The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 12 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
After finishing the excerpt, I placed those printouts on top of the first stack and aligned them absentmindedly as my mind returned from deep space, from that station overrun with a surging tide of shadows. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a dark well, peering into its murky depths, and wondering just how far the bottom lay.
Elena, sitting across from me in the rattan chair, leaned forward, shoulders rolled in, her hands planted on the table next to the empty glass. Engaged like an executive at a serious meeting. Her almond-blonde hair bunched up against the collar of her dark-brown jacket, that fit snugly against her figure and looked more like a cyberpunk gambeson than a piece of outdoor clothing. The edges of her metallic moth’s wings, which rested atop her gray sweatshirt, caught a faint sheen in the overcast light. In Elena’s face, above the high cheekbones and those reddened bags from tiredness and the nightmare of living, her pale blues focused on me with the intensity of a mountain lion. She was negotiating with a member of another species.
“Elena, did you pick these excerpts because they would allow us to discuss your innermost thoughts in a less direct way?”
“Maybe. You’ve read a lot into them. And you’ve been very patient. I appreciate that.”
“Intrusive thoughts are a symptom of a psychological condition.”
“Not necessarily. But if we’re still playing therapist and patient, do you want to know how bad mine get?”
I leaned back in my chair, which creaked; it had taken a battering from many a weary ass.
“Please.”
“Let’s start with the common ones. Knives and scissors? I avoid glancing at them, as I often get these vivid images of jamming their blades into my eyeballs. I see a bottle of bleach in the supermarket, and my mind whispers: ‘Buy this and drink it.’ When I see condoms lying in the street, I get the urge to lick them. Or else I picture myself bloated like a pregnant sow, full of diseased seed. I’ve gotten images of me slicing off my breasts and eating them. One time that my parents had dragged me to a relative’s house, this woman I was told to consider a cousin waltzed over all proud of the tiny human she had pushed out, and proffered that squishy, gurgling thing, expecting me to hold it in my arms. I thought her so reckless that I considered calling the authorities. I knew that if I held that baby, I’d be assaulted with images of me dropping it onto its malleable skull, that would cave in. I told her I didn’t like babies. Which is true. She got all flustered, said that I should change my mind, and scurried away. My parents were so embarrassed that they didn’t talk to me on the ride home. But that was a relief, given that I don’t know how to talk to them.”
Elena paused to give me time to formulate an adequate response to this barrage of graphic terrors. I stared at my empty glass. The last bits of coffee had hardened at the bottom in a clumpy film.
“Well.”
“Yeah, I would be at a loss too. I’ve always felt I couldn’t do anything about such thoughts. That I’ll have to endure these flashes of depravity and degradation until my heart stops or my brain melts. I never told my therapists about them, because I suspected I would have ended up in a psych ward, or heavily drugged. In case you’re wondering, I haven’t acted on the worst of those urges. Never so much hurt a fly. Well, I’ve killed mosquitoes. A couple of spiders as well, which I regret. I quite appreciate spiders.”
“You mean you acted on lesser of such intrusive urges?”
She sighed.
“You could say it’s all in my head, but my ability to restrain such impulses depends on my energy level and how attuned to reality I’m feeling at the moment. I still have enough control to keep the monster leashed. Usually. But once, I was holding a hard disk when my brain sent me a visual command to drop it. Next thing I knew, the hard disk was on the floor, broken. Another time, I had been struggling with insomnia for weeks, and existed in a surreal haze. Every few days, I forced myself to leave the house and sit at a nearby coffee shop. The barista placed my coffee on top of the pastry display counter, and when I went to pick it up by the saucer, a sequence flashed in my mind: my thumb flipping the cup over and the hot coffee splashing against the lap of the guy seated at the counter. An instant later, my thumb did exactly that. The guy, in his honor, was incredibly gracious. He smiled at me while patting the stains with a napkin. No harm no foul, he said. After he left, I stood there petrified. I hadn’t been able to prevent one of my intrusive impulses from taking over and puncturing the membrane that separates them from the world. Although I was out of it, exhausted from the moment I woke up, I couldn’t even pretend it had been an accident, because in the span between my thumb starting to move and it tilting the cup over, I felt as if I were watching a movie, aware of what would happen but powerless to stop it. I should have stayed at home; instead, I ruined an innocent man’s afternoon. Soon enough I stopped going to that coffee shop. I couldn’t stand how the barista looked at me.”
“I can’t deny you’re a bit of a public menace, but you have a heart. That guy should have asked for your number.”
Elena’s lips curved into a faint smile, but her drained eyes belonged to a soldier at the end of a day-long skirmish.
“Jon, I’m a danger to others, and to myself. I don’t have a driver’s license and will never drive mainly because I’d have to fight off the urge to veer into oncoming traffic, or accelerate and burst into a wall. I have to live in the world knowing I’m capable of doing things no sane, decent person would even imagine. The darkness inside me can burst out and hurt anyone at any time. As it relates to my Kirochka, while she might have some control over herself, she has none over the parasite. It’s wild and hungry, and it will feed when it needs to, using her body as a vessel to manifest itself in the world. You could say Kirochka’s biggest struggle isn’t against her parasite. It’s in resisting the urge to release the monster within and let it feast.”
“Are these your two sides? Elena the human, Elena the monster. Trying to coexist.”
“The disgust I feel at such intrusive thoughts could suggest that underneath the cancer there’s some healthy tissue. But how do I know if what I’m thinking comes from me or from another entity lurking in some recess of my brain? Does an uncontaminated me exist? Am I lying to myself, trying to avoid responsibility for parts of myself I dislike and can’t control? Should you be responsible for what you do while sleepwalking?” Her pale blues darted around. She shrugged. “The worst part is that I was born like this. With a broken nature. While other kids learned how to be around their peers, to share and take turns, to make friends and bond with people, I struggled to understand a nonsensical world. People were talking, laughing, crying, and I couldn’t tell why. The more the gap widened between me and everyone else, the less I wanted to try bridging it. Too much frustration, too little reward. So I retreated inside my head. I lived in a parallel universe that overlapped with this one. I could hear their words, I could see their actions, but I couldn’t connect to them. As I got older and my isolation deepened, my perception of people shifted from something that baffled me to something that disgusted me. Dangerous, unpredictable beasts that could turn on you in a heartbeat. And now here we are. I’m almost thirty and I’ve never had a friend.”
Elena’s words hung in the air like the reverberations of a funeral bell. I considered reaching for her hand, but I suspected she would have leaped from the chair and hightailed it out of Bar Palace.
“Do you think of your stories as vehicles to process the different facets of your darkness? Maybe ways of exorcising it?”
Her slim hand returned to her moth pendant, tracing its metallic edges.
“Are you asking if I consciously design my stories for therapeutic purposes? No.” Elena paused with her eyes unfocused and her lips parted, as if searching for the proper words. She shook her head, then snapped her gaze at me. “There’s a fundamental problem in discussing the artistic process. If you earned a degree for it and ended up working at a magazine writing articles on music, paintings, novels or whatever, well, you have to come up with bullshit that sounds good to justify the time, energy, and money spent learning about how to discuss things you didn’t create. While getting brainwashed. A valid approach to life if your goal is to win some friends and influence people, I suppose. Imagine all those professors perorating, day after day, year after year, in a language that would make the creator go: ‘What the fuck are these loons smoking?’ It makes me shudder. I swear, whole university departments could disappear overnight, and society would be better for it. You’re supposed to feel art. The texture, the tone, the rhythm. It should awaken the millions of years of beast inside you. It should remind you that you’re alive, and that you will die. That’s how you connect with the creator, not by dissecting their child, naming the parts, and then putting them on the scales to weigh them. If the artists had wanted to make a point, they’d have written a fucking essay. The conscious mind shouldn’t dare befoul art with its machinations; it should prostrate itself in awe, and be silent.”
“You’re not letting me off the hook.”
“No, I am. I don’t want to bury the conscious mind entirely, even though it should learn to rest away from the light. You need rationality during the editing phase. But if you tasked that part with producing the raw material, it would sit at the keyboard agonizing over every word, judging the pros and cons of a myriad options, quickly going insane. All the fun replaced by paralysis from self-judgment. It would produce a soulless, sterile pile of garbage. You don’t task a fish with flying, and you shouldn’t burden the conscious mind with anything other than classifying and criticizing. You have to venture into the dark places where that part fears to tread. Into the depths where monsters dwell. Only there will you find something that matters. But the deeper you descend, the more you will be tempted to give up. And what is the only tool at your disposal to endure that abyssal dark?”
“Madness.”
Elena’s pale blues glimmered as if a ray of sunlight had pierced through the clouds.
“Yeah, you need to be a little insane. Too much, and it will control you. But I’ve digressed. You wanted to know if my stories are meant to process and exorcise the darkness inside me. Writing is a compulsion. A form of psychological masturbation. If you want to be generous, you can consider it a dialogue with a sacred, hidden part of yourself. I don’t know why I write certain things or why they have to be that way. I don’t care either. You don’t choose the stories, they choose you. They demand to be told, clawing their way out through your fingertips until you’re left bleeding on the keyboard. I’m just honored that they chose me, someone so insignificant, someone with nothing to offer but devotion and the willingness to bleed, as their conduit to the world. And no, I’m not exorcising the monster by writing. If anything, I’m feeding it, and in return, the monster keeps me from spiraling. I was born with a hole in the bottom of my soul where my happiness and fulfillment drains. I can’t hold onto them no matter what I do. But words, they plug that hole, for as long as the tale lasts.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Paint It, Black” by The Rolling Stones.
After finishing the excerpt, I placed those printouts on top of the first stack and aligned them absentmindedly as my mind returned from deep space, from that station overrun with a surging tide of shadows. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a dark well, peering into its murky depths, and wondering just how far the bottom lay.
Elena, sitting across from me in the rattan chair, leaned forward, shoulders rolled in, her hands planted on the table next to the empty glass. Engaged like an executive at a serious meeting. Her almond-blonde hair bunched up against the collar of her dark-brown jacket, that fit snugly against her figure and looked more like a cyberpunk gambeson than a piece of outdoor clothing. The edges of her metallic moth’s wings, which rested atop her gray sweatshirt, caught a faint sheen in the overcast light. In Elena’s face, above the high cheekbones and those reddened bags from tiredness and the nightmare of living, her pale blues focused on me with the intensity of a mountain lion. She was negotiating with a member of another species.
“Elena, did you pick these excerpts because they would allow us to discuss your innermost thoughts in a less direct way?”
“Maybe. You’ve read a lot into them. And you’ve been very patient. I appreciate that.”
“Intrusive thoughts are a symptom of a psychological condition.”
“Not necessarily. But if we’re still playing therapist and patient, do you want to know how bad mine get?”
I leaned back in my chair, which creaked; it had taken a battering from many a weary ass.
“Please.”
“Let’s start with the common ones. Knives and scissors? I avoid glancing at them, as I often get these vivid images of jamming their blades into my eyeballs. I see a bottle of bleach in the supermarket, and my mind whispers: ‘Buy this and drink it.’ When I see condoms lying in the street, I get the urge to lick them. Or else I picture myself bloated like a pregnant sow, full of diseased seed. I’ve gotten images of me slicing off my breasts and eating them. One time that my parents had dragged me to a relative’s house, this woman I was told to consider a cousin waltzed over all proud of the tiny human she had pushed out, and proffered that squishy, gurgling thing, expecting me to hold it in my arms. I thought her so reckless that I considered calling the authorities. I knew that if I held that baby, I’d be assaulted with images of me dropping it onto its malleable skull, that would cave in. I told her I didn’t like babies. Which is true. She got all flustered, said that I should change my mind, and scurried away. My parents were so embarrassed that they didn’t talk to me on the ride home. But that was a relief, given that I don’t know how to talk to them.”
Elena paused to give me time to formulate an adequate response to this barrage of graphic terrors. I stared at my empty glass. The last bits of coffee had hardened at the bottom in a clumpy film.
“Well.”
“Yeah, I would be at a loss too. I’ve always felt I couldn’t do anything about such thoughts. That I’ll have to endure these flashes of depravity and degradation until my heart stops or my brain melts. I never told my therapists about them, because I suspected I would have ended up in a psych ward, or heavily drugged. In case you’re wondering, I haven’t acted on the worst of those urges. Never so much hurt a fly. Well, I’ve killed mosquitoes. A couple of spiders as well, which I regret. I quite appreciate spiders.”
“You mean you acted on lesser of such intrusive urges?”
She sighed.
“You could say it’s all in my head, but my ability to restrain such impulses depends on my energy level and how attuned to reality I’m feeling at the moment. I still have enough control to keep the monster leashed. Usually. But once, I was holding a hard disk when my brain sent me a visual command to drop it. Next thing I knew, the hard disk was on the floor, broken. Another time, I had been struggling with insomnia for weeks, and existed in a surreal haze. Every few days, I forced myself to leave the house and sit at a nearby coffee shop. The barista placed my coffee on top of the pastry display counter, and when I went to pick it up by the saucer, a sequence flashed in my mind: my thumb flipping the cup over and the hot coffee splashing against the lap of the guy seated at the counter. An instant later, my thumb did exactly that. The guy, in his honor, was incredibly gracious. He smiled at me while patting the stains with a napkin. No harm no foul, he said. After he left, I stood there petrified. I hadn’t been able to prevent one of my intrusive impulses from taking over and puncturing the membrane that separates them from the world. Although I was out of it, exhausted from the moment I woke up, I couldn’t even pretend it had been an accident, because in the span between my thumb starting to move and it tilting the cup over, I felt as if I were watching a movie, aware of what would happen but powerless to stop it. I should have stayed at home; instead, I ruined an innocent man’s afternoon. Soon enough I stopped going to that coffee shop. I couldn’t stand how the barista looked at me.”
“I can’t deny you’re a bit of a public menace, but you have a heart. That guy should have asked for your number.”
Elena’s lips curved into a faint smile, but her drained eyes belonged to a soldier at the end of a day-long skirmish.
“Jon, I’m a danger to others, and to myself. I don’t have a driver’s license and will never drive mainly because I’d have to fight off the urge to veer into oncoming traffic, or accelerate and burst into a wall. I have to live in the world knowing I’m capable of doing things no sane, decent person would even imagine. The darkness inside me can burst out and hurt anyone at any time. As it relates to my Kirochka, while she might have some control over herself, she has none over the parasite. It’s wild and hungry, and it will feed when it needs to, using her body as a vessel to manifest itself in the world. You could say Kirochka’s biggest struggle isn’t against her parasite. It’s in resisting the urge to release the monster within and let it feast.”
“Are these your two sides? Elena the human, Elena the monster. Trying to coexist.”
“The disgust I feel at such intrusive thoughts could suggest that underneath the cancer there’s some healthy tissue. But how do I know if what I’m thinking comes from me or from another entity lurking in some recess of my brain? Does an uncontaminated me exist? Am I lying to myself, trying to avoid responsibility for parts of myself I dislike and can’t control? Should you be responsible for what you do while sleepwalking?” Her pale blues darted around. She shrugged. “The worst part is that I was born like this. With a broken nature. While other kids learned how to be around their peers, to share and take turns, to make friends and bond with people, I struggled to understand a nonsensical world. People were talking, laughing, crying, and I couldn’t tell why. The more the gap widened between me and everyone else, the less I wanted to try bridging it. Too much frustration, too little reward. So I retreated inside my head. I lived in a parallel universe that overlapped with this one. I could hear their words, I could see their actions, but I couldn’t connect to them. As I got older and my isolation deepened, my perception of people shifted from something that baffled me to something that disgusted me. Dangerous, unpredictable beasts that could turn on you in a heartbeat. And now here we are. I’m almost thirty and I’ve never had a friend.”
Elena’s words hung in the air like the reverberations of a funeral bell. I considered reaching for her hand, but I suspected she would have leaped from the chair and hightailed it out of Bar Palace.
“Do you think of your stories as vehicles to process the different facets of your darkness? Maybe ways of exorcising it?”
Her slim hand returned to her moth pendant, tracing its metallic edges.
“Are you asking if I consciously design my stories for therapeutic purposes? No.” Elena paused with her eyes unfocused and her lips parted, as if searching for the proper words. She shook her head, then snapped her gaze at me. “There’s a fundamental problem in discussing the artistic process. If you earned a degree for it and ended up working at a magazine writing articles on music, paintings, novels or whatever, well, you have to come up with bullshit that sounds good to justify the time, energy, and money spent learning about how to discuss things you didn’t create. While getting brainwashed. A valid approach to life if your goal is to win some friends and influence people, I suppose. Imagine all those professors perorating, day after day, year after year, in a language that would make the creator go: ‘What the fuck are these loons smoking?’ It makes me shudder. I swear, whole university departments could disappear overnight, and society would be better for it. You’re supposed to feel art. The texture, the tone, the rhythm. It should awaken the millions of years of beast inside you. It should remind you that you’re alive, and that you will die. That’s how you connect with the creator, not by dissecting their child, naming the parts, and then putting them on the scales to weigh them. If the artists had wanted to make a point, they’d have written a fucking essay. The conscious mind shouldn’t dare befoul art with its machinations; it should prostrate itself in awe, and be silent.”
“You’re not letting me off the hook.”
“No, I am. I don’t want to bury the conscious mind entirely, even though it should learn to rest away from the light. You need rationality during the editing phase. But if you tasked that part with producing the raw material, it would sit at the keyboard agonizing over every word, judging the pros and cons of a myriad options, quickly going insane. All the fun replaced by paralysis from self-judgment. It would produce a soulless, sterile pile of garbage. You don’t task a fish with flying, and you shouldn’t burden the conscious mind with anything other than classifying and criticizing. You have to venture into the dark places where that part fears to tread. Into the depths where monsters dwell. Only there will you find something that matters. But the deeper you descend, the more you will be tempted to give up. And what is the only tool at your disposal to endure that abyssal dark?”
“Madness.”
Elena’s pale blues glimmered as if a ray of sunlight had pierced through the clouds.
“Yeah, you need to be a little insane. Too much, and it will control you. But I’ve digressed. You wanted to know if my stories are meant to process and exorcise the darkness inside me. Writing is a compulsion. A form of psychological masturbation. If you want to be generous, you can consider it a dialogue with a sacred, hidden part of yourself. I don’t know why I write certain things or why they have to be that way. I don’t care either. You don’t choose the stories, they choose you. They demand to be told, clawing their way out through your fingertips until you’re left bleeding on the keyboard. I’m just honored that they chose me, someone so insignificant, someone with nothing to offer but devotion and the willingness to bleed, as their conduit to the world. And no, I’m not exorcising the monster by writing. If anything, I’m feeding it, and in return, the monster keeps me from spiraling. I was born with a hole in the bottom of my soul where my happiness and fulfillment drains. I can’t hold onto them no matter what I do. But words, they plug that hole, for as long as the tale lasts.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Paint It, Black” by The Rolling Stones.
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