The Wires

sensitive material: mental health, substance abuse, thoughts of self-harm

Muted breaths before dawn. Silent world and first traces of faint light – impossible to tell if real or a mistake of imagination. The air frigid and everything blue, deep navy wrestling night away from the darkness, flooding everything it no longer swallows. Strange shapes float at the edge of my corneas, shadows on the cave wall that blink off and on, fade and harden under changing scrutiny. A soft glow in the windowpane, subtle radiance shimmering in the glass and a thin surface crack winding like a snake river. The wind outside ferocious. It shakes the cabins bones and me down to my core, way down there where the DNA churns. So uninviting. So hostile the world. The day starts when my eyes open. When my eyes open, that’s when the trouble begins.

              Running water? No. The latrine an outhouse in the woods, sad shack with a missing door and a hole that goes down forever. Fire pit with a roasting spit outside the entrance; my trappings lately limited to rabbits and a few squirrels. Skeletal all of them, hardly any meat at all. Coal scuttle at the foot of the bed – vessel to feed the mouth of the iron furnace. Vessel to keep me alive. Lignite chips and slabs of anthracite in the cellar. There’s a hidden door that pulls up and leads down beneath the belly of the bed. Lumpy mattress. Matted pillow stuffed with ripped feathers. The bedframe is brass and brittle; it shudders and shakes under the tiniest stress. Remnants of the blasting wind. A delicate turn of the shoulder. My own heart beating elevated in my chest. Hanging from the footpost of the bed: a leather belt containing three knives. One hunting, one paring, and a switchblade that loves to play hide-and-seek. A stun gun with fifty thousand volts. On the floor beneath the belt is a pair of cowhide boots with stitched bison roaming in the leather. And a Smith & Wesson revolver beneath my pillow; it sleeps with me always.

              Racing, then slow-dripping thoughts hold me hostage between the sheets. Sirens screaming. Long needles and red-orange bodily fluids. Mountains of opioids and clumps of withered hair. In the drain. On the pillow. Stuck in the fibers of bandanas and wool hats. Your beautiful blonde tresses – everywhere but the top of your head.

              Stand up straight and jam my heels into the boots because already the day is at risk, just a drop or two from a complete poisoning of the well. Top jean buttons undone. Didn’t bother taking them off last night; putting them back on in the morning can prove an insurmountable task.

              I slosh water in the kettle and the furnace top makes the kettle sing. Dry tea leaf mixture, black, and a sprinkling of yesterday’s coffee grounds to wring out whatever caffeine remains. First sip burns my top lip. At the intersection of wall and ceiling a brown barn spider spins webs of intricate beauty.

              Your life is a bed of sticky threads from which you can never escape. You’re a fly that will never fly again. Nothing more than an insect caught in a web.

              Monologue’s off in space. Today my own voice is not a friend.

              I fry an egg. Roll a dart with stale tobacco and smoke it away. Then I sling the leather belt around my waist and pull on a stained wax-cotton jacket, nautical red. My hat I lost yesterday on the adventure; it’s somewhere out there swirling in the wind. Hard bread rolled in a cloth and fermented cherry peppers in a sealed jar. I swing open the front door to a scarred, ash-blown land. Out there: chaos and death and fearful uncertainty. I turn back to the familiar interior of the cabin. In here: slow, decaying disintegration to nothingness. Tires swerving in the mud.

              It’s now or never. I step out into the unknown.

              Follow the wires. A voice in the back of my mind.

              Eyes drift up to the electrical lines above me. Huge, looming steel towers and the copper wires that connect them. Artefacts now, no current to flow through. Maybe they’re culprits to the scarred earth. A rusty hook undone and a showering of sparks and a spot fire that exploded to overwhelming conflagration. Or maybe they’re innocent. Degraded infrastructure of a period long gone. Anyway, there is no map which to follow. I have no heading to pursue. The voice in my mind is the only compass that guides me. 

              Over the rocks and through the calcified shrubs. Dry jagged switchbacks and changes in elevation that have my hands grappling in the dirt. Dirty cuts and sweat that seeps in, fresh stinging sensations where the callouses don’t cover. Grime streaked across my forehead where the back of my wrist ran in the heat of the rising sun. I crack open the jar and indulge in two peppers. I tilt the glass for some of the liquid too. I scan the horizon. Not too far off in the distance: fire smoke and faint sounds of wicked.

              Miserable things when I arrive. Decrepit, winged monsters lazing in the filth. Gargoyle-like creatures with horns and menacing faces. Their skin loose, sallow and diseased. And liquor bottles everywhere. They crash about in a state of frenzied inebriation, loud and belligerent, swigging rum and whiskey, singing and toppling over, cracking crass nonsensical jokes. One plucks a banjo with no rhythm, the steel string snaps and he plummets backwards from his perch, landing with a great big thud. Howling laughter from his buddies and a string of weak obscenities from his backside. On a flat-surface rock, two others chop lines of cocaine with playing cards. Both of the cards are jokers.

              The leader of the circus spies me from his stupor. Big ugly ball of hot air.

              “Ay, ay! Look-y here boys! Got us a traveler we do!”

              The others all perk up to see. The monster passed out in his own piss remains unmoving on his backside. Their collective breath smells like the methane skimmed from the top of a landfill.

              “Well ain’t you a sight for sore eyes! Looks like you been foraging for days mate! Well you came to the right place friend. It’s always a party here.”

              Another in the crew collapses to his hands and vomits. He wipes the puke from his chin and stands, dazed, with a dripping, stupid smile.

              “Nice one Prole!” The ring leader tips his bottle in the vomiters direction. Then he returns to me. “And what’s your name son?” He burps as he says son. S-oooorrrrrppp-on.

              “I’m Glenn.”

              “Glenn. Glenny boy. I like it! Well I’m Grim. And that’s Mortis. Up there’s Spire and Claw. The chap that fell over’s Velkhar and the one’s got puke dribbling down ‘im is Prole.”

              “Well alright then.”

              “More than alright it is! What a lucky chap you are ain’t ya? Stumblin’ about in the ether and here you find all the fun that’s left in the world. Where ya heading Glenny?” Drool drips from his sagging jaw.

              “I don’t know.”

              “We got a lost one boys!”

              The monsters all hoot and holler. They slap themselves silly and the two cutting lines slurp them entirely with one dive of a nostril. Crossed, imbecilic eyes. They rise inches above the ground, weak wings under labor, and spin in circles before collapsing clumsily down.  

              “Well don’t worry son,” he continues, aura jovial and sour, “that’s the beauty about us. You don’t need no heading. Prole, get him some drink!”

              Prole lumbers over with a jug of grain. One whiff enough to incinerate the hairs in my nose. He offers it with his mangy claw. Grim nods encouragingly.

              “No thank you. I’ve got to be going.”

              Grim frowns; he’s offended. “Go? But you just said there ain’t nowhere you got to go to.” The others fall silent around him. Even Prole has a heightened awareness. Grim’s not to be offended.

              “That’s not what I said. I said I don’t know where I’m heading.”

              Grim snatches the bottle from Proles claw. He takes a slow step forward and lowers his voice. Somehow his horns now more sinister. And his eyes hungry. “Look mate. You look like you’ve had a tough run of it. Anyone can see that. Ain’t that right boys?”

              “Ay. Ay. Ay. Ay.” Acquiescent nods.

              In a friendly voice: “Don’t you want to put those troubles away? Wouldn’t it be better to forget all that nonsense? The way the world ground you down?”

              My eyes at my feet.

              His voice lower still: “The love from you it took?”

              I look around. Lost souls everywhere, me included. “Thank you. But like I said, I’ve got to get going.” I turn to leave and Grim clutches my shoulder. Rage and depravity boiling within him.

“LISTEN YOU UNGRATEFUL SHIT.”

A little boy being told no.

“WHO ARE YOU TO SAY NO TO US?”

Wounded ego of the left-behind.

“YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME?”

The last guest flailing at a party that ended long ago. Afraid to be forgotten.

“I’LL SHOW YOU!”

He raises the bottle to crush my skull. With my hand unencumbered I hit him with the lightning. The stun gun ripples and Prole goes limp. He crumples, a portrait of shock shuttered on his features. I holster the stun gun and reach quickly for my revolver. There’s no need. Scrambling to help their fallen friend, they are a picture of inebriation, their spring to action a pathetic whimper. Too drunk to steady themselves, wings too damaged to carry their weight, they clamber and topple over. Incapacitated, they resort to hurling insults and tossing stones, none of which come anywhere near. Into the ether I continue.

Hours pass. Muscles strain. The sun rises overhead and disappears behind a sheet of gray clouds. Always, the wires above me. In the distance I hear a rapid tapping and a continuous machine whirring. Coming into the clearing I stumble on a peculiar sight indeed.

A humanoid at a standing desk, pounding away at the keys of a laptop. No, two laptops. How many monitors? Sixteen. And an island of servers behind him, lit up like digital Christmas trees, blinking and revving, gushing ones and zeros between webs of connected hardware. Cables crisscrossing like the web of the barn spider. GPU rigs beside him, running in parallel, predicting the future with the weightings of infinite vectors and matrices.

I approach in awed silence. Splayed across the monitors: market indices and individual stock performance. Notebooks of code and large language models improving themselves. Vast fields of harvested data and live video feeds from all over the world. 

              “What is-"

              “Don’t bother.” A voice from a man that looks like a Greek god. He’s running on a treadmill at a staggering pace. “He’s lost in it. He won’t talk to you when he’s working.”

              The humanoid plows on, the fury of his mind pouring out through the symphony of his chrome finger tips. Code flows endlessly and then an error. He slams his palm on the desk. The GPU beside him sounds as if it’s about to take off into the stratosphere. He directs cooling fans at the machines guts and pays us no mind. Then its back to the monitors while his servers hum.

              “What’s he doing?” I ask.

              “Oh,” the man answers, “things that I’m sure are important. Market manipulations. Stock purchases. Software creation and predictive modeling. Last week he 3D-printed a house.” He doesn’t break a single stride while speaking.

              “Uh-huh. What for?”

              He side-eyes me. “What do you think? Money.”

              The tapping at the keyboard ceases. At first I think the humanoid’s paused to interject, but then the typing bursts back to life and it’s clear he’s only done so to contemplate a bug. Whatever the issue was is resolved.

              “Do you think he’ll get there?” I ask.

              Confused, the man slows the machine to a walk and then steps off. He towels the sweat from his neck, veins bulging like vipers. Hulking his arms and shoulders. “Get where?”

              “I mean, do you think he’ll make a lot of money? Get rich?”

              The man laughs; it’s thundering. “He’s already rich. More than you could imagine. Couldn’t spend it all if he tried.”

              Now I’m the one who’s confused. “Then why does he keep working like that?”

              “I told you; he’s lost. That’s his identity, work. That’s all he chases, money. It’s a shame too. He used to be a cool guy.” The man’s situated himself on a bench beneath a barbell. Four massive plates on each side- he pumps it like air.

              Growing more confused by the second. “What do you mean guy? He’s a robot. He’s got mechanical parts.”

              The man sets the bar down and sits back up. “He wasn’t always like that. He used to be a person.”

              “How do you know?”

              He wipes his mouth with his palm. “Because he’s my brother.”

              I blink. “Your brother.”

              “Yes.”

              I glance at the humanoid and then back to the man. “But you’re a person.”

              He laughs again. His muscles glisten and from beneath the bench he grabs a protein shake and downs it in a single gulp. “I know - sad. He even has a wife and two daughters. Ignores ‘em all to run on the hamster wheel over there. It’s like he thinks he’ll live forever as long as the money keeps piling.”

              “That is sad.”

              “Not me though,” the man continues. “I don’t live in a screen. I live here in my body. And I work on it. I’m sure you can tell.”

              “I can.”

              “Yep, ten miles each day on the tread. Recovery on the bike or elliptical. Weights everyday of course; can’t skip the meat of it. Pool work. Bands work. Yoga for flexibility. Sprints on the track. And in the hills! God hill runs burn so good.”

              “Uh-huh.”

              “See, that’s the problem with living your life in a screen. You become addicted to technology. That’s really what these high-functioning tech people are you know, addicts.”

              He’s scooping more protein into a blender. Tossing in kale and strawberries.

              “And don’t get me started on the diets people eat. It’s disgusting. Do you even know how processed meat is made?”

              I glance once more at the humanoid and then back at the man speaking. Two addicts. One mind, one body. “I think it’s time I get going.”

              “Take care of yourself young man!” he calls as I go. Then he breaks out dumbbells and starts curling his biceps. It’s like he thinks he’ll live forever as long as he keeps lifting.

              Down a long road. The sun fading, night arriving. Tired. The wires run above me. Approaching a bridge and beneath it a lonely man casting a line into the black water. Tattered raincoat and wool gloves without fingertips. The line tightens but the man doesn’t even tug and the fish scuttles away.

              I sit down next to him. “Hey friend.”

              “Hi.” He replies. His voice gravelly like tires slow-crawling a country road. Cold underneath the bridge, the darkness returned to claim what was stolen. Dark hearts both of us. He picks up a pad and charcoal and begins to sketch, the knuckles on his hands swollen.

              “Feeling any better today?”

              “Do it look like it?” He burps into the back of his hand. Eyes red and watery.

              “Another bad one huh?”

              “They’re all bad.”

              I nod understandingly. We sit in silence. He sketches and I skip stones – never able to get past four circles in the water. A bat takes flight from its roost, radar searching for pulses.

              “We did everything we could you know.”

              He makes tiny flowering strokes, the charcoal between his thumb and index. “I know.”

               “I know you feel hopeless.”

              “Mm.”

              “But I want you to know I’m always here.”

              “I know you are.” From his pocket he produces a needle and an elastic band. He tightens the band around his bicep and taps the vein. He injects and slowly curls to the ground. “Don’t you…don’t you ever want to forget Glenn?”

              I touch his shoulder so he knows I’m there. “No; I won't ever forget. I always want to remember.” Hand on his shoulder until his breaths are deep and far away. Then I turn him on his side and pull the blanket over him from head to toe.

              I stand to go. On the pad a sketch of a beautiful woman. The beautiful woman I loved.

              “Hey Glenn.” He says in a soft voice. I turn back to face him.

              “Yeah?”

              “Would you leave me the gun?” His eyes are open, barely. I can feel the pain searing in this heart.

              I shake my head no. “You don’t want that. Stay one more day friend.”

              He nods sadly. “Okay Glenn. One more day.”

              The moon shines above me. Through a dark wood I stumble, provisions gone, water depleted. The wires are all that guide me. Up ahead my final destination – the cabin where this day began. I shuffle in the door and remove my boots at the foot of the bed. I unsling the leather belt and hang it from the brass post. I start to unbutton my jeans but then don’t bother. I crawl under the sheets into the only warmth I know.

              Time is an infinite circle, my life a nightmare forever. Demons and coping mechanisms try to pull me under. The wires will lead me through. Another day down. Another will come tomorrow.