the last epiphany

[PERRY BUCHANON]

without a drug habit, perry finds he has nothing to do with his days anymore, so he goes to class for probably the first time since at least his sophomore year. he sits in the back, hi, reeking of marijuana and summer lethargy, picking crispy dry summer leaves out of his hair. he rarely pays attention to the lectures - instead he watches, from his seat in the very back of the hall, high up, a perfect vantage point. he watches the people in his class and finds that every day the gaping emptiness in his soul gets larger and larger and his eyes become cooler and more remote - heroin used to be a fine way of avoiding all those big ugly unanswerable questions that haunted his childhood nights lying frantically, energetically awake... but now his mind is sharply unmercifully sober and there's no escaping it.
The Void Trumps All.

he's started reading, finally - it's only taken him about eighteen years to really appreciate the written word as more than just a nuisance. he reads neitzhe and freud and entertains his secret hopelessness with kafka and kerouac, but it doesn't help with the slow creeping soul killing apathy that had started to spin its intricate web around his heart. he doesn't find any of the answers to his innumerable questions in books, just more distraction, more frivolity, more proof of the inescapable ugliness of human nature.

he watches people during the lectures, observes their miniature tragedies and dramas of their simple and insignificant lives - a heartbreak here that means nothing to no one while it tears apart one individual ant soul in the giant cosmos of time and universe. who cares. someone fucks someone, cheats on someone else, robs this person, lies to that person. he sees it all.
can do nothing but smile blithely at the vast stupidity of it all, the pettiness and pointlessness of it all.
we're all dirt in the end, rot and dirt and dust in the memories of whoever comes after us.

he tries to go back to his old ways - reveling in the stupidity of it, in The Void because what else can he do? he sure as hell wont play along, so he might as well go balls to the walls and go down swinging (so he figures, so he tries to convince himself, but it's like he's aged twenty years and well fuck, he's tired)

he goes out at night in search of something to do, and it's only then that he really regains a semblance of his old frightening vitality. he fucks and fights and smokes grass, he forgets the faces that glide by him in the night in the glow of artificial lamplight, orange and ugly imitation of the real thing. he goes home drunk or bleeding or laughing hysterically and shoving his hands roughly down the front of someone's pants to try and force them to see what he sees but of course they don't. they all vanish by the time morning comes around anyway, and hungover, he reads and smokes spliffs in bed.

it's during one of his episodes that the despair finally really gets him, consumes him totally and completely. the stupid fucking rubber bands don't work for shit when he just suddenly feels it in class one day, a nauseating rush to his gut like someone's kicked him and tightly controlled agony prickling under his skin and oh, the want -

way in the back, no one can really see what's going on, because perry doesn't scream or hallucinate or jump wildly up and down like what might have been expected of him. he sits in his seat with his eyes wide open, painful wounded eyes of an animal beyond reason. his knuckles grip the edge of his seat until they're white and he's shaking and his head is filled suddenly with evil screeching and devils dancing in the costumes of voluptuous women and boyish men all lusting and screaming and devouring each other and him, devouring him and he wishes he could scream but it's like his jaw's been wired shut, all he can do is sit and rock slightly to and fro, seeing nothing but his own demented distorted visions of the pathetic, damned junkie.

the pain subsides.
the visions fade.
perry feels the emptiness inside himself spread cancerous throughout him, feels it in the sweat on his forehead, the nervous, pale-faced sweat of a crazy man or a prophet -

he tries to calm himself down by people watching but it's all too grotesque, and eventually he flees, banging the door of the lecture hall violently after him.
with a sob he realizes, completely ,the cold truth of it, it shatters his shaken soul right there in the middle of campus -

n o t h i n g n e s s.