barfly pt. 1

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An incandescent bulb hangs from a void and sways gently with the rhythm of a year. It’s suspended as bait with its cord vanishing up towards the sea of utter black. Fingerprints and grime cake its exterior, traces apparent in its light, as if the ghosts of both man and nature had sunk their teeth into it, before being whisked away from up above. Either that or they had grown so livid of it for disturbing their dark, that they had tried to snuff it out. But inevitably, the tungsten filament overwhelmed them, and now offers an amber glow for the boxed room. At its peak swing, it splays the shadows of a man, a chair, and a table onto the wooden walls and floor, noting some semblance of time.

In this light, unreadable phrases of bootprints scrawl the dusty floorboards. Some are overshadowed, but they twist and turn all the same - following, punctuating, and bleeding all over one another. There is no use to track where they came from or where they lead to, for there is no door here. And determining whether a dance or a brawl occured reflects the same futility as no punctuations space them out. No thoughts, no intentions, no hidden codes are encrusted on the letterings, and one could never tell whether the soles belonged to a dockworker’s or a civilian’s.

For all it’s worth, tracing the origin could be a Sisyphean task from a bored God. Where the punished are condemed to follow prints eternally, eventually adding their own to the schizoid mass of scribbles. And at the very least, they can keep the man glued to the chair company.

The splintered legs groan underneath his weight, the stocky frame barely able to relax as the chair threatens to buckle at any second. He shifts his weight constantly from one foot to the other as he hunches over a typewriter squared on the table. Some unwieldy antique that echoes both where he is and what he looks like - worn down and old. The whiskey bottle, glass ashtray, and radio beside it stands out though, shimmering against the chipped wooden surface, still hot off from the factory lines, plastic wraps and all.

With every shift, the topographical map on his office shirt reflects different time periods. Valleys and wrinkled river routes that run through the fabric is a mere timelapse of geological processes - ever changing, ever molding from a valley to a plain to back again. And what was once a pristine white is damped into gray by sweat, replicating elevation.

Hiking the mountain range running down his back, cowboy jeans choke his waist into a tight fit, with its seams kissing bare feet. The matching boots to hide underneath are either lost or forgotten. This whole display is further furnished by the faint scent of puke that orbits around a core oozing corpse smell.

A miasma lingers here, sourced from somewhere primordial.

He rolls up his sleeves and types.

“You pick your poison.” Red says, his hands over Sarah’s.

“I know,” she seems to speak from a distance, “but what if I don’t want to choose?”

Red shrugs, he leans over and--

The man stops. The jigsaws of letters he clamped onto the paper doesn’t look right. They belong to another scene, further down the road, he thinks. He cranes up towards the void only inhabited by an artificial sun, closing his eyes. Nouns and verbs become a fragile filigree against his eyelids, coiling and intertwining into different patterns. Every node of connection pulses with intent, but they suddenly dissipate into the blistered dark like eye-floaters.

He slumps.

A correction tape idles in the ashtray, handle-side up, drowning with the bloated bodies of six other cigarettes. His shaky fingers rip off a few words on the old paper and ages it even further.

While he waits for the white ink to dry, the half-full bottle gawks at him. Brandless and beaten down by amber light, the only evidence for the liquor is a distinct line separating air and thick syrupy liquid.

”Fuck you looking at? Huh?” His tongue drawls whiskey, urging his teeth closer to it, ”You nobody, you fuckin’ deadbeat, you...” As his nose nears the glass bottle, it reflects a face that could suck concrete through a straw, all morphed and warped, wintering his veins. Whatever word that was being conjured up is now lost, erased by an afterimage of the circus reflection burnt into his eye. It leaves fleeting trails as he steers his head to the typewriter.

He shuts his eyes tight again. The reflection vanishes within minutes. What replaces it are blitzing neurons hard at work, rippling encrypted codes to one another, and pinging it back like pingpong balls. In a micron of a second, the codes are then translated into a colorful carousel of verbs, phrases, and swirling metaphors. All the lights and all the horses flicker into choppy images as it accelerates, sucking up the surrounding eyefloaters in the vicinity. As it reaches terminal velocity, the singularity spinning pieces of who he is shoots down freight trains of senses from his cortex, chugging past along his shoulders down to his arms, and then stopping at a rinky-dink motel lodged in his palm, right before reaching the tips of his fingers. His digits hustle as they offload the delivery.

-- Red shrugs. There’s a still, quiet moment - the cars by the highway replace the lonely barflies and drunk nobodies that used to buzz around here, now empty except for the two secret lovers. It seems more alive like this, he thinks. Instead of drunk mouths moving - empty thoughts bouncing off the dartboard and the pool table and the jukebox - the truck tires and car engines --

Fingers tap on the table, the remaining delivery delayed by road work.

He turns on a vintage yet pristine radio beside the typewriter, an angular and pragmatic machinery born during the Cold War. The bulky mini-heater has a high chance of survivability against a nuclear strike, with its metal covering and slitted grills promising songs of static as dead stations litter the soundwaves of post-apocalyptia.

Stubby fingers turn the dials, feeling at home with its vintage aesthetic, and surfs the calm waves of hissing ghosts. His board ebbs and flows in between different stations: one plays a recording of a mass in an empty church; the second, a man humming by the highway; third is a shovel digging a trench; and the last purrs wings flapping in a distillery.

For a moment, he drowns in the static sea, this lonely crowded road which spaces watering holes and sun-tanned motels; the distance in between just enough that poems by drifters teeter between forlorn and hopeful, and doesn’t lean too heavily on one side or the other. Just right in the middle - melancholic nostalgia.

He dials it to the man humming by the highway, and closes his eyes. Diesel and asphalt coat his tongue, sick gasoline pumps through his nose, the truck tires and car engines--

--rattle the wood alive, like whiskey soaking through casks, breathing air into it. Better this way, a sound that carries meaning; tire wheels skidding off of the asphalt says there’s a job to do, a destination to head to, a package to deliver. And Red is proud the wooden stools and dartboards get to bounce off sounds revving with such a purpose. Unlike the sounds of puking or muddled conversations about some past that don’t matter no more; each lens of their compound eyes blinded by some false dawn, flooding pilot lights into it.

“We always have a choice love.” he squeezes her hands gently, “Always. If we don’t, then what are we but empty meat f r a m--

The typewriter jams with each clack. Goddamnit, nothing works around here anymore. He slams it against the side, the empty whiskey bottle almost tips over but maintains balance. After another hit, the typewriter rings the way a register’s tongue opens up for a dental checkup. Specks of ash dots the already dusty table and dances in the air from the two impacts, like the huffs and puffs of a frightened hedgehog, spikes replaced by dead cigarette stubs.

Keystrokes swell with a carpenter’s fingers, each one hammered in as nails.

f r a m e s.”

He rereads and scans for prey with a pair of hawk eyes. A hawk whose main diet is deer and elk - hobo deers and hobo elks. Their bloodcells religiously honk at each other, or at long stretches of gravel, or at the wind. Highways, byways, dirt roads, and side roads project a symphony of a biological rush hour - unending lines of iron coffins belching smoke and barely muffling the primal growls of match headed men baking inside of them.

The hell’s going on? One of them gets out as the traffic stops. Around his collar is a loose tie.

Just another accident again, up further ahead - a truck full of whiskey, bottles all over the road. A man laying on the hood of his car pipes up - a cigarrete hangs from his lips.

Godfuckin- how long d’you think till they fix this shit? He tightens the noose.

Beats me, bet the roadworkers are guzzling it all up anyway, broken glass and all. Embered tip bounces with each syllable, like a diver’s plank.

HEY DO YOUR FUCKING JOBS, WE HAVE PLACES TO GO TO... The hanged man underlines his yell with a streaming horn, as if someone flatlined, only stopping when the car infront budges an inch. I’m gonna be goddamn late again.

The sunbather flicks his cigarette away, Yep... And it’s going to get later...

Hawk eyes spot a hobo deer swaying to and fro underneath the sprawling canopies. Trees play volleyball with its body, scattering unemployed leaves at the ends of branches with each weighty collision. They tap its shoulders as they fall, warning it of the looming shadow. But it doesn’t listen.

He cleaves off a sentence.

As red ink dries, his fingers absentmindedly switches the radio from AM to FM. The dial swirls, and again he finds himself driving on the road. This time he’s in Vegas - the Strip. Each landmark’s glazed over in aftertrails of halogen and breathing neons that blind the ghosts forever haunting the gaps in between.

A dazzling welcome is a tourist diner that offers pancakes and overpriced milkshakes; their bestseller is a poppy strawberry shake for $20, but tastes the same as their $10 one. Further down the road stands a pawnshop that hoards antiques, its open sign jazzed in blue neon - empty except for the dreaming cashier and two old folks playing checkers. A few blocks away, a gunstore flashes Eastwood on the barrels of their Colts as gunmetal gleams punk rock and hiphop; mohawked youth litter by the door while turning their lungs into ashtrays and livers into distilleries. And towering over all at the road’s end is a burning effigy of a casino, crackling the fires of techno dub, mindless bass deafening the beating hearts of gamblers and degenerates.

The pawnshop door swings open. What greets him first is the scent of a forgotten attic, where dust and musk and mold had been left festering for generations. The dense odor rushes out of its burial and washes over him like ocean waves. Each swash and oscillation echo the words “antique” as the fumes flare signals in his limbic system.

Not like he needed help with that conclusion - scattered all around the interior is a colorful cornucopia of antiques all randomly stacked over one another. More of a dense evergreen thicket than a pawnshop interior, he thinks. A rainbow of sport jerseys, yarns, and cloth for vines hang from the damp ceiling, and cover the fluorescent fixtures that can barely curtain anything. Paint-flecked mannequin legs, wooden and metal baseball bats, and other random junk sprawl across the linoleum like overgrown roots, growing more pronounced further in. Pendulum clocks and lime-green refridgerators stand tall, and sometimes crooked resembling ancient trees - their branches the paddlesticks and canoes balancing on their heads against all physical odds, with old, scribbled parchments for leaves.

From the entrance, the fluorescent lights filtering through tiny gaps of the parchment canopies can’t help distinguish one object from another. Right before the treeline of unwanted junk, a rotary dial could be the face a clock, the handle of a fridge is probably one for a toolbox placed vertically, the brass horn of a phonograph may as well be an experimental art piece of a flower. Kaleidoscopic in its colors yet random in its patterns, the insides is a mere time capsule of unwanted memories coated in a thin patina of nostalgia and regret. The belly of a beast that shadows the inner workings of the mind, biting without barking as a reminder pops up of someone or something - whether it be a scent or a wedding song - and simulates a budding stroke where everything looks hauntingly familiar but strange at the same time.

The two old men to his right are unfazed from his entrance, too fixed in their own game of checkers, as is the young cashier behind the counter with legs raised on the desk, too deep in his dreams.

He rummages through.

--squeezes her hands gently, “And we’re built that way, to choose, to want things, to need things,” Red leans over, eyes lust--

He stops for a moment, kills a calf, and continues over its blood.

--eyes heavy, “to love.” He leans over, she leans over and--

Something catches him at the very back of the pawnshop. It doesn’t stand out against the branches of hockey sticks and guitars, yet whenever he looks over at that direction, the beginning of an emotion whirls inside his belly. As he gets closer, now by the edge of the treeline, he discerns that underneath the tangled banners, its rounded contours are covered over by a foggy membrane. Not a tarp or a sheet of cloth, but a thick layer of cobwebs giving him just enough detail that whatever’s underneath sands the tongue. And his stomach aches at its sight - the longer he stares at it, the more he wants to tear the cobwebs off, as if nails scratch by the craters of an unreachable itch.

With a slippery eel controlling his motor functions, he shambles into the forest, swaying pass random junk perched on top of other random junk in some random careless fashion.

He trips over an overgrown table leg and topples a box of cassette tapes before saving it at the last second. While he plants it on top of a mini-fridge, he scans beyond the treeline to check if anyone had caught the near-fumble. They seem unaware - the cashier still dreams with legs crossed on a table, and the two old men are still enveloped in their own little bubble where uncrowned men kill uncrowned men.

Legs wade further deep into the jungle, hands out front acting as sentries for the occasional vacuum cleaner or taxidermied fish clock. The closer he is, the more his stomach rumbles. Emotions are more defined now, still as abstract, but more physical - like a pit or a cavity, or a throat. Each step stretches it in increments, and what was once a slight ache is now a deep, earthy moan. What is this?, he thinks. Melancholy? Regret?

Before another label can appear, he suddenly realizes his legs move without his own accord anymore. As if he crossed an innocuous threshold that separated the idea of him from his flesh, yet still left him with the conscious physicality of each weight and each tired breath of each lumber; paralyzed in the interstice inbetween dreams and wakefulness.

The camera of his mind bobs with every step. Every inch swells up a blooming pattern of emotions - bouquets of flowers blossom and wilt in a second, and is then thorned by shattered glass and shrapnel, before cycling back and repeating itself, stuck inside a battered washing machine. Thoughts and synapses fire down orders to his muscles: turn away from it, walk back, run, exit out the goddamn door, turn the fucking radio off.

But he can’t. He wants to flail but he has no arms, he wants to run away but he has no legs, he wants to scream but he has no mouth. What he is now is a singular mote, an idea reduced to the most barest concept of consciousness yet still tethered to his sputtering vessel. The hulking frame of flesh lumbers closer and closer towards the cobwebbed object, uncaring of the artillery shells cased in full metal thoughts being barraged on calf muscle walls.

A few steps away from it, the lush layer of cobwebs coccoons a machine. As large as himself, comically so, and wears a metallic sheen, all dusted over. Squared on its head is a see through glass, and inside is an upright collection of compact disks, neatly packed together from left to right. Etched in its belly beneath are ranks and files of buttons, each one next to faded letterings and words, with a coin slot for its misplaced navel. A cheap bubble tube lines its horseshoe contours, supposedly holding fluorescent light fixtures.

Chest high, the man’s neocortex whirs and brands the word “JUKEBOX” on the walls of his skull. It singes across the cranium dome with Melancholy, Regret, Nostalgia, Guilt, Pain trailing it like a kite against the sky.

Instantly, the cavity kicks alive. It jostles stuff around, pushes and pulls, contorts and spazzes, changing his internals as it bores in. Never was he ever so aware of the junk undulating like tapeworms through stomach linings; the cilias of his scorched lungs resembling blackened trees after a wild fire; and the state of nonchalant despair he crippled his body into as whatever’s inside tampers with the biological hardware he had become so comfortable with. And now, every cell blares a reckoning - a reckoning that was bottled up for 40 years.

They howl banshees in agonizing unison,

“OH GOD?! OH GOD WHY!?!! WHYYY!!?!!!???”

Foghorns cement the mote in a bricked wall of sound, concrete in its texture and furious in its timbre. If the vessel still encased him - his tongue, eyes, and flesh would vibrate violently into pink mist; his teeth, skull, and bones would crack hairline fractures before being pulverized into fine bone meal. And the molecules and atoms that make up each of those grains would disintegrate into nothing. There would have been no ash to urn, no trace for tardigrades to stumble upon, no dust for the stars to take in - a ghost of a ghost.

But there is no frame in this place. Just the physicality of the collective clamor for the despots head - his head. And each wailing cell realizes that to bring down that guillotine, sacrifices must be made. So they eat away at one another as if stuck in a perpetual state of ketosis. An unstable rollout of biological suicide ripples throughout - a cellular revolution after almost a century of tyrannical rule. It was only a matter of time. The powder keg had just forgotten to snuff out the candlelight it slept right next to.

One by one, each part of him dies out. His veins dry out into gaping wounds of canyons as each hanged men kick the chair off with their own feet. Neurons blackout from the lack of blood supply, proclaiming martyrdom as their death throes. Lipids-turned ketones self-immolate to further fuel the revolution, and leaves skin draped over bone like papermache. Necrosis and apostosis share the same definition as does beginning and end - ouroboros made manifest.

The antique forest spins. His vessel careens off into the bushy undergrowth from vertigo, crashing down stacks of trees and vines onto it. Underneath, a handful of twinkling fluorescence puncture through gaps in between the burial made of unwanted memories. Slivers dance in the dark like stars in space.

Then they die. Fathomless black. Heat death of the universe. As quick as he had fallen.

Comes with it is silence - deafening as the foghorn - like ears popping to signal a change in atmosphere. Numbness takes hold soon after. The revolution had died down with a whimper. Now it’s just an anesthetic black as if he took that amber bait. And what remains is a mote left to contemplate in the void. A life sentence where there is no life or death. All alone, except for the self.

Left in a ghost station by time’s bullet train, its looping routine rips holes in his mind. Hours and days become one, years and decades bleed over each other. His thoughts scuttle out of their bunkers, scanning their surroundings, “WHERE AM I” he yelps, and again, “PLEASE! PLEASE WHERE AM I?!!?!” but there is no response. No echo either, which he had half expected, for the eye-gouging vantablack resembled that of a cave’s. But no walls bounce off his fragmented screams, no inanimate symphony to anchor himself in space, no rhythmic breath to keep time. He is a boat, eternally unmoored on a placid ocean at the dead of night without any constellation to guide him, circled by sentient silence that hunts down soundwaves the way tribals spear snakes.

Sleep takes him before long, laying the mote on a mattress weaved from the skin of a dead universe - perpetually dreaming of the waking dark.

Then a single blip. Faint... fragile, but it’s there, like a drip echoing in a cave. And it’s from below. A pebble ripples the stagnant pool of his consciousness, jolting him awake.

A voice echoes as if it came from different sources, both near and far - guttural, reptilian - it hisses, “Tsk... tsk... tsk... You really... did a number... on yourself... did you?” Each sweet syllable relished while being dragged through a bedrock of gravel, “Letting *your* consciousness... fester... in here... Doing nothing... forever... and ever... sleeping... sleeping... SLEEPING.” A horrendous slow cackle erupts, then trails off before turning into a wiry singsong, “You don’t have to do anything anymore... devoid of pain... of struggle... of love unreciprocated... of death... of suffering... So sleeeeep...”

An awareness creeps up on him, by the edges of his perception, “Yes... sleep...” It becomes more defined - a frame of flesh encases him...

curled into a fetal position,

marinated in gallons of flammable liquid and piss.

Another laughter that is not a laugh bellows, as though whatever owns the mouth is not acclimated to being bound by flesh and fiber, “Hmmm... yes... keep flinging around this black hole... keep floating in the hadopelagic zone...”

The awareness stirs, it expands beyond the lurid ball of meat,

latching onto

molecules vibrating:

the walls

the ceiling,

the floor,

the glass bottles surrounding it,

the piss,

the air, a fly in the corner.

“Sleep...” Then consciousness dilates further:

the blades of grass sway with the wind,

the trees breath while their canopies rustle,

the flock of birds migrate against the current.

“Wait... that... humming...”

“NO... SLEEP... EMBRACE UNBEING... UNBECOMING... UNFORMED IN THE NON-PLACE.”

The presence swells exponentially, engulfing other frames. They breathe, copulate, and hurt, and laugh - their pain is his pain, their love is his love, their consciousness all one. “I want to get off... please... I want to love and be unloved...”

“AND GO BACK... TO ALL THAT PAIN... ALL THAT HATE...”

The consciousness encompasses everything known and unknown:

a lonely whale sings

a mother sweeps sand in an adobe hut

a baby is born

a funeral is gathered around a shoe-sized coffin

tardigrades crawl

a dog is adopted

a man is raped in an alleyway

a protest

a concert

a father dies in his daughter’s arms

moss breathes on classroom walls

a kiss between highschool sweethearts

a name is changed

“Yes... please...”

gas giants blister

asteroids drift aimlessly

stars die

black holes

blue suns

red suns

galaxies swirl

pirouetting

swinging

an endless dance

choreographed by no one

“But you wanted thisss... longed for *it*... things were too hard to bear...”

The fathomless proportions is made whole,

a psychic vivisection of a clock,

tick

tick

tick

cosmic gears

interconnected & interdependent

with

each other

breathing as one

pulsing as one

converging circumstances

for no reason

other

than

because

it does.

He howls, and it echoes.

“NO. I WANT ALL OF IT. ALL THE LOVE, THE DESPAIR, THE AGONY, PLEASE, ALL THE GODDAMN SHIT. I NEED IT.”

A pregnant pause. An inordinate amount of time passes. Silence swallows every ghostly syllable whole, before it speaks again,“You’ll be back... The shadow is always there... leering... *waiting* for the light...”

The smell of urine hits Ted instantly as he sprawls face first on the cold concrete. A squad of empty whiskey bottles surrounding him refracts the red sun that streams through the basement window. It bathes the basement in blood, one could mistake his pool of piss for blood loss.

He sits up, ears ringing a hangover that beats all hangovers, and eyes the ceiling. A strata of cigarette smoke forms on the low, damp drywall. Its attempts to hide flaking pieces are in vain as foosteps above shave away at it with each lumber, flecks drift like ash.

Hell-Dyed-Heaven... I think you’ll like that one Ida.

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