Chapter 5 – Party Time
Drip
Drip
Drip
I had that dream again.
Except that it was a daydream this time. I walked all the way upstairs and stepped into the first open door into a room devoid of furniture. The walls were a faint, pastel paper just like the ones downstairs. In the far corner of the room was a small embroidered pillow, like the kind that says "home sweet home" with pink lace on it. I quickly forgot about this, though, when I noticed the television sitting in the middle of the room with a full video game console set up.
'Holy shit,' I thought, 'he has BloodThUrZt Mechavision 3D.' I settled down to play and turned the volume up as loud as I could, preparing to do what I love most in video games—not advance the plot at all but instead kill the citizens. Despite the high volume, I heard some noise from downstairs. It was a little hissing mixed with the sound of maracas. Someone downstairs was playing salsa music and blowing up helium balloons. Whatever.
A giant wormhole opened in the middle of the room. You stepped out.
"Hey man, I thought you got your own room," I said to you.
"Dude there aren't any other rooms. I looked. They all had piles of these wooden signs in them that said 'the ghost hole'."
"Ah yeah…" I said in that totally not paying attention kinda way. I was playing video games.
"Hey, is that the game I think it is," you said, and instantly plugged in the second controller so that the game restart itself right before I reached the save point.
"FUUUUUCK!" I screamed. "I was just about to set a record!"
"No, I was," you said, loading my game file and then completing what I had failed to complete, thereby claiming victory after banking on all my progress.
I got tired so I looked for a bed. "Hey Axel, there's no bed in here," I said, after giving the room a thorough survey. "Unless it's really tiny." Then I got hungry.
"I wonder if this room has any Cheez-its," I said as I made my way to the closet. There was only one closet in the room, hiding inconspicuously in a dark corner with chipped wallpaper and warped floorboards surrounding the door. All over the wooden paneling were scratch marks and splashes of something red, as if someone had been trying really, really hard to get inside of it. "Oh cool, Kool-Aid stains. This must be a pantry. I always spill Kool-Aid on my pantry door."
I grabbed the knob and turned it, only to discover and intricate lock mechanism sealed it tightly. It was easily bypassed by my keyblade, of course. The door creaked open like the sound of an old man rolling his neck between his shoulders. A dark shape hung inside. I couldn't tell what it was. "Uhhhhh, help me…" it groaned.
On the inside of the door were rusty nail tips sticking out quite jaggedly. They formed bizarre shapes and encircled an empty space in the middle of the door, which was devoid of nails. In this circular region of the door were deep hackings into the wood to carve out an image of a face with massive, bulging eyes that fixated directly on the viewer, with a sick, twisted smile. Mold grew in the cracks of the teeth on the face. Underneath the face was a sentence, similarly carved, that read "You will die alone."
"This isn't a pantry." I slammed the door closed, infuriated by the world's failure to provide me with exactly what I wanted instantly. While I had been looking for sustenance, you had abandoned the video game console and were looking at the pillow in the corner. You grabbed the small pillow in your fist and read the text stitched onto the front. "I want to murder you," you murmur quietly to yourself. "Hey, we can sleep on this."
"That's dumb," I jeered in response. "That's like smaller than a sofa pillow."
"How would you know? You don't have a sofa."
"My grandma did."
"No she didn't."
"Uh…yes she did. It was a porch sofa."
You bellowed with laughter. "That doesn't count! I lived on a sofa my whole life, you think you know more about what's a sofa than I do?"
"My grandma is never wrong," I said with firm conviction. "Never."
"What are you even talking about, you don't have a grandma," you claimed. "You have no one. There is no one. Only me." A little void opened up in the space to your left and you reached into it with your outstretched hand, pulling out a bottle of orange soda from within. You cracked it open and flopped down onto the pillow, the void floating down to join you at your side. You took a good long swig straight from your two liter bottle, wiped your mouth with the back of your hand, and sighed contentedly. "Yeah, I think I'm gonna take this pillow."
"Fine," I said. "I'll just take it when you're not looking."
"No you won't," you said and you pulled out your giant spinny, violently thrust your arm into the air, and then drove the spinny down with a mighty force in a perfectly straight line, thrusting one of its arrow-points through the pillow, fixing it into the ground. The spinny's tip was so thoroughly lodged that I speculated that from the ground floor below one could see a small metal point peering through the ceiling above.
"Fuck. I am never getting that out…ever. You ain't even gonna be able to use that yourself," I said.
"So? You can't use it. That's the point," you responded.
Then you reached into the portable void by your side and pulled out a small box of Cheez-Its. You then sat down on the floor next to your spinny and leaned your arm on it, used one of the tips to open the box, and started fishing out little orange squares one at a time and eating them while I stared.
"Are you gonna give me some of those. I've been hungry since I wasn't."
"No. It's a single serving. Look, see it says 'single serving' on the box." You indicated it with a flippant gesture that involved the middle finger protruding above all the other fingers.
We stood there in the room a really ass long time while I tried to think of something to do, but every time I thought of something I remembered that I was pissed at you and kept dwelling on it. As I was reciting the phrase 'I hate you' in my head, I was distracted by how quiet it was. Why did it seem quiet? Oh right, 'cause there was music before. I'd almost forgotten about it in the background of my hating you. Soon after the silence fell, it was broken again by a faint thumping. Someone was walking around downstairs.
My hunger was great enough that I immediately lost patience with you and tried to reach into the void so I could obtain my own box of Cheez-Its, but you grabbed my wrist and shoved it away. "Get your own void, asshole," you said. You reached back into the void and pulled out another identically sized box, and before you had even finished the first one you opened the second one and poured the entire contents into your mouth.
"Dude you have like, a thousand infinity of those! Just let me have some," I yelled as I watched you pull box after box of Cheez-Its out. You grinned at me and held up one of the little boxes, tapping at the text on the bottom.
"'Single serving'," was all you said.
I was slightly distracted again. There was a faint thumping that got louder and louder. The creak of someone walking up rotten stairs could be heard. Light footsteps worked in concert with the bumping of a large object being dragged along with them. For a second I thought I heard a melodious murmur or humming.
"Come on—you don't even have to pay for those and I already let you have the pillow," I pleaded.
"Let you have the pillow? Tell that to the spinny…"
That's it. I was so enraged I charged over to the small pillow which was thoroughly pierced by an impractically large ninja device. I grabbed one side of it and began to pull. You just stared at me and then started laughing. I heard a small rip. Apparently you did too because your jocular amusement was shattered by the morbid reality of a possibly ripped pillow—your only sleeping device.
"Stop," you said, half-commanding, half-pleading.
I kept yanking at the pillow.
"No really—stop" you yelled as you ran and grabbed the other side and started yanking that. "Stop yanking it, you're going to rip it!" you yelled again.
"You're yanking it too, you Hippo Critic!"
"Yeah, but I'm yanking it in the right direction, which is towards me. You're yanking it in the wrong direction, which is at you!"
"Hey, do you hear that?" I said again. Through the door I could make out the lyrics to the melody I heard before.
"Balloons and confetti, and maybe machete,
toys you can't buy in a store…"
"All I hear is the sound of you ruining a good pillow. At this rate, it's not even gonna make a sentence anymore if you rip it completely in half," you said to me.
In one dramatic final blow, I grabbed the pillow so tightly within my fist that it sunk through my fingers, bulging white like layers of fat between my fingers. I pulled it as hard as I could and a giant seam tore straight up the middle. Then I flew backwards as the strings totally broke. Confetti burst forth from inside the pillow.
"Fuck. Now what?" I said. "What are we gonna do?"
"Fill it again," you said.
"With what?" I said, though I already saw you choosing the solution of pulling sequential boxes of Cheez-its from the void and filling it up.
"Hey, if you could pull Cheez-Its from the void, couldn't you just pull out feathers or a pillow or something?"
"Shut up."
"Hey, it's that song again. I think someone is singing right outside our door," I said. A deep, monotone, barely melodious voice sung.
"Dollies with strings, wind up things,
party decorations galore…"
"Hey, I know you want this void, but you can't have it. It's been passed down in my family for generations."
BANG. HACK. HACK.
"Hey, I think someone is knocking at our door. Really forcefully."
The sound of an ax being driven into the door repeatedly could be heard. The gruff, deep landlord's voice continued to sing:
"Duckies squeak and people scream,
trees get chopped and so do you…"
"I think he wants the rent or something," you muttered. Confused and irritated, you yelled towards the door, hoping to call the landlord's attention. "We've been here for 5 minutes. Shouldn't rent be due next week?!"
The landlord did not answer. All we heard was the continued thudding noise of the door being struck. Within minutes a hole small enough to see through had been chipped away, and I saw the landlord's eye glaring at me with intense malevolent focus.
"So where were we? Oh yeah, I hate you," you said.
"Yeah, that's where you always at! Oh man, this is like the time where I was so fed up with you going to the waterpark that I refused to go anywhere with you unless it was a freaking desert and so you said, 'okay, we'll go to the desert, man. We cool. We cool. I just wanna hang out with you bro.' Then I said, 'no way—you'll take me to the only waterpark called The Desert.' And you swore and swore in the name of the deity Christ almighty lord god trinity priest, and I have no idea who that is but you swore to them anyway that it was not a waterpark that you were bringing me too and I believed you like the fool that I am! And there we were gettin' in your car of lies again and I even checked that shit thoroughly for floaties, water noodles, swimming trunks, coolers, bathing equipment, beach umbrellas, and anything that could ever possibly be found in the swimwear section of Wal-Mart—I even checked for chlorine tablets! I knew to check for chlorine 'cause of that time when you were like 'I swear I don't have any pool equipment in here' and it turned out that those thousands of Poland Spring bottles that you had in your car were for the creation of a spontaneous pool using the millions of chlorine tablets you had tied to the bottom of your car! And while you were driving I thought it was weird that you kept stopping the car every five minutes to look at something, but I didn't suspect a thing! Fool that I was! And then when we were taking that desert trip I remembered, I remembered so well and there were no chlorine tablets or anything! We were really gonna have a great day in the nice dry sun and I would finally see the stars, and then when we were finally in the middle of the desert, when my back was turned, I was blasted by water! I turned around and saw that you were holding a hose whose end stretched all the way out to the infinite sun bound horizon and I was like 'How far does that hose stretch?!' and you was like, 'all the way back to the faucet at your house!' and I was like oh my fucking god how did I not see the massive hose attached to the bottom of your car that unraveled as we drove down the highway? Turns out you had been saving up for 20 years to buy enough hoses, sewing them together one by one, so that they could reach all the way to the Sahara! You bastard! You tidal wave asshole!"
"Yeah."
Finally the ax struck the deathblow and the door split in half, revealing the heavyset man that was our landlord. The sweat pouring down his face from the effort of destroying the door had smeared his clown makeup so that it dripped down his face and pooled around his shoulders in a mess of white and red. Rainbow streamers were draped around his flabby arms, the tops of which, in addition to the strap of his white tank top, were stained with his stray make-up. His shirt was also stained in yellow splotches by previous episodes of extreme sweatiness. Strings tied to his ears stretched straight upward, perpendicular to his horizontal tufts of hair, ending in festive helium balloons floating a foot or two above his head. The ax head rested upon the floor, the handle gripped by his hands like a cane. He stared at us intently, his immobile will burning in his eyes. In a gruff voice he released the last lines of his song from his frowning maw.
"Ivan loves to party,
so let us get started,
I am coming to murder you."
As the landlord approached us slowly, dragging his ax behind him, I looked at you curiously. In my peripheral vision I could see him hoisting the weapon over his head.
"Hey Axel," I said. You looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
"He's got an Ax," I said. "Heh, heh."
He lifted the blade, and swung it with all of his strength toward my forehead.