Psychonaut: latitude 0°

Chapter #2. Just A Routine Spacewalk (Rough Version)

Back in the 70’s

         My mom, she looked so beautiful in her blue and white Corduroy, jacket. I loved her as much as a little boy was allowed to cherish his mother. I mean, not in a sick way.
         The best way I could describe my mother was, she was born with herself destruct button taped, pressed on full destruct mode. I never understood it until she was gone. I let go of what deep seeded behavior we had come to share, only to find it, one last showdown.
mac&cheese and corn dogs, she gave me some kind side stare, “When you were smaller, you were a nightmare! At the end of the day you had me in tears!” An amusing anecdote ?



Family, instead of offering a kind helping hand, they preferred a subtle fuck you stance lathered in tones of witty hypocrisy.

Just A Routine Spacewalk

         According to the troubleshooting section in my binder, red colored tab number 52-000-1-0, by swapping two "R.A.E. - 920" cards, located at the base of the ship´s transmission module, that should restore communications.
         I have to go outside...
         Since I, so badly in need the human contact!
         Then again. In my current condition, it´s pretty difficult to trust myself. All the damn emptiness inside! Year into the next, decade after decade, my life seems to be one long road to hell. The pitch-black hole in the middle of what little of my tattered soul I might still be able to save.
         My state of exhaustion actually boiled down into resignation to continue, just press on. Why bother?
         Why?
         I just wanted to fuck off, drift away into all that black nothingness. Deep into the void that pretty much identifies with what´s been my life.
         Become an eternal corpse, a rigid castaway, without a destination. A real and deep urge to end all this chaos around me. My lack of belief in a future, hope, has taken over perhaps?
         What is pulling me into this, darker plane of thinking. Solitude, a need for purpose? Human contact.
         Anyhow, I’m still obligated to spacewalk, repair the module by swapping two shit cards and re-board.
         Screw this bull! If it wasn't because I don´t have absolutely nothing better to do. It becomes obvious I´ll end up doing it.
         I wouldn't be able to tell you what the hell I might do once I´m out there. Perform a leap for humanity of my own! It would be a leap of freedom, "Hmm, one small step for man (cretins), and one giant leap as far away from mankind, and all the meaningless crap they offer anyone as credulous as me…”.
         Then, no more nothingness for me! No dry thump of my boots slamming onto the ships inside panel floor. That feeling of relief, accomplishment.
         You know. Though I would have wanted it all to bring a bigger bang in the end, as it would probably turn out to be.
         I might stroll my way across the hull of the ship, perhaps even vandalize it with gibberish, profanity, maybe a big "Fuck off guys!! You all deserve what "W.R.A.T.H." is bringing! You know release my sociopathic side alongside mi inner teenage childishness.
         The big navy-blue binder indicates me to exit the ship through the tail latch. Spacewalk past the fuel tanks, climb the communications tower that will be right behind said tanks. Then to replace the couple of fresh electronic cards for the ones that met their life span.
         My life span was in turmoil, I was sure I had dealt with it.
         I’m a procrastinator, so I’m still fitting my harness a good 39 minutes from when I originally wanted to take my walk. It’s not like I’m going anywhere; I’m simply blitzing into a possibility.
         Uncertainty is a killer a vague fog across the cosmos! Will I make it? Shall I just become another nothing, forgotten a hundred years from now instead. I just don’t bother with my internal chatter any longer.
         You just drop hope, that was what I decided.
         I hooked my safety line to the ship; time seems slower for me out here. I begin my climb down towards the bottom side of the tail. My own breath is all I can hear. White bar after white bar leading me over the possibility of delivering all my current conundrums into the very embodiment of emptiness, solitude, the escalating self-conflicts, the void.
         I can see my reflection in my helmets visor, a man I could barely recognize staring back at me, time had obviously laid its pale hands upon me. Was this journey worth it? Am I still young enough to make any difference in what´s left of my life?
         Now that most of it is gone.
         I begin to loosen the bolts that held the cover of the module, and the solitude comes over me, a death like peaceful silence, the blaring white off the hull, the nothingness, so still, peaceful. A distant shimmer caught the corner of my eye. A shimmering far away within the abyss, If I had to say it seemed greenish, a phantom green if I was forced to say.
         The workday dredges on, in the emptiness, the vacuum of absence just outside my helmet ready to kill me in an awful way. Again, the green shimmer was just a spec from my perspective, it was just there, still. Pulsating like some stars do. I turned my back to it, and I felt that cold wet finger down my spine.
         Was I feeling watched?
         At last the job was done, and my aching body was in plane agreement. I did the whole procedure backwards to get back to the ship, but I stopped at the hatch.
         With a bit of effort, I turned my body to starboard side, and it remained suspended there facing the black emptiness and a green speck holding its own so far in the abyss. At times it gave me the impression it was getting bigger, or closer...
         I couldn’t restrain myself from staring at it. A feeling of untethered guilt crept up my gut. I felt a soul wrenchingly awfulness for not being with my mother when she passed. Having left her house after our last argument over her health, the last of many attempts to get her health in shape. "Mom, I'm really not going to sit here and watch you die...", were my last words for her.
         Oxygen is running low, lower than I’m comfortable with! I see her dead face, bloated and purple lips, far from the mother I once had, a sullen sigh of who she ever was. I´m forced to remember all those little square I.D. pictures. A totally unintended show case I had put together days after she died. I could finally see just how profoundly sad and mistreated she really was. Plain as day Mom anyone could see the miserable and bitter she got as time passed.
         Why think of this tragedy right now? My breath began to become a little more difficult, I tell myself that she wanted to die, she deliberately put herself that situation.

*** + ***

         I’m back at the farmhouse somehow. It’s pouring as usual in December; it was a wet sad afternoon. My mother, confined to her dining room chair, bent over the table, where she slept, chain smoked, played on her i-pad and waited.
         My mother was overweight, smoked three packs of cigarettes a day while having EPOC, took a ton of opiates, thyroid trouble, and to boot she couldn't lay down flat on her bed anymore, so she slept only three hours a day.
         She had managed to convince her usual taxi / delivery driver to take care of a leg wound, a skin wound the size of a quarter and now consisted of her not having skin covering the whole back side of her left calf.
         Mom just didn’t trust doctors anymore, plain and simple. “They are butchers! How many times have I almost died because of those wackos! They are quaks, Mike! The whole lot of them!” In a way she was right, doctors tend to play along with big pharma, not focusing on healing the patient but, on what pills he could push on his symptoms.
         But obviously I knew it was serious. I mean, no skin! Just a puss covered dumbfounding wound. The milky and yellowish nastiness seeped down her leg and made a pool of puss around her foot. She had put towels beneath it to catch the mess.
         The particular moment I was in, it was time to clean her leg. Once they had her foot in a wide blue plastic tub, and plenty towels laid out. And the taxi driver began to wash all the puss down my mom’s leg with a syringe and some intravenous fluid.
         I was held hostage to my thoughts, and speechless. My mother had such low self esteem she didn’t want to bother with whatever it was that she had. Like an abused dog, who only knows life at the end of a chain, the pain of the rod, and the teeth of those who told her to be her blood, what does it matter. Some people after years of being over protected, enduring the blatant disregard of her own father, abused by men, some people just get tired.
         Then the cleaning with the swabs began, I noticed that the poor guy was doing his best as gently as possible, but she had no skin. What really shook me were my mother screaming in agony, even childlike from the intensity of the pain, her pleas for it to stop. It became nonstop, my mom wailing, wailing in a different voice than the one I always knew before her thyroid problem. I left the room, and stood in front of the window, the rain was still pouring down onto the ground, and nothing made sense.

*** + ***

         A tooth jerking headache, my eyes could only make out a blur, my ears were buzzing. I was back on the ship, my lungs yearning for air, I made an effort to use one eye, so I opened the right one, and it was still there. I let myself fall back inside completely, slapped the hatch closed and before I knew it, I was passed out.
         Conceit there was unease, that feeling of someone or something watching me, they can see me. Not with their eyes, or its eyes. I’m so confused, disoriented, I feel totally debased. Whatever it is that’s out there, is the source for this increasing malaise. So I head in the opposite direction.