An Inhuman Condition

I want to sleep in someone’s arms tonight. I don’t want to have sex or any of the complications that it brings; I just want to be in bed next to another person making physical contact so that I might feel like I am alive and connected somewhere in this matted wad of dead hair we call humanity. I want this so badly that I wish I knew someone I could beckon to humor me: someone warm and real and tangible and tactile. This night is made of bastard scissors that cut away my links to the world little by little as the hours pass until I am in my own desolate desert of isolated insecurity. I want to know that someone can smell my pot-of-coffee breath, the nicotine of thirty-some cigarettes on my nubby fingers, my shampoo and the remnants of deodorized underarms. I want to feel the clutch of fabric on some garment, any garment that isn’t my own solitary sleepwear. I want to feel the stitches in my dry, cracking hands and snag a bit on my wild fingernail with the sharp corner. I want to feel freezing toes against mine as they pop back under the safety of cover. I want hair in my face and a light breathing tickling my ears. I want to be wrapped in an intimate cocoon writhing against the nexus of another: any other. I want to feel something real.

The whiskey is calling my name: beckoning with siren song. I can imagine the soft caress of sipped scotch soothing its smoky way slowly down to my stomach. I taste the cool touch on the tongue contrasted with woody warmth. The olfactory ecstasy of its auburn scent sends tickles wafting through my nostrils. Its subtle caramel color has captivated my gaze, and it takes every iota of effort in me to deny the bottle her loving kiss. I scorn her for another that will not come. As I type clicks and clacks into bits and pixels, the clock continues to betray me. There will be no contrition, no absolution on this gnarled night. Not haze nor grace nor mechanized gods will arise to save or service my slumber. And I will sleep alone.

Fuck. The sunlight slicing through closed blinds jars me awake. My head feels like an overpowered subwoofer blasting trance music to drug induced patrons of some warehouse turned dance club – if one can classify trance as music and that epileptic ritual as dancing. I quickly bury my head under the pillow struggling to keep out the burden of daylight. My joints feel drained like they’re coming down from a triathlon high. I feel the sweat caked on the back of my neck and struggle to remember what new hell I’ve earned my way into. The records office in the back of my brain seems to be striking because I can’t remember a damn thing. The only thing I can do is listen to bass bursting from blown speakers. I’m so fucking thirsty.

My mouth is a very dry and rusty ashtray. The back of my throat feels like an exhaust pipe made from tanned alligator skin. I can feel some sort of doughy mass caught in my sinuses, and I need something to drink. As I peer from under the pillow, I notice the shards of light are acting as luminous wallpaper and outing every little cluster of dust in the air that would otherwise remain incognito. Once my eyes find furniture, I notice that I’ve redecorated or participated in a sleep-over. This causes me to look to the left, and the gently breathing cluster of blonde hair protruding from beneath the blanket confirms I’ve not suddenly become an IKEA fan.

The number of problems requiring solutions compels me to try falling asleep again. I wasn’t hoping to solve a mystery; I just need some fucking water. I have no clue where I am, the nearest sink could be anywhere, my legs are throbbing dead weight, the scaly exhaust gator that is my throat just shit a phlegmy mess into my ashtray, and now I have to worry about waking the blonde lump. There’s no way I’m going to swallow this snot, so I toss off my end of the covers and slowly stand. What little composure I had is immediately lost in the dizzy mess of my bassy brain blender.

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At last-light on an autumn evening, a hunter advanced to within forty yards of his hopeful prey. The man stalked through the thick brush toward the sizable silhouette of what could only be a black bear. He readied his rifle from its sling and took a few steps forward. The animal clacked its teeth as a warning, and the hunter knew he had found his intended game. He struggled to target the creature through the thick flora and was forced to creep ever closer. The bear backed up a foot and stood to growl on its hind legs as a last warning to would-be predators that attack was imminent. The hunter, determined in his goal, stepped in again to find a better shot. As the bear fell forward to move in, the man hastily targeted for its head. He exhaled slowly and fired only to graze the fur far from the dark bulk of its center.

The massive animal charged, unfazed by the wound to its shoulder, and closed the distance between them in what felt like an instant. Its first blow landed on the hunter’s chest nearly expelling the wind from his piston-pumping lungs, and the second hit wrested the man’s ear and cheek clean off his face like the peeling of soup skin. The impact knocked the man to the ground with brutal, brain-bouncing force causing him to lose a few seconds of consciousness, and the bear wasted no time mouthing his leg and dragging the now-limp body into some nearby brush. The fast offense left him regaining his senses only to begin scrambling and flailing to find the gun sitting just a few feet away in the leaves.

With his upper body pinned under an immense weight, the man couldn’t wiggle away for his weapon. His flannel was shredded apart, and the animal gouged through bits of his chest. The claws dug out skin and meat, through innards, with intent to feast on the offal. The bear rent the intestines and liver from an ever-growing cavity pooling with a thick, clotty-deep red. The shaking shivers of shock had set in; the hunter’s hand no longer grasped futilely for his rifle. His pieces were simply gut-screaming, gasping with fluid-filled lungs and gargling on rusty, bitter blood. The blackness of the forest furthered his slip into nothingness: his end a welcome relinquishment of being and relief of all pain.

As if to add insult to deadly injury, the bear’s canines ripped the hunter’s scrotum like the sharp corner of a tin can tearing through a trash bag and the repeated crushing of many molars ground his testicular innards with sloppy precision akin to machinery mashing chicken-bits for McNuggets. It bit out large chunks of beer-weight, thigh fat leaving gaping shrapenalesque holes while it gulped the meat down barely chewing. With a few quick swallows reminiscent of snakes snacking on whole rodents, the beast had whittled the man’s left leg down to bones and a few sinewy snippets of flesh.

As humanity paved ever-thus into the wild, the natural lust and hunger of the world bit back at every corner until equilibrium or extinction were attained. If one personified the creature, this ursus americanus might have seemed smugly satisfied with his meaty treat. The lucky catch saved some time he would have spent scouring for shoots and roots preparing for hibernation. One might even had exclaimed when it awoke in April that the semblance of a snicker could still be seen on its visage.

Sic semper Sapiens, and happy hunting.

In the old days they used to believe. Give ten men an ember of glowing fire, and they would shower you with fresh meat, skins, pottery, whatever. In those days they could believe the hell out of something.

They used to believe that when God created being he used one vase to hold all the souls of man. When a child was born, God poured soul into it from the vase. When a man fell in battle against beast, sickness or time, his essence was cremated, and his soul returned to the vase to be poured anew.

The first people were very protective of the vase. They labored intensely to maintain their numbers. If they had too many babies, they believed the vase could not pour essence into them, and some would be born soulless and evil. If they had too few babies, a plague could decimate their human forms and leave them trapped in the vase forever. And so it was for centuries that they lived unwritten in time always birthing, burning, recycling themselves. When a person died just before a birth, it was thought that the soul remained near the top and had not yet mixed with the others, so they gave this new child the name of his fallen ancestor. And so it was that these spiritual accountants lived their lives among the world.

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The waiting room had the somber, black-suit-and-tie feeling of a funeral. All eyes were on the latest Cosmo, Us Weekly, People, Vogue, Sports Illustrated, Fish & Tackle without any warmth or interest in anyone else. He felt somehow under-produced next to the straplessly dressed model types, men in dark, unbuttoned oxford shirts over some ironic or otherwise heavy-metal-related t-shirt. There was a trend of spiky, frosted, product-infused hair designed by some hip, California stylist. He certainly wasn’t under-dressed in a Versace Collection jacquard jacket, Dolce & Gabbana striped dress shirt and Ermenegildo Zegna slacks; he simply felt like he wasn’t invested enough in his appearance. He didn’t have any staff members to make sure his Image, the commodity, was a trendy and salable product. He had something else to sell.

Will sat staring into the eyes of his waiting-room companions: lost, blank, dead. He made a game of waiting for one to flinch and then moving his gaze clockwise to the next. He asked himself why he had come. He hadn’t expected the call from his agent, the urgent flight to New York, the meeting with some unnamed player offering some unimaginable sum and a book deal. He tried to think of his agent’s word; a mogul, that’s what he had said. Some high-rolling, big-money, New York City publishing mogul. Will wasn’t sure what any person fitting that description would want with him. He hadn’t written anything above Atlantic Weekly length in two years and didn’t feel like anything significant had changed since then. The reviews of his last novel claimed he was “digging himself into obscurity,” “clasping desperately for the avant-garde,” and “shamefully past his prime.”

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Guns can make very convincing arguments. Few people will say no to a gun, and when they speak, anyone who they’ve made eye contact with is actively listening. I tell myself I’d rather be a motivational shooter and save my throat a few hours work. This girl: this fucking girl is the driving force behind my current dilemma. Picture the nicest girl you can think of, the type of person middle class moms once were. Picture her with enough disorders to make Freud’s unconscious tremble in the grave. I can’t decide how I feel because everything about her says land mine. If I like her or hate her, I feel bad. So I’m confused, and I’m starting to wonder why I bother with some people, and really all people for that matter. Days spent in isolation seldom end with disgust. Is it sad that a picture definition of schizoid could be a motivational speaker? I think it is too. What can you do though? I have this cult-leader personality that, while absolutely fake, hangs people on my every word. So instead of drinking some bitter Kool-Aide, I get them to pay money for absolutely nothing. It’s not as if people who need motivational speakers actually follow through with anything. You can bring a horse a map, but you can’t make him navigate.

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