I don’t perceive the world anymore.
Not like you do.
I see it distorted: through glass—final drops of booze sliding—
“Shutup, Bellyman. Shut the fuck up!”
He’s laughing at me again; ha-haha-ing at me lying here on the floor, mosaic of glass and bloody vomit.
It wasn’t always like this.
“Dad,” my son says.
I close my eyes.
No, it wasn’t always like this.
“Remember when we met,” Bellyman whispers.
“Dad?”
I was twelve years old, picking up my first glass of whisky, God, how heavy it felt, how it burned my mouth, my throat, “and there I was,” Bellyman says, “moving in—for life.” That first (“Cheers!”) virginal drink.
I hate him. Fucking hate him.
“You used to love me,” Bellyman says. “Couldn’t get enough of me.”
I’m nineteen. Unconscious. My friends are running away, convinced I’m dead. I outdrank them all. I won. For once I was the winner. “They abandoned you,” Bellyman says. “They all abandoned you.”
I drank / talked to him / drank / until my
parents kicked me out of the house because—”they didn’t love you, friend.”—I couldn’t get my act together.
“Act. Haha!”
I got a girl pregnant. I got her pregnant and we drank and I beat the shit out of her when she told me: “Stop!” and my wet fist connects with her soft face; her body crumples, her belly—
“Dad!”
He told me to do it. “She was going to break us up,” Bellyman says. “She had no right.”
My son was born.
My wife left.
I tried to drown him then. Drown myself in the lake in booze. Drown myself in him. Drown himself in me.
“I had to punish you,” Bellyman says. “I did it for us.”
The doctor said my liver was—
Fuck, it hurts!
“But your liver didn’t die, did it? I knew exactly how much to punish you. It was for your own good.”
My son takes my hand:
Squeezing…
I got better after that. I swear I did. “I tried—for you,” I say.
“I know, dad.”
Squeezing…
“But you weren’t meant for this melancholy shit,” Bellyman says. “The clear life. The boring life. That was not for you. I told you that.”
“I tried.”
“You didn’t wanna listen.”
“Not for years.” I was sober months at a time. “Dreary months. Just one little drink, you’d say. But I needed more than that. We needed more than that.”
Darkness falls:
anvillike.
I know the end is coming. (“Dad,” my son sobs.) It’s been coming for decades. Thank God that when I perish he perishes. “Bellyman, I fucking hate you!” I scream within.
Bellyman merely laughs.
Here it comes.
Last
breath.
Distortions ending—final beams of light smashing against my retinas—
“Die, Bellyman. Die!”
Through dimming glass I see:
My son’s beautiful face, dimmer and his open, weeping mouth, dimmer and Bellyman, still dripping my vomit, running, dimmer and climbing my son’s shirt, his collar, dimmer and dimmer and sliding between his lips and dimmer,
and