Excerpt: What Didn't Happen: A Semi-autobiographical Novella

It was nine o’clock on a grey and dreary day, and my mind had wandered off days ago to abstractions and phrases which floated in my mind for hours, congealing into strange dreams, some lucid, some invisible. I only saw the likes of these dreams when I did nothing for days but smoke and leave the guitar, never leaving the apartment my parents were renting for me while I was studying, not even answering the phone or looking at the computer to maintain contact with the outside world. I wouldn’t know how long I’d been skipping class unless I looked at the calendar, and I couldn’t be bothered to do that any more than I could be bothered to sort through my piles of laundry or wash my dishes for the first time this month. All I could truly be bothered with was lighting up one more bowl before heading through the expansive parking lot of the apartment complex and over a small, fairytale world bridge to the grocery store, where I was sure I’d steal a cart and be followed home. Yes, that’s what I’d do if I could be bothered to walk, or even to eat for that matter. I truly felt like the living dead before lighting up. There was a gentle mist of rain, but I stood on my balcony in my underwear for a smoke regardless and wondered how my life had so rapidly become shambles and how I had lost track of what I was even doing on this planet.
Now that I’d had my first smoke upon awakening from an alternate plane of existence, I was ready to get back on track and start the day the right way: with a newspaper and a cup of tea. It would have made sense if the room hadn’t been vibrating and bulging in and out when I stepped back in from the balcony, and if I weren’t still seeing the last bits of smoke hanging in the air and distorting my vision. I lazily scanned the headlines of a paper published ten days ago while heating some water on my squallid, oil covered stove. For a moment I considered putting on some trousers, but decided against it. It was more satisfying to slump on my oversized, cigarette-smelling papasan with my tea.
The paper said something to me about how people always need to one-up each other. Life was all one overemphasized contest and everyone needed to be on top, even when it came to pain. It was like this... When one person feels like shit, someone else has to be shittier, the next one needs to claim he’s dying and the next one needs to be dead. When one person thinks he lives in the worst place on earth, some other country across the sea gets blown apart until nothing remains of a shadow of the land resembling the new settlements on the moon. I wouldn’t dare to complain about my life even though it sucked because if I did that, some optimistic creep would make me feel guilty for not being happy with a mediocre life. Even thinking about this while holding the dry crinkled pages of the free newspaper was a bad idea because there couldn’t possibly be a happy story to re-enforce the mediocrity and despair of my life, there had to be non-stop depressing news annoyingly trying to remind me that things can always, inevitably become worse. I prefered that outlook over reading positive news which reminded me that somewhere along the way, I had the potential to be more than I was but I had lost it long ago, in fact to a particular week I could recall during sophomore year of high school...
The paper was so interesting I decided that maybe I’d watch the news tonight. It wasn’t nine in the morning when I was reading the paper and drinking tea to start the day.
It was nine at night. The late sunset of upstate New York in winter was just setting when I woke up, and I didn’t have a night job to blame this on... discounting, of course, drug dealing as a night job.
I fished around through piles of paper and cigarette butts and discarded underwear for the silver oblong shape of my very out-of-date remote control and the powder blue cushion slid part way off my papasan in the process, revealing the rattan skeleton. There was a layer of dust and nut shells on everything, especially the little crevices between the puffs in the cushion. I wasn’t a slob and didn’t like living in a mess, but I couldn’t care enough to do anything about this except occasionally re-position the cushion between spliffs, pipes, bongs, and the occassional hit of ketamine. The remote would have been lost if it wasn’t tied to a coffee table with a string so I couldn’t lose it in the sea of uncategorized stuff. The TV distracted me from the mess.
I felt as if possibly I should do something productive to society now that I had spent the day napping, but I also felt like I owed society nothing and I had enough of a reason to sleep all day thanks to mutant viruses. I hated all the healthy, active people around me who got up in the morning, went to bed at night, and somehow contributed to society by having a real job. I assumed that every last one of them was a phony.
I momentarily thought about shopping at Wal-Mart, but I was already banned for life because I had a scooter race with a buddy and knocked some fat ass single mom who “needed” a scooter off her scooter, so I was “bad for business”. Being banned for life pretty much ruined my chances of getting any available job in town, too. Wal-Mart was the only one left and I couldn’t get a job at a place that had banned me for life, so I just kept up the drug dealing while telling Mother that I was indeed selling her stupid old shoes on eBay to pick up some cash. Actually, I just wore the shoes occassionally. I was wearing a pair when she called me at that very moment.
“How are classes going, honey?”
“Good.”
“What are you learning in Chemistry these days?”
Don’t mention trying to make your own acid and moonshine...
“Uh.... cognitive functions of the mind... and uh, brain chemistry. Lucid dreaming and crap. Kind of ties in with Philosophy and Mind class.”
I had no idea what was happening. In fact, I’d already withdrawn from every class I was taking previously since I wasn’t even sure what to do with my life yet. So far I had spent my college days fluctuating between dissipation and isolation, being a hermit in my off-campus apartment or a drunkard in every other apartment.
Everyone said that I could be something if I just had motivation. I wished. It seemed as if every few weeks I was back in the student health center complaining about one thing or another, getting a note to stay out of class and nothing else of use.
I was nearly certain that I had never recovered from the virus which had struck me during the second week of sophomore year of high school. The Mutant Virus, I called it. I could almost feel the micro-organisms still crawling around inside of me like a thin emulsion of poison and blood. Like the humours in a Renaissance Medical text, but populated entirely by microscopic furry critters who had gone to the dark side.
t was during my second year of high school that this insanity, this pestilence, had begun, but back then everyone in the school office wanted to think I was just skipping school, not that I was lying on the couch unable to do anything except for hallucinating occassionally. As I lay on the couch years ago, everything in my line of sight had blurred together, and I was only half aware of the news when I heard that several of my friends had just dropped dead from the same virus I was fighting off in a cloud of uninsured struggle for survival happening outside my consciousness. I thought there were zombies after me, I imagined I was going to have my brain ripped open, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe it would just be an excuse to not go back to school again, ever. Because then I wouldn’t just be giving my classmates pnemonia like I did in eighth grade, I’d actually be unable to stop munching on their innards instead of taking notes. Apparently when I looked back on it that cold night in my lonely apartment, there was probably a reason I was unpopular: the idea of being a zombie didn’t disturb me nearly enough. But I never did die or become a zombie despite living in a household too poor to afford health insurance, no, instead of being welcomed into the afterlife or the world of the undead I crawled into a tunnel of light from the couch only to be kicked back into the living realm to forever be a chronically fatigued survivor-- but for what?

...

When I mulled it over I had a brilliant idea: since it was so late I might as well not bother doing anything productive, why not go to the liquor store? Sure, I was a year underage and looked younger though I felt older, but I had a fake ID just for nights like this! I was more or less asleep standing up, but too awake to go back to bed without having a few drinks first. I slipped out into the dark but boiling night, got into the old junker I drove, turned the radio up as loud as possible and put on sunglasses although it was dark already.... and I sped down the driveway.... for hours it seemed, only to reach the nearest liquor store. Down featureless lanes, past featureless houses with invisible, silent people neither missing nor present, down an empty and soulles highway, letting my mind drift as far away as possible, looking at nothing at all and thinking of nothing at all, meditating and nearly sleeping at the wheel when--
I jolted awake as if hit by lightening, I hit what felt like a large speed bump that I never realized existed before but then a person’s face crashed into my windshield for a second as I tried to slam the brakes but realized it was already too late.
The car shook like a volcano ready to errupt before coming to a fully motionless stop, and I opened the door onto the dark, windy road. The air was like a hot blast toasting any skin that was exposed even though the sun was below the horizon. My car was on a very subtle slope and I heard a noise like the innards of a pumpkin being scooped out when I shifted my weight on the way out. Just as I feared, I could see blood trickling over the dimly lit pavement, running from a partially severed head into a gutter. The stench of blood and bodily fluids was so overwhelming I immediately went to the trunk to get out a gas mask that I always kept in an emergency kit in the trunk of the car.
As the furnace-like wind whipped across the open road, I realized that my gas mask was buried with the rest of the emergency supplies under useless items and stuff I was supposed to sell on eBay so my parents could have an empty house and I could have some money. I pulled out a box of curtain rods, miniature candles, a rainbow wig, Barbies, dozens of children’s books, fabrics, expired medicines, my mom’s old and unwanted MP3 player, a tutu sized for a grown man, a shitty outdated computer from 2049, a bear costume-- I stopped right there and looked from the thick plush material in my hands to the corpse, back to the bear costume, back to the corpse. I forgot about finding the gas mask because my mind had moved on to a greater and more complex idea: I was going to make a human corpse look like mere roadkill.
It made such perfect sense that my brain almost couln’t process it... if I put the bear costume on the corpse, people would assume it was road kill. After all, this was route 19; it was like an all-you-can-eat roadkill buffet for rednecks and hobos. No one was going to notice one more dead animal by the road.
I took the costume out, unrolled it, and shook out the dust. It looked a bit worn, but it was good enough for the purpose I needed it for.
My heart was pounding like crazy as I unzipped the plush, soft, padded stomach of the costume and knelt down beside the corpse that I had just created. I whispered into his ear, “don’t worry! This is our little secret... you’re now a bear!”
I lifted the corpse’s left leg and tried to force it into the leg of the bear costume. A very few cars sped by and I had to ignore the urge to run before I had finished my work. The crotch of the costume started to tear as I twisted it and tried to contort the body and stuff it into the bear suit, as if I were dressing a giant comatose infant for a big night of showing off a cute costume. Even in death, the man was making it clear that he did not want me stuffing him into this outfit. It must have taken forever before I heaved a sigh of relief while pulling the hood over the man’s head. I left him face down in the suit so that no one would see the human face, and I knew that no one would have the time to actually inspect a big fluffy piece of road kill. Just for added effect, I squirted him with a bit of ketchup from last night’s fast food bag so that the blood appeared to be outside the costume rather than in it.
The police wouldn’t catch up with me, I assured myself... if I didn’t get caught, I wouldn’t go to jail, and I could go back to my moderately shitty life instead of getting an extra shitty life. As I got back into the car and lit up another joint while plugging in that shitty old music player that I had just decided to keep, I realized how precious freedom was. Maybe life wasn’t the greatest these days, but just knowing that I had bought myself the time to escape was enough to make me high even without the usual gang of substances. I let the flavor linger with each long draw in. Even though it was sweltering outside I left the window down so I could feel the road going by me while I listened to the classical tunes on the music player.
Stripper wife or no stripper wife, I decided that moment that I was going to move to Canada, the real land of freedom. I hadn’t called Stacy the Stripper in over a year now, but I thought I might as well try to get back in contact with her. When I got the answering machine, I talked like we had never broken up.
“Hey babe, it’s Blaine. I’m coming back to Canada for good this time. Call me back later, I should be there by midnight. Love you. Bye.”
The plan couldn’t fail. I was the only one on that endless lonely road at this time of night, and I felt like I owned the whole continent I was so invincible. I felt as if my soul were detaching itself from my body and flying away, far into the night, with no limits on where it could go-- it could be anywhere by morning. I felt like I had lost myself, but I was soon to be truly free.