Disintegration

In May of 2032, human populations lost the power of speech. It’s not known if there was a case zero, nor was a cause ever identified. Early reports cited a decline of memory and a shrinking of vocabulary until the afflicted could say and understand nothing.  

 — 

The condition advanced quickly in some, leaving them bereft in a day or less. For others the decline was gradual, nearly unnoticeable at first, but over days and weeks, sometimes months, sentences and words dissolved, phonemes fell into gurgles and groans.  

—

Millions died; within a month, a true count of living and dead was impossible.  

Culture burned to rubble; people couldn’t follow the simplest plots. Paintings hung as ominous emblems before blending into walls and melting into floors. Without the structures of language, bodies heaved and spit trying to move with music. Commerce and law broke down, subsisting in isolated pockets with primitive exchanges and brutal dispensations of revenge. 

Remaining scientists and doctors worked on a cure, scalpaling brains in the shadow of a lunatic silence. Some survivors initially coped with drugs and orgies but soon their symbolic threads wore through and there was no sense of escape, no limit to transcend, no point to bodily extremity.  

Most documents were destroyed in fits of apish rage. A few journals and stacks of papers were hidden in dresser drawers and mothy closets.  

—

April 9th 2032:

My brother called this morning. We haven’t talked in two years, and I don’t know when I would’ve called him if it were up to me. I’ll give it a day or two and call him back. My family is now at that distance where a phone call carries the weight of serious news. Could be good news, like that of a birth, but illness and death are more likely. It’s possible it could be nothing more than a strained catch-up but I’m not in the mood for that either.  

Families are centrifuges. After mom and dad died my siblings and I stopped having much to do with each other, but even when my parents were alive I saw my family once or twice a year.  I don’t really know who they are anymore. And what’s worse is that I don’t care. Weekly dinners, monthly outings, regular calls; it exhausts me to consider. I assume they feel the same. We’ll continue to wander off, maybe even forgetting to attend each other’s funerals.  

Apart from that, I have little to say and refuse to force it. This idea of keeping records has turned me into dimly reflective gruel. I think I’m done. Maybe one or two more entries, if only to increase my bitterness and more strongly reject this whole futile practice. I could light all my notebooks on fire, though that seems dramatic. To destroy a written account you don’t need to put it to the torch, you just need to ignore it.  

Still, it’s a risk to leave it lying around. Someone could find it, and then they rewrite what you were. What bothers me the most is what I initially thought most appealing; exposing some echo of a shudder to distant centuries, donating your spiritual body to a shameless dissection. By what right does some future dunce cap sit in judgement on the corpse I’ll be? Nasty and morbid, when you get down to it. But there remains the problem of living in the present without an idea of how you’ll be remembered.  

—

June 14th, 2032: 

Most of the people I know are missing. Those still here, including my girlfriend, scare me; their eyes, only now and then do they flash with anything familiar. Most of the time I feel threatened by their cold black stares. Sometimes they erupt in a stream of nonsense. When I say simple things, some almost get it. But we’re all disappearing at a different rate. When I saw my brother two weeks ago, he seemed to be doing better than most, almost as well as me. We were able to share a couple memories. 

My time with him yesterday went much worse. He was basically a moron who acted like he was going to beat me up, but then he would become scared and confused, teetering and retching and spewing a goulash of obscenities. I couldn’t tell him of our childhood, he’d have taken it as a cryptic provocation.  

—

June 22nd 2032: 

When all this started and I had a better grip on what would happen to me, I thought about writing as much of my history as possible, putting down a memoir for anyone who survives, or a future species of literate animals.  

But since then my thoughts have only grown dimmer, and my own ability to express myself or describe anything around me has weakened. Even if I’m declining more slowly than most, my end can’t be that far off, and I can see, even feel like a circuit of wind, the moment when I’ll be pushed into the eternal black stew. It would be vanity to record my disintegration. 

I can’t do much else but sit in my room with its copper walls, a color unlike what I remember, as if reflecting the corrosion of recent days. My girlfriend has left and I can’t find her. She was speaking in short sentences and pointing at things for a while but had stopped bathing and brushing her teeth. And then, just yesterday, I went over to her place, walked the two miles down streets clotted with cars and trash cans and raccoons and men tearing their hair and begging the trees for spare change, and I knocked on the open door and walked around an apartment that appeared like an unsettling, faintly demonic dream space, where paintings and furniture mingled with otherworldly objects, where instruments of hygiene and torture lay in bizarre exhibition, pulsing ever so slightly, as if connected to a dark heart intent on disordering my senses.  

Her friends were gone, too, and for all of them the condition had progressed to the point where they couldn’t leave written notes or arrange anything as a sign. Except, in my deteriorating state, I looked on piles of clothes and torn drapes and a mud encrusted toilet seat as clues; arrows that led me in a dizzying circle. I remember, barely, though it was only yesterday, lying in the bed we sometimes shared, where we’d made love and slept under the same blanket; lying there yesterday in the stale reek, hearing a hum that might’ve been running appliances or the low moans of the dying mad, and trying to remember her face and the sound of her voice before it started, but I could only see her in her purity, in our past, for a second or two before the images decomposed into frightful elements; translucent and irregular shapes with little hairs and twitching feelers and blobs swelling and shrinking and then a vast empty white that burned my eyes. 

—

June 26th:

The strange thing is that I can think of abstractions more clearly than solid objects. The word object feels heavier than pen and paper, or a chair. I look down at the page and watch the letters scurry off like bugs.  

It’s almost as if I no longer live in a house, but in the idea of a house. Physical space is some vanished point. 

It sounds as if I still use language effectively, but the tissue that strings the word to the world has crumbled. The slow rate of my decline has brought subtle features of this condition into view. Concrete actions deteriorate just after a quiet destruction of concrete description. Most people lose their sense for description and practical planning so fast they rot to the bone within a week, but I’m able, for a short while, to live within language as an artifact, protecting myself from rapid collapse and at the same time disconnecting from reality. 

It started as a pall that had darkened the very idea that I saw through a shroud; a myst that hid itself. 

Every now and then a dull recognition would bubble in me like indigestion: I had no ideas and felt nothing for them. I couldn’t describe a practical plan; I couldn’t plot out a normal course of action. I couldn’t describe the tree outside my back porch; I could give it a wooden overcoat, dress it up in death’s take out box. The peculiar flaw is that as practical use of language declines, so does practical behavior.  

There’s really no such thing as fantasy, just the steady erosion of the ground beneath my feet and the cold wind. What I imagine doesn’t help me escape from the world, it only cements the growing gaps in my vision.  

—

June 29th:

After two days of not talking or writing, two days of incomprehension that almost drove me to kill myself, I’ve recovered in part. I can write full sentences, and I’m aware of synonyms, alternatives in word choice. Redundancy gives me a hard time, I’m finding it tough not to repeat myself.  

Organs still work, I can hold in piss and shit, wipe myself. Food goes down but I don’t taste much anymore. The streets are quieter, I think most people are dead. Before this happened I’d never smelled a dead man before. It’s pretty close to any mammal. Meat and fur and feeling give off a stench. Dead reptiles don’t have it. Odorless cold blood. The feelings of warm-blooded animals stink as their bodies decay. Affection and sadness and fear; all those emotions in the blood and muscle and glands steaming in the air.  

Strange how I’ll be a body soon. I always thought it would be embarrassing. Anyone can walk up and mock you. Ask questions you can’t answer, move your arms and legs around and make you look like a cretin. Put you in profane postures. To die while surrounded by the living sounds humiliating. At least now there won’t be anyone around to play with my corpse. Maybe some scavengers will eat me. 

— 

July 2nd:

Difference between sleeping and waking diminished. Used to be an experience of the morning, most of the time, electricity, a feeling of going forward. Now I can’t be sure if I’ve slept, and the darkness doesn’t hold me. I’ve woken up, or come to, remembered I was alive, in the middle of the night, walking around a fountain that still flows, and there’s no one else around. Someone or something has taken the bodies and the birds have flown off. The silence of my own head; not peaceful, not happiness, more of a pressure and heaviness, like I’m filling with corn syrup.  

Eating frozen food still frozen. Sucking on sausage links till they thaw in my mouth. Tried to turn on a microwave and it sparked and smoked. Going to the grocery store and eating whatever’s lying around. I’m glad I can’t smell. Mold and mushroom carpets, walls of slime. The more I think of why I fight against it, the less sense it makes. Even if someone lives and finds this, what will they know about it? If they’re as desperate as me, it won’t help them, and if they’re fine, it’ll be for their amusement. And what is that worth? Not a thing.  

The forked tongue of some theory licks the inside of my head. Language isn’t an evolutionary tool but an alien agent, a destructive ingredient, an interdimensional fungus. It works its way into the brain and soul by appearing as a tool we can use, by looking like it concerns things, the communication of things, but the spores grow and sprout big mushroom heads and the funk swells and spongy shoots reach from fingernails to the heart’s hollow.  

A pyramid flipped upside down and dropped on top of the skull. It digs in over time, it can be withstood for a while but then the head caves, and as the pyramid sinks it widens the wound and crushes more of the surrounding headspace. Needle with an expanding bottom end that worms into infinitesimally small holes and corkscrews larger and larger arcs through the flesh. 

—

July 5th:

Heat is about all I feel anymore. I forget I have a body. A season of heat, red and green. I trip over bones, call out and the echo sounds like someone else. Thinking, coming up with words, much the same. Nothing starts on the inside;  

Would’ve been nice to talk to someone. There have to be a few still hanging on. How would we ever find each other. And then what would we do. The idea of memory is my last memory; I can remember that I used to remember; now I live in the abstraction of abstraction, some charred shell where sensation used to be. Words trickle out me and I don’t bother to understand them.  

Distinction, difference. The difference between distinction and difference. Difference is identical to itself, and that’s a contradiction, and that’s how each thing moves and eventually dies, by trying to coincide with itself and smashing into its own walls.  

Concepts die by their own struggle to become real, fill themselves in. What’s real dies by the opposite process, by failing to hold on to its matter. What do these patterns matter, a guessing game of children on abandoned stoops. Juggling rotten fuzzy lemons like an ashen clown in a blighted big top.  

God is not a man a woman a father a glowing orb a ball of resin a bull’s head with 8 arms a winged chariot a void a white light a tunnel a river a billiard table there is no kingdom no nestling in a satin clad bosom no prayer just a solitary sorcerer’s obsolete incantation. 

—

A piece of the past, it has to be the last one. Not a dream but a feeling in a dream, an event from before. Dreams where I was about to die, and the panic as the bullet landed in my chest with that gross wet thud, but also that soft sense, at the same time, that it wasn’t really happening, that I’d wake up in a second and all would be okay; that feeling, I’m having it now.