Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (13 page)

“And what are those?”

“Fall in love. Have a family. Be a dad and a husband.”

She squeezed his hand, kissed him on the cheek. “You’re wonderful.”

“You’re wonderful, too.” He meant it.

He meant it more than he had ever meant it before.

As they drove away, she kept smiling.

“Why are you smiling?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I just feel like smiling.”

“There’s no reason?”

She piped, “I’m just smiling cause I’m happy.”

“I’m happy, too.”

∑Ω∑

He has nothing left. The weight of his loneliness and heartache bears down upon him like an anvil, crushing his ribs and pushing all semblance of life from his lungs.
She is gone. She is gone. She is gone
. He will never be with her. He will never hold her again, never smell the sweetness of her hair, never gaze into those deep dove eyes, never build a life with her and have wonderful children and be a family man. All of those dreams, nothing but smoke and mirrors.
Smoke and mirrors.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

64

∑Ω∑

A few months following the beloved words at the Ludlow park, the man’s sister became pregnant. She had gotten married in late spring, and while the baby wasn’t expected, everyone celebrated when she announced it at Thanksgiving dinner. He leaned over to his girlfriend and whispered in her ear,

“One day we’ll have a little one of our own.”

She bit her lip, tried to fight off the smile. “I hope so.”

“Me too,” he said, squeezing her hand under the table.

Her eyes batted, seductive. “You’re my angel.”

“You’re my angel, too,” he said, meaning every word of it.

∑Ω∑

“One day we’ll have a little one of our own.”
Her voice echoes like a scream. Smoke and mirrors.

“You’re my angel.”

Kira was his angel. And she had fallen. Everyone had fallen. He is alone, surrounded by fallen angels. The beauty they had been has become a hellish recreation of the inner sanctuary of the human creature: its rage, jealousy, hunger, and thirst. Mankind has become a horde of demons scraping the earth clean.

A bird cries out in the trees and takes flight.

He watches its slender form vanish in the glare of the sun.

And he feels as if the sun is mocking him.

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

65

Chapter Four

The Order of the Ravens

“Death is not the worst;

rather, in vain, to wish for death,

and not to compass it.”

- Sophocles (ca 450 BC)

I

Thoughts of her dance through his head, mixed with the desire to slit his own wrists, an ungodly concoction. He doesn’t know how long he will live; his days are spent thinking of her—her beauty, her laugh, her smile, the way she danced, and cuddled, and the way she sweet-talked him in their deep sensual embrace—and these thoughts are met with a tidal wave of forsaken desires, and sweat creases his brow and his hands shake and he can only scream as the intense desire to end his own life takes over. Their love did not last, and he is lost in that unthinkable question: not why, not when, but
how
. How will he do it? Pills? The serrated blade of a knife? A gunshot wound to the head? The temptation to take his own life will soon take control, and he will no longer be able to live—just as he is no longer able to love. Soon he will break under the temptation; his heart has already been broken, but it is his life that awaits such a resolution.

He can only run and hide, and no matter where he goes, they are there. He walks the empty streets and gazes upon the deathly city. No matter where he goes, no matter what he does, no matter how hard he tries to take his mind off
her
, SUICIDE whispers its name in his ears. He can live and exist in a world overrun by the mankind-turned-monsters, but what he cannot stand is to not be with her. He cannot live and exist in a world without her—and, even worse, in a world where she has become something ugly and horrific, a monster straight from the maws of hell, and he cannot live in a world knowing that he has taken her life. There is no purpose, no rhythm, no reason and no rhyme to his survival. The pain and suffering are endless; his body aches, but his heart screams, as if it has been wrapped in barbed wire, and each memory of her draws the barbed wire tighter and tighter, the metal points digging into the soft muscle of what was once a live and beating muscle. No one can help him. There are no 1-800 numbers to call. There are no hospitals. No psychiatrists. No medicines. He is entirely alone. All he has are his cigarettes and his alcohol, and he consumes them ritually, finding escape only in drunken stupor. His spirit is dead, his heart is shattered, and he is entirely empty inside. So he drinks. And he smokes. And he tries to forget the world. He tries to forget everything he has known.

It has been said that suicide is the most desperately hedonistic crime committed against every conceivable fraternity of all mankind. But in a world where there are no others, where no one will suffer when he takes his own life, what sin is there in such an action? He shall hurt no one—not even himself. Death, that which he once feared, has become that which he longs for every waking moment—even in his dreams, he can feel the blade slicing across his wrists. He sits in the gloom of the living room, hearing them outside, scraping and groaning, searching and thirsting. He thinks of Anthony Barnhart

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all that he has loved and all that he hates. Everything he loved is gone—peace, serenity, tranquility, happiness, joy. Empty words. Foreign words. They find no home in the vacancy of his soul. SUICIDE. It is his fate. He thinks of all the times he used to laugh, and now he just wants to die. Crying every night is not the way to live, and thoughts of suicide haunt his mind. No one will care when he is gone. No one will even know. He will be but another rotting corpse, and he will not be resigned to the fate of those outside—those monsters, those beasts, those shells of once-beautiful human beings, those angels cast down from the highest heights of Heaven. Nobody sees his pain; and no one shall see his mangled body, nor his brains splattered against the wall, and the handgun that will lie in his skeletal fingers. Suicide: it is his bid for freedom. If he kills himself, will anyone miss him? Will he be remembered? Will anyone cry because he is gone? No. Because he is alone. Entirely alone.

The man’s heart is filled with an empty hole. He wishes to put himself on fire and fry; but some may whisper, “With life, you can still make an effort and try.” Make an effort? Try? For what purpose? To continue living in a world void of human life, where he is constantly alone, chosen randomly by the Sun God to persevere in loneliness and depression? They used to say that if you were considering suicide, take heart, because you are not alone in your sufferings. But he is
entirely
alone. He is shivering-cold to the bone, always weeping, wishing he had something beautiful and wonderful—

wishing he had
her
—and wishing he could have treasured and kept her. Love was once on his side. Now LOVE is lying in a grave, rotting under several feet of rocks and clay and dirt. “What is love? A concoction of chemicals in the brain stimulating pleasure.” If only he could stimulate those pleasures; but now all the chemicals are low, out-of-balance, and he only knows that final and fateful resolution. Suicide is his thought of dying. Crawling out of the hole he has made. It’s the only way out of the pain he feels.

He remembers sitting in the tight chair behind the narrow desk. He remembers being in a classroom filled with students. He remembers the short and stocky psychology professor pacing behind the podium, speaking. “Why commit suicide? With life, there is always hope.” He can see the professor now: clawing open the wounds of another human being, feasting on the kidneys and liver and the fetus of a once-pregnant soccer mom.

He can hear them outside.

He sits upon the sofa, sitting in his underwear.

The gun is in his hands. Cold. Cancerous. Calculating.

He stares at the mirror on the wall, focus blurred, and he is coming undone.

A face stares back at him.

Her
face.

The face of beauty: twisted, contorted,

now open in a silent scream, blood streaming from hollow eyes. He is empty inside, bleeding, his head exploding.

He is falling, crawling, and everything grows darker, dimmer.

Blood is on the walls, and he can hear the death-calls outside the window. He cuts himself. The blade runs deep. Blood seeps from the wound.

He takes a deep, shivering breath.

Their screams are poisonous
.

The pain, the pleasure, overcomes him. He slices deeper: bleeding, escaping. He is twisted, crashing and burning, void of strength.

Anthony Barnhart

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Everything is fucked up.

He is sick of life: “My pain will never end.”

His own voice shocks him.

He has not heard it in so long.

All he has heard are his tears.

He drinks from the bottle, running from the past, pushing away the memories.

“I love you. Do you love me?”

“Of course I love you. I love you more than anything.”

“Then why did you kill me?”

He hurls the bottle against the wall, screaming in rage.

He buckles over, head in his hands,

uncontrollably

weeping.

He is mentally sick. Seeing death. Forsaken.

His only cure: the handgun in his hands.

He hates himself. He hates this world. He hates everything.

He hates everyone.

It is becoming unbearable. He wants to die.

Nightmares overtake his thoughts.

He will never be free.

All that he can see, is only

what’s become of him:

the shell of what was once a man.

II

RIVERFRONT, CINCINNATI. A 12-acre lawn splashed against the Ohio River, boasting a playground with dry mulch, several swings, twin slides, a tire-swing, and a wooden castle filled with walkways and catacombs for little children. Walking and biking paths snake through the manicured lawns, now dry and yellow in the heat of the last week of August. The gardens, floral displays, natural landscapes, and nature habitats are wilting, having not been watered for nearly three weeks; and an S.U.V. has crashed into the foot of the promenade connecting the twin stadiums: the Great American Ballpark—”Home of the Cincinnati Reds!”—and the USBank Arena. He stands upon the wharf, stone steps running in circular arcs down into the low height of the river. The past several days have been dry, without a touch of water, and the river’s level is dipping. Bloated bodies bob in the sluggish currents, twisting and turning in the rippling water, the clothes shorn and tattered, the stomachs bulbous and the fat glistening in the harsh sunlight. Some of the corpses have snagged on the wires from a collapsed bridge downriver—the antique John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge. A barge is wrecked into the large Brent-Spence bridge; it hit one of the pillars head-on, and the current swung it around so that it now rest horizontal against the bridge’s base. The far end of the barge is ruptured against the Ohio shoreline far downriver. The man’s eyes are drawn to a bloated corpse lying on the stone steps a hundred yards away; even from this distance, he can smell the scent of death and decay. The body had come to a rest on the steps when the water level receded, and now it is bloated and blistering, hot sears opening along the skin, revealing a mangled yellow-white puss. A raven spreads its three-clawed talons upon the swelled face and pecks at the eyes. Everything is deathly quiet, the Anthony Barnhart

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wind rippling up from the river, dark storm-clouds approaching slowly from the south, rising and bobbing over the rolling hills of northern Kentucky.
The drought will be over soon
, he thinks numbly.

He turns and gazes upon the Cincinnati Reds Stadium next to the USBank Arena. He remembers going to the Reds games with Kira, remembers the Crosley Terrace statues, the Italian-marble mosaics, the famous-dates banners and the Sun & Moon Deck where he and Kira held one another and looked out at motorboats revving up and down the river. Everything had been wonderful then. He had been happy. He closes his eyes, takes several deep lungfulls of air. The memories hurt. He opens his eyes and sees the USBank Arena. He and Kira had gone to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra play there two years ago. He had not wanted to go, but she had begged him; he finally succumbed, and he ended up enjoying the music immensely—he had even bought the CD, though he made sure Kira never knew.
She should have known
. Fuck. The memories ache. He turns away from the buildings and looks out across the river again, Newport on the Levee across the waters resplendent with corpses. He and Kira would go there and huddle around the telescopes—25 CENTS FOR FIVE

MINUTES!!! the sign had read—and they would peep into the apartment buildings and try to see people: 10 points for someone watching television, 20 points for someone reading in bed, 30 points for someone eating dinner, 40 points for someone masturbating, and 50 points for a couple having sex!
Fuck
. Kira surrounds him.
And you killed her. You killed her, you fucking bastard
.

His body is numb, exhausted, and his muscles scream, aching and throbbing. He cannot sleep. He cannot think. He can only remember. It has been three weeks since that horrific nightmare over the Atlantic, a nightmare that plays itself over and over in his mind, echoing like a cello in a dark chamber. Dry heaves have become his daily diet: the well of tears within has completely dried up. He doesn’t eat: he has tried to eat, but he cannot. He feels weak, his body throbs, but he cannot force down any food. He is losing weight quickly, and alcohol has become his new lover. His favorite is the 190-proof EverClear. He downs the drink and becomes lost in the euphoria: the memories do not hurt so much, he finds himself detached, and even their howls and wails and scratching at the doors and windows seem like no more than an awful B-movie dream. He spends his days walking the streets, staring at the city, and he often finds himself in places where he and Kira had spent considerable time, making memories “that will last forever,” as she had said: Eden Park, Mount Aries, Mount Echo, the ballpark stadiums, fancy restaurants, Newport on the Levee—and the Cincinnati Riverfront. He can hear his older sister’s words echoing in the back of his mind: “You’re suffering Failure to Thrive. It’s seen mostly in the elderly, but sometimes it’s apparent in those who have suffered great loss.” He wonders how she is doing. He has never been really close to her, not since the accident, an event which sent a rift between them; she blamed him for his death, and when their mother passed on due to cancer, she pushed him out of his life. She is now working—
was
working—