WacoWas AnAccident
Ex-Bluelighter
Harry’s life is collapsing as he watches the two kids walk toward him. The resolution of the image improves as the distance between them and him shrinks, yet he’s never felt farther away from anyone. They are completely wrong. From far away they were beautiful. She was a coffee skinned beauty and he, as is only right in a universe with any kind of order, was a masculine man with a strong chin and hard eyes and a will cast in iron, the only kind of man that could ever make a girl like that happy. And Harry saw it all and it filled him with a kind of transcendent joy that life was as it should be, even here life had somehow corrected itself.
But things are not as they should be, and as the image jumps out and becomes clearer Harry sees that her smooth skin is cratered and imperfect, oddly blemished and not as smooth as he had thought, tiny wrinkles puckering her eyes and her eyebrows reveal themselves as complete fakes, penciled thick and mute and the color of charcoal. The closer she comes, the clearer it is that her face is a little too full, a little too fleshy, her limbs not as slender as one would like, more like thick cuts of beef from a butcher shop. Her breasts are flat and wide like the nostrils of an elephant.
The false pretenses of the girl reveals her male companion as a fraud as well. They are close enough now that Harry can hear them speak, and the man’s voice is too velvety, not deep and strong, but light like a blast of air under a butterfly’s wings. His nose and mouth and eyes are a little too close together and too high on his face giving him the look of a bird or a rodent or some other thing that does not lend itself to the human visage.
The man caresses her arm and kisses her neck while hiding behind a careful mask of timidity. Harry can see the relationship, can see and understand the dynamic instantly. To him the intricacies of it are like telephone wires running between the two, each one clear and marked and easy to cut. Harry knows that if the girl expresses displeasure, the man will bend his will to accommodate her and this may be for several reasons. He may actually love her. It may be a pure love, but more likely it is the kind of love that crops up between ugly men and women, a love rooted in necessity and fear of being alone. And then again, he may not love her at all. He may just be with her because the thickness of her thighs can take a lot of concussive force. Perhaps he defers simply because he knows when they get home in an hour he can unleash his frustrations through a series of brutal pelvic thrusts and she’ll barely feel a thing.
So you see, there is always balance in nature.
Harry laughs to himself, but hides it from the world because they would not understand. He has crawled out of the cave and shadows and seen the light and it burned his eyes out. Harry prefers to keep that kind of irony to himself.
Harry keeps a lot of things to himself, like his thoughts on suicide. To Harry, the people who advertise their suicide plans don’t really want to die. They want to be saved. It’s all part of the ballet of life, so delicate, so much complexity and so worthless at the same time. Those people who loudly announce their impending suicide attempt are not fully removed from the system they hate so much. They are a stranded lifeboat shooting a flare up, and hoping, desperately, that whoever sees the flare cares enough to come and help. And invariably someone comes, because normal people always want to help other people. And there you have it, another one of those very funny organic life stories, the clever symbiotic circle so subtly hidden that nobody can see it but Harry.
The suicide-attempter gets validated by the person trying to save them -someone does care!-, and the suicide-saver gets to feel good about saving a life that was never in danger. That’s how Harry knows there’s no Christian God. There’s nothing that clever in the Bible. Life is far too clever for Christians to be right.
But Harry knows there’s another kind of suicide. The silent suicide. The real thing. When someone hurls themselves off a bridge, and after the fact the family all sit around saying “I never knew it was that bad!” or “Not Jim, I just don’t believe it!” and drinking coffee out of the good china, Harry knows that is the real deal. Those are the people who knew what they were doing and did what they wanted. Not even Harry can say for sure what it is they wanted, or why they did it. That secret dies with the people who kill themselves. It is likely they simply get swept up in the avalanche of life, and with nothing to grab onto they are washed over the precipice and into the abyss. We’ve all seen the abyss; it is a fearful place and most of us just want a tiny taste of it before we pull ourselves back to the sure-footed safety of our jobs and our spouses and our televisions and the nice things on our shelves and the safe monotony of our routines. But Harry likes to balance on the precipice. Harry likes to swoop down into the abyss and fill his soul with the rotting stink of humanity.
When Harry looks around again the lovers are gone. There are more people now, walking along the tiny paths in the cliffs and looking down into the wide mouth of the ocean as it eats the sun the way Man eats God. Or is it God that’s eating Man?
Harry finds it hard to tell the difference.
But things are not as they should be, and as the image jumps out and becomes clearer Harry sees that her smooth skin is cratered and imperfect, oddly blemished and not as smooth as he had thought, tiny wrinkles puckering her eyes and her eyebrows reveal themselves as complete fakes, penciled thick and mute and the color of charcoal. The closer she comes, the clearer it is that her face is a little too full, a little too fleshy, her limbs not as slender as one would like, more like thick cuts of beef from a butcher shop. Her breasts are flat and wide like the nostrils of an elephant.
The false pretenses of the girl reveals her male companion as a fraud as well. They are close enough now that Harry can hear them speak, and the man’s voice is too velvety, not deep and strong, but light like a blast of air under a butterfly’s wings. His nose and mouth and eyes are a little too close together and too high on his face giving him the look of a bird or a rodent or some other thing that does not lend itself to the human visage.
The man caresses her arm and kisses her neck while hiding behind a careful mask of timidity. Harry can see the relationship, can see and understand the dynamic instantly. To him the intricacies of it are like telephone wires running between the two, each one clear and marked and easy to cut. Harry knows that if the girl expresses displeasure, the man will bend his will to accommodate her and this may be for several reasons. He may actually love her. It may be a pure love, but more likely it is the kind of love that crops up between ugly men and women, a love rooted in necessity and fear of being alone. And then again, he may not love her at all. He may just be with her because the thickness of her thighs can take a lot of concussive force. Perhaps he defers simply because he knows when they get home in an hour he can unleash his frustrations through a series of brutal pelvic thrusts and she’ll barely feel a thing.
So you see, there is always balance in nature.
Harry laughs to himself, but hides it from the world because they would not understand. He has crawled out of the cave and shadows and seen the light and it burned his eyes out. Harry prefers to keep that kind of irony to himself.
Harry keeps a lot of things to himself, like his thoughts on suicide. To Harry, the people who advertise their suicide plans don’t really want to die. They want to be saved. It’s all part of the ballet of life, so delicate, so much complexity and so worthless at the same time. Those people who loudly announce their impending suicide attempt are not fully removed from the system they hate so much. They are a stranded lifeboat shooting a flare up, and hoping, desperately, that whoever sees the flare cares enough to come and help. And invariably someone comes, because normal people always want to help other people. And there you have it, another one of those very funny organic life stories, the clever symbiotic circle so subtly hidden that nobody can see it but Harry.
The suicide-attempter gets validated by the person trying to save them -someone does care!-, and the suicide-saver gets to feel good about saving a life that was never in danger. That’s how Harry knows there’s no Christian God. There’s nothing that clever in the Bible. Life is far too clever for Christians to be right.
But Harry knows there’s another kind of suicide. The silent suicide. The real thing. When someone hurls themselves off a bridge, and after the fact the family all sit around saying “I never knew it was that bad!” or “Not Jim, I just don’t believe it!” and drinking coffee out of the good china, Harry knows that is the real deal. Those are the people who knew what they were doing and did what they wanted. Not even Harry can say for sure what it is they wanted, or why they did it. That secret dies with the people who kill themselves. It is likely they simply get swept up in the avalanche of life, and with nothing to grab onto they are washed over the precipice and into the abyss. We’ve all seen the abyss; it is a fearful place and most of us just want a tiny taste of it before we pull ourselves back to the sure-footed safety of our jobs and our spouses and our televisions and the nice things on our shelves and the safe monotony of our routines. But Harry likes to balance on the precipice. Harry likes to swoop down into the abyss and fill his soul with the rotting stink of humanity.
When Harry looks around again the lovers are gone. There are more people now, walking along the tiny paths in the cliffs and looking down into the wide mouth of the ocean as it eats the sun the way Man eats God. Or is it God that’s eating Man?
Harry finds it hard to tell the difference.
