Day 64: The World

Hi guys.  I put this up on my facebook now.  I'm getting brave in the face of criticism.  Or, mostly, I expect most of the "general public" to tear me a new one.  Being able to take criticism in stride is probably one of the best skills my future self should tell me to learn.

One of the keys to succeeding in "business" is to be prepared for failure and to fail a lot.  Taking this advice in mind, I'm randomly adding everyone I can find on Linkedin. 

Note to recent college graduates!  Don't go back, Peter Thiel says.  I do know I for one have learned a lot more since graduating than I ever did at school.  You get to pick what you learn.  I think maybe what makes the majority of college students (myself included) so direction-less is the fact that they're told what to learn, even if it's in a field they are interested in.  Also, you don't improve technical skills most of the time (honors college excepted), and you don't earnestly want to learn, just get your homework done.  The concept of getting homework done so you can get back to doing "what you want to do", which is presumably leisurely activities, just about cements the fact that you won't continue working hard once school is over.  Or, you'll feel like you had the carpet pulled out from under you unless you had some sort of internship that leads immediately to another job.

I'm going to try to keep the personal stuff about myself on here to a minimum and approach this more professionally from now on, and we'll see what happens.  Unless it's a particularly funny observation from personal life, obviously.  My fiction is personal enough.



            The building creaked, the auxilliary ducts produced poots and puffs of air.  The sound of the furnace in the basement sounded like their was someone down there, walking around with a stick testing weather or not anything was hollow.  Insects buzzed in his kitchen lights, they had somehow managed to wiggle their way into that membranous layer between the ceiling and the next level.  Charles imagined one of them was a snakelike centipede, ramming its head into the upholstery until it would break through.

            The complex had opened itself up to him, it felt like he was wearing it as a glove that wouldn’t come off.  He felt the apartment wrap its way around him like winter clothing, the scarf constantly getting caught in his mouth giving him the dry staticy taste of linen.  He saw his car out front, he’d stair between the blinds at it for minutes and cross his arms.  The red light on his answering machine flickered endlessly, there were people somewhere trying to reach him but all that was left of their innocuous pleas were ghost journal entries in this recorder box. 

            Charles questioned his sanity, even though everything seemed to be clear and direct in his thought process.  A sane person wouldn’t go out and buy a sharp knife, he conceited to himself.  A sane person wouldn’t stay up all night fixating on every noise coming from above.  But then again, a sane person wouldn’t have a dead body laying in the middle of their floor next to the loveseat and a picture of dad.

            He expected the body to smell, but it got a late start on this process.  The skin didn’t decay, either, most of the physical changes Dave was making seemed to be a process of metamorphosis.  The eyes continued to become more milky and white, like bubbles on jelly fish that washed up onto the beach.  Charles turned his body so the eyes no longer gave the illusion of focus, and now approaching it from the side he had produced the nerve to test it’s pliability. 

            The arms bent and fell off like clay, his blood dripping out in thin red lines as if it were licorice.  He felt like he was dismantling a rotten pinata.  Each arm still resisted popping from its socket, Charles thought to himself it was no worse than eating chicken, however disgusting he knew the cracks were.  The torso crumbled when the arms were removed, insides falling out like mummified entrails.  The heart, or spleen, or some internal organ made a popping noise when the air escaped the cavity, Charles slouching backwards with his hand in front of his face in case a little man jumped out of Dave’s control room stomach.

            He emptied the pieces into black garbage bags, securing their yellow drawstrings and piling them by the door.  Like carving a pumpkin, he thought.  The spine and the head formed a pole like a walking stick, his eyes extending out from behind his skull like antennaes.  The spine removed from his lower torso like a sword in a stone, the jeaned legs falling in a heap like a samurai had chopped him into two pieces.  The legs were too tall to fit in a garbage bag; the boots sticking out of the top and flexibility almost completely gone.  Charles thought better of removing the jeans, he’d rather go to jail than deal with a dead man’s genitals, and just threw a second garbage bag over it.

            He eyeballed the trunk of his car from the window, looking back at the body and back at the bags.  The head and spine sat propped against the couch, like Skeletor had been made into a walking stick. He couldn’t resist picking it up and swinging it around like a sword, he had a hunch that was what Dave was intended for, Dave was a weapon.  He handled it two handed, drawing it close to his eyeballs to inspect and getting a whiff of the pungent septic smell.  The mouth had a full set of teeth still, beautifully white pegs that contrasted with the pure black rod.  He dropped it and it rolled under the couch.

            Charles hung around near his door, listening to people shuffle in and out.  It was seven, he had to be at work in an hour.  He picked up the phone, removed a business card the company had made for him out of his wallet and dialed the HR Service Line. 

            “Thank you for calling HR Services,”  The voice echoed through Charles ears like a pinball machine. 

            “Could you direct me to the home office?”  He couldn’t remember what his secretaries last name was.  “If there’s a Nancy there, I’m looking for Nancy, my secretary Nancy.”

            “Who’s calling please?”  The voice asked after a pause, in a nasally monotone. 

Charles had never called in sick to work before.  Normally, work was the most important part of his life.  He’d be in bed by ten most nights, done with schoolwork the week it was due, but with no real reason other than to get it done.  He closed his eyes as he gathered a response.

“This is Charles Lattimore, I’m a worker in Mr. Pulp’s division.  I was there before the explosion.  I was born in 1984.  I’m a Scorpio.”

“Please hold.”  The voice accepted this response.  Charles dug under the couch for his sweet skull sword while pressing the phone against his ear with his shoulder.  He waited through 5 minutes of “That’s What Love is All About” by Michael Bolton concentrated into a thick muzaky mucus.  Charles hummed along and he was taken back to a day when everything was sterile and inoffensive, his nerves twitched and clung like cats to the top of curtains when it snapped back to the main line.

“Where are you, Lattimore?!”  A voice screamed into the phone as soon as the line switched over.  Charles had never felt so wanted in his life, like he belonged somewhere.  Unfortunately, he could not be what he was supposed to be to these people.

“I’m at home, I can’t make it in today.  My throat is…”

“This better be fucking good, Lattimore.”  It didn’t sound like Mr. Pulp, or any boss Charles was familiar with.  This guy was serious.  Beads of sweat formed around Charles’ brow.

“Well, I couldn’t sleep last night, I was up with a… throat ache.  It’s getting worse, my adams apple is turning red on the outside.  I think I caught it at the zoo yesterday.”

“We have foreign dignitaries in.  Mr. Pulp is very nervous.  Your presentation is due at 10, and if you miss it you can consider your job forfeit.  Sort out whatever you have to do by then and get your ass in here.”

He heard the phone slam on the other end and let out a sigh of sweet relief.  He looked at the garbage bags, saw the spine sword in his hand, and decided he had better take care of this body first.  Once he got that done with, he could decide whether or not to quit and find a new job.

An abundance of birds flew around outside as he pushed the doors open, dragging three garbage bags behind him through the vestibule.  He was hardly worried about looking conspicuous, he had went over it in his mind a million times.  The quickest way was to get to the car, get the body in the trunk, go throw it in the ocean.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the air tasted like a summer morning.  Cars whizzed by, the drivers attentive of the road because of the weird curved street Charles lived on.  Charles remembered seeing accidents on the street, hearing random motorists swearing in the middle of the night.  If you didn’t make the turn, you drove right into angle parking spots, and if it was a Black SUV it was almost impossible to see it at night.

He stuffed the bag, feeling the sticky bones on the inside.  The bags would felt like they were full of dead cats.  He sat down in the front seat, the bags safely procured in the trunk. 

The roads seemed especially quiet, on a day like this one most people would be asleep until atleast nine or ten.  His mind played tricks on him on the road, trees seemed to wave, grass wavered in between shades of green, dust seemed visible through the mirror.  When he was going downhill, it felt like his breath had completely left him.  He found himself at the site of the explosion, inadvertantly and suddenly appearing there in spite of the lawes of physics.

It was a little damper, a little darker, the red clay mud of the ground contrasting greatly to the nearby wooded area.  A group of unhappy looking men collected mud samples from around the outer edge of the precipice, a man with a small magnifying glass fixed onto his face crawling slowly in a straight line along the outer ledge.  Charles jerked the car back around in an eight, the tires squeeling and tossing red dust into the air. 

Charles felt like he was on the run.  The gas tank was getting close to empty.  He swerved past a fire hydrant that he swore had popped out of nowhere.  A group of construction workers yanked tree stumps out of the median of a busy intersection.  The bags still sat in the trunk.

He stopped at the gas station, taking a second to wash the windshield with the squiggee.  An old man with a polo shirt and high plaid pants crossed the parking lot, smiling over at Charles and raising a pointed finger to his waist.

Johnny forced a tragic smile.  “What?”  He asked after the man had passed, turning back to the car.  He thought for a second he might have pulled in on the wrong side for his gas valve, then he worried he hadn’t paid his credit card.  He wanted more than anything to go home and take a long nap.