Must be a syndrome.
I get up, hit the wall until there’s a hole in it, and then do some other stuff before going back to sleep. I’m conscious of it. It’s not like I’m sleep walking. I’m just really, really compelled to do it. I make the wall holes five times a night, every night, like clockwork. 1 AM. 2 AM. 3 AM. 4 AM. 5 AM. Then, when I wake up at 7 AM, the holes are gone.
I thought it was a recurring dream. I’d read about recurring dreams once in The Cycle, a magazine about those guys that go into other people’s dreams to help them cure their urinary tract infections and cancer (only those two). These dreams are probably not cancerous. Probably the side effects of this new experimental mind-numbing drug I’ve been taking: Fluroxaminetine II. The doctor said that it would help with the fact that I’m lazy. She said, and I quote, “You won’t be so lazy any more.”
I’m still lazy. I get up at seven. I should be getting up at six, tops. I’m an adult. What is an adult doing waking up at seven?
They’re not dreams. I Took pictures. Lots of them. Check my digital camera every morning and the holes are there.
Must be a syndrome.
I ask Maurice, my drinking partner. I hold the camera screen up to him and cycle through the photos. “Are there holes in this wall?”
“Yep,” he says. He tilts the glass into his mouth, syrup-thick IPA falling into his gullet. “Is that the back wall in your room?
“Yeah. Alright.”
I watch Maurice drink then I convince him to walk up to this super hot girl wearing a heather gray babydoll tee. He starts talking to her and I disappear into the night. Drinking’s probably not good for me. Must be a syndrome.
When I come back home from the bar that night there’s a pentagram on the wall where the holes have been appearing. It’s right side up. I say, “Hello?” It’s just to make sure there’s no one in the house. I’m sure. Not that they would answer, but I’d be able to feel it. I have a sixth-sense about that particular kind of thing. I’d hear them breathing in the closet, waiting for me to pass by. I’d hear them in the kitchen, making an egg sandwich.
I run my fingers along the pentagram. It’s recessed into the wall, like it was carved and then inked or painted after the fact. I go to sleep.
When I wake up at 1 AM, there’s no pentagram. I make a hole. I only make four holes that night. Not bad. I take pictures of the holes just to make sure and — yep — there’s only four of them. When I wake up (at seven again, god damn it) the pentagram is missing a point on the star.
I sit down with a cup of instant powdered matcha and get to work on writing some clickbait for one of my clients in Saudi Arabia. He’s a nice guy. We exchanged pictures once. He said, “Don’t you be a stranger to me. I think it’s better if we know what we look like.”
I messaged him back, “Sure thing.”
He’s fat. The jovial kind, not the kind of fat you see walking down the street and think what a fucking asshole. Must be a syndrome.
He gets my picture says, “What a beard!”
I’ve been growing it for three months. Been growing it since the wall hole thing started. Must be a syndrome.
Clickbait is all about selling other ads. You don’t sell stuff in the ad. This one, for instance, was “10 people who just can’t even. (#8 made my pants a little tighter!)”
I put it on Facebook. One thousand clicks in four minutes. One of my best. Haravier, the fat guy, gets a lot of money for these. He pays me $50 per article because he says it’s only fair because he’s making so much. He messages me to tell me about how it works.
You write the article and people click it. I sell advertising space on the article. No one ever clicks the ads, but every time they show up on my page, I get paid. I get a lot of money. If I have, let’s say, 30 articles running, I’m making a nice chunk of change without having to lift a finger.
I don’t mind writing for Haravier. He’s a nice dude and he’s honest. He tells me that he’s only paying me $50 because his wife has cancer. I tell him about those dream people and he says that it’s a bunch of hooey. Probably. I say, “Don’t worry about it. $50 is plenty around these parts. Thanks for your honesty, though.” His wife’s a lucky woman.
I go out again. This time, for groceries. I stand in the line at Publix and fidget around. I pretend I’m interested in the white chocolate Reese’s cups just so people don’t think I’m boring. When people watch me stand still, I think that they might think I’m a statue and that I’ll come to life. I don’t want to scare people.
I do, though. I do want to scare people. I just don’t want to admit it to myself that I’d be better suited to being a John Wayne Gacy than a John Wayne.
When I come back home, it’s a quadragram. I don’t know if they exist. The top part of the star is missing. Now it’s just like a shitty star. It’s still pretty symmetrical but it looks wrong despite being technically alright. It feels like an ugly face.
When I go to sleep tonight, I only make three holes. I don’t even worry about the camera. I don’t know why I’ve been taking pictures. For myself?
I wake up and the holes are still there and now it’s a tetragram on the wall. Stayed over night. Now it’s asymmetrical. Now it drives me crazy. I want to draw the whole star around it, but I feel like it’s the wrong move. I don’t believe in god or the devil or ghosts or that, but if they do exist I want to play that wager the right way so I don’t get a pike in my ass for the rest of eternity.
I leave the holes and the shitty broken star on the wall and go out for the day. I don’t have money to spend so I head to the Gap to try on clothes and pretend that I’m interested in buying it. I put on a jean jacket. It fits surprisingly well, considering that everything I wear usually looks like a dress on me. I twist in the mirror. I think about putting a tiger patch on it. I think about how great I’d look in a jean jacket with a tiger patch on it. I think about all the swooning women and jealous men. Then I remember that I really just look like a bearded hobbit wearing a pair of jeans on my upper body.
“Can I help you find anything today?”
“Myself.”
I walk out into downtown Winter Park and feel like a floating finger. I want to poke the world until it pops like a beached whale. I want to see inside of it. I want to smell ambergris and feel the fleshy gelatin that’s under the crust of every person’s face. Someone eats me as a finger and swallows me. I feel like I can crush their stomach from the inside.
Must be a syndrome.
When I get back home, there is only one point of the star left and one hole. really, it’s just a triangle with a hole in it. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d shout “Illuminati” and build an altar to dead gods. I don’t care. The hole is deeper than I thought it was this morning. I hear someone sobbing. It sounds distinctly like me.
I reach my arm in and feel another arm. It feels like my arm. I don’t know why it feels like my arm, it just does. Thin, weak forearm covered in little wiry tentacles of hair. I hear someone sobbing. That’s definitely me. I know what it sounds like to cry because I got drunk once and did it alone in my bathroom and it echoed back to me. It cheered me right up to hear what a fucking pussy I sounded like. That day, I did two pull-ups.
“You alright?” I say.
“Nah.” I say back.
“Why are you in there?”
“Dunno.”
“You’re me, right?”
“Think so.”
“Must be a syndrome.”
“That’s what I was thinking!”
“Yeah, man.”
I push a slip of paper through the hole until I feel his hand wrap around it and hear its satisfying crinkle.
“You probably like poetry, right?”
“Yep.”
“Lemme know.”
I hear the sound of reading interspersed with little whispers. I hear him get snagged on something. I take a wild guess.
“Pulchritudinous. I don’t mean to sound smart, I use it ironically.”
“I figured, I figured. You threw me off there a bit, knowing exactly where I was. What does it mean?”
“Beautiful.”
“Ironic. What an ugly word.”
“Dude, I know.”
He finishes it and puts it back through the hole.
“Well?”
“It’s alright. Needs work.”
I look down at the page. I think about editing it. I think about the extra work I’ll have to put into a poem no one will ever read. Then I think about being Pablo Picasso. I think about being dead and famous. I think about how nice it would be to be famous without having to have people like me or talk to me. Must be a syndrome.
“Yeah. Needs work.”
The hole closes and the star dissipates off the wall. There’s nothing left.
Good. Thought I was going to eventually ruin the wall permanently. I don’t have the money to fix that shit.