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A Sickness Like No Other

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I AM SICK. THIS SICKNESS I speak of isn’t some incurable disease, like cancer or the common cold. It is beyond that. It’s like, well, let me give you an example.

I was walking down the street one day, and a thought occurred to me that the rubbish bins were conspiring against me. They weren’t talking out loud, but telepathically, and somehow my brain had been transmitted over into their telepathic channel. They were talking about rejecting anything I tried to throw away or tipping over as I walked by. They snickered and snorted, and when I covered my ears and tried to clear my mind they got louder and louder. The laughter penetrated my brain.

Someone touched my shoulder, a youngish looking woman, and said something, but the trashcans were so loud, I didn’t hear what she said, and she scrambled away as if I were bleeding from my eyes. And indeed, I was.

I’m not sure why these episodes occur, but it wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. The telephone booths and newspaper stands did the same. Laughed at me, threatened to get me into trouble. Giggle, snide, and jeer until my spleen felt as though it would burst and spill precious fluids onto the ground.

I remember, in horrific detail, the first incident in which the chortling and remarks came from the objects around me; I was at the bank.

I had a check in hand ready to deposit, and I heard someone to my left comment on the style of my jacket, and another about the way I walked. They all made fun of me. I turned and addressed a young man with a pierced lip and asked him to repeat himself. He told me he had asked if I wanted to go ahead of him. I smiled awkwardly and thanked him. Then it came again, only from the other direction.

“Look at that styoooopid hat, Aha! Aha ha ha ha ha!!!” A vicious cackling that set my teeth grinding. I looked at a small, mousy woman who smiled at me. She couldn’t possibly have said that. It was a deeper, masculine voice, rough and obnoxious. A voice and a laugh that made me want to beat my skull against the counter.

“Over here!” I heard and then a whole chorus of them. No one around me was talking, and that’s when I knew. It was the chairs, the pens, the piles of goddamned deposit slips. I grabbed my ears and they kept on. They laughed at me as I ran outside. Then the telephone booths joined in, and the traffic lights and the trash bins and everything!

People’s briefcases, newspapers, they all laughed, and I dropped to my knees crying and screaming, deafened by the incessant jeering. I looked at my hands, covered in blood and I thought I was dying. I was convinced it was seepage from my bleeding brain.

The shrieks of hideous laughter did not cease until I reached my lightly furnished apartment three blocks away. As I closed the door, a few jabs at my masculinity ensued from a lone armchair, which I hastily threw across the room. My own furniture had turned against me.

My apartment was void of furnishings by morning, and at last, my aching skull had a silent break from the insanity of the streets. The only thing I kept were the appliances, which hadn’t started in on me yet. They didn’t seem to hate me as much, or at least they didn’t tell me. Perhaps they would stay faithful.

My sickness, as anyone can clearly tell, isn’t quite the type of sickness one might think of when the word is used. My doctors tell me to get more sleep or take a vacation. How can I when my seat on the plane would laugh at my very existence? And sleep, I only wish I could. My back is tormented by the hard wood floor. I’d tossed my bed out, you know, and I haven’t the courage to purchase an air mattress. It would most likely taunt me in my sleep, if I could indeed sleep knowing an ‘outsider’ was inside my apartment. That’s what I called them. Outsiders. And knowing they could not get in was the greatest comfort.

It happened about two weeks after I had been locked inside what I now refer to as my sanctuary. I heard a titter, a giggle, and before I knew it, the blender and coffee pot were in on it too. I tried hard to ignore them, I tried to tell them to shut up, but it made them double their efforts. Mocking me with shrill, taunting voices.

I ran to the bathroom, certain there would be blood pouring from my eyes, I could feel it. But there was none. My face was perfectly normal, aside from the dark circles under my eyes and weeks forth of beard growth for lack of shaving. I rubbed my eyes and looked at my hands, blood. Blood all over my fingertips. I snatched a look in the mirror again, no blood. Was my mirror, too good for words, distorting my own image of myself in the reflective surface?

I laughed at myself. The whole thing was ludicrous. Inanimate objects couldn’t talk, or laugh or shout, “Hey, you stupid fuck face!” as you scuttle down the sidewalk.

I laughed, and it felt good to laugh. I threw my head back and opened my mouth as wide as I could and out poured the loudest laugh that could ever exist. My soul was insatiable, I kept laughing. I laughed so hard I had to sit on the floor. I laughed until I pissed my pants, and then kept on laughing at having done so.

I laughed at how I laughed, I laughed at how suddenly I didn’t feel so alone, that maybe I was one of them. I crawled, laughing, into the kitchen and placed my hands on the counter and laughed into the faces of the blender and then into the coffee pot and then the microwave, and the stove.

I laughed until I realized I was laughing alone, and when I stopped, just as abruptly as I had started, they were whispering.

They whispered that I was crazy. That I needed help and they should call someone. They whispered about how they didn’t realize I was like them, one of them. They whispered and whispered until their whispering was an unbearable hiss in my ear. I screamed at them to shut up, and for once they listened. I told them how it was going to be. How they would shut the hell up and quit bothering me. I screamed, nothing really, just yelled as loud as I could, and not a peep from them. They had been silenced.

I got the nerve to go outside after the appliances in the sanctuary had learned that I was in control. As I stepped out of my apartment, I heard a single voice.

“Excuse me.”

“SHUT UP!” I screamed into the face of a lovely young woman. She cringed and started to hurry away, but I stopped her. “I’m sorry, I’m under a lot of stress.” I tried to keep it simple to avoid having to explain everything, although I wanted to tell everyone about my accomplishment. How I was now in control of them!

“I heard you screaming, are you all right?” she asked me, standing halfway down the hall.

“Yes, I am just wonderful!” I clicked my heels and started down the hall as well. As I passed her, I tipped my hat and grinned. A grin that would soon fall flat. For as I stepped outside, there was not a soul on the street. Not a car, not a sound. It was eerily quiet, and very still. No breeze at all. A gray sky blotted out the sun.

A panic welled inside my chest. My heart pounded, and my breath quickened.

“Where is everyone?” I yelled as loud as I could. Then they started up again. Yes, them. The ones who took away my sanity. They all spoke at once, like one giant rehearsed ‘surprise!’ for someone’s secret party, but they didn’t yell surprise.

The people didn’t jump out with streamers and pointy hats. They didn’t even sound excited, but morbidly harsh. They, all at once, screamed, “they are dead!” and then they laughed.

They all sounded different, it was a jumble of mixed laughter. Crazy loud laughter, giggles, chuckles, chortles, my head was full of laughter, and I could do nothing but stare at the emptiness of the streets and sidewalks. I ran back inside and there she lay.

The wonderful woman who asked, who cared, if I was all right or not. The stranger from somewhere inside my building. A stranger who cared. Lifeless on the maroon carpet of the hall, her golden curls caressing her face like angel wings.

She was dead.

Nothing brutal, nothing hated, but dead as if the life was sucked from her lips. I ran to the other apartments and beat on doors, yelling to let me in. I kicked open a couple and saw the inhabitants all lying mercilessly dead. I was the last one. I was the only one left. They had done this. The inanimate objects. I ran back inside the sanctuary and called a random number. No one answered. I tried another, again, no answer. I called 911, and a voice picked up.

“Hello, Horace,” it said. “They are all gone.” and the line died, too. I slammed my phone down and no sooner had I done so than it rang.

“Hello?” I asked abruptly. “Who is this? Hello?”

Nothing, silence. But whoever was on the other end was breathing, so I knew they were there. “Are you all right?” a voice asked. It sounded like the woman who lay in the hall. I dropped the phone and ran into the hall once again. She was gone. I ran to the fourth door down, taking a wild guess that that would be her apartment. I knocked greedily, and the door opened.

“Can I help you?” It was her. She was alive.

They all had to be alive again. I laughed hysterically and grabbed my hair. I knew my eyes were bleeding but didn’t care because I wasn’t sure if it was visible on the outside or not.

I wandered aimlessly down the hall, bumping into the walls, stumbling and almost falling. I went outside, and it was all normal.

Everyone was there, the cars, the street kids, the businessmen. They were all there, but not them.

The ones who taunted me were silent. I started to laugh again, a laugh that pasted ‘lunatic’ across my forehead in bold, capital letters. Someone had called an ambulance and the paramedics pushed passed me to get inside. I stayed on the front steps of the apartment building, and when they came back out, the stretcher had a body on it, sheet covering the thing and all.

A gust of wind picked the sheet up and flapped it back. I screamed.

I screamed as loud as I could. I screamed and clawed at the body, at the paramedics. I screamed until my throat hurt and I couldn’t breathe.

They were loading me into the ambulance.

They were taking me away.

I was dead. Dead and gone. Just like everyone else.