Ego Death

by

charles michael averin

(for @pardonthememes on twitter)

“The shapes that make up a person are just that—"

Stacks of muzzles narrow and broad, ears scalene and round, lengthy brush and stub scut, curved claw and fang, rectangular box torsos, hourglass frames, leather seams sewn to keep pelts together and secured sockets to make them all move—all shapes compounded on shapes compounded on shapes to form a body but not a person. A panda was not a person, not by default, not because he was a stack of geometry. Others saw faded purple jeans, obscure band tees, and an above-average stature and projected a person onto the shape-made-panda, but that was not Parr. Parr was not Parr.

Parr was a pale ghost among them at the party, masked by the mass of shapes and sounds that flooded the college dorm. Study had happened here, once. Now, though—now college was a old care home where study slowly suffocated, kept sedated by wealth lent. The dorms were a place to purge that wealth, just as when exams came, the students purged themselves through communal bouts of screams. They were screams that echoed for days and hours but passed after seconds. Study, too, echoed somewhere underneath those long, drawn-out howls of rage and regret. Parr was one of those echoes. He felt them whenever he was there, centered, when he became the amorphous panda eye of a sound-shape storm. Any party held the essence of study.

Parr was a creature of contrast: colorless and compounded color, day and dark, and, as a ghost, doomed to walk the half-gloom between study and loan forever. Where classes shattered song and extracted element after rearrangeable element to lend, there, at the heart of study, song was not 'song.' A smoke-hazed dorm room was transformed by tunes and calm body heat, made a chamber of refuge that breathed easy when steady breath elsewhere was an uneasy trade-off. A party floor, every door ajar, became a symphony of worlds that tumbled out of one plane and toward the next. And, Parr, a ghost unseen, haunted not the who, not the where, not the even when, but the study felt at the heart of here.

“—Gears and cogs that churn, churn, churn, then

POP.

Out and done, wham, bam, thank you ma'am—"

Song was Parr's haunt and camouflage—song let the shape-made-panda be a ghost and float on the heartbeat that changed every shape and sound after every pulse. As a wordless observer, he watched study compose an on-the-spot, woeful opera that spanned three acts from merely a pulled, dropped reefer, and overturned solo cup, all performed by world-class otter actors—all amateurs, of course, but nevertheless masterly—and attended by a rapt crowd of beastly, thong-and-bong spectators whose 'true' stakes ranged from low-to-none, but who were deeply engaged nonetheless. And, just as the opera came to be spur-of-the-moment, Parr saw the performance shuffle off-off-off Broadway, one and only one performance ever to be made by that same cast and crew.

Where the stage and Parr ended started the backstage and more study, the afterparty, the black-and-purple bulb rooms where everyone became ghost, where neon breath replaced oxygen, and where packed sweat and temporary fur dye glowed as molten streams of star, moon, and wanderer. The bubble, murmur, and purr of old bong water snapped to the cool-cat, long-furred Beats fated to drop out of an era that allegedly passed decades ago, the modern bongo-drums for sudden poetry slams. But, there, Parr saw more than a slam—a bash, an angry basse Bohème rager that struck out at the hollow walls put up to keep the study out.

The song Parr heard there was acapella resent that reverberated the slow, low, bass-growl ache of bed sores formed from sheets pulled over eyes and muzzles too long. There was a central core that appealed to a ghost, to the shape-made-panda—a sort of barrel put out to catch part of a storm, but the only cloud burst was the one all around them, the one that hung as a cold, wet, unseen blanket, a constant cue that even ghosts could be caught on camera those days. The cloud that connected them and shackled them to folks who sang folk before but shouted hate now, who were a commune-people once but lorded serfs now, who wrote “us, we," years ago but chanted “aye aye, cap'n!" at a rally days ago.

“—Pop out another one 'cuz the assembly

Needs a steady queue to be lawful

And that quota

Came from the horse's mouth—"

The depths of the that dark, smoke-hazed, neon dorm room full of shapes and sounds and contrast were to be Parr's casket, a cocoon others—scalene ears on broad snouts—used to entomb the panda as though a ghost could become a butterfly. As though the Apple Ate-cha bluegrass held the same feel far from headless coal-mount poverty homes, or an encore could be played before the crowd cheered, or a round, alert, self-centered eye could see the future. No, Parr was a ghost through and through, because only when he lay there across the scattered bean-bags could he hear and feel the world-soul-song study. The words shared between fellow students passed unheard because they weren't there—they weren't real, they weren't here, just echoes and shapes.

The body he had come to know as panda was a leant stack of color and shape rearranged to form a type. And, no matter how many layers of fur, pelt, muscle, nerve, and bone they or he pulled back, no one would ever hear the head-ghost, the panda, the other-than-shapes, the Parr who could study and not just lend. What dug at Parr more than that, though, was that the same, the very same went for every shape-stack on the bean-bags on the floor, and the shape-stacks they knew, and the shape-stacks they knew, and, and, and the opera was real, a real moment shared and understood twenty ways by twenty people, real people, but seen only one way because of the focus on eyes—

And so, Parr was a pale ghost on the floor who lay perched between study and loan because he—he was aware enough to hear the study happen at the otter's opera, the cool-cat Beat slam, at the heart of here, but he could not reach out and grab hold of study. He heard the song, floated, passed through walls to dark rooms where snapshot of a lost memory developed, wrote essays on the star-stream sky seen out of a black-papered glass pane, and breathed someone else's smoke as they burned up and eyes burned out. Parr faded away on the floor, content to become once more the haunt of study's heartbeat—to transcend the shape of purple jeans on a panda and start to echo.

“—But don't you go and blame them

When the mess you made

Travels down the treads

To tread all over the cavalry—"

What was worse, though, on top of all else, was that Parr would never be able to grasp Parr—he would forever know that the shape-made-panda was a stack, but because he had begun the stack long before he could remember, he would never unstack the shapes to pull out the base, the head-ghost, the Parr. The purple jeans and obscure band tees, the soft-egg persona over a scared, lonely yolk, and the way he lay there on the bean-bags, near but not present to others had stacked together over the course of years, a slow death by means of self leant to others. When returned, the shapes were fused together and refused Parr's eye—and when each stack leant to someone else was compared, there were small cracks, scuffs, and marks. The records named after Parr played the same song twenty ways to the shape-made-panda.

The dorm party wasn't Parr's song—they never were, but he had gone anyway because he'd been asked, shape changed at a touch. The study overwhelmed Parr, the halls full of wolves overwhelmed Parr, even the bean-bag beneath overwhelmed Parr, but he had come nonetheless. He had crawled toward the closest dark, unseen, mellow hole he found and become a ghost because the request had been too much, but he had followed through, though he'd known full well that would happen. Was that Parr? A good-natured, overly-generous party-martyr? A here-today, gone-tomorrow match that gleefully leapt toward an already ashen heap of smolder? A hollow snout full up of other people's eyes?

Or, were they all just that same-sound echo, doomed to bounce from wall to wall over and over? Was Parr equally that sea otter there who held a new, full solo cup, those red foxes huddled together by the door, the cool-cat Beats and the throng-and-bong beast Bohèmes? He, shape-made-panda, had made the jump, walked the half-gloom between 'study' and 'lend,' heard the songs at the heart of here, so why hadn't they? Parr saw through the stack and spotted the shapes, but what could he say? How could he acknowledge the secret shell-egg game when everyone seemed content to play, even when they heard the study happen all around—because they were creatures of contrast, too, ears perked for the head-ghost they knew was but couldn't see.

“—'Cuz your words feel

And these eyes don't

So lay down before the tanks—"

He—they—were all so focused on the eyes, on the muzzles broad-and-narrow, ears round-and-scalene, body me-or-not, claw-or-fang who-are-you stand-for-that they had lost the feel, the song, the study even though each of them were that. They—he—had had shapes and sounds stacked on them from the start, so all that was learned was how to stack more shapes and sounds onto themselves and others, then how to see those. So, they never saw the otter opera, never heard the cool-cat Beat, never cheered for an encore. He—they—lay on bean bags, crawled to dark rooms, choked on smoke, forgot the stacks leant to them, became ghosts, found the heartbeat.

Then the come-down came down, and Parr was a ghost no longer. He was just a panda, back on a lumpy bean-bag. He sat up, slow, then scanned the room. The corner held two red foxes, but they were further away, now, unknown. The sea otter had passed the room and probably out at another part of the party, but Parr hadn't known the dude, so who really knew? And, last, by the foot of the bean bag and Parr's own footpaws was a bong someone had offered when he'd found the dark room—a bong he had assumed held weed, but now, he knew, held some other strange substance.

Bass throbbed through the hazy walls and made Parr recall that there was both a large party and small fox he had left alone however many hours—or seconds—ago. He crawled to a stand and, craven, crept out of the dark room, a pocket tap and felt wallet-and-phone the assurance he needed to leave. Exhausted, Parr stumbled back out to the loud, colorful, dauntless and not-dead rest of the dorm. Although, there, he found an empty peace at the heart of each song's beats where only frenzy was, before—one he felt accustomed to, even as the steady study sound set Parr's fur on edge. That peace haunted Parr before the small fox and sleep took all the thoughts away once more.

“—Follow your orders,

And hold off a couple years 'cuz they'll stop, sure, you'll see—

…

CRACK."