A Nightmare Called Civilization

Please be aware that this story deals with murder and suicide. It is not intended to promote any of the behaviors it depicts or to condone violence of any sort.

Once upon a time there was a tiny black bug that crawled into my brain. Every night the bug would whisper in my ear. “You need to kill people,” it would say. “You need to put their disgusting bodies into the fucking ground.” I ignored its whispers until one day I couldn’t anymore.

I stood on a strip of sidewalk the color of smoke and far above the clouds were like a filthy gray blanket blocking out the black and starless sky. I checked my phone.

3 a.m.

Tonight was the night. I had my hands in my pockets and my heart in my throat and a bug in my brain. Tonight was the night.

God, I hoped tonight was the night.

I’d already punked out three times. I felt like if I didn’t do this tonight I never would. And then this bug would always be in my brain. Whispering at me to do what I would know that it would know that I would know I would never have the stomach for. It would be there when I ate. It would be there when I shat. Most of all it would be there when I slept, and when I woke in the freezing morning, body made sore and bones feeling brittle from the awful cold of the night, it would be there. And when I died 50 years from now or tomorrow and the worms feasted on my pointless flesh and nobody remembered me, nobody at all, it would be there, still whispering in my ear.

Tonight had to be the night.

I checked my phone again. 3:20. I had already been just standing there for 20 minutes.

There was this street that ran right down the middle of the city. That’s where I was. On the street there was this one bus stop at a T intersection. During the day it was a normal bus stop. But at night there was this big cocoon thing on the bench. A massive chrysalis the shape and size of an armless person sitting upright lifelessly on this bench at the bus stop. Every night it was there, without fail. I saw it sometimes, when I went out walking by myself to let my head breathe in the absolute silence you can only ever find early in the morning, alone in the dark, no people, no cars, just you and your thoughts and the empty world.

And a fucking cocoon at the bus stop. A big soft ugly baby bug, growing large and fat as it marinated itself in its own sticky cloak, pickling itself into an adult, hideous and hairy and crunchy with a glazed brown shell and legs jointing at awful acute angles like some torture victim’s broken fingers. Some horrible creature nature made cause she was sick. Sick in the head.

A bug at the bus stop. A cocoon sitting on the bench. Every night it was there.

I kept my distance, most of the time, at first. But one night curiosity got the better of me and I drew nearer as I walked by and that’s when I noticed what the cocoon really was. It was a sleeping bag. A wrinkled silver nylon sack zipped all the way up, with someone inside it. Not even an inch of zipper left open to breathe. Arms tucked totally inside to where the thing looked like a body bag, just sitting there casually at the bus stop in the dark and the still of the night. I wondered how anyone could wriggle themselves in there like that, zip the thing all the way up from the inside. I wondered how anyone could ever get out.

During the day there was no sign of this person as far as I could tell. But at night they were always there. Sleeping while sitting at the bus stop like a big bug waiting to hatch into maturity Biding time until they could begin their prime. Until they could emerge from the sack, peel through, and their real life could start.

The nights when I stopped to look at this guy, to watch him sleep and to wonder, my breath billowing like clouds of pollutant into the black and freezing sky — those nights were when I heard it most clearly. The bug whispering at me from inside my brain.

“You need to kill people. You need put their disgusting bodies into the fucking ground.”

It was most likely a homeless guy, this guy who slept on the bench. That’s what I figured, even though most of the homeless people around here slept down near the train station and he never had a cart or bags with him or anything and didn’t even smell too bad as far as I could smell. If he wasn’t homeless, he was just crazy, a lunatic. Or a schizophrenic. Or maybe he was everything, a crazy homeless schizophrenic lunatic. Point was I bet nobody was gonna miss him. If anyone did it would probably be me.

God, yeah, I thought as I stood there at 3 a.m. in the morning with my hands in my pockets and my heart in my throat and a bug in my brain. Jesus. I’m gonna fucking miss him.

I started walking towards the bench. Didn’t even mean to. Wasn’t even ready. My legs just went. Like my body already knew what to do even if my head was still hesitating, spinning every what-if around inside my skull till my brain turned to soup.

I flipped my hood on. I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my ears. Nothing in the world was clear except what I needed to do in the next five seconds. What I needed to do was wrestle the bug to the ground. That was step one. The easy step, because I was bigger than the thing, and it had no arms. Once it was on the ground and I was on top of it, I had practically already won. I straddled the pouch, used all my strength to pin it down onto the sidewalk. It looked almost like it could melt right in, ashen as the ground in this gray gloom. It was wriggling hard, thrashing left and right to try and break free. Struggling. Muffled shrieks came from inside the bag. They hardly even sounded human to me. Nothing could have sounded human to me. There was a ringing in my ears, loud and sharp, like a bomb had just went off or something.

I got my fingers on the zipper and yanked it down. Now that there was an opening I could see the guy and he was shrieking louder. Not calling for help, not cursing me, just yelling, wordlessly, the fearful screeching of a brainless animal.

Our eyes met. His were empty and gray like a blind man’s or a dead man’s with heavy shiny bags underneath. Mine were the same, probably. Even still, I needed to do this. I needed to do this. He was halfway zipped down now and still trying to fight me off. His arms struggled free of the sleeping bag and shot at me. We locked hands and tried to push and shove each other’s hands off of each other. His filthy hands reached for my face. I fought to get mine around his neck. Around his throat. So I could squeeze and crush, push that lumpy adam’s apple right in and collapse his windpipe. There was no more sounds or yelling. Just grunting, panting, sweat pouring and freezing me to the marrow as it vaporized in the ice-cold air. The sounds of two animals fighting to kill. Two animals fighting to live. Just two people finally waking up from the longest and most horrible nightmare.

Eventually I did what I was trying to do. There was a lot of struggling and frenzy and then it all stopped. When the guy stopped breathing, I started again. I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding my breath at all. After I was done, my hands released his purple neck. And then I realized something funny. Something I would have never realized if I had never gone through with it. This wasn’t something I needed to do. I didn’t need to do this.

I just wanted to.

I stuffed the body in the bag and dragged it to a park a few blocks away and dumped it out of the bag and buried it in a shallow grave.

The days after were like one long day. One big blur. An ugly stain of nonspecific time.

It was the nights I remember clearly. They were the only way I was keeping track of time. The bug was still in my brain.

On the first night, it told me I needed to kill people. Needed to put their disgusting bodies into the fucking ground.

On the second night, it told me I needed to kill people. Needed to put their disgusting bodies into the fucking ground.

On the third night, it told me I needed to kill people. Needed to put their disgusting bodies into the fucking ground.

On the fourth night I dug the body up. My trembling hands were colder and damper than the soil as I dug into it, scraping it off the shallow grave, piling it to the side, letting the mud gel under my fingernails and score all the grooves of my hands with filth.

There was the corpse, gray from rot and worm eaten.

I shoved it to the side and on my hands and knees I crawled into the grave. I knew now that this was what I was supposed to do. What I was meant to do all along. What the bug that had crawled into my brain had been whispering into my ear about this whole time. Stupid me. I had been hearing it wrong. Not “put their disgusting bodies into the fucking ground.”

Put our disgusting bodies into the fucking ground.

I thrashed my arms and kicked my legs and jerked and convulsed like a dying insect and let the dirt fill back into the hole, pile on top of me, cover me and bury me completely till I had to struggle to breathe. No more waiting. No more. I was finally someplace I could belong.