The distant mountains sat dark blue in the fog-streaked ether. Barwis sighed, clenching his teeth tight against each other. Exhale. Inhale. He counted in irregular patterns of serpentine disillusionment. He spat dark mottles of blood onto the dirt, shivering in the morning chill. He wrapped the twine around his upper arm and pulled until it cut deeply into his circulation, forcing his median cubital skyward.
Barwis buried needle the in his arm and prayed for warmth. Prayer, of course, existed only as a conceptually ironic disillusion of a man lost in the wilderness.
*****
There are some who say that the path to ruin is a long and twisted journey, a trickling and meandering free-fall spurred by poor decisions and the sirenic call of manufactured ethereality. They say that through the clouds, the ground comes upon you, masking both its force and its proximity. In its own sputtering way, the atmosphere draws the body towards the patchwork. Impact is disastrous, but it has its own local logicality.
For his part, Barwis had stumbled upon the end in remarkably rapid fashion. It began with one-legged whore and travel-sized tube of anal lubricant. It would conclude, Barwis suspected, with lubeless sodomy delivered at hands of shrieking demons in the fiery stomach of hell.
*****
Melinda Sanchez lost her leg when she was 19 years old. The terrain in rural Northeastern Oregon is subtle but dangerous. In her ATV, she had mistimed a jump over a creek. The crash had been underwhelming but painful, the dainty pastoral silence punctuated by a dull thud. She landed with the weight of the machine pushing her torso into the rock-dappled embankment and she had laid there for hours. A hunting party found her, alone, unconscious, and looking startlingly beautiful in nearly dried puddle of vomit and urine.
The doctors at Union Valley Community Hospital saved Melinda’s life, but not her leg. Weeks later, Melinda returned home. Legless, spiritless, dejected. The defeat in her eyes was palpable and disorienting. She faded in and out of static. On a car trip to Portland, she told her mother that she used to feel beautiful but, now, she felt empty and cold. Her mother said nothing and stared ahead at the road.
By happenchance, Melinda met Paul. Paul cooked meth. Paul gave Melinda meth and she enjoyed it. She lost her teeth but acquired Hepatitis C. Paul is a sidenote here, but not an unimportant one. That’s the story and there isn’t much more.
Reality is like cement.
*****
Sometimes, there’s nowhere to go. Sick of being sick, tired of being tired. Tired of being. Melinda moved from city to city, and all of it, always, was the same. The waves pounded her. The men, in seedily unmarked brothels, pounded her. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think. She felt the phantom pains of a limb and life that were no longer there. The chemical smell of methamphetamines resonated, but only for momentary slivers of time.
*****
Bill Iver owned a car dealership just north of Reno Nevada. He’d been born in the desert and he’d be damned if he didn’t die in the desert. People who knew Iver knew him as a reckless son of a bitch. But they also knew him as a man that you could trust, a man that you could believe in. Iver didn’t know if the world had meaning or if meaning transcended the world. He didn’t think long or hard about those sorts of things. He thought about money and cars. Women. Procure and reproduce. More is better. More is the only thing. Iver wanted more because there was more to have.
*****
Barwis had met Iver in Los Angeles. Barwis was in LA to attend a plyometrics conference. Iver was there to meet up with a woman he’d met on an online singles site. That woman, though, that woman had been a liar. Her profile picture was no less than 20 years old. No longer an athletic Peruvian woman, she was now a rotund sow and she disgusted Iver. He met her at a bar, befuddled. They talked for a brief moment. Iver hit her in the mouth and drank her drink, a whiskey sour. He left the bar, salient in his own humiliation.
Disconnected and wounded, he dragged himself back to the hotel. The trip had been for nothing and he felt like a fool. Deep down, he knew he deserved this.
*****
In the shade, we see three people. Separate but the same. The night is long and dark and especially so when you believe in nothing.
Next Week: The World at the End of the World
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