Psychonaut: latitude 0°

Chapter #2. Just A Routine Spacewalk

Back in the 70’s

         My mom, she looked so beautiful in her blue and white Corduroy, jacket. I loved her as much as a little boy was allowed to cherish his mother. I mean, not in a sick way.
         The best way I could describe my mother was, she was born with herself destruct button taped, pressed on full destruct mode. I never understood it until she was gone. I let go of what deep seeded behavior we had come to share, only to find it, one last showdown.
mac&cheese and corn dogs, she gave me some kind side stare, “When you were smaller, you were a nightmare! At the end of the day you had me in tears!” An amusing anecdote ?



Family, instead of offering a kind helping hand, they preferred a subtle fuck you stance lathered in tones of witty hypocrisy.

Just A Routine Spacewalk

         According to the troubleshooting section in my binder, red colored tab number 52-000-1-0, by swapping two "R.A.E. - 920" cards, located at the base of the ship´s transmission module, that should restore communications.
         I have to go outside...
         Since I, so badly in need the human contact!
         Then again. In my current condition, it´s pretty difficult to trust myself. All the damn emptiness inside! Year into the next, decade after decade, my life seems to be one long road to hell. The pitch-black hole in the middle of what little of my tattered soul I might still be able to save.
         My state of exhaustion actually boiled down into resignation to continue, just press on. Why bother?
         Why?
         I just wanted to fuck off, drift away into all that black nothingness. Deep into the void that pretty much identifies with what´s been my life.
         Become an eternal corpse, a rigid castaway, without a destination. A real and deep urge to end all this chaos around me. My lack of belief in a future, hope, has taken over perhaps?
         What is pulling me into this, darker plane of thinking. Solitude, a need for purpose? Human contact.
         Anyhow, I’m still obligated to spacewalk, repair the module by swapping two shit cards and re-board.
         Screw this bull! If it wasn't because I don´t have absolutely nothing better to do. It becomes obvious I´ll end up doing it.
         I wouldn't be able to tell you what the hell I might do once I´m out there. Perform a leap for humanity of my own! It would be a leap of freedom, "Hmm, one small step for man (cretins), and one giant leap as far away from mankind, and all the meaningless crap they offer anyone as credulous as me…”.
         Then, no more nothingness for me! No dry thump of my boots slamming onto the ships inside panel floor. That feeling of relief, accomplishment.
         You know. Though I would have wanted it all to bring a bigger bang in the end, as it would probably turn out to be.
         I might stroll my way across the hull of the ship, perhaps even vandalize it with gibberish, profanity, maybe a big "Fuck off guys!! You all deserve what "W.R.A.T.H." is bringing! You know release my sociopathic side alongside mi inner teenage childishness.
         The big navy blue binder indicates me to exit the ship through the tail latch. Spacewalk past the fuel tanks, climb the communications tower that will be right behind said tanks. Then to replace the couple of fresh electronic cards for the ones that met their life span.
         My life span was in turmoil, I was sure I had dealt with it.
         I’m a procrastinator, so I’m still fitting my harness a good 39 minutes from when I originally wanted to take my walk. It’s not like I’m going anywhere; I’m simply blitzing into a possibility.
         Uncertainty is a killer a vague fog across the cosmos! Will I make it? Shall I just become another nothing, forgotten a hundred years from now instead. I just don’t bother with my internal chatter any longer.
         You just drop hope, that was what I decided.
         I hooked my safety line to the ship; time seems slower for me out here. I begin my climb down towards the bottom side of the tail. My own breath is all I can hear. White bar after white bar leading me over the possibility of delivering all my current conundrums into the very embodiment of emptiness, solitude, the escalating self-conflicts, the void.
         I can see my reflection in my helmets visor, a man I could barely recognize staring back at me, time had obviously laid its pale hands upon me. Was this journey worth it? Am I still young enough to make any difference in what´s left of my life?
         Now that most of it is gone.
         I begin to loosen the bolts that held the cover of the module, and the solitude comes over me, a death like peaceful silence, the blaring white off the hull, the nothingness, so still, peaceful. A distant shimmer caught the corner of my eye. A shimmering far away within the abyss, If I had to say it seemed greenish, a phantom green if I was forced to say.
         The workday dredges on, in the emptiness, the vacuum of absence just outside my helmet ready to kill me in an awful way. Again, the green shimmer was just a spec from my perspective, it was just there, still. Pulsating like some stars do. I turned my back to it, and I felt that cold wet finger down my spine.
         Was I feeling watched?
         At last the job was done, and my aching body was in plane agreement. I did the whole procedure backwards to get back to the ship, but I stopped at the hatch.
         With a bit of effort, I turned my body to starboard side, and it remained suspended there facing the black emptiness and a green speck holding its own so far in the abyss. At times it gave me the impression it was getting bigger, or closer...
         I couldn’t restrain myself from staring at it. A feeling of untethered guilt crept up my gut. I felt a soul wrenchingly awfulness for not being with my mother when she passed. Having left her house after our last argument over her health, the last of many attempts to get her health in shape. "Mom, I'm really not going to sit here and watch you die...", were my last words for her.
         Oxygen is running low, lower than I’m comfortable with! I see her dead face, bloated and purple lips, far from the mother I once had, a sullen sigh of who she ever was. I´m forced to remember all those little square I.D. pictures. A totally unintended show case I had put together days after she died. I could finally see just how profoundly sad and mistreated she really was. Plain as day Mom anyone could see the miserable and bitter she got as time passed.
         Why think of this tragedy right now? My breath began to become a little more difficult, I tell myself that she wanted to die, she deliberately put herself that situation.

*** + ***

         I’m back at the farmhouse somehow. It’s pouring as usual in December; it was a wet sad afternoon. My mother, confined to her dining room chair, bent over the table, where she slept, chain smoked, played on her i-pad and waited.
         My mother was overweight, smoked three packs of cigarettes a day while having EPOC, took a ton of opiates, thyroid trouble, and to boot she couldn't lay down flat on her bed anymore, so she slept only three hours a day.
         She had managed to convince her usual taxi / delivery driver to take care of a leg wound, a skin wound the size of a quarter and now consisted of her not having skin covering the whole back side of her left calf.
         Mom just didn’t trust doctors anymore, plain and simple. “They are butchers! How many times have I almost died because of those wackos! They are quaks, Mike! The whole lot of them!” In a way she was right, doctors tend to play along with big pharma, not focusing on healing the patient but, on what pills he could push on his symptoms.
         But obviously I knew it was serious. I mean, no skin! Just a puss covered dumbfounding wound. The milky and yellowish nastiness seeped down her leg and made a pool of puss around her foot. She had put towels beneath it to catch the mess.
         The particular moment I was in, it was time to clean her leg. Once they had her foot in a wide blue plastic tub, and plenty towels laid out. And the taxi driver began to wash all the puss down my mom’s leg with a syringe and some intravenous fluid.
         I was held hostage to my thoughts, and speechless. My mother had such low self esteem she didn’t want to bother with whatever it was that she had. Like an abused dog, who only knows life at the end of a chain, the pain of the rod, and the teeth of those who told her to be her blood, what does it matter. Some people after years of being over protected, enduring the blatant disregard of her own father, abused by men, some people just get tired.
         Then the cleaning with the swabs began, I noticed that the poor guy was doing his best as gently as possible, but she had no skin. What really shook me were my mother screaming in agony, even childlike from the intensity of the pain, her pleas for it to stop. It became nonstop, my mom wailing, wailing in a different voice than the one I always knew before her thyroid problem. I left the room, and stood in front of the window, the rain was still pouring down onto the ground, and nothing made sense.

*** + ***

         A tooth jerking headache, my eyes could only make out a blur, my ears were buzzing. I was back on the ship, my lungs yearning for air, I made an effort to use one eye, so I opened the right one, and it was still there. I let myself fall back inside completely, slapped the hatch closed and before I knew it, I was passed out.
         Conceit there was unease, that feeling of someone or something watching me, they can see me. Not with their eyes, or its eyes. I’m so confused, disoriented, I feel totally debased. Whatever it is that’s out there, is the source for this increasing malaise. So I head in the opposite direction.

Two weeks later.

         The ship has been cruising through space, at a constant speed for days now. My readings say the green object is considerably closer. I’m not feeling any better. Two of my front teeth just fell out of my head! I´m falling apart! Skin and bones.
         I haven’t checked to see if that creature was still there. See it with my own eyes.
         It was about time to know, what’s out there, behind me. Be done with this shit. I could feel it out there somehow, not only because of my general malaise but, I think I hear it in my head.
         The lights in the ship had passed to night mode, a tint of blue, and it feels hollow. I made my way to the back hatch, taking my time for some reason.
         Aaaaand! I just stood in front of the white latch that would let me see what's behind the ship.
         I felt an uncontrollable seed of terror deep in the pit of my gut, it was small but growing. Becoming less controlable and overwhelming with every second.
         I set my hand on the bluish lever, took a deep breath through the rising fear, and opened it. A panel slid up and opened like an eye.
         Green, green shot through the window. I made a few baby steps toward the light, and I slid down into a sitting position, my back to where the phantomlike green blaring through. I can't stop tonguing the shards of bone that hang through my roughed-up gums for some reason.
         I immediately get a gushing nosebleed, my vision shook, and I was looking into my mother’s lifeless face. “You, useless little turd, you failed her…”, a voice so clear in my mind, crass and aggressive in tone. I wasn’t done, I was held in a mental flutter, and feeling myself crammed through some kind of riff. Time and physical space were beginning the feel odd in a deep way.
         My helmet was gone, I dare not open my eyes, I had no spacesuit, and the grass between my toes made the whole situation all most unbearable. A far away breeze swallowed me, humid, countless scents of life; “Home.”. My mouth said but, without words.
         “Paradise...” that crass voice made a reappearance but this time booming all around me. Some, old wino, who smokes two packs a day. Uneasy as well as untrustworthy, and I only have my ignorance about everything to play against, “The Creature”.
         Open eyes see what they want to see, or never what they supposed to be observed, it’s easier just believe they are whoever might seem. Lush vegetation, sand, forests of fruit and sweet water. I don’t care to describe everything, but you should get the idea pretty clear.
         I wasn’t at all ok to be squished into a parallel universe, or drugged, or dead maybe, trickery. I was there, under blue skies, songs of birds, The Creature who was attempting to materialize something.
         Then all I can think of is, “Damn! I am fucking naked!”

         Days began to compound into weeks, I wasn’t even sure which were real. I could see a tall figure every evening at the other side of the river, toads, cicadas, and crickets holding the darkness hostage in the barrage of mating calls. I watch him and his hollowed green eyes stare not only at me, but I also sense it’s peering into and through my head. He wore a long black cloak, that just hung from his boney frame. Bandages maybe loose torn shreds dance about him, as if he was under water.
         I knew it was the creature, but I also knew that as we pace our ways in opposite directions, the malaise was gone. Strength or weakness?
         I cradled intense suspicions that some way, I was pushed through a kind of string theory, a pocket universe, by Rooster, a replica of the house where I finally lost, myself, my wife, two dogs, and my dear mother. All in the context of my cancer, cured myself, a stroke, the lymph node that flares up in my CT scans, and one kidney less.
         For an instant, the Roosters illness was gone, and a foggy awareness of what happened to me. I could be dead for all I know. Or In my head.
         Well, all I know is I still exist, or I exist on some level. It’s not that I relate too well with humans, I might have never had in common with everyone else it’s always been awkward.
         I don’t know if I’m married, after fighting the Cancer with me, bawling our eyes out together in bed, late into the night. It slowly evolved into the terrible verbal bouts, no sex, and never-ending health issues that made coexistence a type of hell. A general disdain for anything about my person had crashed upon us. While all this was unfolding, she became estranged from her father, a bit in the awake of her mother's passing. As some things must just get to the point, she gave me a bullshit reason why she had to travel to Argentina, paperwork that needed to be taken care of about her mother's inheritance.
         She never came home. A week went by, or 12-year-old Bull-terrier was getting sicker by the day, well his time was up really. He was with us though out the university in Buenos Aires, and when my wife, decided it was time to move to Ecuador, and find a life there. With my wealthy pineapple farmer relatives. In hindsight, just leaves me with a bitter taste I can barely perceive in the back of my mouth.
         Best of cases, my 87 years strong grandfather, who with his brother, a self-taught engineer, farmer, merchant marine, Japanese mafia candidate to be a full-fledged member, and Korean war veteran, Cody, went to Ecuador right afer the forgotten war, and he ended up exporting pineapples. In a nutshell, as people say at times.
         They did a pretty decent job for a couple of dust rats out of Arizona. A one-handed, alcoholic, abusive father; it was the late thirties, or so, that bled through into the years of the second world war. Henry, be it he was a real ace of all trades, a rodeo man who had been around, lost his hand in a railroad mishap were what in her eyes a chance at stability. His name was Max, I insisted on it out of home sickness and nostalgia I recall. Mad Max was my all tome go to movie, burning with the desire for the world to break in the same manner, anarchy was something that perhaps stemmed from obnoxious rude and bigoted teachers in the U.S. public schools, from little rich boys in Colegio Americano de Quito
         "Equally possible, ladies and all you gents! Here we go! What do we find behind curtain number two!!" The studio lights race, flash, and sow all that chaos into excitement. The silk pink curtain with the withe trim opened to each side.
         I never managed to get my psychology degree, my Business degree, I don’t have a house, I don’t have a job,
         I am a shitty father.
         I didn’t have it in me, to meekly step into pace with the languid long faced crowd, a drab shuffle on through the motions. Education, finding a wife, a career, kids, a status worthy career. So how all that crap still gets on my nerves, I can’t reasonably asume after life is gone, your body becoming no longer of use, any of that crap can possibly matter to me anymore.
         I guess I was fought to much about what I wanted to be as a kid, besides that I was in mental pain at such an early age, and the evident chaos they had me living in. Mom coming home from work at her daddy’s office totally degraded and in tears.
         Besides this madness feeding the flames of chaos, they found themselves fit enough to tell me what I wanted to become. They never knew me besides a problem child, crazy ass kid, drunk little shit, they never took into consideration I never wanted to be dragged down to South America, apparently I was better off plugged into mediocrity where I can’t cause more heartache.
         All though My mother was right when she forbade me to be a stuntman at eight, just like Evil Knievel! The kid, who wanted to learn the arts, his soul dream of the become a writer.
         “Well, son, come here, (I walked behind my grandfather Korean War submariner, trying to emulate his steps, we walked into his library) see all these books? Everyone one of them have a hell of a better education than you have. Son, (I replied with a yes Sir., see I couldn’t call my own grandfather, Pops, grandpa, my only option was Don Ed, I sure as hell wasn’t pet his ego), you’re just going to starve.”
         I love my daughter, she was my gift at seventeen, I love her in the best way I’m able to, what I have learned from, absent moms entranced by paper back love novellas, a stark old man who was full of himself, moms that abandon you though try to reconnect, emotions have overwhelmed me, a thirst for relay ability and love.
         Mommy was the first to show me about just how deep pain can go, she left me alone in a strange land. If I’m nothing, none of this would matter. Forced to learn another language, eat strange food, and as I got older I realized so many opportunities unavailable. Unavailable because I wasn’t were I was supposed to be.
         Rooster left, gone, so long, so long I begin to think of time so many days melting into each other, time waisting, a gush of water/time gushing out eventually spilling into or death across the floor, not after it’s made you know what sickness is, sorrow, contentment, happy blips, death, you get my drift.
         A downwards spiral, down, down reaching into a great vast nothingness. A precios commodity that man made, just a glimpse of a vast world we barely grasp.

*** + ***

         You know, how as a child’s mother tends to make sure her little baby knows just how special the boy is to her. She used to tell me I was a little piece of her; "A little part of my body...". So many times, she expressed that she doted on me. It is all nothing but false rambling. More good intentions lacking the means to be done by her.
         The truth was mom wasn't able to relate with me, she was baring the weight of the world on her shoulders, I required help she just couldn't give, and I became invisible, turning to my inside world to bare my own trauma, and in everybody else's eyes, "Mikey is just a problem child.".
         "He's just hyper! Just don't give him any sugar Shelley and Mike won't be running up the god damn walls!", my aunts voice haunts me as another intrusive thought.
         “I would end up in tears at the end of the day.”. Other times, "You were a holy terror.".
         “You were a nightmare to raise!” and mom just couldn't handle an unusual kid. So, after I leaped on my stepfathers back, barrage punching him with all my seven-year-old fists could deliver. Whaling on the guy who called me son, as I demanded,"Don't hit my mom!".
         Then I was brushed aside from in between them where I punched him in the ass since that was as far up as I was able to reach. My mother's reluctance to produce Gene's rum bottle one Saturday had sparked another beat down for her.
         The violence had traveled into the kitchen, he had her up against the wall, held her there by the throat, but Shelley Jean ended it all with a knee to his balls.
         I became unwelcome all of a sudden, my mother became worried about my safety. Since she had my baby sister with him, she told me at a later date, how much he had changed towards me.
         A talented boy, smart and introverted; thus no one looked into my problems at all, it was just easier to mark me as hyperactive problem child. A brat.
         It has become harder and harder to acknowledge what damage grew during such an onslaught of chaotic childhood days.
         Time lost, squandered, for the possibility of being alone finally away from people, that eventually became years of bottled angst. Like molten led in the bottom of my gut. Failure going on, and on into a shit show of a life. An existence of a fool that held to heart the values, the chivalry, selflessness that he found in tales of Knights; Joseph of Arimathea and the holy grail, "Le Morte d'Arthur". Only to later find himself bruised, battered, and alone.

*** + ***

         Having established that I do in fact exist, I am alive still, the crappy house I kind of feel fond of, the droopy avocado trees, nothing out the front door. It is some kind of quantum bull shit pocket, a forgotten corner of the quantum fabric.
         I’m certain I will open my eyes, and even more years will have just slipped me by. In the bathroom mirror I can see age has become able of tearing at my youth.
         I want to go back home. If I am still here somehow, I can still fill my lungs with air, my heart keeps thumping in my chest.
         I acknowledge that I am nothing without the other and in our contact other people is what gives sense to all this.
         Rooster had expelled me here from the garden, the hunt of the savanna, Pang-Ghiara! I am so close to take my place as the apex predator.
I stare through the night flooded windows of my father's rented house. A condo but poorly designed. I have a small patio with grass and a few fruit trees growing despite the neglect.
         The gut wrenching screams of a dog, the snarls of other canines in full attack mode. I can’t see them though the attack would flood the nights with rage and fear. I mean that crude cold wet mind stunning fear of death. They were just dogs perhaps, but they created that raw exposed nerve sort of atmosphere.
         Three times a day I listened to the unchained violence, teeth gnawing into skin, saliva, and the bleating cries of an animal suffering. Scorching soulful cries only death knows oh so well. And the despair I was able to find for another species, empathy with an animal I can’t see, or for myself projected in a way that I would understand once and for all.
         Gratuitous empathy is like sharing, stale bread.
         I am defiantly not supposed to be here. In all truth, I have no place being so far away, racing towards my eminent death. Must I observe that it's in the most miserable drawn-out manner possible. Solitude, masturbation, chewing past issues over in wait of making it change, sedentarism, and hard drugs.
         I want to go back to earth, put my feet back on the ground. I really want to strive for a bit of normalcy.
         Man, I sit down on my bed, angry winds shuffle around the half a dozen curtains I scrounged up to make into one thick layer, and I keep the damn sun out.
         Daylight was a painful ordeal, a long old wound would awaken fresh anguish anew at the sight of a beam.
         I know it’s time for me to be back out there, to apease the existential pillar of a somewhat functional life by building it up once more.
         I have worked, since I was sixteen, but with the family. One good day, I managed to get my sixteen-year-old girlfriend pregnant at seventeen, being the wreck less jackass that I was.
         I got a job at a five-star hotel, and I married her. At the moment I felt that the right decision was to take responsibility. The noble road to take; the consequences of my choices obligated me to step up and be accountable. I ventured into the adult world and felt the rawhide of the collar brushing around my neck. I was not comfortable.
         Anarchism has always run in my veins, a perpetual foreigner, even my schoolteachers in the States gave me my fair share of crap, heavy big ass girls would take advantage of me never hitting girls so, they easily beat my second-grade tush breathless. Later in South America, Ecuador wasn’t any different, I just transitioned from a poor brown latino kid clothed in welfare clothes into a rich kid. I can go on and on…
         I was never a big ego guy, I felt just as good when a friend came off on top, but I caught on pretty quick what being an employee was all about. The consequences of becoming a seventeen-year-old father. I went from a struggling highschooler to be looked down upon, barked at, in the systems attempt to tame me, make me another little cog. Oblivious of just how dispensable I was and the wastefulness of that futile effort just to please people that didn't give a damn about me.
         Some nights old Texan oil perverts are asking me in a butchered Spanish, for prostitutes. Giving up on speaking a foreign tongue, he settled on gestures asking where he can get a “Fuck, fuck!”, while pumping his pelvis in the middle of the reception of a five-star hotel. Since I was the only person in said lobby who spoke English I had to deal with the seventy-year-old horn dog. Not even a tip afterwards.
         I would sit down, at the foot of a Bullfighter monument, after a long graveyard shift. This was 1996, my baby girl which I hardly am allowed to see is two, Pink Floyd blasting into my brain as loud as it went on my disc-man. Nineteen years old or so, with a little baby girl somewhere beneath the sleepy blankets of the slumbering Quito lights.
         An after work beer, and I took out my Pink Floyd postcards for a lost teenage thrill and yes, I was not supposed to be in the middle of a national monument. Police tended; I told them I was not doing anything. I went to take a piss, and they left, so I sat right back where I was, and gape at a city not having not a clue what to do.
         I felt so, so trapped, and therefore I finally accepted that for me there really was no future. My whining was no more than loose apathy in a pitch-black world, where no one cared. It was punk in nature. I sang it so many times, and my generation was tangled in it.
         And to make things even better, in this place my mom brought me, if you’re related to some big cheese, if you’re not hooked up with important people or just inherited their money, you will have a difficult time getting ahead in life, if any. I just wanted to learn how to be a writer, I wanted to recite my poetry, I wanted to learn how to draw and maybe paint, in a country where they didn’t speak English.

*** + ***

         The sky has no clouds, just blue, blue skies tomorrow, and no chance of rain!
         I sit down on the grass just past the washing stone, I sit there amongst objects I know are foreign to me, used to it, ( You see an absentee father is never replaced by a frustrated alcoholic who wasn’t able to hold a blue collar job, nor a household full of women, grandma, you get the pattern.) Wherever I might be it’s an endless, flee from something I could never understand?
         On and on, country to country, shabby town to another, a major city perhaps? How about Texas, with a racist old lady I barely knew, Great grandma Evans who I grew to love, where I forced myself back into my childhood fantasies. Making an owl out of a folded sock, I felt so much loneliness. Sitting on a cold white and pea green bathroom tiles while everyone slept.
         Abandonment always leaves me with a hole, the raw gore of it drives you to obese with how hollow it feels, how to fill it, doubt in your own identity, and believe that nothing can be more important than filling it, somehow.
         For the first time in a month and a half, the whole area changed to a soothing pale blue lightings, and the cosmos was swept over by a ghostly reddish aurora boreal. I closed my eyes, and pondered. Night laying all powerful over everything, I opened my eyes. Wrapped in darkness, my eyes were useless, and the realization that I was actually as much a part of the dark as I was with the grass, the sky, my fucked up house, and the nothingness beyond its doors.

*** + ***

         Rooster’s hollowed out eyes, woke with a fiery fluorescent green flare, a few steps away from me in the darkness. That deep green glow I associated with decay. I felt the sickness. His skull holes looked surprisingly organic. Though harshly gnarled flesh, lined the walls in bits of torn meat, rotting; they were both obviously burrowed with wild passion, so sadistically deep!
         Each socket was like putting a mirror in front of another to create a never-ending tunnel of sorts; it was the same just his eyes ended in two barely perceptible Blackholes in a faraway bottom.
         The same ghoulish green light escaped his teeth, shyly peeked out his nostrils at times. Also, from under, or through the snags in his weathered robes.
         “Aaah, yes, yes wasn’t Mikey boy all nice and cozy inside his hurling tin-can? (Then that unsufferable cunt said in a mockingly long and high-pitched voice.".), Hiding, cowering, from the world, from disappointment? Far away from those pesky people, apes, humans I mean with whom you never could understand, and (his glowing eyes raised back with his head while he wheezed out a silent cackle) you seem to be pretty safe from failure out here! Yes? Honestly, be honest now! Just how further do you have to fall to finally become nothing? Have a few more miles on you in that tank of yours?”
         “So many years! Years you have surrendered to the pain! Time! Its time you will never get back! You spineless lazy swine! You wander, stray through life like a lost little boy! Allways trying to get your cheap kicks when ya can! Pathetic!”
         I take a deep breath and muffled the rage in my stomach then sighed it out, “I am very aware that I don’t have many days ahead of me, and almost everyone I loved has gone. I never really did anything of valor nor learn something while struggling through the mess and the fog of my life. I preferred to exist in my fantasy world, a behavior I learned as a kid to deal with the chaos of my environment. Eventually, I ended up forgetting myself, even I have abandoned myself...
         "Turn the damn lights on! Or something, make yourself useful."
         The sickness, of Rooster’s presence made me suspicious that he is out to snuff my ass. He was like devouring my emotions, feeding off my anguish, my despair, all my rage. Resentment. Everyone who just up and left, all those times I was shoved around from house to house, just didn’t stimulate my potential.
         I had a serene, quite peaceful reflection of some sorts, a vision of sorts, I was sitting three meters across from me. I even noticed I was enjoying the blades of grass between my toes!
         “I can’t say if a life can be summed up only upon decisions. Maybe the wrong decisions that are made by a flawed person.”, he scuffed as if about to laugh at me. I knew it would be another half-crooked smile in contempt of my attempt at justifying myself.
         Rooster got up and started to collect stones in one large circle. His underwater tentacles honestly, was impressive to witness. Strips of torn robe, soot dark bandages, and ripped strands of his filthy cloak had stretched high over his head, vigilant guarding master, in a liquid stasis, I believe they were alive in some manner.
         “Rooster... this is not where I’m supposed to be. If I have some days ahead of me... Well, fuck it! I should make it count! So, if you're sorry ass is here to interfere, be honest and cough it up!
         "I want to go back to earth. I want to reconnect with people, find some place to call home.
         “I’m lost! You mute fuck! Plus, I have no idea what the fuck you are, who, damn it your just something I came across!”
         I gathered myself, Rooster was making a fire pit. “I lost my self, get it! Whatever the hell I believed I was, all my projections, dreams were just pulverized. All the pain and grief have a big gaping hole.
         “Whoever I thought I was, just stopped. The moment some prick in a white lab coat says to me, hey kid it’s game over, you got cancer, and it pretty much looks like it’s in your lymph nodes... So I pretty much have a guillotine over my head.
         “I had just gotten married a few months earlier. We left Argentina and college to come to my home and carve out a place for ourselves. A few weeks later I had a stroke! At thirty eight!
         “Three tumors were in my brain, affecting my language center. So, I said bye to my god knows how many times I tried to get my degree in business, and eventually to my job.
         “I was blessed with aphasia, making it harder and harder to communicate with my wife. She eventually left me, the dog died shortly after. My mother died on a Tuesday.”
         Rooster materialized into the crooked reaper like figure. He tilted his head to one side like some confused predator, his hand was showing, the cracks and crevices let the green light out. Unnecessarily long fingers and vicious unkempt nails.
         “Oh my dear friend, I have known you for decades. I am here to help the limp of spirit. I, feed on anguish, sadness, sorrow, pain, fear, sickness… (he paused for a second) despair.”
         I said, “ I a son of Odin, a wolf of Odin, I come from men and women made of steel, my life has always been about letting my ancestors down, yes, and I still have breath in my chest, the blood of my of those who came before me, and a true Viking keeps on fighting to the death, to become worthy.
         “I am not done yet.” I gave Rooster the sternest stare I could muster up.
         The black rags of this grim figure caught the draft, shooting out like black tentacles, flickering, and it was hard to deny, Rooster appeared as a crooked, ill, and corrupt sort of angel of death. His hood was over his eyes, pacing in a square, a black kind of blue gunk seeped from his lips and onto the floor.
         “Your time is almost done.” Rooster pulled his hood back over his boney shoulders. He was hideous, all decay, rot, and a hideous crooked jaw, drooping open, wet, purple black, gushing out black muck.
         “A life wasted, look child,” , the Rooster sat down, with his legs crossed, at his feet a deep indigo fireplace, pop and crackle. “You wondered in search of mother, lost because someone left you, and you needed to fill the hole. Fill it to feel complete!” He broke out into a degrading cackling fit.
         “My time is mine, how much or how little of is my burden, you worthless cunt! I get it, I’m connected with where I am.
         “I am not a limp soul, I am better than this, forget your maimed human to abuse, humiliate, self-sabotage. I am not that troubled sixteen year old that slit his wrists, tired of feeling so sad, inferior, anxious, in general my family just wrote it off as alcoholism. No more, Rooster, you fuck!
         “Make a decision, kill me, out here in this cold black nothingness, I would have died out here anyhow!” I stepped up to his gros face. “You can’t kill me yet! (I was in a fit of laughter, mostly relief.) you have to break me into nothing, a husk of who I used to be.”
         The Rooster knew I was right, there are certain rules that must be observed to keep the chaos flowing. I saw his putrid stinky eyes tremble in frustration.
         The Rooster’s voice grew deep, stern, you could tell the violence brewing inside of him. “Very well, you little shit, let’s have it your way. Keep one thing in mind, (he stepped so close my organs felt like they were imploding) when this is over, and you finally go over that edge, I will make you suffer.”
         Just like that, I was naked in a corner of the ship. Close to hypothermia, and the blue gunk all over me wasn’t helping.
         I acquired a blanket, and planted my wet cheeks on the freezing bench where I could see through the main window. There I was just enjoying the nothingness of deep space, watching nothing, nursing a profound feeling of sorrow, longing for someone who said she loved me. Buff humbug, everyone eventually leaves, even your own mother.