If you sneaked into Corbin Pravus' wastebasket, you would find a mess made out of his daily crap. There would be lots of half dead mint cigarettes or even cigarettes butts burnt to the very end -as if Corbin would have wanted to smoke the butt too. You could find lots of band-aids or pieces of gauze covered with dried blood and packages of all kinds of pills -mainly pain killers. There would also be neglected bills without having been paid yet. There would be plenty of papers with what he would like to call "poetry" on life and how to move on, all written with pencil and a perfect spelling, punctuation, and grammar; all crumpled and with the texts abandoned halfway. You'd find bills from motel rooms -several and all from different motels, from the cheapest and tackiest one to the most expensive one - and packages of the candies he's taken from there, but with the candies still inside wearing only one mark of having been chewed, then thrown. Napkins with semen -his and others'- pile up in a white bulk that begins to stick out from the wastebasket. But his wastebasket is not the only place in which you can find all of Corbin's leftovers: you'd only have to take a look all around his room, all over the floor: papers from work, letters from his condescending mother -condescending as all of the other Pravus-, bits of food, and even books, all thrown after the thought "I'll pick them up later when I sweep one day..." had crossed Corbin's head.
And then, there he is, lying on bed, all numbed, eyes completely lost in the air, as if there was something invisible to others beyond the ceiling but existing only for Corbin's contemplation. The sound of Don't Speak by No Doubt fills the air like a whisper, but overshadowing any other surrounding sound, sheltering Corbin from reality. He feels an ant walking on his arm, near the sleeve of the expensive green-and-yellow-striped Abercrombie T-shirt he got for Christmas from his cold grandmother. He wants to kill her -the ant-, he hates insects walking on him, but it seems the neurological connections that allow him to move are numbed too. He's feeling weird -as he usually does-, his cigarette is half-burnt, about to extinguish and leaving a grayish mark on the sheet it is laying on. The sheets and pillows have been messy for a month already, and Corbin still says "I'll organize this room tomorrow night..." He's got a bunch of books he has being procrastinating only he knows for how long. Books on detectives' stories, books on fictional creatures and kingdoms, books full of a weak getaway from his damned reality, from his damned life. Life disgusts him, so do people. He's always looking down on everyone, avoiding any physical contact and thinking nobody matches up to him. This Pravus also feels disgusted when he hooks-up with strangers, but then he just goes along treating them as another book, as another cigarette, as another ceiling, as another getaway. Once into them, he doesn't think anymore, he just does: whatever he's told to do, whatever he feels like doing. There on his bed, he thinks, he knows he deserves more, he deserves better, but he also knows he would make it aside once he gets it - as he has always done.
Once the silent mental, spiritual and physical death seems to be interrupted, Corbin gets off his bed, put his Vans on -shoes filled with holes all over and with a color different from the one they originally had- and leaves a trace of dried mud as he passes by. His moves are sluggish, as if air represented an obstacle to undergo. He smoothes out his T-shirt on the mirror without really trying, without really caring about his appearance. As usual, Corbin thoroughly checks his lips, he checks they are not chapped or dry, that they are clean, that they are as perfect as they have always been. He had always had this fixation with lips –his and others’. He would always look at people’s mouths and lips and find them hideous, and of course different from his. While in front of the mirror and while tracing the borders of his lips with his index’s fingertip, he remembers the time he went to this motel of which name he doesn’t remember. It wasn’t the finest quality motel he had been to, but it was a question of finding a place, not rating it. The clerk, a fat woman with a crispy horrible rope-colored hair tied up with a pair of tiny white claw clips, stood up from the chair on which she was having supper. She wore a plain light blue sleeveless blouse and jean shorts –both seemed to be dirty and worn out. It was noticeable the sound of her disgusting slippers being dragged across the room towards Corbin as the woman approached him. Corbin found her whole being, her whole existence repulsive to him. But it was not her vulgar clothing, or her bedraggled hair or her blistered toes what disgusted Corbin the most. It was her lower lip and her chin what provoked in Corbin a reaction of repugnance. They were all covered with grease, reflecting the light of the light bulb on the ceiling on it. She would speak, as if nothing was happening, as if she didn’t mind about looking like a pig, a big talking revolting pig with her face all covered with dirt. Corbin was trying to focus on her eyes, but the gruesome layer of grease on the woman’s face would steal all of Corbin’s attention and was making him sick –he even thought he was going to vomit there, in front of everybody, including the guy he was with. He breathed, pull himself back together and looked her in the eye. The woman had to repeat the price list for the rooms in the building once Corbin was able to ignore the woman’s mouth.
[1] Corbin Pravus is a Latin name, meaning each word raven and depraved, vile, perverse respectively.
Holly Molly!!!
ReplyDeleteI really like the changes on your story, it's like a I know this guy, I feel identify with him beacuse of your great descriptions.
Once again you nailed it :D