The Idiot God by Nick Sayers

I used to be the type of person who nonchalantly said, "The only time I feel lonely is when I'm with other people." I’d refuse any entreaty to dent my thick shell with curiosity and be on my way. I can’t say I'm the same after the colorless cloud Ryan and I found in the woods.

Hometowns feel like a tomb to the college-bound, but I always regretted leaving. It was never a tomb to me. Not until it was. Back home, Ryan and I would spend an evening drinking cheap beer, talking about high school girls and the cosmic indifference of a post-religious world. Sometimes, the best times were spent in a shitty easy chair, staring at the stars in complete silence. The infinite things we'd never say to each other passed between us with gentle repose. It was usually when one of us would grunt and say something stupid or get up to take a leak—a balance of the sacred and the mundane in every moment.

It was during one of these perfect, quiet evenings that the realization hit me: I'd have to go back to school in three days. The thought gave me a gnawing sense of nausea about my life and my little-to-no place in driving it. I tried looking at Ryan to distract myself, only to develop a feeling of a familiar mix of jealousy and pride over his simplicity. The feeling was quickly siphoned from consciousness as a sound vibrated from the dark woods behind Ryan’s house.

“Did you see that?” Ryan asked.

“No, but I heard it. What was it?”

“The flash.”

I sure as shit would've seen a flash. I looked at Ryan and saw deep fear in his eyes, mingling with the reflection of his cheap LED porch light. I let my “what flash?” become another one of those infinite, unsaid things. My skin turned cold, and I could hear myself panting slightly. I tried to mask it with deep, quiet breaths, but it only made my hunger for oxygen more dire. It meant nothing because Ryan’s eyes were streaming with tears.

“Ryan. What’s going on, man?”

He looked at me as if I had just walked into his trailer after being away for a semester—a hanging “what the fuck are you doing here” in his gaze. “Ryan?”

“What?”

I stared at him, then looked toward the treeline. He stood up and started to walk toward the darkness.

“Dude. No.”

He ignored me. It was like those situations where someone stands in an elevator normally and everyone else enters and faces the other way, until the one person not in on the joke turns around to face the wrong way, too. Here was my dipshit self, standing off my chair and following him.

“Where are we going?”

“Did you see it?”

“No, dude. What? I hear a weird sound.”

“You didn’t see the flash? The air and colors?”

“No,” was all I could get out as we started to jog into the darkness.

Hindsight screams, don’t fucking go into the dark forest after the non-Euclidean, flashy cloud your drunk friend just saw. But that’s not how these things work. Not with Ryan and me. From poking a dead raccoon for hours, to playing chicken with an Amtrak train, to discussing the complete isolation of being an individual in a connected universe, we always chased the bunny deeper. We never asked why or by what means we'd exhaust our curiosity—a boyish hubris about knowledge always present.

I would have scratched my scalp if I had remembered how to work my hand as I saw what was in the clearing under the weight of the starlight. A cloud? A portal? A simple trick of light? What fucking light? Ryan looked at me for the first time since he knew me and simply stated, “Now you see.” A simplistic understatement that shook my grip on my, well, everything.

Then Ryan touched the damn thing. If "touch" were a sufficient sensory experience to describe it. His fingers elongated through the cloud like they were in a fishbowl, reaching for heaven. When he finally collapsed on the ground and woke up three hours later, I had him back at his place. One shoe lost. After giving him a minute to wake up, I wanted to ask, "What was it like?" His vacant stare met mine, looking through my skull and the walls, into the deep, vastness of space. My question became another thing unsaid between us—not one of the infinite things, but one that contained an infinity itself.

What can two great-ape morons do with a mystical cloud in the backwoods of Toledo, Washington? A lot. Throwing shit in it, touching it, farting on it—you name it. It took everything we offered and treated it like a gift given to some idiot god with no mind to rationally communicate back. Dumb, idiot, braindead, but a god nonetheless. This textual medium cannot begin to communicate the sensory experience of engaging with the cloud bestowed on us, like moronic penitents who worship an even stupider god. Like a dog trying to hump a dead beached whale. It was exhilarating beyond compare.

This is when the schism happened. Ryan, a prosthletizer, started to strategize on who we should show the cloud to. My insides revolted at the mention. I had only ever been chosen by Ryan. I used diversion and fear to dissuade him, which worked for a time. Weeks passed, and I had over fifty missed calls from school friends, all but reporting me missing. Ignore. Dismiss. Phone off. Ryan started to remind me to eat. I didn't feel hungry, so I stopped. He was always better about caring for himself in that way. Another thing I started to hate about him.

Ryan wanted to preach the gospel of the cloud, while I became its monastic adherent, jealously guarding its secrecy. Ryan and I never fought. 

I wish we had. 

Day, or weeks, maybe months? I don’t know, but Ryan brought his father out without telling me. I was lying nude under the cloud in the leaves when I heard their voices. Ryan’s father was a father figure for me. My dad had Parkinson’s disease and wasn’t around much. My mother—well, fuck her. She wasn’t around at all. Still isn’t. Ryan’s dad, much like him, was the type to remind you to eat and look in your eye and actually care about what he saw reflected back. He became my dad in ways. Even so, I still felt this was an affront to our pact—my pact of secrecy. I looked down at my nude body, down twenty pounds, maybe. Who knows. Who cares. I sat up and watched Ryan’s dad fall to his knees in its presence. He closed his eyes and started to smell and pant through his nose, if one could do such a thing. The cloud seemed to flex toward him, but it was always moving. They didn’t even see me under the thing. I could tell the cloud was manifesting through a smell for Ryan’s dad. Ryan was shielding his eyes; the visual component was always too much for him. I could feel the cloud touch them. I could feel my jealousy. It was in the cloud. Or was it the cloud's jealousy?

It would be easy to blame the cloud for what happened next. I rushed from under the thing. Tackled Ryan's father. The man was anything but frail. I had a different kind of strength. He gasped my name, a short-lived smile crossing his face, soon turning to a gasp as my teeth sank deeply into his throat. I tore outward like a feral wolf. It was an explosion of flavor overwhelming my senses, as the warm blood mixed with my taste buds. The cloud made every taste bud explode with a different color, flavor, sound, again, no words for it. I don't understand. It was like time stopped, yet I was still moving lightning-fast, my fingers quickly finding a trachea under some muscle and flesh. It came out with a pop. Ryan dove on me and knocked me over. He was screaming something, but I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see. I'm not even sure I was breathing.

I walked away from their bodies. My nude form bathed in the cloud’s “light,” and it roiled in the air. I bent over, prostrate, baptized in blood. Its moronic pulsing suggested nothing. I felt it. It wasn't confused; it had no logical structure to its suggestions. It was like a toddler putting something in its mouth, and it found poison and then swallowed it. I was that poison. It wasn't even disgusted in me. It just dumbly started to whirl faster and flash colors without names, until it was gone, and I was on the ground asking for it to hold me again.

It's been weeks in some alien perception of time that is completely meaningless to anyone but me. I'm a different person. My skin, well, I don’t know. The food Ryan used to remind me to eat tastes like ash. My limbs feel both lighter and stronger, and I’ve been practicing running through the woods at night. I never get lost. I always know where I am. I always know where they are. 

I carry Ryan’s skull with me. In the quiet hours under the sun, among the pines, I work toward expressing the infinite things I regret not saying. Anyway, the only time I feel lonely is when I’m with other people. I used to say that nonchalantly, but now, I can’t be with them. Not anymore.