Pincher

"Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness [...]." -Ezekiel 28:17

      Our lives can be characterized as sequential phases of introspection, at the end of which we develop a new orientation toward Death; each new orientation forces us immediately into the next introspective phase. But, at a certain junction (usually at the crossroads of middle-age), one is given a choice between two dramatically different approaches to the fact of mortality. 

     Few people ever become aware that the option even exists and take the broad path of literalism and stiff-lipped repression - "Death and Taxes," etc. For people of this persuasion, death is a banal inevitability to be staved off until it can no longer be withstood. It is impossible, unreal. These types can never know Death and will never look it in the eye; they will only be consumed by it when their time comes. Death, for them, is the smooth spot in their retina that registers no light, and for which the brain compensates during cognitive post-production. If not for this, these people would be forced to see the terminal black spot in perpetuity - the true and undeniable Dead Center - a gouge in the packaging of life that takes the world of solid 'realities' unto itself for a spoil. 

    The other path is strait, deliberate, and hilarious. Those who find it discover the rent in the canvas movie screen of their lives and decide that only this hole - this place where things 'fall through' - can be treated as 'real' (and it is all they have left). This second type often appears to the first type as incredibly deflated, aloof, and with black eyes that reflect nothing back into the three-dimensional world.

     Like you. 

     After all, you haven't left your apartment in a month. You've not paid your internet bill or turned on your television in all that time. Instead, you've been standing at your windows whenever the sun is out, watching the display of these alternative screens: a local world set within the quotation marks of an unmistakable abyss.

     Down there on the flat grey paths, you've observed the rotation of characters in this neighborhood.

     There's an emaciated man in what appears to be his early forties, who always leaves the halfway house across the street around noontime, stalking out of view in his billowing gown of a T-shirt, lugging a bookbag crammed with cans of spray paint; from this bag hangs a lenticular wireless speaker that rattles out decades-old techno hits from artists with names like Hieroglyphic Scribe and Tantamount.

     There's a toddling Korean woman who never seems to venture beyond this block. She wears an elongated bonnet of pristine cotton that always obscures her face. Otherwise, she comes out everyday habited in the same robin's-egg blue dress that gives her the aspect of a maid in the antebellum south. Every afternoon, around the same time, she approaches a tree, rooted in a scant patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street's tarry asphalt in front of your building, and kneels before it. You are never entirely sure whether she is praying or simply staring at its unnaturally twisted bark - for the general impression which this tree gives is of having wound about its own central axis for an uncountenanced number of years; it is a knobbed, earthen Caduceus, whose leaves, indeed, seem to spread out like the heralding wings of a messenger. 

     Then there is the fearful fellow, whom all local inhabitants (without ever even lifting their tongues to aver it aloud) know as 'Coriander.' But we shall leave our discussion of him for another time...

     Yours is a block which beckons Death. There is hardly an alleyway or a gated courtyard here which does not seemingly implode on itself, draining the plausibility of its oxygen and the likelihood of its broad daylight, which so falsely lands on every dumpster, hydrant, and scrap of wood.

     So much the worse, then, for your building, which is even less convinced of the globe and its daily turnings. An unadorned brick mastodon from the time of the Great War, it looms on the street corner, glowering with the vacuums of its windows, refusing to provide an alibi for the tenants within, and causing pedestrians from elsewhere in the city to cross to the other side of the street out of cold dread.

     You used to believe that you could hear neighbors through the hollow wooden floor, the bowing plaster walls; but now you know that what you are hearing couldn't possibly be neighbors. There are no longer any neighbors in this place...

...

...

...

     You are shaken from your vagueness, however, by a muffled shriek that seems to have originated from the apartment across the second-floor hall. You look down at yourself - what have you been doing? You find that your body is sagging against a wall in the towel closet by your front door, tangled up in rasping lengths of old wrapping paper, purchased one year (in your early twenties, when you still looked around, expecting something) from a department store in anticipation of a friend's birthday party; you ended up not going, though.

     Freeing yourself from this crunching detritus, you stomp out into the hallway through your front door, which already stands ajar on stiff hinges. You are in the carpeted stairwell that goes down to the tenement's main entrance. A rectangle of sunlight floods in through a towering window in the opposing wall, illuminating the spaces in the wooden banister railing, revealing a total colonization of this ill-traveled space by volumes of spider webs. But there are no spiders in them, nor any clotted concentrations that might have suggested the capture and consumption of flies...

     The shriek breaks out again behind the closed door across from yours. The sound is a brief, hoarse production of the larynx - evidence of a kind of bewildered self-control. No sooner is the sound emitted than it tightens off again: the verbal equivalent of a tightly-packed sausage link or a black square.

     Your hand closes immediately around the doorknob, twisting and jerking until the door gives and swings open into a spacious living room. In part, the feeling of vast space here is due to a paucity of furniture. All that you find is an L-shaped leather couch, shoved into the far corner under a gallery of heavily curtained windows.

     There is someone on the couch. He is a seemingly teenaged male, clothed in denim shorts, a black shirt depicting a joyous, pastel-yellow teddy bear surrounded by abstract children with their arms linked in a ring, and a sectioned baseball cap, each side of which is dyed a basic, fundamental color that you find entrancing. The boy releases another one of his compact shrieks, opening his lipless oral hole into a perfect black circle as he does so. The area around his mouth is chapped and glistening from relentless passes of his tongue. His feet are bare, coated in a vibrant yellow discharge this spills from fissures in his scab-covered shins. A lanyard hangs about his neck on a braided cord. There is a card inside with text printed on it.

     As you approach him, he digs his heels into the cracked leather cushions and braces his arms against the windowsills at his back. Three hyperventilating shrieks grind out of his chest, followed by an extended, thickening silence...

    "What is your name?" you ask him. All demons have names, and learning them is the hardest part. But to know their names is to control them.

     "I nae Pincher!" he responds.

     His wet, blue eyes are glowing with an internal light as they search your own. He seems relieved, now that you have made him remember, verbally, who he is. In a fit of enthusiasm, he holds his lanyard out to you, shaking it, adjusting its angle in the low light of the room in the hopes that you will then read what is on it.

     You scoff, shaking your head, and take the lanyard out of his hand. Pulling it close to your face, you drag him off of the couch by its strap; he nearly crashes into you, but you grip his shoulder before he can do so, absently holding him at arm's length.

     Beneath a thick layer of ketchup-stained plastic, you find a piece of printer paper, marked up by a failing ink jet cartridge. The words are shot through with faltering blank bands, but you can still make out the script:

"Hi there! My name is Spencer. Don't mind my excitement - I know I can be loud! It's just my way of letting you know that I'm happy to see you. If you find me unattended, please call..."

     You read the text several times over while 'Spencer' stands obediently nearby, at the ready for whatever might come next. He is stooped over by the cord still taut around the nape of his neck. Suddenly, you rip the lanyard off of him and toss it away somewhere behind you, which results in a renewed barrage of shrieks.

     "Your name's not Spencer," you tell him with a raised voice, encroaching upon him and forcing him back onto the couch.

     His eyes wrinkle closed as that perfect circular drain reopens in the lower third of his face. You don't believe in his light. But his darkness - that irritated, shrieking darkness that contains nothing of tooth, tongue, gland, or esophagus in it...

     You begin pinching the retard all over as hard as you can - his neck arteries especially. You pinch him until he stops moving. His mouth gapes mournfully. 

     Somewhere, far down in this antithesis of the world's reflected light, you can sense that something is coming up to meet you. You lick your lips, enraptured.