I had a Gregor Samsa moment this morning. I am no longer what I was, yet I am still here.
For those less literary types, Gregor Samsa is a creation of Franz Kafka’s, a staple of any respectable European Lit professor’s syllabus. Samsa awakens one morning to find that he is no longer a man, but a gigantic insect. A ridiculous idea for a story maybe, but many argue that Kafka’s Metamorphosis is one of the greatest works of fiction ever written. Updike referred to him as, “the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament.” I am not equipped to argue that point as I have yet to read anything of his other than the aforementioned title. But there is something a little soul troddening about the phrase. If it is true then there is to be no more holy writers and man’s cosmic predicament will never be more superbly fabulized, and then no one will ever find reason to attribute such words to me. I don’t need twelve weeks of hundred dollar sessions with some Harvard graduate with a notepad, pen, and an over cushioned lounge chair to tell me that I need such praise to feel good about myself. So I hope that he is wrong.
Anyway, back to my moment. When I awoke this morning, Samsa was the first thought to run through my mind. It was actually more the word metamorphosis that I thought of, but that led to Samsa, and Samsa led to me.
I felt different. Changed.
The second thought was the pain in my stomach.
There was a gurgling and pulsing in my bowels that at the time I could only attest to either food poisoning or a light saber duel in my large intestines. Either way, there was a war waging in the depths of my abdomen and it felt as if whatever vile invader had colluded my digestive tract was winning. The fight was terrible and sent waves of pain through my gut, ripping and shredding and twisting its way toward the seeming foregone conclusion of a most horrid and grotesque expulsion.
But forget that. That is not what happened, at least not in the first way that comes to mind.
When I finally attempted to climb out from under the sweat soaked sheets, the blood rushed from my head and my vision filled with stars and blackness. I leaned against the wall and slowly everything came back. I tried to remember just what it was that I had eaten the day before to cause such grief. I could think of nothing out of the ordinary – although my ordinary choice of nutrition always does fall on the line of suspicion. Anything was suspect.
I tried to steady myself and slowly stumbled into the bathroom. I made my way to the toilet and sat down, hoping for relief. I pushed and pain seared across my abdomen, a heat that burned like blue fire and spread as if my veins were coursing with acetylene. When it hit my skull, every synap in my brain went off. The world all at once became very bright before going very dark. With tears running down my face, my skin beading with a feverish sweat and wearing nothing but a single, white tube sock on my left foot, I passed out on the floor of my bathroom with my feet straddling the toilet.
* * *
The fevered hallucinations of a subconscious in turmoil are reflective of the insanity within and without. The unconscious toils to gain perspective and parity, but only the sin comes out. Attempts at severing connections with the causations of dementia collapse under the weight of the travails of life between paychecks. While endeavoring to preempt the debt collections we cannot escape this mental dissension of true reality being annexed.
. . . ?
It is only when the last of our dreams die, and we are too tired to dream up new ones do we get to enjoy the cake.
The life we live is the life we must.
Must we?
People like me should never stop to examine their lives. There are always at least two paths and, frankly, I am never on the right one. Life is just one big elliptical boondoggle of fucktardary, and it too often seems to mix with some pornographic alter dimension where you wake up, have yourself a good Cleveland steamer, a relaxing golden shower of cleansing bukkake, followed by a clean latex suit, and a nice bowl of honey bunches of goatsies before you go off to your. . . job.
It had all become mundane. The norm. Nothing shocks me anymore.
With every war epic I have ever seen, I have pictured myself being there amidst the carnage. Armored soldiers bearing swords running at each other while dodging arrows. Each one fearful of death, and each one more fearful of dishonor. I picture myself there, in support of whatever side is the underdog, or whatever side is the perceived good. I am high above them on a hill and I have modern weaponry. 50 caliber mounted automatic rifle, gatling machine guns, rocket launchers and such. I am Rambo and they are balloons below me bursting in explosions of air and blood.
I am invincible up on my hill. With my weapons I take out a whole army; there is a sick and sad glee in my eyes that is not a part of who I really am. I am greatness.
Do I know my pain? Not physical, but the pain of being me? I no longer have a personal relationship with it, it and I no longer come in contact, and I feel this is ruining me. Long ago I beat depression. I had the fear deep within me. It pushed me and I fought it and when I won there were celebrations and joy and when I lost I would crawl into my corner and cry, and I hated this bipolar life because I lost far more than I won, and sometimes the things you lose take with them parts of you you can’t get back. The last time I lost, I refused depression. I locked it away inside of me, as if I was saving it for later – but later never came. I have recreated myself as this living zombie that smiles when he is supposed to smile, and tries to say all the things that plugs him into the conversation that is taking place, but none of it feels real. I am talked at, not to. I am the tag along. I no longer cry – but then, I no longer celebrate either. I am a living ruin.
* * *
I woke up several hours later, still on the floor of my bathroom, still sweating, still in pain. In the other room I heard my cell phone ring. I was probably supposed to be somewhere, somewhere that wasn’t my bathroom floor.
I thought about getting up, but decided giving up was easier and just laid back and wallowed. The fact that my phone was so far away was a pretty severe point of consternation. Not because I needed to know who had called me, but because I thought there might be a very real possibility that I would need to be calling for an ambulance. Or at least my mother, the one who had so graciously chosen not to abort me. A decision I hope I never gave her reason to revisit.
Then something moved in my stomach. And not my stomach the organ, but my stomach the fleshy paunch, the generalized area between my crotch and my ribcage. The lower half of my power zone. And not really in it exactly, but almost on it, in the layer between skin and muscle, swimming in the fat. It moved again and I curled up like a pill bug and regaled in agony. I clutched at my stomach and whatever it was I could feel it, it was alive and not part of the real me. I lifted my hands and found there was a bump just down and to the left of my navel. With my hands off it, it moved again, about an inch upwards, tunneling into my flesh. I clamped my right hand on it hard, pinning it in place. It tried to squirm out, but I held it tighter.
I was horrified. My mind was racing at what it could be. A large insect, alien implant, undeveloped twin brother, that thing from the Wrath of Kahn that latched onto peoples spinal chords and then came out through theirs ears? Every time it moved in rent flesh from muscle and it sent every nerve in my system afire with pain. But even worse was the realization that whatever it was, it wasn’t a part of me, it was it’s own entity, and I was severely repulsed at its existence within me. My skin was shuddering and slick with sweat, and my mind was still racing around a track with no pit stops and no finish line, but out of all the incoherence, the only stable thought I could come up with was to get that thing out of me.
I tried standing, but the closer to vertical I got, the more oxygen deprived my head became and the more the darkness ate away at my periphery. So with my right hand clutching at the lump, trying to hold it still, and my left working in a disconcerted effort with my legs, I dragged myself towards the kitchen. My clammy skin stuck to the hardwood floors in the hallway and I almost had to roll to get through it. The carpet in the living room was more forgiving, but I could still feel it eating at the skin of my knees and my arms. I was almost there though, my cell phone was on the dining room table and an ambulance was just a short phone call away.
Then whatever it was in my stomach got away from me. It just shot out from under my hand, like a last ditch effort. No matter how hard I tried to pin it down again, it would squirt free. It began rolling around, not just trying to go horizontal any more, but vertical, deeper into me. The pain was the worst physical thing I had ever felt. I tried to stand again, but the world almost went black. I heaved myself with everything I had left at the table and my hand knocked off an unwashed dinner plate from the night before and I fell to the ground while the plate and utensils fell around my head. But no phone. I could feel that whatever was inside me, tearing into my abdominal wall, was winning. It was finding its way back into to the pit of my being.
I tried to roll over onto my stomach, to make another attempt, and my face pressed into something hard, cool and metal. A butter knife, still covered with dried up bits of food. It had a golden yellow plastic handle, and little hilt like a sword. I could see my reflection in the clean part of the blade. There was no color in my eyes. Just white and black. My irises had opened so wide they had disappeared. I grabbed at it, and without thinking, I clutched at the loosened skin of my stomach and stabbed into the side of it. Using the slightly serrated but still very dull edge, I sawed a small hole big enough to get my thumb and forefinger into. At first, I almost couldn’t notice the new pain, for it was so much less than what I was already feeling. I stuck my fingers in and I could immediately feel it. But the thing was slick and hard to get a hold of. It kept jerking away from me. I felt my grip on consciousness weakening. The blackness was coming again – and then I had it! I pinched down hard, digging my fingernails into it and I heard a noise, a living, screech of pain. I jerked it out of me and flung it across the living room. I heard it thud onto the floor as I laid my head back and passed out for the second time that day.
* * *
Happiness has been a hard argued topic of many a great and not so great philosopher throughout the ages. I’ll not go into details of what those arguments actually were, mainly because I tried to forget everything that my professors tried to teach me about these useless people the second I turned in the final essay in their class. The words of Plato, Decartes, Appiah, and others of their ilk are hardly necessary to having happiness in your life. These people are just the Rush Limbaughs of their day, pompous blowhards overly impressed with their own intelligence. If you actually follow, understand, and agree with them in any way, you are more likely to spend your free time questioning your existence than doing things that make you smile, like listening to Björk, going on walks with your dog, or watching crappy television programs while entwined in the arms of some beautiful, warm girl, because she likes the program, and she likes being with you, and you like to see her happy, because that makes you happy.
There is, however, one philosopher that I did take something from. Voltaire. He had a simple idea, which he explained in a simple story. Happiness is the pursuit of happiness. It is an ever changing, morphing thing, and if we ever want it in our lives, then we have to follow it, adapt to it, change and morph with it. Always looking for that one thing that will bring a smile to your face, and then moving on to find the next.
I once found something that made me really happy. Then it stopped. And I never really moved on. And everything else that would’ve passed me on by. But I don’t really want to dwell on that something. She deserves everything she gets. Even if it isn’t me – especially if it isn’t me.
The terrible truth is that since then, I have become some sentimental harbinger of all the good times that could’ve been had if only I had taken this road over that road, picked this girl over that girl, bowed down to this God instead of that form of abject societal displacement. It’s a hard knock life for us, and not just some of us, but everyone. Only those that get off their asses and actually do something get to see any swag. There are great golden fields of happiness out there, and sometimes you have to pick up a blade to reap the rewards. You have to fight for it.
I don’t know if there is any fight left in me. There is something keeping me from taking my right hand off the remote, my left hand out of the white cheddar Cheez-it® baked snack crackers and my middle hand off my penis. It wants to see me fail. I am not sure what it is, but as a faithful and humble agnostic I believe it might be either the gentle touch of Satan on my shoulder, or just the fear.
I hate the fucking fear.
The fear is basically just hope. For example, “I hope that someday a girl with breasts nice enough that she refers to them offhandedly as ‘the girls’, curves that tell time to the second and a face that both melts hearts and makes angels jealous will walk into my life and she will say the things that make me laugh, do the things that make me smile, and use her trust fund to buy the things that will make me content. When I look at her she’ll say, ‘I love you,’ when I lean forward she’ll kiss me and her hand’ll brush up and down my neck, and when I roll over her legs’ll spread for me to enter, and her arms will cling to me tightly when I try to roll back.” I hope the future will be good. I fear the future will be bad. In the pit of your stomach they both feel the same.
The hope and the fear. This is not reality, yet I fear that hope will fail me. All I am is a hopeless romantic, and without the romance, what the fuck is the point?
* * *
I felt something rub against my leg. I kicked out and knocked it away.
I woke up – again. Always again.
My head was fuzzy, and my eyes didn’t want to stay open. I was not sure how much time had passed, but the wound on my stomach had started to coagulate. I was freezing. I was still only wearing the one sock.
I heard a scraping noise and again felt something against my leg. The memory of the thing in my stomach came rushing back. The butter knife was still in my hand and I clutched it tightly while scanning the floor.
For the first time I saw what it was that had been tunneling inside me. It was on the floor next to me, desperately fighting its way back. It looked like a pale, deformed, miniature baby. Its face was flat and it had no eyes, only two empty sockets with a translucent, sickly looking skin covering them. It had two arms but the left had not even developed to the elbow, while the right ended with a skinny hand that was only as wide as the one finger on it. The nail on that finger was long and sharp like a like hawk’s talon. The legs were both like the left arm, only the right was slightly longer than the left. They both had bumps that looked like toes on the ends of the nubs. At least, that is probably what they were meant to be.
With its one arm and one finger, it kept dragging itself towards me, taking raspy, incomplete breaths. I just looked at it, paralyzed, and it – looked at me, is the only word I can think of, even with its eyeless face. It knew where I was. It knew what it needed. It was the void, that blank spot in the pit of your stomach where you push all your fear, your hatred, and your sadness, and it grows there and feeds on everything else that you are until you are a walking, talking, breathing, nothing.
I am not nothing. I will not be nothing.
I will get my shit together.
There was no way this thing was getting back inside me to further incubate itself. I knew that is what it needed, to keep feeding off me until it was complete, a little fully formed demon. Somehow I had gotten this thing out of me, my body had rejected it as an unnatural, foreign entity.
I fought my way up to a sitting position. Every movement I made felt unnatural, like the force of gravity had tripled. My body had moved, but my soul was five steps behind, still frozen on the floor. I waited for it to catch up.
The little malformed demon reached my leg again. It hooked its claw into my quadriceps and pulled itself up onto my thigh. For a moment it just stayed there, catching its breath, and I just sat there watching it. It looked up at me, and I think it smiled. It didn’t have enough of a face to really register, but I think that is what it was trying to convey. A smile would tell me that it thought it was going to win; that it was more persistent than me; that eventually all of my will power would bleed out of me onto my kitchen floor and I would be powerless to keep it from crawling up inside of me again so it could curl up warm and snug in the folds of my intestines where it would continue to feed and grow on all the hate, anger and depression that I continually force into the void. Looking back, I am sure that it smiled.
Oh, if the darkness had its way, we would give the whole, entire of existence to the little stomach demons that we birth in our intestines, and they would revel and turn it all black.
. . . No.
I smacked that evil little shit off my leg and it fell onto its back a few feet away from me, then, with everything I had left I took the crusty unwashed butter knife that was still in my right hand and brought it down hard in the middle of that thing’s pale and misshapen chest. It went clear through burying itself up to the hilt. On the other side of it the knife had lodged itself perfectly into the seem between two floor boards.
That thing started to have such a shitfit. It screeched and hollered and shook, and then it began banging the closest thing it had to and arm onto the, fortunately, unmoving hilt of the butter knife, and it was all just music to my tired ears.
I crawled my way into the living room and pulled myself up onto the couch. I keep a comforter on the back of it and I covered myself with it. I pulled it tight around my neck, and for the first time that day, I passed out intentionally.
* * *
Sometimes I imagine conversations between myself and another; such as those one would have within the intimate constraints of the casual banter of pillow talk, were I to ever again have someone to actually share a pillow with.
“What do you think?” I would ask some beautiful woman, whose face is but mere inches from my own.
“What do I think of what?” she would reply.
“What do you think of me?” I would ask, my self conscious nature forcing me to redefine my question in a way that would either expose or alleviate the fears I carry constantly within my soul.
And though truth is rarely exposed by questions such as these, in my imagination, she answers with nothing but verity. “Why, I find you charming and nice, but almost to the point of excessiveness. Your condition of living is squalid, you have no money or prospects, and your appearance – well, I am not going to beat a dead dog. In fact, I am wondering what it is that has brought me to share a pillow with you in the first place, and I can only surmise that it is that I have been drugged. Have I indeed been drugged?”
I fear with all that I am that the only answer I will ever have to that question is, “Yes, and quite heavily.”
There is a little stuffed bear that sits on a shelf in my closet. Inside of that bear is a circuit board and a battery. When you press on the right paw, it will record a message, and when you press on the left paw it will play that message back.
I have never pressed the right paw. I don’t really dare to. The bear was given to me as a Valentines day gift by someone who actually did love me at the time – I think – and she left me a message on it, “Derek?” with a little pause to make sure she has my attention, “I love you.” I no longer have feelings for the girl who gave it to me, that whole relationship was one of the bigger mistakes of my life, even though at the time it didn’t feel that way. But every now and then I play that message just to remind myself that it actually is possible for someone to love me.
Someday, the battery will die or in one of those angry emotional upheavals – that I’ve never really had, but need – I will record over it.
Then I really will have to start getting some cats.
* * *
When I woke up, the clock on my wall said eight fifteen, but that didn’t help me figure out how many hours had passed, or even what day it was. I walked into the kitchen and saw that the little stomach demon was still pinned to the floor.
It was also still alive. Its eyeless face followed me, and its lipless mouth sneered.
I didn’t really know what to do with it at first. Ideas ranged from the mundane – toss it into the dumpster outside – too the malevolent – broil it at five hundred degrees in the oven – to the down right sadistic – puree it in the blender and then poor it down the sink.
I looked at it and wondered if any of those would kill it. It had a piece of steel running through its abdomen and still it drew breath. Could it even die? And even if I did kill it, could it be reborn again back in the place I had just so painfully extracted it from?
This thing was the coalescence of all the terrible in my life, and for some reason I felt like I should keep it close. I was also tired of calling it an it, and so I with one thought I both named and engendered it by giving it the title Edgar, after a favorite writer of mine, one who inspired both respect and fear.
Then I grabbed the knife, being careful to make sure he stayed impaled upon it, pulled it free of the floor, and transfered him to a spot on the wall above my desk, where he has been the entire time I wrote these fourteen pages of nonsense.
To his great disdain, Edgar’s “feet” dangled above my floor
And there he shall remain, no matter how he shall implore,
Upon my pallid wall of plaster, this ungainly, genetic disaster
With skin of pale alabaster, as I am now his unquestioned master,
Upon my wall he shall fester for now, tomorrow, for evermore
And my despair he shall see,
Ah, nevermore.
Fuck you, Edgar.
And the she-beast you rode in on.
