Dennis Nilsen

He can’t stand still.

His mother, a turquoise-green blob in the distance, approaches the car. When she walks, she wobbles, and vacillates, and bobs up and down.
In the bookstore, he can always find her in the magazine section. As he waits by the customer service section having only remembered the title of a book he wants to purchase, a pair of elementary school teachers start raising their voices because fourteen text-books have been excluded from their shipment.
A cross-country bus almost runs her over as she closes in on the car. Almost home free, she waves at him, staring at her behind the window.
The vet that they visited earlier because their cat has stones in her bladder has very feminine handwriting. According to his mother, the vet is an asshole, and not an animal lover.
He listens to music that sounds good on long drives without specified destinations. He thinks it's really quirky and boring, but it makes sense. Long drives without specified destinations are most often quirky and boring. Nostalgic and all the motel and diner signs seem tragic and humbling. Part of the backdrop, along with the hills and secondhand cars and jaundiced climates that cluster over buildings with linoleum flooring like insects over hives.

In the living room he holds his cat in a towel while his mother feeds it, her, medicine to help with the kidney stones, or bladder stones, or whatever kind of stones make cats piss all over the place, and he loves his cat even though he doesn’t pay much attention to it, and when it makes the hurt purring growling sounds as it bites his mother’s hands he feels guilty. When he lets the cat go it perches on the rug, thumping its tail, staring at nothing, its face flat, its eyes flat.

He ends up deep in New Jersey where there are cemeteries and gray-white fences and brick buildings. He calls his friend, who tells him that he finally kissed the girl who he’s been after for months, moped in her lobby for months, scrunched up in her waterbed with too many pillows (for months), felt a jolting wisp of hope every time the phone rang for months. He tells his friend he doesn’t know where he is. Doesn’t know how he got here. Lately he’s been buying a weird half-beer half-liquor breed from Harlem, drinking it, getting on buses and ending up in the middle of nowhere hours later. There are never any pretty girls on any of the buses. Just squashed Spanish men with tattooed arms and greased hair. He has a subscription to Time magazine and he doesn’t know how he got it. Last week he went out to Long Island to stay with his best friend and incrementally stole his painkillers from the loose-hairy mantle below the mirror in his bathroom, stealing just enough a day so his friend wouldn’t notice, who had recently had his wisdom teeth yanked out and wasn’t knowledgeable about drugs anyway. He’d worked a job at the beach for a week, pulling out chairs and supplying the barge with ice. He’d been knocked up on painkillers the entire time. Even though it was scalding, he’d feel the breeze.
During a makeshift wedding out on the beach, he jerked off in the bathroom, stopping every time someone neared his stall because the plopping sound reverberated. He laughed while doing it, unaware of what drove him to do so besides the fact that there was a wedding taking place and the couples in suits and ruffled flowery dresses were lauding the Bible and throwing around heavy phrases with words like “eternal” and “self-sacrament” in them. He thought about how it’s easy to tell what couples are going to get divorced just by looking at them.
He starts smoking again, after having quit for eight months. He talks to the lifeguard, one of those proud caring types that laughs when they’re hurt – and they’re always hurt – in the dark, walking down the road from his friend’s house. He’s drunk, and scared. She’s easy to talk to because she’s not dogmatic, and shakes her head and laughs at everything. She finds his self-loathing behavior amusing and he plays it off as if it’s nothing to him, habitual, inured to abuse.
He’s in love with a girl who over-gesticulates when she talks, takes obnoxious as a compliment, hangs posters of bands she doesn’t listen to all over her room until the walls aren’t visible. Every few months she calls him up or leaves him a text-message along the lines of “I want to hang out with you, come into the city,” and they (subtly bitter) nostalgically catch up on old times (that were miserable at the time) and get drunk as the night bends towards the A.M’s, leading to them almost having sex with each other. She’s a lesbian, a virgin, and blurts things like, “I want to fuck you so badly,” into his ear. He’s too drunk to be aroused – but wants to be, for her – and longs to lie still with her and breathe into her neck. She grabs his hand, pushing it down into her, meanwhile touching him, except he can’t see her because she only instigates these things when the lights are off, maybe signifying intimacy but probably the direct opposite. The urgency of the sexually inexperienced lingers with him. Her father’s in another country and she’s got the apartment to herself for the summer. He smokes her entire pack by accident and buys her a new one. When he leaves in the morning, before she wakes up, he tries not to fall in love with her, because they won’t say a word to each other until their next reunion. He misses her knowing she doesn’t miss him at all.
(There are much more prominent problems in his life, and he hates himself for putting her before the rest of them.)

“Everyone’s got problems, you know,” lifeguard.
“I ROAM AROUND MY HOUSE WHEN I’M IN PAIN,” he giggles.
His mother sits on the couch, juggling her knees. He roams around his apartment, in pain. He can’t tell the difference between oppression and depression but he knows the anti-depressant pills he’s been taking for five years are ineffective
Doesn’t answer his phone, ever, people realize this and stop calling. Seeing “missed calls” on his cell phone screen pop up gives him tiny joy. Life is spurred by momentary happiness. Checkpoints through his spoiled misery, seemingly pointless suffering.

Without having attended any psychology courses, he doubts his own reality. Vagabonds talking to pigeons on the street are poignant and inexplicably meaningful to him. He can’t stop writing about himself. He waits for something pinnacle to change his life, witnessing a rape, surviving a car-crash, but nothing ever happens. He lies in his bed, repeating song lyrics to himself to justify his lethargy. He procrastinates going to the bathroom because struggling with a shit is the best part of his day.
“How was the ride home,” lifeguard!
“Fantastic and allegorical.”
And then one day, everything changes. In the back of a taxi-cab, driven by a garrulous driver who has an angel figurine on his dashboard. The driver is talking about what it’s like to grow up in Brooklyn. He over-gesticulates. His name is Muhammad something. On the bus-ride home from Long Island, the boy with the mother sat next to a beautiful sun burnt preppy, who slept in a cute fetal position, legs and arms compressed outwards.
There’s a spacey hollow feeling in his chest. He thinks about how when someone expects you to feel a certain way, and you know they expect you to feel that way, you try everything in your power not to feel that way, but it only makes it even worse when you succumb to the way you’re expected to feel.
He can see a giant Aqua Man, wading through the Hudson, looming over the skyline. He has a constipated shocked look on his face, his mouth contorted into the shape of a gnarled bean. When he stomps, waves swell from each direction of his feet. Perhaps he has just been born into the world, and is experiencing the sudden unimaginable wonderterror of what it’s like to be alive. Look at him go, already having learned how to walk! He must have been dropped from a gigantic, planet-sized stork, wings crashing into stars. The skyscrapers around him only amplify his size. Will he fight for good, become a symbol of altruism and benevolence, or will he go down the tubes, become another victim of middle-class purgatory? Does the world appear ugly to him, from his vantage point? What if he begins to crawl? Will the military try to incarcerate him, Aqua Man, neo-Godzilla? Will they impose tests, and somehow, stretching the limits of scientific exploration, discover how to recreate another Aqua Man? A new and improved Aqua Man? Will this new race of Aqua Mans eventually abolish the need for humans?
His life is an exciting, drunken adventure, and yet he finds waking up in the morning a distraction from his dreams. There are crying, lost blond girls, wandering around in his head. They silently grieve on gray-colorful beds, with flower patterns on the sheets; they bend over, and touch the edge of rivers with the tips of their fingers. His peers, turning into coeds, all jumping on the band wagon of new catch phrases, “Happy Belated Birthday!” Suddenly they are all liberated, and prudence is a relic of the past. Everybody long hair!
He gets out of the cab, tips the driver ten dollars, gets drunk and has a conversation with a nurse on break that’s standing outside of one of the hospitals in the area.
“I’ve seen it all. I’ve been working here for seven years and let me tell you I’ve seen it all (drags from cigarette). Just today, in the morning, I saw this nakid man, in his jimmies, running through the halls screaming ‘Sugar!’ at the top of his lungs with security scrambling in tow. He locked himself in a wardrobe, and played bongo with the walls, screaming and screaming and screaming. That’s nothing, though, (drags from cigarette), that’s nothing. I’ve…”

Now, buzzed, on the subway, and in the corner seats there are two black men talking about how one of their mothers stabbed her cat to death with a fork. With a fork! Their clothing could fit someone that weighs twice as much as they do. Golden chains drape their chests, hanging down to their hands and waists. Even their baseball caps are too big, with golden stickers shining from their visors. In contrast to their lanky appearance, their teeth are fluorescent white. They hang and droop like shadows, guffawing hysterically. He smiles.
The conversation dwindles on, always reverting back to one of their mothers, stabbing her cat to death with a fork. Diggings its eyes out with a spoon. He thinks about taking out another bottle, taking a swig or two on the subway, quickly remembering that once opened he would have nothing to close it with. But who cares, he’s drunk. He smiles. And wonders to himself, where to next? Anywhere until his iPod runs out of batteries. The black men, the black young men, slapping their knees, with their watery kind eyes.
Another black man gets on the car. A burly, orge’ish black man, dressed similarly to the two younger black men, but in brighter, more jovial colors. He has no expression on his face, an expression in itself, and extends his crotch out off his seat. He’s wearing sunglasses, two sizes too big. He glances from compartment to compartment. He reminds him of the green giant from that story about the giant who went around cutting off people’s heads. The two younger black men glance at him, then go back to their conversation, prodding each other’s sides.
A mother in a shawl pushes a stroller into the car, forcing it over the entry bump. She hunches. The baby screams. People from the platform stare through the open doors into the car, disappointed that it wasn’t the train they were waiting for. The metal columns coated in throw-up green loudly mouth off their graffiti. He craves a cigarette, badly, even thinks about smoking one in the car, the doors take forever to shut, tons of people scuffle off and on; tons of people, scuffling off and on, the plexi-glass windows are scratched with initials. He knows he won’t feel this lightness for very long. The thought of coming down already depresses him. At the next stop, he slivers off the car, blankly staring into the faces of the assortment of people standing outside of the doors of the car to get on. He wonders what they think of him.
Boinking up the steps, the hot breath of being underground clamming his senses, he thinks of her again. How she always turns the lights off, giving the act an estranged, mechanical quality. Her desire for him is flagrant, and yet he knows that she says what she does to everyone she seduces, probably not even on purpose. Is he really so useless to her? She must only have done what she did with him for the experience. Should he have called her instead of tormenting himself and hoping for her to call him, knowing that she wouldn’t? The moon, slipping through her shutters, cutting a reflection between her shoulder blades, miniature bumps, like speed-bumps. He laughs at his stupidity. He walks straight into the incoming crowds, laughing at himself, laughing at nothing. The lights overhead make him nauseous. He continues up the escalator to wherever.
Columbus circle. People twist and blur, fixated on themselves, others, entrenched in the worlds they’ve distinguished for themselves. He can hear an emptiness ringing in the honking and chattering around him. If he died, at this second, Columbus circle would keep on revolving without him. In the large scheme of things, he is an unnoticed martyr, alcoholic before the age of twenty-one. As the years pass it doesn’t just seem to be a teenage phase that he can outlive. What’s the point of anything he feels? He looks down at his hands.
“Why do people get frustrated so easily?” someone says, brushing by him, frustrated. He waddles to the curb. He bums a cigarette of someone with his intoxicated confidence, but forgets to ask for a light.

In Central Park, he spits a lot, smoking. This is where Holden Caulfield came up with all those metaphors. The ducks, over the frozen pond, and stuff. Soon the park will close; the cops gave him a summons once, for being on the swings at one in the morning. The judge let him go with a warning. He’s been arrested before, for shoplifting when he was fifteen, and drinking in public earlier this year. The trees rustle, its spooky. There are a lot of people kissing and making love in semi-hidden places. He can hear them if he stops walking, leaves them alone. If he was with his friends he’d probably harass them, pop out from behind a bush with a video camera. Feels a tinge of envy. He tosses his cigarette, half-finished, and trolls out of the park.
Still somewhat drunk, he hops on a cross town bus. There’s a crew of scruffy pierced kids his age talking about blowjobs in the back. He’s one of those guys that tells girls that he won’t let anyone give him head, and yet if they offer, he never refuses, so they all end up thinking they’re unique. Or they see right through his fibbing, and think its moronically cute. Or just think he’s a moron. He doesn’t talk about it in public, though, so entire buses can hear.
He gets off at East End, near the FDR. On a drunken quest, he looms his way through the concrete jungle, threatened by the unusual quietude (especially at this time of night), and makes it to one of the many overpasses. Ignoring a full-blown assault of calls from his mother, he stares at the cars below until he’s fully sober – secretly hoping for something profound, being such a picturesque event – then calls her, listens to her scream, and meets her in front of an ice cream shop where she used to pick him up after school.

Not surprisingly, he can’t sleep. Watches half a season of the X-files. Exhausted of aliens and inhuman serial killers, he switches to cable. AOL ads with Coldplay playing in the background. Human serial killers. Law & Order re-runs. In his room, he flips open his laptop. Overweight “ebony beauties” posting nude pictures of themselves on Craig’s List. Male and female options both checked off.
He read an article in New Yorker about bisexual teens a couple months ago and somehow knew that she would be reading it too. When he went to her apartment that night, she had the front page of it cut out and taped to the bottom of the front of her spray-painted TV. The letters of it were all colored in exotic colors.

The next day…he returns to the city. A little more drunk than the day before. His stomach feels shriveled and drowned, or maybe that’s his liver, he can’t tell. He heads to the long-distance bus station. Greyhounds. He takes his backpack, necessary sustenance inside. On the subway there’s nothing out of the ordinary; the break-dancers that worm on the floor and shove their upside-down hats in your face for tips afterwards. He floats unnoticed through the streets like a sluggish ping-pong ball, taking whimsical interest in the shop signs and posters slapped on the sides of public busses.
“Karma is bullshit. It gains interest. There’s like some invisible guy that goes around and stores it, unleashing it on you when you’re most vulnerable.”
He buys a round-trip ticket to some random destination. Upstate New York, maybe, or Westchester. He first comes into contact with the mudwamp space bugs while waiting in the terminal for his bus. They descend from the sky in a holy manner, their thousands of beady red eyes buzzing like monitor lights. They don’t have mouths. Their bodies consist of giant balls, similar to the gigantic rubbery balls found in Yoga practice rooms, stacked upon each other, meshing and unnaturally flowing together. As the balls press together they make farting noises. Gigantic, entomologic slinkies.
The feeling of accidentally coming into contact with a childhood friend and finding out that they’ve started smoking cigarettes overcomes him. There are these bugs, squelching in front of him, veins pulsing and bulging. He waves at them. He’s also overcome by a distressing sense of languor. He sits down, shadowed by the space bugs, on the terminal. He begins to laugh.
“There are so many words. What kind of douche bag comes up with all of these words. How will I ever find the time to use them all? I have journals, tons of them, for when I come across an interesting word, I write it down. I have years of words written down. I don’t know what to do with them all anymore. I keep thinking that if I die, that there will be all these words that I will have never used, not once, and how these journals that I’ve kept will have been in vain. I’m trying to remember one word right now, that starts with an A. I can’t remember what it means, I just know that if I could I would use it right now.”
One of the space bugs belches, “The English language has been developed and expanded over many decades and centuries. Perhaps some of the words that haunt you the most are the new words, the words that’s founders are not even very familiar with.”
“Imagine, how these words were all created, the situations their creators must have been in to come up with such specific letter placements and pronunciations.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been wasting away my childhood. This pain, I don’t know where it originates, or why I feel it. When I think about the vastness of our populace’s vocabulary, how much of will never be used, how many brain cells I’ve squandered that could have been used trying to store them all, trying to find happiness, pity, attention. There’s so much to experience and live for and I’ve been compacted into the smallest of spaces. I’m so lost. I could be in love with you for all I know. Everything I feel is so temporary and transient I can’t even prove that I ever felt it. I just forgot that 12 A.M. is the start of a new day, and not 1. I waited all night for this site to update and it should have an hour ago. I just spilled a cigarette out on my lap. The girl I love just signed offline, even though I wouldn’t have said anything to her if she had stayed online any longer. I’ve been staring at her screen name for weeks.”
“You’re having an epiphany, right now. It’s making you feel as if you’ve connected into something deeper and greater than yourself. A radiant stream or pool that connects us all. Your insides are peeling. All the derision that you submit yourself to, the pain, the agony, isn’t this worth it? This feeling of absolute being. Right now, you know that you’re alive, and the inspiration you have been inactively and listless pining for, it’s here. You’re experiencing it. Is there nothing else? Aren’t you happy, right now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there anything I can do? Won’t you ever be happy?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Oh, won’t you please be happy?”