Timeline: Present
Point of View: Side Character
Location: Earth
Irving Barker was a short, angry little man. Man might not be the right word to use, either, because it suggests a certain level of maturity that Irving Barker certainly did not have. Irving could instead be described as a teenager masquerading as an adult. If he were to shave his patchy beard and cut his scraggly hair, one could legitimately confuse the man for a child.
He was thin and bony, with a face still plump and scarred with acne wounds. It could have been a genetic issue causing such terrible acne, though most that knew him figured it came with the part for such a greasy son of a bitch.
Irving lived in his mother’s trailer. Well, it was his trailer now. He’d somehow chanced into inheriting the house and the lot.
His mother had been both a drunk and a druggie. Irving would often come home to find her lying on the torn and stained living room couch wide-eyed and high out of her mind. Sometimes she was naked on the floor with a man he’d never met. Sometimes, even, she was passed out while the unknown man used her lifeless body. The men would look up at Irving and give him nothing more than a passing glance before continuing their duty while Irving passed by on his way to his room.
Then, miraculously, sometime around the age of sixteen or seventeen, he came home and his mother wasn’t there. As a teen, Irving expected her to show up eventually, either stumbling down the road from another house, dropped off by someone he didn’t know, or the police would show up at the door to pick him up while she finished a jail sentence. Yet none of those things ever happened. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and she never came back.
Now Irving was in his early twenties. He had a job and his own car. He picked up the bills, and paid them in his mother’s name. The lot manager knew what he was doing, but didn’t care as long as he got his check.
Irving had long ago decided he didn’t care where his mother was or where she’d ended up. For all he knew she was dead, and that was quite alright with him. She’d done her job. She delivered him into the world and fed him until he could take care of himself. That’s all parents needed to do. When the job was done, they could straight fuck off, just like everyone else in the world.
Now, Irving worked. He drank. He brought over easy lays then kicked them out. He ate. He got drunk some more. He shit and sometimes flushed if it smelled bad enough.
Yes, Irving was a greasy son of a bitch.
Despite this, generally Irving didn’t do too much harm. He kept to himself. He lived his life. He paid his bills and enjoyed his television. He fathered no children (that he knew of). He, to the appreciation of his neighbors, mowed his lawn once a month to keep the lot manager off his ass.
It can be said that half of the population in the world existed just to get in the way of everyone else. There are people who serve no other purpose but to drive slow and get you stuck behind a red light on your way to work. People who existed only so the store was out of your favorite soda pop and snacks, or didn’t have the shampoo you liked because every goddamn man in the world seemed to use campfire-smelling Old Spice shampoo. Most of these people would go through there entire lives serving no apparent purpose. They used up resources, oxygen, and heated the planet. Then they died, going out in death as they did in life, making someone deal with the mess they left behind.
But Irving, unknowingly, would eventually serve a purpose. Irving would impact the world in ways no one could have foreseen.
Some would say it would have been better for Irving to go out the way his kind typically do, either from a heart attack in his recliner with shit in his pants or on the side the road with his face carved up from windshield glass. If Irving had gone out in this way, then maybe things wouldn’t have gone down as they had.
Maybe Earth wouldn’t have gone to shit.
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It was late in the evening on Irving’s 29th birthday. On the counter in his kitchen was a half-eaten Walmart rotisserie chicken and a cupcake wrapper. He had a 6-pack at his side, one beer already cracked and half-downed. His pants were off, his bony and hairy legs breathing in the cool air. He still had his stained, white tube socks on because sometimes his toes got cold when he took them off. He had a small gravy stain above the left nipple protrusion of his t-shirt.
Irving didn’t really know what happiness or sadness was and mostly lived in a neutral area, but that night he felt content. Everything in the world was as it should be. He had a home, he had food, and he had the present he’d purchased himself. He was one year away from forty. His golden birthday.
At first he considered calling an easy hookup (not a hooker, he was above that - just an easy lay) and get a little pussy for his big day, but he wasn’t really in the mood for that. He was getting older, and sometimes sex wasn’t worth the effort for a thirty second release.
In his hand was a small packet, and in that packet were a few pills. He didn’t know what the pills were, but was told they’d give him the best high he’d ever had.
Irving wasn’t a druggy. He’d seen what the needles did to good ole mom, and so he avoided that stuff. Overall he thought himself a pretty normal dude in terms of the things he’d try. He smoked a lot of the green stuff, and enjoyed acid from time to time. Shrooms, when he could find them, were fantastic. He’d once tried molly, but once was enough of that. He’d seen the future when he took that shit, and it was not a good future. So he was all good with the light stuff. Irving just wanted to live and to enjoy what life had to offer.
Even so, it was his 39th birthday. He was getting to be an old mother fucker. It was time to celebrate before he hit the big four-o. He needed something a little bigger to ring in his old age, and he thought the pills would do just the trick.
He opened the pack and dumped the four pills out onto the mound of his boxers. They created a divot in the thin cloth and rolled to the center. He stared at the pills, at the different colors, at the numbers and letters engraved into them. He had no idea what those numbers and letters meant, nor what they would do to him, but he trusted the guy he bought them from. He seemed like a decent dude.
In the background, WWE carried on with shouts between Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes. It was mostly background noise, but Irving enjoyed watching the new guy Cody Rhodes quite a bit, and he hoped he destroyed that little bitch Roman Reins. He was hopeful that he would, because it felt like it was time for a new champion.
He scooped up the pills from the top of his underwear and popped them into his mouth. He downed them with a long swig of his beer that finished the can. He crunched it and tossed the can at the wall, then reached down to grab a new can. He popped the top immediately. He took that heavenly first sip, enjoying the crisp taste of a fresh beer, and set it beside him on the end table.
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He settled into his chair and watched the match, waiting for the high to take over. Nothing was happening, but he would be patient. On screen, Rhodes lifted Roman up and flipped him into a table. The table shattered beneath the large man. Yes, he thought, this was the moment. There’d be a new champion. He could feel it.
The pills were starting to work. He could feel vibrations in his fingertips, those subtle sensations just before the body leapt off the edge and into a true high. He sipped his beer again, then took several large gulps, eager to hurry the buzz along. He began to melt into his chair, could feel his heart beginning to race, the thud thud thud threatening escape from his chest.
He closed his eyes, then opened them suddenly. He questioned whether he’d locked the front door. He couldn’t risk someone coming in with him in this state. He turned to look at the door, but couldn’t really tell which direction the lock was facing because his vision was getting hazier. He wanted to stand and check, just to be sure, but when he put his arms up on the armchair and pushed, he could feel himself get top heavy. If he stood he would fall over, and that would be no good. It would be hard to watch the wresting match from the floor. Fuck it, he decided, let the world come in. It was his big day.
He closed his eyes and felt himself drifting. Drifting and floating along the pulses of blood along his eyelids. In the blackness behind his eyelids, he was seeing another world, a place of rest and relaxation, where he could endlessly slip through the void between life and death.
He abruptly opened his eyes. No, he didn’t want to sleep on his birthday, he wanted to experience this. He wanted to watch the match high. He wanted to enjoy, not miss out. He forced himself to keep his eyes open. Roman had Rhodes on the ground. When and how had that happened? It wasn’t supposed to be like that. Rhodes was supposed to be the new champion. He took another drink of his beer, but found the can empty. He didn’t remember finishing it. He reached over to grab another, but couldn’t find the box. He dug around on the floor. He grew frustrated. He looked over the edge of the arm chair.
There was no floor on the other side of the chair. It was blackness all the way down into hell. Irving screamed. He leapt back into the chair, holding himself flat against the fabric, scared to fall down into that nothingness. He wanted to feel the void, but not fall into it. The television in front of him was nothing but static now. It seemed the program had ended. But that doesn’t make sense. Television didn't end nowadays. That sort of thing happened back when I was still a kid.
Yet there it was: in front of him the television displayed only static, and it curdled in and out of his ears, a fat and thick hiss. The static began to bleed out of the television and onto the floor around him, and it wasn’t gray static anymore but bright red blood, pouring from the glass and engulfing him. He lifted his feet up from the chair and found that his socks were red and soaked. He ripped them off and threw them across the room, no longer worried about cold toes.
He closed his eyes, told himself to calm down. It was only a bad trip. He’d gotten them before. Never so vivid, yet he’d gotten them all the same. There was nothing to be done but relax and wait out the storm. He was disappointed because he’d wanted to have a good trip on his last birthday as a young man, but such was life.
Behind his eyelids, the room still felt like it was swirling. He felt like throwing up. He knew that he would if he didn’t open his eyes soon, but it was too early. He needed to slow his heart rate just a little bit more before he opened his eyes. If he opened them now he’d be back where he’d started, and the bad trip would get worse. The blackness behind his eyelids was becoming red as the light seeped in from the room through his fleshy eyelids. It was gradually becoming a bright red, and he felt hot, the high burning downward throughout his body. He was burning up. Eyes still closed, he ripped off his sweater and threw it to the ground. He still felt hot, so he took off his t-shirt, then his underwear. He didn’t care that he was naked. There was no one else but him in his apartment.
The redness behind his eyelids suddenly became black, and he could feel warmth emanating from in front of him. He opened his eyes.
In front of him was an eyeball, large and red, the pupil staring directly at him.
He leapt back and fell back over his chair. He hit the floor but was too high to feel pain. He stood, but found he was only in his room. There was nothing else, and WWE was still playing on the television. Roman had defeated Rhodes, but Irving didn’t care. He had to get out of this room.
He stumbled naked through the living room, seeking his bedroom door. He snaked across the walls with his hands, leaning for support as he went. He found a door and a doorknob. He thought this was his room but couldn’t really remember, his head still fuzzy. He turned to the knob and stepped inside.
When he shut the door, he expected blackness and peace. Instead he found a dull redness. In front of him was a long passageway in between buildings. He wondered if he’d somehow wandered outside, but that didn’t seem right either, because the buildings in front of him weren’t mobile homes. They were tall. He put his hand against the wall to his left, and it sunk into the wall. It was mush around his fingers. His nausea returned and he pulled his hand from the building, no longer sure if it was a building at all.
He ran down the passage between the buildings, not sure where he was going, realizing finally that his trip had gone from bad to worst case. The sun shone above him bright and red, which seemed odd because he’d taken the pills at night, and because the sun wasn’t this large, this blinding, this red.
He stopped and finally threw up, the chicken bits coming up and landing on his feet as whole as they had gone in. The sight of the shredded bits of meat made him even sicker, and he threw up even more.
When he looked up he saw the eyeball again. It was attached to a body, a small body without limbs, just a blob of dried, red scabbing sinew. Attached to it somehow was another eyeball, then another, and another. He peered upward into a tower of eyes and scabbing little bodies all sown together, a giant abomination before him. Irving screamed and the thing screamed back, a hollow, reverberating sound from hundreds of tiny creatures, little mice, that rattled his bones.
Irving turned and ran, not caring where he went. He felt something grip his shoulder, and he turned to see the eyeball creature leaning down to take hold of him. He fell backward away from its reach and collapsed to the floor.
The floor seemed familiar to him, had the texture of unclean, smashed carpet desperately in need of replacing. He pushed his nose into it and smelt its filth, his filth, and he nearly laughed with joy. He stood in the blackness and began feeling around until he found a light switch. He flipped it to find that he was in his bedroom.
Irving cried. He put his face in his hands and he cried hard. He told himself that he was done with pills, with beer, all of it. He was going to make something of himself, because he didn’t want to die having done nothing at all.
Irving didn’t have time to see what happened, but he heard it, as the creature of many eyeballs tore open the ceiling and took hold of him. Irving’s sobs became screams once more. In a normal neighborhood, screams might have meant neighbors coming to check in on the commotion, but Irving didn’t live in a normal neighborhood.
The eyeball creature, having hold of Irving now, examined him thoroughly, turning him around in its massive interconnected eyeball hands to study his frame, as if it had never seen a creature such as this before. The creature looked around at the trailer park, at the night sky, at the bright blue moon above.
Irving felt his sensations become fuzzy again, the world around him started to shift from blue to red to blue to red, back and forth in motion with those sensations at his fingertips, and the creature of stitched eyeballs came and went with Irving each time. Back and forth, back and forth between worlds as the drug pulsed through Irving’s veins.
The creature made the sound again, that reverberating howl like a whale calling from the depths, and the shifting stopped in the blue.
“Please,” Irving begged the creature, “Please leave me alone.”
Instead, it placed one of its hands, built from fifteen to twenty of the eyeball creatures sown into one, between Irving’s rib cage. The creatures spread apart.
The motion split Irving open down the middle. The ribs cracked in rapid fire as he was broken, blood spurting from within as if nothing more than a water balloon. Irving coughed up blood, and quickly passed, disappointed that he would die knowing that Roman Reigns was somehow, unfathomably, still champion.
The creature then spread Irving’s remains out against the trailer wall, ripping open his arms, his legs, then splitting his head open from the jaw. The body stuck there against the trailer home, the blood drying like glue, and the creature examined it. The hive mind, each individual organism, studied and reasoned, trying to understand where this odd little creature had taken them.
Before it stepped away from Irving’s corpse, it popped one of Irving’s eyes from his eye socket. It stitched the eye into it’s own body, as was customary of its kind. A badge of honor from battle.