His name is Trog. He is a slight man wearing layers of wool and flannel. His skin is pale, almost sallow, but his cheeks are rosy. His beard is wispy and made of alternating shades of black and brown and red, though the variance is not clearly discernible at a casual glance. His eyes are dark and sunken in his wide, round face. His gait is unsteady. He is walking toward a place that is called a city but isn’t a city. The sky is gray with streaks of sun tearing through the cloud cover. The street and the sidewalk and the buildings in the distance are all shades of gray or gray-brown. There are sea smells and seagull noises fading in the distance. Straight ahead smells of tar and fuel. He is approaching a place called Ocean Grove, Maryland. His pace quickens once he sees buildings on the horizon.
He is still halfway in a dream. His attention is divided but his goal is clear. He will make it to Ocean Grove and carry out his task, and only then can he return to the dream and turn away from the pain and the glaring sunlight. He can return to the underground where the dream is waiting, but first he will have to pay a visit to a man, that man in Ocean Grove who calls himself a doctor. That man has taken many names and lived in many towns and other places that defy designation, but his occupation has remained the same. He calls himself Doctor Spine. His job is to break bodies. He has been licensed to do so.
Trog thinks of a dream, one he found a little while ago. He’s at a rest stop in a Rust Belt town, somewhere he’s been a hundred times before, or more like an amalgamation of a hundred places he’s been. He stands in line holding a bag of corn chips and a can of an energy drink called Fistula. He notices a threatening metal door has been left ajar, and the next thing he knows he is crawling through a freezer full of unidentifiable meat until he emerges in a massive labyrinthine bathroom. He follows a voice coming from one of the stalls. It’s a girl’s voice and he recognizes it.
Then he’s at a diner. This is always how these things go. He’s at a diner called Clint’s, a place that could feasibly be associated with terms like Americana, kitsch, star-spangled, aesthetic diarrhea, and nouveau-fasciste. It is in all likelihood a place from real life but he can’t quite remember. Beneath it there is a basement eternally on the verge of being converted into a dungeon. There is a man with a sweet face and suspicious tattoos sitting at the counter. Next to him is a woman in a wheelchair who can’t speak or move, aside from her eyes. This is how Trog learns about Doctor Spine.
He walks past a sign demarcating the limits of Ocean Grove. A traffic cop parked nearby is eating nachos and watching a compilation of Russian dashcam videos on his phone. This is real, or at least something conceived and created outside the confines of the unconscious. Trog has to remind himself as he walks. He pays attention to sounds, smells, colors, textures. The smell of gasoline lingers in his nostrils. He is partially transported to a dream of unlimited burning, one of the worst dreams, and one that he has never been able to leave behind. He shuts his eyes tightly and shakes his head in hopes his brain will reset. He thinks of grays and tans and concrete, and eventually he reappears on the remote suburban road.
Trog’s skin is cold. His stomach is empty. This city that refuses to be a city is not a place anyone should be. It could justifiably be referred to with words like dead, dying, decaying, post-life, post-human, and, by select homeowners, livable. It is a city of forms and spreadsheets. Doctor Spine’s office is a pale green building sticking out of a row of sleek prefabricated obelisks. It is a site of ritual catastrophe. Trog waits outside for the man himself to emerge, and glimpses through an open window floral print wallpaper in pastel shades of pink and purple and blue. People enter and exit, unassuming types, men with perpetually bad backs and women with impossible diagnoses and others who will be destroyed in time. They are all caught in whirlwinds, somewhere else. Finally the doctor who is not a doctor appears outside the threshold. He is short but well-built, with a square jaw and plastic skin. His gelatinous coif bounces slightly as he walks. He hops into a beige sedan and drives away. Trog hops in beside him, the invisible passenger.
Suddenly Trog is young again and only just learning that he can enter the dreams of other people, and steal them, and change them. His own dreams are nothing, a pregnant darkness. His first foster mother tells him one morning that she’s been disturbed for weeks by a recurring nightmare about a river of blood, and a secret dance hall, and a little boy with rosy cheeks coming up out of the ground and biting her feet and tearing her skin with his overgrown fingernails. She never realizes that he had actually been there. And she doesn’t realize, even as it’s fully realized in time and even as it’s undeniable, that her mind is atrophying as a result of his incursions, which become regular and more subtly cruel. When she refuses to feed him he makes meals of her peace of mind until it runs out.
The small-to-mid-sized business owners and the health food magnates and the infomercial gurus and the celebrity chefs and the graduate students all line up in front of Trog and he swallows them. He keeps moving, under the earth and through existential holes. He gives his body over to rich men for shelter but at night he invades them, and though he is not quite a drill he can burrow like the best of them and leaves a piece of himself whenever and wherever he can. Living half in dreams makes him a ghost. He can’t retain companions but his imprint stays behind in every hovel and penthouse and mcmansion and homeless shelter and subway tunnel where he sheds his astral skin. He only has one friend and he doesn’t know her name.
The radio is tuned to a classic rock station, yet every song seems hand-picked to flatten and desaturate the entire middle section of the 20th Century. A single extended guitar riff drives an ice pick into Trog’s skull as he rides shotgun with his gaze fixed on the false doctor’s glossy eyes. He does not care for the music either, but then he doesn’t even hear it. He is driving with his mouth agape, barely conscious already, fully on autopilot and probably thinking that the fact he is required to transport himself to and from his office is an imposition in itself. Somewhere in time an undercooked Brit sings in a nondescript accent, utterly neutral like an empty beige sedan left to fall into the sea.
They arrive at a gated complex of stacked townhouses. Each one has a disgustingly manicured lawn and a facade of brown or tan brick with three eyebrow windows. They watch as their hapless resident brings an intruder into their midst. Trog briefly, only briefly, thinks wouldn’t life be pleasant if he could just drop all his baggage and become a person. But they hit a speed bump and he is immediately snapped out of his flash fantasy. He hangs onto his target like a disgruntled shadow until they are both securely within the confines of another indistinguishable blithely surveilled displacement-temple.
In the night, with the moon hanging somewhere above like a cloudy eye, Doctor Spine sits at the foot of his bed with a glass of scotch in one hand and his cock in the other. It is small but not exactly pathetic, in some strange way distinguished, and red with anger. He begins stroking it. Trog sits in the corner. He has long since come to terms with his role as voyeur. He feels neither joy nor disgust, but still, even now this far into his long trek toward full dissolution, he can’t help but chuckle to himself when every man, no matter how inhuman, no matter how distorted by greed and violence, will tug on his meat like a high-schooler the moment he lets his mind wander from justified paranoias. A trickle of cum, off-white like the ever-offended moon, lands on the comforter.
Now’s the time. The good doctor begins to fall into a halting slumber. This is the tricky part. When Trog enters the dream he could be faced with anything. He has seen inferno and deluge and the void of distant space. He has encountered minds benumbed by the most esoteric substances known to man and fucked by the neverending onslaught of contemporary life, the gnashing billboard snuff film pop psych smorgasbord that cuts vertices into every lobe and fills them with static chaos. The mind that eats itself. No time to dwell. He confirms his host is down for the count and closes his own eyes, bracing himself for the worst.
The sky is blue. The sun is big and bright. It’s like a computer’s interpretation of a child’s drawing. And there he is, Doctor Spine, the torturer, the huckster, the false prophet, soaring up above with all the glee of a toddler being pushed on a swing set. Trog can’t help but roll his eyes–it’s a flying dream. This is evil in its own way, the dull, prosaic sort of evil that reminds you the worst mother fucker alive could simply be a big kid with no giant hand rising up out of the ground to wag its finger at him and, when that doesn’t work, to grab him and crush his bones into dust. Trog sighs. He’ll have to reach deep to harness some righteous anger.
Somewhere in the past, or in a long-forgotten dream, there’s a kitchen. The linoleum is filthy. In one corner there’s a dog bowl filled with dirty water and cigarette butts. Trog is crawling around on the floor, but he’s not Trog. He’s Doctor Spine with the body of a child, his giant unwieldy head dragging on the floor. He starts chowing down, slurping up wet ash. He can’t help it. He vomits and eats the vomit. He sees buzzsaws. Their sound is deafening. He’s in a metallic sphere and sees images of meat pierced by shards of bone. Sounds of wet meat. Crunching. Buzzsaw and chainsaw noises. Wet paper being torn, meat being ripped apart. Ground beef with blood vessels in it. Vertebrae in it. Salmonella dancing. Blood clots. Brown teeth. A room full of saws, churning, rusty. Electricity pulsing through a whole raw chicken the size of a building. Sparks flying. A world of saws and knives and fragments of bone, pieces of things coming apart, flying away, forever. Bright wet flash. Red burst. Fire. Rancid darkness.
No more open air space for the old doc. Trog is flying now. In his version the clouds and mist playfully swipe at his face. Winds whip past him, but gently. Layers of clothing disintegrate like cotton candy. Down below he can barely make out buildings. Ocean Grove, Maryland. The sea is just over the horizon. He can go anywhere. Down below is a strip mall. Down below is a world of strip malls and condominium complexes and war rooms. Down below an underpaid teenager is wrangling grocery carts. A man with razor burn is loosening his tie as he walks out of an office building and prepares to take a nap in his car. A woman is sitting in a park watching a child that isn’t hers repeatedly go down a slide, and when nobody is looking she takes drags from a cigarette that she’s half-heartedly hiding in the gaps of the bench. Lights are going on and off. Children are screaming. Creatures are wriggling under the earth.
Trog stops. He’s floating in midair. The world becomes silent all at once, except for a distant voice. It could reasonably be described with words like matronly, beatific, ancient, hellfire missile, and lovely. Trog cringes. She is here, somewhere. Once he pays acknowledgement, she appears right in front of him. She is draped in a sheer veil, but there is nothing behind it. Maybe a shape. She is more place than person, a first home from earliest childhood. A window into oneself. She parts her curtains and the tendrils emerge. Trog readies himself. She is the earthling. The keeper of the dirt haven. The star-nosed mole. She wraps herself around him and takes him in. There is no cause for alarm. This is just another in a long series of dances. She squeezes Trog’s cheeks like a mother overcome with love. He is everywhere. He is being dragged across stars. He is being dragged over rolling green hills somewhere in the idyllic west. He is joining a funeral procession. A man is being lowered into a grave and he is Trog’s brother, but the other mourners are strangers. Trog wants to crawl into the grave, but he is dragged away. A million siblings are being lowered into the earth. They are lower than dirt. They are not lower than dirt. They are everywhere. She tells him that a cry comes out of the earth’s core. She tells him that the nonprofit industrial complex is his grandparent. She tells him that a trillion worms are crying out from their special places in hiding and they need him but his petty grievances are unwelcome in the land of blind things. She tells him that beneath the veil of the strip mall is a truth lying waiting for the abandoned child, and that truth is identifiable as a violation. She tells him that she is the avatar of the abandoned strip mall and she has been waiting for a hundred thousand years, raised aloft by an early human, hunting and gathering with visions of capitalism incomprehensible at the time, succeeded by an American advertising executive in the neolithic, succeeded by a bronze age technocrat, succeeded by a grand litany of freaks and perverts and abject former students with backward knowledge. Trog embraces her and smells anise and roses and cigarettes and sees utter blackness and he wants to be there for the rest of his life.
Somewhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States of America, a chiropractor has trouble sleeping. He soothes himself with prescription medication and fleeting distractions. He goes to therapy. He goes to court and pays a meager settlement. Elsewhere, a million blind creatures use their hidden powers to traverse the dark.