Chapter Four
"You extend your hand to those who suffer, to those who know what it really feels like, to those who've had a taste like that means something. And, oh, so sick I am and maybe I don't have a chance and maybe that is all I have and maybe this is a cry for help."
So this is what it felt like to unravel.
That alone was a frightening sensation, but to bear witness to the actual uncoiling of one's own sanity was another thing entirely. It was a dull, persistent pain that made Jay's stomach churn. His stomach condition wasn't from the fear of becoming gradually more undone by the second, but from being sickened by the mere awareness of it.
He brought the beer bottle to his lips, finished off its contents without looking away from the bonfire raging away in front of him.
Jay had no one waiting for him at home, not even a fish, and that's precisely why he came to the ravine as often as he could. Loneliness he was able to deal with, but not its silence. Silence always did him in without fail. Silence was the large fresh, bleeding wound on a water buffalo's leg while lying in front of a hungry lion, the large cat being Jay's black thoughts and memories.
Or perhaps Jay was the wounded water buffalo and the chick next to him was the lion.
Had Jay a needle and thread with him he'd sew this chatterbox's mouth shut. She was like one of those annoying cartoon characters; chipmunk voice, fast speaking and didn't take a pause even after asking a question. Since she never seemed to take a breath Jay assumed she was more shark than human, but instead of having to keep swimming in order to stay alive this one had to keep on talking to pass water through her gills.
Though he wasn't paying the least bit of attention, every so often Jay would mutter a "yeah" or a "nah" or an "mm-hmm"-ing noise to make her believe he really was hanging on to every last one of her words.
He couldn't recall the name she had given him at the beginning of her endless speech, it was so horribly vanilla it wasn't worthy of being remembered. Actually, it could have been the most unique name in the world but Jay hadn't been listening so it didn't register in his brain.
White Noise, that's what seemed to fit her the most, was saying absolutely everything about positively nothing. How that was even possible, Jay didn't want to know. All he wanted to do at the moment was to get blind drunk and get some ass in one form or another. If White Noise was going to talk through the whole hooking-up event Jay's head would explode.
Her hand was on his leg as she babbled on about whatever it was she was talking about, thumb rubbing the outside of Jay's upper thigh as she leaned toward him so that her lips were close enough to his ear to be heard over the music in the background. Now and then White Noise, when he would look at her, made an expression that seemed to ask "Well, aren't you going to do anything about it?" and Jay so far hadn't, just to spite her.
White Noise, apart from her annoying need to constantly remain in a conversation even if it was one-sided, was easy on the eyes. Even if she was ugly Jay was getting too wasted to care. He wanted human contact and sooner than later he was going to get it, sooner than later he was going to feel warmth against his skin.
The warmth of another person's flesh wasn't enough to melt the ice in his veins, but for a while it made Jay feel a little more alive. For a while the haze of sex and drugs and booze made him forget, forget about that day which was too vivid to have happened so many years ago, forget about Jay himself.
"Fucking Christ," Jay said, exasperated, "are we going to do this or not? Just leave now if we're not because I can't stand your fucking voice."
The hand was removed from his thigh so quickly that had Jay been looking at it he would have gotten whiplash. White Noise might have been shooting daggers at him through her eyes, but Jay didn't move his gaze away from the fire to find out. Taking another beer from the cooler behind him he twisted off the cap and drank half the bottle in a few gulps. He wasn't get drunk enough.
Driving home wasn't a problem, he didn't want to go home. It wasn't that far away anyway, he walked to the ravine and left his car in the underground parking garage under his cheep, seedy apartment building. Jay never worried about getting mugged or killed, he kept a switchblade on him at all times when off school grounds. He could to handle himself well enough without the switchblade as well.
"Excuse me?" White Noise must have given up on looking shocked when she realized Jay didn't want to look at her.
"I said I can't stand your fucking voice. Unless you're humming while my dick's in your mouth I don't want to hear a fucking peep out of you."
"You certainly jump right to the point, don't you?"
Jay turned the beer bottle around in his hand, watched the glass shine in the light from the fire.
"Right. Okay," she replied to his silence.
He didn't notice that White Noise had gotten off the picnic table they were sitting on until she walked into his line of vision. Jay rose to his feet as well and walked with this new girl to the van, chugging the rest of his beer as he went and throwing it off into the high grass.
Being with women in this kind of way had never registered a wrong in Jay's mind. There was always a willing participant, always someone who wanted to be thrown away like a used tissue, maybe even needed to. Jay would get his human contact and the girl would get her bracelet, her prize to go along with the many others crowding her wrists.
Sex meant power and nothing more. The more power one had the better off one was suppose to be, but it never seemed to work out that way for Jay. He was able to forget, but that was about it, and he was never able to forget for very long. His hollowness, his nightmarish memories, would always come back to him like a filthy boomerang.
Once and only once Jay had thought stupidly about hitting himself in the head, breathing in the gas from an oven until he caused enough brain damage to cause amnesia. He had come close to trying, so very close, but stopped. There was too much risk involved in doing something like that and it might not work.
Yes, Jay didn't want to have his frontal lobes housing memory to go undamaged, but he also wanted to live. Live, that was a funny concept for someone like him. He was miserable, consumed with every horribly painful emotion known to man, but he wanted to be alive. As long as Jay was alive he could awake, as long as he had the power to awaken he had a chance to escape his nightmares. Death was eternal slumber, not a single chance to claw and scream and bite at consciousness until it groaned and pulled him into the waking world.
Death meant a labyrinth, one in which there was no exit. Death meant wandering the twists and turns for all of eternity and for whatever was beyond that.
But just because Jay wanted to keep on living, never mind the constant pain he was in, didn't mean that he didn't wish for everyone else to live. He only wanted one person dead out of billions, but he had no idea where that man lived or if he was still breathing any more than he knew if space aliens really did exist. Revenge in the form of slow, painful death was currently impossible.
So Jay numbed the voice – his voice this time, not the demons – screaming for vengeance with the ravine and all that was available in it.
The van – one of the many numbing objects for disposal in the ravine – was disgusting, to stop and think about everything that had gone on inside of it and all the filth that might be lingering inches deep in the floors and walls was too much to bear, it would cause even the most steel nerved man to scream and run for the hills, to gag and hurl until his own stomach eventually came up. But as vile though it might have been there was some solace to it.
The carpeting was fluffy and of a warm color, the seat cushion thick, the lighted candles flickering and causing shadows to dance on the fabric covering the windows. Even the harshest of things became soft once inside the black van, the loudest shriek suddenly ceased to be.
This was also a place were people lost their clean and shinning dignity. It was ripped from their person with gribby hands, played around with in the mud of longing and lust, spit on, kicked, stuffed in a blender and then returned only to have the process start all over again the next time one stepped into the vehicle and slid the door shut behind them.
Jay was immune to that raping, for his dignity had been taken for good once upon a time ago. Possibly because he had no dignity for the van to take it did twice as much damage to the other person he was with than any other couple that went inside of it. Jay didn't care, he did nothing about it, it was only something he had noticed.
He got no pleasure out of what he did in that van, hardly got any feeling out of it at all. Doing this, leaning back into the seat while some stranger gave him "favor", was like trying to stop up a leaking dam with bubble gum. Eventually the pressure would be too much and the dam would come crashing down, some small village washed away by the ocean of water that came out from behind the now destroyed dam.
A kitten was playing with the ball of his humanity, a vicious one with a conscious as defunct as Jay's. Gradually, ever so gradually, the humanity yarn ball was becoming smaller and smaller. The black kitten with the blood red eyes and dental work to make Count Dracula blush was working slowly but steadily, walking all through its environment in efforts to get the yarn so tangled around the furniture to try to make sense of it would be wishing every last stick of wood and ceramic to turn to dust and splinters. To get any kind of real pleasure out of what his faceless, nameless rabble of women did to him would do nothing to stop that kitten's sadistic play-time.
So this is what it felt like to unravel.
Thank you to those who've reviewed, even to those who haven't reviewed and just put this on your favorites list.
Anon: Since the show doesn't deal with Jay a lot I have to fill in the gaps of his thoughts, views, personality somehow. Just so you know, I actually don't mind Emma that much – when she keeps her mouth shut. I can't really help hating her with every fiber of my being (though not nearly as much as Ashley) and I have to make Jay seem three dimensional, so there you have it. I do, however, like Alex very much so and I'm not fond of Jay. At all. I only chose him as a lead character because I'm not happy with the show not explaining why he's the way that he is. The new kid is only there because I needed someone who could work well with Jay. I tried the pre-existing characters of the show and I simply wasn't convinced, not with what I have in mind. Besides, every good author puts a bit of themselves into the characters.
VoodooBat: I wouldn't say all my stories are great because if I did then I wouldn't have gotten rid of one in particular. But thank you for the compliment.
Unleash: To me as long as the new student isn't absolutely perfect and/or horribly cliché I can stand them – obviously, seeing as how I have now two stories with new arrivals in them. As long as their father doesn't beat them and they don't cut themselves with razor blades because their father beats them while listening to "Hold On" by Good Charlotte and writing crappy angsty poetry/songs or they don't listen to said Good Charlotte song while trying to commit suicide in the idiot's manner... I'm good.
This story's about Jay after all, why would I want to go with a POV that isn't about him, that no one can understand? That's a rhetorical question, by the way.
Thank you very much for the compliment. I want you to feel that way, like you're sitting in Jay's head and watching the world through his eyes as he would see it. If Jay falls down, skins his hands and you can feel it then I've done my job.