Among methamphetamines, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, a teenager sadistically explores his environment and conscience in an attempt to find meaning in his world, within this universe. Displaced and dispassionate, he embraces the attrocities of murder and necrophilia while coming to terms with his own ill conceived soul. Some things should never be born.

The Physics of Madness

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 PSM
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4389-8212-0

Chapter One

1.1.1

I hate the salty roads of winter, especially after a couple days of wet snow. After the rusted cars of this county had ground the dirt and assorted cigarette butts into the asphalt, the hazy sun of winter would then bleach the unholy mess into some stained memory of regret and shame, and the whole image ultimately becomes a reminder of how days ago children played in their front yards watching the snowplows clear away the purity of heaven's gift so their parents could get to the places they so desperately needed to go. Maybe the salt just exaggerated the fact that I hate roads-not just any road, but the roads in this county. In seventeen years, they've led me nowhere.

With the sensation of salt being ground into a freshly slit finger, I recoil at the thought of how this all began. Call it desperation; call it a pathetic inability to motivate myself to see beyond the valley in which my county, my self-proclaimed hellhole, lies: whatever it may be, I just can't visualize anything beyond those signs that state, "You're leaving Morgan County." They're a figuratively cursed wall: a reminder of the confines of my prison. Often, I've joked that this is purgatory. Occasionally, that rare moment when someone was within earshot, my words would be validated-This is hell.

That opening into a potential conversation would begin and end with those introductory words and a familiar glance of disdain and distrust.

I have vague memories of studying the Greek gods and goddesses from the books I had stolen from the school library. I remember Aphrodite the best. In sixth grade, the thought of her fueled my nights of lust and desire, lonely and dispassionate.

I've masturbated to my vision of her; I've jerked off while dreaming of a goddess.

I'm sure more than a few God-fearing people would cringe at the thought of a man ejaculating to such a beautiful vision, a vision of unadulterated beauty. The sacrament of godlike figures is generally revered despite orthodox differences. The fundamental acceptance of fate and God allow for a baseline of spiritual faith, a foundation for hate.

Aphrodite was always naked while emerging from the Black Sea. She desired me and would consume me, as if I were her possession. My fantasy wasn't about love. It wasn't so much about sex. She'd just devour me, undulating in orgasm. I was her sexual toy-flesh on flesh. Our orgasms defined an element of cosmic origin: perverse in its desperation and incongruity, we were in synchronization with simplicity-the basic elements of creation.

Her genitals were wired into the cosmos, the incomprehensible Big Bang.

I had enough sense to know that I could never possess a goddess. I'm no Adonis; I'm a pathetic mortal who continually pounds his head against the asphalt roads of this county. That's what allowed my fantasy to exponentially increase in its intensity: my lack of control.

Aphrodite repeatedly used me as a dominatrix would use her submissive. The salt water of the Black Sea, on her breasts, tasted like the guilty pleasure of sin; I repeatedly suckled them-as often as she'd allow.

The further I succumbed to my fantasy, the saltier her breasts became; and, as I ventured further into the depths of her temptation, the less I experienced life. At least, I didn't embrace the core essence of it: relationships with those who are similar to you.

With each explosive orgasm, I became more removed from humanity and my seemingly irrelevant purpose in this universe. Within each of the billions of galaxies, there are over a billion stars. For each star, there are unknown possibilities for planets. Somewhere among it all, there's Earth; there's this county; and then, there's me-resembling nothing.

If only I had the talent, I would have chiseled away at a marble slab and created, for the entire world to share, my vision of perfection: my sweat and inspiration immortalized in that stone mined from this miserable planet.

1.1.2

Morgan County is occupied by 3,000 or so other people. The elders seem content enough. They're just waiting for their hearts to finally give out-literally and figuratively-nothing fancy. Just one day, their thoughts and memories would converge into death before falling into nothing. That's it. They're laid out in a casket or run though an oven at a crematorium. I've never confirmed it, but I have always believed that the smoke that I sometimes saw from some town, unknown miles in the distance, was the last vestige of the unknown dead. I've been curious, but the roads have not led me there because, as I said before, I ram my skull into that wall of "You're leaving Morgan County."

Maybe it's obvious, but it bears mentioning: The signs don't offer the platitude of come back soon or anything like that. You're just leaving, and those who are leaving are quite happy to be doing so. The smell of rubber burning against the asphalt as the accelerator is ceremoniously slammed to the floorboard of the car, as a beer can is tossed out the window, is the last memory a lot of children have of their daddies.

Many fathers have left on a quest for bigger and better things. It sure sounds nice, but one look at the hapless mothers and their hapless children more accurately conveys the reason behind the long-forgotten daddies leaving: they just wanted out of their miserable existences. I don't doubt for a minute that they are miserable somewhere else, with another knocked-up one-night stand, ready to move on; but, all that lies elsewhere, beyond my self-imposed walls.

Maybe I care. More likely, I don't. Regardless, I can't help but dwell on those possibilities when I see a young child-dirty, smeared with gunk and stale chocolate-trying to hold his mother's hand, attached to arms scabbed from months of picking at the methamphetamine bugs crawling beneath her skin. To that child, Mommy is beautiful. To me, she's ugly-a wretched remnant of what shouldn't be.

But don't get me wrong; she's beautiful enough for a drunken man every weekend.

More children will be born into this county. More men will leave.

Obviously, childhood and its innocence are quickly lost here. The local park is seldom used by those it was intended for. Hypodermic needles and beer cans are strewn about the weeds and dead grass. The swings are rusted and mostly used by the lone teenager who needs a place to smoke a joint. I've sat on those swings. I never smoked, but there I have sat-despondent and void of any legitimate desire to be anywhere else. It's not as if the swings were comfortable, but the essence of what I understood to be my soul lacked the energy to motivate me into relocating. Certainly, one step followed the other. It's a standard progression of anatomical movement with legs and feet working in unison to transport a body-a head, all the parts that constitute a person-to some thought-out location with, in a perfect world, a happy meeting of desire and resolution. But, what seems obvious is often lost within the quagmire of stagnant thought. When the concept of becoming something greater than what is presently experienced has become that fabled fallacy of those pathetic dreamers who only exist in books, the soul becomes stagnant-virtually dead, like the depths of the Black Sea.

It's not as though home's any better. The rust, the oxidation on the chains of those swings, only reminded me-and most anyone else who has sat where I sat-that the storm doors of home were also rusted.

Hell,...