It’s easy come, easy go. You know, one second, everything is alright, the next, your whole world has turned to shit right before your eyes. It all depends on which side God’s coin falls on. Heads or tails, right or wrong, black or white. Whichever.
But let’s be honest here for a second. You’re eventually going to die, so you’re pretty much equally screwed either way.
Right?
ONE. A Thousand Lives in Solitude.
The cigarette dangled from between my lips, the smoke rising up like fog off a dirty street. Little flakes of snow mingled in my hair, the cold winds all furious in the pale light of morning, causing my curls to tangle and dance at their own accord. My chin was rugged and unshaven, my eyes squinted in the new dawn, my boots caked with snow.
I sat on a log, wrapped in an American flag, listening to the sound of nothing and no one. I sighed and let the smoke escape from between my lips, my dirty fingernails scratching the nape of my neck while the other hand held the hatchet, still dripping rose red, dying the white snow crimson beneath it.
He laid a few feet behind me, almost forming a snow angel with his body all spread out on the ground, barely moving. You could hear gurgling every now and again, but for the most part, everything was silent and quiet and at peace with itself. Standing up, I dropped the hatchet and started walking toward the shed around the back of the cabin. I needed a shovel.
I think this was February, but don’t quote me on that.
TWO. Into the Wild.
I burned all my belongings in a steel drum trashcan, piece by piece, over the course of a night, save a suitcase packed with warm clothes, a couple dollars to get by, the obligatory pack of cigarettes, and a plane ticket directed towards Alaska, the Great White North.
Everything. My clothes, my credit cards, my wallet, my cell phone, all reduced to ash before my very eyes. Everything significant and insignificant; the flames didn’t bother to hold any prejudice.
I left town with confetti in my hair, the drugs still fucking with my head, wearing clothes that hadn’t been washed in a month or more. With sunglasses masking my eyes and the smell of sex still on my body, I drove as fast as I could, swerving in and out of traffic with a reckless abandon for anyone’s safety, including my own. Horns honked and people yelled out their windows, so I just turned the volume dial on the radio up as high as I could and let the music wash all those hateful sounds out of my ears.
The idea occurred to me a week prior. Give Los Angeles one last week of hell and then escape to Alaska to live out the rest of my days in isolation amongst the barren snowfields. Sleep beneath the Northern Lights, listen to the roar of the Bering Sea. Forget how to speak, forget how to live, embrace my most primal urges, and maybe wash my hands of whatever sins I have left over from my previous lives.
A journey to find myself completely, and then forget myself completely, and then start all over again. A radical decision, for sure, but the best decision I could make at this moment of my life, or any other moment for that matter.
The sun baked the streets of Los Angeles, sending the junkies, the hipsters, and the plastic surgery supermodels into a fever that they couldn’t quite shake out. Like dogs in heat, they panted, all sweat and musk in the city of falsehoods, failures, and an infinite supply of fuckups, me included. If New York City is the heart of the United States, then LA is the asshole, shitting all over whatever culture we still had left.
I stood outside of the airport, waiting for my plane to arrive, leaned up against the pane glass window with my head bowed and a cigarette placed in between my chapped lips. I was as much a cliché as the next man, no better than the drug addicted rockstars or their stripper girlfriends who marched down the streets like they were in a parade. I had been here for too long, and the whole place was starting to take a toil on me.
Pollution hovered overhead and I let out a long sigh of relief, knowing that I was finally going to be leaving. I was finally going somewhere that might have been worth a shit.
Maybe somewhere where I could finally be at peace with life, the universe, and everything.
But let’s be honest here for a second. I’ve never really been the type to fight my inner demons and find peace in anything.
Am I?
Interlude.
Some people like to go through life being the same person they were the day before, and the day before that, and even the day before that. Me, I’m the opposite. I like to wake up new, each and every morning. I like to rise from my bed and be a different person, whoever I want to be or whoever I don’t want to be, depending on which way the world is turning and how many planets are aligned.
Some mornings, I’ll wake up as somebody, all glitz and glamour in the California sun. Some mornings, I’ll wake up as nobody, hidden away in the alleys, shooting up in shithouse bars littered across the coastline. Sometimes, I’m a poet with a fountain pen, words flowing in and out of my head to create something beautiful. Sometimes, I’m the poster child for all that’s wrong in the world, all of the evils that you warn your children never to be a part of.
Wake up in enough trashed hotel rooms, in enough cities full of strangers, in enough states you would have never set foot in had your feet not brought you there on some grim wing of fate, and you’ll forget who you really are, too.
You’ll start to realize that nobody really focuses on who you are. That’s not the part that matters. Who you are isn’t what defines you these days. What really matters, what really sums you up, what people really want to know is who you’re not.
And me? I’m not anybody of any real importance.
THREE. The Stranger.
I met him on my third day in Alaska, fluorescent pale, standing beneath a beer light at some bullshit bar, standing up against the wall and smoking a cigarette. A fellow vagrant. Said his name was Ted, but that his friends called him Murphy.
He said he lived to the North, in isolation from all the prying eyes, and he only came down from the mountains once every month or so to grab a pint and put some normalcy back into his life.. I told him I’d never been the type to embrace normalcy. That made him laugh.
“Listen,” He said, pausing to light another cigarette. He couldn’t have been over thirty, but his hair had turned gray and he had a certain wisdom about his face that could only belong to someone who had been on this world for long enough to know what it was really all about. “I dig you, man. You seem like a real cool cat, real different than the rest of these assholes. You need a place to stay?”
For some reason, and I’ll never fully understand why, he took me in and that was that.
He was like the father figure I’d never had, even though he wasn’t much older than me. Every word from his mouth dripped with some archaic wisdom that you just can’t get from the talking heads on television or the half-assed poets that make up the better part of the Brooklyn bars. He would always say, whenever something went wrong, “So it goes.”
So it goes. So simple, yet so perfect for these strange times. So it goes. No matter what happens, whether the bombs finally drop or the sea sucks us all back into it’s depths, so it goes. Everything must take it’s course, and everything will, regardless of what you had planned.
He lived in a cabin a few miles away from nowhere, and from that cabin, it felt like you could see the whole of Alaska. In perfect isolation from the waning world, it felt like you could touch heaven from there. All you had to do was have the will to reach up and try.
I didn’t have that will, and neither did he.
He told me that his wife had up and left him. Took the kids, took the money, and made a beeline for the California coast. I told him that was funny, I had come from California. All he did was grin and say, “No wonder you’ve still got a tan.”
This was January. I’m sure of that much, but after that, time seemed to slip and the days… well, I don’t remember the days.
Interlude.
I’ve never claimed to be a mind reader and I’ve certainly never been able to see the future, or all of the past for that matter, but I’ve always had a certain intuition about what people will do before they do it.
Call it blind luck, call it a sixth sense, call it an act of God himself, if you want. Thing is, nine times out of ten, regardless of the person and regardless of how long I’ve known them, I’m usually capable of assessing whether they’re good, decent people who would never hurt a fly or terrible fucking train wrecks, waiting to crash with you sitting in the passenger cabin.
With Ted Murphy, I could never really make a good assessment. I couldn’t tell which side he was on, and right when I thought I was beginning to figure him out, he would go and fuck it all up again.
Call it bad luck, call it no sense, call it God‘s own personal shits and giggles, but with Ted Murphy, I never really even saw it coming.
FIVE. The Deer.
Murphy kept a shed out behind his cabin, armed to the floorboards with guns, knives, bows, arrows, hatchets, you name it. Murder devices, each and every one of them, which he used for hunting and killing our dinner each and every night.
Once, we built a snow trench and ducked out in it for the better part of the day, barely speaking, and just watching through binoculars. While I froze in the cold wind, getting anxious with my rifle pointed toward nothing but the snow in the distance, Murphy sat silently, as still as a corpse, with a patience unlike anyone I had ever seen.
And when the deer appeared, all star bright and unknowing in the distance, just as the sun began to set and the stars began to appear, he was the one to take the shot. Before I even noticed it being there, I heard the fire of the gun, I heard the bullet rip through the air, and I looked up to see the deer fall to the ground, the snow beneath it turning crimson red.
That night, we dined like kings.
Sitting at the table, picking my teeth clean with the end of my tongue, I looked up to see him staring down at his empty plate. “You alright, man?”
His words came out, hidden behind a yellow tooth grin, his head shaking back and forth slightly as he slowly looked up, his eyes withheld by the shadows. “Do you believe in God, Sean?”
“Do I believe in what? God?” I raised an eyebrow. It’s always those kinds of questions that catch you off guard, the things that you really have no way to reply to. “Well, uh. No? Not particularly. Why?”
“No reason,” He replied, leaning back in his chair and puffing out his stomach, smiling a little to himself. “No reason at all.”
That night, I fell asleep on the couch, without a worry in the world.
SIX. The Axe and The Axman.
There was a cold front moving in from the North, apparently. That night, it was supposed to snow and not stop until morning came up over the horizon. With a moon full of worry hanging in the sky, all the stars fucking on that black canvas of night, I slept with nothing but the roar of the fireplace to keep me company.
Murphy had stumbled off to bed hours ago, or so I assumed. I hadn’t heard a peep from him since I first laid down. He was saying something about being able to see the Northern Lights tonight, but I was too tired to really pay full attention. As the wind howled and the snow began to flicker in flakes, it was like God himself was keeping a watchful eye over all of Alaska. While the rest of the world burned with the fires of war, Alaska remained a time capsule, cut out of history, frozen in time. Beautiful. Immaculate. Perfect. Purer than a baby’s smile.
It was when these thoughts were racing in my dreams that I let down my guard. It was when I let down my guard that I heard the sounds in the other rooms.
As pots and pans fell in the kitchen and the sound of wood seemed to splinter in the nearby hallways, I cracked open my eyes and peered at my bedroom door. With some sort of anxious fear growing in my head, waiting for whatever it was to come barreling in, I laid as still as I could, just listening.
When my door finally did open, I saw Murphy’s silhouette, his left hand gripping the handle of an axe. “Sean…?” He called in, his voice holding a sort of broken charm.
“…what are you doing, Ted?” It was a stupid question, more than anything. I knew exactly what he was doing. I knew exactly what he was here for. When he spoke, he only made my suspicions a reality.
“I’m here to kill you…”
His eyes seemed to glow in the dark, the vague light of the hallway casting a spotlight on me from where I laid. As he began to step forward, the floorboards creaking beneath his boots, I watched like a deer in the headlights.
And then, I began to grin.
Not because I thought it was funny and not because I thought he was fucking around; one look in the man’s eyes would tell you there was nothing even the slightest bit joking about the situation. I grinned because of the absurdity of it all. I grinned because, even here, even in this barren wasteland of snow and solitude, hell could find me and try to drag me back down into the depths.
As I stood to my feet, neither of us spoke a word. He just lifted the axe and I waited for him to swing. When he did, I dodged, and I ran. He followed close behind me, his speech slurred and molding together to form nonsense, gibberish, like some forgotten language.
As I dashed down the halls, looking over my shoulder from time to time to see how close he was, there was an old saying going through my mind.
The saying goes, ‘If there’s one thing that can be said about mankind, it’s that there’s nothing kind about man.’
There’s too much truth in a statement like that…
SEVEN. Of Mice and Men.
I stumbled out into the ice and the cold, my feet immediately burying themselves in the snow as I worked my way around the corner of the house, freezing to death in winter’s embrace. Murphy followed suite, real slow, real menacing, like some stalking butler, waiting to bury the hatchet into my head.
I was making my way for the shed out back with hopes of finding something to protect myself with, looking over my shoulder to see how close or how far away from me he was. He moved faster in the snow than I did, used to it from his years in isolation. As I stumbled and crawled, it felt like I was trapped in some bad nineties slasher flick with some Hollywood horror.
When I reached the door to the shed, it was already too late. He was only a few feet behind me, and he swung with a force that could undo all of God’s work in one single, solitary blow.
As cliché as it sounds, my life flashed in a haze of anticipation.
All moments, big or small, pleasant or wicked, real or imagined flashed and fleeted before my very eyes. Everything everyone tells you that happens before you die happened right then and there. I heard angel trumpets and demons laughing I imagined the dead rising from the snow to take me down to my rightful place in Hell. Like an out of body experience, I saw myself laying dead, all blood and cuts in the pale light.
The axe fell, gleaming and glistening in the moonlight‘s glow. As I waited for the next sound I would hear to be the sound of my skin cracking and my bones splitting, I closed my eyes tight and then I heard it… the wood of the shed splintering as the axe cut deep, right beside my head, barely missing.
Deus Ex Machina. A machine of God. Some slight miracle, by fate or divine intervention.
I could feel the wind brush off of the axe’s force. I could feel the splintering wood crumble beside my quaking head. I could feel the cold sting of death almost, but not quite, wrapping it’s arms around me. As I looked up, both our eyes locked. His with anger coursing through his clouded gaze, mine with a feeling of shock and relief that I hadn’t known until right then. I knew what I had to do.
So, I did it.
His body buckled as soon as my foot rammed into his gut. He doubled over and fell down into the snow, on his hands and knees, coughing and foaming from the mouth like some rabid dog. I stood to my feet and lifted the axe from where it sat, silent and waiting for it’s destiny to be unfurled.
Just as he began to raise to his feet, just as the sun began to make it’s way over the horizon, just as the snow started to burn my skin, I swung the axe out of instinct, out of my most primal rage. And as it caught his neck, his eyes went wide, his body went still, all time went stop motion and the world itself stopped spinning for just a few seconds as he gasped his last breath of air, his life plucked away from him just as easily as it had been given.
I pulled the axe from his throat and blood gushed from his wound as he fell backwards, gurgling and staring up at the starry dynamo above our heads. I looked down at him, my breath visible in the cold air, and I sighed. Breathing heavy, barely capable of comprehending what had just happened, I took a seat on a log a few feet away from where he lay, listening to his body involuntarily spasm in the snow, his throat sputtering blood from between his lips as I lit my last cigarette, staring out over the snowfields, over the mountains, where the morning met the night midway in the sky, letting the stars be murdered by the sun’s rays of light.
Death may come invisible, or in a holy wall of fire, but it will come, without consequence and without question, whether you wish it to or not.
Interlude.
Mankind holds a long history violence.
Even in these modern times, even with all the technology we’ve piled to heaven’s high, nothing has kept us from being the brutal savages we were from our birth. First we clawed our way out of the primordial ooze, then we fought our way out of the sea.
We built civilizations, then we burnt them to the ground.
We gave birth to children, and then we saw them die without ever really having a chance to live.
We fell in love, in lust, in the prime of our lives, and then we murdered our significant others in a fit of passion and jealousy.
We were born only to bury ourselves.
No one’s going to play the harp when we die. We are unimportant. We are insignificant. We are insects, meant to be crushed by the heavy hand of time.
Violence is in our blood, and it boils with the fires of envy, hatred, and above all things, an insatiable animosity towards our own kind.
Get ready for the future, brothers. It is murder.
EIGHT. A Eulogy.
No one wore black to Ted Murphy’s funeral and no one sent flowers. No one said any good things about him and no one bothered to tell his mother that it would all be okay. No one cried and no one mourned. No one even attended, with the exception of me, the very one who dug his grave.
With blood on my hands, I buried him along with his name, without a tombstone or even a coffin to carry him to his next life. I left him to freeze and wither beneath the frozen ground, left to lie without any indication that he was ever there to begin with. I didn’t say I word at his burial, because I knew he wouldn’t have said a word at mine. I just let him sink into the ground, to be forgotten by all minds except for my own.
I collected my belongings and then I set the cabin ablaze with a can of gasoline and a Zippo lighter. I stood and watched, smoking a cigarette as the fires roared and the smoke rose like some bad omen waiting to run it‘s course. The snow had ceased and morning had finally made it’s way into the waking world, cold and bitter even now.
And I realized, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this trip was as futile as it was meaningless. I realized my own stupidty, the fact that I would even come up with such a ludicrous idea as this.
There was no escape from my sins and no escape from the life I’d known since childhood.
As the wind fanned the fire and the crackle of the flames melted the snow all around, I knew in my heart of hearts that Alaska was no different than anywhere else.
It was just another wasteland with another way of showing it, hiding behind a façade of beauty.
So, I went just as easily as I had come, marching through the snow, silent and alone, my head hung and my mind blank. I went towards nowhere, nothing, anywhere, everywhere, wherever.
All the cigarettes in the world couldn’t save me now.