I was taking the song both literally and figuratively. Figuratively in the sense that I was going to beat it, beat that sick fuck, beat The Slob. Literally in the sense that I had to use what was around me to do so and all I had around me was dead bodies. So, I started doing exactly what MJ told me to.
While blasting the songs on the cassette, I dragged each body until it was close range. I stared into their extinguished eyes and listened to MJ’s commands. His words made so much sense to me, like he had written the song for this precise moment.
I did as I was told and took hold of the heavy chain that served as my leash. I zeroed in on a woman who couldn’t have been much older than me. It looked like The Slob had taken a hammer to her cranium. A piece of it was missing and the knotty brain tissue had spilled out all over the stomach of a dead teenage blonde. Her mouth was agape and the sinister expression of dread manipulated her facial muscles with an ugly finality, thankfully exposing her teeth for me.
Michael bellowed into my ears as I cocked the thick metal back. I felt nothing when I took aim and smashed it into her tormented grimace. Several of the coffee and nicotine-stained enamel pillars shattered. Some dribbled out of her mouth and others sat inside it. I laid in several other powerful blows until she resembled an image of an old cartoon character after it’d been battered. When they smiled and their mouths looked like a broken piano.
I collected the plethora of broken teeth from the floor and even dug a few out of her mouth. Her busted oral entrance sliced my wrist and hand but that didn’t stop me. After her mouth had been harvested to capacity, I moved onto another, and then another. I didn’t stop destroying dental until I found enough to fill up both hands with molars, incisors, fronts, and canines. I had created my own den of deformity now, a land of misery without smiles. Happiness had no place in this barn anyhow.
The blasphemous act had taken something out of me. I felt closer to him now and it was appalling. He forced me to stoop to his rung of repugnance, he had gotten inside me in more than one way. But I couldn’t stop there, if I was to evade his despicable clutches, I would need to play even dirtier than him…
I found a girl whose forearm had been ripped open, exposed down to the bone. I beat on the bone for what seemed like an eternity. Again, I utilized my dense and bulky tether until it finally snapped. I was able to pull out the smaller of the two since that was the one that had splintered. The end was nice and jagged and sharp; perfect for what I was thinking.
I thought about everything I’d been through up to that point; the buffet of mayhem committed against me and the wickedness directed toward others that I had no choice but to witness. The unspeakable had been engraved into my story, carved into my cerebellum. There was no way to un-see it.
I thought about Daniel and his perfect storm. There were so many parallels I could draw to my own now. The lottery of choices that brought me to become incarcerated in this menacing barn. Why couldn’t I just have won Lotto America instead? It probably would have been the same odds.
If that bum of a salesman was maybe too hungover that day and didn’t show up, none of this happens. But no, he still somehow made it to my steps, half in the fucking bag. Even with him showing up, there were paths to avoid this. If I just didn’t let him into the house, none of this happens. If I didn’t take his grubby business card, none of this happens. If I didn’t call Doorway Sales, none of this happens.
If I didn’t go past the initial one-week Daniel and I agreed on, none of this happens. If I didn’t go down a nameless dead-end road, none of this happens. If I had turned around when I started getting weary of the long distance, none of this happens. And if I wasn’t so hungry for a lousy forty fucking dollars that I was willing to disregard the strangeness of The Slob, NONE OF THIS HAPPENS. The red flags were wet and bleeding all around me.
Daniel’s life was ruined on his last day in Vietnam, and mine was ruined on my last day of door-to-door sales.
