 Death in the Third Person
by Josh Wardrip
I want to look through him rather
than at him. It occurs to me now that if I try hard enough I can accomplish just that. And
so I do look, but with caution lest the tactile force of my gaze puncture the crepe
paper of Murk's brittle cheek. I feel I should turn, but he's got this look, like some
enraptured five-year-old plopped down in front of the tube on Saturday morning –
slack-jawed and dopey-eyed, a point of spittle forming at the corner of his thin mouth.
The skin on his face and arms is pallid, like putty. A real goddamn zombie, this one. And
just like in the movies, I imagine it'd take nothing less than one right through the head
to put this spaz-boy out of the game (you gotta aim for the head, they always say). But
while my intent is no less sordid, I didn't come here to send Murk packing on Charon's
infernal ferry; just assume let him grow ripe, stiffen and putrefy here – the edge of
the world for all intents and purposes – in the stench of urine and spoiled milk.
//
Murk's TV is this fuzzy-screened old piece-a-shit with rabbit ears and
broken turn-knob controls. It perches atop two dirty brown milk crates, perilously, like a
novice tightrope walker. It occasionally flickers from color to b&w then back again,
rendering the unwatchable less watchable. And why do I find it unwatchable? It's not what
you think. I turn away because of boredom, because I've actually seen this one, and
because Murk's dumb face is more amusing, and indeed more telling. It's his interest that
engages me now, his bizarrely unwilling suspension of disbelief – for I really
believe he believes. . . . And so I'm just staring, looking at him looking. It's so easy
to forget now: the whole variegated salad bowl of motives, misgivings and dead ends
culminating in my sitting here on a yellowish Salvation Army couch embroidered with this
godawful floral pattern, watching some amateurish home-movie tripe – all of it
recedes in the dead shine of Murk's muted frog eyes.
//
High on the wall, behind the TV and directly opposite me, someone has
scrawled the words EAT SHIT in bright-red spray paint. The letters are large and clumsy,
like a grade school art project gone awry. And while I suppose the text could very well
have been composed by Murk himself in one of his more lucid moments, I prefer to imagine
the words oozing from the crummy brown paneling in some freak manifestation of divine
will, like those miraculous statues of weeping Virgins and bleeding Christs. To be sure,
such an unlikely phenomenon would lend itself to a whole array of potentially fruitful
avenues of metaphysical inquiry, yet I find myself quite unable to dwell on these lofty
matters for more than a few flickering moments. Eat shit indeed: to the pragmatic mind it
appears redundant, unsanitary and altogether unnecessary – and as such, precisely
summarizes the manner in which I occupy my time. In certain circles, a propensity for
attaching ecstasy to the most base acts is a rare and noble thing, and it pleases me to
confess I move with ease in such exalted company. Yet the blunt truth of the matter is
that eating my own shit has long since lost its charm, having dwindled to nothing less
than a dreary nightmare of which the present predicament is only the latest episode.
//
My tired eyes tilt back down to the tube and I find it is nearly
finished now, this one more inept than most, though somehow less laughable. Last time,
however, I did laugh – at the way the scene cuts precisely at the moment the
rusted nail is to be driven through the boy's left testicle, and instead shows blood
splattering the masked face of the hammer-wielding would-be sadist. The scene then
awkwardly cuts to the agonized, screaming face of an adolescent-looking Hispanic boy. The
lighting and color saturation here differ drastically from the previous shot, suggesting
that the boy is not even in the same room (or same movie) as his attacker. There's even a
rather stunning jump cut, bringing to mind À Bout De Souffle, though I suspect
incompetence is the culprit here, and not, regrettably, artsy pretense. Immediately
following the shot of the boy's face comes another jagged transition, this time to an
admittedly convincing C.U. of the bloody genitals nailed straight through into the wood of
the chair. Various feigned tortures follow, and eventually, as I remember, the boy is
finally dismembered and partially devoured by the four or five men, all attired in these
rather cheesy black hoods. It's all demonstrably phony, yet it somehow unsettles me now
– not because of verisimilitude, but because of what strikes me as an undeniable
enthusiasm designed, no doubt, to compensate for what it lacks in technical prowess.
Unremarkable as it is, I can’t shake it.
I haven't felt such revulsion in a very long
time – not, at least, since this private little epic of mine got under way several
months ago at an upscale soirée in Vegas. I suspected that one was fake
too, so the source of horror was not the thing itself, per se, but the way all these
affluent fucks in pearls and gold Rolexes gobbled it up like goddamn Beluga caviar. The
word going around was that our gracious host had shelled out nearly a hundred grand for
the tape, and that many of the guests that evening were paying him as much as $10,000 just
to watch the thing. I got in for nothing as I kind of had a thing with the guy's
fifteen-year-old daughter. I didn't even know what was going down. I just showed up
expecting to hobnob a while with these people who eat the bone marrow of children in their
spare time, and later, if all went well, I would move on to transgressions of a more
statutory and biblical variety.
Where we finally ended up, however, was this
medium-sized ill-lit room somewhere in the bowels of the manor. There was a huge
projection TV, a few chairs and couches and little else. After a few awkward minutes, the
video just started up all of a sudden. Some sat and watched in rapt attention, like it was
Jesus up there, the Second Coming live via satellite; others made absent chat, clumsily
clutching mostly empty martini glasses, while others idly groped and licked each other for
lack of anything better to do. The thing appeared to be of South American origin, though
the lack of audio made it difficult to pin down. Even if there had been sound, it most
likely would have been poorly dubbed in English rendering it even less endurable. Later, I
would learn that what struck me as so remarkable at the time was really quite standard
fare, even cliché: jungle setting, a fort of some kind. Stone-faced men in military
fatigues with pliers, phallic wooden stakes and bowie knives inflicting various torments
on dark-skinned women. The women were variously fucked, bitten, cut, branded on the ass
and tits with hot irons, and made to assist in the mutilation of other women. There was
even this crude contraption – women were strapped to it, spread-eagled, and gradually
lowered down onto a four foot vertical metal spike. Human shish kebab, baby. . . . And the
camera: b&w cinéma vérité, shaky and grainy. Rough, choppy edits with little
inkling of coherence. . . . I remember taking my eyes off the screen at one point and
glancing around the room, to gauge audience reactions, I guess. And there were these two
ugly, middle-aged crackers who just started fucking there on the couch. She was straddling
him, and I watched as with no small effort he pulled her tight black skirt up over her
ass. He groped and pulled at the flabby cheeks, finally managing to shove a chubby middle
finger deep into her asshole. Her moaning momentarily leapt in pitch, then slid back into
its guttural car engine idle. It seemed an appropriate soundtrack for the quiet movie,
indeed the only soundtrack aside from the occasional clanging of ice against glass. . . .
And so it came to an end. I sat there for some
time, long after the lights had come up and the bulk of the spectators had filed out. Just
me, and the two crackers still humping on the couch. I remember very little about the rest
of the evening. It was the last time I saw the host's daughter; shortly thereafter, I left
the country and I haven't heard from her since. And like most endings, I suppose, it also
signaled the birth of some new thing which would raise its voice and demand participation
in the world of things, real and imagined.
* * *
A hunk of cardboard partially covers the window to Murk's room, clumsily
held in place with several strips of silver duct tape. The sharp night winds occasionally
slip past an unsecured corner of the cardboard and strike my cheek, like a slap from a
chilled butter knife. I almost welcome these occasional currents as they serve to
temporarily disperse the thick odor of spoiled milk that crowds the air, giving rise to a
mild sustained nausea which I suspect will stay with me long I after I've rid myself of
this Murk character and the purgatorial box to which he's confined himself.
I realize now that the screen has gone black,
and I begin to wonder how long I've been sitting here like this, gazing numbly at nothing.
No more than a minute or two, I imagine, although of late the minutes and hours seem to
glide by, unnoticed and interchangeable.
All is quiet except for the muted and distant
yells, shrieks and thuds of what I can only guess to be a domestic squabble in another
room. It is dark, and just as I begin to feel mild pangs of fear gather and rise from the
bottom of my stomach, Murk switches on a light. His gaze is askew, not pointing at me, but
around or past me. He clears his throat, but doesn't say anything. His breathing is
audible, through his mouth and nose at once, as if he were sleeping. I look hard at him. I
want to know what it is that winds through the muddy currents of his mind. For a moment I
entertain the notion that he's in on the joke, that he knows it's all smoke and mirrors:
just another greedy asshole trying to pull the wool over my eyes. But the enigmatic something
of Murk's presence, and of this whale's belly of a room, somehow undermines such
misgivings. I feel he knows something I don't – that this is the real thing and it's
been there all along, but I just didn't want to look at it, or was somehow prevented from
seeing it.
Murk stands up now, hunched over a little. He
slides his hands into his back pockets.
"Um, so . . . you pay me now," he
says.
I think this is the first time I've heard him
speak since our phone conversation a few days ago. I am struck by how childlike he sounds.
Not in pitch and timbre, but in rhythm and stress. His phraseology is uncluttered and
direct, innocently uncouth in its lack of conversational grace.
I pause for a moment before I speak, uncertain
how to respond. My thoughts flicker like fireflies against the backdrop of night. I can't
pull it together.
"I . . . don't know," I say, more to
fill the silence than to carry signification.
"You have to pay now," Murk says,
with more force now, though still not looking at me.
I stand up. My only thought is that I just need
to get out of here. I don't want to discuss the matter. I don't want to be in this place.
Murk is visibly more agitated, shifting his
weight from one foot to the other.
"I let you watch," he says.
"Have to pay."
"Er, we didn't discuss--"
"Not for free . . ."
"I'll have to think about it," I say.
"I don't have it on me anyway. . . . Either way, I'll have to leave and come--"
"No previews," he says.
"Look . . . tell you what: if I decide to
go with it, I'll give you double. . . . I just need to think about it."
I can't tell if he's buying it. He's becoming
increasingly distracted and jittery, like he's got something else on his mind. He rolls up
onto the balls of his feet, then back on the heels, like an impatient second-grader made
to perform in the school play against his will. If I can just dupe him into believing he
stands to turn a pretty profit, I should be able to make my way out the door without a
hitch. But I'm getting tired of diplomacy. I'm thinking perhaps I should just belt him a
good one and bail the fuck outta this place. All intimations of danger have dissipated,
and I find I regard Murk now with a mixture of pity and derision. He appears to me a
sadistically fragile creature possessed of immeasurable suffering. He depletes by
proximity – some kind of telekinetic vampirism – and I feel myself pulling
toward the floor, dizzy, limbs made heavy and weary. Like some ooze monster out of an old
horror flick, I squeeze between the grimy floorboards, crawling and sliding, down, into a
pungent underworld where shimmering rivers of piss course and wind, snakelike, through
dark labyrinthine caverns. Here, no doubt, is the stew from which Murk first emerged,
sucking in his first gulp of toxic air before ascending to the world of the living.
Bringing his hands out from behind him now, Murk brandishes a pistol and
levels it at my chest. He grips the handle with both hands. I automatically raise my own
hands in surrender. His eyes are manic and his hands are shaking. If he doesn't drop it
first, I think, he'll probably end up shooting me by accident – if the thing's even
got bullets in it. My hunch is that Murk's never pointed a weapon at anyone in his life,
and this bold new course of action is probably far more terrifying for him than it is for
me.
He tries to speak:
"N-n-n-n-now . . . y-y-y-you . . . you . .
."
"Hey, OK," I interrupt. "Look .
. . it's not a problem. No . . . no problem. . . . Let's talk about it. . . ."
He sputters, like hot bacon grease:
"Y-y-y-y . . . y-y-y-you . . ."
I feel my own nerves begin to unravel. If
you've never had a gun pointed square at you by someone who was damn well ready to use it
– and I really believe Murk has very little to lose at this juncture – then
you've most likely day-dreamed, at least once or twice, about how you might hold up under
such circumstances. And if you have had the good fortune to find yourself in just
such a predicament, well, then you know that whatever fantasies of cinematic bravado
– of yeah-go-ahead-and-shoot-me coolness – you may have entertained are
summarily blown to shit as your heart kicks into double time and you start to dig what
Sartre was talking about when he said he could conceive of himself only as alive. I've
seen it faked a million times – even the real thing on a few occasions (however
emasculated by the abstractive renderings of the TV screen) – and I've since come to
fancy myself possessed of some knowledge of death in the third person. Yet, the demise of
the spectateur manages to evade understanding like fucking calculus. It does,
nevertheless, creep in every once in a while: sudden, brief intrusions in the receding
blackness of 5:00 a.m. . . . a steel toe in the groin, a hollow dead thump. Reeling from
the blow . . . circle and dodge . . . shake it off and shove it away. . . . Such mediocre
epiphanies . . . colorless, limp. . . . But yes, might as well just say it – for it
does come, innocent and innocuous, when idleness has pushed it from the most constant
reflection. Fragile horror, a stupid end – end of all ends. Wholly unremarkable. . .
.
For a moment, nothing. Then:
Click Click Click Click
And on the fifth, blood and bone and brain blow
out the left side of Murk's head. He jerks and crashes to the floor with a fury unlike
anything I've ever witnessed. Lost in my own foolish onanism, I hardly even noticed Murk
press the barrel against his own head. And now he's crumpled there, like a discarded wash
rag, his hair nearly standing on end and a pool of red spreading out from under his broken
head. His mouth is open in a gaping grimace of frozen horror. For the first time I notice
the rotten black tooth in the upper front row. The brutal fact of the corpse there in
front of me precludes any idle speculation about motive. I can only stand and marvel at
this hapless thing that just had the life abruptly ripped out of it. I've never seen death
– not even a dead grandma in the coffin – and for a flashing instant I even
doubt its veracity. I am drawn toward the small circular entrance wound. I want to
probe it with my index finger, to scrape the tissue inside under my fingernail, then place
it under my nose and breathe in the death, like the first whiff of cunt. Instead, I make
for the door.
Down the darkened stairs. Nearly slip on some
marbles left on a step. I reach out to steady myself and instead grasp a handful of air.
The rails are broken off entirely in places and the remaining ones are flimsy. . . .
Voices beginning to rise in response to the gunfire. They heard it too – a collective
agreement that something had happened. No movie gimmicks this time. They heard
it too. Yet only I saw – I, the doubting Thomas who probes and prods the gaping
wounds of the dead and dying to satisfy his own lust for tactile evidence. And that,
I now realize, was the narrative of Murk's cryptic face, the message I found so
indecipherable: I'll show you what it's really like. And I taste it now, like hard
metal cracking and breaking the teeth. It overwhelms. I swallow hard, forcing down the
nausea.
. . . Finally reaching the door, staggering out onto the city sidewalk.
Unable to hold back another instant, I spit up a thick brown fluid, staining and melting
the fine blanket of perfect snow, steam rising in response. My throat and nostrils burn
and my eyes water. I heave and retch for what seems like an hour before the feeling
subsides. When I'm able to right myself and recover my senses, I hurriedly make my way
down the snowy sidewalk, putting as much distance as possible between myself and the scene
of Murk's demise. I quickly cover several blocks, turning corners at random, until I
finally lose all sense of direction in the city maze. Taking another corner, I look up and
notice what I take to be some kind of security camera mounted to the side of an old
cathedral. I wonder how many of these roving electric eyes I've already unknowingly passed
under in the course of my flight, and what prying eyes watch from the other side.
When I feel safely out of the camera's reach, I
slacken my pace and try to catch my breath. I stop and press my back against a wall and
allow my heart to decelerate. . . . Glancing about me now . . . I am suddenly struck by
the strange spectacle of the city at 3:00 a.m. Empty, sleepy and silent. All the
buildings, stately and stoic, shoved together in close quarters with little regard for the
aesthetic or the practical. Storefronts with barred windows, the blinking traffic lights
swaying slightly in the winter breeze. The garish flashing marquee of an adult movie
theater. . . . As if through a fish-eye lens, it all appears freakish and awry now, like
some foreign land or world wholly unfamiliar. An ancient city erected several millennia
ago by a long-vanished species utterly unlike ourselves. . . . I adjust my vision and
bring into focus the flakes of snow drifting down around me. Each perfect, unique and
sublime. I imagine an entire world in each, headed toward imminent apocalypse, whether
trampled under foot or dissolved in the burning sunlight. . . . When I readjust I find a
startling change wrought upon the scene. The high-rises, the pavement, the lights and
windows – all recede now into a vast white plain. The light snowfall crescendos into
a fierce, blinding blizzard. . . . Miles in the distance, barely visible through the thick
curtain of snow, a herd of immense, shag-covered mammoths trudges across the horizon. . .
. Nearby, a cluster of hairy ape-like mammals, huddling for warmth as the shattering cold
drains the life out of them. . . . The temporal bends, sways and collapses, and the earth
groans and cracks as something vast and bizarre gets underway. The crawling chaos of the
civilized. . . . Continents crash into continents, ripples rising into mountains.
Volcanoes eject dark clouds of ash and scorching rivers of molten rock. . . . God and Karl
Marx have not yet arrived, and no one has thought to synthesize cellulose, nitric acid and
camphor into a substance conducive to the capture of moving images. |
Fiction