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Authors: Andersen Prunty

Fuckness (29 page)

BOOK: Fuckness
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I turned toward the half-open door, the purplish blue light glowing outside. I dragged my feet along the carpet, feeling its damp squishiness, the door approaching me more than the other way around. My hands touched the door and I pushed it open and I was outside. Outside in a dense fog, the clear night sky above me.

I felt like I was floating away from everything around me, that power still pulling me along. I was sure I was dying. If not from blood loss, then from shock. The fuckness had got me, sneaked up on me and crushed me out. If I died, the fuckness would be over. Slowly, I made my way to the graveyards behind the church. The obelisks and headstones were stubby shadows in the fog. The night air felt warm on my skin, but I shivered uncontrollably.

The whumming screeched like a stopping train in my head. A red vision splashed all over my mind’s eye. The fog out there was a prison. A glaucoma blanket over my physical eyes. I could feel myself falling. No, it was more like that grinding red feeling drove me to the ground, flattening me and rolling over me, a dark and violent fever dream. All of the faces, the hateful fuckness faces of the past came blaring through the red fog, angry and accusatory. All mingling in a huge screech. I collapsed onto the fiery ground, those people enveloping me, wheedling beneath my skin and along my nerves. They yelled incoherence in unison, a tattoo that beat out my last remaining breaths. I had the feeling death was right there next to me and these people were going into some new hell with me. Like I was going to have to spend all of eternity hating them. They were inside of me, ripping at my viscera, tearing my brain to pieces, and vomiting on my soul.

I tried to fight them. There had to be some way to get them out of me. I tried to scream, tried to force them out through my mouth. There was nothing left inside. Inside, there was no me, only them. I didn’t have the strength in my legs or lungs to run or scream.

I was on the ground but I still felt myself falling. It felt like I was falling from some place that was very very high, falling through the sky and the clouds and the dense powdery fog. There was nothing to catch myself on and I couldn’t think of any reason for wanting to catch myself because the more I fell, the greater distance I went, the higher I got, so that when I landed I was right there with the stars, close enough to reach out and palm them with my hands. Then the stars came down on me like a net, coolly roping my body, and the people were gone.

I lay there on the cemetery ground waiting for death. Was I already dead? If I breathed, I was completely unaware of it. Not even like the skin breathing thing I did back in the church. I didn’t breathe, I didn’t need to breathe. I lay there and felt the dew on my back, watched the fog swirl around me, staring up at the few stars littering the sky, listening to the endless quiet surrounding me. The quiet, boundless silence. Maybe the soft rustle of a tree, maybe the low hum of a car somewhere in the distance but, there beneath it all was the quiet—no blood thumping behind my ears. No whumming in my brain. No screaming.

That’s when I heard the scuffling shapes come out of the fog. They were spirits, I had no doubt, risen from the graves around me, ectoplasmic green against the gray of the fog. And they shambled toward me, a whole army of them, coming right up out of the ground, through the grave markers, all of them formless. They got to me and I felt their hands on me, the energy radiating from them and into me, strengthening me. They moved into me, through me, rebuilding me from the inside. The dead come to replace what the living stole. The nothing I felt was replaced with something other. Something completely indescribable because it was so all encompassing. They were healing me. They took away the fuckness. They gave me new skin, swelled my soul to the point of bursting and, as quietly as they had come, they disappeared.

I felt weightless and alive and real. Everything that had happened to me, every person who had conspired to hold me down, now surged through me and lifted me up. I took off running into the dawn, barefoot and stark raving mad with joy.

 

Conclusion:

Happiness In Exile

 

So that’s my story. Only it’s not really my story at all. It was only a period of my life. The period of heavy fuckness. Sometime later that morning I was whisked away to the hospital where I was put into the care of a bunch of nurses. They were like a flock of angels, moving around the white hospital rooms in their starched white uniforms. It occurred to me the hospital society might’ve been the lifestyle I’d been striving for all along. No one ever got mad. I could have flung my excrement at those nurses and they would have just smiled, casually wiped it off, and suggested I use a bedpan. I never had to leave the bed. I just lay there and they brought me things. I had to stay there longer than I normally would have because the doctors were convinced, from what I told them while ranting in my sleep, that I had suffered some sort of trauma, even though they couldn’t find any type of physical evidence to substantiate that claim.

But they were all just tending to a moribund body that had seen better days. I guess it was my last hurrah.

Officially, I died of natural causes. I was a John Doe.

Wallace Black had died three days earlier in an arson.

Mainly what I thought as I watched myself all laid up in the hospital was that question Uncle Skad had posed: Are we who we really are, with all the ugly layers peeled away, or are we who we are trying to become? The more I thought about it, the more the question terrifed me. It seemed like if you took people and stripped away all their layers, you ended up with Boo Thiklet. If you measured most people by what they were trying to become, it seemed like you’d just end up with a lot of rich, self-absorbed fucks. I don’t really have any idea of what I’m trying to become or if it’s possible to become anything in death, but I know there’s always a small part of me that is going to remain the boy with horns.

As for God and divine punishment, I’m still really not sure. I know I was punished, though I question the divinity of it. There were feelings I had—the force, the rope, the inner pulling. If that was God, then I’d have to say he has a really sick and sort of mean sense of humor. And he has, quite clearly, exiled me from the kingdom of heaven.

The fuckness seemed to lessen when I left my body. It wasn’t that the world seemed any less absurd. If anything, with a little bit of maturity and a little bit of death, things only seemed more absurd. I still don’t understand why people do the things they do. I don’t think I want to understand. Sometimes the reasons are far more ridiculous than the acts themselves. A man wears a tie because he has to. Why not wear two ties, or three or four, an insanely wide array of ties, just because he wants to?

So, somehow, I’ve blended in with this absurdity by not blending in at all. I stay on the outside, invisible. Once I stopped being Wallace Black, no one noticed me at all. There was the occasional person, usually a child, who could look at me and I could tell they understood everything. In life, there were a few adults, the people like Uncle Skad and maybe even Maria, but those were rare. With this invisibility I’ve been able to think about my philosophy of fuckness, structuring it into a politics of poverty.

I’ve tried to go back and find the people who helped me along the way, but they’ve all disappeared. Drifter Ken has drifted on. Johnny Metal said he came to me, so I didn’t even know where to begin looking for him. Uncle Skad must have exploded into some blue electrical oblivion. The Thiklets’ house had a sign that said “SOLD” out in the front yard. It may seem self-centered, but it felt like all of them only existed for a short period of time, there to help me through the heavy fuckness.

I don’t know what happened to the horns. I have no signs suggesting they were ever there. Just like the doctors and nurses couldn’t find any bullet holes or internal damage from the shooting before pronouncing me dead. Nobody at the hospital ever said anything about them. Maybe the church found them lying somewhere and took them. I hope they exorcised them first. I was kind of glad I couldn’t find them. I never really want to see them again.

Just a few days ago I went back to Walnut. I finally had to know if the parents were really and truly dead. I think it took me a few years to do that because I had to punish myself. It was like, if I knew they were okay, then I couldn’t feel the proper amount of guilt. And if I knew they were dead, then I could just stop thinking about them. I walked by their house, keeping to the opposite side of the street. It was a warm summer day and I stood there staring at the house. I knew I could never go back in there. That was one of the worst things, feeling like there was never really a place to go.

They had really fixed it up a lot. A fresh coat of white paint gleamed in the sunlight. Vibrantly colored flowers lined the ground. It was like an oasis there on Walnut. The mother and father were out in the front yard. The father had a shiny new wheelchair. The mother wandered around in an honest-to-God practical outfit, watering the lawn. A boy of about four or five stomped around the front yard, hurling a red Frisbee at Racecar. They must have adopted, I thought. Probably took on a foster kid for the extra income. Maybe they were just babysitting. The boy spotted me, creepily standing there, out of place in a world that wasn’t really mine anymore.


What’s that man doing?” he said.

The mother and Racecar both looked across the street.

And that image dropped away. Three black kids stood in front of a low-income apartment building.


There’s nobody there,” the oldest said.


Yes huh. He’s right there.” The child pointed again.


You’re full of shit.”

I waved at the little boy, did a little dance for him, and skipped off down the street.

BOOK: Fuckness
10.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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