The Algorithm, by Arbogast

from Issue 12

(@arbogast1325 on Twitter)

Colton Farmar settled into his new loveseat and let out a protracted sigh of relief. It had been an arduous move, and the one-man moving crew (Colton) needed to take a serious load off. He let the cotton and polyester materiel envelope him as he sunk as low as possible. A cold bottle of beer oozed condensation between his fingers, while a half-finished cigarette idled on the armrest. Colton told himself that it would be the last one—his very last hit of tar and nicotine and other assorted toxins. He dragged slow and low and kept as much of the smoke in his lungs as possible. It was his way of being decadent. 

The townhouse around him was bare but clean. So far, after a full day of lifting and dropping cardboard, hard plastic, and metal, Colton had only managed to set up the loveseat, a lamp, his mattress, and his state-of-the-art computer tower stand. The tower stand occupied the central place in the living room. It included a 34-inch LED monitor, ergonomic keyboard, mouse, modem, Amazon Echo, and a pair of Bluetooth speakers. Everything was connected and completely wireless. The goal was to create the most obnoxious sound system in the county, for Colton had grand visions of hosting his own parties in the new townhouse—a piece of property well outside of city limits and virtually unmolested by neighbors. He had finally found his own quiet kingdom, and the king said: Let it be loud! He played Loveless by My Bloody Valentine at a high volume to celebrate his conquest. 

Colton took healthy sips from the bottle and experienced the music as a biological sensation. Each swallow and hit of reverb brought back one memory after the other. The move was necessary, but not completely voluntary. He loved his old apartment. Sure, it was cramped, and despite hours spent with Clorox wipes and multi-surface cleaners, Colton never managed to fully tackle its century of dirt and grime. But the apartment had been his home for five years. He had written his dissertation there while buried under unwashed blankets from his late grandmother’s house. He had eaten four-star meals and slept until noon in between those drafty plaster walls. He had slept with more beautiful women than he should have. Colton had played a dangerous game with a few of them, but every time a text informed him that no, he was not yet responsible for someone else’s life. 

Alice had been one of these women. He met her through an app. Their first date was at a restaurant, but they ended up at Colton’s place, where he fed her soup from his slow cooker. It was good soup, she said. He thought the potatoes were still too hard. From there they talked about movies. She preferred kids’ stuff; Colton liked Westerns. He put one of his favorites on, but neither watched it. They studied each other instead. It took him less than a minute to realize that he was her first. The knowledge excited him. They spent the better part of that night and the following morning in bed together. Colton’s intentions were purely of the flesh. Alice, however, wanted his world and more. 

The young woman with hungry eyes started worshipping Colton. Incessant text messages and phone calls became days where she never left his apartment. She clung to him like a koala bear until he learned to love it. A sinful Stockholm syndrome gripped him. He stopped watching Westerns, and he stopped caring about the world outside of his apartment walls. Everything that mattered was confined within Alice—her skin, her hair, her sex, her teeth. Colton let go of his individuality and melted into the greater force of her personality. He began to see her face in the wrinkles of white plaster on each wall. 

The spell lasted for the better part of a year and only broke when she proposed marriage. That word— “marriage”—managed to crease and fold the synapses that had gone to sleep in his lustful brain. Shaken out of his dormancy, Colton tried to ease out of the relationship. Alice realized this and grew violent. Her fists did little damage, so she switched to a coffee pot. Colton finally left his apartment-prison while still picking shards of glass from his curly hair. He would not return home for several weeks. By that point, a restraining order had been granted, and thus the apartment was left peaceful and quiet. 

And yet it was different and uncomfortable. The apartment was stained by bad memories and worst ghosts. Colton did not want to, but he knew he had to leave. He had to get out. So, he leaned heavily on his parents and signed a mortgage for a townhouse far away from the city and from Alice. It was an exile, but a blissful one. Colton planned on making the most of his self-imposed solitary confinement. He was done with women. All the women in the world. They were all Alice to him, and Colton wanted Alice dead and gone. 

On the same day that he moved in, he got his wish. Colton learned that Alice was dead. A friend had left a direct message on his moribund Instagram account. Colton saw it an hour later while standing shirtless in his new kitchen after setting aside the last of his stuff. Sweat ran down from his nose and onto the phone’s screen. Suicide. Alice made love to the river. A big jump from a tall bridge. It was just like her, Colton thought. The hard cynicism of his thoughts disturbed him, but not enough to stop or moderate them. He became joyous with hate. 

He celebrated the best he could, but exhaustion and two beers eventually did him in. He fell asleep with the cigarette smoldering. When the ash singed his fingers, he woke up in a brief panic. Colton put out the cigarette, cleaned his armrest, and yawned. He looked outside and saw the pitch black sky of the early morning hours. He looked at his cellphone and saw that it was 4:15 a.m. He winced because he was the kind of guy who could not go back to sleep. Once he was up, he was up. 

Colt transferred from one seat to the other, as he left the loveseat for the more broken-in leather of his computer chair. He played with the one tear near the side as he let his computer start up and settle in. He then navigated to his YouTube account and clicked on a playlist that read: “Alice is Dead.” He had made it months before while drunk and mischievous. The playlist was a mix of breakup pop songs and murderous death metal. He felt that the music accurately reflected the aesthetics of his soul. Now that the playlist was true, Colton felt a small pang of guilt, but pressed play anyway. He pulled the volume bar to maximum for the first song— “Bloodcraving” by Mortician. The massive swarm of distortion fit well with the lyrics about a zombie outbreak, but Colton preferred to think of the song as a pornographic depiction of Alice being eaten alive like that naked punk rock girl in Return of the Living Dead. The song’s sample of When a Stranger Calls made things easier, for both the film and Colton’s frothy daydream focused on tormented women. This ecstasy of misogynistic violence lasted five minutes and fifteen seconds. It was replaced by the sharp melancholy of beabadoobee’s “Talk.” The transition was jarring. Colton loved it. He turned up his speakers until he felt the monitor vibrate a little. It was a pleasurable experience. So pleasurable in fact that Colton grew hard. He put his hand on his engorged member and started to stroke it like a piston. 

He stopped before release. A small noise broke his bliss. It was a light thud, almost as if someone had come to stop above him. He had heard such a noise before. Every apartment dweller knows the sound of an upstairs neighbor, but Colton’s townhouse had no such neighbor. 

“Hello?” he said absentmindedly. The tent in the center of his athletic shorts formed a flesh dowsing rod pointed towards magnetic north, almost as if it had identified the problem. Colton stood up and looked at his ceiling. The noise stopped. He waited a minute to see if it would return. When it did not, he went back to the music. The next song was Napalm Death’s “I Abstain.” He had included it for its title alone, which Colton found a funny reference to his newfound sexual abstinence. It was replaced after three minutes and thirty-one seconds by Alkaline Trio’s “This Could Be Love.” Colton sang along to the morbid, slightly satanic love song. 

Step one, slit my throat
Step two, play in my blood
Step three, cover me in dirty sheets
And run laughing out of the house

Step four, stop off at Edgebrook Creek
And rinse your crimson hands…

 The thudding interrupted him again. This time a flaccid Colton got up and walked up the carpeted steps to the second floor. He found his bedroom, an empty room, and an equally empty half-bath. No signs of habitation; no leftover droppings from a squirrel or mouse or chipmunk or any of the usual critters of far-out suburbia. He was alone. 

“Maybe it’s just the wind,” he said to himself. He quickly nixed that idea after opening one of the home’s many windows. There was not even a hint of a breeze in the humid summer air. Without the wind as a possibility, Colton transitioned to another old chestnut. The thuds were just the product of a house settling. That’s it and nothing more. He went back downstairs and returned to his music, but this time he turned the volume down. He wanted to catch the next unaccounted for noise. When it did not come, he relaxed and let the playlist finish.