Mr. Suicide

by Nicole Cushing

  You scratched your head. “Stuck?”

  “Yeah, you know… stuck… as in… they find the filthy, the diseased, and the decayed so addictive they can’t leave it. They get addicted to fucking and they get addicted to killing. Addicted to the squishing out of cum and the gushing out of blood. They have to keep on marinating themselves in all that squishy-gushy! There’s a fella named Dahmer I used to talk to… a promising prospect, mind you, who wouldn’t move on from Step One to proceed to Step Two. You don’t wanna end up like him, do you?”

  You knew who He was talking about and no, you didn’t. Dude killed and fucked and cannibalized and was a total badass motherfucker. You didn’t want to end up like him, though, because at the end of the day you were a lover, not a killer. Dude landed himself in prison and some punk bludgeoned him to death. You didn’t want to end up like him, because that would be too painful. “No,” you said, “I don’t want to end up like him.”

  “Good. I knew you were my kind of lad. So, you see, the trick is to—very quickly—flip the switch in your mind over to aggressively resisting the urges to fuck misshapen flesh and kill it. Resist them, abandon Degeneracy, and instead embrace Step Two: Derealization. You do know what that is, don’t you flesh-thing?”

  You shook your head. You didn’t.

  “Well, I guess that wouldn’t be the sort of thing they teach in high school, would it? And, hell, even if they did, it’s not like you’d remember it anyway, right? I mean, with the way you zoned out in class and all. Anyway, derealization is when the world around you doesn’t seem so solid, anymore. When everything you thought was flesh turns out to be plastic. When everything you thought was plastic turns out to be smoke and light. When everything you thought was smoke and light is revealed to be… a mirror trick, a fraud, flimflam! It’s the sense that your life isn’t real anymore. The sense that it’s more like a movie.”

  “Gotcha… Gotcha… So I have to follow the Three-Fold Path. How does all this business about a passport play into things?”

  “The Three-Fold Path is a spiritual process. The process of obtaining your passport and taking it back to The Border Crossing is the physical act which facilitates it. Call it magick if you want. Call it witchcraft. And then the magazine, Perfect Monsters, let’s call that a grimoire. Or, better yet, a Book of Shadows. Now does it make sense?”

  You weren’t quite sure it did, but you nodded. You felt fearful of admitting any confusion.

  “Now it’s your time to wake up, flesh-thing.”

  You didn’t want to wake up. Dwelling with the Great Dark Mouth—even if just in a dream—felt too damned good. There was an ease about this place. A detachment from care. An ongoing, chill wind that blew over your brain and froze all worry. A sense of drifting away from your body like a helium balloon that was only tethered to the ground by a thin string. If you woke, you would have to deal with the consequences of… well… of what had happened earlier. If you stayed there in the shadows of the obelisks, you wouldn’t.

  You told the Great Dark Mouth you’d rather not wake up.

  “It feels good, doesn’t it? Dwelling in the shadows, I mean. It feels peaceful, doesn’t it?”

  You nodded.

  “Well, this is only a taste of what you’ll have in the future, flesh-thing… once the magick is completed.”

  “Can’t you go ahead and take me now?”

  The Mouth shouted. “When I said, ‘it’s time to wake up’, did I sound like I was making it fucking optional?!”

  You shuddered.

  “Who do you think calls the shots, bucko? Wake up and perform the magick. Go get your passport. Proceed along the Three-Fold Path. Then, and only then, will you be ready for un-birth. So… go! Wake! Or do I need to make a scene to wake you?”

  Then there was a rumbling in the earth, a shifting of sand, and stones rained down from the obelisks. They tumbled down with great scraping, shattering noises; and when they fell the dust whooshed into your face—up your nostrils and down your throat and against your eyes. And shards of the rocks bombarded you from all directions and you winced and you were wounded and you cried out and fell to the ground, cowering.

  And yet you were still bathed in shadows. The obelisks had not fallen. Only the false exterior of the obelisks had fallen. Now you saw the obelisks revealed for what they truly were, at their core: towers of rotting flesh constructed with a mortar of blood and shit. They were made of body parts that wriggled against one another, sexually. A hand thrusted into a wound made in the throat of a headless neck. The neck, in turn, thrust its stump into a waiting, wet gut. The motion spilled a rope of intestines from its home, and it slithered like a snake, down, down, down the obelisk until it found a rotting mouth to penetrate.

  Your cock stirred to attention at the sight. The erection offered only mild pleasure, though. Nothing compared to the sweet breeze of oblivion you’d felt blowing over your brain.

  XIII

  You woke with cold sweat pouring down your brow. It trickled onto the places you’d scratched yourself the night before. You wiped it off as best you could, but that just reopened the wounds. Sweat made them sting like a motherfucker. Droplets of something thicker than sweat flowed into your eyebrows. You tried wiping it away with the hem of your shirt, but as you grabbed it you realized it was too messy to be of any use. It felt sticky and still wet in some places. So you couldn’t clean yourself up. It felt mighty uncomfortable.

  Of course, your friend was in even worse shape. He’d gotten chilly during the night.

  It was still dark in the building. The windows must have been covered by plywood. The only difference between daytime and night was that in daytime the thin ray of light leaking into the building no longer flickered. You couldn’t see the condition your friend was in. You decided that was for the best. If you saw, you’d be tempted to go all squishy-gushy again. Even with the Mouth watching.

  You couldn’t let yourself succumb to squishy-gushy again. You didn’t want to get stuck on the first step of the Path, like Dahmer had. The old man had told you a little bit about what you’d need—in the way of a passport—to enter the Black Room. The Great Dark Mouth had re-emphasized this. If you went to your mother, retrieved a bit of flesh or blood from her, and delivered it to The Border Crossing, you’d finally be un-born. But that was a paradox, now, wasn’t it? The Great Dark Mouth didn’t want you to murder again, but demanded your mother’s flesh or blood as a passport. How could you obtain flesh or blood without any gushing?

  You were, it seemed, in a no-win situation—but you had no choice but to move forward. You had to take some things on faith. You owed it to yourself to at least try.

  What to do with your friend’s body? Try, in some way, to conceal it? Where? Throw it in the trash? In time, the smell would give it away. Besides, getting all the deadweight through the plywood and glass would be a delicate trick. It would require the dead man to suddenly become a skilled contortionist. Moreover, people might see you move the body around, if you went outside. No, there was a wisdom emanating from somewhere deep in the marrow of your bones that told you to leave it where it was. Just leave it and go take your passport from Mom.

  You’d need bus fare to do this, though. So you searched through the old man’s pants, found found his cash, and took it.

  You wanted to try to find his pills, too. You groped around in the dark for a while, but soon realized the search was futile. The old man had known what he was doing when he’d hidden his stash. Maybe there was a crumbling place in the wall where he’d hidden it, but for all your groping you couldn’t find it. You felt stymied. Sure, the old man was dead, but in a way it seemed like—in the end—he’d gotten his way. You’d wanted a relationship with him, and he didn’t. He’d gotten his way, there, hadn’t he? You’d wanted drugs and he’d wanted to rest. He’d gotten his way, there, too, hadn’t he?

  No big deal, you decided. So what if he could have been able to declare a sort of moral victory out of the tussle. With some more ca
sh in your pocket, you felt like a fucking millionaire.

  A hungry millionaire. It had been forever since you’d eaten. Your stomach made little whining noises. “Shaddup!” you wanted to say to it. “Shaddup right now!” But it would have been pointless to yell at it. It had a legitimate complaint. It felt neglected.

  Of course, there was meat right there on the floor. Perfect Monsters had shown you men eating skin grafts off of one another; a man sucking on another’s foot ligament. Thus, cannibalism was not exactly beyond the pale for you. But that meat had been your friend and your lover and… more importantly… you realized—after your dream—that consuming him would be squishy-gushy. It would be too much like Dahmer. The Great Dark Mouth would not approve. So you resisted the temptation to sate your hunger with human flesh. You put on your backpack, found your glasses on the floor, grabbed the old man’s knife as a memento of the occasion, and abandoned the abandoned building. Scrunched down so you could squeeze past the plywood. Cut yourself again (this time on the leg) as you wriggled out of there. You let out a little yelp.

  If that wasn’t enough, the sun stung your eyes when you left. It took two or three minutes for your vision to adjust. You realized, too late, that you hadn’t been at all discreet about your exit from the love nest. The old man had been wily, had only entered under the cover of deep darkness. You rolled out in broad daylight, and made more than your fair share of noise when you did.

  The moment you realized you’d slipped up, you heard giggles escape from the gap between the plywood and the broken glass door. The Mouth mocked you yet again. You yearned to be devoured by Him but you didn’t like the way He treated you. That condescension. When you’d left home you promised yourself you’d never take bullshit from anyone. You felt like tearing the plywood off and letting light in. You thought that, maybe, that would kill the Mouth (or at least shut Him up).

  You hadn’t said anything. Just thought it. But the Great Dark Mouth replied anyway. He, like Mr. Suicide, could read your thoughts. “You don’t want to kill me. I’m your savior, bucko. You can’t kill me. I’m your god, bucko.”

  You wanted to scream back at Him, but realized that if you protested you’d be lying. He was right. Moreover, screaming would have been decidedly unwise. Already, you noticed a dude glaring at you. He was skinny and shirtless, with a long greasy salt-and-pepper mullet and heavy salt-and-pepper stubble. His teeth were clenched in an expression that spoke simultaneously of anger and bemusement.

  What could you do? You ignored him. Tried (ridiculously) to pretend you were a member of the parade out on a wee merry stroll. That didn’t work. The man knew better. He still glared. First he looked at your face and then his gaze lingered away from your face. Lowered. He must have been looking at your jeans. The blood from your leg wound was starting to stain them. You stopped and rolled up your pants leg. It was a small cut, in comparison to the one on your arm from the night before. You took off your backpack, rummaged around inside, and tied a white T-shirt around the outside of your jeans, at the location of the cut. Figured it would apply some pressure on it. Stop the bleeding. That helped, but it still hurt.

  Mullet Man spoke to you. His voice was scratchy and gruff. “Hey kid, c’mere. I have a question for ya.”

  There is no honor among bums.

  You kept walking and pretended you didn’t hear him.

  Mullet Man spoke up louder. “I need a place to stay, not all the time, I mean. Just at night and when it rains. You there all by yourself? Last year, I tried getting in there, but they had a security system all rigged up and I got tossed in the pokey for trespassing. That ain’t right, you know. I mean, that ain’t right, for you to have a place there when I found it first and had to spend time in the pokey because of it. I think I’m gonna have to pull seniority on you. I need a place to stay when it rains, or at night, or… hell, whenever I want to lay down.”

  Your brain was flooded by a million squishy-gushy thoughts. He wouldn’t rest until you told him he could join you. And if you just shrugged and left, you felt certain he would enter the building and discover the body. Maybe you should invite him in, have him walk in first, and then tackle and stab him? You let the fantasy work through your brain, frame by frame, and found yourself enthralled by it and the freedom it represented. But then you envisioned the aftermath—the way the Mouth would laugh at you and declare that you once again succumbed to temptation. He would compare you to Dahmer and all His other failed disciples and scorn you for clinging to the first step of the Three-Fold Path and not exhibiting a willingness to move onto the second. Maybe then He would declare you a total reject and tell you to not even bother getting a passport. Certainly, He would call you a flesh-thing, and you’d come to realize what a scornful epithet that was meant to be.

  You shrugged and left.

  The Great Dark Mouth, for the first time, offered His congratulations. “Well done, my true and faithful servant. You have resisted a temptation. Now move on, bucko, and say no more to the moron across the street.”

  You did as He commanded because it felt good to have His approval. You felt ten pounds lighter when you paced away from there, not even answering Mullet Man’s questions about who you were and where you came from and how you got that bloody mess all over you. (Oh yes, that. You’d forgotten that you must have looked like you’d just finished a day’s work at a slaughterhouse.) Old instincts emerged, telling you to mentally beat yourself up over your carelessness. You shushed them, even though you knew you were as good as caught now.

  Something about Mullet Man told you he wouldn’t be willing or able to keep all of this to himself. Yeah, he was just another street idiot. But it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to attach a bloody dead body to a bloody man leaving the scene of the crime. None of this had happened yet, but you felt it—literally felt it—hanging in the air behind you. It was like there was a giant finger in the air that was about to flick over the first in a series of dominoes and each click-click-click of one falling after another brought you closer to the end—where the last falling domino would trigger a Rube Goldberg machine to lower a trap door and drop you from the gallows. Rube Goldberg machines being what they were, the hanging would be slightly botched and you’d suffocate slowly as people stared.

  You’d liked to think of yourself as someone who wasn’t easily rattled by cops or the threat of cops, but the truth of the matter was that if you’d been spotted like this—by a witness after a murder—a week ago or even a day ago you would’ve freaked. Would’ve pissed your pants and bawled like a baby. Shit, just look at the way you’d let Officer Douchebag Collins walk all over you.

  But so much had changed. You’d heard—literally heard—your savior speak to you in both your waking state and in dreams. You now knew about the Three-Fold Path. If you were a normal person, just another marcher in the parade, you would have had great reason to worry about getting caught. But the Great Dark Mouth had spoken and made it clear that you had a way out. You would be able to escape your punishment because you would escape existence, itself. You were special. Set apart.

  Chosen.

  So you ignored Mullet Man and kept walking.

  After a few moments, you could tell he’d regretted calling exclusive dibs on the place. He wanted company. He’d expected you to put up a fuss and try to broker some sort of homeless roommate situation with him (in the same way you’d tried to come to a similar understanding with the old man). He followed after you for about half a block, then gave up. About ten minutes later you heard a muffled scream.

  He’d found the old man. So fucking what. You had more immediate concerns, like how badly you hurt.

  Your stomach hurt with hunger, and your cuts hurt, and your heart ached from having to leave the old man behind, and your brain hurt from not yet being un-born, and your back hurt from having slept on the floor last night, and your feet (still) hurt from all the walking you’d done yesterday. Yet you trudged on. What kept you going, as you walked down the street, was the assuran
ce that—after getting swallowed by the Mouth—you wouldn’t hurt at all.

  You attracted more stares. It was just like high school, the way people stared and gave you a wide berth. One lady—a fetching redhead in a short summer sundress; probably a cheerleader, about seven years ago—looked long and hard at you.

  Redheads could be such cunts. You stopped walking so you could confront her. “Is there something wrong?”

  She started to back away.

  You walked closer. “I asked you a question, miss. The way you stared at me, it would seem that the mere sight of me offended you. Like you thought you were better than me. Like, maybe, you found something amiss. Could it be that I left my fly down?” You made an exaggerated gesture of checking. “Nope, that’s not it. Hmm… I wonder… could it be that I have a booger hanging from my nose?” You wiped your bloody forearm along your nostrils, then looked to see if anything came loose. “Nope… it’s not that. Could it be you’re looking at some of the stains on my shirt and jeans… and… arm… and… well… face? Is that it, babe? Do I have stains on my face?”

  She started to pace quickly away from you.

  You giggled. “I was in a little tussle. A chivalric one, I can assure you. I was fighting to defend a girl’s honor… for real, not a girl, really, but a woman who looked strikingly similar to you, actually. Except her legs weren’t all skinny and tight and flawless like yours—they were, instead, horribly disfigured from an accident with her father’s lawnmower when she was three. Y’ask me, though, that makes them all the sexier. I mean, no offense, but you’re not mutilated enough to really turn me on. Anyway, some guy said she whored around all the time, and I told that guy he better shut up unless he wanted to get cut. If you think I look bad, you should see the other guy!” Then you started laughing. You made that whole thing up, right there on the spot. Did it seem plausible? Probably not, but it was sure worth saying it, just to take a gander at her expression.