Disaster

The impending disaster was spelled out in a flurry of yellow Post-Its and ragged edged notebook paper. It was nonsense to any outsider looking in, certainly, but as it was my hand that scratched the angry words in ballpoint, I had a different perspective. This is not to insinuate that I was, in any way, in control of what was spilling out from my clutched pen. I was not. But I was there, inside of my eyes, watching it all happen. And I understood it. I understood what it meant and I was scared.

Despair is a rotting disease, culling the tissue from your brain and melting it into a sort of useless, frightening sludge. I could feel it burning away. I could feel my sensibilities crumbling like termite-infested timber and as it gave out, any hope of my escape was thwarted. I was trapped within the confines of a mind unfit for piloting. This part of me, this reasonable, normal part of me, was lodged within a splintered, broken mess of a structure fully decimated. Debris should have been falling from my ears. Smoke should have belched from my mouth.

The process of degradation was slow and nearly imperceptible. It came in inches. I had begun with such a slew of hope raging around in my guts. I wanted nothing more than to do well, to provide for my family, to do an honest day's work for an decent wage. The money, at first, was slight... but it was understandable. They had taken, I assumed, some pity upon me. They had propped me up, given me a chance and so it was only fair I proved my capabilities to them. I wanted, desperately, to show them that I was worthy of the kindness that had shown me. I worked hard. I tried to do well. I assumed that competence and loyalty would be appreciated and repaid.

Looking back, it's all my own naivete that led to this point. It was silly of me to believe in some sort of reciprocation, especially from people so assured that they were my betters. Degrees hanging on their walls and beautiful cars in their driveways, I suppose, easily led them to the conclusion that I was less than they were. And in many ways they were right. My assets were intangible: a mind willing to dissect their problems, however menial, and solve them; an ability to untangle logical knots; a genuine desire to help my benefactors in any way I could. It was easy enough for them to pluck the thoughts from my brain and steal the credit. But I didn't mind. It was only a matter of time, I figured, before the truth would come out and I would be acknowledged for my utility. I toiled away for them, a minion at a flourescent lit desk, watching their conversations drift to the edges of bad taste and moral delinquency. These were not good people. But that was unimportant.

Imagine a dog being kicked for so long that the abuse becomes baseline, so that a lack of pain is translated as a shower of affection. I became accustomed to their rudeness, to their snake-tongued lies and manipulations. They all hated each other. My peers were little more than chewed-up waste, barely there bodies punching clocks at very regular intervals. They were chair-fillers and everybody knew it. The drones were content in their sub-mediocrity. Their superiors were thrilled to have such a vile pool to elevate themselves above. I was locked, however, in the space between. My competence and my ethic led me to easily crawl over the heads of the slaves, but my lack of formal education and politcal savy kept me cowed under the bloodshot gazes of the fraternity of drunkards signing my paychecks. I was kept at bay by their plundering mentality, their casual villainy. They were invested in my work, my usefulness, but wholly disinterested in me as a human being. I was more like a calculator or three hole punch in their eyes. I was, in all respects, a tool.

Slowly, I guess, the injustice of it began to seep into my conscious like a leaking beaker of acid. This was tragically coupled with a new found understanding of just how very trivial my work had been. I was increasingly aware of how worthless my presence was, and how my only impact was to benefit a veritable army of idiots and grotesque pirates who lived solely to grow a business through any means necessary. It was my own fault for being stupid enough to care. The changes in me were not swift or even noticeable. I tried to shift my mindset. I tried to relegate my many hours of labor into the category of unpleasant necessity. But I was failing. I tripped over the ideas and began to curse myself for having been such a company man. I hated myself for ever having worked so hard at something so innately ridiculous to aid a cadre of disgusting people.

My brain began to melt inside of my skull, and I watched it happen, detaching from my day to day life. I was chastised by my superiors. Interest was feigned in my declining well being and I feigned thanks for their fake concern. I saw my projects topple under the weight of my neglect. The niche I had carved between captain and private was being eroded, and so was my peace of mind. I lost sleep, worrying about my past and its wasted years and fretting over just what the hell to do with my future. That lost sleep spiraled into full on insomnia, and this left me further remote and ever weirdening in the long hours of staring into darkness.

This is my life, I would repeat to myself. This is my life and it's draining away. I have so little to show for it. No advancement. No money. No fulfillment. Nothing but the sour taste of being used. I was a whore for a company of bastards, just another means to a higher profit margin. I should never have expected anything to be anything more. But I let them fool me. And that made me angry.

Anger fueled my sleepless nights and the broken part of my thinking became obsessed with the scum that had been cheating me. I became focused on the faceless, foul-mouthed and blatantly horrid executives that had taken advantage of my inexperience and my enthusiasm. I had listened to the outskirts of their talk for so long, listened to their misogyny and ignorance. I held my tongue, kept my thoughts to myself and fretted at the guilt of it all. I let them run roughshod over me and laugh at me. I took their abuse, but I kept record of every slight, every insult, every transgression against my sensibility. I never forgot. Never forgave. And that grudge that I held so tightly, it began to live on its own. It became a rotting thing, a writhing machine of grubs and millipedes squirming around in my skull and sending me into a sort of silent whirl of despair.

And then I began to split.

This living thing, this living despair, hijacked me. It did. The normal, rational and justifiably angry bit of me was pushed aside and control of the whole works was given over to this charred, squirming pilot. It was just handed over. And then, suddenly, I was stuck inside of myself. I was watching as a crazed version of me began to plot.

Post-It notes and scavenged loose leaf started to fill with a sort of anti-corporate manifesto. My hand was writing it, but my head was not. It was someone else. Someone far more bitter and far sicker residing in my brain and making my clutching, aching hand scribble out rant after rant after rant. Most of the words were indistinct scribbles, furious scrawls that looked lifted from a psychopath's case file. But others leapt from the pages. "LIARS." "CHEATS." "BASTARDS." Other expletives stood out. I wasn't writing them but I could sure feel them being yanked from my skull. I wasn't writing them, but I could sure feel them angrily marring the tattered sheets that surrounded me. Cruelties began to slip from my mouth while my hands worked on autopilot. I wanted to make my tormentors suffer. Make them pay. But that's not quite right. I didn't want that. Not this me. The other me. Not my bruised ego, not my sucker punched normal self. The other one. The worm riddled and foul mouthed creature that snuck in, that built itself up from ruins of despair left behind by broken promises and needless machinations. That thing, that living thing of despair spelled out in frightening chaos and pitch black lettering exactly what it planned to do. Disaster. And I was trapped, helpless to stop it, horrified at what was coming in the guise of me.

It took days and days to formulate its plan. And while it did, I was cut off, tossed into some nightmarish cell of gray matter and impulse. I watched from behind those synaptic bars as power struggle dreams flooded my conscious. I watched the thing of despair tower in its ego and its pufferfish pride. It was growing. It was stronger than I was by far. Meaner. Angrier. And worst of all, it was unhinged. It was unbound by logic or threat of consequence. I could see what was happening with all too much clarity. I saw it all through my unclouded eyes and I was trembling, by God. I was absolutely quaking inside of my prison. Outwardly, I'm sure, I showed no signs of anxiety. There wasn't a shred of it to be found in my monstrous pilot. It was moving through my life without a trace of fear.

And then it acted.

The motion of it is still a blur. The logistics of it were simplistic in execution. A gun was procured. It was cheap and it was old. It smelled like oil. It left a strange film, a strange odor on my hands. I've never fired a gun in my life. I've never held one. I don't like it. It's like holding a bomb. Inside of my cell, I shuddered, worried that a false move would send a bullet into God-knows-what-or-(worse)-who. This did not deter my captor. It elevated him. It bolstered him. He took to its use without a problem. Rounds were discharged into a decaying tree stump the night before the disaster. The ejecting shells hit my hand and it burnt. I felt it. He didn't seem to. This was hellish. This was pure torture. I wanted out. But I had nowhere to go. We stayed up that night, awake and wired in my rocking chair. My family was gone. I barely noticed their absence. I was terrified. I was awake and wired and terrified. And when the morning broke, I drove to work like I would on any other day. The gun was tucked in my pants, hidden by a long, black shirt.

And I walked in, a jumble of nerves and sweat, but outwardly calmer and more content, I suppose, than I had seemed in months. My anger had become commonplace. If there was any hint as to my motive, that day, it was belied only by a seemingly better mood. The thing even whistled, nonchalant, with my damned lips. It was grotesque. And I marched, determined and swift, from the timeclock to the big boss' office upstairs. I bounded, two steps at a crack, upward practically in a sprint. And the despair addled thing inside of me, it painted my face with a horrific joker's grin. It moved my arm and it twisted the boss' doorknob and it moved my legs and paraded me in, smiling like the devil, and it used my hand to close the door behind me.

And then, using my voice, it spoke to him.

"How's it going?" it asked, mocking interest. My boss looked up from his big oak desk, his big oak desk covered with important papers and catalogs and stacks of business. He looked up with such a withering look of disdain, of disgust. He was angry that I had barged in. He was angry that I had dared to bother him. His big ruddy face was a mask of sourness. It was jowly and wide and was so much bigger than it should have been. His cornflower blue shirt was buttoned up and practically strangling him. Fat poured over the collar in bulbous tumors. He was an ugly, toadish man and he felt like I had no right to be there. "No seriously," my despair asked again, how's it going?"

My boss did not answer. Instead, he asked who I was.

Years of working with this man, years of toiling for his benefit, of working long hours to sate his appetite for profits and he didn't even know who I was. He didn't know my name. My despair didn't tell him.

Instead, my voice cackled. It was mirthless. It was creepy laugh that even jolted my fat, red faced boss. He sat up straighter when it happened. His eyes opened a little wider at first, and then he narrowed them again and spat out a "what do you want?".

And my hand reached for the weapon tucked into my pants. And, slowly, it curled my fingers around the handle and revealed the gun to the angry man behind the big oaken desk. And then the balance of power shifted. He wasn't going to ask questions in such a disdainful tone anymore. He wasn't going to begrudge my presence in his beautiful office. He was, instead, going to listen. There was a fear in that man's eyes that I would've thought would've bought me an ounce of joy. But it didn't. It made me sick. It made me sick with worry, with guilt. My brain was rocking back and forth as I threw myself against the walls of my cell, pleading with my despair-born jailor to please let me out and end this before it went too far.

"Your life," my despair said to the terrified, sweating man, "is nothing, do you understand? You have elevated yourself above everybody, so proud of your achievements, so pompous in your success. You have stood on our backs and built your miserable little empire out of our blood and bones. You have lied and cheated and stole and manipulated your way to this position. You have kept me under your polished heel, and God, you don't even know who I am! But you are just as pathetic, just as fragile as anybody else. Your money isn't going to buy a way out of this. Your perceived power isn't going to keep you safe from my wrath. Do you understand?" My despair was making my voice absolutely thunder. My cheeks ached from the constant grinning. "DO YOU UNDERSTAND?"

My boss, the imposing tower of masculine rage and bellowing command was sobbing like a little girl. Big, sloppy tears were pouring down his pore-riddled, blotchy cheeks and snot ran free from his nose onto his upper lip. He looked absolutely pitiful. He looked so afraid, probably because I looked so damned crazy. This was not bringing any satisfaction. None. It was horrific. I didn't want to watch it. I didn't want to see this. My despair pointed the gun between the fat man's eyes and I watched my poor, terrified and awful boss follow it, cross-eyed and about to vomit. "Please, please, please..." he whispered. "Don't."

And then: disaster.

I tried to close my eyes, but my pilot, my despair, wouldn't let me. The shot rang out louder than anything I'd ever heard and it rattled every bone in my body. There was nothing to stop it. There was nothing but a thin layer of skin, a bit of skull and then my boss' brain. Hunks of him flew like splattered watermelon, showering me with gore and staining the walls with white, pink and deep red. And it was over. He was just a smoking rind of a person, a mess of busted bone and ripped, burnt flesh and tissue. The smell made me absolutely sick. Inside of my head, I was shrieking. I was screaming for mercy, for forgiveness for the sin that had been carried out with my hands. I was broken, a wrecked thing left behind and smoldering almost like the corpse that spilled over the desktop. The grin stayed plastered on my face.

And my despair fired another shot, just for good measure.

(c) 2009 Jason "Danger" Block