Spooky Action at a Distance
by C.S. Brambach
"Maybe I just don't wanna say good-bye." He hung up. Almost in disgust. The real horror. Jackson slowly sucked into himself and out of this world. As he grew older he felt his mind, and its focus became more sharp. Sharper. Keen. He began to notice his memory--especially as the decades took their slow, grinding, inevitable toll. There were way more people, but way less variation, everyone physically based on about a dozen defined models, as if everybody was genetically related at much too close a distance. Too many chemicals and free radiation floating around.
In the dark. Dark thoughts in a dark room. One nice thing about the room, he could keep it dark. Real dark. That and it was real quiet. Really quiet. Well usually.
Except for when the police copters circled. Or the neighbors in back started playin' that loud bodega musica. Or the hangover was especially bad.
Tonight was still. You could here the flutter of the devil's wings at a great distance. Sometimes you could hear the news through the wall:
"Satan killers sentenced." The horrors of an overpopulated world, rats chewing at each other.
It was just a small room. Usually the squirels were loud in summer, but this time of year it was the damn skunk problem--that and the struggle of the proletariat. Whenever he smelled skunk he remembered springtime in New Mexico, land of disenchantment and petty misdemenors.
Maybe it was just a fifteen minute midlife crisis. Angst and guilt. Angst and guilt of the law firm. Angst, guilt, and depression.
He thought, like re-invent yourself, that's the beauty of America in a creepy almost spiritual way. Like, fuck you and fuck the world. He actually wanted to be what he was and fuck you very much everybody.
The web disconnected, the glowing screen long dim, but his memory still in warp drive, what visions at odds. Swords and barbarism. Space ships and decay. Maybe all four alternatives in their measure.
The darkness began to coaless as his brain began to slow down from his wound up day. He could leave his eyes open. He was alone. Maybe he was insane. In the blink of an eye. Then he swore to himself he wasn't alone. He could see--
A giant cockroach on the ceiling over the door across the room from were he lay, suddenly sweaty, on his futon on the floor.
A fucking giant, six foot cockroach. He was frozen with fear as he realized just what he was looking at. He was afraid to squint lest it see him move. He was sure that even though it was huge, it was real fast.
Jackson had plenty of experience with its many smaller cousins of several varieties, and he started to really freak out when he began to wonder if it was here on some weird vengeance trip. But Jackson didn't even scream.
He took control of his own mind. Even as his body soared on an unparalleled adrenal rush--for him anyway. His body locked up, his mind careened like a ping pong ball.
He could never beg Mary Poppin's forgiveness now. Not after the werewolf came out. 'Cause he knew in the pit of his gut, at the bottom of his wasted soul, he was surely a dead man. As quick as roaches were, he knew the behemoth would get him before he reached the door. The only doorway.
As the fear grew in his chest and spread to his guts, churning, he became too scared to sweat anymore. Good thing, his body didn't want the gruesome beast to consider him a salted snack treat. And he quickly wondered if he was crazy.
No. He had been alone a long time, and he sure didn't want it to turn into a woman. Reverse Kafka, total and full on--
No, he couldn't fuck a giant cockroach, no matter what it 'morphed' into and how large its breasts became. With his luck this was some twilight zone shit and the thing would suck more than the seminal fluid out of him. Ugh. Visions of sick X-Files effects.
Jackson remembered some of the odd dreams he'd had lately. That bear coming over the bulwarks up the hill at him, climbing, climbing. The squirrels lined up in rows watching him silently. And naked women--not that he was complaining.
Jackson hadn't taken hallucinogens--in decades.
That the room was small and he had been warring with the local roach tribes for months caused him concern again, but--Nonsense, think your way out, stay calm, blink slow. Don't bury your head in the sand or the comforter. Come on the room is small, which makes it look bigger than it is.
He started to wonder if staring into a screen for hours on end was all it was cracked up to be. Then it clicked. He was a loner, maybe he actually could live as a hermit. Maybe the little boy vandal had not been some demon maybe it was some anti-matter Jackson! A reaction to that anti-Jackson Lycanthropic responce.
He could whip the beast. It wasn't the vodka. It was his fear of success. His fear of money. He could help others learn to use money as a tool, a resource and fuck The Man at the same time.
Yeah. Sure, at work he liked to think that. Except for the guy who had yelled in his ear, "I kill all the mortgage brokers!"
No. He hadn't sold out, he was still an unknown artist--yeah, on the make. He was seeing a something. Maybe he was already asleep.
Nothin' in the dark. Like the eye. Meditation. Calm. He would see the eye looking straight down at him. Forget depression, he could and had been calm. That's it, relaxed. Or was that just liver failure? Well, he wasn't yellow. Not like it talked to him. Nothing ever talked. No chemical or booze ever did that to him.
No, it was some guilt bug sneakin' up on him much as a classic schizophrenic sees spiders crawling all over their skin--he had a huge guilt trip bearing down on him. Like when all else fails we can always rely on brute force and stupidity. Even if he was ethically opposed to violence, particularly when aimed his way, he hated his own animal leanings. Avoid the stronger, bully the weak and anonymous, chastise the inanimate and unfeeling. What a crock. Maybe more like do unto others before they did unto him.
Sure, y'know safe, kind, nice, wacky, silly goober boy--but there was a wild streak in there. A capacity to lash out, but what the fuck. Learning control takes years, decades, a life time twice over. Every romantic life has a flipside price. Good has to be able to react to evil, cheek for cheek, 'cause evil will try and snuff good out. Jackson had little doubt.
He told himself not to mistake a blind drunk rage for more than a flash in the pan. The basic form can blunder-bungle futile dumbshit gestures of some small, mean, backwater spirit.
Words failed him. What would he--or could he--yell? Cockroach? At the top of his lungs? No, this was his penance for letting the beast escape and vent its rage. Just hit the old vodka switch.
Learning patience through sheer terror. He had nothing large enough to squish and actually crush the giant's exoskeleton. He'd be dead and never have a chance to apologize to Mary Poppin's for crashing her date.
Always unleashing some animal rage off some misperceived slight, some lame non-insult incident.
If he was already dead this had to be hell, 'cause if it was nirvana the joke was really on mankind. Or was the whole thing some bizarre parking experiment. Life lived on some sad, twisted romantic edge, so silly really. Why not avoid as much crap as possible and if it helped to stay aneasthetized, so be it.
Keep to the middle of the road, if possible, just don't be afraid to use the whole road. That was Jackson's motto.
He would have spent four days analyzing the whole thing, but it took him four days just to reconstruct the event. Jackson came to think he had scared Mary Poppins. Bad. He wanted to tell her how he really felt about her so she would understand how he cared for her like a little sister, but words failed him. He didn't want to hurt her feelings, just let her know how important she was and special--and that the idiot wavin' the big knife around under the quiet three a.m. street light had in no way been anything personal.
Nope.
He would never hurt Mary. Livin' in the city was never boring, though most of the people in it were, but not Mary. No, her intense-flame-spirit-soap-opera-life was a light in the darkness to him. She improved the quality of his life, and the intense little creature was--dare he even think it?--missed.
Now he was scared. Maybe he was mellowing. Hmmm. Words failed him.
Too much vodka, not enough sense. He would never hurt Mary Poppins. He might scare her, he might freak her, he might make her laugh, he might piss her off, he might annoy her, he might enthrall her (for a second or two), he might make her want to slug him but he would never break her heart. At least not intentionally anyway.
He thought, We're too much alike. We each inflict most of our own suffering, Ulcer Girl, on ourselves.
The huge roach didn't torture Jackson. He tortured himself.
It wasn't the eye, the eye of god, but maybe it was an angel. Or a demon. His mind wound down. It spoke.
"Quit drinking alchohol."
Soon the light came up, and it was gone. Jackson got up, pissed, showered, and went to the store. Returning shortly he methodically threw some clothes into a backpack, turned off the pilot light in the wall heater and set off the bug bomb he had purchased at the store before walking out the door.
Time to commune with nature on a couple tabs of good LSD, let the werewolf run free. Get some insight into Einstein's statement about quantum nonlocality and the ability of two half proton light particles to reflect changes in each other even when seperated by a great distance. Spooky action at a distance, Einstein had called it. Maybe it hadn't been him shitfaced defaming the hood. The anti-Jackson had some explaining to do. Stranger things had happened.
Apparently, after all, God was a cockroach.
return to Port Del Rio