The Punch-Hole Universe
Who now has the strength to stand against … the union of these THREE TOWERS1?
—Attributed to “The Reader”
I’m 11. Parents’ vocal patterns are elevated, stressed, I, Robot. In my room, I’ve got a huge cardboard box and the broken expensive toy that came in it. You decide which of these I’m playing with. “We report,” says the fake newscaster I’ve drawn on the box’s walls, “That 9 people got killed in a fire this evening. Yikes.” I shoot the TV with a finger gun, BANG, like Elvis. I erase the fake newscaster with my pencil and it smudges his head all up. He’s genderswapped Christine Chubbuck now. Bored with this, I stab the pencil through the side of the box and look through the hole. Through it is the punch-hole universe, a place much bleaker than any earthly locale or situation. Today I’m peering into a dank dungeon where a kid is getting disciplined, as I should have been. A little girl. I infer that she’s a wizard’s apprentice by her sparkly clothes. I infer that she’s pissed the wizard off by the fact that she’s spinning around in mid-air and being slammed against the wall, which is covered with fungus and her blood. The wizard’s hand is the only part of them visible, their bony index finger moving to-and-fro like Merlin’s did when he was making the books jump around in The Sword in the Stone. Except this wizard is using that finger to beat a child. Sweet.
I’m 37, but might as well be 17 because everything past that is a blur and I’m a hopeless case, despite being a lucrative case study. I’m having trouble with my friends. Having trouble communicating something on my mind. Having trouble with a Pyke in bottom lane. I start to leave everything behind and go shower, but my brain says that showering is work. I don’t work. 10 year gap in my employment, so you’d have to be a real dumbshit to hire me. You’d have to make a logical leap akin to Mao’s Great Leap Forward to see a disabled retard like me and think “he can be productive.” Thinking is the worst. “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” my therapist asks me because she thinks she’s helping. Infinitely useless question. If the USSR can’t make a working 5-year-plan, how the fuck can I? EMDR therapy says “go to your safe space,” so I go into my room and punch a hole in the wall. The universe is broad, vast, deep. Through the fist-shaped looking glass, I can see a disheveled house in much shabbier shape than the one I currently live in. This a serious feat of uncivil engineering: all the walls in my bedroom look like the one opposite Kurt’s last sad face. A man is lying on a mattress. Two men with weird-looking guns are rifling through his drawers (the broken ones in the room, and the torn ones straddling his buttcheeks). The fighting-fun dichotomy from Full Metal Jacket is false. These guys are having fun with both rifles and the more dangerous implement. One of them pulls out his dick (His own, or the mattress-man’s? Choose your own ambiguous pronoun adventure.) Oh, the tyranny of fun. This is a rape scene. One rapist unscrews a scope from his weapon. He sticks it up mattress-man’s ass slowly, while the bloodied waif mashes out a combo of writhing body language and animalistic screeches that would be punishing if God had the impartiality of a fighting game engine. [I wish I could describe the rape more gratuitously in a way that would further alienate the reader, make my point even more distant, and waste even more words.] Is this scope creep? I can see stars falling in the background, blue and pink. Ordinance? Comets? Magic missiles? They silhouette the ruins with their sick light while mattress-man takes it mortuary style. My third grade teacher once asked me about a drawing I did for an imagination exercise: “Is this really your dream house? A weird busted-up crypt?”
I’m in a mid-40’s tailspin, the kind that even Baloo von Bruinwald XIII couldn’t pull out of. I pray for motivation, a half prayer that’s fucking dumb, to a God that might as well be Artemis, or Hera, or Crom even (what use to call on him?), except I don’t have Crom’s maker’s .380 colt. Sheeeeeit. I’m homeless living in my vehicle (Somebody say ih hih ih hih ih) because I don’t give a shit about Kentucky or meeting my own inadequacies head-on (Somebody sing hello, hello, hello). I wander/drive to a bridge where people go to die and cry to pictures of my dead dad. Border Patrol rolls up. “Last time I seen a car parked here,” he says, “There was no one in it when I came to check it out.” Ghost car! Can’t let me drive home he mentions (oh well). Little trip to the crisis center he mentions (damn). When the state troopers come, they handcuff me and put me in the back for transport. “Just a policy,” the 21 year old kid says, trying to preempt my genetically-encoded fear response to something that happened 400 years ago. Something I can’t even mention with a straight face. LOL. Master of Puppets is playing in the car as we ride to the mental health institution. Kidding me. Obey your ... Post-Arkham, I wind up squatting somewhere. An abandoned building. I kick, punch divots in the drywall because it’s all in the mind. Brain noise. Baloo in a Bermuda Triangle storm with no instrumentation. Baloo doesn’t give a shit about IFR anyway. Baloo has to finesse the stick like he’s Lil’ Kim. Baloo doesn’t have a plane with a functional cockpit. Baloo has just (barely) those bare necessities. Some light comes through the holes I make. When I get tired of breathing in asbestos and sheetrock dust, I heave, slump down, and settle in for some hole-based entertainment that isn’t Courtney because my tracfone has no data. As I stare through the gaps in the plaster, an eye gazes back at me. It’s black and quasi-round. It’s clearly inhuman, but I feel like saying that as a lifelong straggler who bathes once a month is the pot calling the kettle mulatto. The eye retreats backwards, becoming a noseless face, which becomes an expressionless head mounted on a tall wiry body. A bunch of bodies like this stand erect in a field of blue long-grasses, decked out in uniforms that belong on a watchlist (FBI? eBay?) or on a Westside Gunn album cover. Some bodies are saluting. This huge black tower is perched in the background of the scene, ominous and less still than something that large should be. Which album cover is this again? I pass out from exhaustion or overstimulation, you decide. When I wake up, another state trooper in their twenties is asking me to leave. I drive by the building in my beat up Yaris at least once a week in the months following my eviction. The structure goes from condemned to gentrified—some Jean Valjean shit—in the blink of an eye. A university extension school moves in. Graduate students fill its once dilapidated halls. I park by the building on a night when the sirens are going off somewhere that isn’t nearby. I stand outside a window looking in. Two scholars are marveling over a cracked indentation where the door strikes the wall each time it’s opened too harshly. Probably writing poetry about it. Scratch that, this is a school of physics. Probably ... writing? ... equations about it. Heh. One says “Hmmm” and stares hard. The next few days, there are too many cars for me to park in the building’s lot, which sucks, because they’re one of the only places that leaves me alone in the winter. The next few months, there are news people swarming the location, which sucks, because the Mainstream Media is full of parasitic shitheads. The next few years—and now you know this is a fantasy story since I’m somehow alive into my late forties—are stranger. Strangers everywhere. Fingers point to numbers and figures. Fingers point at “roots” and “causes,” placing blame. Fingers point at young men and say, “no, you go.” Fingers point at people and make them spin in mid-air, like that girl a long time ago. Fingers give other fingers the finger, lol, cause who gives a shit about transgression when aliens, or wizards, or whatever are transgressing time and maybe space. Things are not great. I pass people on the street. I pass “people” on the street. I pass, quote, unquote, people on the street, and that isn’t meant as resigned disillusionment, but instead as “are these people, or weird otherworldly monsters?” At some point, I get on the internet inside a McDonalds that looks like a dreary Stephen Gammell drawing of a German beer hall. It’s all ur-sausage now. Mandatory all day breakfast. A man with almond-shaped eyes and gray skin is stirring up shit in the front (something about the workers). I wish they would have shut down my twitter after 30 days of disuse. On birdsite, I’m told that holes punched in walls made the world “pretty bad.” Then a little worse. Then a lot worse. Bratwurst.
MidJourney Images Used (prompts in italics)
(towers of gushing, autofictional text, that is).