| Self-Destruction Dreams by Vito Capobianco |
| 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 couldn�t even blink. There�s not much to say in response to that now is there? I mean, it had only been a day and already I was convinced of everything you declared. I coughed the smallest amounts of bile onto my own shirt; it scorched my throat, while both kinds of human excrement slid down the inside of my thighs. The tears crawled down my cheeks; I could feel them get caught in my stubble. Soon after the cough turned into a fit of such an act, a fit of coughing that is. Doubled over, bending my fingernails into the wooden floor in trying to grip it, whilst my stomach acted on its on volition, feeling as if it tried to heave it�s self out of my body. With a sudden forceful violent shudder my body expelled what was left of its fluids. I had been emptied. It felt like a great and powerful wave had washed through me, dragging everything soured and gangrenous from my body. A cleansing; I stood up; tall and straight, somehow feeling empowered by the full expulsion of any fluids in me. It�s funny how memories exist on string lines. Like the memory of that sensation of tears on my cheeks is directly followed by the memory of your fingers on my face. It�s on a string, one scene after another, clotheslines in dry cleaning stores; this analogy isn�t so far off is it? Our memories, our feelings are rarely if ever pure dirty facts, before we retell a tale even once we obscure it, we derange it. We lie, convolute. We live our lives distorting our perception of events merely to suite our feelings, our needs. We clean it all. So who is to say there was something special there? In your touch, in the brief moment your fingers brushed my face, who�s to say you felt anything for me? �Just me and my perception, my feelings. �Mother�� A long pause in which I thought you were speaking to her, but as it turned out you were gathering your thoughts. �My mother�is very ill. Say hello Gordon.� You turned and smiled and with a crack of thunder there was a flash of light and I could no longer focus on your face. Only the ghost of what you were in that flash. Another photograph fixed in my eye; this one a close up of your face, no longer as picturesque as before. The after glow was like a skin tight mask, leaving the image of you looking quite skeletal in its porcelain gleam. That was the end of the first night and day I spent in your estate Dacia. As it turned out, the first of many to come, years in fact. After I said my hellos and goodbyes we left the attic, all the while my head swam with the same pulsing rush as before. It was somehow intensified by the cleansing. When we reached the murder scene you left me at the door, in no particular rush you fetched me a set of clothes, your fathers I presume. The white turtle neck and khakis you so favored. Once again I bathed, this time feeling quite fit enough to do so myself, and afterwards I joined you for lunch, seeing how our busy morning seemed to have whisked away breakfast and brunch. I wasn�t surprised to see the entire meal was comprised of different apple dishes. Nor was I surprised when given the turtle neck I noticed instead of a tiny fox on the breast there was a snake, nothing fancy, just a green line with smaller red line on one end. We spent the rest of the evening conversing over many cups of tea. I felt extremely light headed, and in such a state I did not blush to tell you of my life. I told you many things that night and the hundreds of nights that followed. About my life, and how tedious it was, and would be once I went back. How I spent my days in an office with nothing really to do. I was a lucky one it seemed, I had slipped by with out a real job, I just showed up, sat in my office and made small talk with passers by: �Hey Gordon, you get a chance to look at the Polanski report?� �Yeah�that�s a tough one.� �Yeah tell me about it, it�s got the boys up in accounting spinning on their heads.� �Yeah�ha, ha, ha.� �Hahahahaha. Hey, I�ll see you around all right.� And other such drivel that made absolutely no sense to me. It seemed that everyone thought I did anything they were doing at the moment but wanted nothing more than to talk to me about how they would deal with it. I never saw that Boss, I never socialized with coworkers; I didn�t play squash at lunch. I just became a sort of living, laughing stress ball people could walk by and squeeze with their inane chatter. We also discussed your upbringing, the strictly buy, consume, collect and amass, spend money and make money lifestyle your parents fed you. The world vision they created in which only the greedy survived; only those who lacked compassion and had not only the will but the desire to capitalize. To consume, to gain, to rise, to fulfill, to become the richest and coldest of all, to care not for the well being of your fellow man. To use and profit. You had only the most vicious of words to speak of them. I could see the anger in your eyes as they narrowed with furrowed brow, and in your palest pink lips that twisted with malice, and your cheeks as they burned. Fire was your anger, fire and violence. I�m not sure what it was, exactly, that kept me here. Sometimes I think I never did recover from the shock of the robbery, like you never seemed to recover from the terrible violence that exploded from you. Perhaps it was the way I felt for you, it seemed that after I had spent those first few nights in your home, our home, I couldn�t bring myself to leave. Every time we spoke you opened up a little more, I�d compare you to a flower in bloom but I�m certain you�d claim to be a Venus Fly Trap, and I�m not sure I would disagree. So when it comes down to it, I believe I just could not bring myself to leave you. I�m a fool to say it but I loved you then, and even now while I hunt you, I am in love with you. You can�t understand the awful desperation I feel Dacia. Time. Grinds slow and ever are the gears rusty. As they turn a fine red dust fills the cavity of the room, I breathe it in and it catches on capillaries and clogs the lungs, turning quickly to sludge. The next breath is harder to take and there is yet more fine red dust to inhale as each second of each minute passes. Panic bursts and dies as quickly as a match, and still lungs tighten and constrict. The powder rust collects under the gears and slows them further, my mouth dries as a paste forms under the tongue. This is waiting. In sullen discontented moods the dust collects on my skin, in the hairs of my arms and on the ridges of my eyelids, it weighs me down. Every blink is painful and brings streaks of red across my vision, and the gears move so chokingly slow it seems that they have no motion at all. Fall grips your body in a chilling embrace. The sort of hold you want to push away from at first but once it settles it begins to warm you up. The yellows and oranges are subtle yet leave nothing to be desired. Fall has not the overpowering swollen feel of summer nor does it have the barren frightened desperation of winter, it lacks even the self righteous cocky feel of spring. Truly it is a love hard fought for, the love of fall, and once it burrows deep inside and the warmth of yellow and orange blurs becomes something greater than vision, more then what is seen but is truly something to feel, it will disappear under the wretched clutch of winters frosted hands. Fall is wisdom, knowledge that allows for content and peace of mind, and as you stare off at the horizon and the setting sun reaches that point where it blazes like a flare before slowly and sadly burning out, the beams of light crash against fallen leaves causing them to shimmer in the softest warmth you will experience. Pitifully enough, I cannot help but feel saddened by this image; although it should remind me of all that is beautiful it only conjures an apprehension, a dread for the coming months. When you can do little but hide indoors by the uneven heat of a fire, which has its own beauty but could never match the crisp fresh month or so of harmony in nature. I remember during a fall�s evening golf cart ride through and around the hedge maze we did speak of the weather. Much in the way I have just now expressed it. The ride was smooth and I needed to pay little attention to the sights ahead of me, since by that time I had been living in the house for a year or so, you quickly became the centre of attention. My focus on you and our conversation was so rapt that it was as if we were not moving but the scenery around was, like the golf cart was firmly set on a conveyer belt set around your property. We spoke of the design and pattern of scattered leaves, the structure created when none is intended and how so much beauty is found in nature. Soon enough though, your light smile, the one that would make me flutter, disappeared as you began to speak of the horrors of humanity. That nothing we create could ever be so beautiful, so natural; I disagreed, it was my point that we could create life, and life is the most beautiful and precious of things on this earth. Also that we could love, and love and life are two things that are so intertwined as to think you could not have one without the other, or at the least not want. You only smiled in a sarcastic way that let me know that I was being a child and that a world view in which one could love despite what one knew to be true; that all humanity was but a sickness of the earth, a vile twisted sort of plague, was nothing more than a frivolous fantasy. A hope and prayer that would never be answered, a desire that would forever go unfulfilled. |