were sizzling and boiling in their sockets. At that moment I knew that life didn’t need us. Maria had simply lived and then she did not and the world did not stop spinning.”
He began weeping aloud.
“Uh, sir? Would you like me to take you to a hospital?”
“What?” he looked up, his face a mask of pain and confusion.
“Where to sir?”
The sensitive human being, who mourned the loss of his wife and the loss of a world in which things made sense, winked out of existence. What remained was an existentialist monster, a walking horror film, just another fucking couch potato.
“There’s a sign post up ahead. It reads… last stop the Twilight Zone!” said the unforgettable voice of Rod Serling then he shot the taxi driver’s head off.
The cab swerved insanely and barreled into a powder blue Cadillac. Both men left their vehicles. The cab driver stayed behind the wheel spouting blood out of his face. The owner of the blue Cadi’; a tall overweight Texan in a gaudy maroon suit, walked over to the side of the cab and looked in the front seat.
“What the hell happened to him?” he exclaimed.
“Awww, the poooor puddy tat. He fall down go . . .”
click, click, BOOM!!!
The Cadillac’s corpulent owner fell on his ample buttocks, spraying blood from the steaming hole in his chest.
A motorcycle cop scooted up out of nowhere looking terribly phallic with his bulbous helmet wobbling atop his reed thin neck. The helmet appeared to be wider than his narrow, bowed shoulders. The impotent looking prick-of-a-cop leveled his weapon at the demented human chameleon that even then was morphing into another TV character.
“Drop the weapon freak and spread out on the floor! Now!!!”
His voice shook as he attempted to bark out the command in his most authoritarian tone. He didn’t sound either strong or confident as he had hoped. He sounded scared. His gun hand was shaking as well. Anyone watching would’ve known that someone was about to die.
The gore encrusted man with the deranged gleam in his eyes turned to look at the little man in his idiotic little uniform with a look of amusement.
“Let’s get ready to RUUUMBLLLLE!!!”
He rushed the little prick swinging the Mossberg pistol grip pump shotgun above his head in a tremendous arc. The cop squeezed off a shot that grazed the top of the man’s ear searing a furrow alongside his temple just before he connected with the crude assault. The little prick fell to his knees and the gun flew from his hand. The gore soaked maniac brought the shotgun down again and again driving the cop to the asphalt where he continued to bludgeon him.
“Captain! I can’t hold her together much longer. She’s going to blow!”
The police officer’s helmet cracked and a stream of blood erupted from the top re-enforcing the phallic imagery. His helmet continued to disintegrate as blow after blow rained down with relentless fury. His skull fared no better. When it was over it was difficult to distinguish the fragments of the helmet from the fragments of the cop’s obliterated cranium. The maniac was in a frenzy. He looked into the officer’s ruined face; staring into his eyes as they drooled out of their sockets onto his cheeks.
“You look marvelous!” said the voice of Fernando Lamas or rather Billy Crystal imitating Fernando Lamas.
As he turned to leave he noticed that the Cadi’ owner, whom he’d written off as dead, had dragged himself over to the prick’s gun. He gave him a few whacks with the shotgun too.
“Homey don’t play dat!”
At about ten minutes to midnight he finally came home. He peeled off his blood encrusted, gore splattered clothes and sat down on the couch; in front of the television. He turned it on. It had blown its color tube last night and now the screen produced nothing but static lines. It didn’t matter. He supplied the show.
Tears rolled down his cheeks tinged pink from the blood covering his face as he recounted the day’s events.
“Today in the news a series of gruesome murders struck our fair city leaving nearly a dozen people dead. Conflicting witness reports describe the suspect as everything from a tall black man identical enough to Michael Jordan to be a twin, to Bela Lugosi, to . . . uh . . . Tweety Bird? Either the killer is a master of disguise or this is the worst case of mass hysteria this reporter has ever seen. It sounds like whoever it was that the cops interviewed in this case watches entirely too much television.”
“Yeah,” the man said, using his own voice for the first time in years, “just a bunch of fucking couch potatoes.”
More Maggots
“. . . more maggots . . .”
Anthony loved his mother. He clung to that love like a lifeline —as he had all his life. If nothing else, he was sure that it would see him through this.
His mother had been determined to make a success of him. That’s why she’d worked nine hours a day in the sugar cane fields, swinging a machete from sunrise ‘til the sun bled out across the sky. That’s why she’d had Mama Luanda put a mojo on his daddy to stop him from beating’ on them. That’s why she’d sent Anthony off to London to study at the British University.
Anthony dreamed of bringing her his college diploma, getting a good job, and buying her a new house. He would make certain she never had to work in the fields again. That’s why he couldn’t allow himself to die. Not like this.
“. . . more maggots . . . need more . . .”
The dust, mold, and mildew that filled the room with a graveyard stench were not the first odors that Anthony became aware of as he reluctantly regained consciousness. It was easily overshadowed by the sickening sweet smell coming from the parasite-infested hog carcass lying on the floor beside the bathtub, or the rotten egg smell of infection and decay coming from Anthony himself.
His nostrils roared with the noxious aromas acting as a smelling salt, reviving him even as his mind attempted to retreat from reality into the comfort of dreams. He wanted to escape into the cool ocean where he’d trapped crab and lobster years ago, where he’d swam with sand sharks that had long grown accustomed to the presence of islanders, while his mother and sisters washed their clothes alongside him in the same refreshing waters. He longed for the smoky nightclubs where calypso and dancehall reggae played ‘til the wee hours of the night and everyone danced, drank rum, and smoked ganja. Any memory would’ve sufficed. Anything to shield his mind from this . . . this horror. But he could not escape it.
Anthony’s mind waded sluggishly through a mucoid swamp of hideous, putrescent images—images of pale slimy creatures wriggling ecstatically through decaying flesh . . . his flesh! Images too terrible to be real. He was in a delirious state of shock as he struggled to ascribe logic to it. Nothing in his life had prepared him for what he was now seeing. This was not being stabbed in an alley by a junkie hungry for a fix. This was not being caught in the crossfire of two rival gangs and ducking automatic weapons fire at a dead sprint. This was not being attacked by a jealous girlfriend with a steak knife, being beaten to death by racist cops, starving to death in a rat-infested tenement, or slowly w
orking to an exhausted collapse in the sugarcane fields at home. This was not like any of the horrible ends his mother had feared her little boy might come to when she scraped together years of savings to send him away from this place. This was a slow, crawling, rotting, living death. He shuddered and groaned in revulsion. He could imagine no torment in hell to equal this.
Anthony wanted to scream. He wanted to scream until the movie screen shattered and he was back on the sidewalk, in the sunlight, with the horror already a fading memory. But he knew this was not a movie. It was real and it was happening to him.
“. . . Na ‘nough . . . need more . . . na can stop now . . . more . . . need more maggots . . .”
Even more than the terrible sights or the horrendous odors, those words cut through the dense miasm surrounding Anthony’s mind like a splash of cold water. He could not make out everything the old woman was saying. Her hoarse mumbling was like the hiss of a snake and spewed from her lips in an unending rant. But Anthony could decipher enough of it to know that he was fucked. Her gnarled arthritic talons danced over his bare skin as she worked her medicine upon him, and he cringed each time her flesh made contact with his own. Still, he made no effort to resist her. He needed her.
He watched with revulsion as she pulled a handful of maggots from the rotting entrails of the dead hog and worked them gently into his wounds. He could feel them consuming him, or rather he imagined he could, but he offered no protest. For the sake of his own sanity, he had to believe the old woman knew what she was doing.
“. . .’till not ‘nough . . . need more . . . need more maggots . . .”
It had begun with bleeding sores. Anthony first thought it was little more than bad acne, then when the ulcers multiplied and began to enlarge, he’d been afraid he had skin cancer. When the sores had widened into gaping holes, large chunks of flesh simply missing as if he’d been attacked and half eaten by some wild beast, and a gangrenous stench wafted from them like the smell of fresh road kill, he had finally gone to the hospital seeking help. By the time he reached the emergency ward the avulsions in his flesh were so large that he could watch his lung working behind his ribcage and could trace the path of food through his intestinal track. It had nearly been too late then.
The Book of a Thousand Sins Page 12