Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 18.
Clive, turn me into my mother.
Self-destruction incoming. Inevitably.
Chapter 18. Clive, turn me into my mother.
Dick says there’s a bar in town about a mile down the road. Marshall waits for the rain to let up and then starts walking down the side of the main road in the slick cold. Dark smoke still rises into the evening sky in the direction of Pleasant Farm, fire unhindered by the Sky Mother’s tears. Perhaps she’s playing a cruel trick by dropping her dousing water like a cold lick of hope just to let it all burn down anyway.
Marshall doesn’t think much while he walks. It’s all he can do to put one foot in front of the other and end up somewhere else when his feet are done moving. There is a weariness that he feels down to his very bones. He cannot tell the clouds from the smoke, the road from the dirt, himself from the devil.
The bar is called Clive’s. It sits on a short strip of business developed land. A gas station. A tailor. A grocery store. A bank. All looking closed down for the day, lights out, windows dusty and dark. Clive’s is the only living thing and it does throng with a certain energy. A neon sexy lady pours beer into a thick glass mug above the sign. Two women are smoking in the alley in red high heels. They eye Marshall hungrily as he enters.
Inside is just as dark and surprisingly loud. Must be nothing else to do in this town after dark. Men sit at tables with their legs spread, knees barely touching. Women lean over the pool table, whale tails of their thongs riding above the waist of their denim skirts. A couple makes out in the back on top of a pinball machine. Someone snorts a white line off of a fat woman’s leg. The bar counter is long and unoccupied. The bartender is a dark-skinned guy with a tall red mohawk. Behind him, the walls are lined with skinny bottles of liquor, backed by a mirror so the drinker can watch himself deteriorate through the liquid distortion. Marshall takes a seat at the bar and decides that he will drink until he falls backward off his stool into the arms of someone who will pull him into their bed. Something must be here. Something has to make him feel or otherwise kill him. He’s lost the ability to prefer one or the other. Doing nothing is a choice.
The bartender’s name is Boy. Marshall tells Boy to keep pouring brown liquor until his eyes are swimming in it. Boy grimaces with recognition but his job comes before his compassion and he does as he is asked. A good man.
The bar is full of locals. They all know each other and eye the outsider suspiciously. Every once in a while, one group of people will send up a delegate to pry information out of him. A flat-chested woman smelling of bile asks his name. He says he is Mars and returns to his drinking. An emaciated man with pants riding below his waist swaggers over and asks, “Mars like the planet?” and Marshall says, “Yup,” and returns to his drinking. The delegation of men with touching knees sends up their tallest, darkest man. Even as he walks, he keeps his legs spread wide. His cock is very important to him. “Where you from, kid?” this one says. “Mars,” says Marshall and returns to his drinking. He is not drunk enough yet to fuck anyone though every ugly soul here is a viable candidate.
The sun has set entirely outside and the music is turned up. Any variety of locals continues to fill the space behind and on either side of him but he does not look. He will look when he is ready. Soon the spaces at the bar are filled too. He is between a heterosexual couple both wearing camouflage and a dark woman drinking with the same fervor and hunger for oblivion as Marshall. Maybe her? Maybe she can feed the end?
The night whittles into the spaces once occupied by the innocence of the day. People drink and get loud. People drink and touch Marshall’s shoulders. People drink and want to touch each other and forget about it. Marshall drinks and wonders how much it would take to kill him. Which is funny because just that morning he could have died and he didn’t want to but he wasn’t alone then and he was alone now and he could only sort of blame the cult.
At some point, when the mirror starts to mock him, Boy the bartender tries to cut him off. Holds the bottle of rum to his chest like a parent demonstrating that toys can be taken away.
“Who’s Clive?” Marshall asks.
Boy shrugs. “I don’t think he’s a real person. I didn’t name the bar.”
He nods, thoughtfully. “I just escaped a cult.”
“The…one that’s on fire?”
“Yeah.”
He refills Marshall’s drink.
When midnight rolls around, Marshall stands on wobbly legs and teeters across the bar, making eyes at anyone who will look at him. He can’t be sure what’s in his eyes. There are some people in the bar that he would like to fuck and more than a few that he can envision killing. His executive function is fucked so he might be sending the wrong signals to the wrong people. It’s all the same anyway. It’s all violence.
He sits on the toilet with his head in his hands and pisses for a long time. He sits for so long that he almost falls asleep. But then someone knocks on the stall door. He opens it with his pants around his ankles. The emaciated guy from before. He basically already has his pants around his ankles too so Marshall pulls him in and drops to his knees.
It’s cold and dirty on the ground. The gaps between the door and the floor are large enough that anyone could surmise what they were doing. Marshall does not care. When he’s finished, the guy just pulls up his pants and nods before leaving. There is less of Marshall than there was before.
He thought to be filled might close the holes in his heart but he is bleeding still.
He is on the dirty floor of a bathroom. He is the vision of unprocessed masculine turmoil, which he knows is stupid. His hair is unwashed, his clothes dirty, his eyes red and bleary. He is a mess of self-pity, self-hate, self-destruction and he wants more. Less self and more destruction. He is a building on a rotting foundation. The whole thing must be brought down.
But of course, the thing that Marshall is avoiding as he sinks into this spiral is the love. Love had and love lost. Things Marshall has only felt briefly, glancingly, distantly. Nowhere close to the love he has felt from Beaver. From Lana. From…Jamie. What would his love think if he could see Marshall now? He hovers like a drone outside of his own body. He is a sad thing. He pities this thing. He continues.
His eyes must be swimming like he’d asked for but he cannot stop. Become my mom. Become my dad. Become something that I would kill.
People try to talk to him again. He is a wall. There's a television over the bar. This is the hottest December on record. There is a new deadly virus sweeping the globe. Someone tried to kill the president last week. A new app is sparking controversy. Taylor Swift has come out as straight. He cannot fit any more liquor into his stomach so he drinks in every thing he has been running from. Terror of the world collapsing. A society built to confine everyone and keep them unhappy. Everything matters. Nothing is important. There’s a killer on the loose and it’s Marshall and he’s just a drunk and a slut tonight and maybe tomorrow he’ll be dead or in jail. He doesn’t care. He’ll let anything happen to him.
He's a killer. He’s a monster. He is nothing. To be nothing is a choice.
When the lights begin to flicker at closing time, he finally achieves that sweet enveloping blackness halfway between his stool and the hardwood floor, no one reaching out to catch him.
Previous chapter. Next chapter.
Implosions happen rather quickly, don’t they? As a reminder, if you wanna skip the wait for chapters, you can grab your own digital copy of the whole book on my website or on amazon for your e-reader. I leave that decision up to you.