An Inhuman Condition

Walt sat in his chair, pensive. He was thinking about today and his stint of depression: car troubles, money troubles, and girl troubles. He felt like he was made of trouble. Why had he acted the way he did? Blowing up and breaking down in front of his co-workers was not the act of a sane man. He didn’t understand why his normal face, “the daily lie” as he liked to call it, wasn’t working anymore. He was happy – once. Maybe his problem was simply the past tense. He had a foreboding feeling that, while he was happy two months ago, it would never happen again. Everything in his life seemed to burn-out, fade-away, flush down the drain of depression into darkness. But why had he been happy then? He was making roughly the same money, driving the same shitty truck and dating an equally interesting girl. Walt couldn’t wrap his head around the change.

The brakes went out on his life, but he could recover in August. He was doing so well. Now his wheel was falling off at 50 mph, and it left him dangling on the edge of a breakdown. The truck never seemed to work. No stereo, bald tires, bad brakes, etc. Walt wondered why he drove such a death trap. He needed to drive up-state the next day; maybe it would finally crash and be done with. No, probably not. He didn’t have luck like that. With fate’s sick track record, the truck could crash, roll, explode even and leave him without a single scratch. That was the tragedy he saw. Everything fell apart, died, and he was stuck living with the cold embers. This is (mostly) why he drank.

Alcohol, for all its faults, had such a seductive allure. It made Walt forget, for a while, that he was sad, broke, alone – alone. There he sat, cigarette in hand, thinking, alone – the lonely loner. Walt suffered from an inability to connect with people. He could chat, flirt, accompany, but all the while remain his solemn, solitary self. The face, the facade, the farce that was his “daily lie” kept him isolated. He was a man trapped inside his head, surrounded by people, curse by an abundance of friends, dating his way through a series of cute girls. Despite his ability to find a date, Walt was still dreadfully, terribly, depressingly alone.

Walt thought about the girls: the psych major, the dancer, the fragile, the artist and all the rest. They were still fresh in his mind. The psych major – he always thought that she was too damn hard: on herself, for him, whatever. He wanted badly to be there; she was just always too damn hard. The dancer – she knew that she would break his heart. Her mother knew it too. The girl had warned him to beware. Even knowing, it cut deep, down into him. The fragile – always down on her luck, self-deprecating her way through life, she searched vigorously for it, but couldn’t find the break. It tore at her. The artist – if only she knew how sweet, intelligent, spontaneous, creative, beautiful, everything she was, then she could finally let the defenses rest. In this nostalgic world, Walt thought things could work out with any of them. He had cared for them all and wanted to drink.

He tried desperately to let them in, to lose the mask and actually be, exist and act in a manner consistent with his self. This always backfired. He hated himself. They all love the mask – the smart, funny, awkward-but-charming, tech-savvy writer. They ate him up until they realized there was a scarred man underneath the mask. That’s why he never showed them his writing; if they knew just how deep the well went, they would realize the ruse and leave. Then he would act strong until the next one came along, but they all left in the end anyway.

Walt was waiting for someone who could connect the clues and solve the mystery of his mania. At the core he was insecure awkwardness and isolating intelligence. Try as he might to hide it, Derrida would rear his ugly head, and Walt would lecture until he deconstructed his own illusion with a simple, accidental allusion. He hadn’t found someone who understood. Simply, without pretense, without the black clothing, sappy poetry and Depeche Mode, nobody understood him. Most people found some way to connect with others despite their isolating tendencies. Nobody could guess how often Walt thought about suicide. His lie worked fairly well.

He would always get too close to girls, let them in too far, and it would all burn up. The troubles would increase exponentially, and Walt would break down. Then he would stay in bed all day until he had to drop out of college. He would explode at work and have to quit his job. He would fall in love and watch her walk away. It was all predictable, impeccably inferred, empirically tested and easily observable. This was the operating nature of his entropy. He wondered how others functioned and guessed that there was a glitch in his firmware. Maybe it was time to muzzle-flash the BIOS? No. Not today.

He had read an article that claimed the same aspects of one’s personality that cause creativity tend to cause depression, bipolar, thoughts of isolation, suicidal tendencies. This was not news to Walt. He had just heard that one more of his literary idols were dead: hung himself last month. Anyone whose writing would suggest that they understood Walt’s perspective had a limited shelf life. The art was inseparable from the noose, the bullet, and the pills. He knew he had the bug, but all of his life he had been trying to ignore it. He was finding it harder to push out of his mind ever since his uncle had described his early bouts of manic depression. He nailed the exact details, the way crippling depression would, months later, be followed by the carefree bliss of mania. It scared him because his uncle had stolen the words, the plot, and the setting straight from Walt’s life.

Most bipolar individuals killed themselves at the end of a manic phase: when they felt the rollercoaster, that cocaine high, fading and the steel reality of sadness and sulking hovering on the horizon. They knew where that road went and couldn’t follow it once more back into bed, back into their head, back into their bleak hibernating hole. Walt could tell this was where his mind was going. Problems fazed him, people were a chore, obligations started slipping and, worst of all, he was writing again. His months of sadness had started to scrawl their way into the back of his notebooks. Creativity was the harbinger of his demise. Every time, every fucking time he built a life from the ashes of his depression, every time he ended it with a pyre, the saddest thing for him to face was the start of another fire.

Why didn’t he buy the gun? He was so close in August. He had the money, but he spent it playing dance partner. He refused to see her faults, to keep his distance. Then she broke his heart like he knew she would – like she said she would. At least if he had bought the gun, it would still be with him. Walt supposed that she was still with him in a way. People without the bug didn’t seem to know regret the way Walt felt it, and he had a life that could fill a dictionary defining the word. Regret, remorse, melancholy, manic, depressed, dejected, alone – he could expand Webster’s into an infinitely bleaker OED. How were other people happy? He couldn’t reconcile his thoughts.

Walt lit another cigarette and took inventory. He had two left and would have to stop on his way home. Two and a half packs had already graced his lungs with the comforting tar and smooth burn that any vice should. Winston tastes good in Marlboro country, and Lucky Strikes are first again with tobacco men like Joe Camel. It was a Basic need of his, not something he did to be Kool. It was an itch symptomatic of the American Spirit. The smokes couldn’t kill him; ad copy was much more potent carcinogen. He knew how it would all end anyway. Walt was Macbeth consorting with weird sisters, and he knew in this tragedy he was Macduff as well. Why was he waiting? Everyone who thought like he thought, wrote like he wrote, felt like he felt, everyone like him did themselves in. For what was Walt waiting? He had no metaphysical questions left to be answered. He was not a religious man. He didn’t consider it unethical, so why not? He really wished he’d bought that gun.

He thought about them again, his laundry list of unrequited loves. He’d only ever left one girl and even regretted that a bit. Last night he dreamed of the artist, the latest. He had dreamt it would work, that she would be able to love him, and that he wouldn’t have to wade through winter alone. He thought about the best way to show her how he felt, tried to find a way to make her stay, but maybe he was still dreaming. He thought about his truck – the rusted, busted thing waiting to drive him back to a lonely bed. He thought about his job, the scene he caused earlier, his friends who didn’t deserve to be hurt, and the work he had invested since January. It was all waiting to be burned up as fuel for the writing. Walt felt powerless, without efficacy. He was hopeless, sad and knew in a month that it would all likely disappear.

This time the end would be big. He would lose the best friends he’d had in a long while. He’d lose his phone, his dusty truck and his home in the works. He didn’t want to pay the price. Walt wanted to keep it all: the little he had. He wanted more time with the mania, but he didn’t have a choice. He wasn’t naïve enough to think he had a chance. Walt wanted to lead two lives without the expense of either. If he could take an indefinite vacation from the computer shop and come back when he’d found his marbles, he could save it all. He thought about using school as an excuse, but he wasn’t ready to return to that burned bridge. It was also mid-semester and most of his paths backwards were thoroughly scorched. Walt sensed he was running out of places to hide, things onto which to move. He felt like his time was running out.

It had become late; the evening withered away. Walt had to wake in a few hours to torture himself some more. He didn’t want to drive home. He wanted more coffee, time alone, memories of the past few happy months, and a notebook waiting to chronicle the denouement. He wanted to limp home, turn off the phone, and spend tomorrow alone. The burn was in him at full heat, and he was at a loss for a way to fight the fires. He couldn’t see the doctor again; the meds made him think about suicide constantly. Drinking was only a temporary fix and too expensive anyway. All the escapism in the world couldn’t salvage him at this point. His last cigarette was burning, and a choice overtook him. It was a seemingly important choice, but Walt knew it was only a pretense. Going or staying were only temporary forks in a path that would lead him back to a familiar flame. It was all just one thing, his life, boiling on a solitary stove underneath which a healthy pilot light burned hidden. Walt wondered if he had any talent for writing. If he did, maybe it wasn’t all a waste; his torment could produce something. He wanted to find an audience, any audience, and leave his legacy of dysfunction. It probably wouldn’t happen though; statistically he was a solo stenographer of misanthropy likely to be lost like most others.

Walt hated how much he was like his uncle. Everything he knew about the man was a hindsight confirmation of his condition. Walt’s uncle had been through a series of divorces, a series of breakdowns, a series of dead-end jobs, a series of weight-gains, and a series of scrawlings. The only difference Walt could find was the direction they wrote in notebooks – Steve wrote front-to-back and Walt began at the end. It was part of his lie, a piece of his disguise. The front was always failure-free, sanitary sane and devoid of depression. This notebook was dangerously one-sided to the rear. The depression had slithered in through his creativity – that sly serpent. He wondered how long he had been fading like this. It seemed pointless to pinpoint, but Walt wanted to be aware for future reference – as if he thought he had a future.

He decided he would go to sleep. He was unsure if his digression had passed the point of return and summarily whether he could leave his bed in the morning, but damned be all if he wasn’t going to find out the hard way. He packed his effects into the simple black bag he carried and slung it over his shoulder. He cleared the empty glass with its brown coffee remnants and the overstuffed ashtray from the table. He took one last glance around with a heavy sigh and walked sullen into the brisk night.

The past, pain, rain and regrets accumulated for Walt over the years. It was all there in his mind while he slept – cataloged stacks of scars. He always tried to live away from those things: in a place he could stand. In his mind he was running away from something, everything; it would all track him down. The same city, the same shit returned in perpetuity. Walt felt that all his life was spent chasing fuck-nothing. He was consistently left with fuck-nothing. He could count on fuck-nothing. Fuck-nothing was what he had to give, and Walt knew it wasn’t good. He knew it wasn’t, but she could have it: everything. In his dream she kept inching toward him and the troubles he’d wrought. Walt found it astounding. He was ashamed of it but trying desperately with any string he could grab to get out of the hole. Walt knew he was burning out, proving wrong all the people with high hopes for his future. He thought the future was good for fuck-nothing; it was never present. The past was a clinging illusion – jellied gasoline that stuck to his skin and burned flesh into the hard shell of experience. Walt wanted her to have more, better, something – anything. He wanted her to have it all; but she would have to settle for fuck-nothing if she wanted him. At that moment he wanted her so badly that he was ready to stop running and succumb. Then he awoke.

Morning melted Walt’s mind with the violent alarm of an unruly clock. He stumbled to silence it and grasped for the stale twig of an old, rolled cigarette he made the night before. Then with the click of a lighter his lungs were burning again with the bitter oil that pumped his internal pistons and drove him through the day. He coughed. The protest of his lungs to the invading vitriolic smoke was so immense that he could feel it in his side. Walt shuffled dazed to the bathroom to spit. As he was attempting to purge the tar and mucus, the cough returned without remorse causing him to hack and hack with no release and sharp claws digging into his side the whole while. He was stuck there in a dry-heave; the myriad poisons a smokestack accumulates refused to relocate.

He took another hit from his stale twig of a cigarette and started to dress. He put on the same pants he wore yesterday – his trash-stained, frayed and faded jeans. He swapped his sleeping black t-shirt with an identical one and threw a black polo over it – the one with two tiny holes in the chest. He scavenged two socks from the floor and stumbled into them gracelessly. After brushing his hair and a quick rub of deodorant, he collected his effects – lighter, phone, keys, wallet, bag. He packed his lunch, the same lunch he’d eaten for almost a year now, and slipped on his shoes.

The ride into town was always the most solitary moment of the day, but it wasn’t awful. It gave Walt twenty minutes to zone out and think about his mindset. He could try to put his thoughts and feelings into context. This morning the artist was in the back of his mind, but the dancer was stuck on the surface. She dipped and pirouetted through his thoughts on an endless, repeated interpretive shuffle. The slide-show of their stint was stuck burning its images into the backs of his retinas. All the awful followed her through his thoughts – the PTSD shock of the bump-belly, the baby-daddy, the breaking. Walt’s pain was alliterated with the letter ‘b’, and the cold of morning caused him to cough. He was awake again.

The truck rumbled with a quick key turn and shivered itself awake. The team was back together after a night of arrested rest. Both angry, shaky – falling apart – they rolled down the tolling road. God damn the dancers, the prancing necromancers, for charming their way in and leaving a man undead but dying. His body jerked through every irk work inspired. Walt felt like he was drifting, working away waiting for the day when he could finally be fired: no job, no blight, no need to fight, no dreams, no hope, no steam, no thing with which to cope. It all seemed ethereal, but he wished it was real. They could have it all, those debt vultures. They could repossess the big shitty pile of nothing he had – the amassed mass of things Walt didn’t need, things that didn’t work, and things that didn’t mean shit. It could be theirs for the low cost of the nothing it was worth.

And so it was that his attitude decayed. Every day was another problem, another worry, another basket of fuck nothing. It was bleeding his soul, taxing his mind and body, taking everything and giving nothing. Null, zero, emptiness – these were Walt’s bricks and mortar. No love, connection, feeling – nothing. No cash, assets, dreams for the future – nothing. No booze, no drugs, no escape – fuck nothing.

He grasped at the one thing in his life that could make him forget. Walt spent every bit of cash and every moment pursuing the artist. He didn’t understand her, but he knew that what she had was special. She was becoming distant; it was easily seen. He could see the unpleasant end obfuscated by the fog of her words, but he was tired of being afraid, guarded, safe, unhurt, alone; he was so damn tired of being alone. He wasn’t going to leave himself with regret by matching her distance – backing away from each other gently until there was nothing. He knew where that would take him. He was so low that he felt the rejection was inevitable, but he told himself he wasn’t going to let go quietly. Walt vowed to let it all out because the hurt was coming regardless, and he would be left with fuck nothing.

It had been more than a week since he could afford to call her, but it was the first thing he would do when the payus-ex-machina of money graced his wallet. He had it all planned out, how he would sip coffee and spill every wonderful thing he thought about her gracelessly on the table. He only had to make it to Friday. The mornings were getting worse like they always did during a shift. He was increasingly anxious, bitter, caustic. Walt was ever on the edge of an outburst, one pin away as it were. He knew his friends could feel it in the air around him in the short answers, emotionless sentences, lack of interest in anything, but he couldn’t hide it anymore. The daily lie was dying along with any grace, face, or subtlety left in him. He was feral, fighting simply to survive until he could see her again. He wrote about being broke, scribbled words describing how she made him feel – how they all had made him feel – and how he wasn’t feeling any of that warmth anymore. Walt’s pen was clenched around the memory of his past and he was null nostalgic, catatonic, hibernating emotionally. He longed for a taste of positive feeling, human connection, something more than nothing – anything. He was stumbling lower daily – down too far to escape. It was time to forget thought, reason, whatever excuses he had and fuck consequences.

Finally, his day arrived. There was money for spending in Walt’s wallet and he was ready to follow his best laid plan. The acidic bile of anticipation slithered through his mind slowly burning away all other thoughts. He wanted to see her so fucking badly. He called her after work – voicemail. His throat almost trembled as he spoke to the cold machine. He wished she had answered more than he had ever wished for anything. He hoped – a feeling for those lacking efficacy – she would call back soon. He lingered in painful anticipation waiting. He was idle, stuck, unable to do anything but wait obviously for a return call. Every paranoid permutation of rejection ran rampant through his immobile mind. Walt was so stuck on her, on his chance to feel, connect that his mind concocted a state of despair over nothing, over his idling, over being able to do nothing, over being so obsessed with his state. He was an internal cycle of doubt and immobility – the synergy of which was an immensely crushing feeling. He was stuck there when his phone rang.

Her voice was faint like the degraded sound of old records, like a copy of a copy of a copy over time. Their voices were filled with an awkward apathy toward one another – the two of them speaking between breaks in their conversation of silence. Walt’s short, listless sentences asked if she would meet him. Her shorter half-thoughts agreed on coffee. They said goodbye.

The shop was busy, and they sat at a small corner table – her usual seat. She was shining, wearing the same eclectic bits of jewelry she always wore. Walt was rough, wearing his typical black-t-shirt-blue-jeans-black-boots uniform. Her face was warm, full of color, aflame. His eyes were steel, sharp with a blade-like determination. They began the game.

They volleyed hollow pleasantries back and forth discussing his work, her classes, what books they were each reading. His gaze was welded to her visage. He was searching for something in her eyes and expression, anything that showed feeling. Walt looked for what seemed to him like hours while still returning the serve, volleying politely, playing along, talking quite a bit, but saying nothing of significance.

Before long the moments had indeed become hours. Walt was engrossed by her voice, her words. He was enthralled by her everything, lost in a maze of her presence. It all stuck to him like a magnet deeply attracted to the girl across the table until time itself betrayed him and it was too late. Walt searched himself for the words to tell her everything, but before he could she declared her intent to leave for bed. Walt was trashing the interior of his mind looking for those damn words without success. After a long, staring pause, Walt gave up. Their goodbye was the dialogue of Walt’s regret – words crafted from his failures. He wanted to tell her how she could have everything, how he was sick of playing the game, sick of looking without finding. He wanted to hold her hand, confess everything and hold her close. He wanted it more than anything but couldn’t speak – stuck, mute. He said goodbye and she walked away. Walt sat in lament.

He spent the next day in a state of silent regret. He went home early, used his free time for sleeping and carefully ducked any inquiries regarding the state of his happiness. Stagnant, stifled, he hated how he failed to take the chance meant to be his last stand. He waited in his fickle funk drifting between desperate distress and aggravated apathy. He called her again and spoke sorely to her voicemail.

The next day he was late for work. He wanted to call in sick, but he didn’t. He wanted the ability to immediately leave bed in the morning, but he had no such luck. He had hoped she wouldn’t steal his attention and occupy his thoughts, but her memory remained an unwanted mind guest. He moped without energy through the day. His boss bitched at him for accomplishing nothing ignorant of Walt’s interior. He was left with no excuse, no retort. He left work hating himself and drove home.

The next morning leaving bed was even harder. Lighting a cigarette to wake up was arduous labor. He struggled to find clothes and drive his shitty truck into town late again. He called her during the day – voicemail. He limped through work on the crutch of return-phone-call hopes. When everyone had left and his things were packed, he unplugged the glowing sign and walked into the scantly illuminated night. The drive home stung deep with avoidance and hollowed out another lonely hole in his chest. Sleep refused to take Walt and he stared at his dark ceiling through the night eventually finding a few fitful hours of respite.

In the morning, time betrayed him again, but he felt too internally ill and tired to stand. He called work to say he wasn’t coming. He listened to abrasive blues and slept as much as he could to avoid having to engage the thoughts that waking inspired. He picked up his notebook a few times, but he could only write in semi-romantic pronouns: “She was bright atomic flames burning in the dead winter apocalypse – a Gaia from which all myriad life could spring anew. She was his Omega.” Walt knew who he and she were, but he figured there wouldn’t be a second chance to tell her. The hours slid by hurting only slightly. He picked a book from the shelf and read himself to sleep.

By the time Walt crawled out of bed, he was already a half-hour late for work. He sluggishly dressed and stumbled to the car. The drive was slow, silent, heavy with a surreal hangoveresque pain. His thoughts lagged with the latency of his mind. His head screamed at him to give up, turn the truck around and stay the hell away from town, but he just couldn’t give in. His late arrival caused tension as expected, but it barely fazed him. The constant feeling that he was late, lazy, listless only confirmed his negative feeling of self-worth. He spent his day mindless, fixing computers, but never really engaging anything. Whenever he was waiting for a virus scan, disk check, software install, etc., he was blank. Nothing was near the shallow water of his thoughts, but below a preponderance of background processes analyzing the girl, his life, what he should do, things one thinks about with whiskey ripped him sharklike apart. Walt was distance personified.

Toward the end of his day, he called her one last time. He left what might be the final words this amazing girl would hear him say. His tone was subtle desperation, but he tried his best to mask the hurt. He didn’t expect that she would call, but he had to try one last time for the sake of himself.

During their time together, he had thought the impact she had on him was permanent. He thought carefree adventurousness had radiated from her smirk into his being. Walt wanted there to be some code, dogma, some life lesson that he was gleaning from her presence – something greater than just the girl. There was no such thing to find; his hopes and mantras were all lies. The same sort of false feelings religious people seemed to attribute to stories and coincidences.

Walt felt bitter, betrayed, like he’d sold himself a sour sack of lemons. If it wasn’t her, wasn’t an idea but a mindset inspired simply by being near her, then Walt would have to admit it was all internal, intrinsic to him. The warmth, happiness, hope, the best things he’d felt in a while were all his; all of them. He owned them the way a painter, not the scenery, owns a work of art. A bitter lip-curl graced his face as Walt blamed himself for staying in bed, moping around, fucking up at work, avoiding his friends and all the rest. He sat stupefied, fuming to himself at the emotional rock-bottom, as he dissected this loss of faith. He was not surprised or depressed when it became clear that she would not be returning his call. He was angry with a rage that leapt from his expression. His terse responses puzzled everyone, and he gave no excuse for his rotten demeanor.

Walt was mad only at himself for constructing situation after situation that would lead him to depression like this one. He set himself up for failure that would take him into his head, back to bed, and leave him with fuck nothing. As he continued to accept it, the anger grew. His words were manic, sarcastic; they stung as he spoke. Walt went on with obtuse offense and no thought, feeling, or remorse. Every uttered word to those around him was a laceration of self-hatred. Walt was intent on witnessing the world burning, and he wouldn’t quit until he smelled smoke.

The next morning he woke among the coals of regret. He had staged another heavy-bed morning, another silently sad commute, and another shitty, somber day. He repeatedly ruined himself, ruined his relationships, ruined his academic goals, ruined his jobs, his friendships. He ruined anything that might make him feel better than the dirty low of malignant fuck nothing. He could see it now. It was every story he’d ever told, every endeavor failed in the past. It was in him every time aiming for fuck nothing, thrashing with the mania of his anger, relaxing in the bliss of his depression. It was pushing everything that might improve him, make him happy, and challenge his morose writer-type maladies far, far away until he felt comfortable.

Walt spent the next month writing and recovering. He wanted to grab this realization, hold it, bleed it deep into paper where all could see. He wanted to brutalize the shame of his defeat so he wouldn’t forget. He took a good look at his tendencies – the pattern of his actions. He wanted to be painfully aware of himself so he wrote it out. He explained how much he idolized happiness, school, girls, academia. He scribbled down his romanticized vices – how he used them to cope with his perceived lack of luck, his thought that everything good left him eventually, how he was stuck helpless climbing a new pedestal only to fall every month.

When he finally came to the ending, it was the most difficult bit to write. Walt wanted to seal the coffin of his former self and bury all his regret with it. As soon as he was finished, out there in plain sight, he would have to make the effort to change. People would expect it. The thought of leaving his callous corner of loathing scared Walt. He might have to genuinely try at something, give everything. He’d have to leave his mantra of lowered expectations behind or look like a fool. He knew it would be rough – that he might fall off the wagon, slide into familiarity, and start some fires. He was terrified and eager for the future. Despite the uneasy feeling in his gut, Walt was ready to try. This time it wasn’t a job, school, some girl; it was all for him. It seemed better than lump after lump of smoldering fuck nothing.

Walt lowered his pen, inhaled deeply from the burning cigarette in his left hand, and rested a while.