mouseofcards89
11-24-2010, 08:25 PM
*The following is a brief excerpt from an extended fictional work of mine which is presently in progress. It is meant to examine certain aspects of new media, and the advent of a new sort of nihilism which has emerged in a globalized world. Seeing as I have no intention of profiting directly off of this, I don't have a problem with sharing it online. I would be delighted to hear some of your thoughts on this.
March 15th, 2013
12:15 AM
Driving on the wrong side of the median at a quarter past midnight can be an intoxicating revelation for some people in the same way that moonlighting as a transsexual disk jockey can give a white boy from the Bronx a sense of philanthropic entitlement, because you’ll never see the impending eighteen wheeler before it eliminates your $500 dentures at well over 120 miles an hour in the same way that Mother Marla Spook’s crooning overtures are oblivious to the certain-as-God-and-Taxes-In-Texas revelation that popular culture is going the way of the dodo because people never really listen to you, they listen to the illicit fetus gestating in the womb, or the coffee simmering in its incubator, or the sound of stolen barbiturates rolling around inside of the bottle with the orange cap that you snatched from the pharmacy when Marley was puking out his five minute head start in the car and a kid whose nose looked like some five-and-twenty cent actor from the dime flicks that your Daddy used to watch as he told you that the game was just between the two of you was meandering around on the other side of the store trying to find you a five dollar fake platinum Rolex which looked like an embezzled prize from a cereal box, and you’re thinking about how you wish that preacher man was on again, the one who made fire and brimstone sound like a walk down a Tom Petty song before he went off and came up one card short of a full deck down in Reno, or so they say. Frank Alvarez senior understood full well that his dentures were not insured. For reasons unbeknownst to himself, Alvarez felt disinclined to drive his car off a bridge. Colorado was too far above sea level for that.
The cameras required a spectacular conflagration to juxtapose the howling darkness as you instinctively decelerated slightly before the inevitable impact. Suicide/murder could well cause him to lose points in the long run, but chances were that it wouldn’t be seen as vehicular homicide. You don’t call a former Crest network advocate for bulk toothpaste (and a former member of the National Guard, to boot) a murderer just because his pledge happened to involve some oblivious insomniac schmuck who thought he was driving down Easy Street. Sorry, fella, shucks on a ****cracker, I had no way of knowing that you were off to buy some batteries for a remote that doesn’t work half the time all because you’re too much of an imbecilic inebriate to shuffle four feet to the set and change the channels manually while I was jacking up the ratings. Besides, chances were that the other guy would survive in traction and eventually discover Alvarez’s offshore assets like a semi-comatose rat in a Times New Roman and ****-brown envelope coloured maze of bureaucratic sycophancy. What would a trucker do with well over 6.5 million dollars? Recycle like a good boy, doubtlessly. Alvarez decided that this whole thing would have been a hell of a lot more goddamn efficient if he had, say, temporarily misappropriated a taxi and taken off the license plates. Most of the cops patrolling out this way were jacking off in the bushes to Reese Witherspoon’s latest underground porno all night. Alvarez could have worn it around his neck, like a Westminster Mall dogtag. They would have to burn the midnight oil identifying his body.
Besides, he could have improvised one of those banner ads. Robert De Niro was making a comeback, after all. It would have been one of those calamitous bonds fostered by a dwindling respect for canned morbidity; a cacophonic proverb from one washed up celebrity to another. Well, it was all a moot point now. Alvarez smelled burning toast, and cast a withering look at the IHOP air freshener widget dangling from his overhead mirror. This seemingly innocuous decorative accessory had singlehandedly caused Myrtle, his disarmingly endearing wife who had recently filed for an annulment after three kids, to begin referring to him as a “two timing *** spelunker” rather than her more customary “blindsiding pirate” noun. How had he been supposed to know that his enchanting wife had suffered from chronic seizures all the way through public school, and that her aura had been a lingering scent of burning toast?
Mother Marla was winding up now. Alvarez tuned in to listen to her FM radio show, Dead Air, most Friday nights because he approved of her enigmatic temperament. She seemed slow, somehow, like she was taking her time and had a foregone conclusion in mind, pronouncing every syllable as though it were a nugget of wisdom that she had chosen to confer upon the unsuspecting masses. She possessed the presumption of self-entitlement customary of most stupid people. That being said, Marla had a way of intoning her words meticulously which led Alvarez to believe that she was anything but foolish. It was like a chaste bedroom voice, if there can be said to be such a thing. ABC had once done an hour long broadcast spoof about how Marla’s voice possessed some sort of unique property which appealed to the inner infant in a way that synthesized Whoopi Goldberg in her most benign role with George Clooney before the operation. Alvarez believed it.
Mother Marla mainly told tales of the supernatural. Popular rumour had it that her studio was in an old abandoned church somewhere, and that she presided over the pulpit with a bottle of moonshine in one hand and a baby monitor in the other. More than once, she had interrupted a live broadcast because “His Daddy’s little joy waits on no man or beast.” Her speech often became slurred as the broadcast went on, almost menacing, as she suckled her infant while imbibing something which had most likely been collecting dust in a cellar for the last ten years. More than once, she had alluded to the possibility that “Daddy” was a down and out silhouette, and invited any listeners who might have some idea as to his paternal ancestry to call in. Sometimes, she played the harmonica while Alvarez watched silent movies and shot crickets with an old BB gun in his basement.
Mother Marla was a Pandora, a sort of moral absolution. Alvarez always felt absolved whenever he tuned in. Listening to her was like heeding the secrets that your mother had always warned you about, or perhaps kept hidden from you in the vestiges of her own soul. She was the other side of the proverbial coin, a sort of voyeuristic poltergeist of the airwaves.
Alvarez whistled snatches of an old Neil Young song between his teeth as he surreptitiously reached for a Marlboro in a way that an ex-con might reach for a concealed shank made out of a toothbrush handle. Eight years of living with a wife who spent her free time distributing Smoke-Free America leaflets to parents at the end of Boy Scout meetings really pulled a number on your sense of dignity. He had long since given up on keeping the things in the house. How she had howled earlier tonight when he permanently disfigured her lips with the butt of a burned cigarette. Alvarez had yearned to bay triumphantly at the moon. They really do kill ya, ya beatch! The problem was that he had been unable to leave the smouldering butt anywhere near her, for fear that she would somehow use her toes to manipulate it and burn away the ropes before the spark had ignited. All those years ago now, Alvarez had ensured that they were living on a natural gas line for precisely such an eventuality as this. So, he had compromised, and used the charred butt to light her funeral pyre instead. Of course, it had been challenging to manipulate the camera while doing all of this. He had not originally expected that there would be any need to expertly brandish a camcorder in one hand while simultaneously barbecuing his wife, but that was before the market niche had emerged in the days leading up to the Y2K scare.
She had admonished him thoroughly in authentic Myrtle fashion when she first came to, of course. Waking up tied to your grandmother’s old rocking chair (appraised at well over $2,000 on an EBay auction that had gone to bust after the winner contracted conjunctivitis) with Home Depot rope that had been purchased wholesale rather than individually (Alvarez had saved himself a quarter), after having sedated with over the counter sleeping pills bought from a street vendor had most likely inflamed far worthier women than his wife.
Oh, it wasn’t that Alvarez particularly detested Myrtle. The fact remained, however, that an improper domestic closure would probably jeopardize his fifteen minutes. Nobody likes grieving widows. Myrtle would have kicked up an irrepressible stink about the whole thing, and most likely would have flummoxed the entire deal when he was post-mortem. Alvarez supposed that her death could have been ruled accidental had he not filmed both a prologue and an epilogue shortly before setting the live camera on a stump outside to watch the house go up in flames.
Alvarez abruptly hit the brakes, causing the family Hyundai to fishtail into a half doughnut and leaving over twenty feet of burnt rubber in his wake. In all of the excitement, he had practically forgotten the coup de grace. Cursing fluently, he pulled out his Razr flip phone from the right pocket of his jeans. Its display indicated that he had three missed phone calls, and two messages. I wonder who’s going to deactivate my Facebook after I’m dead. Wouldn’t it really be something special to leave a lasting imprint of yourself on a dead celebrity’s voicemail? His cell phone was a drove of compelling information, and would almost certainly be disseminated across most channels of public communication.
He hurriedly switched on his headlights. It would hardly do to be reduced to so much desiccated residue while his preparations were still underway. In the distance, a sheet of lightning temporarily engulfed the horizon like a pretentious flashbulb, and Alvarez was tempted to strike a pose as sheets of torrential rain began to impact his windshield. He was witnessing tens of thousands of tears and the magnanimity of the masses, the sorrow which would have been exacted had the world at large not been completely desensitized to the circumstances of death as such. It truly meant something to be mourned by the world itself under cover of darkness while one was still alive to witness it. Even now, a sanctimonious knowledge of his own mortality threatened to overwhelm Alvarez’s mind, as it had these many days and years, but the truth was that such thoughts had no real meaningful rhetoric behind them.
Alvarez knew his history, and understood that humankind had been attempting to make sense of death since antiquity. Purging, genocide, crusades, ritualistic sacrifices, holy wars, occult death pacts, natural disasters...the act of dying was believed to be useless unless it served some underlying human purpose. All of this was pretentious beyond all imagining. Now, the world was submersed in the advent of global telecommunications and a rabid consumer market which yearned for increasing forms of moral depravity in the same way as surely as a fish swims in its own piss. Mother Marla, who had been narrating a lengthy monologue for the last five minutes, addressed her audience softly and almost contritely, as though communicating some sublime insight into the divine that was best left unheard.
“Now, my children, our evening together is drawing to a close. Stay tuned next week for a special appearance by a very unique guest, a shaman from the mountains of the Caucasus who has travelled halfway across the world to describe his homeland to us, with all of its great mythic folklore. I will be taking your calls for the next quarter of an hour. Please, let this old girl know what you think of her.” Marla didn’t breathe often. Alvarez tended to judge people by how conscious they appeared to be of their own respiratory function. His own wife revolted him, with her phlegmy gulps for air which sounded like the death rattles of a wounded porpoise. Marla never resorted to such ostentatious humanity. She was occasionally prone to exaggerated little sighs which heightened her erotic appeal. Alvarez had no idea if Mother Marla was or had ever been affiliated with the Church at all, but no nun sworn to vows of chastity and celibacy could have communicated a sense of sexual repression through those little exertions more effectively than she could.
Alvarez was fully aware that she was a popular culture exhibitionist only. Her chintzy intro music sounded as though it belonged on the set of some 1980s Hey-There-Maggie-June suburban yuppie drama. Even the show itself was conducted with a grandiose air of what otherwise might have been poorly concealed frivolity, comparable to the telephone psychic industry which had started doing radically well at the turn of the millennium. Alvarez listened to her show religiously every week without fail because she capitalized on the more traditional aspects of nocturnal radio without either becoming an endlessly redundant cliché or a haughty innovator who paid lip service to brand loyalty while discarding primary influences completely. Alvarez had no idea what the listener volume was like. He listened mainly due to the fact that the entire show sounded counter-clockwise. Conformity was bad, conformity was politically incorrect, conformity had become the inflated Goldstein of this massive cultural suicide which had precipitated the hallmark years of the early 21st century. So, counter-conformity was the new black in a colourless world. Mother Marla seemed to stand for all of the implicit, quietly funny ironies of the new millennium, though she had never openly stated as much.
Alvarez had long since committed her program’s phone number to memory, but had yet to call. It wasn’t the prospect of public mortification over the air or even a conscious knowledge of his own infatuation which intimidated him. He was scared, but not in any discernible way. His years in the Academy, fifteen macabre winters on the Force, a couple more inside of the big house on the other side of the bars, and now retirement on a significantly reduced pension had exterminated most of his fear. He was not a schoolboy with a crush. Calling Mother Marla would simply be a monumental step. The woman did not communicate with words. Words were her incidental tool, the insidious conduit through which she chose to convey a still higher meaning. Should he call, she would know him instantaneously, would read him like a book, would radically alter his life to the point of no return.
She was most probably female. He felt convinced of that, at the very least. More than once, she had made reference to her lack of sexuality, to some underlying ambiguity of gender. She could be twenty-eight, fifty-eight, or anywhere in between. Hell, she could be a quadriplegic hooked up to an abundance of tubes like a ventriloquist being manipulated by pharmaceutical compounds, for all he knew. Sometimes, he imagined that she was maimed and scarred, scarcely recognizable as anything living, some animate object occupying the threshold between life and death and speaking in a drug induced delirium.
Alvarez felt more daunted at the prospect of speaking to her than any comparable amount of trepidation he might have encountered on the brink of the next world while preparing to talk to God Himself. He had never believed in God, and did not intend to change his stance now, after fifty years. One nicotine stained palm slowly reached towards the glove compartment, moving seemingly of its own accord like some repulsive insect. It grasped a standard police issue revolver. Without thinking, Alvarez silently placed it on the dashboard. Fumbling in his jacket pocket, he produced a lighter for his final cigarette. Bombs away. This would be a triple whammy. Completely unprecedented. Alvarez envisioned himself accelerating through the brisk spring evening fifty miles over the speed limit with no headlights on while driving on the wrong side of the road, smoking a cigarette, clutching a gun to his temple, and talking on a cell phone. The general idea was to blow his brains out all over the windshield immediately before impact with the next oncoming vehicle. He should have at least a couple seconds of prior warning, assuming that the other vehicle was driving with its headlights on.
Frank understood that he would not be missed. It was a fact of life, not some morose reasoning inspired by an embittered nature. Myrtle had hardly been able to live with him ever since her old man had come home to his penthouse with a black mark on his report card. The radiation clinic gave him six months, though Frank would have staked money that the mogul’s private physicians would likely keep him sucking on his poison at least until the daffodils had poked their heads through the soil at this time next year. It went without saying that Myrtle was his only child and heir apparent. It therefore stood to reason that she believed that he would press his nuptial advantage at the first possible opportunity, which would translate into millions for Frank. Most days, he failed to understand why she had consented to marry him in the first place, but that was neither here nor there.
Alvarez had considered his options at length. Hanging, though it involved a practically certain probability of eventual death (he had witnessed enough jailhouse suicides in his time to understand that this was the case) would not generate a sufficient demand to warrant anything special. Overdosing was excluded for the same reason. Slitting of the wrists would have catered to a higher class. Such methods were reserved for artists, like Juhan Viiding. Jumping from a perilous height would have been next to impossible to capture on film properly.
He had eventually settled on this method after tremendous deliberation. Not only did executing his wife represent a potential motive and garner aesthetic points, but it also incinerated all of his worldly possessions in one fell swoop. In doing so, this method utilized fire, which in turn happened to be a grandiose, romantic gesture. It would win him a lot of acclaim where it mattered.
Frank was perfectly indifferent towards his wife’s fate, so it would be useless to dwell on that aspect of things. He did not vindictively dislike the woman, though he wouldn’t have objected to perhaps looking on for a couple of moments for the first few fresh howls as her pedicured toes were roasted one by one. Most likely, this much was wishful thinking. Assuming that Myrtle had not passed out almost immediately as a result of smoke inhalation, it was probable that the furnace had combusted, killing her instantly. He never should have married again, but was all too aware of his own occasional lapses in judgement.
This evening had been a long and arduous time in the coming. Ironically enough, most of this had been for want of a motive. In many ways, Frank’s second marriage was outlandishly inconspicuous. Though prone to occasional pathological outbursts and exclamations of anger as were befitting of a woman who had grown up ****ting golden nuggets, Myrtle had been a mainly quiet and passive woman. Her father’s illness had provided an opportune pretence for the murder.
People did not want to hear about clinical depressives ending their lives for reasons best known to themselves. Homicide more or less dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s in an instance like this one. Slaughtering oneself on camera had gotten in vogue during the early 2000s, generally consisting of self destructive webcam slayings. The rest had been history. Producers had caught on to the trend, and increasingly macabre video feeds had begun to circulate around the web. After the massive marketing bust which ensued following tighter regulations on music and multimedia downloads, the public had increasingly begun to tune in to more violent forms of programming. Of course, such content had yet to make a debut on network television (for the most part, anyway), but was mostly pay-per-view on video streaming networks.
Of course, Frank possessed his own unique reasons for killing himself which had nothing to do with any sort of posthumous notoriety. He had wanted to die for well over a decade, but that was superfluous information. Obscuring one’s true motive beneath an elaborate masquerade of popular culture seemed efficient enough.
Frank had never truly understood why people chose to drive at breakneck speeds. Living for the bottom line seemed like a precarious existence, though his own knuckles were whitening on the steering wheel as he put the car into reverse and gradually turned about in the oncoming lane. Retrieving the gun, he placed it to his temple with a grimace. One foot tentatively stepped on the gas pedal, and the car accelerated forward. Almost without conscious consideration, he dialled a number on his cell phone as the engine began to whine in protest. He was one more anonymous time capsule, howling through the oblique valley of death as existence itself averted its face from him. The phone began to ring, and someone picked up on the other end.
“You’ve reached Mother Marla Spook’s “Dead Air” program. How may I direct your call?” Frank swallowed, hard. The woman on the other end of the line sounded entirely nonchalant.
“Miss Spook, please,” he said. His heart was threatening to implode at the sheer adrenaline of it all. Sixty miles. Eighty. One hundred. Frank’s sole illumination in the otherwise all encompassing darkness was the liquid crystal display of his cell phone. It was casting a garish artificial light on the right side of his face, which had drained of all colour.
“I’ll put you right through, sir.” The line was transferred, and began to ring again. One hundred and twenty. One forty. One sixty. Frank’s hands were perspiring so considerably that he found it difficult to grasp both items. His pulse was undulating, and he wondered if he was going to begin hyperventilating. The total ubiquity of the darkness caused him to speculate that he was, perhaps, already dead.
Someone picked up, and Frank’s heart almost stopped. The fact was not lost upon him that, should he suffer a heart attack right now, then he would need to immediately shoot himself so as to cause it to appear as though he had died of two entirely isolated causes simultaneously.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “It would seem as though we have found each other. Two kindred souls, migrating through the night like two lost pennies abandoned for eternity at the bottom of a wishing well. Or, is it an ocean? I can never tell, but it’s wonderful to hear from you. What do you have to say to our listeners tonight?” Frank’s oesophagus had seized up. He found himself entirely unable to speak, and forced himself to search for the moon instead. It appeared to be obscured behind a cloud. As he leaned over to check, the muzzle of the gun seemed to caress his cheek like the lips of some forlorn lover. The shot that was heard around the world. Remember us sinners in the hour of our death. Frank could still smell that goddamn burned toast.
Miles away, a silent apparition was throwing darts in the dark. The luminescent blue digits of a clock radio played across the pensive face as it sipped a glass of Chardonnay, listening to the hushed crooning of Mother’s tortured voice. Somewhere in the distance, a dog howled. A tortured male voice spoke up on the line.
“Will you marry me?” A car horn honked somewhere on the next street over. The apparition lit a cigarette. Abruptly, the male spoke up again.
“Oh, ****!” A sharp noise emanated from the apparition’s radio speakers, and, for a moment, he suspected that they had been blown. However, the tinny background music carried on.
March 15th, 2013
12:15 AM
Driving on the wrong side of the median at a quarter past midnight can be an intoxicating revelation for some people in the same way that moonlighting as a transsexual disk jockey can give a white boy from the Bronx a sense of philanthropic entitlement, because you’ll never see the impending eighteen wheeler before it eliminates your $500 dentures at well over 120 miles an hour in the same way that Mother Marla Spook’s crooning overtures are oblivious to the certain-as-God-and-Taxes-In-Texas revelation that popular culture is going the way of the dodo because people never really listen to you, they listen to the illicit fetus gestating in the womb, or the coffee simmering in its incubator, or the sound of stolen barbiturates rolling around inside of the bottle with the orange cap that you snatched from the pharmacy when Marley was puking out his five minute head start in the car and a kid whose nose looked like some five-and-twenty cent actor from the dime flicks that your Daddy used to watch as he told you that the game was just between the two of you was meandering around on the other side of the store trying to find you a five dollar fake platinum Rolex which looked like an embezzled prize from a cereal box, and you’re thinking about how you wish that preacher man was on again, the one who made fire and brimstone sound like a walk down a Tom Petty song before he went off and came up one card short of a full deck down in Reno, or so they say. Frank Alvarez senior understood full well that his dentures were not insured. For reasons unbeknownst to himself, Alvarez felt disinclined to drive his car off a bridge. Colorado was too far above sea level for that.
The cameras required a spectacular conflagration to juxtapose the howling darkness as you instinctively decelerated slightly before the inevitable impact. Suicide/murder could well cause him to lose points in the long run, but chances were that it wouldn’t be seen as vehicular homicide. You don’t call a former Crest network advocate for bulk toothpaste (and a former member of the National Guard, to boot) a murderer just because his pledge happened to involve some oblivious insomniac schmuck who thought he was driving down Easy Street. Sorry, fella, shucks on a ****cracker, I had no way of knowing that you were off to buy some batteries for a remote that doesn’t work half the time all because you’re too much of an imbecilic inebriate to shuffle four feet to the set and change the channels manually while I was jacking up the ratings. Besides, chances were that the other guy would survive in traction and eventually discover Alvarez’s offshore assets like a semi-comatose rat in a Times New Roman and ****-brown envelope coloured maze of bureaucratic sycophancy. What would a trucker do with well over 6.5 million dollars? Recycle like a good boy, doubtlessly. Alvarez decided that this whole thing would have been a hell of a lot more goddamn efficient if he had, say, temporarily misappropriated a taxi and taken off the license plates. Most of the cops patrolling out this way were jacking off in the bushes to Reese Witherspoon’s latest underground porno all night. Alvarez could have worn it around his neck, like a Westminster Mall dogtag. They would have to burn the midnight oil identifying his body.
Besides, he could have improvised one of those banner ads. Robert De Niro was making a comeback, after all. It would have been one of those calamitous bonds fostered by a dwindling respect for canned morbidity; a cacophonic proverb from one washed up celebrity to another. Well, it was all a moot point now. Alvarez smelled burning toast, and cast a withering look at the IHOP air freshener widget dangling from his overhead mirror. This seemingly innocuous decorative accessory had singlehandedly caused Myrtle, his disarmingly endearing wife who had recently filed for an annulment after three kids, to begin referring to him as a “two timing *** spelunker” rather than her more customary “blindsiding pirate” noun. How had he been supposed to know that his enchanting wife had suffered from chronic seizures all the way through public school, and that her aura had been a lingering scent of burning toast?
Mother Marla was winding up now. Alvarez tuned in to listen to her FM radio show, Dead Air, most Friday nights because he approved of her enigmatic temperament. She seemed slow, somehow, like she was taking her time and had a foregone conclusion in mind, pronouncing every syllable as though it were a nugget of wisdom that she had chosen to confer upon the unsuspecting masses. She possessed the presumption of self-entitlement customary of most stupid people. That being said, Marla had a way of intoning her words meticulously which led Alvarez to believe that she was anything but foolish. It was like a chaste bedroom voice, if there can be said to be such a thing. ABC had once done an hour long broadcast spoof about how Marla’s voice possessed some sort of unique property which appealed to the inner infant in a way that synthesized Whoopi Goldberg in her most benign role with George Clooney before the operation. Alvarez believed it.
Mother Marla mainly told tales of the supernatural. Popular rumour had it that her studio was in an old abandoned church somewhere, and that she presided over the pulpit with a bottle of moonshine in one hand and a baby monitor in the other. More than once, she had interrupted a live broadcast because “His Daddy’s little joy waits on no man or beast.” Her speech often became slurred as the broadcast went on, almost menacing, as she suckled her infant while imbibing something which had most likely been collecting dust in a cellar for the last ten years. More than once, she had alluded to the possibility that “Daddy” was a down and out silhouette, and invited any listeners who might have some idea as to his paternal ancestry to call in. Sometimes, she played the harmonica while Alvarez watched silent movies and shot crickets with an old BB gun in his basement.
Mother Marla was a Pandora, a sort of moral absolution. Alvarez always felt absolved whenever he tuned in. Listening to her was like heeding the secrets that your mother had always warned you about, or perhaps kept hidden from you in the vestiges of her own soul. She was the other side of the proverbial coin, a sort of voyeuristic poltergeist of the airwaves.
Alvarez whistled snatches of an old Neil Young song between his teeth as he surreptitiously reached for a Marlboro in a way that an ex-con might reach for a concealed shank made out of a toothbrush handle. Eight years of living with a wife who spent her free time distributing Smoke-Free America leaflets to parents at the end of Boy Scout meetings really pulled a number on your sense of dignity. He had long since given up on keeping the things in the house. How she had howled earlier tonight when he permanently disfigured her lips with the butt of a burned cigarette. Alvarez had yearned to bay triumphantly at the moon. They really do kill ya, ya beatch! The problem was that he had been unable to leave the smouldering butt anywhere near her, for fear that she would somehow use her toes to manipulate it and burn away the ropes before the spark had ignited. All those years ago now, Alvarez had ensured that they were living on a natural gas line for precisely such an eventuality as this. So, he had compromised, and used the charred butt to light her funeral pyre instead. Of course, it had been challenging to manipulate the camera while doing all of this. He had not originally expected that there would be any need to expertly brandish a camcorder in one hand while simultaneously barbecuing his wife, but that was before the market niche had emerged in the days leading up to the Y2K scare.
She had admonished him thoroughly in authentic Myrtle fashion when she first came to, of course. Waking up tied to your grandmother’s old rocking chair (appraised at well over $2,000 on an EBay auction that had gone to bust after the winner contracted conjunctivitis) with Home Depot rope that had been purchased wholesale rather than individually (Alvarez had saved himself a quarter), after having sedated with over the counter sleeping pills bought from a street vendor had most likely inflamed far worthier women than his wife.
Oh, it wasn’t that Alvarez particularly detested Myrtle. The fact remained, however, that an improper domestic closure would probably jeopardize his fifteen minutes. Nobody likes grieving widows. Myrtle would have kicked up an irrepressible stink about the whole thing, and most likely would have flummoxed the entire deal when he was post-mortem. Alvarez supposed that her death could have been ruled accidental had he not filmed both a prologue and an epilogue shortly before setting the live camera on a stump outside to watch the house go up in flames.
Alvarez abruptly hit the brakes, causing the family Hyundai to fishtail into a half doughnut and leaving over twenty feet of burnt rubber in his wake. In all of the excitement, he had practically forgotten the coup de grace. Cursing fluently, he pulled out his Razr flip phone from the right pocket of his jeans. Its display indicated that he had three missed phone calls, and two messages. I wonder who’s going to deactivate my Facebook after I’m dead. Wouldn’t it really be something special to leave a lasting imprint of yourself on a dead celebrity’s voicemail? His cell phone was a drove of compelling information, and would almost certainly be disseminated across most channels of public communication.
He hurriedly switched on his headlights. It would hardly do to be reduced to so much desiccated residue while his preparations were still underway. In the distance, a sheet of lightning temporarily engulfed the horizon like a pretentious flashbulb, and Alvarez was tempted to strike a pose as sheets of torrential rain began to impact his windshield. He was witnessing tens of thousands of tears and the magnanimity of the masses, the sorrow which would have been exacted had the world at large not been completely desensitized to the circumstances of death as such. It truly meant something to be mourned by the world itself under cover of darkness while one was still alive to witness it. Even now, a sanctimonious knowledge of his own mortality threatened to overwhelm Alvarez’s mind, as it had these many days and years, but the truth was that such thoughts had no real meaningful rhetoric behind them.
Alvarez knew his history, and understood that humankind had been attempting to make sense of death since antiquity. Purging, genocide, crusades, ritualistic sacrifices, holy wars, occult death pacts, natural disasters...the act of dying was believed to be useless unless it served some underlying human purpose. All of this was pretentious beyond all imagining. Now, the world was submersed in the advent of global telecommunications and a rabid consumer market which yearned for increasing forms of moral depravity in the same way as surely as a fish swims in its own piss. Mother Marla, who had been narrating a lengthy monologue for the last five minutes, addressed her audience softly and almost contritely, as though communicating some sublime insight into the divine that was best left unheard.
“Now, my children, our evening together is drawing to a close. Stay tuned next week for a special appearance by a very unique guest, a shaman from the mountains of the Caucasus who has travelled halfway across the world to describe his homeland to us, with all of its great mythic folklore. I will be taking your calls for the next quarter of an hour. Please, let this old girl know what you think of her.” Marla didn’t breathe often. Alvarez tended to judge people by how conscious they appeared to be of their own respiratory function. His own wife revolted him, with her phlegmy gulps for air which sounded like the death rattles of a wounded porpoise. Marla never resorted to such ostentatious humanity. She was occasionally prone to exaggerated little sighs which heightened her erotic appeal. Alvarez had no idea if Mother Marla was or had ever been affiliated with the Church at all, but no nun sworn to vows of chastity and celibacy could have communicated a sense of sexual repression through those little exertions more effectively than she could.
Alvarez was fully aware that she was a popular culture exhibitionist only. Her chintzy intro music sounded as though it belonged on the set of some 1980s Hey-There-Maggie-June suburban yuppie drama. Even the show itself was conducted with a grandiose air of what otherwise might have been poorly concealed frivolity, comparable to the telephone psychic industry which had started doing radically well at the turn of the millennium. Alvarez listened to her show religiously every week without fail because she capitalized on the more traditional aspects of nocturnal radio without either becoming an endlessly redundant cliché or a haughty innovator who paid lip service to brand loyalty while discarding primary influences completely. Alvarez had no idea what the listener volume was like. He listened mainly due to the fact that the entire show sounded counter-clockwise. Conformity was bad, conformity was politically incorrect, conformity had become the inflated Goldstein of this massive cultural suicide which had precipitated the hallmark years of the early 21st century. So, counter-conformity was the new black in a colourless world. Mother Marla seemed to stand for all of the implicit, quietly funny ironies of the new millennium, though she had never openly stated as much.
Alvarez had long since committed her program’s phone number to memory, but had yet to call. It wasn’t the prospect of public mortification over the air or even a conscious knowledge of his own infatuation which intimidated him. He was scared, but not in any discernible way. His years in the Academy, fifteen macabre winters on the Force, a couple more inside of the big house on the other side of the bars, and now retirement on a significantly reduced pension had exterminated most of his fear. He was not a schoolboy with a crush. Calling Mother Marla would simply be a monumental step. The woman did not communicate with words. Words were her incidental tool, the insidious conduit through which she chose to convey a still higher meaning. Should he call, she would know him instantaneously, would read him like a book, would radically alter his life to the point of no return.
She was most probably female. He felt convinced of that, at the very least. More than once, she had made reference to her lack of sexuality, to some underlying ambiguity of gender. She could be twenty-eight, fifty-eight, or anywhere in between. Hell, she could be a quadriplegic hooked up to an abundance of tubes like a ventriloquist being manipulated by pharmaceutical compounds, for all he knew. Sometimes, he imagined that she was maimed and scarred, scarcely recognizable as anything living, some animate object occupying the threshold between life and death and speaking in a drug induced delirium.
Alvarez felt more daunted at the prospect of speaking to her than any comparable amount of trepidation he might have encountered on the brink of the next world while preparing to talk to God Himself. He had never believed in God, and did not intend to change his stance now, after fifty years. One nicotine stained palm slowly reached towards the glove compartment, moving seemingly of its own accord like some repulsive insect. It grasped a standard police issue revolver. Without thinking, Alvarez silently placed it on the dashboard. Fumbling in his jacket pocket, he produced a lighter for his final cigarette. Bombs away. This would be a triple whammy. Completely unprecedented. Alvarez envisioned himself accelerating through the brisk spring evening fifty miles over the speed limit with no headlights on while driving on the wrong side of the road, smoking a cigarette, clutching a gun to his temple, and talking on a cell phone. The general idea was to blow his brains out all over the windshield immediately before impact with the next oncoming vehicle. He should have at least a couple seconds of prior warning, assuming that the other vehicle was driving with its headlights on.
Frank understood that he would not be missed. It was a fact of life, not some morose reasoning inspired by an embittered nature. Myrtle had hardly been able to live with him ever since her old man had come home to his penthouse with a black mark on his report card. The radiation clinic gave him six months, though Frank would have staked money that the mogul’s private physicians would likely keep him sucking on his poison at least until the daffodils had poked their heads through the soil at this time next year. It went without saying that Myrtle was his only child and heir apparent. It therefore stood to reason that she believed that he would press his nuptial advantage at the first possible opportunity, which would translate into millions for Frank. Most days, he failed to understand why she had consented to marry him in the first place, but that was neither here nor there.
Alvarez had considered his options at length. Hanging, though it involved a practically certain probability of eventual death (he had witnessed enough jailhouse suicides in his time to understand that this was the case) would not generate a sufficient demand to warrant anything special. Overdosing was excluded for the same reason. Slitting of the wrists would have catered to a higher class. Such methods were reserved for artists, like Juhan Viiding. Jumping from a perilous height would have been next to impossible to capture on film properly.
He had eventually settled on this method after tremendous deliberation. Not only did executing his wife represent a potential motive and garner aesthetic points, but it also incinerated all of his worldly possessions in one fell swoop. In doing so, this method utilized fire, which in turn happened to be a grandiose, romantic gesture. It would win him a lot of acclaim where it mattered.
Frank was perfectly indifferent towards his wife’s fate, so it would be useless to dwell on that aspect of things. He did not vindictively dislike the woman, though he wouldn’t have objected to perhaps looking on for a couple of moments for the first few fresh howls as her pedicured toes were roasted one by one. Most likely, this much was wishful thinking. Assuming that Myrtle had not passed out almost immediately as a result of smoke inhalation, it was probable that the furnace had combusted, killing her instantly. He never should have married again, but was all too aware of his own occasional lapses in judgement.
This evening had been a long and arduous time in the coming. Ironically enough, most of this had been for want of a motive. In many ways, Frank’s second marriage was outlandishly inconspicuous. Though prone to occasional pathological outbursts and exclamations of anger as were befitting of a woman who had grown up ****ting golden nuggets, Myrtle had been a mainly quiet and passive woman. Her father’s illness had provided an opportune pretence for the murder.
People did not want to hear about clinical depressives ending their lives for reasons best known to themselves. Homicide more or less dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s in an instance like this one. Slaughtering oneself on camera had gotten in vogue during the early 2000s, generally consisting of self destructive webcam slayings. The rest had been history. Producers had caught on to the trend, and increasingly macabre video feeds had begun to circulate around the web. After the massive marketing bust which ensued following tighter regulations on music and multimedia downloads, the public had increasingly begun to tune in to more violent forms of programming. Of course, such content had yet to make a debut on network television (for the most part, anyway), but was mostly pay-per-view on video streaming networks.
Of course, Frank possessed his own unique reasons for killing himself which had nothing to do with any sort of posthumous notoriety. He had wanted to die for well over a decade, but that was superfluous information. Obscuring one’s true motive beneath an elaborate masquerade of popular culture seemed efficient enough.
Frank had never truly understood why people chose to drive at breakneck speeds. Living for the bottom line seemed like a precarious existence, though his own knuckles were whitening on the steering wheel as he put the car into reverse and gradually turned about in the oncoming lane. Retrieving the gun, he placed it to his temple with a grimace. One foot tentatively stepped on the gas pedal, and the car accelerated forward. Almost without conscious consideration, he dialled a number on his cell phone as the engine began to whine in protest. He was one more anonymous time capsule, howling through the oblique valley of death as existence itself averted its face from him. The phone began to ring, and someone picked up on the other end.
“You’ve reached Mother Marla Spook’s “Dead Air” program. How may I direct your call?” Frank swallowed, hard. The woman on the other end of the line sounded entirely nonchalant.
“Miss Spook, please,” he said. His heart was threatening to implode at the sheer adrenaline of it all. Sixty miles. Eighty. One hundred. Frank’s sole illumination in the otherwise all encompassing darkness was the liquid crystal display of his cell phone. It was casting a garish artificial light on the right side of his face, which had drained of all colour.
“I’ll put you right through, sir.” The line was transferred, and began to ring again. One hundred and twenty. One forty. One sixty. Frank’s hands were perspiring so considerably that he found it difficult to grasp both items. His pulse was undulating, and he wondered if he was going to begin hyperventilating. The total ubiquity of the darkness caused him to speculate that he was, perhaps, already dead.
Someone picked up, and Frank’s heart almost stopped. The fact was not lost upon him that, should he suffer a heart attack right now, then he would need to immediately shoot himself so as to cause it to appear as though he had died of two entirely isolated causes simultaneously.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “It would seem as though we have found each other. Two kindred souls, migrating through the night like two lost pennies abandoned for eternity at the bottom of a wishing well. Or, is it an ocean? I can never tell, but it’s wonderful to hear from you. What do you have to say to our listeners tonight?” Frank’s oesophagus had seized up. He found himself entirely unable to speak, and forced himself to search for the moon instead. It appeared to be obscured behind a cloud. As he leaned over to check, the muzzle of the gun seemed to caress his cheek like the lips of some forlorn lover. The shot that was heard around the world. Remember us sinners in the hour of our death. Frank could still smell that goddamn burned toast.
Miles away, a silent apparition was throwing darts in the dark. The luminescent blue digits of a clock radio played across the pensive face as it sipped a glass of Chardonnay, listening to the hushed crooning of Mother’s tortured voice. Somewhere in the distance, a dog howled. A tortured male voice spoke up on the line.
“Will you marry me?” A car horn honked somewhere on the next street over. The apparition lit a cigarette. Abruptly, the male spoke up again.
“Oh, ****!” A sharp noise emanated from the apparition’s radio speakers, and, for a moment, he suspected that they had been blown. However, the tinny background music carried on.