Beats Entropy

(CONTINUED FROM PART 1 and PART 2, PART 3 Continued in Part 5)

You can always feel it coming. The curdling air before an acquaintance decides to let their necessary fiction slip. Before they tell you about their scab collection, their grabby uncle, the dog they fucked in grade school. Some unwanted crush you tried to ignore. You can feel the back pressure build, then release, in one awkward, stammering, burst. Sustained Anonymity is a much underrated personality trait.

Tom stared with sick fascination.

“Are you a zombie?” Tom asked.

I tried to meet Tom’s stare. But one eye kept drifting left and downwards.

“Hard to say; I dunno the criteria” I said.

Tom nodded along with my non-answer, as if it confirmed some prior suspicion.

“Are you hungry for brains?” Tom asked.

I didn’t know what that would feel like. I’d never been a craving guy. I was, though, upon reflection, actually pretty full … almost uncomfortably so. My gut bulged like a sun starved famine victim, round and pale.

“No. Not especially.”

Tom paced excitedly across the room. On his second pass through he turned and punched me hard in the face. The cartilage in my nose fanned alarmingly to the left; a slow ooze of blood sagged down my cheek. I should have been upset. Tom smeared two fingers through the thickest of the crimson.

“It’s fucking cold!” Tom said. Delighted, rubbing the muck greedily between fingers and thumb.

“This is fucked. You’re dead! How are you standing here?”

I was actually sitting. Normally I’d let that slide, but I felt a little attacked. Demeaned, somehow. It seemed obvious and cruel to harp on my condition.

“I’m sitting” I said.

Tom ignored the correction. His pacing gathered steam until he was doing wind sprints (nearly) from the kitchen to the front door, and back. Occasionally he’d take a lap around the couch, for variety. Now and again he would freeze, then glitch across the room like bad stop motion. I couldn’t remember how fast things went.

Tom stopped. Legitimately; I think.

“Are you a cultist? Tom said.

“No.  I don’t even have a library card” I said.

I began fumbling at my wallet to prove the absence. My hands twitched in token accord, mashing gracelessly against the leather; the nails had grown tremendously. The wallet wouldn’t open.

Tom flopped onto the couch beside me; eyes racing along my seams and growing imperfections. He grinned.

“We need to get some girls over” Tom said.

***

Continued in Part 5