Just to See Hell

by Chandler Morrison

  I close the small door to the medicine cabinet, my cold and deadened heart warmed slightly by the thought of a man who simultaneously abuses prescription drugs and eats vitamins shaped like cartoon characters that nobody even remembers anymore. The humor of it passes quickly, though; now all I can think about is how my wife, the center of my existence and the woman to whom I have tethered every fabric of my being, could possibly be inclined to fuck someone like this.

  I start to turn away, but am stopped by the face sneering out at me from the unfeeling glass of the mirror, a face that is not mine but instead hers. Her eyes are cold and shallow, and it is only in them that I see my own reflection, pale and shivering and drunk, the sole imperfection beset her horribly flawless face. She flashes a beautiful and terrible smile, a smile full of perceived promises and cool, unfeeling deadness.

  “Look at yourself,” says the phantasm in the mirror, her voice seething and disgusted. “Look at what you’re doing. Remember this, if you ever grow the fuck up.”

  It is my voice as much as it is hers, goading me, taunting me, conflicting me. I look down at the bottle of Southern Comfort in my quavering hand and see myself smashing it into the mirror, obliterating her jeering face, but I am more afraid of a shattered, useless bottle of liquor than I am of her. There is nothing she can do to me that cannot be numbed. I…have…an escape.

  “You are a coward,” she derides, beaming with satisfaction. “You are incapable of doing anything alone.”

  Again I briefly give vague consideration to the notion of destroying the mirror, but instead elect to drink deeply from the bottle and squeeze shut my throbbing eyes, thinking she will remain without them where she belongs.

  But then there’s that image again, ever persistent and inescapable…their writhing, sweating bodies entwined together, her euphoric moans overlapping with his brutish grunts. Their movements are aggressive and lacking any notion of passion, making them seem less like lovers and more like animals in heat. I have not yet beheld the likeness of the man whose apartment in which I am currently trespassing, so in my imagination he currently resembles the grotesque offspring of an irradiated pig and a diseased mule.

  As is to be expected…par for the course, as we Americans so lovingly say…a familiar twinge of nausea ensnares my stomach the second that the vile scene begins to unfold inside of my woefully troubled mind, where it will continue to play on repeat for some time. This is standard operating procedure.

  I close my eyes and grip the edges of the bathroom counter, taking deep breaths and waiting for the sick feeling to pass. There is poison in my veins, a burning, corrosive acid that circulates through my body, contaminating my blood with what feels like a thousand lifetimes of betrayal and sorrow. This is what love does to you…not necessarily at first, but if you wait around to get your heart broken, it becomes a ruthless toxin that will eventually drag you into a state of rabid delirium, and then the next thing you know you’re stumbling into a twenty-something’s shitty little apartment with murder on your mind.

  The best antidotes are poisons in and of themselves, so I take another long swig of my long-beloved SoCo and let its warmth flush the worst of her venom from my burning, bubbling blood, allowing the alcohol to slurp up the poison into its unprejudiced mouth among endless rows of razor-like teeth. This is not the healthy answer, but it is the best one.

  I leave the bathroom and walk out into the living room, where I sit down on the couch and look around slowly. There’s a boxy old TV with some sort of video game device beneath it, and a large stereo system in the corner, equipped with turntables and a microphone. Posters of mostly-naked starlets hang on the walls, and several issues of Playboy and Penthouse lie scattered about on the coffee table.

  What the fuck did you see in this juvenile douchebag? How could you come here and be compelled to desecrate our marriage by hopping in bed with someone like this? You’re better than this…I’m better than this…if you had to cheat, why not do it with someone who isn’t a pathetic stereotype of a randy American asshole who probably spends his days playing video games and jacking off? Why not have a little fucking self-respect?

  Raising the bottle to my face, I am dismayed by its emptiness…it had been half full just moments ago in the bathroom, and somewhere between there and here, then and now, I had finished it despite my lack of knowledge of doing so. I can almost feel that which I must have drank sitting pleasantly in my chest, but that could have been there before, and it is no longer noticeable enough to be worthy of explicit mention.

  I stand up and go into the kitchen, which is a mess. There are heaps of dirty dishes in the sink, empty Bud Light cans hither and thither, and there’s a half-eaten slice of pizza lying on the floor. I open the refrigerator and find it filled with more Bud Light and pizza, a couple two-liters of Mountain Dew, and a huge tray of Jell-O shots. I shake my head and turn away, not bothering to close the refrigerator door.

  Her voice returns, this time pleading and repentant. “Don’t do this,” she begs. “I made a mistake, I wasn’t in the right place, I was mixed up. You have to understand. I love you. We can get through this. I want to get through this. I can’t lose you…not after everything, not after all this.”

  Debilitated, I collapse against the wall, grappling futilely for support but all the while sinking down, down, down into the sea of linoleum and its urging waves of despair. I cannot see without her…I am blind and there is darkness, so much darkness, but simultaneously I can see everything. It is all there before me, and it is hideous, and that is precisely why I must do what I came here to do.

  I force myself to shaky, unsure feet and start opening random drawers and pawing through them until I find one filled with various eating utensils and cutlery. I select the longest knife and test its sharpness against my thumb, smiling at the little stab of pain and the bead of blood that eagerly rushes to the surface of the cut. Still grinning, I stick the knife in the waistband of my jeans.

  I guess, when you get down to it, this isn’t about revenge; if I really wanted to make this guy suffer, I would let him live out his wretched, pitiful life to the end of his days. Unfortunately for him, though, that isn’t my objective. Vengeance doesn’t interest me, but freedom does. This is all about liberation…liberating myself from the knowledge of his existence, liberating my wife from the ability to go back to him, and liberating the world from his parasitic presence among people who actually matter. More than anything, I’m liberating him from himself, and for that I should be awarded, praised, accepted. Everybody benefits from this outcome. This is negative eugenics at its absolute best.

  I can see her so clearly…gorgeous, divine, untarnished by the grinding rust of perpetual life…she is everything I thought I would never have, everything I could have had but never will. I had her in a conventional sense, but I never really had her…I could tell myself that because of that I never really lost her, either, but that would be a lie. Years spent by her side, in her bed, her heart…all for naught, all because of my own fucked-up deficiency of a straight, legitimate consciousness. I deserve her absence because of my own. Things are this way because I made them so; to fault her for everything is to lie to the self, to deny the reality I seek so desperately to escape. I sought it through her, to no avail, and so I must turn elsewhere.

  This is where I find myself.

  This is where I begin.

  This is where I end.

  Next stop…last stop…the asshole’s bedroom. As I walk down the hallway towards the partially ajar door, my heart palpitates with anticipation. Everything in my life, and everything in his, has led to this. It will be in this man’s bedroom that our universes will converge in a culmination of blood and emotion. He no doubt thinks his future holds in store for him great wealth and success and a playground of promiscuous women, but no, he will fulfill his purpose tonight, in this shitty apartment, his fate now resting at the end of the knife in my waistband. His part in my wife’s adulterous doings has made him mine; all that
he is, was, or ever will be now belongs entirely to me.

  And lately, I’ve been making a habit of destroying my possessions.

  I creep quietly through the door and into the guy’s bedroom, and I have to swallow a harsh laugh. If the rest of the apartment didn’t accurately sum up this piece of shit, his bedroom certainly does. It smells strongly of sex and beer and piss…maybe even a hint of my wife’s perfume, but that could be in my imagination. Mounted over his bed (a waterbed in the shape of a heart, no less) is a huge poster of Ricky Rampage, rocking out on a stage with shooting pyrotechnics, wearing nothing but a tattered British flag around his waist, topless women bowing down at his feet. Here’s to role models, kids.

  Dirty laundry is strewn all over the stained carpet, and there’s a small garbage can to my left that’s filled with used condoms and more beer cans. On the table beside his bed is a magnum of Sky vodka and an alarm clock shaped like a naked woman. A wobbly ceiling fan whirls loudly overhead.

  How did you feel when you first came here? Did you gaze upon this mess and find something enthralling about it? No, I don’t think so. I think you were disgusted with his misogynistic possessions and the disorderly state of his apartment…I think you found it revolting, but then he took off his shirt and you forgot all about it. And the rest…is…history.

  I take a few steps forward. Moonlight spills in through the window, illuminating the heart-shaped bed and the man sleeping in it. Seeing my wife’s lover for the first time, my muscles go rigid with hate and my mouth fills with bitter saliva. I am full of resolve. I will not leave this room until the man in that bed has been robbed of his life in the same way that he robbed me of the woman I love.

  “Last chance. Turn around. We can still be something. Everything doesn’t have to be for nothing.”

  My eyes are waterlogged with soggy tears of grief and self-pity. She can whisper and talk and vow all she likes, but I am here, I have come this far, and I see no exit door. Five to one, one in five, no one here gets out alive.

  I take the knife from my jeans and advance closer until I’m standing over the bed, my shadow falling over the sleeping man within it.

  He even sleeps like an asshole. Arms and legs splayed out, mouth agape, chest rising and falling in rhythm with his loud snores…he’s a caricature of my expectations. He’s maybe twenty-five, at the oldest, his body lean and tan and rippled with muscle. Tattooed on his shoulder is a tiger-striped jolly roger that’s surrounded by a circle of inverted pentagrams. His hair is dark and shaggy, making him look a little bit like Russell Brand, whom I never thought was that good looking, anyway.

  “We could have been something…we could have been everything. We were almost there, but I fucked up a little bit. Everything is an experience, right? We…we can’t end it like this.”

  I can picture her lying there with him, and it horrifies me. The clarity of the image is startling…her hand resting limply on his hairless chest, her smooth skin glistening with perspiration, her expression content and void of any noticeable remorse. After all, who gives a shit about marriage when you have the chance to fuck an attractive kid with rock-hard abs and a third-grade vocabulary?

  Not I, said my wife in unison with the fly.

  The image nearly ruins everything. I double over, dropping the knife, and put my hands on my knees, breathing deeply and trying to keep myself from vomiting. My body roils with tremors, and sweat dampens my brow. Just when I think I’m going to lose consciousness, a renewed sense of desperate longing for relief gives me a second wind. With restored resolve, I pick up the knife, stand up, and gently place one of the kid’s soft white pillows over his face.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this. We still have a chance.” She pauses, a pause full of all that remained unsaid between us for years, and then repeats, “we were meant to be everything.”

  I answer abruptly, without even the slightest consideration for the construction of my words…“No,” I reply hastily, ready to get on with everything and all of it…“No, we were meant to be nothing.” For as true as I know this is, it kills me a billion times over to admit it aloud, and it makes my skin crawl to think that I could acknowledge such a concept. The love of my life should never have been with me, should never have even met me…my life, her life, our lives as a unified whole have become as they are only because I made them so. I can summon so much anger, so much hatred, and level it at her, but it is merely displaced from myself, which is precisely where all of it belongs.

  I had thought that I would hesitate, but I don’t. The knife rises and falls with effortless ease while great scarlet roses blossom upon the stark white canvas of the pillow. There are tears in my eyes and a smile upon my face as I put into him everything I despise about myself and desecrate it as I was never before able. It is magical.

  I’m thinking that this it, this is ecstasy, this is perfection, this is fucking it…and then it really hits me. My surroundings explode with vibrant color, the cheerful thwuck! sound of the knife filling my ears. Great surges of sweetly burning, sweetly soothing adrenaline urgently courses through my weeping veins. I am overcome with power, drunk on my sovereignty over this bleeding worm, stoned on his silent helplessness against the dominion of the knife, his knife, my knife. I am God. I am Satan. I am Man.

  My arm eventually gets tired, and I take a step back to observe what I’ve done, panting as I bask in the warm, tanning sun of lingering residual bliss. The pillow remains over my victim’s face, but it’s now almost completely red and tattered to ribbons. Feathers float in the air, some of them tinged with blood. His body is still, although his feet had been kicking fitfully for a few moments towards the end. There’s a large stain on the front of his boxers.

  I sit down and light a trembling cigarette with sticky crimson fingers, closing my eyes and staring vacantly ahead, anxiously chewing the inside of my cheek and thinking over and over “what now?” The smoke tastes stale and bland…at least, I think it’s the smoke…maybe it’s the air, maybe it’s life…maybe I just have a bad taste in my mouth from inhaling too much of all three of them.

  I wipe smeared blood from the face of my watch with my shirt cuff and look at its incessantly ticking hands for a long while, temporarily transfixed; there are only myself and the unflinchingly unstoppable force of passing time…everything else has vanished, become wholly irrelevant, past and future no longer applicable, and the present feels as painful as it does sublimely beautiful. I have been found, and as a result I am lost, likely forever. I should be upset, I should be afraid, but there is only a burned-out emptiness, like the drained bottle of whiskey in the other room.

  I stir slightly, uneasily. The cigarette has gone out and the liquor’s warmth has abandoned me, leaving me cold and alone and vulnerable in this unfamiliar place of sex and lies and death. I can feel ghosts, both alive and dead, watching me with curious, judgmental eyes as they slink about in the comforting safety of their shadows.

  “You never loved me the way you should have, the way I deserved. You always put it before me…even with everything I gave you, it was never enough. You turned elsewhere, sought your own special brand of avoidance because you are afraid.”

  There’s no sense in arguing with her; she’s right about everything, and nothing is exaggerated. If I was ever worth anything at all, she never would have strayed. She came here for the same reason that I did…because of me, because of my faults, my failures. The illicit young lover was little more than a side effect.

  While I was lost in my soundless lament, the remaining bliss…the thrill of the kill, if you will…had quietly sneaked from my body, and my environment, so briefly beautiful, had dulled to a washed-out gray hue, contrasted only by the glittering cherry-colored blood that is everywhere, that is in too many places…there’s too much of it, there hadn’t been that much, there just can’t be that much blood…not in any place, not in any person, and certainly not in him. But it is there, all of it startlingly real, too tangibly existent to ignore. On the bed, on
him, on me…splattered on the walls and streaked across the carpet and dotted along the ceiling. It is laughing, the whole world is laughing, and I am the joke, and there is just so much blood.

  All at once the reality of my actions descends upon me like a swarm of a thousand chattering locusts, and the too-real, too-near consequences arrest me in their clarity. I want to scream, I want to run, I want to take it all back. I want it to be a dream, I want to wake up, I want my bed…I want my mother to whisper it away and sing me to sleep. I am unprepared to deal with this, I am not equipped with the necessary tools to wage this oncoming war alone, but I am alone…I always have been and am destined to remain so, the sureness of my fate cemented by what I have done.

  And then I’m back in the bathroom, my hands under the gushing faucet, the basin of the stained porcelain sink swirling with blood. I scrub. I scrub. I scrub. I can’t get it out from underneath my fingernails and I’m sobbing. I don’t look in the mirror because I know who is there, and I can’t bear to face her. Not after this, not after I have pardoned her every indiscretion with my own momentously sinister deed. Her infidelity has been validated, justified. I am more of a worthless wretch than the dead thing in the bedroom. I am nothing, and there is nothing before me, nothing within me. This is what I have chosen.

  What now? What now? WHAT NOW? What are you going to do what are you going to do what are you…

  On my way here I’d driven by a dog lying on the side of the road, legs askew, bleeding slowly from its split stomach, jerking and shivering in the spasmodic throes of impending death. Its mouth had been opening and closing desperately, its fading black eyes filled with aching, pleading vulnerability. The sight of it had affected me on a level I thought I no longer had, bringing tears of woeful grief to my strained and bloodshot eyes. I’d thought about stopping, getting the tire iron from my trunk, and putting it out of its misery, but the thought awakened the perpetual sickness in me and nearly drove me off the road with crippling nausea. I wish now that I had stopped, that I had ended its suffering, because I would have wanted someone to do the same for me.