| Self-Destruction Dreams by Vito Capobianco |
| Yes, I remember that day so well. My head swimming and my knees weak with a fearful anticipation, my ears filled with the drowning sound of flies and my stomach sick with the scent of death on my tongue, truly an assault of great proportion on my senses. We climbed the stairs at a disquietingly slow pace. Every step you took was deliberate and steady, mine were quick, choppy and stiff with a stutter and jerk I hadn�t ever felt in my footing before. I attribute it to the foul setting and strange swollen feeling of my brain. You stopped somewhere in between the beginning and the end of the stairs. Standing there in silence I stared into the curve of your back while bloated flies bounced off my skin. Bulging with the spoils of death, fattened on the bloodied remains not yet carted away. Flies, so filthy, I could almost see the germs and disease left on my bare skin. My brain throbbed with my quickened pulse. Dizzied I did lift a hand to the wall to steady myself; it lightly dragged across the faded wallpaper, I could feel every ripple in the paper rub across my fingertips sending a feverish chill through my spine. My hand falls to land flaccid at my side. �Dacia.� I started out as if to say something, soon though I lost all thought of what to say and I stood there in silence as you turned to me. The look you bore was that of the truly tormented; the look of the haunted and fearful. �Gordon.� A soft laugh coughs out of you. The sort of laugh brought out not by good humor. No, it was a laugh more along the lines of some sort of twisted irony, a joke that shouldn�t ever be. Laughter no one should feel. A sick sort feeling, the laughter of the hopeless, a cough. �Gordon?� �Yes.� �Tell me, what do you know of the Arctic Salmon?� I almost laughed. Had the setting not been so dire I believe I would have laughed in your face. Sorry dearest but it�s the truth. �Nothing. Dacia, I don�t believe I know a thing about the Arctic Salmon.� You nodded, as if you had expected nothing more than that. �Well, let me tell you something of them. Won�t you Gordon?� Your voice croaked; you rolled your head around on the wall, smearing a blood stain into your hair. I thought this quite the rhetorical question so I did not respond. We both wavered in dazzled states, each waiting for the other to speak. �The Arctic Salmon, as you have no doubt gathered from the name, spend a great deal of their time in the arctic. It is their natural habitat, their feeding grounds. But every year, during the spawning season, they come to the mainland, or rather lakes in the mainland, to bare their eggs and spread their seeds on them.� You said all this with a look of great distaste. �Your thinking right now, �so�, well Gordon the thing is they die soon after. And you know what else they leave behind beside their offspring?� �No.� �PCPs, Gordon. They collect PCPs from the ocean and deposit them in the lakes. PCPs, Gordon, are pollutants. Poisons.� �But wouldn�t that mean-� �Exactly Gordon. Now you see don�t you. The salmon are poisoning their young. By polluting the lakes they breed in, they doom their children to live lesser lives then they themselves have led. Leaving these PCPs in the waters after they pass on they stain the waters and lake beds, they taint the lives of their children. Causing birth defects shortened life spans and unnatural behaviors.� Your gaze shot through me, that distant look stealing your face again. �Does that remind you of anything Gordon?� Before I could answer you merely continued along the way. The conversation had left a deep sunken feeling in my guts, that terrible quivering bowel sensation. At the top of the stairs there was no door to open and close on the threshold. Only an empty space where light cut in on an angle and particles of dust float and fell as oppressive as some sort of force field, it was the presence death in the other room. It was a swollen feeling that took the entire span of the attic, and as we crossed the threshold I could feel my attention immediately drawn to the window where I had first seen your mother watching us in the field. As my eyes fell on her silent form my throat did constrict and all that was in my bowels quickly flushed through me. You made a sound of distaste and shot me a scornful eye. �Mother is very sensitive to the functions of young men�s bodies Gordon. You do want to make a pleasant impression do you not?� We moved closer as if on a conveyer belt, in static little jerks your mother�s end of the room got closer and I shook and quivered. The terrible reek of death turned every breath into a cough as eyes streamed tears to fight the terrible burn of the air. In prophecy to vomiting my mouth felt a sting and quickly welled with spit that I swallowed to ease an aching throat. You floated further in front of me, pulling on my bandaged arm, which oddly enough did not seem broken. I didn�t want to be any closer but to resist you seemed an unfathomable thing, an action that could not be taken. She was sitting, and still is to this moment, in a low backed white wooden chair, facing the attic window from which she always did watch us. Surrounded by a shroud of flies that were only visible during crashes of lightening. �Does it remind you, Gordon, of anything?� A flash of lightening burns a picture in my mind. Nature�s photography. Your soft palest pink lips closing on the last word you spoke. Your tongue hiding deep within your mouth. The soft curve of your cheeks highlighted with the contrast created by the white flash. Even here in the midst of this murder scene, you are beautiful. You, in that moment surrounded by the clutter of old tennis rackets and trunks of clothing covered in deep blankets of dust, were at your most striking. I would compare you to a gem found already polished in the rough rocky earth if I didn�t know exactly what you would say in hearing it. Something terribly melodramatic; along the lines of beauty should not be in such close relation to worth. You�d say that this gem only has beauty because of what it can offer people, the riches and fame. Then you would say I only loved you because of what you could offer me; disease, pestilence, fear, an array of things I could not receive anywhere else. No one had been up there in years, that is, until you brought your mother�s body there. I could see it in my mind while we stood there and I stared at the fading image, that strange glowing aftermath of light, burnt temporarily on my cornea. I saw you, in your yellow flower dress, bare arms and legs straining, your hair in your face barely concealing a savage twisted smile. Your palms sweating while pulling her limp and lifeless body by her ankles, on each step you stamped a dirty pair of heels and twisted them in the worn wood, watching her head bob up and down as it hit each stair, as if to say: yes Dacia; put me in the attic. �Does it make you think of the human race? Does it make you think of garbage land fills and littered ditches and highways and parks? Does it make you think of smoke stacks and thousands of thousands of cars in rush hour traffic? Or nuclear waste that will never ever go away�Does it make you think about cancer and heart disease, flesh eating viruses and still born babies? Does it make you think that we all deserve to die?� I |