Brendan's Bones

Everybody’s got a skeleton in their closet. Mine is dismembered.

I’d love to share this fact with somebody; it's not every day you get to play God. But I get it now. We humans weren’t meant for such a game. Lesson learned.

That lesson lay in my closet in pieces. A bundle of sticky severed bones inside a brown burlap bag.

These bones are Brendan’s, extracted like slow-cooked ribs pulled from a cooker. Though separated at the joints cleanly, they made my new apartment a bloody mess, a viscera canvas of gory spectacle: gizzards dangling from ceiling lamps, sinew stacked on blackened windowsills, ligaments spray-jetted across kitchen linoleum. Part of a penis stuffed in a sneaker. A testicle (I think) in the fruit bowl.

As I said. A real mess.

#

Some secrets just want to be told. This secret, of what happened here, is the kind that draws attention to itself. Like when the neighbors complain about the too-loud television and even louder arguments. Or the Maintenance Manager who asks about the rotting smell. Or the postman wondering about my “new roommate” (the one who signs for deliveries and “is that OK?”).

No, not OK. Not at all. But what could I say?

What could I say when a friend told me she thought she “saw Brendan” out and about? “It sounds nuts, but it really looked like Brendan,” she confided, clearly disoriented by the vision. I could have replied, “You did see Brendan. You know why? Because the bastard was not supposed to leave the house, not even for a short stroll.”

But I didn’t say anything.

Because despite a desire to brag about making the impossible possible, my explanation (for Brendan’s re-appearance) would have been too unbelievable. Even more so this morning after he burst apart like a flaming flesh piñata.

After all, this was not actually Brendan. It was Brendan 2.0.

It’s a cruel irony, but the only people who’d believe my tale are the very ones I wanted to stop.

#

During his short life, from inception to ignition, Brendan 2.0 or “Bad Brendan” as I thought of him (“BB” for short) brought nothing but grief. An awful manifestation of good intention, BB was a misguided attempt to resurrect an old friendship, to say things I wished I'd said. I know now, you can’t relive the past, can’t bring it back to life. You can’t play God.

Or can you?

Just after Brendan was reborn, when his dead eyes suddenly lived again, I explained everything to him. How I relieved his buried coffin of those sun-bleached bones and grew him back into existence: skin, muscle, organs, all sprouting back into reality, covering his skeletal frame like a chia pet.

A recent discovery made this possible, a black book of supernatural conjurings uncovered in my closet’s crawl space. This brought Brendan back, but also brought out something in me, a knack for cross-incantation configurations. A page here, a phrase there; mix and match chant combinations that did the trick. A formula to beat death.

But I had no one to tell.

I’d brought my deceased friend back. I’d played God!

“Alive,” I’d yelled, in awe of my miracle. And the dark room had brightened suddenly, bathing his face in yellow-orange light.

“Fire,” he said and raised a hand to his mouth. Behind me flickered a 3D fireplace.

“Don’t be frightened. It’s just my screensaver,” I said, but turned back to find New Brendan finishing a yawn, wiping his mouth.

“Me not dumb,” he said curtly, then smacked his lips. “Hella thirsty. Have beer?”

In stunned silence, I watched Brendan, never a drinker, downing one craft pale ale after another in rapid succession. A six pack practically inhaled.

“Pull finger,” he said sloppily, index extended.

“What?”

He insisted. I did and the skin of his finger came off like a wet condom. I gasped, but he seemed to feel no pain, laughing as he unleashed a loud rumble of broken wind.

Aghast, I stared.

“Me too low brow? Take stick from ass, bro.”

He moved on to the liquor cabinet, pausing between sips to place the loose wrapping of his formerly covered finger back upon the wet digit. “Some handiwork,” he said with a smirk, wagging the ragged finger. After several more whisky swigs, he passed out, face-first, a dull thud upon the kitchen table. Like a baby grizzly he slept, vibrating the room with his snoring.

What had I wrought?

A newborn cries when smacked on the bottom, the first sounds of new life. New Brendan’s first utterances? Snark.

This was not Brendan. This was someone else, something born from Brendan’s bones but not of his spirit. Brendan gone bad. BB.

That was the first night.

#

The next morning, four days ago, I was awakened by his words.

In front of my computer he sat, glowering. “Shift button sticks,” he shouted, tapping it wildly with his re-sheathed finger, the detached skin wrapper held tight with a twist-tie like a hobo’s engagement ring.

I cursed myself for leaving the damn thing out the night before, but it wouldn’t have mattered; in addition to the laptop, I have two tablets, two desktop computers, and three smartphones, all with differing operating systems. If he wanted to get online, there’d be little to stop him. In my apartment, the tools of my trade are ever-present.

I looked over his shoulder, mortified.

A brightly colored flag-draped page filled the screen, a site called Dissension Dispatch. An eagle logo perched proudly in the masthead, its talons embracing a machine gun with the words Sic Semper Tyrannis imprinted across the barrel.

New Brendan rose, grunted. “World crazy,” he said, then made for the bathroom. His viewing history troubled me. I scrolled the tab: PatriotTruthBomb.com. Anon-Anonamon.net. StrappedSaints.org.

Seemed BB had spent the night burrowing into conspiracy rabbit holes. These websites were literally unbelievable; fetched far past the mainstream, deep into the swampy waters of coocoo bird cavern. Inundated by this far-flung, anxiety-inducing content, he’d kept reading, each site deadly earnest in its claim that their news was “too hot” for conventional news to handle:

 Satanic scientists harvesting Amish DNA to identify and eradicate religious genetic disposition. Self-dealing space dragons (disguised as politicians) selling state secrets via interdimensional backchannels. Debt-desperate celebrities moonlighting as hitmen (and hitwomen) “for contract cost savings of 80 cents on the dollar.”

On it went, enemies everywhere, a non-stop supply of villains pumping readers with outrage fuel.

“Why are you reading this garbage,” I asked as BB exited the bathroom, a string of burps trailing behind him.

“Me learn world me live in. Should try, bro.”

“These sites are totally disreputable; they’re incentivized to rile you up—”

He dismissed me with a wave of the hand and sat down to continue dumping doo-doo data into his newly rebooted brain.

“You’re not hearing me,” I said, my frustration rising. “Listen. The business model is simple, scratch the amygdala; a dopamine drip for the angry ignoramus; red meat for zombies—”

“You know-it-all.”

“I… well I know they need the audience to keep coming back, right? Even the talking heads spewing this crap don’t believe what they’re paid to say. Why are you being like this?”

“Like what? Me own person.”

“The drinking, farting… this propaganda crap. Brendan was not—”

“Me not Brendan.”

The words cut deep. Exasperated, I yelled, “You’ll rot your mind.”

“You think so smart. You wrong.”

“Oh, really? You’ve been alive for less time than it takes to cook a turkey, but you know better?”

“Me well-informed, bitch.”

#

This indignant attitude presented a new wrinkle. Most unexpected.

Brendan, the original, was highly literate; an articulate, straightedged neatnik, skeptical and smart. The new Brendan was something else, a jumble of wack software misfiring beneath a once-friendly face.

Maybe I should’ve seen it coming.

I’m in QA (tech, gaming) so this result (BB’s malfunctioning mind) was sort of an unforced error. I didn’t anticipate he’d be drawn into online derangement like an infant to mother’s milk.

And yet, as a project manager, I’m well-versed on how the spell, so to speak, works. I know what keeps a player playing. Maintain engagement, that’s the goal. Game theory at work, the key is insularity; those in the community are in the know, everyone else an outsider. And while the user uses the product, the product uses the user. A dealer/junkie relationship.

Nonetheless, BB’s addiction to B.S. happened so quickly. Literally overnight.

Tethered to the screen by a parasocial link, this was a creature in thrall of sociopathic nonsense, a self-centered soulsuck who drank all my liquor, ate all my food, and argued incessantly, pointlessly. He was the anti-Brendan, a Dunning Kruger douchebag overflowing with misplaced angry certitude, perpetually aggrieved by opinions too ignorant to be taken seriously and too dangerous to ignore.

At dinner, three nights ago: “Possessor Amoebas enter private parts when pee. Make testosterone to estrogen.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Supreme Court under amoeba control. This why gay marriage legal.”

I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

“Freedom March on Monday,” he continued. “Me protest. Bring noose to courthouse. Hung Jury. Get joke?”

I kept eating.

“Me go,” he added.

“We’ll talk about this later.” I hoped he’d forget about it.

Like a spoiled teen, he harrumphed with a long “Whatever” and stewed for a minute before asking that I “pass pasta.”

I did, and watched as he emptied the whole bowl onto his plate in a large glob. It resembled a brain strangling itself in wet noodles.

#

Three days ago, before heading out for a client meeting, I decided to give BB some Brendan background, inspire him into being something better.

“I thought you might be interested, wasn’t sure if I mentioned it. Brendan, old Brendan I mean, was pretty accomplished. He had a Masters in Comparative Literature.”

New Brendan suckled his beer bottle, said nada. I soldiered on.

“His undergrad was actually in plant biology, though. A professional aspiration became a dedicated hobby. He was collecting plants when he died.”

Shrug. I kept going on.

“He’d thought about becoming a researcher initially, but was more artist than scientist. That’s where I met him, in grad school.”

Brow arched, nothing more. One last attempt.

“He spent several hours each week feeding the homeless.”

“So?”

“Really? That’s your response?”

He angled his beer bottle at me. “Ex-military snatch homeless childs. Bet you not know.”

“What?”

“Make skin garment for rich peoples. Saint Brendan not stop that.”

“Where do you get your facts,” I yelled. “Never mind. I already know.”

He smiled a wide smarmy grin. “Real facts or fake facts?” he said, his smug mug the kind you’d imagine rearranging with a baseball bat. Facts, for BB, were proving selective; when faced with them, his necromanced noggin would loop along its warped thought track, an error-stuck disc spinning stupidly in a logic cul-de-sac.

Returning to the computer, he hunched over, escaping into the online landscape and began writing vigorously, pumping his own personal stock of bile into the net’s bilge surplus. Weirdly, his writing was fully formed, in stark wordy contrast to his limited speech. Comments about “pedophilic commie-trans replicants” flowed from his fingers, inflammatory phantasms finding kindred spirits on likebarn.com, a popular social media hang infamous for being overrun by bots and Nazis.

“Tell me you’re using a pseudonym on those sites,” I said.

“Yeeessss, maaaassster.”

Sarcastic bastard. Acting like I’m a monster. “Frankenstein was actually the doctor, you know.”

“Doctor real monster,” he replied.

What the?

#

After three days with New Brendan, there could be no doubt. He was indeed his own person. He definitely wasn’t the old Brendan.

Nonetheless, he was very familiar.

This Brendan was a natural born troll, a carbon copy of every chin-bearded chud traffic-jamming the info superhighway with ill-informed nastiness, one more miscreant hell-bent on destroying humanity’s sanity infrastructure.

“Immigrant people,” he said, apropos of nothing, “are different gene. Not human DNA.” He stated this as a matter of fact, not even looking up from the computer, so enrapt was he by yet another numbskull revelation.

Media had cast a spell on him, an algorithmic alchemy that made him mental.

And this, in a way, was what I was trying to fight against by reincarnating old Brendan. It wasn’t just his companionship I missed, but his empathy and critical mind. Perhaps if one uniquely good person was worth a thousand bad, then perhaps I could create a small army of the good. Rebalance reality, re-right the wrongs of those unable to reckon with what is.

A grandiose notion, maybe. But using old Brendan as a template, why not try and shift the tide? Drown divisive shitstarter culture in a decency tsunami. A Brendan battalion to beat down the prick parade pissing idiocy all over Mother Earth.

I could create a corrective. I could change the course of history. Something worth bragging about. News worth sharing.

But I’d done the opposite.

I’d brought another toxic nitwit into the world.

#

“Where get book that make me,” New Brendan asked at breakfast, two days ago.

“Why?”

“Closest thing me have to mother.”

I was struck, moved. This was so out-of-the blue, so not the usual snot-spray of pig-ignorant dumbassery. Was he maturing?

I told him about the secret panel in the closet floor, how I’d stumbled onto it after the Maintenance Manager jerry-rigged the bathroom piping; how this plumbing had sent PVC through the closet, an ugly but temporary fix causing me to trip and assback into the hidden panel’s open-sesame trigger button.

I reminded him that his rebirth was due to my efforts at mixing spells, that’s what brought him back. “It’s not the words, it’s what the reader does with them,” I emphasized. Hoping he’d take the hint, I added that “you can’t always take things at face value. You get out what you put in. That's the key. Understand?”

“Me not get out.”

“Excuse me?”

“Stuck in house. Me slave!”

“I know you left the house once already,” I yelled. “You snuck out when I went to meet with a client. You did this against my express wishes.”

“You not God.”

I tried to calm myself. “Look. Before we do anything else, we need to make a plan.”

“You not think through when make me,” he said, derisively. He picked up a framed picture of Brendan and me camping, post-graduation, and examined it closely. “Why he? Why bring back?”

“He died too young. He was a good man in a world of bad ones.”

His brow rose cynically.

“What?”

“You love man.”

“I… uh, well… yes, of course. He was my best friend.”

 He smirked. “You know what me mean.” He put the framed photo back down and sat in front of the computer, nodding with disapproval.

I stood watching him type a post on birdbrainz.com (a social media space where users “chirp” at each other in poorly considered nine-word statements). He wrote: “If gays can’t procreate don’t they imperil humanity’s survival?”

He looked up, sincere faced. “Just asking question.” A flurry of responses immediately populated his feed: terms like unholy lifestyle and conversion therapy.

“See? Me not only concerned citizen.”

Soon the thread widened, chirpers asking their own questions on a variety of topics, each more nauseatingly offensive then the last. Bad Brendan smiled a wide smile, most-pleased.

He had to be destroyed.

#

It had not even been a full week into his new life when BB argued people should be “made aware” of his existence. It was as if he intuited my desire for recognition of my God-like feat and was using it against me.

“Bad idea,” I said and reminded him he needed to stay indoors until I could figure out the next move. That went in one ear and out the other; he brought it up yetagain over dinner. When I sternly said no, he nodded exaggeratedly with another “Yes Maasssterrr,” which caused his left ear to fly into the mashed potatoes.

“There’s duct tape in the bottom drawer,” I said. But the tape was so old and frayed his ear refused to hold; instead, it flopped on the barely sticky loop of tape like a cheap sandal. He threw the ear at me.

“Workmanship suck,” he yelled and stormed into his room, my former office. He opened the door a second later, shouting, “Tomorrow me go to DC protest!” Another door slam.

Resigned to his histrionics, I held up the detached ear, spoke into it: “This is a guy who won’t listen to reason.”

I scrubbed the dishes. It occurred to me that New Brendan’s state of increasing decrepitude was poetic symbolism, his noxious beliefs corroding him from the inside out. Nose, eyelids, lips, all affixed at odd angles; glued, stapled, or spackled back into their respective approximate place. His bad brain made him a patchwork man, hodgepodged into a tangle of conspiracy, hate, bigotry, and fear.

I had to admit it: putting old Brendan back together had failed. This new Brendan was crap—in mind and body—a talking turd worthy of flushing from existence. But how to do it?

The doorbell chimed, disrupting my first serious consideration of unmaking my monster. BB was still on the can when I answered the door.

“What happened to your cast,” asked the Maintenance Manager.

“What?”

He pointed at my arm. “You healed quick.”

My recently broken wrist. When I first found the book, I’d performed a spell test, a charm trial run, which reset my bone almost immediately. This led me to the bigger, more ambitious idea. That idea was now polluting my bathroom.

“Anyway. Got complaints about a smell,” said the man. BB’s deteriorating state was starting to draw more attention than the loud snoring, loud arguing, loud farting, and loud television.

I placed the blame on a botched batch of boiled cauliflower. Before the manager left, I asked about my closet and the stop-gap plumbing.

“I’ll be around tomorrow to get you squared away. Will have to take out the floor. Hang tight,” he said.

#

The next morning, this morning, I awoke immobilized, my wrists wrapped to the bed posts with old duct tape. Bad Brendan sat in a chair glaring at me.

“What the hell,” I yelled.

“Hell? No. Me heaven-sent. Me reborn. World must know.”

“You said the world is crazy!”

“Me have medicine.” He waved the black book.

Why did I tell him about the closet’s secret space?

“Mainstream poison, make world toilet,” he declared. “I help.”

“You mean you’ll make everyone like you, willfully ignorant, feeding their heads with trash.”

“One men trash, other men treasure.”

“You can’t do this!”

“Me free. Do as please. You not God.”

I pulled at my bonds, shouted. In my mind an army of the braindead stamped through green fields, turning them blood red as they passed.

He held up a multicolored noose, spiral strips of reds, whites, and blues. “For protest,” he said. A large torn envelope sat at his feet (the package he’d signed for). Out poked an order fulfillment slip from Dissension Dispatch Productions LLC. Apparently, “the roommate” the postman was asking about had tapped my credit card.

“After protest,” he said, “me go on LibertyMuscle Podcast. Give scoop of lifetime.”

“Don’t you dare leave this apartment,” I yelled.

“Me not.”

“What?"

“Not until make me good. You do bad job.” He raised the book from his lap and cast an incantation, each word read slowly, deliberately.

Nothing happened. He whined, then tried another. And another. Nothing seemed to change. He slammed the book shut, grunted with anger.

“What are you doing,” I asked.

“Spell not work! Me want fix me!” He threw the book down and stormed from the bedroom. I could hear him slump into the leather living room sofa, television turned up. I wondered. Did his chants fail because he truly was undead, and the book only answered to the living? Was BB literally soulless?

I moved my wrists back and forth and the old worn tape soon tore away. Peeking through the door crack, I could see the top of his head against the couch. On the television, a panel of talking heads blathered. The discussion centered around the viability of a key speaker scheduled for the court protest later in the day, a Mussolini impersonator in blackface running for state senator. “Sure to offend the people worth offending,” opined one panelist.

“Speaking for The People will be back after this commercial break,” said the smiling bow-tied host, a self-satisfied trust-fund fop (coal-baron-born), his family known mostly for blasting West Virginia mountaintops into moon surface. It cut to a commercial, a promo for “The Rust McFunkle Show,” a quick montage of the show’s most outrageous “hot takes” intercut with a spray of bullets spelling out the word RUST. “Trust in Rust,” he said, finger aimed at the viewer.

Who watches this?

“Damn straight,” BB yelled, fist raised, as if to remind me.

#

I scanned the book quickly, searching for a conjuration that would relieve me of my terrible creation. One spell, a reversal charm, seemed to fit, but there was a catch. Unmaking him in this way (in real time) would mean a few more interminable days with an out-of-control BB as the clock ticked back to inception, effectively undoing him.

Bad Brendan was still on the couch, possessed by the television. Unquestionably enslaved by the screen, he could not be saved.

I needed to customize a chant, the equivalent of a ctrl-z undo. I soon found another on time acceleration. After sneaking into the closet, my feet between the damnable stop-gap PVC, I read aloud the combined invocation.

Then, just short of completion, my voice choked out. Behind me, Bad Brendan had snuck up, his noose taught around my neck. I dropped the book.

“You suck you no good,” he yelled, pulling me out of the closet, through the bedroom. I struggled to keep speaking the spell, my voice a hoarse whisper. Dragged into the living room, I fought both for breath and words, trying to finish the words from memory. I was losing consciousness.

Barely had I completed the chant when the force of a quick burst baked the room with light, a flash fireball followed by a shower of blood and bone.

I blacked out.

#

A detonation chant.

I hadn’t meant to do this, but at least I’d eliminated the problem. Unfortunately, it was a messy resolution. And loud. Fortunately, the other tenants were at work.

After cleaning the apartment, I examined my neck in the bathroom mirror, the noose marks raw, ghastly. Shirt burned away, shoulders and back reddened from BB’s implosion. I could’ve died.

But I didn’t. I’d undone my mistake.

My face in the mirror looked back in amazement, in awe. “God,” I said to my reflection. “I created life then destroyed it.”

Lesson learned.

But then I looked at the framed photo of Brendan and me, happy. I wiped away a small smear of BB’s blood. The last decent photo, before he went on that damn solo hike; disappeared, a year almost, down the mountain, hidden in the tall grasses. Dogs rooting for a bone.

Maybe I could just…no.

Well.

I could give it another shot. Get it right this time.

Yes. I decided to try again and remake Brendan with a new spell-set. Create a man worth talking about.

But when I went back to the closet, the book and bag of bones were no longer there. Into the deep of the closet I went, searching the floor, under and around the makeshift PVC. The hidden panel was empty. I turned to find the Maintenance Manager, bag in one hand, book in the other.

The PVC began to move up and around my body, a now-organic tubing, bloodless white intestines twisting around my arms, legs, waist, imprisoning me like a fly caught in thick white webbing.

He waved the book. “This can be found in each unit, y’know. It’s like the Gideon Bible in this place.”

I tried to yell, but tubing moved over my face, into my mouth, silencing me.

“Though to find it, you have to want it bad enough. Each one is designed solely for the tenant, whoever signed the lease. What you do with the book is up to you. Good, bad, you make your bed, so to speak.”

I wanted to defend my actions, but words stuck in my throat, unintelligible. He raised a hand in response.

“I got no authority here. I just maintain the building. My cross to bear.”

 He shook the bone bag as if weighing it. “Anyway. Looks like it’s just you and your friend here. Traveling light, as they say.” He tossed the bag at my feet.

And then the floor gave way, but the PVC tentacles held me aloft. He opened the book, drew his finger down a page, in search of something.

“Here it is. I’m supposed to read this disclaimer, the “you were warned” bit:

In using the book, you expressly agree that doing so is at your own risk. You are solely responsible for the outcome of your actions, personal or otherwise. It is understood that playing God is the Devil’s work.”

He closed the book, put it under his arm, and shrugged. “Lesson learned, huh?”

And then down I went into the darkness.

Secrets and all.