It’s a guest post! How exactly would one describe Noah Rymer to the uninitiated? He’s sort of like if Bukowski and Burgess were to meet in a dark alley of the future and try picking up some BPD art ho’s online, meanwhile hating his very own generation of zoomers for being “vacuous, hedonistic assholes.” He’ll be reading from his chapbook Invocation of the Bruised at Cultural Futurist Salon II - Cabaret of Secrets on 2/3/24, and has penned some Suburban Gothic fiction for our perverse entertainment here at The Cultural Futurist. Today, I present you with something genuinely creepy. Today, I present you with Drift.
The stereo blared with dull constancy, artificiality of the butchered/butchering electronica rendering greasy traffic lights and blinkers nigh-trancelike like a rave for the disenfranchised; this was the death disco of a nation shuddering on collapse, but the suburbs had been ground zero. I felt the loam of isolation and anxiety break over me like bleak waves as I glanced surreptitiously at the tortured arabesque of woman nodding off in the passenger’s seat, bleach-blonde ratty buzzcut like some beautiful dyke with eyes that could cut you up like fragments of stained glass or old Coke bottles sea-green with a dull, damning shine. The breathless melange of overhead streetlamp merged with my sight flickering like dying fireflies, my eyes themselves feeling like two empty ashtrays. And the highway stretched off infinitely, absurdly, into the peerless night but she came to soon enough, and I could feel her strange gaze begin to pierce me once more.
“Jack… Jack…” she trailed off, hot breath disgusting, intoxicating and intoxicated. I instinctively pulled away but Vampira with her damned stare caught me, and now I felt inclined to listen; strips of aged, yellow light struck her face like in those old gothic flicks and for a second I hallucinated Barbara Steele riding shotgun, but blinked and instead saw my loveliest scourge and yet she loathed and loved me just the same, if not stronger, and for this reason we stuck together this long, continually caught in the eyes of the other like cracked mirrors. And oh, how we yearned to shatter the reflections.
“Mmm. What’s up.”
She stuck a match for her cigarette, just about fumigating the whole damn car as I drove, trying to clear the smoke from my sight. She puffed contemplatively.
“Let’s pop over to the gas station. I’m thirsty, babe.”
“Alright.” And I made the turn and pulled over and opened and subsequently slammed the door as she waited patiently inside, cheap fluorescence glaring angrily, almost blasphemously, with how bright it was like some kind of electric idol; a Golden Bull, wired. The door jingled merrily, and as I left the black plastic made me nostalgic— so that particular chill amongst the rattle of the branches stripped bare still rung like a thousand lost days as Michelle shifted her stare sideways while I walked out of the door, back to the car, still watching passively as I fished for my bottle opener with her green eyes flickering, fading in the pitch of the car like headlights on a desolate highway.
I sped past a graveyard or two shrouded in the moonlight and in the momentary flash of headlight against those mossy stones, I could’ve hallucinated a miniature of our town in the ragged arrangements of the tenements of the dead, true mirror to the suburbia I’ve known and loathed and suffocated in all my life, and yet there was no true place for me and my rootlessness followed me as it followed Michelle, and we were consistently haunted; it’s always hard to make friends with those kinds of ghosts, the phantasms of memory.
We were all ghosts; dead before death, alive in rare moments of brilliance and passion that one knew were fleeting like the chemical warmth from a good bit of smack.
And the passion towards her that thudded away in my head like a pickaxe to my brain was nothing if not chemical. So I kissed her. Passionately. And she miscalculated, thrusting her tongue into my mouth to which I almost gagged. I just had to laugh. Here we were, Sid and Nancy— we could’ve only found each other, lonely enough for each other, trying to glue back the pieces of the other. We were both sick, just sick enough to last. Our love was a morgue.
Now the streetlights started to disappear on the backroad as the moon began to turn rancid, starting to decompose and leaving little but the dull gaze of my beams to guide us. The trees themselves started to melt away and were instead replaced by a battalion of burning crosses, stakes at the stake. Tongues of fire writhed weepingly from the wood, pouring out their sorrow upon this unholy crucifixion, and her gaze cooled, making the broiling woods reflected in her eyes ash with a single blink. I kept driving with but a single thought— the need to slough off this accursed heat— and I found once again the lake made mythic with rumors of the suicides of students. I flayed myself of all clothing and dove headlong into the freezing pitch to escape the forest fierier than the tombs of heretics with the water as deep and as cool as pure oblivion.
I opened my eyes as I swam through the murky depths, seeing the bodies of a million forgotten names with tangles of hair blossoming and billowing and wordless mouths rapidly pantomiming desperate conversation; I felt an astronaut of some galaxy populated by living corpses, the husks and skeletal frames that comprised bare remembrance. I swirled around a little more in the amniotic fluid waiting for a rebirth but I could not find another world. There was no Promised Land; not here on earth, anyhow, so I turned over and floated on my back towards the cosmos threatening to swallow me up and spit me back into a place of stars, light, and void. I felt as large as the lake and yet as insignificant as a waterbug, my consciousness dispersed throughout the placid ebb and flow.
I felt myself dragged down underneath the surface and relinquished the will to struggle, letting myself be led to a final resting place. But as I drifted off into the unknowable I felt a collision of flesh, a bump against me madly fighting against the natural force, throwing me out of the lake and back onto dry land. Michelle’s once-powerful jade expression had crumbled into an animal fear, a terror, her eyes no longer carrying the power they once had. She was naked, trembling, hair plastered over her face and tears and saltwater commingling and dripping onto my face. Her kiss tasted like something once lost. “Don’t leave me,” she murmured. “Don’t die.” Hesitating, she added a “Please” to her conviction. She held onto me like a little girl with a doll as her only companion. We both dried off. Once we got back to the car her lips clung to mine for an uncomfortably long period; she had attachment issues.
All of America starts to blend together if you don’t live in the city, but soon enough the usual monoliths of commerce and commodity began to arise and the greasy glare of the cars blurring into one another seemed more familiar. I steered to a bastion of personal culture, the Checkers off 234, and we shared oily napkins and fat-drenched burgers. The sign before us flashed and flickered and hummed its death-rattle, but it was too stubborn, too broken to completely burn out in this dead, dry air. I thought a lot about how much Americans lived and died in their cars, how I only saw the buses run about once a month, and how I never seemed to find any hearses on the highway; I guess the ambulances are effective enough in that aspect. The stereo was now shrieking wild with some no-wave disco, saxophonic slashes and a dance for the tuneless. It was harsh noise but I liked harsh noise and anything violently danceable, and I bobbed my head to the arrhythmic pulsing that felt like an audial miasma.
We drove up to the memory of a madhouse— dilapidated, torn apart and in its decay it looked like if it were ran by the inmates themselves. In remembrance of the death-cults of my youth I chucked an empty beer can at the glassless window I remembered to be the holding cell of a sweet little redhead girl who got hitched to a fellow inmate in the loony bin, a pathological liar who could lie up a whole Hollywood film script if she got into the business. Lost talent, some might say— she got hitched to some guy in the looney bin she knew for about two weeks, someone just as crazy as her to tie the knot for the noose and take the plunge together. I could only pray if they decide to have kids.
The surrounding woods stood monstrous, engulfed in the same particular darkness that abandonment held for any space. As if by instinct I moved into the forest, Michelle trailing cautiously along with her lighter providing the ounce of light in the vast, perfectly unknowable blackness. We got lost for a few times, swimming in the pitch before turning back, heading home to let our thoughts spill out into the eternal chasm of sleep. The groans and creaks of the industrial wilderness, lonely freight trains howling at midnight, and the odd motor revving for a last ride all made their cameo in the schizophrenic nothingness of the suburban void as we pulled the covers over.
A pair of jeans in our closet hung guiltily like a man executed, ourselves draped over the other in bed as if the crime were a double poisoning. Night had fallen over us, closed our lids and lulled us to our fitful rest while the stars watched over us, and I could sleep easily enough knowing that no matter where you went, the sky will be the same sky as anywhere else; in spite of the mutable nature of life there still exists the eternal in the temporal, and this is what gives me strength to continue to drift throughout it— past the daytime yawn like the gaping wound of America, or in the hallucinatory dreams borne in her strange hearth.
Wow...this writing impressed me. Looking forward to more...
Found it rather confusing to follow, but then again, literary fiction’s not my thing. I get what you’re doing, though -- you’re describing a feeling of aimlessness, like the couple has nothing to live for.