The Human Mound

Preamble:

Altering our state of consciousness is a natural urge. We, as beings endowed with neurotransmitters and robust desires for the exotic and the bizarre, will probably always need to alter our consciousness in some way. Like the body needs to shed skin, or like how the fashionista needs to change clothes in order to remain "vogue," the brain will always need to change its chemical-channel so it can adapt to the demands of its fervid imagination. If it doesn't adapt, inertia and boredom casts the being into a state of vacuous nihilism. In order to avoid such a deplorable state in the past, the brain and our human consciousness--the hardware and software of experience--created the caffeinated beverage known as "Coffee".

In a roundabout and humorous way, this short story talks about how we are addicted and afflicted by the biochemical demands of coffee.

The Human Mound:

The NASA Marshall Space Flight Centre once undertook a study that involved spiders and various drugs. After the spiders took marijuana—or to be more specific, THC—they started to build a web of impeccability, but then abandoned their efforts to build such a web because they burned out. At the periphery of the web, the lithe and effervescent lines were left naked and incomplete. It looked almost as though they wanted to build an entire city, with an urban center, clock tower, industrial corridor, and even suburbs, but after the marijuana wore off, their sinuous paths were either curtailed by lethargy or by lost hope. On the other hand, when the spiders took Benzedrine, a potent stimulant, the spiders didn’t even try to render a city with their silky wires of biochemical consciousness. Instead they rendered a landfill; some place with cracked lines and no symmetry; a place Dennis Quaid found in the movie “Dreamscape”. Despite these alarming discoveries, nothing shocked the NASA scientists more than the results produced by the spiders drunk on caffeine. These spiders no longer attempted to spin and regale in circular webs. They just made bad abstract art. They entered into the frantic state of the hyper-mundane. In other words, the spiders were clearly not themselves. - Clause Pentrick, A weirdo

I include a snippet from one of Mr. Pentrick’s studies into the nature of consciousness and drugs because it helps me come to terms with the events of April 16th, 2007. A day that will probably haunt me until the day I die.

Like any other monday, April 16th, 2007 started off with an all-too-common plotline: man got up for work (this man being myself of course), man got into the shower, man brushed his teeth, man buttered some toast, man looked quizzically and pensively at the clock, man grabbed his briefcase, and man entered the outside world. The trees, the same. The cracks in the concrete, the same. The songs of the birds, the same. Everything was working in accordance with the last known step of Nature. Nothing seemed out of touch or altered in any shape or form.

When I walked into my office building, the receptionist greeted me with the same bashful expression I had come to expect from her. As soon as I turned the corner, I heard her phone ring. The tonality of her voice, the same. The elevator was also the same. So were the inhabitants. “So, do you think the leafs are going to win it next year?” one doleful man asked. Every inhabitant of that rectilinear contraption, including myself, shook his or her head in a type of pessimistic acquiescence. No we didn’t think the leafs were going to win next year. When the elevator stopped at my floor, I silently and sheepishly walked out, with my head glued to the carpet. You could say I had the serious case of the blues; the monday downers.

I made it to my desk and dedicated a good fifteen minutes or so to organizing the mess I left on friday. My hands concerned themselves with stacks of useless paper. Boredom was already setting in like an early morning fog.

The steady flow of bodies and mundane chit chatter, the same. After awhile, the flow seemed to take on a predetermined shape. I predicted when and where each body would be at a particular moment. Because I deciphered the pattern and hinged it to my synaptic cleft like an ornament on the prescient tree, I could have even gotten up from my desk and interrupted any conversation or bodily vector. But perhaps my behavior would have been predetermined if I would have done that. I certainly didn’t want to succumb to the humdrumness of predetermination. The gods would have been guffawing at me.

At 10:15am, or at least it seemed like 10:15am, the horror began to take shape. I was entering some information into my computer when my manager came by and informed the entire floor that there was no coffee left in the lunchroom. Some people looked genuinely disappointed and dismayed over the news, but then they obviously figured that they would just get their coffee at some other vendor—a kiosk downstairs, or a Starbucks across the street. At around 10:25am or so, my manager came back and informed all the workers about an even more alarming fact: coffee was no longer available. A few employees took this as a caustic joke and fired back with, “No Coffee, you say? How is such a thing possible?” My manager told them to go MSN.com and check the news. “This isn’t disinformation,” he said, bugged-eyed and fuming beneath his calm facade of congeniality. “This is the real deal.” They all ran to their computers and frantically checked the web. And so did I. My manager’s words were true. According to the mysterious news report, coffee had preternaturally disappeared from every source possible. I, including everyone else, scratched my head.

After reading the article, an employee sitting next to me informed me that he didn’t believe what he just read and that he was determined to find a drop somewhere in the building. He tried to clandestinely make his way to the lunchroom but another employee, someone sitting directly across from him, got the same idea. When their uneasy eyes met, they both decided to run to the lunchroom and acquire the nonexistent coffee before the other person even had an opportunity. At around 10:30am, a clamorous commotion was heard in the lunchroom. Yelling. A struggle. When my manager said, “They are fighting over the last pack of instant coffee,” I ran to the lunchroom in tandem with everyone else. My eyes witnessed the battle and all reason left me. I knew how the soul felt at the apogee of death: alone in an ocean of absurdity. I struggled to understand the sight. Two grown human beings, dressed like professionals, were going at it like rabid mongrels.

But this was just the beginning of the horror. My eyes saw more.

The struggle continued for some time before another person stepped forward into the lunchroom and grabbed a hold of the miniscule packet of, evidently, salvation. Then there were three mongrels going at it. “It’s mine! It’s mine,” they all yelled. Saliva, the jetsam and flotsam of rage, came sputtering out of their mouths as we all watched in rapt horror. Or at least I thought we all were watching in such a way.

At 10:36am, a fourth person dived into the heart of the struggle in a vain attempt to wrest the package from the fury. This person, sadly, was knocked back ten feet by the fist of the third person. He was lying there unconscious, right by the filtered water dispenser.

You would think this type of ravenousness would have caused someone to call security, but it didn’t. The fifth and sixth mongrels dived in shortly afterwards and went for the arabica gold. Soon afterwards, a blitzkrieg of people stormed the lunchroom. They all had their hearts set on the package. The clamor grew and grew. It was so bad. I had to plug my ears. “It’s mine! It’s mine!” they all yelled. It was a sadomasochistic orgy for automatons.

At 10:45am, I realized something that stretched beyond the limits of the profound. I realized I was alone in the hallway, and that every single person in my office was in the lunchroom. What I perceived to be flesh and attire was really just a heap of frazzled, gnawing bodies; a mound writhing in sync with the stale air; naked insidiousness. Christ! They tore off one another’s clothes! I had to look away. I had to run.

I last remember throwing down my employee identification card and running to the nearest bar. I asked the bartender for his greatest elixir. “So, you survived,” he said. I nodded. He placed a gun on the table and said, “You’re going to need this.” I nodded. We drank in silence for an indeterminate length of time. When I came to, I wrote this on some napkins. May you find this and tell the world.