Part 1: A Table For the Ravens

A perfunctory introduction to your timeless hero, your courageous brother Narrator, Echo !...the deadbeat.

Intense alienation has the unfortunate quality of making for terrible story telling. After all, isolationist policies tend to be among the most alienating. Everywhere else, however, the people were glowing: their horse-toothed smiles and perfectly coordinated work out clothes, masterfully presented in a way as inaccessible as it was arousing. The vibrant lust bubbling aimlessly in the featureless canyons between my ears was a horny parasite, blustering ravenously without any knowledge that I was in fact dead. Unremitting somnambulism is a remarkable feat of the unconscious mind, and certain cases have been known to persist for decades. 

I stared out the window blindly, drifting there and for a moment suspended carelessly in the wind, drifting in torpid melancholy. 

Listen 

listen to the whizzing, sloshing

movement

Hits me when I’m with myself.

We don’t get along well

When I listen to the traffic.

Sounds of desertion and bubbly drunk death

Twisted and aimless to drive off my breath

A passenger Shanghaied along for the ride 

Carried away to pass myself by 

Listen 

listen to the whizzing, sloshing

movement.

I don’t stay long

When we listen to the traffic.  

Stillness. The window was sealed safely against the onslaught of the street below. Inside was the protective familiarity of the same air breathed a thousand times, the same walls with the same stuccoed patterns. The same mountain of unwashed clothes, the same immaculate kitchen, though only from disuse rather than intention. The stale air of my mausoleum is like a fortifying salt breeze in a tuberculosis sanitarium. Hints of sulfur complement a smattering of tangy alkaline metals, with a turbulent finish of bitter misanthropy. It takes a truly virtuoso palette to detect the nuance.

Outside was the dreadful animation of glittering sunbeams and spandex, tasteful scarves and fixed gear bicycles. Everyone hurrying to come then hurrying twice as fast to leave, nobody dared to be caught stupidly in between. You’ve always gotta have a destination. Always gotta alert the relevant social media accounts. That’s all of them, by the way.  And most of all, you gotta stay relevant. Moving. Arriving. Alerting. Moving. Witty captions, big smiles. Tag me! At a restaurant. Here’s our food! Wait, don’t touch it yet. Let me post this. Now throw it away. We’ve gotten what we needed. For lunch, it’s cigarettes and crunches. But only off camera. The garnishes are diegetic, but we’ll leave the lung cancer hush hushed.  

 I grimaced at the bright, pulsing colors. I was a sick dog, one whose continued intestinal deluge brought on only protracted discomfort rather than relief. It would have made for a terrible dating profile. I’d like to think my owner was staring at me, reviled, and I was staring right back. What was going on out there? Was it an illness or a cure? Halfway through a grease stained thought about whether to tweet this clever thought or add it to my story, I felt the trailer coupling shear from its hitch. Tires blown all the way out, my mind crashed into a sand dune as all motion came to a dusty halt. I mean, I had all the thoughts. There was just nothing pushing them. I didn’t notice it until just then, but my room had at least double the gravity of similarly sized rooms. You would have said so in an online popup survey, or a brief ninety second customer satisfaction survey following this call. I lit a cigarette, the smoke falling into one corner and refusing to move. 

Torquing my neck around in the sand, I grabbed my phone off the floor. The screen was shattered. It had been that way for months. Twenty seven new voicemails. It was 11:18 am. It was Wednesday. Days of the week can be remarkably challenging to get in order, but this particular Wednesday was one that fell exactly two days after Monday. 

“Hello, Echo? Just checking in to see if everything’s-”

“Echo I’ve got nobody to cover any of your clients today, please can-”

“If you’re harboring any desire of returning to work you’d better-”

There seemed to be very little purpose in continuing on to the remaining twenty four voicemails. I’m efficient as hell. No room for redundancy here. The hallway terminated in three separate doorways, a suffocating array of choices for a mind recently marooned in the desert. My unwashed face trudged by in the mirror, a week’s worth of paralysis and human grease blurred back at me. That face was mostly red, lavender and yellow. In all the wrong places. Hardly more than a year ago the same glance would have found them to be blue, tan and white. There was no double gravity back then. I guess my feet were planted squarely beneath me. They were torqued slightly outward to brace my hips. My glutes were engaged, bringing my pelvis forward. My abdominals were flexed and my ribcage was centered squarely above my hips with a neutral spine. I was capable of generating force. F**k, I was unstoppable. I’ll tell you, without even lying, that having my feet underneath me was strange. I even had momentum, moving uphill with late nights and early mornings. It was perfectly unnatural - the classes, the charade, the salmon or cerulean collared button-ups and slacks. There were Oxford style lace-ups, with and without broguing, and wouldn’t you know it that some people found the broguing to be gaudy and unbecoming. How the f**k was I supposed to know? I was already wearing the goddamn salmon button up. And then all my clients - that was a fancy word for “people getting played for my non-existent expertise” - were sapped of anything but contempt and painkillers. What sense was there in compromising my integrity f*****g around with the interim decades between me and them? I’d arrived at their conclusion and still had my youth. Hell yeah. It was honestly the surest measure of my sanity, if you asked me. 

Tranquility Meadows could have been the name of an asylum, rehab, hospice, track housing development or after school club for silence enthusiasts with matching passions for fine grasses. I always thought Tranquility Meadows sounded like the destination for well-behaved horses after being euthanized. A sugar cube for the geriatric Clip-Clop before he got both barrels under the jaw and spent eternity chewing and galloping away in Tranquility Meadows. Sometimes I was jealous as hell of that. I wouldn't even insist on the sugar cube. It was beige meals three times daily, and Bingo on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Sometimes I would hide puzzle pieces right when one of them got close to finishing. Then I’d put ‘em down on someone else's lunch tray or by their feet, but only several days later. Other times I’d replace religious books with pamphlets on STD transmission or funeral home ads. They were both infinitely more useful than the Bible or Quran anyways, so you’re welcome. I was pretty clever when I substituted Mornings with Jesus with the second volume of the Mouldings and Bannisters for the Ornate Woodworker. 

I quit playing games. I left buttons undone. I wasn’t giving anyone physical therapy exercises, I was really just reappropriating their prescriptions. But not to hurt anyone - those people were over medicated anyways. I was undermedicated. It was an ideal circumstance. So I stopped seeing my clients at Tranquility Meadows. I’d show up and hang out in the rooms with ventilated patients for as long as I could without being noticed. The air conditioning was never on in them, because who was going to complain? The air was heavy and still, the only indication of life being the gas exchange and compression of the ventilator and the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor. It was perfectly predictable and uncommonly soothing. 

Reviews

[Dennis Wolf]

Hahaha hahaha
There is a certain mood to this, it's dark and I like it.

The way you have with some of the words is actually funny, even though... There's nothing supposed to be funny in any of this.

The wondering about what the name of the place sounds like... That's priceless.
I'll be reading along soon.

[Lizzylou2004]

when reading this, It took me a second to connect the lines, and I could still be wrong, but it seems like a lot of what you are explaining here is PTSD episodes/triggers. In your review of my story, you said that your writing often reflects your own experiences, so if I am right, and you're experiencing these, then 1.) I commend you for being open about it, and 2.) I really hope you are getting help, and talking to someone. I know you're a veteran, and sadly 22 veterans a day commit suicide due to PTSD situations. Overall I really enjoy your writing. your choice of words, your descriptions, everything makes it really interesting to read. keep up the good work!!

[Cat Armstrong]

I will enthusiastically reciprocate with anyone rad enough to leave some thoughts for me!