The Call of Cunthulu

Actual picture of Rachel’s soul

“the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth….Then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”

~H.P. Lovecraft describing my sister

About a month ago it was all I could do to console Natasha -my sister’s step-daughter, by her recent marriage to a man she had known for approximately three weeks. My sister Rachel announced, in a huffy disgusted voice, that she just had to “get out of here,” and when my new niece wanted to go with her, Rachel promptly told her no. When my niece persisted in her desires, Rachel told her that if she kept acting up she was going to give her back to her junkie mother and make her live in the streets. When this made Natasha cry, Rachel’s threats became even more vicious. Rachel told Natasha that her cries were “really fucking annoying” and she was “this close” to taking her back to her mother. For those of you who have forgotten, Rachel bought Natasha from her meth-addicted birth mother like a toy for the sum of $500. And like a toy, Rachel has grown somewhat tired of her.

As I heard this and left my room, I promptly picked Natasha up from the stairs, held her tightly against me, and patted her back. For the first time ever I told her that I loved her, and that I would always be there for her, and that I would never let anyone hurt her. Her sobs were so deep she couldn’t speak, but from the way her hands clasped around my neck like a pipe wrench, I knew that she needed to hear them.

As I tended to this more pressing emergency, Rachel quietly departed the house before I could slam her head through the nearest wall. Natasha cried for nearly an hour, after which I made her dinner -which Rachel neglects to do if she can’t find anything that takes five minutes to make in a microwave- and Natasha told me that she loved me too. Then we wrote the alphabet a few times, and she asked if we could play Zelda. I agreed that we could.

Rachel came home several hours later, and promptly shut herself up in her room. When the time came, I took Natasha by the hand and led her up the stairs to her room. Previously, I just walked her to the stairs and let her make her own way. That night however, concerned for her emotional state, I actually entered the room.

I nearly choked on the smell of rotten, musky piss. Apparently Natasha is a bed-wetter, and rather than actually wash the dirty sheets each morning, Rachel just threw them on the floor and laid down whatever she could find in their place. I spent that night doing four loads of laundry, and by the next day the smell of piss was mostly gone. I now make trips up to her room every day to make sure that matters do not fall into the same condition.

Still, lately I’ve found myself hating Rachel even more than I could ever have believed possible. I have been picking up all the slack from her short-comings and the feeling is intoxicating in its wickedness.

Over the past few months, I have been responsible for driving everyone where they need to be every day. When I pick up an odd job doing construction somewhere, over half of all the money I make goes to my father to help pay for food and other bills. I cook Natasha the meals Rachel doesn’t buy at fast food venues for her, and take care of house chores that need to be taken care of. I sweep the floors, I wash the dishes, I do the laundry, make sure the aquarium is working, and I feed the goat. When my father gives Rachel grocery money and she returns with hundreds of dollars in cookies and potato chips, I spend money on actual food. That’s my routine. That’s what life is like for me at home.

When I’m not working, my day begins at 3am. An alarm goes off and I march bleary-eyed, down the stairs to the kitchen to wait for my father. My father gives me a list of errands he needs run for the day, and with whatever fragment of my mind is actually operational at such hours, I make note of them for the rest of the day. Afterwards, I pick up slightly less than three hours of sleep waiting for it to be time to take Rachel to work at 6am.

Rachel, after being threatened with expulsion from the house, picked up a job working in a nursing home. Her job is to clean shit, and I find this, from a philosophical standpoint, to be a fitting occupation for her. She typically leaves herself somewhere in the neighborhood of four minutes for me to drive across town, and becomes violent if I drive at any speed under five miles over the speed limit. When I put forward to her that she leave herself a five minute window to be early in case anything happens, she gave me a look as if to say that I had suggested something on par with making love to a cactus. While commuting she generally eats several pieces of candy, and drinks at least one can of soda, only to leave the wrappers and can in the car when we arrive, expecting without any kind of acknowledgment or apology that I will throw them away for her.

I catch two more hours of a dreamless schizophrenic sleep, that never quite reaches the point of rejuvenation. Sometimes for whole weeks, I never catch a period of sleep over four hours, and it’s all I can do to keep my eyes opened.

When I get up again at around 9:30, I turn on the aquarium lights, and make sure the pumps haven’t quit working. I wash the dishes. I do the laundry. I sweep the kitchen floor. I do whatever it is my father asked me to do six hours earlier. Then at noon, I drive Natasha to kindergarten.

From noon to 1:50pm I have about two hours to take a shower, eat, and do whatever it is I want to do. At 1:50pm I leave to pick Rachel up from work. She is usually at least twenty minutes late getting out. Sometimes I have to wait for half an hour. While you might believe this means she’s a good-worker, a deeper more honest voice inside of my mind tells me that she does this mostly to annoy me.

I drive her home, and because she is late, she immediately needs the car to pick Natasha up from school at 3:00pm. I give her the keys and spend twenty minutes watching television, because I know somehow Rachel will stretch the ten minute commute to the school and back to about twenty five minutes, leaving me five minutes of time in which to drive across town and pick my father up from work. He yells when I’m late.

From 3:40pm or so on I generally spend time with Natasha, reading, making her food, or playing Zelda. Several weeks ago she told Rachel and her father that she wished I was her daddy.

By the time night falls my mind is too scattered to write anything that sounds coherent, because I know I only have about three and a half hours before I have to get up again and relive the same day.

Sometimes I work, and I like this. It gets me out of the house, and away from Rachel. I pick up a decent wage, enough to give something to my dad and keep some for myself. He uses it to buy gas and groceries. Although Rachel often goes for long drives in the middle of the night, for reasons she doesn’t tell anyone (although I have my suspicions) and often uses a quarter of a tank, and although she consumes about twice her body weight in food per day she doesn’t pay a red cent. Since being here she has spent $200 on groceries that did not come from my father. It came from her mother-in-law. I feel like I am subsidizing evil.

This cycle was disrupted briefly during the storm, which is the only reason I bother to write about it at all. Excepting Rachel and her husband, who don’t really like to contribute unless the matter at hand involves them directly, the whole family was occupied in clearing out the forest that had piled itself against our house. We have our problems, but we work when we need to. During the storm, my mother finally managed to track me down and get me on the phone for the first time in months. She confirmed what I had already dreaded. Rachel was pregnant.

I have a rule in life. Do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone else… but the second you become a parent it’s time to shut up and then buck the fuck up. Despite the fact that my audience is mostly older females, I’ll take a moment to remove the fourth wall, and give a word to my younger male readers. Firstly, do not have kids until you are able to support them both financially and emotionally. Wait till you are at least 30 and have a few years of life experience under your belt. Secondly when you have kids the part of your life that’s about you is over. You’re a parent. No more excuses. No more blaming your own parents for your shortcomings. You have taken upon yourself the most important duty any human being can ever have. You have become the chaperon of a living human being. Deal with it.

I don’t have a steady job right now. I work when I can find it, but I’ve made a decision. It’s more important to me to focus on writing than it is to have an abundant source of money. I’ve chosen to take this risk and accept a period of poverty in hopes of one day achieving a future reward for my efforts in the form of either publication or advertising dollars. That’s my decision, and since I carry my own weight, it involves only me. I say that only so that I make it clear where I am coming from.

To reiterate, because I genuinely want people to take this to heart: I don’t care if you are irresponsible. I don’t care if you are rude. I don’t care if you want to sleep with prostitutes, and I don’t care if you want to inject yourself with drugs… if it only involves you. The moment you add a kid into the equation, I will tell you with the blunt honesty of a Monopoly Card: “Do not pass go, do not go out to ‘have fun,’ go directly to fucking work.”

Rachel is going to be a mother in seven months. She has a husband who can barely speak let alone work, who already has two children by two different women. She has the emotional maturity of a three year old girl in the princess phase, and the only items she owns of any non-essential value are pieces of serial killer or Nazi memorabilia, which she finds fascinating.

Yesterday when I drove her to work she was later than usual. She had left herself with only three minutes. On the way out the door she told me that she could make the drive in five minutes. I said “I don’t give a fuck,” and got in the driver’s seat. Ever since I found out about her baby, just looking at her is painful.

Rachel told me, like a boss reading a list off to their secretary, that she needed me to bring her lunch at 10 o’clock. I had been planning on catching up on my sleep and I had a story to finish. She became hostile when I asked her why she just didn’t make a lunch at home. I thought of the baby growing in her stomach and grimaced. I said I would try.

Unable to get back to sleep, I finished “Stranger than Fiction” had IamRob of Freak Safari edit it, and then promptly passed out after its publication. I slept in past 10 without any inkling of remorse. I had a dream of raising a nephew named Sky-Walker. I was his uncle, and after I told him he couldn’t join the Imperial Army, I was killed by strange desert aliens. Only his father was not Darth Vader. His mother was.

I brought Rachel lunch when I picked her up. It was warm at 2:00pm but cold by the time she actually came outside. She looked at it in disdain, and told me that she would have to get something else. She did not say thank you or imply her thanks one time.

In fact, she was furious at me. Despite the fact that this whole schizophrenic sleep cycle is solely for her benefit, and that she has not stopped to thank me one time. Despite the fact that I am under no obligation to her whatsoever. She told me that I had not only failed her, I had failed Natasha. She had wanted me to take Natasha out to lunch too, because there was no food at the house. I told her there was cereal, peanut butter, jelly, and bread.

She looked at me the same way offended Ann Coulter looks at Alan Colmes as if smelling a piece of animal shit. “Like Josh is just going to look in the refrigerator to find food.” Her tone was that of a smarmy genius speaking to a village half-wit.

“Do you understand how ridiculous that sounds?”

She then claimed that out of some sense of nobility her husband (Josh) would not eat any food she had not bought. Having seen him do so at least several thousand times I could scarcely wrap my mind around what she was saying. And this, I thought, is the kind of thinking she will use to rear her child. I choked it down like bitter vomit.

This morning, I took her to work again. She again demanded that I bring her lunch. This time she wanted it at 9:30am. “I’m busy,” I said. I could tell it wasn’t the lunch part that bothered her. She didn’t like that I had defied her the previous day, and wanted to exert her power over me once more.

“Doing what?”

I could have told her writing, but that would have been a justification, and I didn’t owe her one. “None of your business. You should have packed a lunch.” From her expression you would think I had told her I supported the murder of small children by means of torture.

“Excuuuse me?”

I thought of the baby turning in her womb. Unless there is a miracle in the next seven months, I know what kind of life it is going to lead. It is going to grow up like me, only worse. More maladjusted. More awkward. I was born with unusually high intelligence somehow, and that was my saving grace, but the odds of this baby getting dealt the same hand is slim to none.

We pulled up into the parking lot. My voice was dead-pan. “I’m done helping you. I don’t owe you a thing. My sleep is all broken up so that I’m available to drive you around, and you don’t even think to say thank you. I’m done. You’re ugly, stupid, poor, and worst of all you don’t have any class. I’m not bringing you lunch, I’m not driving you to work anymore, and I’m not picking you up. You contribute nothing to the house. You’re not my princess. I could give a shit whether you live or die.” During my speech she gathered, her things, and cursed non stop at me in a string of insults I couldn’t be bothered to hear. I had a fuzzy memory of childhood, of Rachel swiping at my face while I lay in bed, tearing open the skin and making me bleed. And now she is going to be a mother.

As soon as she left the car, I reached across to the passenger side, closed her door, told her to go fuck herself, and went home. I slept in until 9:30 when Natasha came upstairs to wake me up. “Rachel wants to talk to you.”

Not wanting to put Natasha in between she and I, I took the phone and told Natasha it was okay to go. “BC?” Rachel asked, hostilely.

“Yes?” I answered.

“I need you to go get lunch, get Josh, go to his mom’s house, get me some shoes and some pants. A resident shit all over me, and it’s an emergency.” Same old tone. Same old condescending voice. Same old little Princess… but with a bun in her oven.

“Have anything else you want to add?” I asked.

“No,” she said snidely, “that’ll be it.”

“I was looking for the word ‘please.’” The same word she didn’t say when I did all the packet work she needed to graduate from high school because my mother made me. The same word she didn’t say when she was gobbling down my groceries. To Rachel, “please,” “thank you,” and “sorry” are not words but only exotic, unknowable sounds.

“After the way you acted this morning I guess I really don’t think I need to say it,” she sneered. Stupid little Rachel. Rachel who did nothing but hurt me from the day I was born. Rachel who had only ever recalled those stories of blood and tears with laughter and never sorrow.

“Then I guess I really don’t need to help you out,” I said, hanging up the phone. I ignored the next flurry of rings and dug my head deep into my pillow. Finding sleep impossible, I got up and asked Natasha if she was hungry. I needed to take a shower, then I had to go get new parts for the Drier and pick up a couple of transcripts for my brother Bryan. The phone rang again. I looked at the caller ID. It was my father.

“Whatcha need Dad?” I asked.

An angry puff of air crackled through the speaker. “BC?”

“Yeah, Dad. What do you need?”

“Go get Rachel her fucking pants, bring her a fucking lunch, and-” The summers of my freshman and sophomore years I roofed houses with my father for free so that he could buy Rachel new cars to replace the ones that she had totaled. She was Princess only by virtue of his blessing as King of the household.

“Nope. I’m done.”

“Get your fucking ass in the car, or I’m going to have to take off from fucking work and do it!”

“You don’t have to do it either.”

“BC! Get your lazy fucking ass-” I hung up, and hopped in the shower. He doesn’t know Rachel is pregnant as of this writing. In fact, as I write this, I’m even looking at him, considering telling him. Whenever I think of the baby I feel dizzy and sick. There’s never a time to tell him when I don’t think the news will give him a heart attack. Anyhow, onward and upward.

When I got out of the shower, my father caught me just as I was hopping into the car. He had driven to the house with his girlfriend. He was so furious he couldn’t even speak to me. He yelled up the stairs for Rachel’s husband to come down. He looked me up and down, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to get Drier parts and pick up Bryan’s transcripts.”

“Never mind. I got it.”

“It’s just Rachel. I don’t mind getting stuff for you.” This is how my father generally works when I decide I’m not going to do something for my sister anymore. He takes away some other job from me to try to shame me into doing the other one. He did the same thing when I was bleeding and looking for an apology, as Rachel danced away with another fistful of my hair. Protect the Princess. Enforce her will. The Royal Imperative.

“She didn’t tell you she just had to say ‘please’ did she? It’s not a hard word to say.”

“It’s hard for all of us to say!” my father said so passionately, it took me a full three seconds to realize it didn’t make any sense at all, and was in fact, incredibly stupid and irrelevant. I thought of the baby turning over, hunched around its umbilicus. My knee spasmed.

It’s been five hours now since the argument. I’ll update this when there’s another go around. But I think IamRob of Freak Safari summed it up best. “Dude, you know what’s fucked up? When the best thing a woman could do in her whole life is abort her child.”

Christ. If I drank I think I’d be downing a bottle right now.

Update (12/16/07 12:24pm)

I told my father yesterday.

We were driving out to a construction site to do some masonry work. The drive is forty-five minutes, and it takes us down a lot of isolated roads, without any kind of distractions. When we have traveled a ways into the forest, I told him we needed to have a talk about Rachel on the way home.

He asked me why. I’m pretty sure he thought it was going to be about our fight again. I took a deep breath, told him there was something I had been needing to tell him for about the past week, and then, because I simply couldn’t hold it in any longer, said “Rachel’s pregnant.”

I had expected an explosion of emotion. I expected him to curse, scream, and then fall down on his knees and weep. He has been having heart troubles lately. I even wondered if the news might cause his ticker to simply give out. However none of this occurred. In the same way that an ant is insensible to thunder, because the magnitude of its reality is outside the scope of its imagination, my father’s expression betrayed no inner horror. The words had flown into his ear, passed through the part of his brain where the dread receptors lay, found them to be inoperable, and then simply faded into the background noise1.

When I asked him how he felt about, he simply shrugged and said, “Well there’s nothing I can do about it.”

And thinking “there’s nothing I can do about it” is pretty much the whole reason we’re in this mess right now.