ThEraPeutIc SKIn JobS #11

I wrote this just after my Nana Smith died, but that's no excuse.

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    “It is not dying,” whispers Dr. Skin. He’s sitting comfortably in the middle of his bedroom floor, his legs crossed, surrounded by loved possessions and haunted memories. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ playing softly in the background, the inevitable psychedelic soundtrack to the end of his world.

    His mind slips comfortably into the requisite meditative state, his holographic thought processes systemically shutting down, only to be replaced by the burning light at the core of his being. Beyond this words fail to describe what’s happening in his head, though it doesn’t last for long.

    Before the song has even finished, he’s opened his eyes, and assumed a number of the more adventurous yoga positions, raising feet up over his head and scratching an itch in the small of his back with his toes. Yawning softly, he brings his appendages around to their proper position and stands. Now fully immersed in the reality of the now, he notices that he remains as naked as the day he was born. Strutting confidently to the wardrobe, he removes his favourite black suit and places it on the edge of the bed. He places the rest of his clothes for the day next to it: Shirt, tie, socks, boxer shorts, shoes, sunglasses and belt, all colored a deep, deep black.

    Black, obviously, is the only color to wear to a funeral.

    He quickly dresses, inspects his immaculate appearance in the full–length mirror on the wall and leaves the room. He’s going to the kitchen, looking for breakfast. As the door closes behind him, two flies on the wall above the mirror contemplate the fact that he’s left the stereo on.

    “’Ere, Trevor,” says the first fly in an appalling cockney accent. “If a stereo plays in a room, but    there’s nobody to hear it, does it make any noise?”

    “Don’t be fucking stupid, Keef,” answers Trevor. “Of course it bloody does.”

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ThEraPeutIc SKIn JobS

#11

[Nobody’s Funeral]

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    First there is a stop sign. Then there isn’t.

    Making full use of its entirely adequate 42,800hp, The Car With No Name hits top speed along the country road. Leaning out the passenger window, Kristine takes aim at a passing road sign with an inordinately large shotgun and blasts it into oblivion with one shot. Hollering in delight, she squeezes back in the window and tosses the gun in the back seat.

    “Please, my dear,” pleads Skin, not taking an eye off the road, but still managing to make out the sign’s destruction through his peripheral vision. “This is a solemn occasion.”

    Kristine frowns. “It’s only a funeral.”

    Dr. Skin doesn’t reply. Frustrated by his silence, she forces the conversation. “How did he die?”

    “Does it matter?” answers her lover. “Went fast, went slow, no difference, same thing. He’s still dead.”

    Kristine is bothered by her companion’s morose state. It’s unnatural, a perversion of nature. For a brief moment she leaves him to his thoughts as they thunder through gorgeous, picturesque countryside. The sun is shining, weather is sweet, and the leaves are fallin’. Ancient oak trees reflect in bright blue lakes, green and gold in reverse. Kristine gets lost in the moment, tears welling in her eyes, but she quickly sucks it up and gets back to the fucking point.

    “So,” she asks innocently. “What do you suppose happens to the personality when you die? Is it lost forever, you think?”

    Skin isn’t listening. He’s walking through old memories in his mind, devoting less than one percent of his attention to the road, and none whatsoever to Kristine. Harsh and he's a cad, but it's true. In his mind’s eye, he remembers the last night with the dearly departed: Three o’clock on a Tuesday morning, six bottles of vintage already polished off, walking around modern suburbia and admiring slices of middle-class paradise.

    Skin suddenly has no idea of the time. Is this now? Is this then?

    Ignorant of such temporal cerebral calamities, Kristine yawns with concern as she studies her partner. Believable or not, there is a distinct possibility that she is the most observant person on the planet, even if she isn’t always sure what planet she’s on. She prattles on regardless, laying soft subliminal overtures in her voice as she varies the octaves to a ridiculous degree. “I mean, what if there is nothing? What if we die and that’s it? No more. Endgame. Can you even imagine what that’s gonna feel like when it happens to you?”

    She glances at Skin. Nothing.

    “You’re no fun anymore,” moans Kristine, folding her arms and pouting, looking straight ahead.

    He wants to reply. He’s got an answer screaming to be told, but it holds it in. This is a sacred day, and he refuses to let pseudo-philosophical crap grab a tenacious foothold in his consciousness. Not here. Not now. Besides, it feels like his emotions have been ripped raw, spliced open and left to rot, and he can barely say a word without choking on his own syllables. This is how he mourns. He can’t help it.

    Biting his own tongue and swallowing his own feelings, Dr. Skin drives on towards the cemetery.

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     “And sometimes…. sometimes you get ideas that are too big for your head, and you’ve just got to get them out there before you blow up.”

    “Is that so?”

    “Yes. And furthermore…. Hang on…. ‘Yawns with concern’? What the hell?”

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    It’s a another bright sunny day at the cemetery, but there's nobody alive to appreciate it.

    Nobody except Skin. The ubiquitous fucker stops searching for the grave and soaks in some rays, his eyes closed behind excruciatingly dark glasses. The cemetery is deserted, which is only to be expected. It’s located far enough away, somewhere out in the country, far from any tedious human community. A journey here requires an amount of grieving rare in the modern world. But the caretaker here maintains an impeccable atmosphere all the same. Somebody has to care.

    And yet….

    Skin moves on, looking for the right grave. He’s left Kristine in the car where she sits in the backseat, watching the Olympics. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Kristine & Skin had paid a visit to a sub-Vertigo derivative Alternative a number of weeks ago, and she had seized the opportunity to have a remote-feed gland implanted at the base of her frontal lobes. The result of this surprisingly mild insertion was the ability to spontaneously generate a terribly fashionable heavy duty hallucinogenic with a mere distinctive wink. So she sits there in the rear seat of the Car With No Name, tripping off her nut and watching specific, precise rituals carried out to a ridiculous degree.

    Back in something that resembles the real world a little more, Skin finally finds the grave he’s looking for. He stand there for a moment, and manages to cram a lifetime of contemplating into those short minutes. There is, after all, no need to fuck about.

    “Ah well,” sighs Skin softly, pulling out a large handgun and pointing it at his own head. “Might as well get on with it.”

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    “What?”

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    Skin pulls the hammer back, his finger squeezes the trigger, and time stretches out like Plastic Man on acid. Everything comes into hyper-focus, he can smell the trees, he can see the worms under the grass, he can hear Kristine snoring softly.

    “I tried to cope,” he says, speaking to nobody in particular, but giving the words the same power that always comes with speech, “but I’m not strong enough. It’s The Fear, you see. I can’t handle it. Every night it comes, just before sleep. I’m going to die, there’s nothing I can do about it and it’s going to happen. Every night it hits me.”

    Skin is sweating visibly now, the hand clasped around the handle of the Testosterone 723 shaking slightly as it digs into the side of his head. But. He. Doesn’t. Stop. Talking.

    “Kristine is so much stronger than me, she’s on a different level. She can’t see me down here, cowering in terror.” He pauses for a moment, breathes deeply, kicks a little dirt into the open grave and, with apparent reluctance, continues. “In the end, the knowledge of my own demise is too much to live with. Kinda ironic huh?”

    His finger applies more pressure on the trigger.

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    The act of the main character shooting himself in the head is not symbolic. It does not mean anything. All it signifies is the Author’s intent to shock with a highly visual and equally visceral form of suicide. It does not imply any suicidal impulses, nor does it condone them. It does not mean anything.

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    “Well, shit,” sighs Dr. Skin sadly. “When you put it like that.”

    e shoots himself in the head. The bullet blasts an entry hole just behind his left ear, tears through the grey goo Skin has residing within his skull and blows a significantly larger exit wound on the other side. Blood, brains and skull fly lazily through the air. The good Doctor is well and truly deceased, but his body remains standing for a moment, swaying under the force of the shot, but otherwise perfectly balanced.

    His legs finally cave in under him and he topples forward into the open grave.

    But he’s not there any more. The late Doctor Jacob Skin is surprised to find himself still thinking lucidly, despite his recent demise. He can’t see, hear, smell, taste or touch anything, but he can still think coherently.

    “It’s strange,’ he thinks. ‘I thought it would have been different.’

    Maybe it’s more different than he thinks as his thought processes start to break down. Panicking, he seizes on a dominant thought, and a song he’s had stuck in his head all day proves a life-line, and he rolls along with it, hitching a ride on its melody, destination unknown.

    He’s not scared anymore, and if he still possessed a mouth he would have smiled. He skips along the memory path that used to pass for his personality and relives his life a dozen times over, marveling at its inventiveness and troubled by the melancholy at the end. He focuses on specific moments to the detriment of others, and plays God with his own destiny without realizing it.

    He’s so far gone now, he doesn’t even see how little he resembles the person he once was. He died little more than a second ago, but the dead have no concept of time, and the eternity within every living moment is where he lives now.

    This other place, both within and without what he’s known, comforts him like the child he is. At long last, Dr. Skin slips into the afterlife and the incomprehension it encompasses, with consummate ease. It’s so simple, despite being like nothing he’s ever experienced before. Fortunately, despite not having the words to describe the experience, the final scraps of that song still exist, and they articulate all.

    It is knowing, it is believing, it is not living, it is not dying.

    It is not dying.

THE END

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