Hate: Chapter Three

[jute]

Hate: Chapter One

Hate: Chapter Two

Hate: Chapter Three

and when Adam wakes up, rises from his makeshift bed, he scans his surroundings, looking for something, some reason. Dead. Adam remembers how Horatio described culture. They should never have come here. But a suggestion was made. “If there were still insects, they would devour us all.” Adam can’t quite remember and when Adam wakes up, he’s slightly hung-over, but nothing major. Last night he dreamed of an octopus, flitting around in the overpowering blackness of the sea, tentacles releasing and contracting. Zoom in on its eye: harsh, unblinking, unmoved, and then a door opens somewhere. And when Adam wakes up it’s 10:20 a.m. and he rises halfway and seats himself on the edge of his bed and attempts to stand but it doesn’t work so he waits a while, waits…. Now he gets up, finally compelled by the intensity of his urge to urinate, and so he opens the door from his room and enters the second-story hallway and, groggily stumbling, at last makes his way to the bathroom, where he pisses violently while staring at the print of Pieter Brueghel’s ‘Tower of Babel’ that hangs above the toilet, and beyond the din of his urination, he thinks he hears the sounds of laughter, music, maybe another party, from the first floor. And maybe he imagines fucking a ghost.

Once, Adam found a little girl’s corpse hanging from a noose in the ruins of L.A., and being pretty interested, he got up close to it, very close, and was sniffing, and it must have been there a while, as the hairless, maggot-infested genitalia would attest, and about when he got curious about that is when the little girl, pigtails, dirty, faded blue ribbon, turned out to be a zombie and started kicking and moaning, making sounds like baby wolves crying in the forest at night, and she was thrashing around on the rope, muscles and bones cracking and popping from the onset of rigor mortis and she couldn’t do Adam any harm but she still frightened him, moved him somehow, so he aimed and unloaded two rounds from his Desert Eagle into her forehead. Then he pulled her down from the rope, her neck bendable like a point of articulation on an action figure, and thought about fucking her (actually, he’d already been thinking about that), but the maggots were still there and they were really pretty disgusting so he started to take out his knife before deciding that this body was old enough that maybe he didn’t even need that, so he punched her stomach, once, twice, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, until he felt his fist puncture, revealing midsection, intestine, spleen, decaying, and Adam imagined worms on concrete, dying because they can’t find the dirt they need, and he sifted his hands through the grainy khaki slug viscera, and life went on, and in the end, he was trying to imagine the maggots turning into butterflies as he orgasmed weakly.

Adam flushes the toilet and thoroughly washes his hands, inspecting his fingernails with automatic concern. Then he showers quickly, and afterwards finds himself staring into the mirror, rendered near-opaque by the steam from the shower. His reflection is vague and blob-like: hollows for eyes, smooth flat nose, long teardrop mouth. Adam feels like an extra in a movie that doesn’t exist. The rest of the morning passes without event, no laughter, no music, no party, whatever the hell Adam thought he had heard, except that someone at breakfast had some jet, which Adam thought was pretty fucking nifty, and somewhere else at some other time Ellie Dunn replied, “Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.” Afterwards, Levon Besnelian tells Adam he has something to show him, so they go out by the pool and Levon grabs this pitcher full of yellow/brown liquid that he informs Adam is called shicuichi. They go back into the kitchen, Levon pours two glasses, and they drink it while Adam rolls a joint disinterestedly. Levon explains: “I made this batch yesterday. What it is, is leaves of this plant from Mexico. You pluck ‘em and let ‘em wilt a little, then liquefy ‘em in a blender and let ‘em ferment out in the sun for a day or two. Course, there’s no more plants around for me to get leaves from, so I gotta use dried ones now. There’s a big bag up in that cupboard there by your head” but Adam is thinking ‘I need a new lighter’ and Adam is thinking ‘I wonder if someone still makes lighters’ and Adam is thinking ‘who fucking cares’, so they finish the shicuichi and make themselves cosmopolitans (after a long and inelegant search for limes) and go into the standard nonspecific living room and sit down on assorted nondescript couches and watch the only movie in the entire mansion (Adam never goes to any other places that might conceivably have films that haven’t been converted into melted puddles of plastic and used to make cocoons for deformed infants, so he’s not sure if this is due to The Rapture’s strange selective processes, or just that the previous owners of the house only liked one movie): Return to Horror High. There’s a guitar leaning on the couch Adam is laying on, so he starts strumming it, and he figures out how to play “Moonshiner” by Uncle Tupelo, which impresses him because he hasn’t remembered how to play that in forever, but the shicuichi makes sound seem strange and he has to stop, but that’s okay because the movie has started and he sits up. Return is an experience Adam doesn’t want to miss, since every time he sees it he catches some new detail to support his staggered-double-helix metanarrative theory (see Appendix I). Unfortunately, the massive coma cocktail he’s been consuming throughout the day makes watching the film nearly impossible, and he ends up supine again, his legs bent, knees pointing at the ceiling that he stares at, occasionally managing to sip his drink. Thoughts and perceptions are at this point akin to a Sam Raimi montage minus the gore: Levon laughing at or about something. Someone being stabbed to death on the soundtrack (okay, maybe a little gore). Mary enters at some point (Adam estimates it to be roughly halfway through the movie, but knows better than to toss out a definitive figure at this point) and seats herself with her back on his shins to watch the movie. She says something at some point, probably.

Sometimes Adam thinks of Chloe. This is not out of wistfulness or any sort of emotion Adam knows of. These thoughts tend to have the grainy pallor and unsentimental cool of an autopsy video. Occasionally, though, the colors sharpen and become bold and stabbing in sudden, unanticipated flashes of memory that can leave Adam feeling nauseous and quieted for the rest of the evening when they come as he’s walking through an empty first-story hallway or strumming a guitar on a generic couch or masturbating to an encyclopedia description of a preying mantis or shoving the barrel of his pistol so far into a zombie’s mouth that its teeth shatter into millions of pieces, white chips and flakes flying about him like snow coming down on a little boy making snow angels with his sister and his father. The jagged, perfect blues and greens of the default Windows XP background. A pink shelf against a black and filthy wall. Adam recalls watching old Alfred Hitchcock movies with Chloe, trying to balance in his mind the dual concentrations that both enjoying a movie and making out with someone require. Adam recalls running up hills with her hand in his as it began to rain. Adam recalls Chloe’s breasts pressed against fogged glass.
The movie ends, Adam rises from the couch and, grasping a now-watery cosmopolitan, stares out the window. Deep blue. Adam feels like he would be somewhere, feels on the verge of something large and hollow like a tomb. Deep blue. 6/4 time. Ultramarine. Somewhere ultramarine. But staring out the window, all Adam can see is the hologram landscape of a vale of mud-brown tears.

[m0l0t0v]

...

The name 'Adam' is mentioned a lot. You could replace it with 'he' from time to time. Other than that the story is... interesting...

[DaJuice]

Hey, finally, my fave story is back:D
I like it better than ch.2, definitly more harcore and disturbing.
I have a beef though. The problem with Hate is that each chapter reads like a chapter out of a novel, unlike many short stories posted here, which more or less wrap themselves up at the end. You read one chapter of this and wish you could read the next three chapters right after that, but instead we have to wait a couple of month for the next one to roll around:(
That's it, I really liked this chapter, I hope the next one comes around a bit sooner:)

[jute]

DaJuice said:

The problem with Hate is that each chapter reads like a chapter out of a novel, unlike many short stories posted here, which more or less wrap themselves up at the end. You read one chapter of this and wish you could read the next three chapters right after that, but instead we have to wait a couple of month for the next one to roll around:(

yeah, sorry about that. my (probably never-to-be-acheived) intent is for this to be at least novella length. with serialization, i can't really avoid this problem, but it heartens me to know that i can leave you wanting to read more. as for the slothlike speed at which these are written, this is due to me writing in fits. i'll write a page or two and then not write anything else for two weeks. i'm trying to curb this tendency and force myself to write more regularly, though. maybe i could release more than one chapter at a time, also. i dunno. but thanks for digging my story and always contributing commentary, man.

[Dingus Khan]

That was a pretty excellent chapter. As this book progresses the feelings of isolation and lonliness seem to increase greatly. The purposes and goals for the character in this story are nonexistant. He simply is. He kills something. He fucks something. He does drugs. Pure carnality. Occasionally it shows glimpses inside his mind, which reveal a long forgotten past. It's almost sorrowful, the character almost misses it, but then he realizes it doesnt matter anyhow. My assumption is that this story will never develope any sort of climax. It's all a climax i suppose. Its only goal is to portray a particular feeling, hence the title. Christ it's an honest portrayal.