Chapter Text
He is awake, and wishes not to be. The dream he came out of was dull and confusing, but he prefers to stay there and not see the white line under the shutters, the objects on the dresser unmoved and unchanged since yesterday. Sounds come from the rest of the apartment, the soft voices of innumerable servants. Light, tripping chains of consonants all ending in -mas. The soft patter of cats’ paws. The child squealing. It’s all too much, too relentless.
He emerges slowly, sits on the bed, smokes a bit. He feels grimy and unawakened, but cannot, will not dress or wash. If he does either, another day will start, and the weight of its potential will smother him. He has herbal pills he takes to send him off to sleep, but even they have reached their limit. It has probably been over 18 hours since he last got up.
He never turned the TV off and it plays away with the sound down. Network news, a talk show, a game show. There is a radio on the bedside with two preset tunings: one to a classical music station, one to a Muzak station. It’s all he can bear to listen to now. Sounds so subtle and vague they might as well be silence. Real music, music with heart, crushes him. There’s too much of it, he can’t keep up. Let it play and fade far away from him. The songs he remembers have the weight of feeling, feelings like joy and pain and intensity. Those feelings have no place in this white deadness, his real state.
He turns on the classical station and the sound immediately becomes background noise, like the hum of an airplane. He remembers being sat down to listen to a sonata years before, and being ashamed that he couldn’t make himself concentrate for the mere nine minutes it played for. He covered the shame up with aggression, loudly saying that it wasn’t real music, it wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll, even went on a silly tangent about how Beethoven was a con. The people around him listened as though he was giving the sermon on the mount. It makes him feel utterly ashamed and miserable to remember, even though it’s far from the worst or stupidest thing he’s ever said. He pushes a fingernail into the side of his foot to try and drive the memory out of his head.
He half lies, half sits across the bed, looking vaguely at astrology magazines. Behind him, a small pile of interesting books sits on the dresser, unread and accusing. He can’t even look at them. The brief fervour that led to their purchase drained away as quickly as it came. His room is full of the fruits of these momentary flashes of energy, mocking him as he freefalls back to nothingness, floating above his own body.
Something with a harpsichord plays on the radio and he has to change to the Muzak. The sound of the instrument is too jangly. He is flattened and unmoving, but also painfully restless, his brain cycling and turning around unresolvable themes. He hears his stomach and gets another cigarette. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t feel at least a little bit hungry. When he’s like this he can go for hours without eating and he takes a grim satisfaction that at least in the throes of depression he can stick to his diet, avoid food - if only because he can’t summon the will to get it. It’s not enough, though. He knows when he looks in the mirror he sees a thin man, but he feels greasy, bulging, hideous. The years where he nearly lost his jawline haunt him. He knows he doesn’t look good now, but at least he is thin. Even if he doesn’t feel it.
His whole body feels like a betrayal. He hates its insistence, its need to expel air, waste, smells, sounds. His skin is sour, his breath a dark cloud. He chews skin off his fingers and takes a vague satisfaction in the intimate taste, the feeling of a sliver peeling off to the point of pain. There are things he could do today, but all of them feel worse than death to even start. He briefly touches the guitar propped in the corner on his way to the toilet, but knows better than to pick it up. There is nothing there for him in its placid wood. Only pressure and misery.
He brushes his teeth, but feels no cleaner. He looks out the ensuite bathroom window at a piece of skeleton-coloured, relentless sky. A dirty, one-legged pigeon flies past. He dreams vaguely of tipping himself out the window. Just to not to have to wake up to another day. But the image of it - the violence and immediacy of his body hitting concrete, blood and screams and sirens, is too loud for his brain. Better to just wait till he next sleeps and maybe the night will take pity on him and fold him away.
He feels sick, something pulling in his pelvis with soft groaning pains. Right now he doesn’t have the energy to worry, but knows that at some point he will start cycling into anxiety about every pain, every blotch on his skin. For someone who wants so much to die, he absurdly fears illness and pain, feeling the weight of cancer over his shoulder. It’s almost a habit now, to fret about his health even as he wishes he could slough off every last cell of this body.
He looks at his feet. His toes look yellow and disgusting. The minute burst of energy that took him to the bathroom has worn off, and he shuffles back to the bed, laying flat, smelling the thick, beige air. He is tired of himself, the foolish prison of his own mind. The child is yelping again and he places a pillow over his ears to muffle the sound. He is floating above everyone and everything. The idea of loving any person, or being loved by any person, seems like an abstract theory that a physicist might play with. He knows there are people who love him, can picture them, but they seem as distant and strange as if they were underwater. Them loving him seems no business of his and he is wearied by their attachment. They belong in the land of the living.
He belches slightly and winces at the smell. He remembers a line of poetry, something he doesn’t do often these days. The novelty of the memory, remembering his reading self, sparks him a little bit. The lines come back and wrap themselves around him:
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves, but worse.
Notes
The poem referenced is 'I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day' by Gerald Manley Hopkins.
The chapter title is a lyric from the folk song "Same Old Man" as recorded by Karen Dalton
Story playlist, mostly, but not exclusively, folk and traditional music.