My Appeal to all that is right and good

For the love of god and all that's holy (regardless of whether there is a god, whether anything is holy anymore; and of course setting aside any dialog about the relative merits of humanistic versus theistic discourse), please, please, please, can we please have another episode of You Look Nice Today already? It's been over 8 months. I might cry soon.

Check out the hell I created

General asshats
Circle I Limbo

Parents who bring squalling brats to R-rated movies
Circle II Whirling in a Dark & Stormy Wind

Osama bin Laden
Circle III Mud, Rain, Cold, Hail & Snow

Bill Gates
Circle IV Rolling Weights

Rednecks
Circle V Stuck in Mud, Mangled

River Styx

Jerry Falwell
Circle VI Buried for Eternity

River Phlegyas

George Bush
Circle VII Burning Sands

Scientologists
Circle IIX Immersed in Excrement

The Pope
Circle IX Frozen in Ice

Design your own hell

Surfacing

Abby took a left on Washington and then another quick left into the entrance of the Speedway station. She stopped short as a big blue Ford Explorer suddenly lurched forward, then eased up when the SUV stopped again. She peered in the passenger door window and saw the driver. He was looking in his side-view mirror, judging the distance from the pump to the side of his tank of a vehicle. Abby let off the brake and moved past him, gliding into a parking space at the side of the building. She felt a tiny release of satisfaction at her ease in finding a spot, and jumped out of her car with a little spring. She checked herself as she approached the door, seeing her reflection and instinctively reaching up to smooth down her hair. This too she stopped herself from doing after the briefest moment, perhaps a second or less – and also instinctively – on the chance she was being watched; and feeling foolish as she saw herself doing all of this she swung open the door.

Inside the gas station there was a small line at the register, which Abby noted and resolved to take her time picking out snacks. She moved quickly toward the refrigerated drink display and gradually slowed as she approached the diet sodas. The selection was crap. She consulted her mouth, which was very dry, decided on something non-carbonated, and moved a few more steps to look over the iced teas. They had the green tea Rick was always drinking, and she started to open the door and reach out to grab one before she had fully decided to buy it for him. She let her hand close around the cold bottle, but reflected on him at the same time, trying to decide how he would receive the gesture. Was it overly familiar? Three times she had been to his house. Rick was all frozen pizzas and green tea and car race video games and that weird smell in the basement level of his house, not altogether unpleasant, but with an unsettlingly indefinite origin. She focused in on his person, his face, his vaguely distant but grinning aura. She swiveled the tea bottle into a more cradling grip and imagined a gracious, sarcastic, decidedly Rick-esque comment on her presentation of the gift to him. With a quick afterthought she re-opened the door and grabbed a second bottle. Now he could be the afterthought.

Abby got in line then felt a pang in her stomach and quickly turned to survey her food options. Someone came in just then and approached the line, so she grabbed the nearest bag – pork rinds for chrissake – and turned back around toward the cashier, who was rushing to ring up the next person. Now committed to it, Abby tried to ready her taste buds for pork rinds. As she ran her tongue around her mouth to fend off her dry mouth she considered Rick again, wondering what he would think if he knew she got high before she came over for their little snacks-and-video-games sessions. Is this the kind of guy who gets high? She still couldn’t decide, even after two weeks. Probably used to, or maybe still does, but only rarely now. The inevitable comparison with her own habit came like a rush of oncoming traffic, and Abby actually waved her hand, as if to wave the thoughts away, and shook her head quickly. No sooner had she done so but she felt alarm that someone might have seen this and she turned her head slightly to survey the guy behind her out of the corner of her eye. It looked like his head was turned, so she relaxed and stepped forward to the cashier as the person in front of her moved away.

In Rick’s driveway there was an orange cat, which jumped up to move away, hesitated, then ran across the yard as she came around the curb and past the mailbox. No car in the driveway. Abby caught her breath, and then exhaled again when she saw the front door was open, with only the screen door keeping the bugs out. She pulled to the end of the driveway and gathered her things to go in. She looked in the rear-view mirror. Oh shit, redeye. She thought for a moment maybe she should leave it, let him ask, give it a chance to get out into the open, but then she thought better of it and opened the glove compartment and got out some Visine. In a moment, with dripping eyes, she got out of the car and made her way to the front door. She wiped her eyes and went in.

Rick was on the stairs when she came in, and walking past her, he hardly looked up as he announced, “You gotta see this pile of bugs on the window sill in my room.” She looked at him. He was grinning like he thought it was the funniest thing he’d said all day.

“I’ve got a shitload by my kitchen door,” she answered. She looked over at the door where she had come in. Sure enough, he had a similar pile of little bugs, like ladybugs but brown and black and not nearly as endearing, laying dead or mostly dead in front of the doormat.

“My buddy ate one yesterday on a bet,” Rick said. “He coughed it up after. It was nasty.”

Rick’s house – or rather his parents’ house – was a modestly sized and excessively suburbanite home. The front entranceway from which she had come in led to a large sitting room with thick carpeted floors. Puffy, comfortable-looking furniture sat untouched and lit by the sunlight which was now streaming through the sliding glass door at the end of the room. A well-kept lawn was visible through the glass. To Abby’s left was the kitchen, which was not separated from the sitting room by a wall, but by a counter space with two bar stools on the sitting room side. There was a waist-high kitchen island obscuring the oven from where Abby stood, and another stool was pulled up to this. To Abby’s right, opposite the kitchen, was a hallway leading to the bedrooms, and a staircase leading to the basement level where the play room was. This play room was Rick’s domain: it had apparently for some time been used exclusively for the purpose of playing video games; there was an enormous television keeping watch over the room which served as the portal for Rick’s daytime diversion.

Abby took out the green teas she had bought at Speedway and handed Rick one of them. He let out a hearty, “Nice!” and snatched it up. He was halfway through it before Abby could get out a few words of explanation, but he wasn’t listening anyway. He tipped the bottle upright again, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm, and said, “Meat Lovers’ in the oven.” As soon as he said it, she smelled the pizza, and it smelled good. Abby took a step forward, then looked around for a place to sit. She felt awkward, and she didn’t know why. She sat and waited for it to pass.

“You’re going down today,” he said, onto the game now, and launched into a string of commentary that went unbroken for a few moments. “I was on fourth level yesterday – fourth level! – and then my sister came in and stood in front of the TV right at the end, I could have killed her, and I was like, ‘Get away!’ and by the time she moved I crashed. I was like two seconds before the finish line. Two seconds! I swear to god. I was so pissed. Anyway, I’ve been practicing up so I can totally trounce you.” Here he changed his voice to a sort of demented, hunchback-of-Notre-Dame kind of voice, and repeated, “Trounce.” Then he burst into a short laugh and turned around quickly and opened the oven. She watched the back of his head. She felt swept up in his mood, but she also knew he was acting a little. She smiled anyway and decided to play along.

“You shall be rendered as less than the excrement of an eel!” came out of her mouth, and she laughed nervously. Rick was right there with his own laugh, though, and she felt her shoulders un-tense a little. Maybe he wasn’t acting. By now Rick was taking the pizza out of the oven carefully, and his hands were shaking a little. She watched him, pursing her lip. She distracted herself with a furtive glance at the pizza. Her stomach made a noise.

“Oh my god, I’m so hungry,” she said, perhaps a little too quickly.

She twisted open her tea and took a swig. It was heaven as it saturated her tongue, and she closed her eyes for a second, and then reopened them to survey the pizza again. Already the taste of the green tea was starting to let her down; there was something blunt about it, as though it had stopped short just before it finished caressing her. She swallowed and put the cap back on.

“So is that what you do all day, play video games?” she teased Rick.

“Totally.” He laughed again, less heartily.

“I suppose you wait around for someone like me to come by and entertain you.” No sooner had she said it than she regretted it, but she forced her voice to stay steady. “I mean, what am I, just some cheap entertainment?”

“That’s it. Yup. Now dance!” He made little pistols with his fingers and pointed them at her feet, which were by now dangling from the stool she was sitting on. He came around to the other side of the kitchen island and handed her a plate with a piece of pizza on it. She looked at it. It was sitting off to one side, and some sauce was smeared across the empty part of the plate. She felt a strong desire to photograph it. She picked up the slice of pizza gently and turned it from side to side in front of her face, deciding where to bite.

Rick’s mouth was full, and he was tilting his head back, his mouth slightly ajar, breathing quickly in and out, not chewing. He reached for his tea, which he uncapped and gulped quickly. He slammed the bottle down and breathed in and out loudly. “Holy shit,” he said. Abby looked at her own slice and appraised its temperature. She took a small bite and smiled at him to show him she was learning from his mistake. “Yup,” said Rick.

There were a few moments of relative silence while they ate, Rick going along a little more carefully but gradually building up speed as he devoured his pizza, Abby taking small bites and picking off little bits here and there that didn’t look right and arranging them carefully on her plate. She was cataloguing; organizing. There was a grizzly aesthetic about the bits of food. Abby briefly indulged herself in the fantasy that they were bits of flesh, of dissected animal parts she was saving for some future experiment. Then she was suddenly aware that she had stopped eating, that Rick was looking at her. She quickly took another bite and smiled a shy, guilty smile. Rick was apparently prepared to ignore it; he picked up his plate and put it in the sink behind him. He then patiently waited for Abby to finish, which she did hurriedly and handed over her plate. Rick rummaged in the cabinets and found an open bag of pretzels, from which he took a small handful, and shifting the bag to his arm so he could pick up his tea, he gave her the look that meant he wished to descend to the basement level. Abby followed.

The game was played mostly in silence, with only the sounds from the television and the odd comment to punctuate the stillness. There was something about this scene, the two of them sitting on the couch, Rick’s corduroyed leg propped up on the coffee table, Abby’s own leg within an inch or two but never touching, Rick’s face a silhouette, his bony hands crawling over the video game controller, that felt to Abby not arousing, not sexual, but intimate – pleasant even – and delicate, precarious. Abby tried to breathe it in, savor it. Things turn bad. You have to savor them. You have to push the imprint of them down onto the soft mold of your memory and make sure they stay, before they turn bad, and before the reality of life starts to eat away at the edges. You have to cling to the colors and to the shapes so they don’t get eaten away. But they always do. They always do.

Abby had to pee. She waited to the end of a round, then the end of the next round, then she announced her intention and got up from the couch, trying not to look at him watching her get up. She took the stairs quickly but quietly.

Inside the cluttered bathroom Abby checked herself in the mirror. She looked pale in the bright light pouring down from over the sink and she wondered if she was feeling well. When she had finished at the toilet and washed her hands she looked up again at herself. She performed a few of the mechanical operations of smoothing her hair. Abruptly she felt weak in the legs and she put her hands down on the counter to help support her weight. She lowered her head as she did this and exhaled into the sink. Disconnected memories of the day, of the past few days, and then gradually of more distant times began to come, and she let this happen, felt a vague hopefulness begin to gather in her chest, an undefined mass below her heart, pulling tighter and rising slowly upward. But no sooner had she become consciously aware of this than the flow of memories faded quickly into the background, and she tried to follow them, but they were somewhere out of reach and she was left with her hands on the sink in a cluttered bathroom. Abby stood still, feeling the thing in her chest gradually die away, and then after a moment she took a deep breath. She decided to wash her face.

Feeling a little refreshed and with a still-damp face Abby crept out the bathroom door. She didn’t know why, but she felt a desire to move undetected, to sneak unseen and unheard through the recesses of this place that did not belong to her. She hesitated outside the bathroom, and then resolutely turned to the right, away from the sitting room, toward the end of the hall where the bedrooms were. She came to an open doorway and saw a tidy master bedroom, bed made, a large television on the opposite wall, curtains closed, a dark stillness throughout. She turned from this room, and moved to another door that was ajar. This was clearly Rick’s room; she could see through the half-open door clothes strewn about the floor and remnants of a childhood spent in the same room – a short bookshelf with children’s books intermingled with science fiction novels; a red-painted dresser with large blue knobs for drawer handles. Abby squeezed herself past the door as quietly as she could.

She stood still inside Rick’s room and surveyed her surroundings. The bed was unmade; this did not surprise her. The closet door was half open, and she could see clothes hanging there that she did not recognize; however, on the floor near her feet was a shirt he had worn on her first visit to his house. There was a small desk by the window, and she made her way over to it. Pieces of paper were scattered on the surface of the desk, some with phone numbers scrawled in Rick’s barely legible handwriting, some with sketches of eyes and hands and trees. These she took a moment to look over, without touching them, but bending her head this way and that to view them right-side-up. They were very good. Not amazing, but there was real feeling in them, and this more than anything brought a sense of…was it triumph? There was something vindicating in the discovery of these drawings, like she had sought and won from him something others were denied, stolen though it was. She felt a smile creep across her face, and then her gaze fell on a short sentence, scrawled below the penciled image of a tree half-barren of leaves, bending slightly as though against a breath of wind.

She hesitated before reading the words, taking in the image of the tree in its fullness. It was drawn in pencil, with the ground below shaded to suggest grass, and with enough sharpness of detail and skillfulness of hand to convey a sense of life, of determination to win sunlight; in short, of the individual character of an individual tree, rather than a picture of a tree in an abstract sense. Above the tree were splendid clouds parting before a waning sun, and the tree itself stretched its remaining leaves up toward the last of the light. The suggestion of a breeze was not overt, but apparent, and the tree bent as if in deference. Next Abby let her eye move down to the text. Through Rick’s chicken-scratch handwriting, she identified the words, ‘Tomorrow never comes.’ She reread it a few times and let it take hold. It felt on one level bleak, but in a trite, self-absorbed way. At another level she saw a maxim, a prescription, but it too felt stale and pedantic. Abby shifted her feet a little and stood still again, looking down at the picture and the words. There was the glimmer of another meaning, darker and more complex, but she couldn’t pin it down exactly. She stood for another moment, chasing after it in her mind, but it quickly faded again and she came back to herself and realized with alarm that she had no idea how long she had been standing there. Abby quickly picked her way back across the room and stole out into the hallway.

Rick was still on the couch downstairs, engrossed in his game, when she came down the stairs.

As she descended he bellowed, “D’ya fall in?” in an exceedingly taunting voice.

Abby wrestled herself into a safe recess and put on a sardonic face. “You’re hilarious.”

“You playing?” asked Rick.

“I’ll wait for the next round,” Abby answered as she took her place next to Rick. Then she fought the urge to ask him about the pictures and the writing and watched the screen, uncomprehending and uninterested. She let the colors and movement on the television entrance her, offsetting her restlessness.

“Do you smoke?” she suddenly asked him.

“Cigarettes?” he clarified.

“No,” she answered, and tried only marginally to find more words. She waited.

“Sometimes. Why? Do you?”

Here she surprised herself again with a little expressive sigh, a sigh of reservation, and feeling this was not quite an answer she added, “Yeah,” but this sounded guarded.

“Do you do other stuff?” he asked her.

“No,” she answered, and then quickly, “I mean, nothing heavy or whatever.”

“Yeah, me neither,” he responded, and it felt as though there was now another link between them.

Just then Rick’s car crashed in the game, and he said, “Fuck,” but not in a tone of frustration, but rather something like complacency. He looked over at her.

She let his eyes fall on hers for the minutest moment before the feeling in her stomach was there and she had to look away. She stood up and began to wander about the room aimlessly. She made it nearly four or five clumsy steps before he saved her, utterly saved her, with one sentence.

“Just once before I die I want to go somewhere completely remote.”

This produced the sensation that all topics were of equal weight, of comparable relevance, and of relatively little bearing on the real world as it was occurring right at this moment. It was all back-story. Abby threw herself into this sensation.

“You wanna go for a drive?” she asked him.

“Yeah, I could use something to drink,” he replied, and she smiled faintly at the vagueness of the term “something” when it was obvious he wanted more green tea.

Laying in her bed that night Abby took inventory of her day, her world, her life, and in point of fact her worth, as she tended to do before drifting off on nights like this one. She believed in some recesses that she was ultimately a worthwhile person, which justified, or rather condoned, the frankness of gathering evidence of her own insufficiencies. On this night, however, something pushed its way through this storm of thought and resolved itself into the sun peeking out from behind the clouds in Rick’s pencil drawing. In her mind’s eye, Abby brought forth the tree now and let its character come back to her like a scent. She inhaled it deeply and extended this for a very long moment. Holding this image in her mind but loosely now, Abby rolled over onto her side and drew the blankets around her. With her tongue settled sleepily at the bottom of her mouth, Abby whispered the three penciled words to herself and considered them wearily, dismissively, before she fell asleep.