As the night began to lighten through the protective film of the window shade, he made preparations to spend the day in his coffin. They put the knives away and stacked their pitiful pile of wooden stakes in the corner. He arranged his blanket so that it provided the most protection from the wooden splinters of the plywood. The old man’s face disappeared with a final assurance that nothing would happen as he closed the lid.
He felt like he was forgetting something. It didn’t dawn on him until much later in the day. He heard the rattling of the window shade being raised and a quick inspection assured him that his stifling coffin was indeed light free. He closed his eyes and went to sleep.
Chapter 31: An Urge
He awoke some time in the middle of the day. He had an urge. An urge to lift the coffin lid and see exactly what would happen if he let the sunlight hit him. He wondered if it had to be direct sunlight, in order to harm him. He wondered if the reflected sunlight from the building across the way would be enough to start him on fire or turn him to ash or make him transform into a swarm of butterflies.
He stared into the darkness almost daring himself to open the lid. All he had to do was open the lid and it would all be over. His hand reached up caressing the splintery feel of the coffin lid. The snores of the old man could be heard through the thin plywood walls of his coffin.
Then he felt a different urge. For the first time in a long time, he had to go the bathroom. He clenched his buttcheeks together to prevent his brown bounty from escaping.
He wondered what time it was. How long did he have until the sun went down? How long did he have to hold his action until he could release it? The urge went away and the turtle’s head retreated long enough for him to fall back asleep. He didn’t hear the shuffling movements of the Old Soldier as he gathered his things and left the apartment. Sometime during the night he had run out of his beauties and despite his promise to the man inside of the coffin, he set out to find a drum of cheap tobacco to slip inside of his coat.
Chapter 32: Cradle of Filth
He awoke again, half an hour later, even though he didn’t know exactly how long it had been. The air in his coffin reeked. He must have been passing gas in his sleep, a problem he had had since he had been a young boy. He had cut a loud fart in Ms. Moore’s math class one time in middle school and been ridiculed for most of what was left of that school year, about five months. Everywhere he walked students made fart noises at him. He couldn’t bend over without someone in class making machine gun like fart sounds at him, which would cause the rest of the class to burst into raucous and rude laughter. He remembered the faces that girls would make as they pointed or wrinkled their noses in disgust. Since that time he had always held in his gaseous action in an attempt to save his own insecurities from further attacks by whoever might be in his presence when he let one slip.
It didn’t matter who was around, he just had a problem cutting loose with one of life’s basic functions. He knew that everyone had gas at one time or another, but that didn’t matter; they weren’t the one’s that had been made fun of.
He remembered how his wife, after they had known each other for a sufficient length of time, had become comfortable enough to pass gas in front of him. She would let one rip and laugh. He would laugh too, because, yes, it was funny, even if it smelled like rot and the sounds were sickeningly ass-rattling. No matter how many times she did it, he was never able to overcome his embarrassment and join in the fun.
Consequently, whenever he was around people, he held it all in. Occasionally, he would sneak into a bathroom and sit on the toilet and let it all out, like some twisted ass-musician playing the butt tuba, but most of the time he held it in until his stomach and intestines filled with the offending gas and started rumbling. After a while, the rumble of shifting gas in his intestines would end up being as loud as farts, but thankfully, most people could tell the difference between an ass eruption and intestinal rumblings.
He listened for any noise from the Old Soldier. He didn’t think that any smell that he let loose in the coffin would reach the Old Soldier, but he just couldn’t stand the thought of the dirty old veteran laughing and making fart noises at him. It made no difference that he was a crusty old drunk with a penchant for pilfering; it would still be embarrassing to him, so he listened. He didn’t hear any noise, no snoring, no shifting, and no deep breathing.
The gas in his stomach had been building ever since he had woken up. He decided it might be ok to let one go. It already reeked like ass in the coffin. One more blast wouldn’t make that much of a difference. Besides, it was his own brand. There was nothing like being trapped in a coffin to help you get over your phobias. At least he wasn’t claustrophobic.
He relaxed his muscles and he felt the bubble make its way down his intestines and to the fleshy valve of his sphincter, where it halted. He made an extra push and out it came. The smell was immediate and the feeling was anything but satisfying. Besides the gas that now filled his little box a decidedly mushy substance had come out as well. It’s warmth clung to his buttocks as he froze, attempting not to mash the warm substance against his own skin. He had shit himself.
Gas was one thing, but he didn’t know many people that could stand the feel of their own shit. He began pounding on the sides of his coffin as he simultaneously gagged.
“Get me out of her! Close the fucking blind!”
There was no response from outside of the coffin. He banged harder trying to get the Old Soldier’s attention.
“Wake the fuck up, you old drunk! I shit myself! Close the goddamn blind.” The more he yelled and banged the more the smell invaded his noise and throat until it felt like he was swallowing his own shit. Even worse, his efforts to bang on the side of the coffin had him moving enough to smear the hot paste of his own crap all over his backside, and as it smeared the smell became even more potent, as if he was breaking open a fresh loaf of bread. The retching muscles of his esophagus finally managed to fulfill their reflexive duties, and fresh stomach acid billowed out from between his open jaws and onto his face.
For a second, he was too shocked to register what had just happened. The dark of the coffin certainly didn’t help any. As he breathed in, some of the vomit that now covered his face managed to work its way up his nasal cavity, and he began to cough and thrash. He banged on the sides of the coffin desperately hoping that anyone would come up and close the blind on the window so that he could step from his cradle of filth and cleanse himself. He continued to gag and dry-heave and then he stopped.
He had to pee.
Chapter 33: Spoon and Egg Race
The Old Soldier found his way home a half an hour later. The sounds from inside the coffin had ceased by then, and except for a peculiar odor, he didn’t notice anything. He sat on the floor and began to roll his handmade beauties, slipping them into his jacket pocket when he was finished with each one.
As he rolled his beauties, he looked around the apartment for the source of the smell. He checked his jacket; it smelled awful, like stale wine and butt-musk, but it wasn’t anywhere near as complex an aroma as what permeated the apartment. He checked the floor to see if he had vomited in the night. It was rare with a tolerance like his, but he had been known to wake up in a puddle of his own making, and the smell that filled the apartment definitely had a tinge of puke in it. He walked around checking the corners of the apartment, behind boxes, and even in the bathroom on the odd chance that he had actually made it to the bathroom, puked, and forgotten to flush.
His next place to check was the kitchen. From his many years of experience, he knew that if there was a smell in a place and you couldn’t quite figure out what it was, chances were that whatever was making the smell was residing in some dark corner of the kitchen.
He began sniffing and smelling like a bloodhound, his old nose wrinkling and twitching as it led him to a new offensive odor, an odor more subtle than the one that had been assaulting him. The new smell was coming form underneath the sink and
quite possibly in the sink. He opened up the cupboard and was immediately greeted with a swarm of freshly hatched flies. They buzzed around his eyes and ears, up his nose, and around his tightly clenched lips. Even though he had no proof that he had thrown up the night before, he was certainly seconds away from making it happen now.
He ran from the pile of garbage that sat rotting underneath the sink. Flies streamed out from the decaying remains of his friend’s dinners. They weren’t giant flies, but tiny little flies that looked like diseases with wings hovering in the air, looking for a comfy place to land and trample sickness with their legs. He sat back for a second and contemplated what effects closing the cupboard would have. On the positive side, he wouldn’t have to clean up the mess, which meant he wouldn’t have to smell the rotting corpses of rats and see the things that crawled through their rotten flesh. On the other hand, he knew that the fly miasma would not disappear on its own. The rats had only been rotting underneath the sink for a few days; this was just the beginning. In a few days, flies would be crawling on everything, leaving their filth throughout the apartment, congregating around the toilet bowl, having tea, and talking about how rough life was. There was no choice in the matter, he couldn’t stand flies. Even the sight of them made him feel uncomfortable and nauseous. He had seen death in Vietnam, and that had bothered him, but it had always been fresh death. Even the people that had been strung up in the clearing next to the dead village had only been dead for a little while. They hadn’t had time to putrefy, to rot, and to sprout forth new life in the shape of flies and maggots. He had to get rid of the flies before they became a buzzing hoard of disease that would choke his mouth and cover him in their excrement and bile.
He looked around for anything to cover his mouth and nose with. The thought of any of those rotten-rat fed mites with wings flying up his nose was more terrifying to him than anything he had seen in the world: the vampires, the death, his friend in the box. The only thing he could find to put over his face was a towel that had been hanging on the handle of the refrigerator. He decided that it had been too close to the kitchen and the swarm of flies that he had unleashed upon the apartment. The only other thing that he could think of was to use one of his socks as a mask. He immediately threw that idea out of the window; he hadn’t washed his socks in ages and the smell from those might actually be worse than the smell coming from the garbage can or the mystery smell that filled the apartment. He decided he was going to have to go in unprotected, no cover fire, no backup.
He took a deep breath before he ran into the kitchen, then he pursed his lips and tried to make his nostrils as small as possible as he ran to the garbage can that sat underneath the sink. He attempted to grab the liner of the garbage can. His fingers slipped at the first attempt. He almost panicked and opened his mouth to utter a swear word or two; instead, he kept his mouth closed and made another attempt for the garbage liner, this time meeting with successful results.
He lifted up on the bag and felt the sickening shifting of the contents as the bag sagged with the liquefied insides of rat remains. The moving of the bag disturbed the flies feasting and a new cloud of flies buzzed around his face. He stopped breathing and prayed that none of the buzzing specks would find his nostrils or ears interesting enough to explore. The flimsy white plastic of the garbage bag began to sag with the weight of its contents.
He ran out of the apartment with the bag at arm’s length, wondering at the mystical nature of garbage bags. They always seemed to want to break whenever you were carrying something that you didn’t want to splatter your shoes. Perhaps that was because the heaviest things in life were most often the most disgusting things.
He pounded down the stairs almost leaping down the landings. He tried to hold the bag as still as possible and still move quickly. He could see the white plastic at the bottom of the bag stretching and becoming clear enough for him to distinguish colors through the bag’s surface. The bag now hung like a comet full of filth pointed directly at the earth’s surface. He reached the bottom of the stairs and burst around the corner, like some child in a spoon and egg race during field day. Maybe he would get a ribbon.
As he rounded the corner, he brought the bag up in an arc, using its own centrifugal force to toss it into the dumpster that waited with an open lid. As the bag reached the highest point of the arc, the plastic gave way and the contents of the bag splattered all over the side of the open dumpster. A few drops of the putrid mix landed in his hair, and the Old Soldier added his own special mixture to the side of the dumpster. He stepped back and surveyed the mess that he had created. He decided to leave it for someone else to clean up and then he turned and went back into the apartment.
As he was going up the stairs, an angry face peeked out of one of the apartments. The face looked like he was about to say something, maybe complain about the Old Soldier’s mad dash down the stairs, but then he changed his mind.
The Old Soldier paused to let the man say what he was going to say, but the man said nothing so he moved on. As he passed the man he got a good glimpse at his face, and for a moment, he felt a spark of recognition. He turned to the man and said, “Don’t I know you?”
The man’s face lit up at the question and he said, “I don’t think so. I was just expecting someone and I thought you might be him.”
“Oh.” The Old Soldier climbed back up the stairs trying to shake the feeling of familiarity out of his brainpan. He heard the door close behind him. Maybe it was just some sort of weird déjà vu. He reached the door to his friend’s apartment and strolled on in. He left the door open in the hopes that the flies that were in the apartment would feel the warm breeze from outside and fly out.
He cleaned up the sink area, making sure that the flies had no food source to multiply in, and then he put a new garbage bag in the trash can and replaced it under the sink. Once he had finished with his tidying up, he sat down again to roll some more cigarettes.
He finished rolling the first of his beauties, wet the seam with his tongue, and placed it in his jacket pocket to dry, before he noticed that the original smell that had precipitated his cleansing effort was still lingering in the apartment. He couldn’t find the source of the smell so he opened up the windows of the apartment. The fresh air, as fresh as it can get in the city, was pleasing and helped with the smell. The open apartment door helped create a nice crossbreeze that swooped out flies and stench. The flies went but the stench still remained, albeit in a less pungent state. He suffered through the reek of the apartment, and the tainted sense of ghost flies on his skin. Is this what it feels like to be dead, things crawling on your skin, rot filling your nostrils, and nothing to be done about it? He rolled his beauties until the sun went down.
Chapter 34: Getting Clean
He awoke again in his stultifying, lightless environment. He was splattered all around the waist with shit and piss. Vomit caked his face and chest. If he could have seen the blanket underneath him, he would have thought it had been used in some sort of scat film. He couldn’t stand his mess anymore. He reached up and shoved the cover of his coffin open on its hinges, sunlight be damned. To his surprise, it was the evening and the Old Soldier sat, smoking one of his beauties. He stood there, trying not to step on any off the filth that he had filled his coffin with.
The old man choked on his most recent puff of cigarette smoke, startled by the appearance of a man that looked like he had just come crawling out of a sewer.
“Where the hell were you!?”
The Old Soldier looked up at him in surprise and said, “What are you talking about? I’ve been here the whole time, sleepin’ and rollin’ smokes.”
He had no time for the old man’s antics and protests of ignorance. He ran into the bathroom, trying not to drip any filth onto the carpet. He jumped into the shower, scrubbing the waste out of every crevice, not waiting for the water to even heat up or to take off his clothes. Once he was in the teeth chattering chill of the shower, he stripped off his soiled clothing and
dropped it to the floor of the shower next to the flower-shaped adhesive bath grips. He had to pick chunks of crusted vomit out of his chest hair. He had to scrub bits of filth from in between his ass cheeks. He yanked on the hairs that grew out of his ass, making sure that no shit clung to them. Even when all visible signs of waste were gone from his body, he still thought he could feel it clinging to his skin, in his hair, on his hands, in his nose. He scrubbed his hands until his skin began to wrinkle and prune, and then he scrubbed some more until all the dead skin was gone from his hands and all that was left was the fresh pink under-layer.
When the water stopped running hot and began to get lukewarm he stepped out of the shower, slipping on the carpetless linoleum. He toweled himself dry and walked into the main room of his apartment naked, not even caring about the Old Soldier’s questioning eyes. He found an old Social Distortion t-shirt and slid it onto his pink skin. He found one of his many old pairs of jeans and slid into it, enjoying its relative cleanliness on his skin.
A fine layer of sweat had accumulated on his upper lip from the heat of the shower. He licked the sweat from his upper lip before he spoke to the Old Soldier. “Where the hell were you? I needed you to close the window shade so I could go to the bathroom.”
The Old Soldier looked at him, trying to hide his guilt in the back of his mind and play it off like he really didn’t know what he was talking about.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I swear that I was here the whole time.”
His mouth dropped open as he stared down at the rough old man that sat cross-legged on the floor. “You mean to tell me that you didn’t hear me pounding and screaming inside that box? You’re going to sit there and tell me that somehow, underneath a bridge somewhere, you found a bum’s bed that was made from soundproof wood?”
Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale Page 11