404 Documents Twelve: Epiphany in Aisle Nine

(More 404.)


I was in a grocery store with Stella, and I think I was awake. I mean, I think this was real now. Was. Was. Is? I’m not dreaming? I can’t tell anymore.

I pace in an aisle, and try to ignore that playdough smell still clinging to my headboard made of cheap plaster and wood, held together by nails and tacks and tape, a head lined with wires buzzing zzzz as the moments stretch like taffy between eager childrenfingers. The meat of my body tenses, a strange thing stretched over a framework of ancient calcium and phosphorus bzzzt pig hearts quietly wrapped in cellophane. bzzzzpptt electrical current running through us all. I can feel the weight of the atmosphere, the pressure of miles of air and radiowaves and wifi signals pressing down on my chest. I can’t breathe in here, you assholes! I scream, but no one responds. The pig hearts are all pulsating in unison with my own pig heart, convulsing in the encaged crevasse of my chest. A woman grabs her child close and they rush past this crazy bag of meat and bones that hasn’t shaved in a week, oscillating neurotic frequencies in a medium of thin air. I gasp and reach out for Stella’s reassuring hand, but now I can’t find it and my hand just hangs out there, awkward and useless. I’m alone, she’s in aisle 9 looking at cat food.

“Should we get the pine stuff?” she asked, too far away really for me to respond conversationally. I grunted and lurched sideways, my hand still sticking out at an odd angle like I was a statue or Frankenstein coming to life.

It felt like someone was standing behind me, squeezing me in a bear hug with all their might. Impending doom - chest pains - heart attack - or what you might experience when you're at a party, and you realize that you just took the proverbial 'one shot too many,' and you're trying to hide it from everyone and act like you're really okay and not about to puke all over yourself, piss down your leg, or fall over. You have to get out.
“No!” I yelled.
She looked at me and shrugged. “We can’t flush the clay stuff is all.”
“This isn’t about fucking fucking groceries,” I mumbled aloud, pushing the sounds clumsily past a tongue gone thick and limp.
All my life I have denied the truth. High tide is coming. The established rules are a 404. Prison camps. The grim meathook future for ever. “It’s the end of everything. But not. It’s like. Fuck. I- I have to get out of here.”

I was staring blankly now at endless aisles of identical neon packages. A life of OCD, emotional distance and passive aggression, all defense mechanisms, shielding me and those around me from an incredible amount of constant, undirected rage (following process psychology: the rage is a blind for sadness, which is a blind for some as of yet invisible, unfulfilled need. mommy's teat wasn't around long enough when i was a baby or some bullshit. though well actually i was, not surprisingly, breast fed for a fairly long time. till almost 4 i think. and none of that explains my deep seated desire to coat the earth in ash, or my obsessive pattern-making habits. i never socialized well. they told my parents i was autistic.)

i had never owned up to it before. i’m a calm person, i’d said. calm and rational. count the tiles in the bathroom, touch the light 7 times before leaving. i exhausted myself every day trying to reign “antisocial behaviors” in. my curse is morality. the buyer was just trying to strip me of that restraint. somehow, he knew what was under my surface.

repeat after me:
no (not the knife) no (not that brainless fuck driving that ferrari skull shucked like an oyster) no (not through the window) no no no no no no
the organs are not playthings
the organs are not playthings
the organs are not playthings - why did i always accept the buyer’s missions? because he knew. all of these tangents are tied together with hidden threads. these invisible threads connected dream images, (waking up screaming from playdough women, banging my head into the walls of the building i’ve become, the being i saw while waking last night, hovering over the bed, my own mirror image, a monster without a conscience, bradley the buyer, my alter ego), and could provide a stepping off point for me to tie all my life events together, as i invariably do whenever i experience emotions i can't immediately process.
i lurched toward the checkout aisles. stella followed behind me, a crate full of nonsense tucked under her arm. (cat litter, deodorant, pens, lighters, a stick of butter, celery, milk, and chocolate syrup.)

you spend your whole life locked in struggle against yourself, and some asshole blows by with a head full of coke and breaks every bone in your body. who is to say then that the asshole with the head full of coke doing 180 and mowing down pedestrians isn't living more in the moment than you? and who is going to be there in your own private Armageddon to tally up the score?

this too i could endure, but why? what's my carrot? my prize that'll keep me kicking another day, another month, another year? (until i attain it and need to invent another, or until it is yanked away from me, and after more pointless existential reflection, i find another flashy distraction to pass the time, until that time when the fires burn so low that i don’t care anymore, no longer struggle against my cage bars, like an animal that’s been in the zoo so long that there’s nothing left in their eyes but liquid.)

...time to invent another imaginary salvation, or--