Just to See Hell Read online

  Also by Chandler Morrison

  Hate to Feel

  Just

  to See

  Hell

  Chandler Morrison

  Just to See Hell

  By Chandler Morrison

  Copyright © 2015 by Chandler Morrison

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-1515297604

  ISBN-10: 1515297608

  Cover art by Lauren Rynee

  For S & M

  Shine on, you crazy diamonds.

  Contents

  Satisfaction 3

  April Showers 24

  Pleasant Times Away from Home 48

  To the Face 60

  Sick Again 72

  Somewhere Between Screaming and Crying 88

  Objects in Mirror 122

  Mechanical Patriots 136

  Rocket Man 142

  Body and Blood 174

  Coming Down 200

  “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

  ---F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something...but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable madmen.”

  ---Joan Didion

  “The world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.”

  ---Patrick Bateman

  Satisfaction

  Trekking past shelves lined with endless provisions packed to surging excess, the huge fluorescents glaring down like enormous white suns unrelenting in their intensity, shoppers filing by with their tiny little lives condensed into the coldly vacant galaxies within their unblinking black pupils…and all of this is only just beyond the periphery edge of my attention. My awareness is being greedily dominated by the tiny hand tugging at my own, and the little voice piercing through the cacophonous raucous of this horribly ultramodern marketplace, whimpering, “Hurry, Daddy. Daddy, hurry. Hurry, I’m not gonna make it.”

  His free hand is clutching his crotch, and his customary toddler’s toddle is even more stiff and awkward than usual. The small round face is scrunched up in agony, his eyes huge with something that looks like terror.

  “Don’t hold yourself like that,” I say in an even tone barbed with passive annoyance. “It’s not going to make any difference, and you’re just making yourself look ridiculous.”

  He either doesn’t understand these instructions or just chooses not to acknowledge them, because he only squeezes his groin harder and continues to whine.

  He doesn’t need diapers anymore, she’d insisted to me just two nights ago, lying in bed and smoking her menthol cigarette and drinking her bubbly white wine while I undressed and readied myself for much-needed sleep. I know most kids his age still wear them, but he’s more advanced than them.

  I had looked at her quizzically when she’d made this claim, and I asked her, Advanced how? In what ways is he advanced?

  She’d just shrugged, downed the rest of her wine and stubbed out her cigarette in the heart-shaped ashtray and then refilled her glass. In all ways. He’s just…advanced.

  And so here we now find ourselves; me hurrying our in-all-ways-advanced son to the grocery store’s restroom while the darling Missus scours the cosmetics aisle. I can feel my blood starting to gurgle up to its boiling point, can feel myself slipping to the very place that Bill and Bob keep adamantly telling me to avoid. More whimpering, more tugging, and it takes everything in me not to scream at the kid to shut up, shut up, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

  Deep breaths, turn a corner, follow the arrows cheerily pointing the way to the RESTROOMS. Hanging from the ceiling between two of the burning white suns is a gigantic papier-mâché bird of a species that would be indiscriminate if not for the well-known name of the grocery store chain and the huge sign hanging from its gnarled claws that exclaims, “THANKS FOR SHOPPING AT BIG PIGEON, WHERE YOU’LL ONLY SPEND A SMIDGEN!!!” Some ingenious corporate asshole’s latest brilliant advertising pitch, no doubt, and my already-dwindling faith in Commercial America drops another few points.

  I’ve managed to all-but-completely tune my son out, and I’m now just mechanically maneuvering through the maze of shopping carts and sample stands and junk-food displays, hearing nothing but the steady drone of indistinguishable noises and garbled snippets of unintelligible conversations. I sidestep a mountainous heap of a woman who is shoveling boxes of Twinkies and cellophane-encased cupcakes into her cart with a heavy, sagging slab of flesh that might be considered an arm to those with lower standards for the human race. A young girl, probably about my son’s age, is holding a crimson bag of licorice and pleading with her mother, tears streaming down her face, and all I can think is, I bet she still wears diapers. A man in a sharp business suit, hair prematurely gray at the temples, bumps carelessly past me while barking into his cell phone as a woman calls angrily after him. Two boys no older than six or seven dart up and down the potato chip aisle with plastic guns in hand, pointing them at each other and shouting things like “Bambambam you’re dead, motherfucker!” and “I just shot your guts out, asshole, get down on the ground so I can teabag you!”

  As we’re passing the water aisle, I stop, much to the sniveling chagrin of my son, who starts doing an obnoxious crotch-holding dance that I ignore, for my attention has been diverted to the sole woman standing in the aisle. She has dark skin and peculiar, foreign-looking clothing, likely hailing from some poverty-stricken shithole far to the east, across leagues of wild ocean and miles of sternly-divided airspace.

  It is not her ethnicity that gives me pause, however, but instead the expression upon her decidedly not-yet-American face. Her thin dark lips are parted in breathless awe, her gentle eyes wide with incalculable wonderment, the faint lines on her thirty-something face tied taut with something between perplexity and…horror, perhaps? She’s fidgeting, picking at her too-short nails and shifting her inconsiderable weight from one leg to the other every few moments. Her slight frame is suddenly wracked with a shivering tremor that winds up her spine. She keeps moving her gaze up and down the aisle, milk saucer eyes drinking in the innumerable jugs and bottles of shockingly varied sizes. Selecting a single bottle of Aquafina, she turns it over in her brown hands, holds it up to her face, presses it to her cheek. Then, with tentative, frail fingers, she twists off the cap, lifts the bottle to her trembling lips, tilts it back, and takes several long swallows. When she pulls it away, she emits a soft, shuddering moan. It’s a sound not unlike the ones my wife makes following her rare, legitimate orgasms that are always in such stark contrast to the artificial ones that she thinks are so convincing.

  I want to call out to her, to run to her and tell her the truth that she will not find in American television and billboards and propaganda. I want to tell her to go back, water or no water, back to whatever place from which she came. I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, shout in her face that this place will consume her, it will make her into one of us and violently wrench out any purpose and worth which now may reside within her. I want to tell her to say to hell with all of her glorif
ied, preconceived notions about us, to run away and don’t look back, for the love of gawd don’t look back, because Sam’s gaze will turn her to stone the moment she makes eye contact. I want to steer her from the bountiful, prettily-painted delights of consumerism and point to the fat, hideous pigeon hanging from the ceiling. I want to say that...that is what we really are; we are bloated, bottom-feeding birds too lazy from our gluttonous engorgement to utilize our borderline-useless capability of flight. We are parasites, winged tapeworms plaguing a doomed society, and I want to warn her away before her appetite starts to set in.

  I want to do all of these things, but I will do none of them, because it is too late for me. Americanism has claimed me wholly and completely, and the American Way is to want and want and want but never really do anything about it. Effort and hard work are as foreign to us as the plentiful water is to this woman. We base our pretensions on the delusion that we do work hard, but I bet this woman would scoff at our definition of such. I can see in her face that she has seen true labor, slaving away beneath suns hotter and brighter than the ones currently above us, enduring back-breaking conditions all in the name of earning a measly fraction of what we “earn” here in the manifested destiny of the West.

  My ruminations are interrupted by the slowly creeping awareness of my son’s wails as he pleads with me, weeping now. I grumble at him to get a grip and lead him away, down the final stretch towards the elusive restrooms.

  When we reach them, I am Ulysses at the end of his quest, Roland at the top of the Tower…my son is a ring, a terrible ring to be cast into the long-sought fires of that horrible black mountain of fabled lore. I am exalted with elation at the notion of an end to his whining by means of an emptied bladder. For a brief moment I’m terrified that it won’t work, having been clutched and squeezed for so long…if such were to end up being the case, the miserable wails would only intensify, and that would be it for me. I can’t handle any more, not even the slightest increase in the volume of this child’s woeful cries. I don’t know what happens when people snap, so to speak, but I really don’t feel like finding out. Not today, at least. Not here in a fucking grocery store named after the worst goddamn bird in the animal kingdom.

  We’re still standing outside the door to the restroom, neither of us moving, and thus I look down at the boy and say with agitated expectance, “Well? Are you going to go or what?”

  “You gotta go with me.”

  Advanced in all ways, she had asserted. What a joke, haha, haha, everyone laughs, the crowd goes wild and shouts a screaming demand for an encore.

  He’s just…advanced.

  “Are you kidding?” I say, my voice prickly and cold.

  He shakes his head furiously back and forth, bending his wobbling knees and squeezing himself so hard that I’m sure I won’t be getting grandchildren from this kid.

  No great loss.

  “Fine,” I say, letting out a seething sigh through my clenched teeth. “Let’s go.”

  The big gray door is closed, but the handle is unlocked, so I turn it and push and it swings open on shrieking hinges.

  Something’s wrong with Daddy, he looks funny, he just went all white in his face after he opened the door and now he looks funny. I don’t like his face looking like that, it doesn’t look normal, I’ve never seen it like that and it looks like the pictures in my coloring book before I color them in. I wish I had some crayons so I could color Daddy in because I want him to look normal again, not all white like that. I wish I could make everything the color I want it to be. He doesn’t like something in the bathroom, there’s something in there that’s making his face look like that because his face was normal before he opened the door but then he opened it and looked inside and now it’s all white and his mouth is open a little like he’s about to say something but he doesn’t say anything. He’s not holding my hand anymore, his hands are just hanging there like they’re dead or something, just hanging still from his arms and not doing anything. Then I remember I still gotta go potty, and we’re just standing here, just standing here not doing anything…Daddy just keeps looking straight ahead and I’m looking up at him and trying not to cry because he gets mad when I cry, he gets all mad and then Mommy gets mad, and Mommy is the worst when she’s mad, so I’m scared she’ll come and see Daddy all mad because I made him mad, and then she’ll get mad that he’s mad and then she might hit me like she does sometimes, always with the hand with the shiny ring on it that hurts so bad when it hits me. I don’t want that to happen so I can’t cry, but I gotta go potty, and we’re just standing here and I’m afraid I’ll pee my pants, and then Mommy will hit me even more so I gotta go in there and go potty. I look in the bathroom to see what’s making Daddy’s face so white…if I find it and hide it maybe he’ll stop being scared, because he looks scared, so if I do something to make him not scared he’ll be normal again, and then I can go potty, but I don’t know what’s making him scared. Maybe it’s the words, the words on the sign that I can’t read but I know it’s purple, the sign is purple and the letters are yellow and maybe they say something he doesn’t like, I wish I could read them and know what they say but the only time I can read is when Molly reads to me so maybe that doesn’t even really count because I’m not even looking at the words when she’s reading to me but sometimes before she leaves when Mommy is giving her money she says that we read a book together, not that she read a book to me, so maybe it does count but Mommy never really says anything, she just gives her the money and then Molly leaves and I’m always sad when she leaves because I like Molly and Daddy likes Molly too, I can tell by the way he looks at her and talks to her…he doesn’t look at Mommy like that or talk to Mommy like that, so I don’t think he likes Mommy all that much, but I know he likes Molly. I think a little just slipped out, I think I feel a little wet down there, so now I’m really scared, and I hold my thing down there really hard, and it hurts a little but I don’t want any more to come out, and I tell Daddy come on Daddy I gotta go real bad but he doesn’t say anything, he’s just staring at the man under the sign, so maybe it’s the man that’s scaring him, but the man doesn’t look so scary to me. He looks real tired though, and he’s got a booboo on his arm with some blood coming out and there are some weird spots on his arm that might also be booboos but I don’t know. He’s got something around his arm too, it looks like the thing Daddy wears around his neck when he goes to work so I don’t know why this man has it on his arm, so maybe that’s why Daddy is scared, maybe it’s because the man is wearing it wrong and he doesn’t know it and also because he has booboos. Everything else is shiny and normal, the sink looks regular and the toilet looks regular and everything looks regular so I don’t know what Daddy is scared of and why his face is so white but I say to him Daddy I’m about to go you gotta hurry but he still doesn’t move and now I’m scared because I feel even wetter but I can’t go in there and do it by myself because Daddy needs to lift me up since I can only pee sitting down because when I tried to do it like Daddy and stand and pee I made a mess and Mommy got real mad and yelled and hit me so now I’m only allowed to go when I’m sitting but I can’t unless Daddy helps me up. Oh no, oh no, more wet and crying, crying, I can’t stop crying, and I can’t stop peeing, and I feel it going all down my leg and I see it on the floor, and I scream because I know I’m gonna get in trouble now so I scream and scream and scream and it just keeps coming and I just keep going.

  “IF THE CONDITIONS OF THIS RESTROOM DO NOT MEET YOUR SATISFACTION, PLEASE NOTIFY A MANAGER AND WE’LL GET IT CLEANED UP FOR YOU RIGHT AWAY!”

  So reads the sign on the bathroom wall in letters loudly yellow against their bright violet backdrop, a cheerful invitation to “HELP KEEP OUR STORE CLEAN” as prescribed by a smaller sign taped to the lid of the trashcan. I keep looking from one sign to the next and then down, down at the man sitting propped against the wall below the first sign, the man with the cornflower blue tie fastened around his scrawny bicep, the sleeve of his neatly-pressed white coll
ared shirt rolled up a few inches above his elbow and a thin trickle of blood racing down the tracks on his pale, narrow forearm. He’s sweating, damp black hair hanging down and partially obscuring one of his glassy, washed-out eyes while the other one stares at me with calm disinterest, and the corners of his chapped lips twitch slightly, offering forth a weak, dopey smile. Legs clad in creaseless beige slacks lay splayed out before him in a sharp V, each one ending in a tasseled black loafer that shines glossy and polished in the fierce light of the overhead bulb. Pinned upon his left breast pocket is a green rectangular badge that reads “TERRY REINER” and below that, “GENERAL MANAGER”. The needle lays discarded a few feet away on the sparkling white linoleum, its scarlet-tipped point glinting ominously. Beside it is a dormant walkie-talkie shed from its clip on the man’s belt, shrugged away like some totem of shirked responsibility.

  Am I seeing all this? Is this real? Somewhere far away my son is sobbing and shouting at me and pulling on my limp hand, but none of it registers. All I can do is look into that slow-burning ember of an eye that is whispering to me, soft whispers like tendrils uttering “What of it? What of it? What are you going to do about it?”

  Suddenly the abandoned walkie-talkie begins to bleat out a crackling squawk of static, followed by a male voice that says, “Hey boss, I’m awful sorry to bug you, but Karen’s out smoking, Beth is on lunch, and no one knows where Ron is so you’re the only manager on duty at the moment.” Terry Reiner makes no attempt to answer; his whispering eye just rolls lazily to gaze in the transceiver’s general direction, blinking sleepily.