Burning House

We finally get to his house and the dead guy is kind of bubbling. And of course, all these people are doing their conspiracies and freaking out and I’m in the corner, neutral in face and mind, calmly anticipating some sort of emotional response. I can’t bring myself to care. All the wonderful things in the world, I think to myself, and this does nothing for me. In fact, all these people around me don’t look much different, head an hair and body and all that. Never have, in retrospect.

But there’s a dead guy and that’s first and it’s all about who did what and who’ll do what but I can’t even hear them, really, there’s a leaky faucet somewhere in the crumbling mess of this house, on the second floor maybe, and it’s shuddering through my bones, I think I’m feeling the sounds but I haven’t had anything in the last ten days. And for some reason I’ve met this guy a hundred times and his name eludes me, I start wondering whether I ever really talked to him or if I just avoided listening to his name out of spite, but nothing comes to mind.

They get a little more organized and I saunter over calmly, looking over them like a part-time accountant looking over a list of numbers. I just want this over with, done and gone, out and out, slipped in the recesses of some memory that will come back later, arbitrarily if I’m feeling in the mood to think it arbitrary, and that will be it. That will be all this experience amounts to, a memory, and here in the present it’s like a very calm waterslide that I am inextricably sliding down.

And they notice my calmness and give me a few looks. These people have seen too many films, they’re imitating mobsters who think their intuitive step has suddenly caught the right rung and can now reach the top of… whatever. I just stare. Finally, I ask them what the problem is. Of course, now I’m the problem. They can’t focus on the topic at hand and think that some kind reconciliation on my part is going to ease their emotions, make the situation nice and even and clean. I wonder if they’ve had two funerals across the country on the same day. I wonder if they’ve ever had to pick between saving one person out of a burning bus full of people. I wonder if they’ve ever had to lose either an arm or a leg. I wonder if they’ve ever had to choose.

So I answer nicely, calmly but with a calculated bit of nervousness, I need to act well or their shitty intuitions are going to think that the stonefaced guy is the one. And they buy it, they’ve always bought it, I’ve been living in this body for thirty years and everyone has bought it, even the ones who say they see something empty end up buying it, and even I like to think that I’ve bought it when the wind sweeps high in the clear blue sky and for a moment I think I’m alive and I’ve seen something beautiful.

By turns they chatter towards their objective, no one is fessing up and everyone is ready to pitch in, an eerie sign but these aren’t the dumbest people in the planet, they won’t leave simply out of fear, so a plan comes to fruition and I’ve already retreated to a couch. They give me shit for it, tell me I’ve got something coming if I plan to leave evidence like that, so I get up and raise my hands and they just frown and wonder if I’m on some kind of drug they haven’t heard of. By definition I might be.

I am a thousand miles away, watching calmly on this nice little sphere that my imagination has given to me. I descend, this imagined projection now looking at grassland, then this lone and dilapidated house, and finally to this living room which looks something like a war table. Everything is laid out, strategies are written down in little codes to make it look like a game in case, for some retarded reason, they don’t burn it after the fact. I find it kind of amusing that they’re this slow despite being decidedly above average in the brains department, I’ve known by talking to them, and I smile just a little bit. No-one notices.

And now it’s time for my part, my time to shine, I walk in and give them a new and tantalizing piece of information, completely false, I don’t remember it now but it was exactly what was needed to throw this place into hell. Silence, followed by crying and assuring pats on the pack. I look penitent, I tell them this was the reason for my detachment, I’m sorry, oh god I’m sorry, and they just can’t stop with it. I stay around, I’m sure that they’ll ask a few confirming details, and they do. It’s a neat little puzzle I’ve made, and it’s a neat little puzzle they accept.

Their options now are few. Two can turn themselves in and the rest can get out, or they all go in and get let fate sort out the scapegoats. They’re trying to measure life now. This is the best part, my favorite part, where they take every method of measurement and thought and convoluted moral code and try applying it to this, this clusterfuck that has nothing but peril ahead.

Around and around, one of the women wants to run, fuck that quiet guy and the guy making the plans, she just wants her friends to get away. But the friends don’t see it quite this way and the strategy guy and I are a little less than pleased. A long discussion begins. What is life? Who’s going to do the most in their life? Who’s done the most? The most what? How do you qualify that? It comes around in the strategy guys’ head that there’s no winning this situation, so he pulls out a knife and lunges at the girl.

A brawl ensues and some light cuts come about but in the flurry I’ve already left, I’m stripped and naked and pure, my feet lightly touching the earth. I can hear the scuffle ensuing, a scream, maybe someone stabbed or beaten pulpy but I could care less at this point, my attention is with the task at hand and even then I almost walk out on the whole thing completely oblivious.

But I feel like I might have a chance, someday, somewhere, maybe at some kind of life in love or a hobby or work or something, anything, not this soulless husk lumbering around, the echoes from within mimicking those twitchy things of flesh that populate the world around. I can’t feel this chance and truthfully I just lack the impetus to kill myself. I look down to the disfigured thing, the jumble of flesh that marks some early accident I cannot even remember, the lumpy surgically-fashioned hole where urine on occasion comes out, and I am serene. There has never been anger, looking at this. Who am I kidding? There is no chance. There has never been anything.

The grand finale, oh boy, the grand bore, I’m barely able to light the match and get this over with, it bores me to hell, to see this hell, just the thought makes me sigh. The rustle is still going in desperate kicks, exhaustion clear in the voices, and I light the match. The slithery line of gasoline spreads to the house and this time I made sure not to overdo it or do in incorrectly. No vaporized fumes annihilating the house, no poor air circulation or unspoken saferooms to fish a survivor out of. I can hear the screams and the house burns, full and bright, and inside I can only feel a tinge, the slightest tinge, and it seems like there must be something better, more affecting out there. I can't even remember the bubbling man I killed.