Chapter 1
Walking on Sunshine
Walking on Sunshine
They told me it all started with fairies, or some **** like that. Somewhere, aeons ago, some God damned winged broad somewhere had decided 'hey, I have a great idea, let's make the sun rise!'
*****.
So as I hung there, handcuffs around my ankles, flailing in the wind like some chicken strung up to bleed, staring down at the waning street lights flickering off one-by-one, I wondered how much my mask was going to protect me against the raging ball of death which would be on the horizon within the hour. Probably about as much a woven paper umbrella against a tornado, I figured.
So that's how it was down south. Up north they were busy enjoying all kinds of horrific deaths, safe in the knowledge they'd be back sipping cocktails in pretentious nightclubs by the end of the month. Banging and killing, that's all they ever seemed to do back in my home town. But I guess when you couldn't catch a disease and you couldn't die, why not live it up a little? Sure, too much sex and you might end up with a monstrous demon gestating inside of you, but hell, a sundered abdomen wasn't something to cry about. Time heals all wounds, as they say. Even death.
But death anywhere outside of Harper Rock meant the end of the line. So here I was, about to kick the bucket in a glorious, sizzling, grizzly wailing fashion, and somehow I just couldn't help but take solace in the fact that nobody would ever find out my secret identity, because my body would be too badly burned.
But that was me; always looking on the bright side of life. Carpe diem, I remember thinking. Or was it that the day was about to seize me? Looking back at my life over the past few months, that seemed like the trend.
I was an old man back then. Well, I haven't grown younger, obviously, but at least recently I hadn't been actively ageing, which brought me comfort in those not-so-rare moments when I was being shot or stabbed or burned alive.
Okay so perhaps I wasn't old. But I heard people talk about their 50's as if they were still in their prime, and I'd think, 'you hit middle age about 15 years ago. As in, you are well past the half way point.' Show me a building whose mouldy, termite ridden foundations are crumbling, and I'm not about to point at it and say 'hey, now there's a distinguished building in its prime.'
The thing is, where most addicts and alcoholics were snorting, popping and swilling themselves into an early grave, I was digging that grave for myself and chiselling the headstone to read “flammable materials.” 52 years old, for me, was my twilight years. Hell, if I could have taken my pension fund right then and there, I'd have blown it all on whiskey and cocaine without a second thought about my “future”. My future involved some organ failure, and if I was lucky, some sponge baths from a busty nurse before my day came.
Heh. Before my day came.
So I was working at the time. Shocking, I know. I was one of those white-collar manic depressives, who couldn't seem to find the energy to fasten their top button or shave more than a few times a week. Or maybe those things were my half-hearted attempt at individualism. The highlight of my year was my performance review; that always brought me plenty of laughs. But yeah, I was a banker. Which is to say, a glorified button pusher and telephone answerer. No playing the stocks for me.
This wasn't always who I had been. So if you're the type of person who sums a man up by his means of living, rest assured, you ignorant prick, I had been a soldier by trade, a long time ago.
But my soldiering days weren't important any more. Sure, I did horrific things. Lots of us did. But it wasn't killing people for a living which turned me to anti-depressants and drinking, it was this life, years later. The slow grind. The march of us folks who had just accepted our fate and had that dead, distant glaze in our eyes. You know the type. The type of glaze you see on a Monday morning, behind every suit and every broadsheet. It was that same glaze you saw in the eyes of a fatally wounded dog, who had just stopped eating because, hey, that was the better option. Say what you want about animals, but at least when they get that same dead glaze in their eyes they have enough sense to quit their breathing habit.
My life had been that way for a while. A series of unfortunate events. A mixture of bad choices, bad luck, and just plain bad attitude.
The most recent hilarious story that had been added to the roster of punch lines in my comedic arsenal was that my wife had left me. I hadn't been the same since I returned from the war, and then with the death of our son, I'd become the version of me that you'd get if you'd stuck me under a magnifying glass and pumped me full of inhibition nullifiers. I was unpleasant.
“There's nothing left,” she had said.
I wasn't sure if she was talking about me, or her feelings for me, or our bank balance. I didn't ask. She had that exhausted look in her eyes, and whatever she was talking about, she was right. She was always right.
“Since James...” she left it hang in the air, still unable to finish it after all these years. “You've been so distant for so long.”
“I know,” I said. I was drunk. That weighty, dull haze was there, just behind my eyelids. That mixture of a hangover waiting to be invited in, and your buzz trying to leave, but each swig of whiskey wouldn't let either of them do so. It was the kind of drunk you got at those parties where there's absolutely nothing better to do, and your friends don't want to leave until 5am. Deep drunk.
She sat down next to me on the bed. She was wearing her that lilac sweater which hung off her left shoulder, exposing her pronounced milky-white collarbone, just taunting me with the knowledge that I'd never get to kiss her there again.
“And I've tried for so, so long to forgive you.” She said my name, twice. I looked up into her bloodshot eyes, which shimmered with the finest film of tears slowly balling up around the edges. The fish tank bubbled, just out the corner of my eye, and I remember thinking that I still had to clean the damn thing. All of that God damn oily algae on the glass, and that stringy fish crap mingled in with the pebbles.
“And I think I have forgiven you,” she lied. “But sometimes soul mates just have to part ways,” she said, with an extra sprinkling of sadness, which was considerate of her.
Soul mates. I didn't believe in soul mates. Part of why I wasn't hers.
In my paralytic state, I took some joy in the sudden knowledge that I'd have to leave our home, leaving her to clean the fish tank. Hah. Have fun elbow-deep in all of the fish urine, my love. I'd feel bad for the thought later, when I was crying in the corner of my motel bathroom, wondering what I did to deserve losing my son, my wife, and my self-respect. It was all my fault, of course, but in those moments of agony you blame God or the universe or Buddha. Anyone but yourself and your crappy life choices.
I remember stepping out into the street that night, face full of the kind of stubble you see worn by the newly homeless, and thinking that what my life needed right now – what could really make the difference – was a new bar to hang out at. Yeah, that would solve all of my problems.
So I walked the streets, heading straight west away from my motel, enjoying the cold Canadian night air on my face in ways only a drunk possibly could. When you've drunk enough booze, the night air is like a jump into the Atlantic for a skinny-dip. That first rush of nausea passes, and then every breath is cleansing, like you can feel the change washing over you, and fate just coming for you on a flaming sled pulled by demon huskeys. Drunk night air smells so good, even in a cesspit like Harper Rock.
Ahh Harper Rock. Two years ago nobody even knew we existed except for gangsters and corn syrup truckers. Look at us now, Canada. Don't we make you proud, with our abandoned homes and scared citizens? Don't you wish your city had a Quarentine Zone where roughly one-twentieth of your people were purged?
Yeah, I was heading west, away from that. Surely there were better things on what had once been the wrong side of the river?
So I wound up in some bar called the Westall Arms. I could describe that bar down to the smallest detail for you now – I spent so much time there in the following months. The smell of malted vomit soaked up by a carpet of wood chips and saw dust, and that sickly sharp scent of urine wafting in from the rest rooms (assuming anyone ever made it that far before just giving up and pissing on the nearest wall). Nice place. The sort of place where the pool table was so badly ripped and lob-sided that you'd be better off racking them up on the floor. The sort of place you'd go to the bar and lean away.
The regulars weren't much better smelling or looking. Drop-outs and lonely old men, mainly. At least during the day, any how. Guys with expressions so vacant that they made my office co-workers seem like Patch freakin' Adams. And that was just the bar tender.
Some whore would come in from time to time, trying to get the guys there to buy her a drink so she could slyly offer them a blow job in the alley in exchange for a couple of notes. She didn't need to hide it; If the owner of the establishment gave a crap about legality, he probably felt too sorry for her to do anything like asking her to leave. Besides, it was hard to be arrested for prostitution when nobody ever wanted to be prostituted to. If they wanted a foul-smelling, obnoxious, tubby skank to cuddle up to, they'd have just gone home to their wives.
In the night, though, that's when it changed. Sure, the low lifes were still there, some of them just got meaner, and others were replaced by low lifes of a different kind. As it turned out, the place was a favourite establishment of the Westwall Rocks, but I just really didn't give a damn. Compared to me, I decided, they were the Westwall Pebbles ... no, the Westwall Gravel. I laughed at my own joke as I ordered another whiskey, during my third night in the place.
(Chapter to continue shortly, when I get some spare time to write the rest of it.)
