“I’m pretty sure she knows I’m not a fan…”
Another day, another carpet to stare at. The one in my therapist’s office is a long-fibred imitation of snug luxury, dyed in deep hues of indigo and ultramarine. Its lushness is purely visual, with no textile evidence to support it. It is, however, perfect for long periods of idle perusal.
Dr. Zamanhoff’s prying gaze scorches my face as I eye-dig my way through the rug, burrowing in between the threads until the patterns melt into uniform haze.
If only I’d concentrate on the task- instead of giving dull repetitive answers to duller and even more repetitive questions- I know I could easily pull an Ant-Man and teleport myself into the blue field maze. I’d then hide between the towering rows of thick fiber until the session is over and Zamanhoff is forced to kick me out. What a relief it must be, to feel the musty softness closing in on me, shutting off humanity’s inane blabbering.
“Why won’t you tell her? You’re obviously angry at her…”
“I’m not really… angry. I mean, she can be annoying, but she does have a point, you know?”
“And assuming she does have a point, which is not necessarily the case, does that mean you have to put up with everything she says?”
“Well, she does pay a substantial chunk of my bills…”
Including yours.
“It is her choice…” exactly. All the blood rushes from my face to pump through my chest in a ferocious thunderstorm. Her choice. What if she chooses otherwise?
He leans in closer, uncharacteristically excited at my overt emotional response. “What is it? Talk to me.”
A faint gleam of hunger seems to touch his eyes. It lingers for but a fraction of a second, only to die away as briskly as it came.
It’s not malice per se- more curiosity than sadism. Something similar to the borderline psychopathic joy an epidemiologist might momentarily bask in upon discovering a new strand of some rare lethal disease. Or maybe the pride of a mortician presenting the grieving family with a perfectly restored, rosy cheeked mannequin of a cadaver dexterously put together from odds and ends brought in the previous day as a pile of mangled pulp.
I find such infantile glee rather endearing, albeit maddeningly enviable. I wish I could go into such ecstasy over so much as a pretty corpse, or an ugly rash.
Instead, I turn back to my own puny pleasure of wearing virtual holes into the rug.
Having poured out most of my anxiety into the fading patterns of Dr. Z’s carpet, I stumble dazedly back into the brightly daylit street. My head is spinning with unexplained fatigue- to the point where I’m struggling to remain conscious and upright.
For fear of fainting alone in my apartment I drag myself an extra block to the local supermarket. It’s not that I don’t prefer the company back home. But when one is heavily flirting with horizontality, creatures with opposable thumbs make more desirable companions than ones endowed with brains.
While my corporeal shell drifts somnambulantly between neat stacks of canned beans and psychedelically bright energy drinks, its operator retires to brood over a malodorous pipe in a dimly lit parlor at the back of my memory palace.
The mawkish oldtimer has an uncanny penchant for leafing through yellowing family albums. After a therapy session, the penchant becomes an outright compulsion.
Once Mr. Brain has gone into post-shrinkage mode, control tower communication is faulty at best. There he sits, puffing pensive smoke rings into the mildewy air, as the rest of me struggles to gather a reasonable assembly of provisions to sustain us both.
He keeps one eye half-focused on a distant CCTV monitor wall streaming the outside world, but only perfunctorily so. My image strolls back and forth across the central screen, filling a shopping cart with cat food and beer. At his disapproving cough I throw in a pack of whole wheat bagels, for appearances’ sake.
“Too much responsibility my flat pasty ass,” he cackles hoarsely as I load up on potato chips. Cringe as I may at the thought of the little old man’s wrinkled posterior, I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment.
Zamanhoff has an unpleasant tendency to regularly declare that I’m prone to taking too much responsibility for things far beyond my paygrade. Few, if any, of those who know me would concur. Not with the words “too much” and “responsibility” placed so close together.
The operator rolls back the tape in the ancient cassette recorder. One bushy grey eyebrow is cocked up like a mangled antenna, tuned to detect some clandestine signal encrypted in the transmission.
“It’s like these people who died last year,” a robotic zombie facsimile of the therapist’s voice seeps from between the whirring wheels. “You’re still blaming yourself for their deaths, aren’t you? You still think you could actually kill them by merely wishing them harm.”
I am and I do. I shouldn’t have been able to. Thoughts don’t kill, we all know that. It makes absolutely no sense. But mine did.
Obviously I couldn’t have done it on my own. I’m not even sure I actually wanted them dead. Most of them, at any rate. But I did express the wish. And it was heard by the wrong bunch of nasties. Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall receive anxiety medication for the rest of your natural life.
I can’t even honestly say I don’t believe the world to be better off without some of the bastards I may or may not have offed. After all that happened, I still have little regret for the lives lost during that horrible week- the ones I’m aware of, at any rate. And this I regret the most. That and the meaninglessness of it all. Had I known what I’m capable of from the get go, I’d have gone after scumbags more deserving of my wrath. I’d have wreaked vengeance on the world’s rapists, animal abusers, telemarketers. I’d have done something that actually mattered. I could have taken so many more.
My melancholy chain of Bizarro-Schindleresque contemplations is cut short with a sharp metallic screech. My muscles respond automatically, before my mind gets as much as a hint of the imminently approaching collision.
Where the front wheels of my cart would’ve been a second later have my arms bothered to await instructions from my brain, a small humanoid form lays sprawled on the floor.
My initial response (not again…!) is closely followed by a big fat neon-lit WTF.
I’m almost relieved to recognize the form as a normal human child. Normal, that is, aside from the fact that she lies nonchalantly on the store’s gleaming tiles as if it were her nursery’s carpeted floor. This, and the fact that I’m glad to see her. Until last year I didn't know worse monsters than kids even existed. Not so close to ground level, at any rate.
Having been proven bitterly wrong, I don’t dare count the times I wished for one of the noisy human-shaped leeches to be permanently silenced in the course of that unfortunate week. The unexplained increase in SIDS incidents reported in the area speaks for itself. Yet, I hold on to the brittle straw of a possibility that maybe, just maybe, the whole thing can be chalked up to coincidence. The abyss of insanity staring at me from beneath my straw is just too dark and too deep to glance back into.
At the very least, I have no proof I’m in any way responsible for a single case of infanticide.
Today, thank Ashtoreth, pure serendipity has come to the defence of my comfortingly clear record.
The little girl may be a little paler than one would consider healthy, but otherwise unhurt. Having established that, I proceed to take in the next whatthefuckery du jour.
I’m not the world’s biggest expert on human spawn recognition, but some of these goblins’ mugs are just made for long term memory storage and recurrent nightmare cameos. The twins from ‘The Shining,’ Elmyra Duff in ‘Tiny Toons,’ the psycho bitch from ‘The Orphan.’ Pretty much everyone on ‘Rugrats.’ Damien Thorn is an all time classic in the top five, along with Toshio Saeki and the newborn in ‘Dawn of the Dead.’
And then there’s a more local phenomenon, every bit as memorable as any of the former: the imp from the other side of yesterday’s twilight. Now lying in front of my shopping cart like some goddamned bite-size Anna Karenina in pistachio-green corduroy overalls.
Based on the kid’s apparent obliviousness of her surroundings, for a brief moment I believe her to be a tad simple-minded, if not outright retarded.
However, there is nothing simple about the feral glare she deals me when she finally raises her head to acknowledge my presence. She doesn’t quite growl, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did. Someone spills a bucketful of ice water somewhere at the pit of my belly. The sheer animosity of her scowl would give Freddy Krueger the heebie-jeebies.
She looks right through me, impaling me on the twin icepicks installed in her face where other children normally have eyes.
My goosebumps sprout into a forest of full-fledged porcupine spikes as two appalling realizations strike me in a single sledgehammer blow. First and foremost, there’s the presence. I can’t pinpoint it any more than I can pinch the air around me, but once I know it’s there I couldn’t ignore it if my life depended on it. A disembodied being of whitehot menace. A wanton entity of unadulterated hunger.
The whole world goes a couple of shades hazier.
Simultaneously, somewhere at the back of my head, the operator realizes it’s not me the child is gnashing at.
I turn around to find myself facing a pair of opaque white contacts swimming in a puddle of mascara. No corpse paint this time. Only a touch of eyeliner and the natural pasty pallor of a true sun hater. Not unlike my own.
An eye-wink later, the protesting child is snatched by a mildly embarrassed and somewhat apologetic mother and dragged towards the row of cash registers at the far end of the store. While my attention is preoccupied with the little freak’s shameful departure, Louis’ gaudy made-in-China knockoff virtually evaporates, leaving in his wake a long, empty aisle lined with endless rows of cereal boxes. The other presence is nowhere to be felt either.
Now it’s just me- minus every last speck of energy I carried in through the sliding glass doors. I don’t even smirk at the thought of Lost Boy paying for a box of Count Chocula.
I can barely remember paying for my own groceries. For all I know, I didn’t. Hell, for all I know I just teleported from the cereal aisle straight into my living room. If it weren’t for the fresh supply of beer and sodas, I could have easily convinced myself I’ve never been to the supermarket in the first place. I’ve had weirder dreams before, most of them every bit as vivid.
After an hour of aimless staring at my computer screen, I lose all hope of productivity for today. I fold my laptop closed and start staring at the TV instead. I even make sure to turn it on, hoping to bore myself to sleep. No such luck.
Accepting my inability to push myself over reality’s threshold, I try for the land on the opposite shore of apathy. Halfway through my second coffee, the numbness in my brain starts to dissipate, one node at a time. I wonder if that’s what resurrection feels like. Jesus’ features form in the foam at the bottom of my coffee mug. The bastard is laughing.
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