Drown

I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

I

A foaming pool of orange juice yellow stares accusingly at you as you kneel above white porcelain for the fourth straight morning. 

You plead with your body to stop its retches, but only when the last stream of golden bile erupts from your eroded stomach do you rise slowly to your feet. You look in the mirror, fascinated by both the inherent weakness and resistance of the human body as your pallid, shapeless skinny-fat stomach absorbs your attention. 

Not too bad, you think, reassuring yourself. Could be worse. 

This happens whenever somebody breaks your heart. It’s cyclical. A disease. A waking dream morning after morning after morning involving an ex and another body. Any body. Just never your body. 

You wipe down the toilet, wipe the acidic dribble from the corner of your mouth. You flush and stare intently as your digestive juices are engulfed, your insides and your memories and your feelings transported to the anonymity of the sewer. You fumble with the childproof cap on a bottle of Listerine and gulp a mouthful to sooth the sourness settling in your throat and singe the fur from your teeth. You aggressively slap your cheeks to regain some colour. 

Seasons change
It won't ever be the same
I'm hopin'
I won't stay the same

You tell yourself these lyrics are in some way prophetic whilst neglecting to remember that you yourself searched for them on your iPad only minutes ago. You implore yourself to eat some breakfast because you are paranoid about losing weight. 10st 7lbs. Okay, that’s fine – that is fine. 

You open your fridge. The combined stench of its contents make you retch and suddenly you find you’ve swivelled 180 degrees and are bent double over your kitchen sink. You close your eyes and blunder through the breathing patterns your cognitive behavioural therapist photocopied for you. The anxiety begins to pass; you chance opening your eyes but viciously dry heave when you catch a glimpse of decaying broccoli and chunks of white buttery minced beef fat clogging the plughole. You turn away and pour yourself a glass of water and close your eyes. You exhale deeply and watch as a dense white fog emanates from within you.

Over your shoulder the cold tap sporadically leaks droplets into the basin with distant sounding thuds. 

You shudder. 

Banana. You can always eat those. 

They’re your go-to. 

As you peel the fruit you gag as the idea of being forced to eat the skin inexplicably washes over you. You imagine it rammed down your throat, the leathery peel blocking your airway. You admonish yourself; you can feel that somewhere deeply buried in your mind a better version of you is screaming routine instructions to pull yourself together – Stop – being – so - FUCKINGABSURD.  

You take a small bite of the banana. See, there-there it’s not so bad. 

You chew and chew. Mash and mush. She creeps into your mind, begins to stomp around under your scalp Curly blonde hair sea breeze scented candles an ice cream animal face paints.

You find yourself staring at a pathetic mush of banana and saliva on the lid of the bin and continue to watch as the motionless mess taunts you and reminds you of all your worldly inadequacies.  

II

You wobble out of the kitchen and into the front room. With a wheeze you tentatively paw the curtains open a fraction, hoping for just a drop of morning to fall in through the window.  The sun meets your gaze and relief trickles down from your mind until your entire body is filled with a steadying warmth. You close your eyes tightly and inhale deeply from a big invisible cigarette. You count aloud the seconds that pass. One. Two. Three. Four - Once more - One. Two. Three. Four. 

You open your eyes you are taken aback by a bearded man who stands staring at you through your window, staring whilst stealing your sun. You raise your hand in a half-hearted acknowledgment, but he doesn’t appear to notice you. Through the dirty, misted single-glazing you notice a hazy swelling of tears in the bearded man’s eyes. Gradually little droplets begin to plummet towards the pavement, the stranger looking straight through you as a small puddle begins to form at his feet. You notice that the man is shoeless, his thick purple winter socks soaking up their fill of the murky water. You close your eyes again, hoping that he might go away. One. Two. Three. Four - Once more - One. Two. Three. Four. 

Open.

The man continues to stare back through you, only now his crying has stopped and a fearful look of lethargy has taken over his despondent features. The look of somebody who never slept. The look of somebody whose thoughts tick and tock all night like a clock ticktock.

You open your mouth to say something but your underfed mind struggles to formulate words. You start to wonder if you could have seen this man before. 

Without taking his eyes from you, the bearded man reaches into his pocket and carefully extracts a creased square of dirty once-white card, no bigger than a lottery ticket. He unfolds the card and lifts it to his face, wiping methodically at the watery streaks, smearing them into his cheeks in a circular motion. 

The scene remains inaudible as it plays out in front of you, with only the light rattle of your breathing filling the cold and otherwise empty room. 

III

You tumble out of the room and towards the front door, stubbing your toe and knocking over the heap of books that she’s supposedly returning for. With one hand on the door handle you turn and look at the collapsed pile, the toppled mound of McEwan and Postman Pat, Peppa Pig and Orwell, forgetting the bearded man and sinking limply to the floor, hands writhing clumsily and childlike across your face. 

Sun-blushed thighs
           water-slides
bodybuilder boyfriend’s penetrating eyes.

You smash your head repeatedly off the front door to repress the need to vomit that rises alongside invasive images, only to hear your discordant thumping returned in the form of an anxious, brisk knocking. You sit there, ignoring the door and the outside world. 

An empty minute passes. Another knock ticktock 

...

You are vaguely aware of the letterbox slowly opening above your head, of something getting prodded through the thick bristly gate. A weightlessness tickles your scalp then brushes your left shoulder before settling on the collection of take-away menus and insurance brochures that have come to comprise your doormat. Mindlessly you watch as your right arm picks up the small piece of damp card – one side lightly muddied but otherwise blank, the other bearing a solitary, blurred microscopic black and white image on its centre point. The card has been quarter-folded so often that you can’t even guess at what the picture might be. You stand and look through the peephole. You open the door tentatively and look up and down the street. A hooded boy on a pushbike smokes and lingers across the road, but no sign of a beard. You look towards the spot where he’d been standing staring through you, a metre from your window. 

Gone. 

What you don’t notice, perhaps what could save you, are  sockprints on the concrete paving, bold at first then gradually fading as they recede from the puddle’s epicentre in an unwavering direction.  

    

IV

You hear the restless vrrrt of your phone as its vibrations reverberate from an oak shelf in an upstairs room. You feel a heavy tightness in your chest; time all but stops as your mind races into a frenzied overdrive. 

vrrrt   vrrrt   vrrrrrrrrrt    

You try not to think who it could have been, but can’t stop yourself from wondering if it’s her. Distractedly you tuck the sodden scrap of card into your chino pocket and ascend the stairs with the disturbed caution of somebody anticipating an armed intruder. You creep into the bedroom and spot the phone lying dormant, lifeless, playing possum. You tap the unlock button and read missed call (2) – unknown. You feel a nauseating surge of adrenaline. Legs suddenly prosthetic you boot your wooden wardrobe, causing no impact other than a momentary muted thump. You take the smartphone up in your hand and shatter it against the wall, consigning to oblivion everything and everyone within its memory. And that cunt Siri. Fuck you Siri. 

As you stare at the ruin of glass and baby blue plastic, you have an acute sense that the life you have been living is absurd, that your whole generation is an absurdity - a living, breathing unconscious decimation of all concerted global progress.  

V

You run a bath. Not a hot bath. Nor a cold bath. You close your eyes, your face submerged. You take refuge in the cradling sensation of temperate water licking your body.

She had always seemed, to you, to embody a Tess-like purity, yet together you had had a life far removed from the world of Hardy’s tragedies. 

Now, months later, you regularly find yourself scouring the infinity of Pornhub’s archives for a resemblance. There are two imitations of her known to you, one more adequate than the other; neither satisfy and both leave you berating your own ridiculousness as you finger the milk in your bellybutton or watch it circulate the plughole. It sickens your malnourished body to imagine that innocent face quietly desirous of someone else. You realise that you have been watching too much porn and reading too much Houellebecq, but such toxins are your only release from the brutality your mind otherwise inflicts upon you. 

it’s all in your head the therapists say,
we’ll soon have you thinking in a healthier way.  

You push your face up through the water’s surface and with a desperate inhalation allow your thoughts to blur and fade as your breathing steadies. A coolness settles in your stomach. 

You lie there staring at the ceiling. The extractor fan eventually chugs to a halt; the ensuing silence wakens you from your cyclical reverie. Something needs to change. Something always needs to change. Maybe you could go to the airport and book your arse a one-way ticket to Ho Chi Minh. That would probably solve everything. A new life. No associations of any kind, good or bad. A blank canvas. Maybe India. You suppose that your nice British pounds will go a long way there. Could probably live comfortably and worry free on £20 a week somewhere like that. Yes yes that’s what you’ll do. What does the West have to offer you anyway other than a collapsing morality and £4.60 pints of lager that you can’t afford but buy all the same because what are you going to do, not have one?

You look down at a tangle of untamed pubes and your semi-erect cock poking inquisitively towards you. The sight depresses you. Disgusts you. You take a razor and meticulously clear the region of every hair in sight, before moving on to your chest and armpits, shaving them for the first time in your life, just for no reason.

You pick at the soft white Athlete’s foot living between your toes, absently smelling your thumb and forefinger after a good scratch. Perversely satisfying, that familiar smell.

Your eyes return to the ceiling. Hypothetically, how would you do yourself in if it came to it? Like everybody else, the idea of death, of non-being, intrigues you. After very little consideration you know that you could never do it, but find the option bizarrely reassuring. You manage a wry smile as you consider that life probably flashes before your eyes in a series of selfies when you die in 2017. 

Do you hate yourself? You don’t feel intensely enough to hate anything. Your internal and external self seem increasingly disparate. You wonder how often the body dies before the mind.

Suddenly claustrophobic, you sit up – water swashing and sloshing beneath you. Vietnam for fuck’s sake. 

Likely. 

VI

You dry yourself slowly with your stale bleach-stained towel. Water trickles down your legs and falls into the cracks of the floorboards. You step back into the same pair of boxers and wrap yourself in your dressing gown, leaving your chinos and top in a crumple on the floor. The isolation of the bath has failed to sedate and numb you towards a pleasant mindlessness, so you tip-tap your way into your room and lie diagonally across the big double bed. You grab Hard-boiled Wonderland off the sideboard and stare at the thick black words for a few minutes while your mind tries to eat itself. The words look like words but won’t read like words. You are too enveloped by your own life’s narrative to sustain even a momentary interest in Murakami’s bizarre prose.  You thump the novel shut and discard it under your bed, reaching instead for the TV remote. 

Bargain Hunt…Cash in the Attic…Deal or No Deal [that fucking moronic hair-piece]… Nothing.

After a bluster of channel changing, you stare at the blank screen, seeing nothing but your own reflection in the blackness. Your face seems a mile away, but even at this distance you notice a dim expressionlessness, a tiredness born not in physical or mental exertion, but in your newfound tendency to oversleep – the extra hours beneath the sheets draining the vigour from your brain and body, rendering your consciousness a dimmable lamp, forever stuck on late-evening mode. 

As you consider booting up your laptop for a few minutes with a disposable live-cam girlfriend you hear the awkward clatter and scrape of aluminium on stone. You hear the unmistakeable thwacks of bold booted feet stomping up a ladder, and your gaze meets the sullen, downtrodden face of a man that you rightly assume to be your window cleaner. A black beanie bearing his employer’s logo is pulled tightly over his forehead, obscuring the subtleties of expression and suggesting a fixity in his apparent discordancy. You look straight at the man, hoping to catch his eye before more time passes, but his focus never seems to penetrate the double glazed pane that he arduously sponges in circular motions. Without appearing to deliberately avoid your gaze, the window cleaner takes a piece of crumpled paper – perhaps the bill? – and, using the soapy residue as an adhesive, tacks it to your bedroom window before methodically descending his ladder. 

In your self-absorption you are only vaguely aware of the abnormality of this encounter. You register the scene but somehow view it objectively, as though watching it on a lonely Tuesday night from the back of screen 12 at the Odeon.  

You stand up and open the window, reach around and scrape the piece of paper from the outside. Already the ladder is packed up and gone, its owner nowhere to be seen, the only trace a trail of foaming, soapy boot prints on the concrete below, leading out of your back gate and out onto the street...  

VII

 silenced memories slipping slow
     seeping out to mean streets go

VIII

… You catch yourself staring at a fuzzy watermark on the window, missed by the man with the ladder. You open your palm and survey the piece of crushed paper in your hand. You smooth its creases over the wood of the windowsill, zapped from your melancholia by a sense of the uncanny; like the bearded man’s piece of card, this piece of paper also has a black and white image at its centre point. This one however, not smeared by tears, isn’t so blurry, but the image remains too small to see. You return to the bathroom and pull the first piece of card out from your trouser pocket, and sit the two side by side on the sill. As you blink from one to the other, you realize that at one point they must have featured the same microscopic image, before one became folded and sodden with tears. You stare deeply at the pictures. The image is circular, with little indeterminate features. You realise you’ll need a magnifying glass, but only mad eccentrics have those nowadays. You consider your obliterated phone, there is probably a magnifying glass app, you think. 

Unable to think of a solution you try to recall what you were about to do before the window cleaner turned up at your window. With a negligible, purely ironic sense of shame you smile as you remember you were going to pay an online organization with a Gibraltarian bank account to masturbate to a middle aged Romanian woman. You look again at the two pieces of paper with the little circles in the middle and swipe them off the windowsill into the overflowing bin. Feeling drained you flop onto your bed, your aging laptop mocking your depletion as it fires up with the enthusiasm of a pull-start petrol lawnmower. You scroll through the gallery of girls on LiveJasmin, mildly intrigued by a golden promotional banner informing you that 30 credits are available, for today only, for just 9.99. 

New Tab. 

Google Search: Escorts Manchester.

You tell yourself 180 quid for three hours isn’t unreasonable, until you come all over your keyboard trying to determine which one you should pick.

IX

You drift in and out of sleep. 

You wish you could sleep the whole day away but your hunger screams at you through your dreams, prodding you in the side whenever you string together a few minutes of rest. Your stomach is your biggest tormentor during bouts of anxiety, it begs you to eat then rejects every offering you make it. 

Your troubles extend far beyond a singular break up. There’s something about the rigid, barely mobile heap that you become that expresses an existential resignation.

The digital clock by your bed blinks from 11:59 to 12pm meaning, by the laws of your self-governance, you can start drinking. Really it’s 11am, but you no longer really see or talk to anyone so it seems acceptable, and indeed preferable, to doctor your own time zone slightly. You’ve never been a heavy drinker, but a couple of small beers liquefies your internal strife, allowing it to spread thinly across the whole of your body, giving your mind and battered stomach a momentary rest. 

On your way to the fridge you notice a new piece of post on the doormat of leaflets and brochures, a small brown envelope with your name and address handwritten in black biro. Strangely there is no stamp on the letter. You do not recognize the handwriting. In your bleary eyed, angst-driven ambivalence, you feel only a mild, indirect annoyance as a third white card containing a black and white circle looks up at you. You draw it fully from the envelope and are about to tear it to shreds when you notice some pencilled handwriting beneath the tiny picture: 

missing 

You reconsider the image, holding it at arm’s length and squinting. As you stare at it, your mind begins to morph the circle into a resemblance of a face, yet it could be anything. If something or someone is missing, why print the picture so fucking small? An irrational irritation tightens your fists and chest. 

A knuckle thwacks against your front door. They can fuck off whoever they are. You creep backwards towards the stairs, silently ascending without taking your eyes from the door. You get into bed and pull the covers up over your face, waiting for whoever it is to go away. A key is jammed into the lock. Your stomach growls. Your mind bends. 

Downstairs, the door is pushed open and two voices enter your house.     

You clock one male and one female voice from tone and intonation. Suddenly, her muffled chuckle, and you recognize, unmistakably – 

Sophie! You shout from over the bannister at the top of the stairs. Sophie! As she picks up the books that you earlier scattered across the floor and loads the last of them into a cardboard box. Sophie! As you run down the stairs towards her. 

soured sweet saltwater perfume

The man picks up the box for her, hoists it up to chest height and marches out the door. You stand at the bottom of the stairs facing her, she with her back to you. Sophie! Please. Turning slowly, she glances around her old home. Oh Sophie! Her face reveals no sign of having heard you, and with a sigh, she pulls the front door open and steps back onto the pavement.    soph...

With a clunk her keys to your house drop through the letterbox and sit on your doormat like dog shit. 

You move to the front room and watch as she is driven away in a shitty Toyota to her new life. 

You try to cry, but no tears will come.  

X

Your stomach grasps and grips itself. You retch and expect to see a projectile launched from within. The sounds escaping your throat sound almost inhuman, like a dying horse wheezing and spluttering through its final seconds. A thin string of spittle falls from your mouth to the carpet. You refuse to look in the mirror as you imagine your gaunt, grey face looking shamefully, pityingly back at you. Why didn’t she say anything? Anything. You are certain that you shouted her name, you know you did. But why, then, did she not acknowledge you? 

You barely let the decanted Glenfiddich settle in the tumbler before slinging a good few measures down into your cavernous stomach.  

Almost instantly you feel a little better, and resolve to never again wait until this late in the day to take your medicine. You feel your heartbeat slow to a steady tick tock, and a mollifying sense of detachment from your anxiety passes into you. 

The hot whisky instils you with the desire to do something and gives you confidence to take your landline phone off its stand. You call your parents. 

Hullo, you’ve reached Alex and Pam. We are sorry we are not avail... 

You try your sister. The same result.

You stare absently at the clock for a while – its hands working but their direction meaningless in your post-structural way of living. You realise that if the clock rebelled and its hands suddenly travelled backwards the effect on your life would be marginal. 

You wonder if everybody feels like this these days, whether between all the painful dinner parties and droning conversations in the pub everyone returns to their hovel and looks at a wall.

XI

You wonder why life can’t be as simple as in Victorian times, when people were married off and that was that, no more anxiety. Of course, you know that you’re kidding yourself, the Victorians had it worse, the sour-faced wankers. Even so, you can’t help but feel that the anxiety that pulses through you is symptomatic of the age you live in. What age do you live in anyway? The post-truth era? The post-moral era? The post-everything era. You can feel your brain’s functionality fading as you muse upon such trivialities. Your brain is decaying; states of pure thought come upon you less and less frequently as you sink aimlessly. As a younger man you used to worry about death from time to time; never during the day, when everything seemed airy and light, licked with irony and joyous insincerity. But sometimes as the lonely nights suffused your consciousness, you regretted the daytime jokes with your grandad about his impending keeling over.

Now, older, trapped by habitual patterns in your own meaninglessness, death is strangely less invasive. 

You consider your childhood friends. Believe it or not you actually had many. More than most could wish for. 

Yeah whatever else may be,
may my friends remember me. 

Which friends, Frank? Who? 

You open your laptop again, return to your previous google search and call the escort agency. A man’s voice answers the phone. You sit and listen to his hollow hellos for a few long seconds before pressing the red end-call button. You fall asleep, whisky glass firmly clutched in your slumber, vaguely aware of the metallic echoes of a distant tap dripping water into a sink.  

XII

You dream of roast beef dinners, party poppers. Your days as a boy at your grandparent’s dining room table. Pass the potatoes. Pass the cauliflower. Sneak out of the room between legs under the table to sit alone at your computer.  

You regain consciousness slowly to the whine of an alarm. As you fumble through a haze of dehydration and unwelcome hunger, you realise that the sound is your landline. How long have you slept? You hear the BT lady telling whoever it is to leave a message.

Hi Mark, it’s just Mum, I was in the garden. Hope everythi... 

You grimace as if you’ve stubbed your toe and jam the mute button on the phone. 

Your house smells lonely.

You will the day to end. You try not to acknowledge that tomorrow will only bring the same nausea and aches. Tomorrow will be worse than today, for it will be all the misery that a new day brings reinforced by the ever expanding suffering of the past.

Who was the last person you spoke to? Actually had a conversation with? Without emotion you recall it being a prostitute, but that could have been months ago. You shudder as you contemplate your disavowal of time, your self-imposed existence underneath society.

You paid the escort to come to your house but you did not try to sleep with her. You remember the conversation. You asked her how such a nice young girl ended up in such a line of work. 

She left shortly after. 

XIII

Your mind rallies, charging against your skull in an attempt to break free. From the drawer you take two small white pills from a brown glass bottle and hold them to your palm with clenched fingers. Your heart drums and you plug your ears with your fingers, bellowing incoherent words. As your lungs empty, and your shouting stops, you become aware of a light rain pat-pitt-patting against the window. You crush the tablets into a crunchy dust and sweep it to the floor. You follow the little beads as they form on the glass in front of you and wiggle their way down the pane. 

A desire seeps into you. The desire to touch the rain, to feel the rain – Fuck! drink the rain! 

For the first time in many lost weeks, you have a real urge to step outside. 

As you walk downstairs and towards the back door, you hear the weather gathering impetus. The drizzling has become a heavy pounding. 

You savour the downpour through glass for one final moment, then pull the door open and run out into the rain.  

You stand there, eyes closed, arms twitching by your sides, face upturned into the shower, ready to soak up the glorious rainfall.  

. . . 

rotting bins exhaust fumes damp saw dust old cat litter

You open your eyes, confused. 

A cascade of water falls onto you from the empty sky, yet you remain dry. Your clothes are bone dry. Rain bounces off you like mercury, splatters off the concrete at your feet and trickles into cracks in the paving. 

You watch it eddy into a broken drain. 

You hold your hands out in front of you. The raindrops miss you, somehow slipping between your fingers before falling to the earth. You run a hand through your hair, feeling only a light grease from natural oils. Desperate, you cup your hands together and try to catch some water, but the rain never quite seems to find your skin, whichever way you move your hands. 

Helplessly, you stick your tongue out as far as it will go, once again lifting your face towards the sky, eyes wide open and fixated on the moon Curly blonde hair sea breeze scented candles an ice cream animal face paints     Sun-blushed thighs
           water-slides
bodybuilder boyfriend’s penetrating eyes   

vrrrt   vrrrt   vrrrrrrrrrt          

ticktockticktock                      VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT

ticktock

bored girls and sad boys,  dull roads to anywhere
bad sex and ethanol,   high scores on solitaire

sweetsour saltwater

missing

Nothing. Not one drop. Fucking nothing.  

   

XIV

Slumped in your armchair, you take up the piece of paper with the image captioned missing. Turning it over and over in your fingers, your shoulders begin to tremble then snap into a spasmodic jerking. The picture is miniscule, neither dimension more than a centimetre in length, but, unquestionably, when scrutinized, the disfigured circle resembles a face. Feeling unsteadied, you begin to cry as you stare into the circular blob. Stinging droplets slide down your cheeks and seep through the page. Through your tears, you smudge the ink of circular image until it is no longer anything recognizable – a shapeless charcoal mess.  

You focus on your blackened thumb and heave through your breathing patterns. You ponder the bearded man and the window cleaner. Damp footprints leading away from your house no longer linger on the ground. 

On autopilot you walk into the front room and sit down on the floor next to a brand new black wireless printer that endlessly churns out paper. 

Hundreds of minuscule pictures of your face, captioned missing, accompanied by countless printed envelopes addressed to Mark Robinson rest next to you in orderly little stacks. 

You shuffle around cross-legged, discarding your socks in the general direction of the window.

With coarse, unclipped fingers you scratch wildly at the fungus on your feet, stopping only when you notice a light glazing of blood smeared across your toes. A lumpy red-black scum of damp dead skin and blood forms under your fingernails. 

The tap drips. 

You look vacantly from the pile of paper to your bloodied foot, and for a fleeting moment appear to feel nothing other than a mild relief that the itching has stopped. 


___________________________________________________________________

Bibliography / Acknowledgments / Influences

Houellebecq, Michel, Submission.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Notes from the Underground. 

Murakami, Haruki, After The Quake. 

Murakami, Haruki, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. 

Didion, Joan, Play It As It Lays. 

Green, Simon, Black Sands, Bonobo. 

McVeigh, Harry, Ritual, White Lies. 

Turner, Frank, Love, Ire & Song 

and Ann Coburn for great support, advice and guidance.