WacoWas AnAccident
Ex-Bluelighter
In the end they became like robots. They kissed like robots. They made love like robots. They got along like robots. They even fought like robots. Explosive fights, subdued fights, tangential fights and fights conducted in the passive shadow of mutually repressed anger. They fought like trains passing in the night that never meet head on but always pass within feet of each other and travel at high speeds in opposite directions. They would yell and shout, but only on Friday nights, and then they would only hear what they wanted to. Rivers of anger spilled over the banks of our little lives and flooded the meadows, where we would sit in darkness and choke back our tears.
They were automatons. They had been for years; only recently had the Platonic light invaded the cave and exposed those shiny metal surfaces, the hinged joints and empty oil cans laying crushed and empty in the corner next to the half eaten bowl of pasta and the strawberry torte, the markings of a normal life seamlessly woven into the collapsing tapestry of this one. When light falls on eyes long used to watching obscured shadows dance on the walls it disorients. The reality of the sun is rejected for the safety of the shadows, and the fabric of the tapestry dissolves away into nothing, unravels in your hands like a thrift store shirt and turns to dust like the dream of better days ahead. There was no way to stop it, not now. Only God can come down out of the machine and stop the firing of the piston for that split-second, only God can save the cylinder cap from cracking and replace the gasket in time. And God fled this world when it became clear who the victors were. So there was no chance now.
It’s funny but when you hear things you don’t want to hear the brain plays tricks, it plays make believe and whisks you away for a while. I already knew what they had come for when I heard the knock at the door, and I didn’t even listen to the awkward explanations and the pained looks. I just went away for a while.
To a dead man. I went away to a dead man, that is. Not to him, but to the memory of him as he lay dying. It’s a funny thing to think of at a time like that, but it felt the most natural for some reason because all I could think of was that dead man lying on his back in the parking lot with a crimson halo slowly spreading out from the caved in crown of his head, extending itself like the perverted specter of a demented angel. The blood was thick and red and it stained the blackness of the asphalt like cherry juice that you would lick from your fingers after spitting out the pit. The Pizza Hut sign glowed white and red in the darkness and cast a pale light on the dead man’s face.
“That motherfucker’s gone.”
Someone kept saying that. I don’t know who, but he was standing right behind me and he kept saying it, repeating it without altering tone or inflection, like some kind of ancient burial chant that was going to help the dead man’s soul ascend to Heaven. That motherfucker’s gone. I can only hope someone will chant it for me, lest my soul be trapped forever on this cold rock as it spins through denseless eternity.
God, we are so primitive.
So after a while I came back. I came back to the present, to the sting of reality and my parents were looking at me, their eyes were sad but tinged with relief because it was over, all the cards were on the table now and they could both finally be honest and in some way cleansed and they felt somehow lighter. They’d been trapped before, trapped by the economic and social institution of marriage, trapped by their own morality, trapped by that oh so human fear of the unknown, trapped by the kids, trapped by the world and everything in it and now the trap was sprung and all of that and more, infinitely more, poured out of their eyes like leaky faucets and it was all part of that broken engine that God couldn’t fix.
I didn’t say anything because what do you say? I think they expected me to cry. But I didn’t feel like crying. I felt like going away again, and I did and I thought about the Christmas when my brother and I laid a trap for Santa Claus. We had a spy kit with a motion detector, and we hid the motion detector in the tree. I didn’t see how it could fail. When Santa approached the tree, we would be alerted to his presence immediately. I waited all through the night for the beep to give Him away. I fell asleep with the delicious taste of anticipation in my mouth.
In the morning the motion detector was gone. My brother had taken it out before he went to sleep.
Why, I asked him and he never answered.
But I know now he didn’t want to puncture the illusion. He knew that had he left it there, we would’ve come running out of our rooms and found my Dad putting presents under the tree and some part of that most precious and tender jewel, our very childhoods, would’ve died. He didn’t want the illusion to dissolve into nothing and vanish on the wind, just a memory of youth now.
And so I came back again and my parents were still staring and I went outside and sat in the grass where I played as a kid, where I rolled around and waged war on the ants and the other insects who claimed the garden as their own, flooded their dirty little holes and killed them with globs of honey, sticky death rained down from the sky, breathing destruction and terror and a feeble, childish innocence. This is where I would make my last stand, but against what I wondered.
I ran my hand through the rough grass. We were middle class, so our grass was not the best quality but not the cheapest either, it was solidly mediocre just like everything else about us and I always wondered if I would be mired in it, if the mediocrity would sink me like a rock in a river and if I would have enough strength in my arms to swim back to the top. Grass is funny, so small but it’s everywhere and if you snap a blade in half do the other ones ever notice?
I got up finally, I went inside and got a glass of water and pretended everything was normal because doing anything else seemed weird, abnormally weird, dangerously weird like the entire world would come crashing down on me and I stood there in the kitchen and drank my water and stared at the linoleum and thought to myself, God that is such an ugly design. It was warped and cracked and peeling, pulling away from the rotting floorboards in some areas, a gesture of repulsion and hate. It was repulsed by the rotted wood, and afraid of the termites and full of self-loathing because it was so goddamned ugly.
And I thought in that moment, with my glass of water and the ugly linoleum, about my first girlfriend and I remembered that the first time I had sex with her, which was the first time I had sex with anyone, I was overwhelmed with shame. I was repulsed by her skinny body, the outline of her ribcage, the beauty mark on her hip, it all disgusted me and the feeling sunk in my stomach like sand in a pool but I smiled at her when she turned to look up at me. And when she looked up a bead of sweat fell from her forehead and stained the pillow and I noticed a thin sheen of sweat on her back and she appeared to me then as a lubricated engine part, oiled like a piston and I smiled so as not to betray the weakness I felt inside, which of course was rage. I wanted to rage against her, and hit her but instead we had sex again ten minutes later and when I left and went home I showered until the hot water ran ice cold.
I hate my memories sometimes. They float up to the surface and explode with a feral brutality, erupting along the carefully manicured slope of my soul and they make me stumble down the hill with my arms stretched out so I can catch myself when I fall.
I haven’t fallen yet, but then again it’s not the fall that hurts.
I finished my water and went into the living room, where my parents were sitting. What was there to talk about? I looked around for a second, fixed the image in my head because it would be one of the last of its kind and I wondered briefly how I would remember this day in ten years but the thought found no light and floated up into oblivion with the diaphanous transparency of a soap bubble.
My mom and Dad were talking about selling the house. I still wasn’t ready for the sting of reality; I longed for the fluid warmth of a dream so I sat down and I went away again while they talked pragmatically, while they talked like robots.
I tried to block out the grinding of the gears, and thought to myself that maybe this time I wouldn’t come back as I closed my eyes and dissolved into nothing like the soft imprint of a child’s foot as it melts in the wet sand of the beach.
I closed my eyes, and I tried to melt.
It turns out the fall does hurt a little bit.
They were automatons. They had been for years; only recently had the Platonic light invaded the cave and exposed those shiny metal surfaces, the hinged joints and empty oil cans laying crushed and empty in the corner next to the half eaten bowl of pasta and the strawberry torte, the markings of a normal life seamlessly woven into the collapsing tapestry of this one. When light falls on eyes long used to watching obscured shadows dance on the walls it disorients. The reality of the sun is rejected for the safety of the shadows, and the fabric of the tapestry dissolves away into nothing, unravels in your hands like a thrift store shirt and turns to dust like the dream of better days ahead. There was no way to stop it, not now. Only God can come down out of the machine and stop the firing of the piston for that split-second, only God can save the cylinder cap from cracking and replace the gasket in time. And God fled this world when it became clear who the victors were. So there was no chance now.
It’s funny but when you hear things you don’t want to hear the brain plays tricks, it plays make believe and whisks you away for a while. I already knew what they had come for when I heard the knock at the door, and I didn’t even listen to the awkward explanations and the pained looks. I just went away for a while.
To a dead man. I went away to a dead man, that is. Not to him, but to the memory of him as he lay dying. It’s a funny thing to think of at a time like that, but it felt the most natural for some reason because all I could think of was that dead man lying on his back in the parking lot with a crimson halo slowly spreading out from the caved in crown of his head, extending itself like the perverted specter of a demented angel. The blood was thick and red and it stained the blackness of the asphalt like cherry juice that you would lick from your fingers after spitting out the pit. The Pizza Hut sign glowed white and red in the darkness and cast a pale light on the dead man’s face.
“That motherfucker’s gone.”
Someone kept saying that. I don’t know who, but he was standing right behind me and he kept saying it, repeating it without altering tone or inflection, like some kind of ancient burial chant that was going to help the dead man’s soul ascend to Heaven. That motherfucker’s gone. I can only hope someone will chant it for me, lest my soul be trapped forever on this cold rock as it spins through denseless eternity.
God, we are so primitive.
So after a while I came back. I came back to the present, to the sting of reality and my parents were looking at me, their eyes were sad but tinged with relief because it was over, all the cards were on the table now and they could both finally be honest and in some way cleansed and they felt somehow lighter. They’d been trapped before, trapped by the economic and social institution of marriage, trapped by their own morality, trapped by that oh so human fear of the unknown, trapped by the kids, trapped by the world and everything in it and now the trap was sprung and all of that and more, infinitely more, poured out of their eyes like leaky faucets and it was all part of that broken engine that God couldn’t fix.
I didn’t say anything because what do you say? I think they expected me to cry. But I didn’t feel like crying. I felt like going away again, and I did and I thought about the Christmas when my brother and I laid a trap for Santa Claus. We had a spy kit with a motion detector, and we hid the motion detector in the tree. I didn’t see how it could fail. When Santa approached the tree, we would be alerted to his presence immediately. I waited all through the night for the beep to give Him away. I fell asleep with the delicious taste of anticipation in my mouth.
In the morning the motion detector was gone. My brother had taken it out before he went to sleep.
Why, I asked him and he never answered.
But I know now he didn’t want to puncture the illusion. He knew that had he left it there, we would’ve come running out of our rooms and found my Dad putting presents under the tree and some part of that most precious and tender jewel, our very childhoods, would’ve died. He didn’t want the illusion to dissolve into nothing and vanish on the wind, just a memory of youth now.
And so I came back again and my parents were still staring and I went outside and sat in the grass where I played as a kid, where I rolled around and waged war on the ants and the other insects who claimed the garden as their own, flooded their dirty little holes and killed them with globs of honey, sticky death rained down from the sky, breathing destruction and terror and a feeble, childish innocence. This is where I would make my last stand, but against what I wondered.
I ran my hand through the rough grass. We were middle class, so our grass was not the best quality but not the cheapest either, it was solidly mediocre just like everything else about us and I always wondered if I would be mired in it, if the mediocrity would sink me like a rock in a river and if I would have enough strength in my arms to swim back to the top. Grass is funny, so small but it’s everywhere and if you snap a blade in half do the other ones ever notice?
I got up finally, I went inside and got a glass of water and pretended everything was normal because doing anything else seemed weird, abnormally weird, dangerously weird like the entire world would come crashing down on me and I stood there in the kitchen and drank my water and stared at the linoleum and thought to myself, God that is such an ugly design. It was warped and cracked and peeling, pulling away from the rotting floorboards in some areas, a gesture of repulsion and hate. It was repulsed by the rotted wood, and afraid of the termites and full of self-loathing because it was so goddamned ugly.
And I thought in that moment, with my glass of water and the ugly linoleum, about my first girlfriend and I remembered that the first time I had sex with her, which was the first time I had sex with anyone, I was overwhelmed with shame. I was repulsed by her skinny body, the outline of her ribcage, the beauty mark on her hip, it all disgusted me and the feeling sunk in my stomach like sand in a pool but I smiled at her when she turned to look up at me. And when she looked up a bead of sweat fell from her forehead and stained the pillow and I noticed a thin sheen of sweat on her back and she appeared to me then as a lubricated engine part, oiled like a piston and I smiled so as not to betray the weakness I felt inside, which of course was rage. I wanted to rage against her, and hit her but instead we had sex again ten minutes later and when I left and went home I showered until the hot water ran ice cold.
I hate my memories sometimes. They float up to the surface and explode with a feral brutality, erupting along the carefully manicured slope of my soul and they make me stumble down the hill with my arms stretched out so I can catch myself when I fall.
I haven’t fallen yet, but then again it’s not the fall that hurts.
I finished my water and went into the living room, where my parents were sitting. What was there to talk about? I looked around for a second, fixed the image in my head because it would be one of the last of its kind and I wondered briefly how I would remember this day in ten years but the thought found no light and floated up into oblivion with the diaphanous transparency of a soap bubble.
My mom and Dad were talking about selling the house. I still wasn’t ready for the sting of reality; I longed for the fluid warmth of a dream so I sat down and I went away again while they talked pragmatically, while they talked like robots.
I tried to block out the grinding of the gears, and thought to myself that maybe this time I wouldn’t come back as I closed my eyes and dissolved into nothing like the soft imprint of a child’s foot as it melts in the wet sand of the beach.
I closed my eyes, and I tried to melt.
It turns out the fall does hurt a little bit.
