Chapter 4

There would be no sunshine that day. He knew it.

He didn’t feel like working. He didn’t feel like waking up at all. «Hell.» Was his first thought of the morning. «Kill me.» Was his second, and from then on it wouldn’t get any sunnier in his mind.

The sun itself felt detestable, and he scrambled to shut the curtains while trying to not really wake up at all. He laid still on the bed, like dead wood, hoping for sleep to carry him back into the void, and in the void keep him.

«But I need to work.» Said one half of his mind.

«But I fucking hate working.» Replied the other half.

Twisting and turning on the mattress, he “slept” for thirty minutes longer until... Woosh! He sprang from the sheets, startled by nothing, and jumped straight into his desk.

«Stupid piece of shit. You stupid little sack of fucking s-!»

...

Silence. He got a moment of it.

...

That’s it, one moment. Now, back to life. He couldn’t waste a precious second of his day. «I’ve gotta...!!» His head was close to exploding. «I’ve gotta ... work.»

Make money. Survive. If he ever dared to stop...

... if he ever dared to take a day off...

... to stop for just a second and contemplate any other life but work, work, work...

... he would die. He would starve. That was just a fact of life. Of his life. The life of a poor, worthless gutterscum: one second of laxness and everything he’d ever achieved would just ... rotten ... rot away as quickly as the burn of the hope he once had for a better life. A kinder fate.

You spend an entire life hustling your way into decency, into the barebones basics of subsisting, and then ... one slip ... one pull of the rug beneath your feet ... Poof! All is lost. And there ain’t ever coming back.

One shot at decent living. Not luxurious. Not comfortable. Decent. One step above the streets, and that’s it. That’s all you got. That is the way of life. That is your way of living.

So he labored. The illustrations were especially spicy that day. Bad news. He always had this terrible boiling in his sack every time he was forced to stare at those beautiful vixens and their tall, chiseled stallions, their angelic faces barely concealing their hellish intent towards their potent partners.

One would understand the pain, the thirst that came with the job: working with sexual abundance, yet being unable to sip from a single drop of it. Retouching without touching. A starving beggar seeing a playboy splurge. Even eunuchs would have a better time in their masters’ harem. At least the eunuchs didn’t have a cock left to make them suffer.

Such exposure made him masturbate once or twice or nineteen times before the evening was set. He did the deed so many times that not only his dick, but his arm felt numb. «Piece of ... shit.» By the seventh or eighth or perhaps ninth session he went through, blood came out. Squirt ... squirt...! His member was a stillborn worm in his hollowed-out hands. A couple of jerks more and it’d fall off. «I... » He had to spend the rest of the day walking around like a cowboy, his crotch burning like it’d been ground against glass fresh out of the smelter. «I hate my life.»

Yeah, yeah. How many times had he complained about it? What did he expect to accomplish by complaining even more? Was he hoping for pity? From whom? It’s not as if he had anyone but himself to pity.

Whomever it’d be, he was getting none of it. And he knew it.

«I fucking hate my life.»

And he deserved it.

Then, there were the voices. Only his voice at first, and a nasty one at that, until it copied itself and gave birth to other voices, several clones of him talking, screaming, screeching, yelling at the clouds, banging their fists on imaginary walls, turning his brain into a ball pit of tantrum, a clatter of hatred so intense he felt the house itself shaking around him, his body and his insides throbbing like rails as the train slowly approaches.

«I ... I can’t stop ... I can’t do shit! No. I ... I wasn’t born so fucked up! I had many opportunities in my life, yet still I can’t do shit with any of them! My fucking ... job, it’s ... so fucking worthless!! There are people half my age making billions, and they ... no! They had it better! They had mommy and daddy! They had love and a good country, a good ... fucking ... society!!»

He gritted his teeth, screaming into a pillow as his country, his motherland, it became yet again the target of his wrath. “Fucking ... pile piece of shit place I had to be born into!! Fucking shite filled with nothing but pigs and monkeys!” He began to tear the pillow off. The feathers glided softly onto the ground. «That fucking land of useless mediocre mongrels!! I could have been so much greater if I were born elsewhere!!» He bit the pillow. Tore it piece by piece. Soon, he was eating the cloth and the feathers. “I could have been king of the world by now!!”

Other voices joined in—different voices this time, and much less merciful than the others. These newcomers, real voices, not just invented ones; the voices of his past, stored deep in his mind, programmed to play on repeat for as long as he lived, and only on the worst moments of his life, to make them somehow even worse, like salt on the gaping wound:

Parasite! Have some common sense, you fucking crazy! Who do you think you are? Some lucky sperm? Some golden boy from trust fund heaven?!

These were the responses every time he’d been foolish, stupid, asinine enough to tell someone, anyone of his dreams: «But I wanna...!» Tears raining down his piggly face. «I wanna be an artist!»

...

Hah, hah!

...

Hah, hah!

...

HAH, HAH, HAH, HAH, HAH, HAH...!!!

Oh, the laughter. The laughter and the hatred.

Never once did he want to design pornographic portraits for a living. Never once did that career, or anything remotely resembling it, ever cross his mind. Of course it never did. Who, in all earnestness, would ever want to do this for a living? If he had gotten to that point, it was only because ... he needed it to survive.

To make money. To get by day after day until hopefully he had saved up enough money to not do this anymore and finally focus on what he truly desired in life.

So he labored. Day after day. And the day after that.

And the day after that.

And the day after that.

And the day

...

«Fuck me, gods.»

Those cheap, knock-off illustrations were the only thing in his whole damned life that had ever made him any money. His art, his genuine effort, it was worse than worthless. It was negative: he lost money, he lost time, he lost friendships, he lost every damn thing a human being would consider basic. «What a joke.» He clicked his tongue. «What a great, fucking joke.»

His dreams had cost him everything, yet his shit made him money. Not that any of this elicited any pity from the voices. Useless. Useless! In both failure and “success,” they all agreed on the same thing, and screamed it, at the top of their lungs, into his brain, directly on the ears of his soul:

Sad. Disgusting. Pathetic. Ridiculous. Repulsive...

Useless! Useless! You’re so fucking useless!

Their words weren’t the worst. It was the laughter. The laughter, the jest, the ridicule, like hyenas and demons eyeballing as they scoffed at him. In time, their static became only one long, uninterrupted chant of mockery.

The whole world scoffing at him. Enough to make one blow their brains out.

“Arrgh!” His brain felt at its limit. His eyes, nearly popping. He could see the blood coming out. “Aargh, fuck!!” He screamed his pain out, yet the longer he screamed, the greater the pain became, for the voices all screamed with him, always one step ahead, always more powerful, ever so unrelenting:

There are slaves toiling their bones out in the Sahara! Their paltry little children being sold off for barley! What do you know of pain and misery, you fucking imbecile?! Useless! Parasite! Fucking waste of semen!

The look of disgust from his neighbors as they sideglanced his mother, who too was deeply disgusted by him...

Twenty years of a child for this?!

And the laughter. Oh, the laughter! The endless jest, the unrelenting tearing down of his hopes and dreams. You are a piece of shit. If you were not a piece of shit, you’d be born in some good country, not the dump you were born in. And you know why were you born in this dump? The voices paused before the answer, grinning and crying out with so much laughter. Because you’re garbage, and garbage belongs in the dump.

His dreams and ambitions, for the most part, never warranted a proper response. Only laughter, yes, only jest, and ridicule.

Sometimes, though, there was silence. The worst of silences; a silence so contemptuous that no word could better convey its message: this is so stupid it’s not even worth addressing.

But sometimes it was addressed, and when it was addressed...

«P-please ... n-no!»

Yes. He preferred the laughter anytime.

MISERÁVEL IMBECIL!

Bang!

...

Hit. He was hit.

And he was hit and hit, and then hit some more, and offered up to the neighbors so they could hit him too and laugh at his expense, feel a little better about themselves by hitting and hitting him and cracking him up good. This guy thinks he’s some special boy!! What a fucking nutcase! What a cockless donkey!!

And laughter. Oh, the laughter.

And the hits. So. Many. Hits. Blaam!

...

Heavy blows on the back of his head. Strong enough to make his eyes pop.

But they didn’t, they sadly didn’t, and he sadly never died from these hits, remaining alive just to hear more of the laughter, more of the sneer, and get more of the hits as they grew plentiful, heavier, and merrier. Blaam! Blaam! Blaam...!

There is a method to torture, you see: the secret is to cause just enough pain without damaging the body. Maximize the pain while minimizing the harm. This way you get the best net suffering, the best return on your blows.

Who do you think you are? Some kinda genius?! Sneer, laughter, and blows. Every. Fucking. Time. Hey, y’all! He thinks he’s some fancy brain, some finer soul than us! Worthless slice of flabby pecker, that’s what you are! Laughter. Just laugh and laugh and laugh. And blows. So many blows to his head! Fucking stupid piece of shit! Thinking you’re any better than the fate you’ve been assigned!!

But he was. He swore he was: he studied, he read, he made art. He stayed silent when no word was needed and spoke the truth when he was prompted, but the land, that accursed, piece-of-shit land he’d been shat on needed no truth nor peace nor silence. It was a nation of babble, a land of lies.

Lies. Lies and lies and damned, fucking lies! It was a place so enamored with lies that the worst of liars became righteous, and the only good, upstanding citizens in the public’s eyes were those who lied and thieved the most. Truth and decency, humility and honesty ... bah! Only losers clung to them! Those who spouted them got themselves whooped! No mercy or love for truthtellers.

In a land of lies, the truthsayer is first to die. In the land of the blind, one of the many voices screamed, the one-eyed man is king. It was a famous saying from somewhere ‘round his continent. Another lie. «Yeah, right. What a load.» He banged his fists on his head harder, if a bit more slowly this time. «In the land of the blind, anyone who’s got an eye will be blinded too. As soon as folks find out the person still has an eye, they will jump on them like animals and gauge that eye out.»

His land, after all, was so compelled to mediocrity, so pulled toward indecency that the biggest crime, the only crime was to try and rise above their station. It was a country where everyone—and he meant everyone—spent all their days and their energies trying to bring everyone else down to their level, to the mud and the shitter where pigs so love to linger. Where good, compassionate leaders were unheard of, and where only the biggest scoundrels of the earth could make themselves respectable.

Alas, he wasn’t such a scoundrel. He wanted to be, but he had no talent for it, nor any skill for crookedness. Sigh Unable to be evil, but with no talent to succeed in goodness either, he just became hollow. A shell. A purposeless little spark of spurious flame fluttering by until it faded, with no fire left behind for a legacy.

Just the dark. And the cold.

...

A long time ago, he swore it, he knew it, he could remember it vividly, there had been a fire where his fleeting spark stood, but the people of his land made sure to correct that, to dampen it until it was moot. They could be very competent, his people, and quite skilled and well-coordinated when it came to pulling someone down and bringing them back to the shitter. If anything, it was the only thing that brought them meaning, hence the laughter, the insults, and the blows.

So. Many. Blows.

Bang! «Worthless!!» He hit his head. Bang! «You useless, worthless man.» And he hit his head again. Bang! Bang!

The worst thing was ... he didn’t disagree with the voices. He fought them for the sake of fighting them, for the stress of it, but never really denied them. Bang! Bang! To think was to be continuously humiliated. In a way, the act of thinking was just another form of self-immolation. Bang! Bang! To ram his head against a wall, see all his hopes and dreams shattered as soon as the words left his tongue. Bang! Bang! Bang!

A great humiliation, that of never being able to rise above the words of your detractor. The greatest humiliation, then, when such detractor lived inside your head, followed your every step, always and forever, and never, ever, not for a single second stopped chasing you, not for the briefest of moments took some rest. Bang! Bang! Bang!

When it wasn’t his family, it was his teachers.

When not his teachers, his bosses.

When not his bosses, the strangers.

When not the strangers, his acquaintances. And only acquaintances, for he had never had anyone worth calling a friend. «God ... d-damn...!!»

Bang! Whoever it was, whomever he knew or had ever known, they were all enemies, they were all foes, and his foes and enemies needed no sleep, nor did they ever give him any sleep. Bang! Bang! Bang!

“Useless. Useless. Worthless. Useless”

And his head yelled back at him:

Bang! Bang!

Bang! Bang!

Bang-bang-bang-bang-b-

...

Crack!

He felt a sharp pain above his eyes and heard something splinter. “Aargh...!!” Perhaps his skull had finally cracked. Maybe, just maybe ... you finally die.

The window was right there. Bang! Death would be more merciful through it. Bang! Still, despite all his pain... Bang! He didn’t really want to die. Bang! Bang! He just wanted to sleep!

At one point, his body got stiff. Bang! Both mental and physical exhaustion burned him. None of that stopped him, however, from bashing his skull against the wall enough times for its surface to bend and crack under the impact. Bang! Bang! He felt a wetness on his skin. Blood, probably. Hopefully. Bang! Bang! Despite all this, he still hit it. Heavens knew what could happen to him if he truly hurt himself. If he ended up on a hospital bed, damaging his brain so bad that he’d have some freaky issues for the rest of his life, unable to walk, to eat ... to work.

Bang! Bang! The act wasn’t all torture. He preferred the pain in his skull to the cruel voices inside it. Bang! Whenever he hit it... bang! The voices got a little quieter. Bang! A little happier. Bang! Almost as if they were hurt. Bang! Or satiated. Bang! Bang! Like he was doing exactly what they wanted him to do. Bang ... bang...

...

Bump!

He stopped. With his brain drumming and throbbing against the cracked bone of his skull, he turned his head to look at his bedroom door, and then he just ... stopped.

The silence was soothing with the chill wind from his window. The curtains touched his naked arm as they fluttered, bringing his body the only smooth touch of that night.

Something had happened. Something had made a noise there, across the hallway. «W-what...?» He remained there, sitting still, head burning and veins boiling, staring at the hallway and seeing colors in the dark. “Ouch.” He braced his head with both hands. “Ooow!”

Tundum-tundum-tundum! His brain throbbed with his heart. It was very close now. His head. Very close to cracking up. Just a matter of time now. Just a matter of seconds for death to snatch him.

“Ouch!” Tears rose. His nose, all clogged up. “Ooow...!”

Hush, hush now. It won’t be long. Not too long before the silence. Not too long before the dark. Not too long before those voices finally shut up. Just flow with the wind now. Close your eyes and feel its blows take you kindly into the night.

Tundum-tundum! His heart ... his heart... Tundum-tundum!

Tundum-tundum.

...

Tundum ... tundum...

...

Bump!

He stood up. Something had made a sound, somewhere in his hallway. “Oh.” The door of the storage room across the hallway stared back at him silently. It had been many days since he had left it closed. Almost enough to forget the pain, the shame, the love he had rejected and abandoned. Trapped. Locked up.

He had heard a noise coming from there. A bump against the door. A call for his heart. «Enough.» His head hurt. It hurt. «E- ... enough.»

It hurt so bloody much!

With the gait of a living man, and feet so white and numb they’d belong to a corpse, bumping and thumping against every wall while his broken brain bumped and thumped against his shattered skull, the boy got himself out of his bed, into the dark, and...

... and...

«Enough. Enough. Enough.»

He walked to the living room. Woooosh! His home turned cold as he slid the balcony door open. Woooosh... The wind, through whispers, invited him to sleep.

He stared into the night, approving of its uniformity, the few stars dimmed by the even dimmer lights of the lifeless city beneath, and stepped forth, feeling the cold wind on his body.

He looked down. It was a nice, merciful fall from there. The rails were low enough for one to fall over with only a slight push. A simple, careless lean, and then

...

...

Whoosh! That’s all there was. That’s all there would ever be.

For the standards of that country, it was a very sloppily-built place. «They forbid these kinds of hazards.» His hand touched the rail. «They try to protect their people at all costs.» He raised his head, sniffed out the chilly air. The northern winds had such dry bitterness to them. «They care that their people don’t hurt themselves.» He choked on his own saliva. «They won’t care for me.»

He stepped on the lower rail. Looked down again. If he ignored the few white dots on the streets, he would be staring into a perfect dark. The full moon shone much brighter on those latitudes, yet at the feet of his building lay only shadows, like the mouth of a leviathan ready to swallow him and give him peace.

«One step. Just ... one step.»

Yes. All he would need was one step, just a single step, and a tiny jolt into the dark. The silence and the dark he knew so well. The silence and the dark he somehow ... for some unknown and inscrutable reason ... took so long embrace.

His head, his heart.

Tundum-tundum.

Tundum-tundum...

«No more pain. No more past.» No more surprises in the dark.

No more past. No more future. No more voices to make him cry.

Provided that the religious folks were wrong, there would be nothing beyond the veil, and this nothing was so much better than the everything he’d ever known, than all the things he’d ever experienced in the light. «Zero is better than negative.» He looked up, staring at the different, hideous darkness of the sky. His mathematical mind was giving him some peace. Or the illusion of it.

He put his other foot on the lower rail, and his body rose higher against the night, into which he looked again, neck bent, head low, eyes down, down, down. «But the pain... » It gave his mind a split second of thought and his heart a splinter of doubt.

The pain. Yes, the pain. The pain was his only enemy. He’d seen pictures of people who’d fallen from those heights, yet somehow survived. Only a demon or a very nasty brand of god would curse a person to such an end: to deny them the release of death, but also invalidate them through the rest of life.

In that country, sure, these unlucky souls tended to be put to sleep. This was some solace, but not enough, oh, not nearly enough for him to ignore the pain that such survival, no matter how brief, would bring. «Oh, gods, take pity!» He shivered, looking down, thinking not only about the pain, but also the agony of the fall.

The fall. Yes, the fall. One could never forget the long, dreadful fall itself. Some folks in more savage places had it easy, for their lands abounded with guns, and every discussion, every torment, every slight was resolved with a bullet to the eye. Easy, quick, simple, efficient. In most places of the world, though, most people weren’t so lucky. They only had tall buildings at their disposal. To leap from such heights, though efficient, still left them with one too many seconds of horror and despair, even regret as they met their fates and the dark’s embrace.

There was no kind dying for those who jumped. Their last seconds on earth, the longest of their lives, would be filled with horror and second thoughts.

Oh, the second thoughts! The windows of opportunity when no opportunity remained. The plans of salvation that only came when salvation became impossible, all hope lost, a little too hard, a little too late. But that was the point of it, wasn’t it? To torment the tormented one last time. To give them a little taste of hell before they went to freeze in it forever?

It was his stupid body trying to survive. «I want to die. I do, but my body doesn’t.» In a last-ditch effort of self-preservation, the mind went berserk, filling the person with all sorts of foolishnesses and stupidities. «Hope.» He realized. «It gives us hope when there’s none. It’s always like this, ain’t it?» He smiled, barely realizing he was still leaning into the void, staring into the dark. «We only feel hope when we shouldn’t. We persist when it’s wise to give up. Endure when it’s best to surrender. Better for everyone.»

He knew what it was: survival instinct. He knew it, but preferred to always think of it as «torture. Sadism.» Life wanting to keep him struggling to no avail. A hangman enjoying the struggle before the inevitable end.

Everyone would die. Why not, then, make it quicker? Why not skip all the bullshit and hurry to the common fate of all? «Enough.» He bobbed his head, tears of blood sipping from his eyes. «No more pain. No more lies.» He looked up one last time, cursing all the gods and spirits that watched him from the moon. «No more doing the bidding of an uncaring life.» He closed his eyes and stepped blindly into the air, climbing one final set of stairs that wasn’t really there.

One hop. One tiny leap. It was ... so easy ... to just... «Lean forth and fly!» He wouldn’t even notice when his feet had left the rail. It’d just be flying, and he’d just be gone.

Tundum-tundum. His heart. Oh, his heart... Tundum-tundum.

Tundum ... tundum...

...

BUMP!

A loud noise startled him. “Fuck!”

Blaam! His buttocks came hard on the ground. “Ooow!!”

He squirmed for a while, not on the asphalt below, but on the balcony floor behind him, having fallen back thanks to the startle from that weird, mysterious sound. “Motherf-!!” He felt he’d broken something. Not his head, but his hips. It was certainly less broken, sure, than if he’d fallen in the opposite direction, but still... “Hurts like a fucking bitch!!” He grabbed his butt and squirmed on the floor a little longer. “Ooow!!”

The wind receded very slowly into a soothing silence, but the pain in his butt and the burn in his head prevented him from enjoying it. He was left squirming and whining on the ground. If anyone had cared to hear him, they would have thought a puppy had been struck and left for dead in that chilly air. Pain. Intense, bone-splitting pain! Yet now ... he no longer even had the strength to get up, climb over the balcony, and end it. «Curses...!»

Bump!

He froze. The sound had come again. «What the hell?» This time, it was undeniable: that mysterious sound had come from deep beyond the living room, somewhere hidden in the hallway. «My ... my room?»

The intense burning, though... “Aaargh!!” He held on to his head. The sharp, searing pain struck him often, and it struck him hard. “Aaah!” Like the waters of a dam collapsing after years of neglect, the pain burst from him like lava. “Merda ... merda!!” Deep inhales. Hurtful gasps. “Fuuuck!!” His quick breaths formed misty clouds rising to the darkened dome. There were very few people left in his town, yet still very few stars shimmered in the sky. The night was dark and dead, much more than it needed to be. “Fuck ... heaven’s ... fuck!!” Everyone was gone. Everything was dead. Except for him. «This pain! This fucking pain!!» Skull slowly splintering into eight, ten different pieces. «Okay, you win! I live!» He prayed to the gods on the moon. «I will live! I won’t die! Just please ... please...!!» His shattering eyes, shedding crystal tears, begged forgiveness. «Make this fucking pain go away!»

Bump.

...

Bump!

...

Alone in the dark, squirming in pain, he heard the strange noises again. «Fuck! What the ... what the fuck!»

Bump! Bump! Something ... someone ... knocking on a door.

It certainly wasn’t his living room door, he knew it. As hurt as he felt, he was enough too well to hear it clearly: those bumps came from somewhere near his room, deep, deep in the dreary, dark hallway. Bump ... bump...

«Fuck!» With the pain slowly receding, he tried staying as still as possible on the floor, letting the cold breeze freeze him, hoping that his quietness would bring that blistering ache to an end. «Please ... please... »

...

It did. It actually did. It took while, but ... in the end, it really did go away.

Dark and cold embraced him in the open. The floor was so chill he could no longer feel his back or his limbs.

Didn’t matter. The fact that the painful freeze, not the burning pain, was all he could feel, oh, it was like his soul was dancing in the stars. Not happy. Not glad. But relieved. An appropriate feeling for a dance on a night devoid of light. «What the fuck has gone on with me?»

In the back of his skull, the throbs of a hurt, bleeding brain. Boom! Boom!

In the back of his home, the knocks of a covert, mystic being. Bump! Bump!

«Screw this.»

By the time the moon herself became sleepy, he tossed aside whatever pride he still felt and, with great difficulty, feeling his skull threatening to explode and his brain drop from it like a piece of meat hanging over a fiery pit, he got up and...

... stumbled his way through the living room ... into the hallway, and...

Bump! Bump!

Bump! Bump!

... seeing shapes and colors flickering, sources of light all around him, he toppled and tumbled his way to the very end of the corridor, paying no mind to whatever demons or ghosts inhabited it, waiting for him and plotting his demise.

«At this point ... at this point... »

His head. Oh, his head.

Boom! Boom!

Boom! Boom!!

«I kind of wish for a ghost. A monster to just ... jump on me and ... let me fucking die!»

No monsters. No ghosts. Only...

Bump. Bump.

Bump. Bump!

... ghostly knocks.

“Who’s there?” He asked, making his way through the final feet of his hallway, walking between his bedroom door and the storage room. “Are you there ... ghost?”