Fiction: Descent

By Scott Taylor

 

School was over. In a way, I was relieved. The breakup with Sarah had damn near killed me; it had just about done me in. Good or bad, it was all over now, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. We went about preparing for the great exodus, packing our stuff up in cardboard boxes, making ready to flee. Most of them knew where they were going to land next; me, I had basically no idea. A very large part of me didn't care either way.

My parents drove up in the morning and we went to the graduation ceremony. Everyone was all dressed up in their long black gowns and square red hats, with gold tassels hanging down on one side. I didn't know why the hats had to be square; there was probably some reason for it though, some ancient ritual going back into antiquity. We sat in the sun waiting it out, then some bigwig gave the grand finale speech and everyone was set free. I said goodbye to John and Tim and a few of the others, whoever was still hanging around, then we all climbed into our parents' cars and just like that, we were gone. So much for college.

We went and had omelets at the diner down at the bottom of the hill, then went back to my Dad's friend Sam's place to celebrate. Sam's place was a little house in the woods down near Binghamton, a cabin on a lake which he'd built with his own two hands. He liked to call it a 'shack' but it was actually pretty nice. My Dad broke out the scotch and handed cigars all round. He was being pretty damn jovial, for a change; I couldn't tell what for. I'd neglected to let him in on the news that there was nothing in the world I was ever going to be able to do with my degree. I figured I'd just let him be happy.

We drove back home to Jersey in the morning and I sat around for awhile. A few interviews here and there, but nothing worthwhile, nothing I actually wanted to do, or that would pay me any money. I was screwed already and I knew it - I'd just graduated a few days ago and my life was already over. Some fucking life. At night, I thought about Sarah. I was trying not to, but didn't seem to have much say in the matter. Maybe she'd haunt me until the end of my days. It certainly felt like that would be the case. I'd been trying to imagine life going forward without her and was having trouble coming up with much. She was off to Med School in New York while I was sitting around in my parents' basement, playing guitar. John had his cushy job waiting for him in Manhattan, Miguel was off doing his computer thing somewhere in the general area, even Tim had something lined up in New Hampshire, a teaching gig I think he'd said it was. I was the only one who hadn't taken it seriously, and now it was time to pay the piper. I felt like I'd torpedoed my own life, and for no good reason.

I was feeling suicidal, to be honest. Nothing was making any sense, the cards all seemed stacked against me. I didn't see the point in continuing: a cliché, to be sure, but an appropriate one in this case. The girl was gone, my friends were all slipping away one at a time, and even if I'd been able to snag one of these fancy-ass jobs they were dangling in front of everybody, I didn't want the damn thing anyway. My batteries were drained, my gas tank empty, my motivation level somewhere below zero. I just wanted to crawl off into a hole and die, or at least sleep for the next twenty years or so, and only wake up again once they'd managed to figure things out a little better. I felt like we'd been swindled, like there'd been no point all along: if this was where we were winding up, if this was the finish line, then we might as well have not started in the first place. It wasn't a reward of any kind, it was just another prison sentence. It might have been better if I'd heard someone mention it, even just once, somewhere along the line for someone to have called bullshit, to admit what they were seeing right in front of them, that we were all being taken for a ride. But everyone just stayed silent, about this and about everything else. They were all such good little soldiers. Sometimes I felt insane, or conversely, like I was the only sane person alive and the rest were all batshit. Suicide seemed to me the logical response and yet somehow I didn't pull the trigger. I guess part of me wanted to see what happened next. Rubbernecking of a sort, a bit like watching a train wreck.

It took about six months but I finally found a job. They had this training program for computer programmers out in Parsippany which would take just about anyone, and they'd taken me. We were given the crash course, run through the ringer and drilled like army recruits for awhile, and within a matter of months we'd been transformed into proper trained monkeys who could be safely let loose on the world. My mission in life was now to type lines of code into a computer all day long. A long childhood of hopes and dreams, and this was what my existence had been distilled down to - I hated it, I despised it with every fiber of my being. There were very few jobs that were any good out there, and this was definitely not one of them. There were no conciliatory words, no reroutings of so-called reason, no exhortations from my betters that would be able to distract me from the fact that this was just some new form of hell they'd cooked up for us. However the world now seemed fairly satisfied with my existence, so at least I was out of the fire there. With the glaring exception of my mother. She was starting all sorts of shit at home and so I went and found myself an apartment in Hackensack, just to get away from her. It was a nasty little cave down in the basement with people walking by the window all day long, it was dark and dank and there was something in the air that made it difficult to breathe. I wasn't going to last long there, whether they wanted me to or not.

I toughed it out for a year or so and then decided to go to California. Anything was better than where I was at, and I figured I could use a little sunshine for a while. And who knew, maybe I'd finally find a place to go with my music - maybe I'd meet some hotshot record exec on the street and he'd finally give me my shot. In my mind, I didn't really believe it was possible, but even if it wasn't the sunshine would certainly be nice. I packed the car up with a bunch of stuff and made a beeline for the Pacific. In a few days, I was there. I made right for the water and found myself a room in a hovel about three blocks from the beach. The sea was blue and the skies were too and I felt fine - for about a week. A month later I was up in Los Angeles, working another bullshit corporate job. The apartment was a lot nicer this time but the job was the same. It was like humanity had entered a new evolutionary phase, where all anyone could do was sit around in cubicles under bright lights and tensely waste away. If this was all there was, then I was going to start robbing banks.

I sat there in my apartment in Los Angeles and did nothing. All I did was drink beer and stare at the walls, there was nothing else to do. The people outside were all shit, they were nasty little Hollywood types, starlets in training, I wanted nothing to do with them. There were places to go, I suppose, Santa Monica and Las Vegas and things, but I just didn't want to see any of them. The job went on and on, I drank my beers and I waited. Nothing happened.

Christmas rolled around, I packed up my stuff again and fled back east. I sat around in the basement of my parents' house and simmered. What the hell was the point of any of this. Damned if I knew. My folks were the same as always, they never changed; my Dad went to work and my Mom wasted time in her own way. Dad had to keep throwing himself against that fucking Manhattan every day, I didn't see how he kept from going completely looney tunes. I was back in Jersey again and it was making me ill. I had to get out. The south, maybe that was where it was at: more sunshine, maybe a little more relaxation. A place to fall asleep for awhile. Less expensive too. I got an interview down in Richmond and then I got the job. The stuff went back into a moving truck and in a week or two I was in Virginia, another little apartment, at the west end of town, tiny but bright and airy, with a view of a lake from the balcony. Swans floating around and things. Like a pleasant nightmare.

The summer days were hot and heavy, the air so full of moisture you thought you would drown. It was a strange world I'd plunged into down there. I was hoping things would change in some fundamental way, but it was just more of the same in Richmond - another corporate job, another dead end. The only difference here was that the office was swarming with beautiful women, an army of them come just to torment me, each one younger and prettier than the next. I went home at night hopelessly horny, guzzled beer and bothered girls on the internet. They wanted nothing to do with me in real life, and they wanted nothing to do with me from a distance either, over the airwaves in cyberspace. I was a lost cause, and so was life.

I'd made exactly one friend there in Richmond, a guy from work named Mike, a transplant like me who was originally from Chicago. He was a nice enough kid, as far as it went, and we'd hang out on occasion downtown, drink beer and shoot pool. It was one more friend than I'd had anywhere else, at least since college. I could have taken that as a sign that things were looking up, but somehow I didn't. My mind was always playing tricks on me; it worked against me almost compulsively, like some kind of enemy slowly biding his time.

Another year had gone by and nothing had happened. All I'd done was to write a whole bunch of poems and songs I had nowhere to go with. If that was all there was, and all there ever would be, fine: c'est la vie. But I wanted out. The thought had crept into my mind of retreating to the woods, getting a little cabin out there somewhere in all that wilderness between the city and the mountains where I could hole up for awhile and forget about things. A place with no one else around, where I could make as much noise as I wanted, where I could do a bit of screaming, a little ranting and raving. By day I'd be one of them, and by night I'd be one of me. They couldn't have everything, I wouldn't allow it.

The idea gestated over a course of weeks, and by the Fall it was all I could think about - getting to the woods as quickly as possible was now all that mattered. I got ahold of a local realtor and he started showing me around on the weekends, driving me out into the country and seeing what there was. One of the places was a little brick bunker on fifteen acres of land, out in the middle of nowhere, about forty-five minutes from civilization: nice and secluded, surrounded by trees, with a huge finished basement that would be just about perfect for making music. A place for a serial killer in the making. I told the realtor I'd take it. About a month later, my stuff had been transferred for about the millionth time and I was all settled in. A human no more, a hermit at long last. They could all go to hell.

The days and nights were longer out there in the woods. I was still suicidal, but marginally less so. Somehow you didn't feel alive out there, so there was less to kill. Everything passed as in a dream. You drank your beer and you blasted away on your guitar or thundered away on your drums and there was no response; it was almost as if it wasn't happening. Perhaps it was like the philosophers said, all of reality was just an illusion, there was the dream and nothing else. Day by day the songs went down on tape and the poems went down on paper. I was happy with what I was doing there, pleased with what was being produced. Elsewhere, the job dragged at me all day long. The commute was now a long one, a tedious hour-long shot over the river and through the woods, an endless tussling with country lanes before finally being dumped out onto the highway to cut through all that deep featureless green. My hair was getting longer and longer and the girls were starting to look spooked. Even Mike was steering clear. I'd changed. Change was anathema to these people, they didn't even understand the concept. All they knew was the rulebook, and those who did or didn't make the grade, except I was now entirely outside their curriculum, whether they knew it or not. I'd replaced their system; I had a new world of my own out there with the deer and the squirrels, the pheasants and fawns, a quiet little wonderland full of babbling creeks and tall solemn pines, of fields of grass and rickety barns teetering. It didn't seem to want me there any more than these idiots wanted me here, but I felt far more comfortable in one place versus the other. The suspicious stares were minimized out there. That was pretty much all you could ask for.

My new life continued, out there in the middle of nowhere. By day the little girls ripped and tore at me, and by night I wrote and sang and screamed. I would drink as much beer as would fit and then stand there in the middle of the little red living room, in the dark with the music blasting as loud as humanly tolerable, letting it wash over me with abandon, soaking in the sweet sound, letting it keep my afloat. Music was everything to me, it always had been, it sustained me when nothing else would. I was going to make it whether they were listening or not. The songs and poems came one by one in an agonized little stream, a slow flooding torrent of objection; drums crashed and amps rumbled and keening wails carried nowhere at all. I was alone, and strange.

The seasons changed. Winters were cold and summers were unbearably hot and humid, like living in a greenhouse. Driving back from work, I'd come around the bend just before reaching the house and the woods would fill up with pockets of fog, as dense as pea soup, as if the air were so moist it couldn't contain itself anymore. At night the deer would come out into the field and wander around, their eyes reflecting moon and starlight. I'd take long walks in the dark with my can of beer, no one else around, my shoes crunching gravel, my drunken eyes rubbing against the soft quiet gloom, basking in the silence. My hair grew longer, the stares more concerned. I was pulling even further away from their world; soon I'd be gone completely, unable to return to work, incapable of proper interaction. Unworthy of their company. I was fine with that, it couldn't happen soon enough. Death was preferable to being like they were. If I had to evolve into my own new form of life to escape them, then so be it. The thought of remaining in their presence made me swoon, made me look away from everything. My existence had become indefinable. It was a strange coda, a culmination of all things prior, and yet in a way it felt perfectly natural. I'd always been meant to disengage, it was only the form it took that was ever in question.

More time went by. My hair got longer, my thoughts stranger. I was living in some kind of slow-moving phantasm now, a lugubrious oozing ofttimes nonsensical stream of images and activities. The transformation was complete - I'd achieved my goal, I'd become incongruous with the world. I found that things had changed but they hadn't improved. The songs were still coming, but slower now and with less urgency, as if a spring were drying up, a fountain of youthful vitality which once lost could never be recovered. And all this for nothing, anyway, no one would ever hear any of it. It was me and the basement, the brick walls and the flitting fauna, who were similarly unconcerned. My life was still absurd, just in a different way. The river of beer I'd been floating upon was no longer carrying me as far as it had before; I didn't get happy anymore, all I did was get drunk, night after night, drunk and stupid, moreso each time. I wasn't talking to anyone, my parents or Mike or anyone else. I was as much a stranger to them as I was to myself. It felt like the end of days, like the end of some game that had been playing out all along and which was finally reaching its utterly pointless conclusion. I went around mumbling, I talked to the walls and I yelled at God, cursing him for his treachery, for his lack of faith in what I could do given half the chance. I could write and I could sing and I was being cast aside, like some leper, some slab of meat gone bad. Misplaced detritus, many miles from home. A home that didn't even exist anymore. At night I sat on the floor with the curtains closed and the tears dripped down in the dark, falling into the little hole in the aluminum can. I tried to understand what made me so bad, what I'd done to deserve my fate, but there didn't seem to be any answers. All I knew was that I was forsaken, and that forever had come awfully fast.

Springtime again. It had been four years since I'd moved to the woods. I barely resembled the person who had arrived there so long ago, that stubborn idealist with a headful of dreams and eyes full of fire. I felt weakened, distracted, diminished. I was barely going to work anymore, they'd all but forgotten I still worked at the place. My lungs were destroyed, the crap in the air out there was clogging them up completely such that I could barely breathe, and my eyesight wasn't any better, anything past about five feet away was a complete blur. And my mind was mush. I could barely speak to the people around me, and had no interest in doing so anyway. I couldn't tell if it was the world at large who'd done me in, or if it had been the woods in particular. The trees were in league with the rest; previously sympathetic, they now rose up against me, looming there in the eternal gloom, pikes at attention, a green leafy army ready to finish me off. The woods had swallowed me whole, roped and vined me into the web of their mindless insanity; I was now a part of them, my identity merged and obliterated. Theoretically there were ways out, and yet I felt trapped, ensnared, rooted to the spot. It was a cell without bars, a fortress without a gate, a door without a key. A lament without end. There was a fridge full of beer and a basement full of guitars, and me standing there uselessly in the infinite silence, contemplating the wind. That was all. I didn't see how anything could follow.

And yet it did. One day, I got up and left. I opened the front door spilling into the heavy muggy mist, with the laden boughs sleeping and the tall grasses waving, crunched along the gravel one last time, got into my car and left. I drove west, making for the mountains. When I got there, I stepped out of the car and went trudging into the wilderness. I climbed the highest mountain I could find - either the highest place in the Rockies or the bowels of the Earth, I couldn't tell which - and then just kept on going from there: I went for the sky, stepped out into space and went moon-hopping for awhile, skipping from stone to stone, and then I was drifting lightly through the ether and slipping past the galaxies in all their spiraling and flaring wonder, and the cosmos encompassed me in its icy-hot embrace, wrapped me in its inky twinkling calm, and nothing was there, nothing mattered, nothing needed doing anymore. Motion, endless motion. Slipping out to sea. Movement with eyes closed, sighs in the void.

 

 

 

 

 

Scott Taylor hails from Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a writer and a musician, and an avid world traveler. His short stories and poetry have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Vast Chasm, Adelaide Literary, Unlikely Stories, Literary Hatchet and Swifts and Slows. His novels 'Chasing Your Tail' and 'Screwed' have been released with Silver Bow Publishing, and his novellas 'Freak' and 'Ernie and the Golden Egg' are slated for inclusion in an upcoming anthology with Running Wild Press. He graduated from Cornell University and was a computer programmer in a past life.