Survivors Envy the Dead
“Hey there, I´m Ray! Thanks for calling the Happy Thoughts Hotline! How can I brighten your world today?”
“Hey Ray. I think we´re all going to die.”
My name is not Ray and I am in the business of making people happy. Today I am not happy but I am still in business. I work for a company called the Happy Thoughts Hotline. We´re found by the desperate in the back pages of the classifieds, conveniently situated above the obituaries. We work under the assumption that somewhere out there, in between the drive by shootings and teary eyed abortions, the genuinely happy do exist and instead of making something of their lives, they want to sit by a phone all day and hear about how bad someone else´s life is. And the people, bless their hearts, buy into it at a rate of five dollars per minute. My colleagues and I are under certified psychologists, human band-aids for couch potatoes in their finite moments of depression.
It´s a wet, humid North American Monday and it started nicotine free and filled with discomfort. Last night, I quit smoking at exactly seven PM.On my way to work this morning, my life nearly ended against the bumper of a city bus. As I waited for a red light to turn green, my hands began to shake uncontrollably. I held it out above me against the backdrop of the grey sky and tried to hold it steady. And then as I raised my left foot over the curb to cross the street, it was hit by a slow moving bus which in turn, swung my foot ninety degrees just so that I was upended, careening into a mud puddle, silt staining my dress slacks, polluted rainwater travelling through the thick of my flesh all the way to the bitter marrow. I stared helplessly at the clouds drifting above me; wheezing, perpetuating the pathetic caricature I´d become. Somehow I've escaped this with only a bruise to my ego. There are few things more embarrassing than falling over in public.
I pulled myself up and brushed what grime I could off me and looked across the street. There was a homeless man cocooned within many different layers of cotton and plaid, holding up a sign.
THE END IS NIGH
Crazy old bastard. He leered at me, his eyes cavorting about in his skull like wild marbles as if he was on to the punchline before the joke was finished being told. I feel a strong sense of foreboding as he grins at me. His face poke out of a mass of dreadlocks and a ratty beard. His little eyes gleam like obsidian marbles; watching and probing me like any breed of predator. I feel a cold hollow blow up in my gut. This black uneasiness follows me to work, gnawing up and away.
I now sit at my desk, a shivering wet cat depriving myself of their catnip, ignoring the coddling coos and behests of my owner, itching my belly ferociously. My left hand is trembling by the keyboard and every single nerve is attuned to agony, my teeth are itching and there´s gobs of phlegm crawling up the back of my throat. I´ve chewed slashes out of the walls of my cheeks, there´s a grimy sweat squealing out of my skin and for breakfast I ate an entire box of frosted flakes, without flinching, belching or drooling. The Wrigley´s in my mouth tastes like rubber, my gums are bleeding profusely, my jaw is sore and there´s strife crawling out of any exit it can find.
Thinking back on my career as a professional consumer, I know that every single rush from tip to filter I´ve savored. I love smoking more so than the act of living needed to sustain it. It´s only 9 AM and the day awaits, crouching in the unknown, insidious. There´s this itch dragging right up my spine, working my nerves like defibrillators. And I don´t even really know why I´m quitting. I´ve been telling myself all the obvious things that I´m failing to believe: health, love and money. The mandatory non smoking policy enforced by upper management is the real reason. They want to keep our voices smoke free. And people like working here so much that everyone, including myself, bowed to the pressure. I didn´t even know I liked working here that much. It´s the only thing I´ve ever been half good at other than smoking.
And here, in the throes of irritation and weary passage, I find myself at a computer desk surfing the phone lines for people who find themselves desperate; a soundtrack of tears falling on the mouthpiece or a trail of saliva, the click a tongue gone asunder searching for words that slip up and perish. The more I think about it, the more I can feel it. A wolf that´s chased me down the last block and tore into my calves.
“Easy, easy, buddy. Ray´s here. What´s your name?”
“Alex,” he says.
“Alright Alex, I´ve got a goal and I´m bent on reaching it. I got a job just as I´m sure you got a job. Can I call you Al?” I say. In my line of work you have to hit them hard and fast, peppering them with injections of subconscious happiness. At least, this is what they tell us at the orientation meetings.
“Nobody ever calls me-“
“Al, do you know what day it is?”
“What day- Why- It´s a Monday,” he says.
“Wrong, Al. Today is your day. Carpe diem, my friend! Seize the day!”
“How can I seize a day that always comes to an end?”
We get these difficult calls a lot these days. It comes as no surprise with the current weight of the world, but it's much easier when they buy into everything we say. Everyone is losing their minds over the economy, the bombs, the trail of dead. At least it´s keeping us in business. Everyone´s world ends at some point, I´m not sure why they´re all so concerned with all things collected. And I´m about to tell him all of this. And then a wail, long and high pitched, peels out of the staff room.
“THEY´VE DROPPED THE BOMB!”
And the office stops what they´re doing. This is not the voice of a practical joker. There´s a clatter of earpieces and a scraping of chairs and everyone stops what they´re doing. And Al screams back through the receiver:
“Hello? HELLO? ANYONE STILL THERE? I WAS RI-”
I drop the call.
“The bomb?” someone shouts back.
“They´ve dropped a bomb, maybe nuclear, maybe something, but its big” says the voice from across the room.
“Who dropped a nuclear bomb?”
“Someone over there, somewhere hot and sandy. No one knows where exactly. They could see it from the sea.”
It sinks, collapses in on us. The bomb. Whispers begin fill the vacuity of shock as a shared image that everyone holds creeps into their minds. The mushroom cloud. The one of the big boy going off in Hiroshima, waves of the blast vaporizing dreams and painting the walls with permanent shadows. A raised cup of tea to the lips, a side glance out the window and it´s over. A split hair of a second lends you to nothing from something without mercy or introspect; a vacuum sucking up the ashes of millions and spitting them through the brand new holes of the ozone.
In a daze, I stumble towards the window and look out onto the city. We´re on the eighth story of a thirty story building in the center of town. Cars have stopped, the streets have flooded and I can see it from here; first in tiny little tufts of cobalt, then a bluer hue as they converge in man made clouds above the people. Smoke, glorious smoke. Plumes of it, the contrails disappearing as they climb the adjacent buildings. And suddenly a thousand termites are borne in the center of my spine, spanning the highways of my nervous system, tearing me apart from the inside out. Between the first timers succumbing to grief and the seasoned veterans quickly finishing one only to light the next one right off its dying embers, the city smokes together. I need to be with them.
I turn to see the office empty, the buzz of the mainframe playing on, intermittent beeps whimpering from the empty desk, cries for help and salvation unanswered. Life, quite literally, has crashed to a halt, resting in front of the talking heads, awaiting every new development.
“...And Jim, initial reports as it stands are unclear. We are on full alert for retaliatory strikes . There has been more than one nuclear weapon detonated in the region. The President has taken the country into DEFCON 2...”
The glow from the staff room as they huddle around the warmth of the TV pours out into the reception area. No one notices as I walk past. I hit the hall and the usual busy water cooler chatter ceases to be. There´s a few intermittent announcements from various televisions on the floor, but otherwise the halls are filled with dead air. I hit the elevator and for once there's no muzak. When the doors open, I´m staring through the pane glass doors at the mobs, tear stained and wailing. Two lovers have collapsed into each other, holding one another as if their counterpart might break. An old man leans heavily on a cane, his face resigned, eyes beginning to well up with tears. The building´s security guard watches the mob nervously and the line looks like its about to break. The wringing of hands, the wild looks, the tenuous rhythm of chaos building in anticipation.
I push out the doors into a chorus of surprised tones and tearful cell phone calls. Traffic has stopped, a bus has crashed into a taxi, there´s smoke beginning the exit the car´s hood. There´s a body slumped over the steering wheel. The bus driver is slumped against the wall holding his face in his hands. Horns blare up Yonge St. and people fill lobbies along Bloor. And that´s when I begin to hear nothing.
Across the street, the light of the convenience store beckons me. It´s taken over now, the brief image of the mushroom cloud now obscured by a giant pack of Du Mauriers. My hand creeps around the lining of my jacket pockets and pulls out a crumpled ten dollar bill. I go into the store and before me is a dishevelled man gaping at his mute television. Leaning against the wall, the store´s proprietor is staring at a speechless reporter.
“Pack of Du Mauriers.”
He hasn´t registered that he is not alone and that he has a customer. I, the customer, the walking suicide, the soon to be dead.
“Du Mauriers.”
The screen goes white. It abruptly cuts into static and the man turns to me his face creased with desperation. He snaps out of it and numbly pulls the pack from beneath the counter and places them on top of the scratch cards. It strikes me for the first time as I stare at the pack. The same cold I felt this morning spreads out from my lungs and my fingers barely make it across the counter to take the pack. The warning on the box reads in gibberish as I quickly unwrap the plastic.
The man, unnerved, takes them out from beneath the counter and places them atop the lotto cards without so much as looking at me.
"God save us all," he whispers.
He doesn´t take the bill, so I walk out with both. I close my eyes and I´m taken away from this life. It takes over and the rush carries me through into the oncoming seconds, as I briefly open my eyes to see the hordes turn on the city they inhabited. It begins as a quiet murmur and then a chorus of sirens open up.
And when I open my eyes, I witness the people tipping the bus over, the bus driver amongst them. The body still sits in the taxi as flames begin to poke out from beneath the engine's crumpled hood Throaty screams and maniacal laughter break the dead air and the street takes on a renewed life of its own. The pedestrians become monsters and begin to tear their home apart.
As I drop the cigarette, it´s swept up in the back wind of a man rushing down the street with a flat screen television. A group of young boys rush out of a supermarket, their pockets loaded with candy. The alarms and sirens blend with the wailing grown men; a civic orchestra of disarray and wrought reaches full tilt. And in the center of the intersection a police car screeches to a halt. Five officers pop out with their guns drawn and begin to brandish their pistols like crazed desperadoes. The homeless man with the dark, black eyes runs toward them, dropping his picket of prophesy behind him; shots are fired and his world as he has come to know it ends. As he falls to the ground, his head slaps against the pavement, his mouth upturned in a victorious smile. My cigarette burns on.
And I return to the fold gladly, the quieted wheezing mob, scorned by the masses, cast quite literally out in the cold. And in Moscow, they whipped us until the skin came off of our backs. In the Vatican, they excommunicated us. In Nazi Germany, they gassed us, tortured us and shot us, burying us beneath the rubble. And in North America, they sue us, persecute us with propaganda, tear away at our rights, pass laws against our choice to sit with our backs to the sun, basking in the shadows and dark corners, like the carcinogenic mutants they´ve painted us out to be. A history of addicts in the face of the true killers. And now, there's going after us except ourselves. We´re eating away at each other from the inside out. And it clicks in. As the smoke begins to diffuse the crisp edges of the skyline, I get it. I am he as you are he as you are me and, smoker or non smoker, we are all dying together.
Shivering with the last wisps of blue coil and grey ash, I feel nothing. I live therefore I die and die therefore I smoke and I will smoke until this one ends. And then it does and I light another. A bright light goes off on the other side of the world and I look down. My hand, for this brief second in a splinter of dying minutes, is steady.
2 comments:
Grate.
Also, I didn't know you moved to Paris, Ontario!
When the fuck were you going to tell me?
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