Eliza is dead, so I drive to McDonald's
This is a discarded chapter of my novel
It’s Sunday morning. Eliza is dead.
I rush downstairs, fumbling a few steps.
Floridian sunlight has flooded my living room in such a glorious manner, I have no choice but to bask in it. I lift my hands to the ceiling and spin, just once.
Hanging on my mantle is a taxidermy tiger’s head. I look into its darkly reflective eyes. Privately, I’ve named him Xavier.
I run up to Xavier and kiss his dusty nose.
“I’ve won!” I tell him, “That cunt is no more.”
I stroke the tiger’s head.
“Oh, Xavier, how I love you! I finally love nobody- Just you! And you are quite literally a no-body.”
I laugh at my cleverness, hahahahaha.
“I know I did right by killing a bad person. That girl tortured people.”
Somewhere upstairs, there’s a female body, lying on its back, with limbs splayed out at irregular angles, looking like a dead beetle. There are pink branches of Lichtenberg figures racing up to her neck.
The fractal scars were ornamentary. She gave them to herself. As with many injuries, I was merely the conduit through which Eliza inflicted harm upon her body. The desire to hurt her was never my own; My desires were hijacked by her, much stronger, desire to stimulate herself.
Eliza sought stimulation because she had a high iq. She made a private game out of trying to shock herself. She treated those around her as objects in her game. She called it ‘disturbancemaxxing.’ Gradually, it took higher and higher doses of shock for her to feel anything at all.
Eliza loved categories. She had an almost autistic tendency to place everything under the sun into one category or another. Even as a child, she created extensive taxonomies for all of her stuffed animals and lined them up in a fictive hierarchical order. More than the information itself, she loved its categories. Categories often are information. Actually, they always are. Categories and language are not only in the same category, but are the exact same thing.
Eliza had a natural aptitude for language because of her love of categories. Language gave her an immense sense of purpose, until it failed her. The more information Eliza accumulated, the more she began to notice how similar everything is to everything else. Similarities, rather than differences, made all information a lot less interesting. She only found information interesting if there was some degree of novelty attached to it. This isn’t exactly a trait that was singular to Eliza; Information you already know is never as interesting as information you don’t know. The thing is- If everything is the same thing (as evidence increasingly supports,) then everybody already knows it, so there’s really no point in describing it.
The most enjoyable thing about language is that it doesn’t work. There’s always a gap between what is described and what is really there; But that gap makes things endlessly enchanting. Remove that gap, and there’s no fucking point in existing. That gap between what is described and what is really there works as a mechanism to generate novelty. Both variation and novelty could not exist without the artificial construct of categorization. I don’t think that human beings invented language in order to communicate their reality; Instead, I think its sole purpose is to shield us from the truth. I believe that this truth is so boring and disappointing, that if it was revealed to us, there would be a global mass suicide. Ok, and I do know the truth and the truth is that everything is literally the same. Schizophrenic people are gifted with this knowledge, and, obviously, knowing the truth is a massive burden for them. I know that, at first, that fact appears to be interesting; It may, in fact, be the most interesting thing in the world, in the single moment in which you came to believe it was true, but trust me- once you cozy up to the truth, the novelty wears off.
I can only speculate, but I believe that Eliza’s need for stimulation came out of a fear of nothingness. The stimulus was just a distraction, and she needed that distraction in order to not think about what would happen after she died.
Well, now she is dead and not thinking anything at all.
Now, I am the one thinking.
Eliza is dead, so I drive to McDonald’s.
It’s Sunday. I hate Sundays. Today, however, transcends Sunday-ness. It isn’t Sunday, but simply ‘today.’ The concept of ‘today’ is elusive, but I most certainly feel that today is a day distinct from every other day, which can’t be said of most days. I’ve never experienced a proper ‘today,’ until today, I realize.
Today, the Flordian sunlight is hitting different; It’s uncharacteristically icy- piercing, even. Once on the highway, I appear to be driving through an endless white tunnel, a white tunnel similar to the kind you see before passing out. I can only imagine that it is also the sort of white tunnel one sees before passing out of existence- but, then again, I wouldn’t know- which is why, though I find the thought so endlessly fascinating, I suppress it, since, today, I’ve decided to ensconce myself only in things which are concretely knowable; Hence, my drive to McDonald’s.
I put my aviators on and admire myself in the rearview. I chuckle, thinking about how I look like Ted Kaczinski, or, perhaps, Elliot Rodger. In simpler terms, I look sus.
So what if I look sus? I ask myself. It has only ever worked in my favor.
I connect my iphone to bluetooth and put on an ai-generated playlist catered specifically to my personal brand of mania. The first song that comes on is “Ecstasy” by Strawberry Switchblade. The saccharine duo are still chorusing as I pull up to the drive thru and order a Fish Filet.
A girl with Pippi Longstocking braids emerges from the pay window, looking dour and xanned-out. I smile up at her.
“Hey!” I exclaim, “Is it just me, or was there a great cultural reset within the past twenty-four hours?”
“I dunno, sir. Your total is $6.60.”
“Huh.” I take off my aviators and squint into the distance. “It’s just weird that- It’s just that because- It’s just, like, uh… Everything has an effulgence today. I feel like I just did ketamine for the first time.”
“Do you have $6.60, or should I call the cops? Cus you look sus as Fuuuck. You look like Jeff Dahmer. You’re on some true crime shiiii”
“Sorry, sorry!” Flustered, I shuffle through my wallet and hand her a hundred dollar bill. “Keep the change!” I tell her.
Her expression shifts to delight, before twisting back into suspicion. Without thanking me, Pippi disappears. I pull up to the pick-up window.
I park in the lot and eat my Fish Filet. “Nostalgia” by the Buzzcocks plays. I finish in four bites.
Feeling self-conscious, I look into the side-mirror and pick at my teeth. I’ve always thought of side mirrors as the ears of the car. Cars have ears. Cars have faces, too. Inevitably, cars were made after the image of mankind, in much the same way that mankind was made after the image of God. I wonder if cars have any residual celestial qualities hidden in their faces or in their mechanics? I suspect that the answer is no- Trickledown divinity doesn’t extend beyond original creation (except through procreative sex.) According to my upbringing, cars are a perversion of creation, as are all things men design after the image of themselves and infuse with artificial life.
There’s a line of text on both ears.
“Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear,” I read out loud.
I try to think about objects and distances. I get dizzy, so I stop.
I’m overthinking things, I think.
Above the text, is my reflection. I look younger than I did yesterday.
Several decades younger.
My skin is wet. I didn’t shower. It isn’t sweat- So why is my face glossy, like a freshly hatched snake?
My wunderkind looks are back. Excellent, I think.
That’s when it hits me: Eliza is dead.
Perhaps she died so that I could feel this supreme rejuvenation. Perhaps, her death was a vampiric exchange, allowing me to regain my wunderkind essence.
Today, I look eighteen. Yesterday, I was forty-six. Only one thing changed between yesterday and today, which was Eliza dying. This has to be a classic cause-and-effect situation- But I won’t trouble myself too much with the cause; The important thing is that, now, no one will recognize me; I can start over.
Shivers rush up and down my body. I picture Lichtenberg figures. These aren’t orgasmic shivers, but the inverse- A cocktail of sensations, all lying on the spectrum between auto-electrocution and nausea.
Inversely orgasmic: the feeling of being sucked into a black hole.
It hits me. Eliza is dead. This simple sentence was nothing more than a simple sentence, just a second ago. Now it means something. I don’t know what it means, but the meaning is getting pretty visceral; I can feel it surging back up my throat.
A Happyhardcore remix of “Forever Young” has started to play. Though tonally inappropriate, the song is a little too on-the-nose in this context. Some invisible, omniscient entity is mocking me.
Eliza is dead. I don’t even know what that means.
Dead.
Dead.
Dead.
I don’t know what that means.
Dead.
Eliza is dead.
Jesus fucking christ.
I roll down my window and projectile vomit.
A minute later, Pippi trots out of the McDonalds’, a wad of cash in hand.
“Sir?”
I perk up.
“Yeah-Huh?”
“My supervisor says that I’m not allowed to take tips. She told me to return this to
you.”
She tries to hand me the cash, but I brush it away. The poor girl looks confused. Her gaze keeps flicking from the yellow puddle on the concrete, back to the vomit drizzling down my chin.
“Here,” I say, holding out my palm. As she leans toward the car window and hands me the cash, I grab her, pull her into the car, and shove the wad into her bra.
“There,” I say, “Tell your manager that I tell her to go fuck herself! Go buy yourself a classy dinner and learn how to live a little, you corporate drone!”
Pippi scowls at me, then trots off.
I laugh at myself because I’m a funny guy. hahahahahaha.
But then I remember that Eliza is… Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m young again, and I’m starting to understand the appeal of so-called ‘disturbancemaxxing.’