(Ch. 1 & 2)
By Jack Moody
1
Sometimes I can float. I can move things without touching them. People wouldn’t believe me so I don’t tell them. But I can.
The light reaches through my bedroom windows, and the motes of dust glitter as they float like a hundred fireflies. I’ve never seen real fireflies but that’s okay because I like mine. They’re here every morning. They have nowhere to go. My apartment is their glass jar.
The box cutter slides out from underneath my pillow but I didn’t tell it to. It wants me to hold it. Use it. I reach out my hand and wait for it to hover into my palm but it won’t. It says no. It says you have to do it yourself. So I don’t.
I walk to the bathroom and vomit. Streaks of bright red settle atop the bile and liquor and foam. That’s good. That’s fine. If it’s bright red then I’ve cut my esophagus or reopened the sores in my gums. But if it’s black then the ulcers have ruptured and I’m bleeding internally. That’s fine too. It’s just a different situation.
Then everything else ejects. It boils inside my guts before it leaves. I wipe until I’m clean and there are nothing but red streaks on the toilet paper. There are always cuts and blood. The cheap one-ply material that I steal from bars and restaurants was designed for precision and focus and fiscal responsibility. It was not designed for an extravagant procedure.
I continue wiping without thought, like a machine that’s malfunctioned. I wipe until the blood coats each square and I think about Elvis Presley. He had a name so famous that it feels odd using his full name instead of just Elvis. He died on the toilet. If I had a gun I would kill myself now and I would die on the toilet like him. People would remember me by two names. Those two names would disappear into a pile of other newspapers, and together they would all stack in the corner of the city dump. They would become shelter for rats and raccoons, and the rats and raccoons wouldn’t read the names but they would sleep beneath the printed words of a hundred obituaries.
I flush and the toilet paper rolls away, unfurling as it exits the bathroom and stops at the bedroom carpet. I hold out my hand and the toilet paper levitates. I wiggle my fingers, one at a time, and the toilet paper coils back around its cardboard tube and lands on the cold floor by my feet.
2
The woman at the liquor store is hiding something. Her face is caked in layers of makeup. I’ve never seen her do that before. There are sores on her face, covered in foundation, but their crusted edges are more noticeable when the cheap, yellow powder is applied over top. There is maybe no one in her life that will tell her this. No one who will tell her that she looked happier when the sores were visible and unhidden. It’s not my business either way. I don’t know her name, and she doesn’t know mine, but she is beautiful because she doesn’t judge me for the frequency of my visits.
I place the bottle of Old Crow whiskey onto the counter. “How are you, Mark?” She doesn’t look away from her feet when she talks to me. We don’t make eye contact and it’s so helpful. It’s so helpful.
I don’t answer and she didn’t expect me to. They were just words to fill the space during the otherwise silent interaction. I give her a ten-dollar bill and she hands over the bottle in a paper bag. A man is stalking through the aisles behind us. He wears a black sweatshirt and his soul breathes through the clothes like a death rattle. His face changes every time I glance at him. He is an amalgamation of the consequences I anticipate. One day someone will find me, and I won’t know what they look like, but they’ll know me when they see me. And so his face is malleable and distorted. He is a piece of the hive-mind that searches for me, whether he knows it or not. But he knows.
The man notices me watching him. Our eyes meet and knives pierce through my stomach and my mind evaporates into the familiar terror instinct. I choose flight. It is always flight. The first option is purely hypothetical.
I hold out my hand and the door opens, and I run. I run out into the parking lot, and I can’t look behind me. The bullet or the knife will have to slide into my back. I won’t look when they do it. Miracles occur around me, and maybe this will be another, and when I turn no one is there. My heart screams and pumps without rhythm, and I find my car, bend over next to it, and vomit. It’s a thin and shimmering viscous puddle and it talks to me. It says: They don’t know what you can do. And neither do you. Not yet. But you’re going to live forever. You’re going to see through the eyes of God. You can’t die.
The vomit says to me: You can never die.
My soul melts into the concrete and becomes the street, and becomes the world, and I exist without body, outside the walls erected by time and space, and in that hollowness I become peace. There are other paths. Unfurling before me. Diverging in every direction. They tell me to find the entrance, to follow them. To undo each mistake.
I sit in the car with the key in the ignition, and I drink until the bottle is half-empty, until the fear is a distant mirage.
The man walks out into the parking lot carrying a handle of vodka. He walks past my car, his eyes on the cloudless sky, and he doesn’t see me because I don’t exist. I live inside the veins of the earth.
End Chapter 2
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