Disenchantment 30

He turned back to the older woman. “Mrs. Higgins. She is a postmaster, and you should talk to her about your ideas for changing the post office. She is just enough of a bitch to probably think it’s a good idea.”

 

With that, Mark got into his truck and drove away.

 

He considered going to the police station because he wanted more information on Nannette. He hoped that he could see her, but at the same time didn’t want to see her corpse. He wanted to remember her when she was full of life and not lying cold on a slab. He thought about calling Hornblende, but didn’t know how to do it with the exception of calling Nannette’s phone.

 

Mark decided to just go home. He didn’t even go back to the post office for his own vehicle, but drove the mail truck home. He parked it on the sliver of lawn near the curb, left the back completely open, and returned to his apartment, without a care in the world if people looted the contents.

 

Mark was happy to see that it was a little too early for Hector to be loitering outside in the courtyard.

 

The homeless people that were out on the main street had still not been able to crack the security code to the complex, but Mark wondered every time if they soon would.

 

The air conditioning had stopped, but Eddie seemed okay, panting heavily, but okay. Mark turned off the AC, then turned it back on, and it seemed to work, although sluggishly. That would not do, with Eddie alone in the apartment sometimes. Pugs could not handle extreme heat. He tried to call the landlord, but got no answer. No one answered any of the five air-conditioning repair places that he called. “That’s right, the world is ending.”

 

“Why the fuck did I go to work today?” He tried to feel upset that he lost his job, but just couldn’t bring himself to care.

 

Mark walked toward his old stereo system. He hadn’t turned it on in years. He pressed the power button and the Technics speakers hummed to life. It was top of the line a few decades earlier, with the Technics SL-1200 DJ turntable, but he had few LPs. He looked through his CDs, having over two-thousand of them, and stopped in the M section, for Metallica. “Kill ‘em All” seemed appropriate, but he grabbed “Master of Puppets.” And put the disc into the system. He had a carousel-type CD player that could fit multiple CDs. He hit random before he hit play, and cranked the volume up. This one goes to eleven, he thought to himself and forced a smile

 

The first song happened to be the title track. Mark grabbed his bottle of Johnny Walker and sat on the couch. Metal music tore through the air as Mark opened the bottle. He sat, listening to music, and smelling the Scotch.

 

Eddie was unfamiliar with music playing in the house, and at such volume. Soon, fear turned to curiosity as he approached the speaker sniffing. He seemed to decide everything was okay and started wagging his butt for a minute before taking a shit on the carpet.

 

Mark could care less and just smiled at his dog. James Hetfield’s voice rang out through the apartment and probably the entire neighborhood.

 

[ Lyrics removed due to site's policy on possible copyright infringement]

 

Mark took a drink, then another one. He thought he sensed a slight feeling, some hidden emotion creeping out from within him. The whisky burned through his system, and felt hot and well and appropriate

 

[Lyrics removed]

 

That poor girl. It’s all your fault, asshole. Mark took a long, hard pull from the bottle.

 

[ Lyrics removed ]

 

Mark shed a solitary tear that slowly made its way down his cheek. It was soon followed by many more.

 

 

 

 

*****

 

 

 

 

Tonight was the night that Floyd might meet the gods. Yes, it probably wasn’t the exact night, but it was the first of a group of nights where everyone had agreed that it might be possible, and he was going to be there if it happened. Something was going to happen, if not tonight, then very soon.

 

The Greek gods. Why did they have to be the ones? Of all the possibilities known and unknown from the Egyptian Aten or the Sumerian goddess Inana, both of whom were in some way responsible for creation, why did it have to be the Greeks, the most well-known mythology throughout contemporary society? That was excluding all prehistoric societies with little known about the deities they worshipped, only certain anthropological evidence remaining that those primitive peoples did worship something.

 

It did give Floyd some pleasure knowing that all the people alive today were wrong in the religions that they embraced. They all felt themselves to be so superior to others who didn’t worship exactly as they did. They were all wrong. They had shunned him and made him an outcast in society, all their values and superiority were for nothing, as they were all so terribly wrong. For all their talk of diversity and inclusion, they were still hypocrites and he was still an outsider.

 

Ever since he was a child, he was picked on for being small and scrawny. In adolescence, it was for being different and weird, a solitary teenager with solitary thoughts. As an adult he was mostly avoided by others, making them uncomfortable on the occasions he attempted small talk or almost any other form of interaction. He felt that he understood the human condition, but couldn’t grasp the subtleties of being a well-regarded member of society. The pack evaded him, so he had to make his way on his own through life.

 

He was still mostly scrawny. His height was just barely over five feet, his arms, legs, and neck still just as scrawny as ever with a head that seemed slightly too large for his body. His torso had thickened out over the years to the point that he had a rather large belly, which made him look all the more comical. He was a joke to others, something to laugh at and avoid, to communicate with only when necessary.

 

He had only been to college for one semester before dropping out. The Internet had started becoming popular when he was in high school, and was flourishing with a large amount of information by the time he left college. University couldn’t teach him anything that he couldn’t learn on his own and seemed to lack any sort of information that he was interested in learning.

 

He had never been close to his parents, and when they died, he didn’t feel anything at all. There was little communication going on the Benson household when he was young. Much of his social awkwardness and disdain for society came from the way he was raised. His parents rarely showed affection for him, and never showed affection for each other. They had to have been intimate at least once, as he had been conceived at some point, but by watching their behavior, one would never know that they had ever loved one another, or anyone else for that matter. The atmosphere was cold and utilitarian and not much else. There were occasions when a day could pass when not one soul in the household communicated with another.

 

He had worked construction for nearly a decade, until he fell from a second-story house. He had never been as quick or strong as his colleagues and had tried to compensate by ignoring safety, just to keep up, and he took a spill. He damaged his spinal column and the doctors told him that he was lucky that he didn’t end up a paraplegic. Still, some nerve damage had been done to his spinal cord, and he was placed on disability. His parents had died in a car crash and left him both a house and some serious debt. His insurance and social security checks allowed him to slowly gnaw away at their debt and still live relatively well. It had been a few years since he had felt any pain in his lower back, but declined to tell the doctors, claiming that it still hurt. He didn’t want to get back into the work, both for social reasons and laziness. So, he continued collecting disability and trying to learn the secrets of the universe.

 

Some people might describe the interior of his house as resembling a pigsty, but Floyd had little concern for that, as visitors were extraordinarily rare. He had removed very few of his parents’ belongings, and had acquired much of his own. The primary source of what some would consider mess, were stacks and stacks of papers. He was beginning to trust technology to save his files, as he backed them up in multiple places, but for over a decade he had a strong distrust of digital information storage. He had printed out everything he learned in physical form. Initially, the files were well-organized, by as time went by and more files appeared, the organization became less, until they were no longer organized at all, but stacked all over the house, even in the upstairs guest bathtub. He printed out less these days, but refused to discard any of his old files.

 

So, the Greek gods are the ones, the ones that might be real. That excited him and frightened him at the same time. Floyd Benson found no purpose with people. Yet, there had to be some meaning, and since as far back as he could remember, he wanted to know what that meaning was. All peoples throughout history had sought these answers. Sure, it was likely some of them completely fabricated their creation, but there had to be a reason that they all sought to believe something. Floyd felt that the gods themselves instilled this drive into man. From the dawn of man’s reign on earth, he had strived to explain his existence, but there had been no proof, just conjecture, or even insane thoughts and practices, but nothing substantial.

 

Floyd was excited because he wanted to learn about mankind’s creation. That would give him power. If the gods had this power, he could gain it too. Then, people would pay for the way that they had treated him.

 

Floyd was scared too, because he knew a great deal about the Greek gods, and he absolutely knew that they would not like his secret. Of course to them, if they were all-knowing, it wouldn’t be a secret at all. He still had to go. It was something he had to do, was destined to do.

 

Malbourne knew his secret too. Malbourne helped to force him to have the secret to begin with. The attorney had instructed him to have minimal contact with the others, and zero contact with the others without his presence. That was the reason that Malbourne was giving him a ride and not any of the others. Malbourne would pay for his bullying too.

 

Floyd Benson had been told about the death of the Chinese girl. Malbourne had been full of glee when telling him during their telephone conversation, but Floyd knew that the man hadn’t liked her. It had actually saddened Floyd to hear of it. She had been not necessarily kind to him, but respectful. She had listened to him and acknowledged his comprehension of the subject matter. In that act, she had done what so few others had ever done in Floyd’s life: she had given him slight hope in humanity.

 

It didn’t matter, he supposed. Floyd was about to meet the gods, about to discover their powers, about to hopefully become a god himself. Then people would see. Then people would know the true Floyd Benson.