Millennial Purgatory

-CCP begins-

I could hear the voices all around me and I could feel it enter my brain, my thoughts.

A sea of little monstrous ideas came through me like little bits of bacteria with personalities. They were inconspicuously molding me with microscopic hands that never let go but rather waited for me to fall into the underworld that was being meticulously crafted deep within the black holes of my subconscious. Just like the bacteria that lives inside of you but isn’t you, these ideas form inside you but they aren’t actually you. They only exist because you exist.

It’s all about the balance.

A sea of weighty thoughts overwhelmed me, washing over as the sun blazed brilliantly above. I was well on my way to sucking down a fifth of cheap Vodka along with the neighbor who lived in the apartments across the parking lot from my own. It was the same complex, however. He stayed there with his mother, jobless and janky, and with little motivation to do much of anything besides drink and watch the time pass him by. Most days he felt like a little, buzzing gnat that I couldn’t quite successfully swat away. Nonetheless, we did drink a great deal together for the sake of cheap company, I guess you could say. Plus, he usually provided the alcohol and I had a dirty, oppressive relationship with the bottle back then. You’ll learn this soon enough.

His name was Sheldon. He had short blond hair with a small-framed body like that of a middle school boy in the midst of puberty. He looked up to me with subservient eyes, but it was in an odd sort of way that drew my pity. There was a perpetual display of confusion plastered across the ridges of his face and some fanatical sense of stupidity in his smile--as if he never quite understood what was really going on but was just competent enough to get by. Somewhere deep in the fathomless gorge of my heart, I did possess a soft spot for the guy and I always would.

“This shit tastes horrible,” Sheldon mumbled with liquor dripping from the corners of his mouth. His lips were cringing and his eyes began to glaze over. He took another drink and looked like he was going to gag but held it down by leaning his head back and closing his eyes. He then let out an odious groan that bellowed through the canals of my ears and strained my nerves.

“You say that every time you take a swig,” I muttered back bleakly. I was still stuck halfway inside of that malign daydream. The monster was swimming through me, patiently watching me, but I wasn’t saying a word back to it.

“How much have ya drank in one night, Henry?” He asked as he clutched the bottle of Vodka with his baby fingers.

“I don’t know, Sheldon. I don’t measure the liquor in my stomach at the end of every night. I don’t think it matters,” I answered caustically. “I drink to forget my shitty low-paying job, or the fact that I live paycheck to paycheck even with a college degree or I just drink to remember.”

“Remember what?” He asked with a childhood curiosity.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe remember when I still believed that this country had something to offer rather than fifteen years of student loan debt and a crippling cost of living. But you know... sometimes I just drink to drink. Now, pass me the bottle,” I said reaching my arm out towards him.

“I’ve drank fifty shots in one night, man,” he said looking ridiculously proud then leaned over to hand me the Vodka.

“Those shots must have been taken out of thimbles.”

“What’s a thimble?”

“Never mind.”

“Seriously, man. I’ve had fifty shots in one night.”

“I bet you have, Sheldon… I bet you have.” The sarcasm soaked my words with a deluge of derision and I felt bad for thinking so pessimistically towards this little guy but at the same time it almost felt like it had been carved somewhere inside of me. Maybe not all at once but slowly over the years as I grew into adulthood. What made it even more unnerving at times was that it was now carved in stone.

He mumbled something under his breath and jerked the bottle back out of my hands as it was just reaching my lips and brought it back to his mouth and finished off what was left in that bastard as if trying to prove something. It more or less only served to piss me off though. We sat there in silence for a few minutes awkwardly shooting short, irritated glares at one another.

“Fifty shots my ass,” I murmured under my breath. “You god damn little bastard.”

“You can see them looking down at us,” Sheldon whispered tersely to me. It broke the tension that was suffocating us both as we looked up the hill to our right.

I said nothing back but followed his glances meticulously. There was an apartment complex that sat on a hill above ours and was naturally much more eloquent and expensive. The people glared down at us from time to time with their hands on their hips and a squint of satisfaction in their glossy eyes knowing they were above us. I never minded though. It wasn’t the shiny, golden trophy I was looking for in this life or the pat on the back from my comrades-- it was something much simpler, even though at the time I couldn’t be sure what it was.

It made me giggle a bit on the inside knowing that they probably mentally jerked off to sensations such as pride and status, lubed with affluence. The swollen ego growing rapidly like the cock of a young, virgin teenage boy as his first naked victim laid bare before him, quivering. The fictitious power I never truly understood on an in-depth level but I always had a weird feeling inside of myself that there was a danger that followed it if it was not recognized.

From time to time, the ones above would throw beer bottles and other trash down into the parking lot of our complex, which would be abruptly followed by a barrage of half drunken chuckles and snarls. I knew that one day they’d push it too far and somebody down in these slums would snap and a war would begin. At the time I laughed at the nonsense as they basked in their perceived glory and all was ok amid the complex.

Beyond the group of guys at the top of the hill, one girl stood alone near the corner of the crowd, seemingly shining as the sun set perfectly behind her. Even standing so far away, I witnessed each of her flawless features. Her hair was long, wavy and black, jet black. She wore a big pair of glasses that circled largely under her eyes. Her legs... God her legs. They were long and brown but gleamed as if they were soaked in oil. I saw a beauty within her that evaporated everything else inside me in that moment.

It was a soft, secular moment that I shared with every soul who’d ever been in love though the quantum entanglement of time. The world as I knew it was lightly entranced with a notion of a body that inhabited the space just above what I could reach but somewhere deep down in the pits of my stomach, a spec of hope revealed itself. It was like the sun had just lit up for the first time but it was still small and far away; still appearing as a distant star with potential.

“It won’t be too much longer before the sun goes down,” Sheldon said looking off into the distance, momentarily forgetting the people above us for the moment. He then looked up to the sky and said, “I can’t wait for the stars.”

“Why?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. I guess I just like lookin’ at them, ya know?” He said shifting his head in my direction.

“I think you like looking at them because we came from them.”

“I don’t think we came from the stars.” Sheldon said after a moment of introspection. “God made us.” There was a strange confidence in his eyes. One that I would never understand simply because I had such little faith in anything holy.

“How long have you believed that?”

“I’ve always believed that.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “You’re conditioned… You’re conditioned to such dogma and it’s probably too late for you to ever alter your belief.” Right as the words left my mouth I realized that I also was probably conditioned in more ways than I realized in accordance to my beliefs and ideologies.

“What’s wrong with thinkin’ God made us?” he asked, sounding slightly offended from my remark.

“All organic matter containing carbon was originally produced within stars, therefore, if we go back far enough, it’s evident that we stem from them.”

“But God made the stars, so we came from God,” Sheldon said proudly. As his words sifted around me, the smirk that crawled across his face showed me that he believed that he had just cracked me with an intellectual checkmate. It reminded me of every Sunday school service I went to as a child and every answer to the unknown could be distilled into platitudes such as ‘because God made it so,’ It was a cop out—a cheap tool to keep you from learning anything interesting and reinforcing a docile mind that revels in its ignorance without ever noticing the true beauty that rests in the sky above. Sing, sit, stand, sit, pray, have a snack from the body of Christ. At the same time I envied people with a structured faith system because the more I learned, the crazier I became. So goes the art of irony.

“What I think about sometimes is the Gods of Ancient Egypt,” I said. “The stars and constellations all represented something profound and eerily important to the people. Orion especially was associated with death, which would make sense in a special sort of way.”

“How?” Sheldon asked defensively.

“If we come from the stars, when we die, we should probably return to them.”

“I think I’ll just go to heaven,” Sheldon rebutted, with a cheap smile that looked as if it belonged to a used car salesman right after he fucks your wife.

“Well, you better start praying,” I muttered.

“Speak for yourself, dick.”

Time floated on as we sat like lazy sailors and the sun finally set over the horizon. I missed it when it was gone. Maybe all good things can last forever, a voice whispered. The sweat began to feel cool on my forehead and I closed my eyes and let the wind cascade across me, taking in deep breaths of the warm, summer air. It tasted free and delightful and was a nice blend with the liquor that lay inside me. The concrete still hadn’t cooled and was fairly hot on the bottom of my feet. The skies were a hazy blue near the horizon and the clouds stirred between different shades of gold and auburn with a ubiquitous sense of joy that floated along within them. One day I’ll float away up there somewhere into Orion.

“I can go grab another bottle,” Sheldon mentioned enticingly.

“Well…” I slurred. “You should probably go do that.”

While Sheldon was gone the neighbor to the right of me named Terence came out on his front porch to water his plants. He was always watering his plants. He had an unusually weird infatuation with them, if you ask me. I had vaguely glanced inside his apartment a few times before and the whole place seemed to be shrouded in those little bastards. It was like his own personal little green house. Brown buckets of soil everywhere, growing all different kinds of crazy fucking things. It was kind of neat though, I will admit. He was the happy hippie next door in my mind.

“Hey there, neighbor,” Terence, shouted over to me as he swooped his hair back and gave me a big, goofy smile.

“How’s it going, Terence?”

“Oh, not too bad. Just watering my babies before I forget.”

“You have... a lot.”

“Yeah… It’s peaceful having them around.”

“Maybe I’ll get some someday,” I said, trying to shield my indifference.

“Hey, man. Do you wanna burn one, by chance? I can show you some really amazing little species I have in here,” he said as he crouched down to look at one of his plants a little closer. He was tall and tan and always had a very relaxed way about him. It seemed like he always knew or at least thought that he knew everything was going to be ok.

I laughed a little to myself because of how he sounded like a stereotypical stoner when he asked that. “How about a rain check?” I said as I lazily shifted my body towards him. “I’m waiting on Sheldon to come back with another bottle of Vodka. You can stay out here and drink with us if you want.”

“That stuff is poison, man,” Terence said. “I’m going to jump back inside before Sheldon comes back though. That little guy bugs me. Hit me up sometime though if you ever wanna smoke, man,” he said as he stood back up and walked in the door while making a gesture with his hands to his lips like he was smoking a little roach. I giggled on the inside. Fucking hippie. But a good heart.

My phone rang and I saw that it was my crazy, estranged uncle. I didn’t want to answer because he always had something weird to say about the other side. I remember him talking about it when we were young and close but it got stranger and stranger the older I got. Nonetheless, I picked up my phone reluctantly. Static and crunchy reverberations punctuated throughout the receiver and it all seemed distorted.

I heard a voice somewhere off in the distance. “CCP,” it said. I heard it numerous times but couldn’t make out anything else beyond the distracting static noises.

A couple minutes later Sheldon came running back across the parking lot with a bottle tucked under his shirt and a deviant smile daubed across his face. He seemed like a retarded puppy dog running across the yard with a bone in his mouth. I smiled inside.

“Why do you have it under your shirt?” I asked him curiously as he pulled the bottle out.

“It’s my moms and I didn’t want her to see me take it.”

“Won’t she look outside and see you drinking it?”

“No, she’s drunk on the couch but the kitchen is right by the living room so I stuck it under my shirt until I got over here just to be safe, ya know?”

“Well, I’m sure she’ll notice the bottle missing in the morning.”

“I’ll just tell her that her boyfriend took it and watch the two of them fight like dogs for a couple of hours. He’s an alcoholic, so she’ll believe me.”

“Sounds like you’ve got yourself a foolproof plan articulated.”

“Yeah, something like that.”

Sheldon handed me the bottle and smiled sheepishly. Stolichnaya Vodka it said across the front sticker with a thin red riming around the name. We passed it back and forth a few times; cringing each time we swallowed the stuff. Each time you took a swig, a chill would run the length of your body, forcing you to squirm as the sweltering piss ate away your insides. It wasn’t pleasant but it got the job done—it always did, and plenty fast enough to boot.

“I’ve got to go inside soon, Sheldon. It’s getting dark and I’m feeling drunk,” I said after having only a few drinks from it.

“What are you going to go do in there? How come you’ve never let me in your place?” Sheldon asked eagerly with his strange puppy eyes.

“I don’t ask to go in your place. Don’t ask to come in mine. Let’s keep it at a neutral zone out here.”

“Is there something in there that you don’t want me to see?” Sheldon asked. I paused for a minute then stroked my unshaved face a bit before saying, “Yeah, Sheldon, I don’t think you’d be able to handle it, either.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I looked at him in his beady eyes and said softly as I stepped backwards towards the door, “It’s haunted.” Then I walked inside and closed the door behind me as he shouted something like… “I’m not afraid of ghosts! I swear, Henry!!”

You should be. They’re all around us.

I went to my desk and sat down and lit up a smoke. A couple minutes passed as I sat there, staring off into space without a single thought. Under the grim shade of my greasy hair, a fervent headache crept up under my skin. It soon began to pulsate and beat rapidly like an off tempo bass drum being kicked by a bull. When I closed my eyes I could see a psychotically starved tapeworm feeding away on my skull only seconds away from devouring the elusive tissues of my brain. The thumping intensified rapidly behind my heavy eyelids and an occasional blur would surface across my vision or my eyes would cross altogether. I hadn’t had a headache like that since I was a child but I felt the demons growing inside. I felt vulnerable.

Listening to the whispers in my mind, I sat in pain and wonder-- a toxic, tantalizing mix. I thought about what a therapist or psychologist might say about it. I thought about what my mom would say. Maybe an incongruous abundance of dopamine being transferred through my neurons with a mysterious sense of direction. Everything is a disease or disorder. Any average screwball can walk in to see a therapist or psychologist and come out believing they have a mental illness or imbalance and need to be medicated, but, don’t worry, Big Pharma is here to save the fucking day. Just take your medicine. Always take your medicine.

I laid my head in the palm of my hand slightly wishing I had a magic pill from Big Pharma to put me to sleep. Beyond my blurring rays of vision, the Old Crow whiskey bottle atop my desk looked back with saddened, liquid brown eyes, as smoke from my cigarette twirled above the darkened ashtray, permeating the air around me with wafts of nicotine sinking into the musky yellow walls.

I let my unsettled sights fixate on the ice in my glass as it rattled incessantly from the raucous coming from the apartment to my left. Thunderous pounds of bass and screams crept through the cracks of my paper-thin walls. It was like vexing little termites eating away slowly at the wood and arduously at my sanity.

It was like everything was all getting louder at once; the thumping in my skull, the screams, and the heavy bass music. I could feel the axe coming down on me, slicing the hemispheres of my brain creating numerous versions of myself inside one fucked up body. The pain accentuated within and became execrably worse with each sudden thump. All I could do was simply hold on and breathe-- then I laughed. I laughed uncontrollably. I laughed long and hard at myself for no reason.

That apartment complex, at times, made me feel like I was in a living grave filled with the people who refused to die. I used to hide away inside of myself there, most of the time in a drunken stupor, distracting my mind with abstract or mundane thoughts because it’s for only so long that you can keep your mind off of the internal battle creeping behind those petty diversions. Those whispers gave me hope though. Hope for love in the madness. You want to be set free. I laughed again hysterically and then I cried.

You have twisted your whole reality and created a prison.

The repetitive throbbing eventually subsided a little later that night and I restlessly paced around my place, becoming lost in memories and madness. I couldn’t be sure what time it was. I felt like maybe it wasn’t night or day but some lapse of time trapped between the two. Still, I found myself wishing that I could find that place more often, for some strange reason. It was nice in its own way. It also made me kind of want to kill myself.

As I paced the hallway somewhere in what I believe to be sometime in the middle of night, I had a strange feeling that something big was going to happen that summer. Something dark. My feelings eventually proved themselves to be true once the murders resurfaced in some far away thought. I couldn’t be sure where these memories came from.

For the rest of the evening or morning or whatever it was, my mind focused solely on the creature with the brown legs and long black hair that I saw standing on the hill above the complex earlier and an illustrious feeling of peace took on the virus that had been eating me alive. The prison of my mind was being structured and calculated.