centrifuge

 

The headlights of Derek’s Toyota Tercel violate the darkness outside, illuminating a curving road and harvested cornfields. The trees that we can see are skeletal, stripped of mystery with our tungsten bleach. I’m sitting in the backseat, searching for anonymous things beyond the reach of our light, though these things don’t want disclosure. Guilty secrets, they retreat into deeper sanctuaries of night.

Marie came up with the idea of going to the site of a recent murder. A goth slum exercise. There is Dark Wave music coming off soundtrack from the car radio: Heathen (A Thousand Thoughts) by Android Lust. We aren’t Goth. The contents of this car, Marie, Derek, Hab and I aren’t Goth. There are no covens and foggy heaths, no wampyre jewellery, no pagan dabblings. We’re real, normal with a touch of skater skid and a smattering of art student or whatever. It’s 11:53. Derek is driving and Marie is steering verbally. Hab and I are in the backseat, asking Marie questions. Her blue moon face turns to us occasionally, lit up aquamarine by the dashboard lights. I can see Derek’s fibrous goatee and sideburns. In the rearview mirror, there’s Hab’s sculpted coif and my own shaven scalp, just silhouettes against a lesser black. The red star of Marie’s joint glows as she takes a drag and exhales little wisps of ghost into the air. I’ve just finished mine, its pungent smoke still lingers in the air. I envision Marie’s breath and mine stirring into each other like consummation.

Marie explains the fresh legend as we go along. She’s read up on this. It had just happened days ago, countable hours ago. Apparently it was a murder/suicide. The murder was a girl that had gone to school with Marie’s older sister. The suicide was a male friend of the murder through their work with a courier company in the city. Suicide lived where the incident happened, in a house in the rural shorthills that had been converted into apartments.
"Rural apartments?" interjects Hab.
Marie stops talking for a few prolific seconds before she answers.
"Just shut up and I can tell you- f**k, are you going to pick this story apart for bad grammar too or something? Yes, rural apartments! F*****g leave that Lit U. s**t in your cranium for once! F**k! Life is not fiction! Drop your f*****g illusions! Jeezis!"
There’s something about Marie’s way of swearing that makes me want to laugh in applause. She really does put the ‘ing’ articulately at the end of it. F stop. F with a sudden stop (burp excuse me). Her sweet female voice streams off her tongue at colloquial speed with the same rhythm as her poetry, like weather, like tidal surge, like planetary spin.
"Okay, okay sorry! Go ahead."
"You’re such a dick sometimes, man!"
Derek laughs on reflex at this (burp tee hee). He loves stuff like this.
"I’m sorry, okay!? F**k! Tell the story and I’ll shut up!" says Hab.
"Yeah, can we hear the rest of the story, please?" I say, though I feel as though my request is muddled in the heat of their exchange.

Apparently, Suicide had made friends with Murder at work, though everything seemed entirely platonic. They just got along well in a crowd of employees that all got along. There was a social that night and they were going to go. No one knew of any plan that they were going together, nothing was ever known of any connection between the two through anything other than work. Neither ended up going to the social that night. This is what the other employees were saying to the papers.
"I remember that." I say. "It happened last week, right?"
Neither came to work the following day, nor any after that. The concerned were alerted and eventually the police were sent to Suicide’s apartment. They had both been shot. There was no naked rape victim, but there was a suicide note saying that he had killed her and willed his own death, though the media is barred from the actual gist of the letter. There was an admission of guilt and that’s all we know. We talk about our theories of what may have happened. Hab thinks they were having a relationship and were keeping it a secret from everyone else. Something had brought Murder to Suicide’s house. She hadn’t been forced as far as we know. There had to be a connection, she had died in his house to his hands. There had been emotion, there had been violence. Something had happened that was large enough to have death as a result. Marie imagined a rejection. Murder had gone to Suicide’s house, considering maybe, then deciding not to carry through. Maybe there had been a collision of expectations. I wonder what the last minutes of Murder’s life was like. Was there that piss-your-pants kind of fear, facing down the gun of someone she thought she could trust? Was there any moment of surrender or valiant defiance? For Suicide, was there an unrequited love happening? Was there a deep seated psychosis manifested in deluded connections to the victim?
There were so many canyons between the facts. It’s titillating to fill the blanks with innuendo. The nun’s pantylines.

So this is the foundation of this night. Everthing is set up, this mood, this contemplation of ‘Death as Spectacle’. This is the premise of David Cronenberg’s ‘Crash’ and America’s Greatest Snuff Films. Forehead to scythe. Derek’s radio is playing some strange hebephrenic Yoko-clone wailing to percussive brick rhythms on reverb. We’re getting good and weirded out as he steers the car into such deep centrifugal curves that we can’t settle into our seats. The terrain is getting hilly too, and he can’t get the odometer over 70 k no matter how he pushes it, provoking occasional yelps of mortality from the tires. We can see more trees out the window and the hollows now are deeper. Marie is perfectly quiet and I want to insult her just to hear her voice again.
"Why do I feel like we should have brought a Great Dane along?"
Derek laughs a dopey horse laugh.
"Zoinks!" he says. Marie stays quiet, looking so intensely out the window she can’t be disturbed. The sooner we find her haunted house, the sooner we can have a beer and some wings.

"Here it is! Here it is!" Marie is saying, slapping Derek’s arm. We slow down and watch the headlights illuminate a building with faded barnboard siding. It looks like a shack from Little House on the Prairie. Lights are on inside. Someone is alive in the house of Death. I look at the dark windows and wonder, which was Suicide’s, though nothing indicates anything. Everything is left to the imagination. Nothing indicates anything. As slow as Derek goes, the house still eventually disappears as our lights move on in accordance to the road. I’m disappointed, but Marie is in the midsts of some kind of reverential silence. I want to say ‘is that it?’ just to snap her out of it, but don’t. She feels some kind of connection. Pornography and the rube is all I see.
"Weird." declares Derek.
The goth music seems overplayed and inappropriate now.
"Can we change the station at all?" I know I’m ruining Marie’s mood. I sound annoyed. Derek changes the station and Aerosmith’s crotch rock comes in, as generic as fluorescent lighting. We ascend out of the hollow and up an escarpment. Now this road could be anywhere, one of the thousands I’ve driven on in my lifetime. The road is now straighter and flatter and we are now passing houses lit up with Christmas lights flickering with each other to form a luminous neighbourhood. Of course, it’s the middle of November, so these lights aren’t unusual. Almost all of them are devoid of colour, obliging the trend of the day rather than celebrating. Did we see any of these kinds of lights on the way here? We must have missed them. Derek celebrates the passing of hindrance by opening the throttle like a champagne bottle. Over the horizon, I can see wasted light from the city, caught in the vapour of a cloudy sky. Between that glow, and myself there is only blackness, the dark expanse of the country. This expanse surrounds every city, like a sea around an archipelago. I shuffle lower in my seat and put my knees up against the back of Marie’s, jostling her. She doesn’t protest, just looks out into that same space I’d been looking into. That’s good enough for me. I drift into an ecstatic half-sleep until I’m startled into wakefulness by Marie’s scream and I am suddenly thrown against the door. Derek is swerving to miss a possum that we’ve caught crossing the road. I can see it screaming at us with its jaws agape, then it disappears underneath us; I can hear the thud and feel the bump displacing our tires. Those tires then squeal in obeisance to gravity as the car descends to the gods of momentum. There is a flash of light and suddenly the entire world is an Armageddon between the immovable and unstoppable.
I don’t know how I got outside, but here I am, walking in a grassy field. Lights are spinning around me like sandflies. My equilibrium is chaotic and I don’t know where I’m going. Just fall down and get your s**t together- just right here, the grass is soft enough.
There.
There are voices and there are lights and there is someone touching me.
What is he saying? Why is he shouting?
Yeah, I‘m fine. Can’t you see? Oh s**t, I’m leaving you now.
Let go of me. Just let go.


The doctors at the hospital told me that Derek and Marie died almost instantly when we hit that truck head on. Hab had his seatbelt on and went for the ride when the Tercel rolled and bounced five times. They had to use the Jaws of Life, but he got out- he got out of it- with bruises and a concussion. Myself, I was thrown a good twenty feet from the car. The grassy field I landed in had cushioned me. I passed out seconds later from shock, never noticing that I had broken my hand (my f*****g right hand, my pencil- pushing, mouse-clicking, chicken-choking right hand). I had no idea of the violence of the accident. I feel so outside of it all. It still boggles my mind that it killed two people. Were those two actually friends of mine? Was I involved? I survived? What had I survived? Hab and I don’t even talk about it. In fact, we don’t talk at all. After the hospital and after the funerals, it was as if we never even knew each other at all.
He means nothing to me.

I’ve decided that I was in love with Marie. I still think of her, I still hear her voice. I sometimes think of her using my bedroom when she stayed over at my family’s house. I imagine how she felt waking up in unfamiliar surroundings, waiting to hear a familiar voice in the hallway outside. I should have gone to see her. I sometimes fantasize about her in compromising positions when I masturbate, feeling shame only after the act. I then think of her sitting in the corner of my room, watching my sadly sinister spirit, laughing sympathetically at me.

I’m convalescing in my family’s house right now, December the 27th, two days post-Christmas. I’m not going back to school for the time being. I’ve already missed too much school, so I figure my year is already washed up. I want to go down to St. Catharines to get my things, but Mum wants me to get better first. Whatever ‘better’ is. Maybe better is when I get out of this stupid, cumbersome cast I wear over my wrist. The only people who have signed it are my sister Ellie and her pubescent friends. One of them wrote "Boys Rock!" in red greasy marker on it, contaminating any possibility of saving this cast as a memento. Oh well, if that’s all there is, then f**k it. I don’t have anyone else to sign it anyway. It’s attached to me yet I feel it no longer belongs to me anymore. It means nothing to me now. F**k it. I spend all my time sitting here downstairs in my recroom, watching satellite images of music videos because I can’t decide which book I want to start reading. Kerouac or Jarman? I’m getting sick of these sugary dance videos. I want to hear some Headstones. I want to hear some old Genesis, maybe Stagnation or something. It would make me all moony and ponderous. I want to hear that new Vain Avengers cd I’d heard about. I’d love a copy of Exclaim magazine here with me but Wilberforce, flung far to the north of everything I need, has never even heard of Exclaim, nor does it have any stores that would even consider carrying it. I wish Matthew Firth hadn’t stopped publishing Black Cat 115, with its visceral morsels of fiction. I want to rent a movie like Eraserhead or Taxi Driver or something. Anything my sister would hate would be just what I need. Is Low Self Esteem Girl on DVD at all? Gawd, that’s a stretch.

My mother is upstairs now. I can hear the clanking of pots and the creak of floorboards above my head. She has the radio on loud. It’s Chantal Krevaziuk. She used to listen to singers like Neil Diamond or Gordon Lightfoot, but now it’s the new bohemian sound. She’s become part of the cast of Friends. I can hear Mom cooking upstairs to Gen X coffeehouse blues, I can hear the television showing me Destiny’s Child in front of me, but I’m more aware of the silence between these sounds. I’m aware of the fact that there is a silence beneath them. I listen for that silence like I’m hunting for it, because it’s elusive and it feels good to notice it.

The wood stove is starting to fail from lack of fuel and the room is getting colder. Its fan is shut off already. I could take a chance and try to light up another log but I’ve never been able to get a fire lit before. I look at that stove in the corner of the room and think of all the times I spent laying on this same couch, listening to the wood pop and break inside that stove. When the fire would take and the heat was enough, the fan would turn on and billow warmth across the room to me. I would then sleep deeper than I’ve ever slept before or since. It was my late father’s job to boss the fire to life. He seemed to have the knack for provoking flames from the wood, sparking the relationship between the two elements. As he became sicker, he became tired of being the one to cut the wood into digestible sizes for the stove, being the one to truck the wood into heavy bushels. Quickly, the whole chore of keeping the house warm lost its meaning to him. After my father died, my mother, who took it as an added inconvenience and would only do it if the cold was serious outside, inherited the chore. Ellie was too little to do it and, like I said before, I just can’t get it right. My older sister Giselle had already moved out of the house and started university. So after my father’s death, the house went cold more often than not. Keeping the house warm no longer meant anything to us either.

This Christmas was a disaster. I hate Christmas, really. Its syrup gets into everything. There’s the expectation to go out and buy, as obliged, the thought that counts. I didn’t buy anything for anyone though. What thought could I have given that could be held in hand? A wreath of thorns? There is no Christ in Christmas anymore. I kept thinking of a wreath of thorns. Giselle brought over her boyfriend Ted for Christmas Eve. They came loaded with baggage and boxes and overtures of a potential wedding engagement, I suppose. We may never know. As soon as they walked in, I knew it was not going to be good; the way Giselle grabbed Ted’s arm as she introduced him, in my mother’s unhappy polite greeting. So when Giselle left Ted alone with me in the living room to put her things in the kitchen with Mom, I knew exactly what to do. I walked out of the room. In the hallway, I passed Giselle, who met me with a look of wounded anger in her eyes. She rushed into the living room to sit with Ted until my Mum would come in to entertain.

At supper, it was Ted and Giselle carrying the weight of conversation, mostly with each other. Occasionally, my mother would remind Ellie to sit up and El would whine in protest, but mostly the rest of us quietly ignored the happy couple. When the main course was out of the way, Giselle brought out the apple pie she had baked as a favour for the meal. She began serving, with pieces of cooked apple oozing off the spatula back home to the plate. Mother tried to coach her, but neither could hide their agitation, neither would relent. Giselle raised her voice, telling Mum she had it under control while Mum ignored her, telling her she could show her how to do it. Mum then stood up and took hold of the spatula, trying to wrest it from Giselle’s grip while Giselle pulled back.
"God damn it, Mom, will you just let me do it?"
"Can you do it without destroying it?"
As they shouted these things, I looked across the table at Ted, watching the waves of fear on his face as he beheld the wild look in my mother’s eyes. He even jumped when Giselle shouted. I then began to feel a wave of nausea seize me, the room shifting and spinning. My sister let the spatula go, throwing her arms in the air. The pie no longer mattered. The clank of the spatula hitting the pan was what echoed in my head just before I passed out. That was my Christmas holiday.

It’s awfully cold in this room right now. I pull the blanket covering the couch over my shoulders. I notice the basement window aglow with daylight, so I get up and take a look through it. The snow on the ground outside is fresh and white in the bright midday sun. The sky is blue. The sparse trees around my family’s wooded lot are dark and young against that brightness. I think I’ll go outside. I go up the stairs, put on my jacket and my father’s boots and am soon out in the full winter light. White, blue and black. The air is cold, but there is no breeze, so I can feel the softness of the sun. I walk into the woods and see some golden leaves clinging to a young sapling. White blue, black and gold. I notice then that my footprints are the only ones in the wood. The snow is flat and smooth, uninterrupted except for my own footprints. This snow is my own.

Reviews

Amazing you're an amazing writer, although who needs opinion when you're this good. I admire how your point of view works into everything so smoothly. The details are not at all out of order like mine. Positively awesome like jaw dropping, I've never read better!