disgustipated

                                                                                                            life                                                    feeds on life                                                    feeds on life                                                    feeds on life

@misterselfdestruct ;

though   michael   was   bored   and   slightly   annoyed,   being   babysat   by   his   dad   wasn’t   the   worst.   he   was   just   glad   to   be   out   of   smith’s   grove   and   away   from   doctors,   pills,   and   white   walls.   

the   occasional   fifteen   minute   break   to   get   a   coffee   at   the   diner   next   door   was   a   treat.   mike   never   was   allowed   to   have   caffeinated   drinks   before.   and   that   he   could   ask   the   waitress   to   bring   him   one   made   breathing   feel   so   much   more   free.   the   bitter   undertaste   was   almost   unbearable   but   his   hands   vibrated   a   few   minutes   after   the   first   cup.   cool.

when   he   sat   down   at   the   bar,   the   person   sitting   on   the   adjacent   stool   waited   only   seconds   before   vacating   to   a   booth   on   the   furthest   side   away   from   him.   michael   awkwardly   tapped   his   fingers   against   the   smooth   metal   of   the   bar   top,   averting   his   eyes   to   the   empty   cup   in   front   of   him   before   glancing   behind   to   what   surely   would   be   his   dad   motioning   for   him   to   come   back   to   the   shop.   slowly   turning   back   to   face   forward,   michael   noticed   the   clock   —   sixteen   minutes.   dad   was   usually   on   the   dot.   

boredom breeds bored people, and bored people lead to a diner too packed for one poor waitress, desperately trying to keep up with the herdsounds of my coffee is cold and i’m not paying for that. the noise is not just pestering, but pulling-- it drags you in, buffeting you against the screams of tantruming babies. white walls yellowed from an older era of indoor smoking contrast with cherry red booth-seats, cracked like the chapped lips of the woman who sits at the table just beyond the entrance.

but loki can’t blame them too much. the coffee is cold and sour.

he’s used to seeing men size each other up, but for a man in this town to wilt at the sight of another, something must be worth investigating. he approaches quickly, snatching up a millisecond of silence. “--Michael, right?” with the question comes a hard clap just below the man’s shoulder-- an assurance that no one is going anywhere for the time being. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee--”

it’s an odd kind of hour. a QUIET kind of hour —— 3 am is the kind of hour that creeps up on you, a silent omen settling over your shoulder. she raises her gaze and the clock is stern, judgmental: it seems to ask, what is it you’re doing with this life you’ve been given ? WASTING IT, WEARING IT OUT. freddie lets her gaze drift down, to the silhouette across from her, and wonders whether it wouldn’t be plausible for her to aim those same question right back at him. every time she sees him he looks a little more washed out, like the color is being stolen from him, hue after hue. she wonders what will be left, in the end. if a grayscale copy or simply VOID, where a man used to be. “ you don’t have to keep checking up on me, you know ”. 

her smile is meant to counteract the potential sarcasm of her words — she means them truthfully, and there’s a hint of gratitude in her gaze. never much believed in angels ( not the way her mother did ) —— but there’s an aura he radiates, like there’s still something close to a GOOD MAN on earth, and that’s as close to an angel as she’ll be allowed to encounter. she’ll take it over desolation and an endless parade of ghouls, any day. once she notices his glass is half empty, a new one is silently placed before him, cold water in place of liquor. call it a cure for future headaches. “ i’m doing good, now ”. fake words, a fake smile. her youthful acting aspirations never really left. “ i can handle myself ”.

PLOTTED ( ISH ) STARTER / @misterselfdestruct​ .

he’s never believed in auras before, but there is an undeniable warmth in her that contrasts the blue moonlight that streams in through thin curtains---- synesthetic puzzle pieces all adding up to a sense of ease. his hands are clasped together, forearms resting on his thighs, back hunched in a strange imitation of the fetal position.

he turned forty this year. the big four-oh, as his supervisor (predictably) said. he can still feel the clap of an unwelcome hand on his shoulder and the look on his face. something about the moment burned an image into loki’s mind-- the eyes of a man who’s convinced himself that he really matters to this poor, lost soul of a detective.

does she see those eyes looking back at her--?? 

she likes this weather. it’s more in tune with her spirit, she thinks —— it gives her body a reason to be so TENSE, tightly wound around the expectation of danger. it does not make her stand out like an out-of-tune chord: everyone alive and then she, making herself at home among the dead. and him. her head turns at his request, a dull ache of her neck reminds her she’s kept herself frozen STILL in the same position for the last hour. easy to slip back into a makeshift coma, she thinks, when he doesn’t even make an attempt at looking more alive than her. “ what do you want me to tell you about ? ” a sigh — the only way she’ll ever betray her exhaustion. “ i keep dreaming about wolves ”. neck bends back, she lets her head rest, thoughts trailing off for a second. “ and statues. i keep trying myself it’s not an OMEN, i just… keep smelling something BURNING ”.

"Tell me about the wolves.”

discovering what one can and cannot feel after being forcibly resurrected by folks who use the word kafkaesque too often isn’t quite as fun as the movies make it out to be. no high energy music montages, no realization that you can spit up acid on command, no prophecy to fulfill to bring your mortal coil back to you-------

well, maybe that last one.

------- but what there’s plenty of is a deep wrongness in it all. no sense is to be made out of symptoms and sensations, though you may try your damnedest to justify your existence in a way you never did when you thought everything was as simple as alive and dead and nothing in between.

the sand in loki’s throat cannot be cleared and he’s begun to wonder what happens when bone marrow freezes.

the nights are long and the days blend into each other, unidentified and unimportant. the only thing that matters is movement. freezing cold air hisses through the car’s vents. loki’s fingers ache. heavy eyelids warp the road, lines rushing with decreasing speed as he feels something begin to pull at his consciousness. he blinks once, twice, and a third time with such force that it wipes some of the sleepy haze out of his eyes.

       she raises an eyebrow at him, her features looking only mildly amused. zoe’s not offended that he probably wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to her. court cases can be long and drawn out – and it wasn’t usually for everyone. especially someone who wasn’t an attorney.

       ❛  great deduction.  ❜ she says dryly, though a small smile cracks across her mouth. it was very, and unfortunately, likely that the case wouldn’t be settled for another few months. an unfortunate side effect of the law. ❛  as amusing as i’m sure that would be, i’m hoping we skip that part.  ❜

there is something sickly enjoyable about seeing sweat and stink accrete on a man who has just learned the meaning of the word hubris. scrub as he might, the fucker’s stench won’t be going away any time soon. though it may not be obvious to everyone in the room, loki can sense the suffusion of terror over the courtroom. when the doors opened for recess, it began to spread even further. the piss-scent of humiliation is nothing next to it.

he wonders from time to time if that spread is the thing that keeps them coming back, day in, day out, a new face, a new type of fetidness discovered.

things seemed to be falling apart in susan’s life. her second marriage was ending and she was worrying about the reception of her art gallery that had just opened tonight. the woman of the hour was now waiting at the subway for the next train to come.

the man in front of her was well dressed, but wasn’t paying any attention to his surroundings–something that could’ve bit him in his ass especially since his wallet had fell out of his coat pocket. “your wallet” she repeated, leaning down and picking it up before extending it out to him. “you dropped this.”

he squints at her a moment--- well dressed, decently put together. could be scamming. pick pocketing is a skill not easily identified by appearances-- he’d know. in his youth, sunday bests were reserved for busy streets and perfume counters, where old women with wit dulled by age and years of neuronic suicide-by-cocaine fueled key parties.

Tall grass wave in the arid breeze, undulating as if the land - the rolling chest-hills - itself was breathing, palpitating with an uncanny aliveness. Even the air seemed to radiate a pale yellow, the color of an early sun and onset decay. Nothing here seems to grow right. Weeds rooting fences guarding nothing, cradling signposts pointing nowhere, cicatrices of grass patching the red open wound of a road destined to oblivion. Traces of man who proselytize the biological certainty that he was distinct, something other than a grotesque animal-human that was not governed by the same instinctive nature the weeds and tall grass proliferate with. 

Man should not be here, he concludes, against the belligerent stare of his reflection, insisting like everything else- like Loki’s peripheral presence does. The repetition of Rustin’s words contorts in the pronunciation of someone who seemed like a perpetual neophyte to life- to himself. I dunno..I had a teacher…, something like that…don’t know what god…. —even in his conviction there’s an echo of a question mark. For a moment Rustin considers what Loki looked like to the rest of the CID. Quesada’s blind categorization of their partnership might as well have something to do with it. — Who the fuck is we?

“I’m not your teacher.” it’s not a corrective distinction, but the uprooting of mundane familiarity that comes with small talk, untangling himself from the passive rhizome. “If things were closed you wouldn’t be here- just like everythin’ else is. Cause and effect exists because nothin’ that comes into existence is ever self justifyin’. ” he won’t define what things are, who Loki is, verbally dissolving definition into a nebulous, writhing everythin’ else. He keeps his distance to the window, the muted glow of the cigarette feathering parts of his face.

“People are only as much as their convictions lead them to believe, much as god is. Else someone would know what god wants and find out what nothin’ means.” a hand weighs itself against the ledger on his lap, his voice drifts on the cigarette wisps. “And realize that you can’t pray to nothin’.”

anemic. the word rises behind loki’s eyes, clouding the landscape with an even stronger sense of sickness. an image of rolling hills, green grass, and trees stretching to protect miles and miles of unexplored land melts into the squalid sight. taken for granted, shrugged off as invaluable among high rise buildings and a never ending stream of engines humming--- loki understands the error of his ways. homesickness is a fleshy mass in the pit of his stomach, eating whatever it can and growing larger with every rain ditch under their tires.

a placid silence falls over the car as loki thinks.

“God is just somebody’s ego.” half of his face crinkles in concentration as he attempts to spit out the sentiment on his tongue. it sticks with every syllable like saliva caked during desperate attempts to be heard. it manifests in a half-mumbled correction, “Everybody’s ego.”

“People make whatever they want out of it,” twist it, tear it apart, and reassemble it into a patchwork simulacrum of what used to be. frankenstein would be jealous of the deft manipulation-- words of with intent long lost among men who gnashed fat between their teeth and spat out the rest to rot, “Turn themselves into demigods so they don’t feel so bad about making it up as they go along.”

he can’t see the confessional booth so much as he can smell it. old dust and the thick scent of sweat soaked guilt. forced confessions under the pressure of further accusations, seeping out of bruised throats in small, broken voices who knew what was to come. daily torture in the form of anticipation. sharp shards of sensation like glass against concrete walls of smothered memories.

❛❛ explains what, exactly ? ❜❜        not a chuckle, not a scoff: 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚢𝚘𝚞’𝚕𝚕 𝚕𝚎𝚝 𝚕𝚘𝚔𝚒 𝚍𝚎𝚌𝚒𝚍𝚎 𝚋𝚎𝚝𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚟𝚎𝚜 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚖𝚘𝚞𝚝𝚑.        ❛❛ … i’m open-minded. ❜❜        your mother tried to make sunday mornings devote to words in red, but you aligned with the teachings of your father.             to only carry disinterest for anything that didn’t concern yourself.          ❛❛ catholicism has a lot of commitment … baptists have a hell of a lot of hollerin’, and church of christ ain’t allowed to dance. i make my due just fine somewhere in between. ❜❜

several comments come to mind, all of which could be summarized as how to break probation 101. he sucks in a breath and pretends it’s cathartic. “That’s very interesting.”  thumb and forefinger move to toy with the signet ring on the opposite hand’s pinky. he wonders, for a moment, if detective hart’s two brain cells have even noticed.

His face reflects transparently in and through the car’s window. Rustin sees himself. The mirage of an almost image of a man, smudging through the blur of the car’s steady drifting, smeared in the blotches of rib-picked houses and broken teeth fencing they streak past in a teak colored blur. It prompts the synaptic suggestion of something sweet, an overabundance of it he can taste- insoluble granules of sugar staling the undertaste of the cigarette in his mouth. Like having a lozenge in your mouth for too long bittering into medicinal residue. 

The landscape soon subsides into the waving plains of tall weeds ripened from the sinking sun and flourishing from desertion. Only the silhouette of a rusting water tower in the distance and the abrading trail of the car signalling distant inhabitants. Loki ripples the image now, distant like everything else, and Rustin’s deliberate silence makes his voice echo over the scuffing hum of the tyres, as if he was talking to himself and solidifying his presence. His arrival to Louisiana had been something of a workplace myth, but rumors were always more interesting than the truth. Assigning from nothing to nothing. “Nothin’ is ever closed.” he breathes in and exhales, interposing his own presence. “Even if it was, people wouldn’t know what to do with themselves without vestigial abstractions. Nobody knows what to ask or answer after nothin’ so there always has to be somethin’.” 

The day is thickening against the glass, and both of their reflections have begun to disappear. 

“Should be a left turn ahead.”

if you asked him six months ago where he’d be, he might have said where i always am-- or if you caught him on an “off day”, maybe dead. an exile to louisiana was the last thing on his list and even now, driving through countryside of bumfuck nowhere, surrounded by white trash and swampland, loki can’t quite believe it. everything feels like a dream and the southern drawl narrating their car trip only adds to the dissociative sensation behind his eyes-- a brain in a jar, sloshing around with every bump of the dirt road underneath them.

a therapist would call it a coping mechanism. loki calls it i got an hour of sleep last night-- even if it was more like six.

the sharp sound of the old car’s blinker pulls him out of autopilot and he begins to register what rust had just said. nothin’ is ever closed-- in his head, the sound loops over and over, fragmenting into shards of a distant and echoing voice. somehow, he isn’t quite so sure about that. his own case feels pretty damn closed these days. the words “inappropriate use of force in a non-violent scenario” will forever stay in his file, written in red ink, copied and sent out to god knows who. loki pulls the left turn and the blinker stops.

“Vestigial abstractions, huh?” he wonders if rust says this shit just to impress people. probably not. it’s too sincere. the feedback loop continues as he tries to think of something to fill the silence.