Barwis thought of these things, and then thought of a world gone to hell.

******

David Bowie wrote “The Final Countdown” before “The Final Countdown” was actually written. “Space Oddity” is the final countdown. “The Final Countdown,” as a concept, as a thing, as a fragment of intellectual property, is inherently dishonest. And, disappointingly so. Countdown? Countdown to what, exactly? When Major Tom burst through the clouds into the infinite blackness of space, time became irrelevant. Unconstrained nothingness deems the fiction of spirituality meaningless. In his tin can, floating high (but not that high, when you consider everything) above the marbled gloss of an absurd world, Tom remarks, with clarity and with poise, upon the only thing that can, or should, exist. “Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows.”

******

On her twenty-sixth birthday, Melinda knew the end was apparent. She was sick, and for reals. She felt it in her stomach and in her chest. The disease was spreading. It would take her and she would disappear into nothing and no one besides her mother would remember her. She was scared, so scared. More scared than she’d ever been.

Scared enough to try kick the habit and focus on dying the right way, if such a thing could possibly exist.

******
Bill Iver was ready to call it quits. He knew the score and it was overwhelmingly against him. He called his wife and said, “you’re mostly what I think about.” He told her everything. He told her about the women, he delineated his sins in a cool and steadied voice. He washed himself clean and then he sunk into the hotel armchair, defeated. They sat in silence, each holding the receiver, each afraid. Words burned and failed. And she said, “Bill, you know I’ve loved you since the day I met you, since we were kids. And I said I would love you until the day I died. And I will.” And then she started crying.

The line went dead.

******
At this point, we come across a casual nexus of sorts. As the French say, “Il est difficle de vaincre ses passions, et impossible de les satisfair.” The French aren’t normally right. But, perhaps, here they are correct, even if indirectly. In the unsteady moments before the great leap, there are quiet respites of pause and reflection. The fruit rendered, seemingly, reflects the individual. Introspection, retrospection, self destruction. It’s different for everybody. In our case, though, it’s not so different.

******

Melinda, equipped with her newfound sense of purpose, had a thought. One last time, she would taste the thing that had controlled her life for so, oh so long. If not, she feared, the taste would haunt her, it would follow her like a phantom. Addiction turns the mind into something perverse, or maybe it just unleashes an optimality that is indistinguishable but alive in all. She drove into the valley in her ‘96 Taurus. It was hot and the air conditioning was broken. She sweat, heavily. She scanned the radio. Through the smog that sat low in the July afternoon, she heard it. It sawed her in two.

Here am I floating round my tin can, far above the moon, the planet earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.

Two hours later, she was waist deep in the ephemeral beauty of a chemical lacuna and it felt wonderful, so wonderful. She drove through the city, looking at the way that the lights blinked against the fabric of pavement and, occasionally, palm trees.

She thought, over and over, the planet earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.

******

The plyometrics conference was bore. “Who the fuck are these fucking jobbers,” thought Barwis. He wanted to hit people. He wanted to go do chest flys. He wanted to do pull –ups until his arms felt like jelly and his back muscles danced with innervation. He wanted to get into the octagon and bask in the glory of bloodlust. He wanted to run with his wolfpack, to be at peace again. He wanted to get into momentary fights over the raw beef that blotched the snow red. Barwis was sick of pussies, whiners, and complainers. Barwis thought about things. Everything. He hated the Cure and all their pretty boy fans. He was sickened by the thought of saturated fat. Homosexuals irritated him. P90X was for certifiable fruitcups and anyone who said otherwise could sit and spin. “The world ain’t about daisies and fairies and god damned butterflys and all that ridiculous bullshit!” He shouted, his voice sharply cutting across the conference center and interrupting a bespectacled professor’s lecture on tetany. The room went silent, eyes fixated upon him.

He felt cornered and uneasy, strangled. He took a deep breath, a pregnant pause of great enormity and unleashed a chalky howl that bounced off the walls and into the hotel lobby. Barwis, suddenly overtaken by a moment of sheer and raw orgasmic primality, ripped his clothes off. His shirt, his pants, his rocket-themed underpants. His balls dangled like a pair of Christmas ornaments hanging from a glorious White Fir. Fully nude (save a gold chain affixed with nugget of fool’s gold), he sunk to all fours and galloped from the conference room. He sped through the hallways of the hotel, grunting and breathless. He broke into the fast approaching twilight, his paws hardly touching the sidewalk that was still warm from the day’s heat.

******

Next Week: When We’re On Different Sides of The Globe

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