Mania’s coming. Schizoid, schizoid, schizoid. Here’s three of me. Here they are at a carnival, all pretending to be ducks at the shooting gallery. They want to die.
Here they are at the top of the Empire State Building, throwing pennies off and trying to assassinate people.
Here they are on a farm, helping a cow give birth with tender care, then sacrificing the calf right outside the barn by a pit fire. The cow is a sacrifice for the sake of sacrificing. Nobody knows what to believe, but they feel like the absurdity of what they’re doing is enough to cover them for the better chunk of a century.
I’m just a little kid. There’s an old man chasing me. He’s wearing a tuxedo and purple harem pants. I’m running and running but I’m basically just a sentient bean with hydraulic legs of half-cooked spaghetti. The old guy catches up to me. He grabs me by the shoulder, screaming, “Son! Son I love you please don’t fucking do this!” He shakes me. I can feel my tiny, developing brain wiggling around in the Tupperware of my skull.
The old man opens his wrinkly mouth and a bunch of cereal bowls fall out. There’s cereal and milk inside, but it’s all frozen to the bowls like those fake cups of coffee you see at furniture stores. Then, when the cereal bowls stop coming out, he wipes his mouth and smiles at me. He sings a song to commemorate all the men who have died from a broken leg.
His eyes get really long and fall out of his head and hit the floor and start snaking around my ankles. They start to constrict me. Then they dig into my legs and wriggle underneath the skin like snakes in electrical sockets. I wonder what it’s like to see the inside of a leg. I faint.
I’m not a little kid any more. I’m a door handle in a busy mall bathroom. Everyone is touching me with piss-fingers. I never thought I’d see so many fat men’s palms in my life. They sigh when they grab at me, like they’re about to go into cardiac arrest. And every time I try to scream. I try to tell them to not touch me with their piss-riddled hands. I can’t scream, though. I’ve no mouth to do it with and also I’m just a door handle so why would they even care what I have to say?
A guy comes into the bathroom late at night. By now, I’m covered in a greasy layer of ammonia and sweat. I can barely see him through the haze. I don’t even know where my eyes are. Maybe the bolts on the metal panel that the handle is attached to? I don’t know.
I watch the guy head to the sink. He pulls his pants down and aims at the mirror and lets loose a hurricane of liquid shit. I gets all over the mirror. I mean all over. He’s covered the entire mirror from corner to corner. He starts chanting something in a language I don’t know. A few hours pass while he mumbles away. Then I hear the sound of an old phone ringing.
A hand reaches through the mirror and grabs his face. I hear a muffled, “Thank you.” The hand rips the skin off his face and disappears back into the mirror. He turns to me, somehow knowing that I was there all along. He flashes a muscly smile, eyes like crescents, and gives me two thumbs up. He walks out. I’m watching the mirror the whole time. I feel bad for whoever has to clean that up.
Now I’m just a regular guy. I have to get up in the morning to work. I have to listen to people tell me things I don’t want to hear. I have to drive a car because I don’t live in a big city and — even if I did — I don’t feel safe walking around in a world this scary.
The eleven o’ clock news tells me that more people died. Then more people. Someone was shot. Someone shot the person that shot that person. There’s a daisy-chain of shootings around the state. Four months later, it finally comes full circle and the first person comes back to life in his coffin. He’ll probably die there anyway. Then all that’s left is the eternal struggle between a box made of composite wood and a modern-day Sisyphus.
I sit in the kitchen with the lights off. I don’t want them to be on because then I can see everything. I can see the spiders in the corner. I can see the mess I made trying — and failing — to make a decent stack of pancakes for my Saturday breakfast. I can see everyone that doesn’t talk to me hating me and saying to their friends and family that I’m such a fucking asshole and I’m obnoxious. It’s fine, really. I am. I am both. I’m pretty much everything anyone says I am. Their word is all I’m worth.
I lay on the table. I look up at the popcorn ceiling and imagine that I’m in a big microwave and that all those little white tumors will pop into delicious, fluffy kernels while my 74% water body cooks to combustion. I’ll end up like those crispy lizards you find in the bathroom when you least expect it. The ones that feel like autumn leaves.