London Calling, pt. 5: This is The End

The silence of the car and the stillness of the air only exacerbate the tension building in me as I sit on the side of the road in the Delta. I'm surrounded by endless expanses of nothingness pregnant and oppressive with the force to make me realize my insignificance like some piece of forgotten flotsam on the face of the endless seas that girdle this earth. I don't have to have my eyes open to know that my knuckles are white from trying to throttle the steering wheel or that every single muscle in my face is taut from gritting my teeth. A cacophony of emotions burns, rising uncontrollably after so much work on suppressing them for weeks.

Or maybe, just maybe, I'm feeling them for the first time.

I explode into tears, with a violent scream I feel coursing through every single last fiber of my body as I shake myself and try to rip the steering column from its welds in my car. I weep. Jesus, I weep so hard that I lose control of myself. My body contorts and twists as it tries to fit itself into the fetal position, as if my body is trying to move to the one evolutionary comfort hard-wired into our very souls. My face hurts so much from the tortuous effects this effort of blatant emotional display forces upon muscles that are far too often unused for a society to be truly successfully expressive. There is a sort of dignity that comes from this sort of honest, cavalier display of humanity; however, I lose it as I slowly slide down in my car seat, moving from weeping into a sort of snuffling, self-drowning crying that almost lacks the energy to even exist in the first place.

I'm broken, ruddy-faced and tear-stained, stewing in a cheap suit soaked with sweat from an August funeral. And alone. So alone in this place, where the only landmark is a dead tree off somewhere and cicadas are so loud I can barely hear my own pathetic blubbering.

I get it, I'm nothing.

I first heard that Becca had died in the bathroom of a Village Inn. The seafoam green wall and the creme tiles on the floor and I were soon acquainted as I slid down the wall to lightly come to rest on the floor after hearing the voicemail from Aaron. The message never really set in, no matter how many times I replayed it and no matter how many customers walked in eyeing me like I was some insane junkie. It's been a week since I fled Conway for Memphis in some vain attempt to try and find salvation from this crucible. Salvation was just a veneer it seems, and losing Becca demolished the little dream I had of my reality.

Becca was an archetypal college friend. She was someone you could fall out of contact with for months at a time, yet would still know you on site and care about every little detail you could tell her. She was patient and kind, she was caring, she was honest. She was a blast to drink with, too. Jesus, the nights where that girl saved me by opening her place to me and my drunken antics. The Night of the Throw'd Chairs, one of my absolute favorite nights of all time, was all under the aegis of Becca. She was also a pillar throughout many of my classes. If it hadn't been for her support, I might not have made it through some of my classes. If the revolution had come, and backs went against the wall, she would have been in my Politboro.

Becca lived and died around Helena-West Helena, a sleepy town on the Arkansas bank of the Mississippi. That damn river is going to call me until the day I die, it seems.

The days between when I get the news and the funeral are a blur. I worked on the pipeline, I talked to plenty of people, I did things. Numbed, that was it. I was completely numbed to an infinite degree. The thing that kept troubling me was that me not feeling anything didn't keep me from thinking about my lack of feeling or, for that matter, Michelle. Not since I came back have I wanted to just hear her voice as much as I do now, and it's a pain in the ass to realize that I probably still love this girl. Confusion is not the emotion I want on top of mourning the loss of one of my best friends. A heart can only handle so much, and Tom Waits is calling me.

The road curves, guiding me through Fordyce, Kingsland, Rison, Pine Bluff, and the multitude of towns that depend on the fertile soils and unnerving flatness of the Delta for their sustenance, and very existence. It is this swathe of black soil and wide open space that feeds the mouths of the world, that gives life to an innumerable mass the world over. It is this living soil that will house Becca to its finality. Ashes to ashes, I guess. I don't want to ponder the whole life-death-circle-of-life bullshit right now. I'm tired of the phoenixes, I'm tired of the martyrs, I'm tired of the messiahs. I simply want absolution and manumission from this torment, and being the maladroit I am I can't seem to find any way out. I wonder, more seriously than I would like to admit, if somehow Becca died because of me. Maybe, somehow, I've had some sort of karmic retribution upon myself that is so enormous that it somehow steals innocents' breath in order to punish me?

Hell.

I stomp the pedal to the floor, speeding into the east and (hopefully) leaving that self-destructive train of thought to choke on my carbon monoxide, just in time to almost be caught by a state trooper. Not again. Some miles later, I reach the sole funeral home in Helena-West Helena in a complete and thorough daze that robs me of any sense of time or place. The automaton that ruled me when I was next to the Thames has taken over again, and before I know what's over or even before I can tell something has started, I'm off with a friend in my car to stay the night at the Isle of Capri Casino in Lula, Mississippi. After all, what better way to memorialize our friend who had a lust for life and genuine happiness than burying ourselves in the disorienting lights of slot machines and the intoxicants provided en masse, for free by the single greatest source of revenue for the impoverished State of Mississippi? What better way to remember the passing of a friend, what else can I do to forget the monumental loss of one of the most beautiful people than by doing whatever necessary to force my mind into not firing those synapses?

Being the shallow asshole I am, I'm almost late for the funeral when I decide to go to McDonald's for breakfast. The funeral is a nonevent, for me. I don't know these people. I don't know these memories. I don't want to. I'm fucking lost and adrift in myself as wave after wave of conflicting emotions dash my brain and heart into the hard rocks of life over and over again with unrelenting fury and inhumane delight. You want schadenfreude? If humans weren't ingrained with this disgusting trait, we wouldn't do half the things we do to ourselves to make our pain linger that much longer every time our miserable, filthy little hearts find themselves ruptured.

The burial is intense. The heat pressing down on the congregated people there from all walks of life, the sun that sets skin aflame with a simple kiss, the emotional tension and outpouring that is such a constant that it almost desensitizes you to its presence as soon as it is encountered. A Methodist reverend dedicates Becca's remains to the soil that has provided these people with their very way of life. Small talk follows, that inane sort of thing that people do instead of either falling silent in reverence towards the power of the moment or ripping your goddamn heart out and sticking a pin through it on your lapel. Negotiations begin on lunch and other worthless drivel, and the road calls again. Leaving, we see a honor guard from the Army approach.

It sucks being in a nation that enshrines people who die so young they never truly lived.

I don't know what brought it on. I don't know what sort of Joshua it took to break down my walls that had held in all the emotional responses I should have been feeling for the last weeks, but when it came I was unprepared. I weep on the side of US 79, somewhere south of Stuttgart for the better part of a quarter of an hour. My mind seems to have stopped working, I cry things out to no-one in particular, I make mad statements that have no subject, no verb, no direct objects. It's as if Irving Washington has taken his censoring to my very speech. These animalistic and pathetic utterances are not even worth wasting the time or energy on, but for some reason doing it makes me feel better. A catharsis that happens so naturally and fluidly it is almost like I'm not doing it myself. Everything is fuzzy and glazed over. I'm losing touch.

Suddenly, clarity. Sadness waxes evanescent and is replaced by sobering, clear, pain-fueled rage. RAGE. There is no fairness to this whole goddamn farce that I call a life. First, Michelle. Then, jail. Then, Becca. Where is the fucking justice in this, why is this happening so fast, with such intensity? Fuck karma. There is no way that karma exists if this is happening to me, I have done my fair share of lying, cheating, stealing, and general illicit intoxicants in my time, but nothing to warrant THIS. No, this is bigger. This is more pointed, like a knife aimed right at the heart. This much pain has to have a purpose, I refuse to believe this much misery is simply chance! I scream and rant and rave in my car. I curse Michelle with every name, every word I can think of for making me so numb I couldn't cry when someone far more deserving of my tears than her died. I curse her for every little thing she ever did to hurt me and to make me so blind that I can see no one but her in the single greatest moment of pain I've ever felt. I curse Lynn for not loving me anymore. I curse my parents for living in such an inaccessible part of BFE. I curse me for every single little transgression and sin I've ever committed in my life before I descend into tears again.

I'm volatile. I'm desperate. I want, more than anything else, some kind of peace. I beg God for help. I beg Him to kill Michelle and bring back Becca. I ask Him to kill me. I ask Him to give me the Michelle from two months ago, the one who loved me as much as I loved her. No, not her. I want someone who I can love like I loved her. I ask Him to simply leave me alone. I cry and cry and cry, my dirge for Tom Joad. Then, the tears stop. The anger dies. I sit, staring straight ahead in a moment of odd, shimmering tranquility that I imagine settled over Dresden when all was said and done. A moment that is so still and quiet that not even your lungs dare disturb it by drawing a single breath.

This adventure is over. I have roads to drive, gas to burn. I have to live.

Keep on rockin' in the free world, 'cause your pretty little face is going to hell.