I was in a muddy hell. No light filtered into the room in which I stood. Dark mold and filth caked the windows that looked to have been once made of Depression glass. Rising flood waters had, seemingly for years, been rising and falling inside the house, marking their progress in chalky, disgusting mineral marks on the now rotten wall paper. The inside of the house was misery anthropomorphized to a standing structure. Death lived here.
The smell hit me first. It was rotting carcass and sulfur and earth and old fish all at once and I could feel the bile rise in the back of my throat. I was ill, feverish. I didn’t know where I was, but this had to be close to hell. Only it was wet and clammy and cold, not hot, like I had expected.
There were lost souls in here, I noticed at once. Old Louis XIV couches that had once been beautiful were torn and wet and held waiflike elderly people. Their mouths were agape, but not in fear, more, in a lachrymose sentiment of abandonment. They were covered in mud. It caked their necks up to their chins and streaked like tears over their pallid cheekbones. Their eyes were watery and yellow and sunken into their faces. They didn’t stare at me. I didn’t exist to them. They could only see what they had lost, right before their cataract clouded eyes. It was desperate and desolate and I was afraid of them, so I didn’t venture close.
Water licked at my knees. It had crept in through the open front door. It was still rising. I wondered if the old man on the porch had fled, or if he was just going to give up like these people inside that surrounded me.
I bumped into a table. It had a chess set on it that was missing most of the pieces. I couldn’t imagine a day that anyone had played chess in this place. All I could see was the deterioration.
I could hear arguing next to me.
There was a man perched atop a couch, keeping his work boots dry. He was middle aged and he wore dirty jeans and a stained shirt. Some of his teeth were gone and he hadn’t shaved in a while. He was yelling angrily toward the kitchen. I waded deeper in. He didn’t notice me. Everything was brown and black and dark. I couldn’t see well. I didn’t know what drew me further in. My phone and my wallet and my keys weren’t in here. I couldn’t leave, though. I had to see what the argument was about.
A miserable looking woman stood in the kitchen. Her hair was in knots and she had never been pretty. Most of her teeth were gone. He clothes were ripped and filthy. She was holding a young girl viciously in the cook of her right elbow. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. She looked scared and beaten up. Her right eye was purple and her top lip was split and bleeding. She wore a dirty white tank top and jeans. She didn’t have shoes. Her filthy hair used to be blonde and curly. I recognized her from somewhere. She looked like Thora Birch from that video.
The man and woman argued more. Only their lips moved. I couldn’t understand any of the words, but I could understand their body language.
Whore. Slave. Bitch. Prostitute. Money. Blackmail. Desperation. Loss. Greed. Hatred. Lust. VIOLENCE.
Their vileness hit me in the face like a hammer and I vomited violently into the murky water. It was red for some reason.
The girl had a dazed look on her face and she stared into the rising water, hoping it would swallow her up. She didn’t belong there.
She didn’t belong to them.
Suddenly, she noticed me. Her eyes widened. I felt like Gabriel. I needed to save her. She was my child.
I put my hand out toward her.
“Let’s go,” was all I mouthed.
She nodded and took my hand. The man and the woman watched her and she walked toward me and took my hand. It was then that they noticed me. Terror possessed them. Their eyes widened, then glazed. They stopped, frozen in time, filthy, in monochrome.
I was the creeping death. I had introduced myself to them.
I was in color and my hands were red and slippery with blood. The water had risen to our waists.
“It’s time,” I said aloud.
She nodded and took my hand, and we walked out of the house.
Everything was dark and wet. It must have been late in the evening because the sun wasn’t anywhere to be seen, not that I could have told otherwise with the thick, oppressive clouds obscuring most visible light coming from the sky. Everything smelled damp and musty, I remember that clearly. There was a particular sense of rottenness in the air, like potatoes left out too long. I could hear fat rain drops impacting thick, wet wood all around me. I could feel their wet shrapnel on my exposed skin, which was everywhere. I wasn’t naked, but I was clothed for the hot, wet South; shorts, a t-shirt, and not much else.
I had managed to lose the following: a ring of keys containing nine keys, most importantly a car and a house key, my tired, black leather wallet, and my cellular phone. I felt more naked and alone than I did when I was born.
I was extraordinarily worried about my phone since it was new, everything around me was wet, and I wasn’t ready to pay the money to have it replaced. In fact, I was looking for all three of these items, which is why I found myself here, standing on a sagging porch amid an urban sprawl of dilapidated, dark, rotting houses.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. The rain continued.
“If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s gonna break,” a toothless old man said to me in singsong as he sat on the porch and whittled. He wore nothing but wet rags that probably hadn’t ever been dry.
I rested against a column that was once painted white but had all but orange peeled away, leaving ruddy white flecks of paint barely hiding what was once white pine underneath. It was rough under my finger tips. I dug my finger nails in and paint came away. There was something gratifying about it that I couldn’t quite place.
“Yer stuff’s inside, y’know,” said the withering old man.
I nodded. Somehow I did know. The water was still rising. Maybe the levee had broken already. The porch I was standing on was almost level with the water. The water was murky and dark. It stank like rotten fish and oysters.
“It rains all the time, doesn’t it?” I asked to no one.
I was answered by the rumble of thunder in the distance. It kept raining.
The door before me was of the same makeup as the pillar: formerly white, cracked, warped and glistening with dampness. The knob was brass, one of those oval shaped Victorian-style knobs that people used to install in houses in the 1940s. It was tarnished brown and green from the wet weather. I grasped it and twisted and the door opened inward with a subdued squeal.
It’s melancholy outside. Some writers would describe the roiling, floating, dismal gray clouds as pregnant. They’re not pregnant though. They are postpartum. They’ve delivered their payload down to the earth and have thoroughly soaked the land. Anything left is just afterbirth, spattering the pavement with a mess and making your walk home quite uncomfortable. Everything is green and wet and soft and serene. The air is damp and cool and expectant, but still humid. You’re waiting for the stir of the wind like an old lover you met in the park, invited over for coffee, but that won’t come. It’s dreary but exciting because finally there is weather that can match your dark mood. It’s so hard to be mournful when it’s sunny and hot. When the clouds fill the skies and the gentle whump whump of intermittent wipers drone out the news station on the radio as you drive home, you can lose yourself in your thoughts. You can carry yourself away to another place and remember the last big storm you weathered.
People write music for this weather. The bagpipes. The pan flute. The cello.
Night comes quickly under the dense clouds, and a wet slickness drops over the city like an oily curtain. The sodium vapor lamps project a mist of harsh yellow light that reflects back from the asphalt making ordinary reflections look malicious and wicked. The light is, at the same time, both banal and warm. The metal edges earn a softer appeal, but within the wet city sidewalks a truth emerges like steam from the manhole covers that is forged sharp and real.
The rain washes away the sins of the city, for a moment. The villains have retreated under roofs and eaves and awnings until the clouds pass. If you dare to walk alone in the storm, you’re safe from the monsters, for now.
Real murder happens when the weather is good.
You have an average of seventy four years to make something important happen.
You’d better hurry, because the odds are, you’ve already spent almost half of those years and you haven’t made your impact where you wanted to. On the flip side of the coin, you probably have actually made a huge difference in the life of someone but you’ve failed, time and time again, to give a shit about what you’ve done for other people. It’s the tragedy within your human nature. Though you fulfill others you still thirst for your own happiness. It’s not just you. It’s everyone. But we’re talking about you here.
It’s not going to come, though, so you should just fucking forget it.
I haven’t thought about it in seconds.
You seek, you strive and you don’t yield: Tennyson said that and it made a great deal of sense, but still you sit with your head in your hands at the end of the day, missing something. Not knowing what’s missing, you take a drink of wine, a shot of whiskey; two, three, five, seven, eleven. Drink to the prime. It doesn’t seem to have an effect, except to make you more emotional and withdrawn.
I’m more sensitive this way. Things make sense.
It’s a hot, white sickness. You stretch and breathe and squint your eyes against the bright fluorescent lights. You rub your hands on your oily face and squeeze your eyes but your mouth takes like vomit and you’re not any closer to finding the right path.
I’d be sick if I didn’t do this every night.
There’s no God in that bottle, love. He’s not there, but you’re going to look for him anyway, aren’t you, love?
I’ll find Him somewhere.
Everyone eats some of their demons, and you’ve eaten your fair share. When something makes you feel good you consume it. Happiness has to be nearby, it just has to because everyone else is happy, aren’t they? It has to be close by.
But then you wake up and the happiness is replaced with a skull filled with sawdust and eyes filled with fine sand. You’ve been in a fight but you’re the only one who threw punches.
God, I feel like shit today.
There’s this longing and it won’t leave you alone. Everyone around you is an antagonist, aren’t they? You spar with them verbally, never truly enjoying anyone’s company. Who’s the next person that will take a swing at you? Who is the next person that will challenge The King?
But you won’t come down from your tower for anyone, will you, love?
I don’t compromise for anyone.
It’s time to go. It’s time to find your usual dosage. It’s just the same drug you always take. It’s a gentle lover and it doesn’t need you to apologize. It doesn’t need you to be responsible. You can fall away into it, and it will always love you. It’s a sexy witness to your suffering.
Why am I always so sad?
You’re probably fucked up in the head like the rest of us, love. It’s not your fault, though, remember. It’s society, or your parents, or your school, or the fact that you don’t get laid much, or the fact that you play video games. Nothing’s your fault, love.
It takes you a while to find the right music for the occasion, doesn’t it? But once you find it you know. Maybe it’s Portishead. Maybe it’s Stabbing Westward. Maybe it’s Cold. Maybe it’s The Cure. Maybe it’s Blue October.
We all cry to different music.
I cry to everything these days.
Listen to the songs you can’t sing, but wish you could. Your vision is narrowing, so it won’t be long now. Stumble in and fall into the abyss. The happy drugs flow through your veins and you’re numb now. You feel better than you ever have. Before you go out, you’ll write some cryptic, pseudo-intellectual Facebook posts and you’ll be off to Neverland. It’ll be lovely.
I don’t want to sleep yet.
Oh, but you have to, love, you’re so tired.
If you wake up tomorrow, you get to take your medicine again. You get to think about what you’re never going to do. Get yourself a nice cold beer. Drink yourself away. Celebrate nothing.
There’s that music again.
Shhhhh, now, love. It won’t be much longer.
