Why is the world so dark?

“Cas! Let’s get going!”

Glen’s disembodied command snapped him out of the daze he’d drifted into, something between a daydream and a wordless inner dialogue characterized by existential angst. His name assaulted his ears, like a metallic-voiced slight when magnified in volume by the flu. Cas. Short for Casper. He hated it, the constant cracks about him being an apparition. But it was not the comparison to the child ghost that riled him as much as it was the truth. He was a ghost, or felt like one most of the time, being only partially in the world of the living.

He’d felt it from a time he had been too young to recall, a difference within himself, a vibrating chord of dissonance that, through the years, only resounded more loudly. It was not sociopathy, for he felt more greatly than he wanted, though he shackled it inside himself and let it gnaw at his bones. It was neither depression nor conscience, and it was not evil. It was simply an inexplicable, deep, dark hole that spoke to him, sometimes screamed at him, plaguing his mind day and night.

“Cmon!! Let’s get to this show already!”

The call was followed by three sonic booms landing on Cas’ bedroom door. Glen Conroy was what most people would refer to as his “best friend,” meaning only that Cas spent most of his time with Glen, when Cas spent time with any other being that did not have four legs. Animals he understood.

“I’m coming, man. Hang the fuck on!” He half-heartedly slung on his black leather jacket. The shoulder chain, strung through the storm flap and reattached to itself like a silver ouroboros, knocked against its own links as it settled down the sleeve with a dull sound, like marbles falling on each other inside a cloth sack. Since high school, this had been his armor, transforming him into a black-clad paladin, protected from the dangers of psychological mundanity. Then he trudged to his door.

It will only be more of the same—duplicities in the open, disinterested civilities, mad egotism. You’ll regret it.

Cas ignored the voice before swinging open the portal to glaring light and overwhelming sound. He wanted a beer and to hear some music, to be lost in the pulsing crowd and an alcohol-induced relaxation. It was the only time the hole was silent.

“Finally!” Glen chided from the living room, his blond mohawk cascading over the right side of his head, free these last few weeks of the superglue that made it stand at attention. “What were you doing in there? … Or do I not want to know?”

“You don’t want to know,” Cas replied, perfectly honestly. He didn’t have any interest in burdening Glen, or anyone else, with the ruminations and remonstrations of the other consciousness. He wasn’t playing a role, per se. He wasn’t pretending to be someone else for other people’s adulation. He just knew there was no explaining it, and he knew that, if he tried to explain it, it would respond by chastising him and reveling in its own rectitude when that explanation failed. That wall had always existed for him, depriving him of an untainted human connection, the hole creeping between and keeping him on guard.

Glen peeled out, making the rubber of his copper-colored Toyota Corolla squeal, while Bad Brains tore at the air. The local punk club was hidden in the back of a seedy motel with sticky carpets, cheap wood paneling, and smoke-imbued drapes, a real low-end, 70’s casino vibe without the slots. No one expected any less, but the fact that the club had its own entrance made it seem like another building altogether.

When they pulled up, they found the usual assortment of wannabe dregs– disaffected suburban kids of GenX in leather and combat boots–mulling around waiting for the doors to open.

They’ll all grow up to sell out. They’ll trade in their shaved heads and spikes for business degrees and BMWs.

Five bucks a head, unless a kid waited an hour or so outside, cajoling the door guy, who’d eventually break before the headliner started and let in the stragglers. Generally, there was some kind of stamp involved in marking the entrants. But sometimes it was a spur of the moment choice, just a stray fork, and the enterprising would scurry off to their cars to use the one they kept in their car, lacquered with a quick coat of sharpie and pressed down on the skin. But Glen and Cas knew the current gatekeeper, Ed Barley, a holdover from the older crowd, who’d never moved on and still played shows with his own band. They had the required fundage, but ol’ Ed didn’t charge them, leaving them more for beer.

“Thanks, Ed!” Glen said, keeping his cool, as if it were no big thing, while Cas just nodded at the old timer, adding a grin.

“10-4,” Ed nodded, as they passed through the threshold into purgatory. “Gotta do right by the old scene. These new kids … I don’t know, man.”

Are we old timers already? Cas thought.

Inside was an all but forgotten tomb frequented by derelicts, clad from wall to wall in low pile, blue carpeting, black pleather booths, and tables at varying heights that blended into the background, leaving the floor in front of the stage clear. It was reminiscent of an abandoned laser tag arena but with a low ceiling but, in that moment, lacking hypervivid blacklight imagery, always poorly lit, which helped to keep it cooler with the mass of bodies that would soon be circling the pit in a tribal dance of sweat that made no pretenses at being related to anything native.

They trudged over toward the bar, where the collection of drinkers was thin. Being an all-ages show, most in attendance were just shy of legal, and, at the eleventh hour, those who bore the stamp or smear of tines on the wrong hand would get shown back out to the parking lot. The drinking selection was always the same–Bud Light. It was piss but it was cold, and it was the acquired taste on that side of town, in that part of Texas, mostly by virtue of its ubiquity as the loss leader. When they were short, Cas and Glen would scoot over to the 7-11 for four quarts of malt–Mickey’s, Cobra, Colt, maybe English, whatever was cheapest, and drink one each before the music started, saving the other for any spontaneously arising after party or a sweat-soaked intermission between sets.

A vaguely recognized phantom that haunted the domain crossed in front of him with an outstretched palm, offering a pill-formed treat. Cas took it and swallowed it without care. As he sat on the edge of the raised platform leading to the booths, downing his fourth beer and watching the crowd perform its inner ceremony of recognition, red-lit skin, leather, velvet, smoke tinged with cloves, and stale beer comforting him like a child’s blanket, the tableau shifted into black wings, scales, and writhing horned things.

The clack of a guitar jack split the air like a god’s whip, quieting the demons. It was followed by another, an open E that made his ear drum pulse and and a lower E in echo which made his chest vibrate. Pop of a snare. Hi-hat jingle. As he was about to stand and take in the view of The Blowers, a dark cloud intercepted his view, a fork-tongued demon, a walking wound the hole had warned him of to no avail.

She only came here to torture you. 

Glen appeared at his side, as if emerging from within a shadow, having been standing next to him in a phase shifted nothingness the entire time. Cas was unsure as to whether he’d been there the entire time or not.

“Oh shit. Claire’s here, bro. What the everliving fuck?”

The name pierced him, taboo, never to be spoken. “I see her.”

“Thought she was all in on the preppie douchebag scene now. If her friends say something again, let me know. I’m up for cracking some wannabe MBA heads. Phil and Necko are here too.”

“Just let it go, man”

“But she lied about you to everyone … set you up. Can’t let that shit slide.”

“And I paid her back for it.”

“But you took the hit. She didn’t.”

“Just let it go, Glen. It’s over.”

The slack mohawk shrugged his shoulders. “Okay. But I’m keeping an eye out. Any of those fratholes start causing shit … you know what happens.”

“And I’ll be the first one in, man.”

He had not forgiven, and he would not. He had no reason to in the absence of any recognition of wrongdoing, and it made no difference if he did or not anyway. It had no impact upon anyone else, touched no other heart. He had not been forgiven either, even if a bad faith claim to that effect had been made somewhere he could neither hear it nor ever know of it, self-serving. He’d loved, a wasted effort, but that did not really bother him, as the feeling had been real … to him .. and that was enough. The small, ephemeral happiness it brought justified it, though it was followed by pain. Still, he did not regret it, only how he’d handled the latter. And, even that, became somewhat justified, when the scope of the deceit had been revealed, along with its accompanying malice. Think of that. Malice in return for empathy and longing. What monsters exist.

He had not forgotten, and he never would. It was not in his nature to forget, to dismiss life experiences so casually, no matter how destructive. He could not just move on from such a disaster, become oblivious, transfer it away. That was a trick of the heartless, and he had never mastered it. But it made no difference anyway, as it affected no one else.

People were not a mystery. Most were shallow, selfish, prone to making claims they had no intention of seeing through, though many hid it better than others. Hence, that it, once again, showed itself to be the truth, did not surprise him. He expected so little of people as it was, and now he expected nothing. And nothing was what he received. There was no amount of time that could reach a heart set in opposition to him, a mind that clung to its invented premise, a nightmare it had conjured from nothing and made real. His soul having once tried to tear itself from him to reach its desire meant nothing to that coy heart, regretless.

There were no happily ever afters in the real world, no unification after strife, though people endeavored to convince themselves they had one or would find one, some day, just like most people thought they were one clever idea away from being rich and murdered their own hearts in its pursuit only, in the end, to find it elusive and what truly mattered wilted into sand. Time sped past them without notice, and, the next time they looked up, they found death was around the corner. Even those who seemed happy were usually hiding something, and the happier they were, the deeper the sorrow or sickness they hid, in direct proportion.

That’s what he had tried to love without knowing. It was no one’s fault, but he was the only one left to bear its weight. No tear would ever be shed for his loss, and it didn’t matter. It had never mattered and never would.

A waste. A devil seeking someone to torture.

No, I am a monster. 

A crested wave of sound broke over his head, bending his neck and snapping his attention toward the stage, whereupon the violent fury of sticks and picks went psycho. The crowd herded toward the stage, but Cas and some veterans stood back for the time being, content now to see if the band could play. But, as the bodies thinned, a cosmic tunnel formed, shimmering silvery gray, glowing with black light opalescence, and, at the end of that ephemeral corridor of imposition, a wall against sound, stood Claire Boschen, staring at him, glaring at him, line of a mouth, a black hole swirling in her chest. The light bent and snapped as she walked away, the blowback snapping him back into sound.

He found the stage again, an expert admixture of rasta ska punk, which, any other night would have made him float, the band black-lit, glowing like otherworldly spirits, visiting a past life. The wall to their left was missing. In its place was a swirling vortex, sucking in the light and laughing at him. The hole. It was overwhelmingly surreal in the moment, and a shadow fell.

I told you so.