Bad places #2

Randomness.

Note: As I explained in the first one, this is more of a creative exercise so I won’t vouch for the results. It’s gonna be silly and I wrote this in an hour so don’t shoot me! Also forgoing an illustration because I’m gonna wait and see how hard it bombs! If you like it, let me know what kind of picture it oughta be. I’m seriously blanking on something fitting without giving anything away!

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One… two… three… four… five… six… seven… eight—

You can drive yourself crazy thinking. Just following one thought into another, deeper and deeper, to the point where nothing makes sense anymore. Take a word—any word— and bear down on it hard enough, and it loses all meaning. I mean: chair. The fuck kinda word is that even? But you don’t. Because if you do, you’re saying hello to a kind of etymological psychosis. 

— seven… eight… nine—

It’s the same with everything. The air, the water, our bodies. Beneath all those layers of skin and flesh and bone, we’re nothing but molecules somehow tricked into staying together. Throats of molecules drawing in other molecules to expel yet another kind of molecules. Right now, my body is leaning against this steel railing fucking seventy feet in the air. Both of us solid, so long as you don’t look too far beneath the surface.

—twelve… thirteen—

But then, you can’t not think, can you? I mean, you can, for a while. I’ve made it almost five minutes, once. Just— staring at the lights and letting my eyes go soft, all my thoughts just swirling away in the colours. But it doesn’t take long for one of them to shake me from the blissful nothing and then it’s just the same old shit again.

—seven… eight—

A lot of things just don’t make sense, is all. Cancer, murder, child abuse. I don’t get any of that. But I don’t want to think about it, either. Because it will never make sense, despite what the religious types say. What is it: you’re being tested? Who, exactly? Just doesn’t add up, does it?

Wait, how long was that?

I don’t get some people. The way they get hung up on the how and the why of some things. You ask me, that’s the problem with the human race. We gotta pick everything apart. The modern soul can’t abide wonder and mystery anymore. We want to go into the deep dark caves, eradicate every last jumping shadow with our cold light of reason. Until you come across a shadow that doesn’t let itself gets chased away. Then what do we do?

—nine—

I think about those ghost shows a lot. The way they keep freaking each other out, saying something just brushed up against their legs or they just felt a cold patch or the ghostbuster doodad just showed an “unusual reading”. I watched a fair few of those at some point and I always thought they were a crock of shit. Now I know they are.

— seven…eight—

It’s always: “The ghost is trying to communicate”. Or: “Something happened here a long time ago”. Rhyme and reason. Cold light of logic. That’s why I know there isn’t anything wrong with those houses. If there was, they wouldn’t be able to play-act through forty-five minutes. 

—fifteen… sixteen… fuck—

I think they’ve come across real bad places. But they do what everybody does when they come across one: bury it deep. Deep enough where the logic can’t get to it. Because that’s the thing about a real bad place, you know. It doesn’t make sense. It’s just wrong. And nobody can handle wrong like that for too long at a time. So we bury. We forget. We edit.

—eight… nine…—

This place isn’t any different. It’ll never end up on any show, despite the lawsuits. The story about sustained injuries and windowless vans sounds good— sounds right— so nobody’s gonna question it. But I know.

—seven… eight…—

And sure. Some kids go barreling down just as fast as they can, while others go down spread-eagle, trying to slow the ride. But how many seconds does that get you? One? Two? That doesn’t explain ten or fifteen extra between red and green going down a covered slide at a forty degree angle. It doesn’t explain how sometimes there’s a weird hitch in the water going down that black hole, a gloop, followed by a heavy nothing that comes rushing up that pipe, a kind of negative sound that pulls at the pit of my stomach and makes me weak in the knees. The water is still coming, still cascading over my feet and down the slide, still rushing out the other side down below and yet—

—seven—

— and yet I know that somewhere down its length there’s a disconnect. I can feel it in the soft places, in the gooseflesh humping up in ninety degree weather. And when the kid comes out the other side, he flops in the water like a dead weight. It’ll take him a few seconds to shake off the worst of it. But he’ll never be all there again. 

—eight… nine…—

Concussion, they’ll say. Or some other bullshit. 

It happens to kids most often but I’ve seen it happen to a few adults as well. This one older guy had to be fished from the pool when he went facedown in the water and floated around for almost ten seconds. They gave him CPR. All good, considering.

And really, he knew he wasn’t supposed to go down head first.

As for the few really unlucky ones: lured from the park by a pedophile. The one adult had debt, so that works out nicely.

—nineteen.. twenty…—

Of course.

I wish Raoul would hurry up. I need a cigarette. 

Sometimes I wonder what he makes of all this. But I’m afraid to ask. And besides, I need this job. I’ve got college in the fall and I want to go to Amsterdam in August.

—twenty-nine… thirty…—

Green light.

“Let’s go, kid.”