July 2nd, 2006 - Part II.

The sun stretches out in slender, meandering patches across the hardwood floor, interrupted by shadows of kitchen furniture and the cross-marks of window panes. I forget, if only for a moment, about the pain in my head and the twisting in my stomach. I do not sit down. "Okay," I say. The left side of my face is warm and greasy from the plastic phone pressed against it. There is a sigh and what sounds like a choked sob on the other end of the long-distance conversation. "I don't know how to tell you this, kid," my father says. There is a seemingly forever kind of pause. I do not breathe. He continues. "Last night...last night Kyle shot himself." The sensation that follows is total and complete. It reaches across all dimensions of my being from my perception of myself, to my physical self, to my spiritual self, to my mental self. They begin to tear. The ripping of the fabric of my reality sounds like a white-noise scream. Shock and awe. My infrastructure is immediately destroyed. Tanks roll over the on-fire citizens flooding the streets to flee their burning houses. Faceless, nameless death squadrons rape and murder every woman and child. The men are all beaten, stomped, clubbed, shot, burned to death...their charred remains devoured by foot soldiers and thin, black wolf dogs. Concrete is reduced to rubble and shattering glass embeds itself in the eyes and fleshy parts of the people. There is much screaming. There is much lamenting. People beat their chests and gnash their teeth. Everyone is drinking each other's blood. There is a great flash and a deafening roar. The winds blow from the center of the earth outward and in a blinding storm everything is turned to so much ash. And then there is darkness and nothing lives inside the city walls ever again.

I start to cry a little. It is the kind of cry a child cries. The cry of a lost person or animal. The cry of someone so beyond the reaches of help. A quiet choke before a drowning person's lungs suck in that first breath of water. Everything is over.

"I am so sorry," my father says. He begins to cry as well. Our conversation is brief. It is undoubtedly as difficult for him to deliver such news as it is for me to receive it. I know not what to do. I hang up the phone and sit down on the floor. Disbelief. "What happened?" asks my sister. I look at her and tell her. "Oh no, brother," she says. She hugs me and I cry again. After a moment I wipe my eyes and seeing that the phone is still in my hand, I dial the only person I can think of that needs to know about this. I call Kevin and tell him what has happened.

"Kyle shot himself last night."
"Noooooooooo."

I hang up the phone and stare out the window to the street at every car that stops and every car that goes. They are all to or from somewhere. None of them appear to notice what has happened and I do not know how they do not know. Why are they not stricken with grief and cutting their own throats and drowning in their own blood? Why are they not sacrificing their children and hanging themselves from the telephone poles and pressing the accelerators of their vehicles all the way through the floorboards of their cars and smashing into each other in glassy, metallic, bloody sprays of gasoline and nightmares? Why are people not smashing their teeth out of their heads on the curbs of nearby sidewalks and why are they not blacking out their eyes with jagged sticks and broken bottles and why are they not stomping burning dogs to death and with white knuckles and splintering fingernails tearing their own faces off? Why are people not stabbing themselves in the stomachs with samurai swords and reaching into their intestines to pull them out and devour them like blind and ravenous sharks? Why?

I do all of these things and at the same time I swallow a 55-gallon drum of sulphuric acid and swan dive from the Empire State Building into a pool of bayonet-toothed Great White sharks and atomic bombs.

I spend the rest of the day smoking on the deck and staring through the world into the nothingness that has become my life and existence. Catatonic with my eyes open. Nearby the crack and bang of store-bought fireworks snaps me in and out of reality in an instant. The crack bringing me back to the present moment and the bang reminding me of what it may have sounded like when he pulled the trigger that fired the round that tore through the soft tissue of his throat and shattered the bone and tore through the brain matter that sprayed out the back of his head when he made the Ultimate Decision.

ul·ti·mate
b: last in a progression or series.

de·ci·sion
3: promptness and firmness in deciding

ul·ti·mate de·ci·sion

1: the decision to take ones life or the life of another.

The warm summer air and smell of drifting smoke and fresh cut grass blows gently all about me as the evergreens whisper secrets to the rustling maples who tell them only to the dandelion skeletons who carry them forever to somewhere else. Cigarette after cigarette, smoke spirals down and to within and coils upward to without into the darkening evening sky. Long after the street lights come on do I rub out the last smoldering bit of ash in the ash tray.

Jesus Hates It When You Smoke.