Selfie, Suicide

by Logo Daedalus

  The bottom-left quadrant shows surveillance camera footage of that most monumental of fuckups, that aforementioned day of irredeemable ire, which had caused the final breakdown of his pride & his belief in the power of his resolve to face the daily iniquities of his disenchanted world, his day’s commute, his gigs, his trivial apartment, his excursions with his psuedo- girlfriend with all their intimations of psuedo-intimacy, she who he’d worked with, slept with, fought with, sometimes laughed with, but never truly loved. As it was on that day that they had signed a lease on an apartment they would share, when they had commingled the detritus of their lives, their luggages, & boxes, their silverware, their appliances, all together strewn on the vacant floor of the future they would cohabit- that they had set out to buy some odds & ends, decorations, a new lamp perhaps, a curtain rod, champagne glasses, a painting... things that would be owned by them as a singular unit of residence- things that would come to symbolize their now insunderably shared world- it was on that very day that they’d gone to Flöskel, at the time of their “Here & There” collection, which was promoted so ubiquitously across the city- it was there that this security camera had recorded the collapse of their togetherness.

  "FALL: Farce, Blue Blue Blue"

  Cairey’s rapidly fracturing mind cannot contain the entirety of this memory, nor could this footage of his former-self gone mad, slashing the kitsch-for-sale, screaming, threatening innocent bystanders with upraised kitchen utensils, overturning displays, shattering all depictions of tasteful domesticity, crashing through their furnishings, those reified ideals in carpentry, with their price-tags hanging, jeering, overturned, upended, & smashed to bits. No- this was only the surface level of his interior collapse, which defied depiction or exposition in these terms. Though the footage was damning, & the debts, & punishments, & the strikes on his social-credit score he’d incurred for his actions were enormous, they were nothing compared to the damage done to his psyche, within that larger undepicted context, his internal life, with all of its invisible associations, motifs, thoughts, dreams, nightmares, which composed the constellations of his personal astrology, which he’d only revealed in part, but never, to anyone, in whole.

  Cairey hears some laughter from the pews.

  He is drenched in sweat. His head aches & his skin is clammy & cold. He feels vomit preparing itself for expulsion, & he wishes, oh how he wishes he had never been born. He prays to forces he’s long ceased believing in. He prays for deliverance. He prays for erasure. He prays for a miraculous correction to the accident of his birth.

  & the final scene appears in the lower-right quadrant, & it is strange.

  It depicts a map of the Museum of Expressive Humanism with a star on it which reads “You Are (Not) Here”- & the star appears to be located in the room which adjoins the posterior exit of the Museum, & this is somewhere Cairey has never been.

  What could it mean? He fears. What awaits him there? Could he face it? Avoid it? Why is his the only expose so cryptic in its symbolism?

  The voice booms:

  "WINTER: Blue Blue Blue Blue Red"

  & then:

  “Cairey Turnbull, you may depart.”

  But Cairey cannot move. There is a disconnect between his desire to move & his abilities. He is shaking from top to bottom, as if he has been locked in a freezer. His face is pale & drained. His eyes are red. His nose is running profusely, & blood drips from his left nostril. As he’s revealed to the crowd, there is complete silence.

  The pews are full of faces squinting ponderously, chins titled to the side in question, lips scrunched, cheeks puckered- it is like his nightmares of overdue lateness, a sensation at once so familiar & strange, as Cairey knows he his awake, & this had never been the case in his dreams, wherein he always knew that he was dreaming, but dreaming inescapably- the moment of awakening always coming from some jump scare concocted by the hack director of his subconscious, an explosion, a gunshot, a snake-bite- but never from the awareness of his dreaming. His lucidity was always useless, in the daylight as in dreams.

  & still he sits there, time warping, space wobbling, & the crowd seems to undulate in waves like the ripples of a curtain in a breeze- he thinks he’s having a stroke. His heart is racing & all he can do is sit there, mouth agape in dumb stupefaction, hands clutching the ends of his armrests, hyperventilating as the crowd gives scattered gestures of applause to coax him from his expository throne. It takes a museum employee, hidden in the wings, to come onstage & grab his hand to help him stand, before his self-control reasserts itself in part. He leans on this stranger for support, without ever looking him in the eyes. He’s lead back to his seat, to his date, whose face is tinged with horror, concern, & disgust alternating in rapid succession.

  She asks: “Are you alright?”

  & he replies: “Bathroom.”

  & he continues to lean against this faceless employee as he’s lead out of the auditorium to the sound of scattered, confused applause- the sort that follows any resolved stoppage of play resulting from an injury.

  & Cairey is injured alright, most invisibly injured. It is his soul, his mind, his genius perhaps, which is bruised. All of the defenses he’s erected against the panging wounds of his past are falling down. All of the strategies he’s practiced to ward off his mind’s diseases no longer function. Where once stood the rusted iron of his machination, now whirl clouds of dust- his fortifications vaporized by the thermonuclear strike of the truth. In the wasteland of his mind, he knows this to be the case. He feels it- what so long he’s been suppressing, by the dictates of his therapists... It is as simple as it is unbearable, & as sublime as it is unholy- this truth.

  Cairey senses, & not for the first time, that the entirety of his life is a joke.

  It is a joke of irremissible cruelty, but no less compelling for this fact. It is a joke played by something, he knows not what, but something of incomprehensible power. He senses the fundamental unreality of himself, being but a pawn & prop in its play, this comedy of tortures played before a coterie of demonry, both invisible & ultravisible, like any audience in the anonymity of night.

  & this- oh lord how it makes sense! How explicable he is to himself in these terms! Yes- how innocent he is in this surmise! How helpless, how frail, how victimized is he in light of this revelation! What hopeless resignation, what relief here, to be slave to this archon of supernatural iniquity. How helplessly, beautifully, reliably doomed!

  & Cairey laughs like a madman, salivating even as he sobs, & wipes the phlegm & tears & blood & drool from his utterly maniacal mug. His ribs ache, as his steps become erratic, as he sways in the shoulder hold of his possessor, his deliverer, his fellow prop, & pawn- this stagehand of the furies, who’s shuffling him to the bathroom, through its door, into the yellow-tinged fluorescence reflecting off a the bathroom’s tiled floor, into the corporate beige of the plasticine cage, to the porcelain mouth where his innards will splay.

  He falls to his knees before the bowl & vomits with tremendous force. & in this complete spasm of his innards, he evacuates his immediate awareness, & does not notice the employee’s disappearance, his departure offstage, as he’s whisked away by the expedient convenience of the infernal author of his woes.

  He vomits, then breathes, & spits nasty acrid spits which cling to his lips like strands of a spider web- then he vomits again, & again, with equal force, & less & less of his brunch remains until he’s vomiting his emptiness in dry heaves which shake his spine & wrench his ribs & swell his diaphragm to its organic limits- until the expatiation is complete & only the spits remain. His breaths are like the gasps for air of the nearly-drowned. He feels miserable, horrible, & yet- strangely free.

  He feels nearly weightless & diaphanous, transparent to himself. He feels a clarity so serene, so pure, that he feels that this must be what it’s like to die- that after all the torments of the flesh he’d reach a state of relief so perfectly removed from his agonies that it would render them immaterial like multiplying a non-term
inating decimal by zero. It is in this complete nullification of himself that he feels solace. & he realizes this, on his knees, on the cold tile floor of the museum bathroom, before this goblet piled & heaped with the acrimonious slop of his insides- & it is here that he feels himself enlightened.

  With his face reflected in the vomit flecked pond of the toilet bowl, he sees the light above enframing him with a halo. & it is here that he decides to constellate his memories. & then he will decide what he will do with them. He’ll splay them out & read his entrails for omens. He’ll look for patterns suggesting completion in his infernal author’s design, & perhaps therein he’ll diagnose his intractable position, his fatal nameless illness, which he hopes bears no hope for recovery. & it is thus that Cairey Turnbull, ecstatic & dizzy, slumped in a public restroom, sets out to recompose himself.

  First, there is the condition of his birth. It was truly accidental. His parents had not planned to produce a useless eater & killer of joy. They had been perfectly pleased to remain fruitless limbs on their family trees. Both were nearing middle age when Mrs. Turnbull discovered her pregnancy, whose signs she had presumed to be the onset of menopause. By the time her disbelief was overpowered by the accruing evidence, she was too far along, according to her particular school of moral calculus, to fix the problem.

  Alas, the parasite had acquired a soul. Mr. Turnbull was none-too-pleased with the news, as he’d been firmer in his disbelief. He’d considered himself quite impotent, as he’d been taking male birth control for years without a single scare. Though, he had worried that perhaps his various slips from his prescribed dosing schedule (a point of contention in the marriage, his forgetfulness) had allowed some sneaky spermatozoa to slip loose, like a kamakazi pilot, to sink the cruiser of his domestic tranquility.

  He knew better than to challenge his wife’s “compromised position” with regard to the ontological category of this menace, & so he resigned himself to his fate, & eagerly awaited this eighteen year contract’s end.

  Mrs. Turnbull tried to develop an enthusiasm for motherhood she knew herself to lack, as the very idea of motherhood, with its selflessness, its sacrifices, its silent duties, seemed nothing but senselessnesses in various guises. She was agnostic on the natalist question, while her husband was a dogmatist in favor of the antinatalist answer. Human life had always sickened him. He believed it a mark of virtue to save potential prisoners of the cosmos from the desultory bad-deal of consciousness.

  His was an apocalyptic comportment, dashed with a bit of epicurean ethics. He believed the avoidance of suffering to be the only rational philosophy & detested every school of lying huckster who sold particular plans for doing so, though, he remained among their ranks. He believed that most of them vastly underestimated the endemic nature of suffering, & would often, in spirits of dark humor, demonstrate his thesis regarding the implicit courage in the act of suicide- after which he’d glibly call himself an arch-coward, being too afraid to miss some contextually relevant future occasion- the next season of a television serial, the results of an election, a mutual acquaintance’s get-together, the death of a hated person- anything at all worked, really, as its purpose was to resolve the tension he’d introduced into the room, & in resolving it, he’d prove himself to be an amusing & sincere person amongst the flocks of humdrum optimists. Yes, it showed his courage, his forthrightness in saying so. It demonstrated his freedom from superstition & taboo. & it was this sincerity & morbid humor which had brought he & Mrs. Turnbull together.

  They had met at a hotel bar in Tuscaloosa, after both had been sent to conferences for their vocations. He was an Auto & Boat Insurance Salesman. She managed Public Relations for an Apartment Development Corporation. He’d turned to her at the bar & said “Doesn’t this godawful town make you want to kill yourself?” to which she’d laughed & replied “More than usual you mean?” They continued talking, sharing the things they scorned in the world. Soon, they had realized, over margaritas Mr. Turnbull had purchased, that they were from the same neighborhood- & eventually, they found their mutual companies so agreeable that they merged their corporate structures & consolidated their assets. They traveled the world with their

  vacation hours, & made retirement plans. They would spend their last days pleasantly, on a beach, somewhere within the price range of their savings. They were happy with their partnership- two souls navigating the horrors of the world in semi-suburban luxury. So the news of this unaccounted variable struck a decisive blow to their plans, a blow from which they never fully recovered.

  Sometimes Mr. Turnbull became aware of the antipathy this had sown in his attitude toward his son, but he never lacked evidence for the rationality of his disposition. Cairey was anything but a pleasant creature. He destroyed things. He woke them from pleasant dreams. He made them tired & bitter. & worse, he was not normal. His obsessions were alien to his. He did not enjoy sports, fishing, or classic rock. He did not enjoy yelling at the idiots on the news. All he seemed to enjoy were these strange bricklike books of japanese cartoons which he begged for incessantly. He read from right to left. For a while, he thought he was probably gay.

  Mrs. Turnbull, on the other hand, developed a sort of stoicism, a wearied resignation which accepted things, all things, with the refrain “What can you do?” She survived the child & endured the destructions he wrought. She played the mediator between the two as Cairey grew into his ornery youth. She deployed all diplomatic means necessary in returning the household to stability & silence. Often, at their most peaceful, Cairey was like a boarder or an employee they’d acquired, who was satisfied by the great american tradition of bi-yearly gift-giving, which functioned in the Turnbull house like a seasonal bonus on top of a more regular wage-regime of chores & allowance.

  Contracts governed the house. Mrs. Turnbull wrote them, & the two boys signed them. There was never a question about Cairey’s leaving at the end of their eighteen year commitment. They took no interest in suggesting a vocation for him, as both had essentially drifted quite arbitrarily into their respective vocations. They’d both graduated from fairly respectable state schools with degrees in the social sciences. She’d majored in Spanish, & he, in Sports Management.

  When Cairey, at age five, under the influence of cartoons, announced that he would be a Knight- they said “Go for it.” When Cairey, at age fifteen, under the influence of his comic books, announced that he would become a world famous manga-artist- they said “Go for it.” & when Cairey, at age eighteen, under the influence of his guidance counselor, announced that he would be enrolling in the avant-garde & critically respected General Arts Youniversity- they said “Hold on there,” & retrieved their financial binder, containing the exact figure of the severance package they’d set aside from percentages retained from his yearly allowance. Beyond this figure, they told him, he would have to procure a loan for himself.

  & that is what he did, knowing nothing about interest rates or economy, as he had believed so strongly at the time that he was uniquely gifted & would be immediately recognized as such & compensated accordingly, which he understood to mean extravagantly. His parents were less certain, but they did not interfere. They’d reached their longed-for retirements. They’d already put their suburban home on the market & had their eyes on a remote beachside bungalow in the

  South where the temperature was more agreeable. They’d held up their side of the arrangement. Cairey was a free agent now.

  Initially, they saw Cairey on those biannual days of festivity, but by the end of his protracted six- year term at the youniversity, even these visits ceased. Their communications dwindled to nearly nothing. The last call he’d had with them had been on his twenty eighth birthday. It had lasted five minutes & was composed mostly of awkward silence.

  His parents were neutral props in his biography, & they do not shed too much light on the nature of his private cosmology of solipsistic memory which centers itself on other incidences & characters, most of whom were fictitious. It would be rude to
not include them, but they are now out of the way.

  Rather, in Cairey’s recollections, his thoughts focused more on his rapturous adorations. As a child, his parents had learned that he was easily pacified by entertainments of any caliber. He was provided an unending supply of television shows, documentaries, comic books, cartoons, video games, movies, & website- all available to him on the hand-me-down electronics he inherited whenever his parents upgraded their own. He routinely consumed these entertainments for all of his waking hours. Whenever he was free to do so, he could be found, in his room, glued to a screen of some-sort- or else, reading right to left through those mysteriously prized cartoons.

  He fulfilled the basic requirements of his life. He did what was asked of him at school & at home, & generally presented himself as a harmless & forgettable element of both worlds. Infrequently, he would provoke havoc in the household, but mostly, he passed under the radar. His shyness was commented upon, at times, but over the years he’d been able to manage a few fleeting friendships when he found another child who also enjoyed the same entertainments that he enjoyed, & enjoyed, also, re-enacting them in pretend. It was only when these games became play at adulthood that he became alienated again. He only wanted to be a knight, not a marine.

  The highlight of Cairey’s life in these early years was the familial summer vacation to the lake house they rented upstate, where he was free to roam about the adjacent forest, drink unlimited sodas, & furnish two whole weeks with entertainments, however he pleased, in entirely choreless freedom. (Mr. Turnbull fly-fished, something Cairey found boring & horrible, screaming like a girl whenever a writhing fish was brought before him. Mrs. Turnbull read, mostly, romance novels disguising their bared bodices beneath tastefully minimalist cover-art & titles like “The Unassumed Liability” or “The Client & Patient Relation.”)