Days kept flying by in their usual blur into one another, bleak in their lack of distinction. From one gray morning to the deafening silence of the next witching hour, life had become a trailing haze of uneventfulness that connected these points in their dotted line toward nothing at all. The same room, the same house, the same trees, the same pain in the same spots. The same regret from the same mistakes being made over and over again throughout days different in numbering only.

Being someone who had gone through life holding on to the belief that routine was a value set in stone, he couldn’t help but notice life itself had an interesting way of demonstrating that wasn’t quite the case. A life that consisted of next to nothing besides a miserable household, a stint through public school, a job at a munitions factory, marriages that had gone nowhere, the army, the trenches and an eventual series of court hearings that had been just as painful as anything so far: all a reminder of the importance of routine, but not anymore than a reminder of the constance of pain. Now, with not much of a routine left, it seemed like pain had filled that void like a leak inside a sinking ship.

And it was amidst this daily blend of nothing good and nothing at all that he tried to find a blind spot, some kind of safe zone square in the middle but at the same time outside of it. It wasn’t clear to him what he was even trying to do in order to survive what his life had become, but he knew he had to do it one day at a time before wasting any energy trying to spell it out.

In the end, anything short of surviving each day felt like a waste of resources, from the more high concept activities like trying to rationalize it to the more mundane ones like holding onto recent memories. The complete lack of distinction between an empty moment and the next, coupled with the severity of the actual problems life kept hurling at him: the perfect blend for the worst sort of attention drain.

Ivan, or at least who he had once believed himself to be, had died in those trenches. What came back was a lifelong batch of shame and regret piled on top of each other, piloting his mortal coil like a vessel.

The dim light that pierced through the curtain announced another one of those days that begged surviving. Humming and constant, the sound of rain could be felt much more than actually heard, aside from the loud noises of water hitting the old roof or crawling through its many holes, splashing over the pots and pans spread across the house.

Another rainy Monday looked straight through him as he dragged the curtain aside. But was it Monday, even? Keeping track of days was the hardest part for anyone living what seemed like an endless succession of poorly-enjoyed holidays with no friends or family. It had to be Monday, he decided, because this week was going to be his best shot yet at trying to talk to the physician; something he had been eager to do for almost a month, and to which he had been counting the days. He remembered thinking it was just three days away, the day before. So he knew it had to be it. “Monday it is.”

Walking through the creaky floorboards, he made his way toward the stairs and saw his old living room from the top. As he stared at the dim light that barely made its way in, all he could think of was how much his house seemed like it had been abandoned long ago, although he had never quite left. It was definitely the weather, but the way his living room on a Monday morning looked as dark as his bedroom made him feel like his day wasn’t exactly going anywhere before it even started. That thought wasn’t anything new, however, so he discarded it much the same way he did every morning as he stood on that same spot.

As he tried his best not to stumble down the staircase, he leaned his weight on the banister while feeling the sting at every step of the way. The pains had gotten worse, unsurprisingly, as it was something common when the weather acted up. This was already a common occurrence in most of his joints, but the pain that cursed the right end of his hip bone was like trying to shrug off a fresh injury. The simple act of walking down a flight of stairs early in the morning felt like punishment. But it was barely the worst part of his day, and most importantly, it was still the first.

In the kitchen, he left some water boiling while he pulled aside a flimsy wooden chair and dropped his weight over it. His body felt more like he had gone through a drill rather than a night’s sleep. Having to catch his breath barely a few minutes out of bed was shameful for him. As he massaged his brow with one hand, he could feel the stale sweat on his skin as well as the tension on his face muscles. It seemed like for all the good a half-decent rest had done for him, the first few minutes of his day had already managed to ruin it.

As the water boiled, he looked around at his greasy kitchen in the dim light and felt a sincere desperation boiling along with it. That sinking feeling he had just experienced on top of the stairs had not let go in the slightest, as much as he tried his best to put it aside. It was like each and every part of the house in which he had spent all his life were different reminders of a wide variety of reasons why he was alone. Just as the living room made him think the place he lived looked abandoned, the kitchen made him think there was no way someone would choose to live there.

The memories were ancient at that point, but still fresh as bloodletting. People had come and gone from that house throughout almost half a century, either through their own graves or their own volition. It wasn’t always a choice, but when it was, it hurt even worse.

The humming sound of the rain outside seemed to be getting louder, and the rhythm of the drops inside the pots and pans was getting more accelerated. He rarely emptied them, and some of the floorboards were starting to get stained with the humidity of the overflow. That whole place seemed like a huge chunk of wood made brittle and darkened by all the water that ran through it across the years.

Ivan felt like he himself wasn’t that much different, in that regard. A wooden sculpture of a man, an old simulacrum left out to soak in rain water until it was crawling with termites and finally fell to pieces over the tall grass, the husks of its limbs inhabited by bugs, worms and spores until nature claimed all else as well.

He knew that was the fate that awaited his house, after he was long gone. But he was also beginning to wonder if that wouldn’t be his fate as well, even if just symbolically.

Ivan hated that house. He had grown up in it, spent the best years of his life living in it next to the few people he had by his side at one point or another, and he still hated that place. Everything about it felt like an exercise in revisitation for the absolute worst moments of fear, isolation and pain he had undergone outside of the battlefield. Still waters are known to run deep, and in Ivan’s case it was his deep-seated hatred of some of these memories that lay beneath the surface.

Already at the end of the painful journey of getting back on his feet, he poured the water and made a fresh pot of coffee, serving a cup for himself and then savoring its bitter, watery taste. That first sip of bottom-shelf brand flavor would possibly be the highlight of his entire day, so he had to make it last.

Lazily slumping forward, he left the kitchen and walked to the small table that sat beside his old recliner. Without having to face the pain of sitting down again, he grabbed one of the orange pillboxes that lay on top of it and poured a pair of capsules on his palm before hurling them inside his mouth followed by a generous sip of coffee. He repeated the process with another three different compartments lying beside the first one, in no particular order.

He didn’t bother remembering those complicated names anymore. They just wouldn’t stop changing. All that existed were the crass numbers and letters in black sharpie ink over each label: “2 – MORNING”, or “3 – EVENING”. There was a time when he was more careful about this whole process, afraid of taking the wrong pills at the wrong time. These times were long past, as now he knew mixing up medication by accident was hardly the worst thing that could happen to him.

With his eight o’clock medication out of the way, he allowed himself the simple pleasure of lying his battered body on the wrinkled leather of his armchair, raising a thin cloud of dust on the impact. Turning on the TV after what seemed like an endless breath of exhaustion, he was surprised by the local news.

Was it even eight o’clock, anyway? The green hue of the digital clock said he missed the mark by almost an hour and a half, but in the end it didn’t matter. The medication didn’t have the same effect as before, and at this point he was basically bargaining for some spare change in the placebo effect currency. He knew he was knee-deep in his bargaining era and, to be honest, he had been enjoying the change of pace so far. Not much else to be happy about, anyway.

“HAS EVERYONE GONE MAD?” shouted Jim Schwartzman, because of course he did. “What has happened to the people in this country? Have you people lost your minds? Have you gone insane? Or even worse, have you gone soft?”

That last word came accompanied by what seemed like a shrivel of disgust, as Jim’s face thwarted itself into a wrinkled mass of angered concern, his skinny shoulders retracting inside his oversized TV personality blazer. “I wonder what Jimbo’s screaming about today” was a frequent thought that circulated in that house in early mornings like those, and to Ivan it had become a daily ritual of sorts.

“You people think you’re patriots? You think you’re deserving of everything this beautiful country has done for you? Of having your freedom delivered to you from the claws of that scum that wanted to make slaves out of you?”

Jim slammed his fist against his daytime television pulpit, which was really just a regular counter, and started pointing to the camera as it shakily closed in on his face.

“Well, I think you’re cowards! The whole lot of you! What have you done for this country, anyway? You free-loading, opportunistic weaklings, tell me right now, what HAVE you done?!”

Ivan was not impressed with the irony of seeing himself of all people in the receiving end of that bit, and thought about how much he had been enjoying that clown show less and less with each passing day. Ever since the war had been won, Schwartzman had set off on a decade-long personal project of degrading into a parody of himself.

During the eerie but still exciting days of political discourse that led up to the civil war, Jim was a respectable political analyst in the journalistic community, taken seriously even by the leftist peers he so famously bashed. During the conflict, he had earned his chops as a brave war correspondent in the grizzly frontlines of the Eastern front, dishing out provocative think pieces and even an autobiography, which Ivan did get to read in the hospital before being honorably discharged. Those were good times to be a patriot; if you could ignore all the blood and the killing, which most of them did.

Fast forward to the decadence of consumerist, highly-neutered life of the post-war republic of over a decade down the line, and you could see Jim’s credibility at its absolute rock bottom. Now relegated to so-called “commentary duties” on daytime programming, the man now looked less like an influential figure in any capacity than the political science equivalent of someone’s decrepit uncle having a stroke at a family gathering.

All that aside, Ivan still had the habit of watching the man on television every morning. Half expecting to be surprised in any positive manner, perhaps, but mostly just scraping the surface of what he could hope to consider genuine entertainment.

At that very moment, for example, he was keeping busy while attempting to deduce the reason Jim was screaming so much. He couldn’t just skip steps and start shouting at the viewer, for as much as that was what his job consisted of in practice. Being a TV commentator usually implies you’re commenting on recent news, and it had become a game of sorts for Ivan to try to guess what Jim was basing his rant on.

So far he didn’t get much to work with, but was caught off-guard when the diatribe wandered off somewhere slightly less vague and more concerning:

“How are we letting this happen? Why aren’t there people on the streets hunting these foul creatures? Where are the men of our nation, our fathers, our warriors?”

The image cut back to a news report that apparently had been the morning’s top story. The footage looped on mute while Schwartzman’s voice kept rolling.

“Do you people not realize this could be you, tomorrow? Your family? That these people you see before you could very well be your wives, your daughters, the boys you want to raise to protect their own families one day? Have you people gone off the deep end that far that you see something like this happening in your own community and you decide the wisest course of action is to do nothing?”

Ivan didn’t quite squirm, but he did furrow his brow at the sight of what was being shown. It wasn’t much, considering daytime television wasn’t shy on restrictions, but what he did see was enough to touch a nerve.

The girls were barely ten years old, and their mother couldn’t be that far into her thirties. The father was an ordinary man, hardly the type of gun-toting doughboy you’d see living around those parts, but he could tell that poor bastard must’ve fought like hell to protect the women in his life. The information about the state of the victims that crawled across the screen was succinct, but he could tell that this man barely his own age had gotten the worst of it for trying to fight back. Judging by the wording of the reports, the girls weren’t even given the chance.

Realizing how much that disturbed him, he took a step back and allowed himself to rationalize how local news agencies and package deal celebrities like Schwartzman were little beyond glorified buzzards. Exploiting the misery of small town folk being preyed upon by unknown threats the government barely had the personnel or the technology to keep at bay was already bad enough as it was, but using it as a stepping stone for a hack like Jimbo to splash around his pseudo-insurectionist dogwater was too much for someone who had paid for democracy with a pound of flesh.

“Where is the government? Where are the authorities? I need to know right now if all of this is happening because we’ve been abandoned by those who have sworn to protect us, I need them to come clean RIGHT NOW if we’re on our own or not. Because I fear for myself, and my family, and so should you if you know what’s good for you and the ones you love.”

Just like Schwartzman himself and everything his brand of so-called journalism had come to represent this far into the post-war years, Ivan hated television. He couldn’t bring himself to see it as anything more than a sleaze repository, a sewage pipe that sprouted into his living room and flooded his every waking hour with its single flavor of scum.

Paradoxically enough, it was with television, as an entity, that he spent most of his time awake, and a decent portion of his time asleep as well. He was convinced at that point that only tangentially miserable aspects of modern life would fit in a life as miserable as his, which explained why so many things he hated still remained so present.

“Do you people realize what this is? Do you have any clue of what’s going on right before your eyes? Do I need to spell it out for you? Well, in that case, I’ll indulge you: this is punishment from God. There, I said it. You people don’t wanna hear it? Well, that’s TOO BAD. There it is, you filthy heathens. This is what we get for all the sin and debauchery our people believed they could get away with. Our children, our families being defiled by these fiends, the spawn of the Adversary. We now live in a land forsaken by God, and this is your fault. I hope you’re proud of yourselves. You make me sick.”

He was sitting there for barely a few minutes, but that news report stuck with him in such a way that Ivan already felt that it had been enough television for one day. He tried his best to stay away from local news reports, especially the ones that felt particularly exploitative, but they still managed to sneak up on him and his dormant morbid curiosity. There was something especially vile about their detachment, mostly for the dismissive way in which they exposed the pain and misery of what he considered his community. In a sense, it was almost like a personal attack on his character, but in a way he couldn’t quite articulate.

“Thank you Jim, very insightful as always”, said the generic new guy as the camera cut to him, probably instructed to say these exact words even if Jimbo shot himself on live television. “This just in: we have official confirmation from the authorities that the severed head found last week in Los Telares does in fact belong—”

Compared to most news reports that came in from around the country, however, there was no denying that watching gruesome and opportunistic bulletins about townsfolk being found dead or not being found at all was something much less taxing for someone with Ivan’s very particular concerns. Anything from the stories about the reconstruction efforts along the frontier, to the most recent political maneuvers between Containment lobbyists and politicians, or the less-than-encouraging recent findings by the scientific community was enough to make him want to spend the rest of his days just having to focus on sporadic deaths and disappearances.

“As heinous crimes related to on-going investigations of unverified occurrences of non-catalogued phenomena—”

Those were just news reports on television, he kept telling himself, but for some reason it felt almost like a trapdoor opening on its own, revealing all sorts of vermin and creepy crawlies just waiting for an excuse to pour out, strong enough to bust the wood from the hinges like a gust of wind.

“We will proceed with our regular coverage as it develops. Thank you for joining us.”

At that moment he realized he forgot to touch the remote and had watched the morning news to the end, being welcomed by another episode of what seemed to be the millionth re-run of that Bucky Roswell TV series he despised so deeply. Exploitative journalism was only the beginning, when it came to allowing television to ruin his day: Ivan’s absolute pet peeve was foreign pop culture, and how it poisoned local outlets like a venereal disease there is no treatment for.

“Y’see ma’am, ol’ Buck right ‘ere may be just a simple feller tryna make an honest livin’ in this Gosh-forsaken land, if y’all pardon mah cussin’…”

Ira Hinckley’s style of acting was already annoying enough on its own for how much of a dick he was. Although it consisted of basically nothing else besides putting on a hat and pretending he went by a different name, something about that character made him just way too easy to despise.

“But I’ll tell ya right ‘ere an’ now, ah rolled wi’ boys such as these in mah wild years, and lemme tell ya for a fact that these ‘ere ain’t no regular small time cattle rustlers…  No siree, what we’re dealin’ wit’ere is somethin’ much, much more sinister…”

Bucky’s voice made Ivan want to shoot someone over a parking lot squabble. He had a deep-seated contempt for people who talked and dressed like that, especially when they were the same brand of potato-fed backwater yokels as himself but wanted to act like they were characters from some foreign soap opera. The idea that he fought in the war so greedy executives halfway across the world could make money selling cultural slop to his people was the sort of humiliation that made television way harder to bear looking at than it had any right to be.

“Buck’s battle against the gang of cattle rustlers that terrorizes the peaceful community of Weaver Springs just took a turn for the worst”, said the announcer, whose tacky artificiality made it clear he didn’t think he was being paid enough. “As he prepares to face the dangers of the unknown, will our hero—”

As his thumb crushed the remote’s power button, Ivan was met by an eerie visage; his own reflection on the screen. The vague shape of that blurry gray ghost sloped over itself filled him with a sense of dread he wasn’t really sure he wanted to address. The feeling was made even more jarring by the difference between the blaring noise of the TV set and the humming of the rain. Sprinkled in the midst of the non-silence, the dripping noises all over the house added another layer of desolation to what felt like a nightmare about a lonely, uneventful life.

His horror was still yet to take another step in that direction, however: he looked at the green hue of the digital clock and realized it was only five past ten. He had been sitting there for barely half an hour and he already wished the day was over, while in reality it wasn’t even noon.

Between the constant pain and the struggle to keep himself distracted, there wasn’t much happening on the planet he inhabited. His gaze hovered along dusty books piled up to knee height on one of the grimy corners of the living room. They had been there for what seemed like decades, waiting to be put on a bookshelf he never really got around to building instead of buying; or at least just buying, since he wasn’t going to build.

Those old books were a bitter reminder of his youth. It was hard for him to believe that at one point he had been an actual person with hobbies and interests like anyone else. A man not defined by his trauma or the hardship he endured, but his dreams and aspirations.

How far had fallen from that tree the rotten fruit he spoiled into.

Maybe as an effort to reignite whatever genuine drive was part of his youth, he tried taking up woodworking again after he came home from the war. From his early teenage years to those of his recovery, there had always been a peaceful sense of belonging in the activity. He’d come to learn just how much time spent on handiwork you feel like you have a natural talent for will always do good by you, and helping fix stuff around the house or building modest pieces of furniture had always been Ivan’s choice manner of achieving this.

Naturally, that was all in the past. He didn’t have the motivation or the disposition of his youth any longer, as is common with all of us. But in Ivan’s case, the poor physical conditioning inflicted by the years of recovery coupled with the daily reckoning with the chronic pains had been the death knell of what was his only genuine occupation.

The results stood around him like a mausoleum. The state of disrepair in which his house laid, with missing pieces of furniture and water pouring in through the ceiling, was all the proof he needed. The small workshop in the back of the house, with the heavy chain on the door held by a padlock he forgot where he left the keys to, was the tomb’s inner sanctum: racks of tools rusted beyond further use, piles of wooden planks and beams covered by an ancient coat of dust, cans of paint and old tarps inhabited by cobwebs and well-fed spiders.

The dusty heaps of books lying around his house were in their own right a symptom of this defeat, but mainly from another one entirely. Some would have trouble believing thanks to his more rustic sensibilities, but that didn’t change the fact that Ivan was once a well-read young man. Books of history and tales of knights and brave combatants were his greatest passion in his later boyhood and into his teenage years, and among the chief factors that stimulated his foray not only into the Republican Army, but even in political theory as a whole.

That, of course, was now barely a forgotten relic of an era that couldn’t be more distant. As many who get to witness the writing of history with their own eyes, Ivan had no interest in the accounts of those who didn’t, and even those who did as well. Fact or fiction, it all offended his intelligence, mainly for the lack of respect anyone alive had for his own perspective of all he had been through. It had gotten so that he sometimes wished he could just forget how to read, just as an excuse to never have to bear reading some of those lies again.

The trip down memory lane had been long and absorbing to the point that he didn’t even notice he was already on his feet, having paced across the kitchen toward the coffee pot. Already halfway through his second cup, he leaned back on the grimy counter, distracted from his pain enough to not overthink every movement he made. Maybe that was the medication kicking in after all, or maybe he just wished it was. Whichever the case, it was better than the alternative.

As he paced around in the silence of the rainy morning, he suddenly saw himself walking toward the front door and stepping out onto his front porch. Daylight was shining brighter, but the rain wouldn’t let up. Seeing it up close instead of just letting his mind drift along the sound, he could see it wasn’t pouring at all, but instead flowing almost softly.

There was something relaxing about watching the view from his porch all brushed by the rainy haze and the broad strokes of the shades of autumn. It almost felt like a different planet from the suffocating environment of the house; a different life in a different place, much simpler and less punitive. 

He looked to his left and saw his dog sleeping, the tip of its nose just barely poking out of the crude dog house that had been there long before the mutt moved in. It was still chained to a heavy iron stake buried halfway into the dirt, as it had always been.

The large mongrel and Ivan had never really seen eye to eye ever since they banded together, but the dog had earned its keep so far. It was useful in keeping him alerted about trespassers as long as it was properly fed, so the partnership could be considered successful for what it was. Ivan was annoyed by the dog’s constant barking, especially when he knew it had most likely been set off by a squirrel or a racoon, but seeing it sleep so soundly did add to the rare sense of peace he was feeling at that moment.

“At least you’ll shut up if you manage to sleep.”

That was the exact moment he felt something click inside his brain. A missing piece of the puzzle rotating clockwise maybe once or twice before slipping into its proper slot. No, not quite, it was something different. A similar feeling, but different enough to be perceived as such. Not a piece falling into place, but the realization there was an empty slot at the puzzle he hadn’t noticed before.

The barking. That was it. That’s what triggered the memory. Not the barking itself, since the dog wasn’t even awake, but the faint memory of how it sounded. The faint memory of that very specific sound, in a very specific setting. The wind against the naked branches, the creaking of the floorboards along the loud thumps of rushed steps in the dark. The yanking of the chain, the rusty links stirring against each other. The steps in the dark. The barking.

The laughter.

Ivan’s primitive brain engaged in full alert. He could feel the tension in his eyesight as it scanned the trees from one end of his porch to another. That heated, almost electrifying body-wide sensation of instinctive physical reaction to a danger unseen, unknown. Something common in the days of the war, but not nearly as much in whatever days those were. Which made it all the more disturbing in a way he’d take hours to explain to someone who’d never seen armed combat, and still not manage to come across.

He laid his coffee mug on the wide wooden bannister of his porch, a few inches from the beam that sat right beside the front steps. He didn’t realize it yet, but he would forget that mug on that exact spot and look for it all over the house before noticing that was where he left it. By then, he would have no recollection of the state of mind he was in at that moment, and would still wonder why and how he could even forget a mug half full on his porch in the first place.

Walking down the creaky steps, he saw himself standing in the rain, his gaze fixated in the woods as he slowly took one step at a time toward the battered wet earth of his driveway. He felt ensnared in some sort of ancient spell, a mix between an unsuspecting prey animal driven by a hungering scent and the almost otherworldly sensation of hypnosis, sleepwalking, a drug stupor or perhaps even some yet unknown manner of inebriation. He felt the rain pouring on him much harder than what he had perceived of its strength minutes before, a much less peaceful sensation than merely observing it from a dry, safe distance.

And sure enough, he was suddenly visited by that familiar feeling once again. Of pieces snapping into place, a bigger picture starting to take shape. At first, it wasn’t quite clear what the memory of the dog’s barking that night had made snap inside his brain, but standing in the rain that far into his driveway he could feel the breaches on the veils of perception align just about enough to let his mind’s sight have a glimpse at it.

It was him.

Standing on that same spot, in that same state, on that cold night, however many moons ago it had been.

And for a brief moment, for what barely felt like an entire minute back to back, he was out there once again. Not in the rain, as he was literally, on a physical scale, but out there. In the woods. Not the trees that surrounded his house. Not the bucolic countryside that was Weaver Parish, with its short walk to the creek and the old oak tree of his childhood, but the woods that surrounded all of it: his memories of his father, the march across the swamplands, the day of the siege. It was all there, happening at the same time, at the same place, him standing at the exact same spot, his eyes fixed on nothing in particular but also everything his sight encompassed. Trees. Woods. Whatever lies beyond them. The shape of a man. Just a man. No one in particular: just a man. He could be anyone. It doesn’t matter who he is, or what he looks like, what matters is that he is there. Standing right in the middle of it all, just a few steps off-center in the opposite direction from which he approached him. They’re not supposed to be there. They are never supposed to be in the presence of one another, either of them, yet there they are. At the same time, at the same place. About to approach the final threshold. He doesn’t want to see it. He was there before. He didn’t want to see it then, doesn’t want to see it now. But he can see the man standing there, with his back toward him. He wants to get out of there. He wants to go home. But was there ever a home to go back to?

The man turns around.

The dog starts barking again.

Ivan is taken back to wherever he was.

Once more, standing in the middle of his driveway, several feet away into the dirt and toward the woods.

This time, soaking wet from the rain. Standing outside on a rainy Monday morning, the water pouring on him, perceived by his body just as much as it went across it.

He looked over his shoulder. The dog had barely just gotten up, and it wouldn’t stop barking. That made him snap back into place firmly enough to notice the noise, but strangely not enough to be bothered by the rain. He raised his forearms slightly and stared at them from side to side, realizing he was completely soaked. That realization felt so confusing to him it was almost strange, as there was nothing strange in it. He felt tired, more mentally than physically for what seemed like the first time that day, and slumped back toward the house.

Was it the meds? Something else? What else? All he could think of at that moment was a dry change of clothes and maybe an extra hour or two of sleep. There was nothing else on his mind. Absolutely and utterly not a single other thing.

He forgot the mug outside. The dog wouldn’t stop barking.