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Hell is other people.
— Jean Paul Sartre
You’ve always feared. The only reason they call you “hermit” and not “schizo” is because you can hide it.
No one’d even notice it upon first glance. In all other regards, you look like a normal human being: regular if not shifty eyes, a pair of pearly whites that’s barely used to smile, you follow the rules of basic hygiene. Switch out that turtleneck for a suit and tie, and boom!— upstanding citizen right here, folks.
But you’re not exactly human, are you? You’ve got the body, sure, any test run on you would say you’re a bonafide homosapien. Though, when you peek through the blinds (you know, before everything all went to shit), watching your neighbor and his kid play catch outside while his wife feeds the stray dogs scraps from the dinner table, as bystanders greet each other where urban concrete meets rural soil, and couples walk hand-in-hand past the elderly with their grandchildren and great-grandchildren— well, you know that normal human beings aren’t supposed to feel an aversion to that kind of thing.
They can see you, can hear you, can touch you, can impose their own interpretations of you onto you, (an action which you have somehow convinced yourself is a violation of your autonomy), but they don’t know your thoughts, hidden behind seven millimetres of solid skull. So long as your thoughts are your own, away from the prying interpretations of others, you’re safe.
Your autonomy is preserved, and you truly are human.
He sat at the edge of the bed, sweat glistening off his back, head buried in his hands, palms digging into his sockets. Behind him, the woman’s chest rose and fell like a dying animal’s, emphasising the pronounced bulge in her abdomen.
It was impossible, he reassured himself, for a slim woman to suddenly become nine months pregnant in the span of three nights. He swallowed down the dread pooling at the back of his throat, and listened to the rustle of the new tenants in the house, making themselves at home. The gun was at the foot of the bed, ready to unload a full shell into whoever was unlucky enough to be at its mercy.
It’s impossible, he said to himself once more. Then again, rationality had become a luxury in the days when even a minute under the sun could lead to third-degree burns. He didn’t want her to be a Visitor. He rather enjoyed the company — the sex, mostly — and the warmth beside him when he woke up. How long had it been since he’d listened to the soft breath of another person slumbering?
Slowly, he crawled to her, the mattress creaking painfully loudly under him, and pressed his ear against her stomach. Her internal organs churned like clockwork, reminding him of when his mother would hold him against her and he’d hear her insides grumbling and squeaking. He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. A kick, surely, would be undeniable proof of pregnancy. He moved his hand to the warm exposed skin of her lower abdomen, where her belly had grown too large for her tank top to cover it.
Suddenly, she stirred, a raspy groan coming from her throat. He recoiled, retreating back to his side of the mattress. Her eyes fluttered open as she stretched out her lanky limbs. “Hmm, baby…?” She hummed. “You okay?”
He leaned back on his haunches and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Are you…” he began, “really not pregnant?”
“Oh, baby,” she cooed and propped herself up on her arm. “This is really getting to your head, isn’t it? You wanna talk about it?”
His heart dropped when he realised she was waiting for an answer. “No,” he quickly said, and returned to his spot at the edge of the bed.
“C’mon,” the mattress squeaked as she shuffled towards him, and threw her arms around his neck so she was pressed against his back. “I know you’re dealing with a lot right now,” she whispered into his ear. “I’m here to listen to you…”
Her breath sent a chill down his spine, and he turned his goosebumped neck away from her. “I don’t know who to trust anymore,” he admitted. “I don’t even know if I can trust myself…”
“Yeah,” she planted a cold kiss onto his bare shoulder. “It must be so hard on you. But you have me, I’m here for you, baby. Just keep talking, yeah? I’m here for you, you can always talk to me.”
His eyes landed on the gun. “Yeah, I know…”
He waited till she was asleep again before slumping to the floor. More than anything, he hated revealing things to people. His mind was his private sanctum, privy to his and only his perception. To give out his thoughts would be to let others mar them with their own conceptions and ideas. How would she view him in the morning, in the clarity of the blazing morning heat?
For a fleeting instant, he hoped that she was a Visitor. That should give him enough of an excuse; he wanted her thoughts of him to die alongside her in a bloody hail of buckshots.
Then the moment passed. He glanced back, praying he did not just see a shape push from the inside of her enlarged stomach.
You never liked to talk to people. Like, really talk to people. Small talk you could manage; brief quips about the weather, questions about the wife and kids, inquiries about work… You didn’t mind listening to other people either. Go on, you used to think, tell me more about your life. Remind me of your humanity.
What few friends you had always used to tell you that you could talk to them about anything that was bothering you. And you did — a slow driver, an empty can of beer, rowdy teens outside your window. But you knew that wasn’t what they meant. No, they wanted to know the real you, the kind of shit they couldn’t gauge from your often passive facial expression. People wanted to know the ins-and-outs of what made you tick, all so that they could comfort you, hold your hand and tell you they know exactly how you feel, but also that they couldn’t image how you must be feeling, and then they tell you to be strong about it, but also that it’s okay to not be okay.
Honestly, it never really had much of an effect on you. The only time you really, genuinely spilled your heart out to someone was to an old friend from school. You were thirteen, freshly bruised from where your drunken father had struck you on your cheek. Your friend saw it, pestered you for the truth until you cracked and told everything.
At first, it felt good, like a weight had been lifted off your chest. Sympathy and hugs were offered, and you even got to learn a little more about your friend in return. For the first time, someone knew something intimate about you, something that no one else knew.
However, that very night, the childish dream faded, and you dreaded seeing your friend the next day. Now that you really thought about it, you didn’t actually feel better. You felt naked, exposed, like a crazed zoo animal making a furious show inside its enclosure while others watched safely from above. And when you do show up the next day, the bruise having faded a little, it’s all “how’re you feeling today?” “Everything okay at home?” “Anything you wanna talk about?”, tiptoeing around you as though you were a volcano waiting to burst.
You couldn’t fucking stand it. They got a taste of your private thoughts, and they wanted more. Wanted to pick you apart and study you like scientists dissecting an animal. Even in your own mind, you weren’t safe from others. From that day onwards, you swore never to let anyone in ever again, to never let yourself be put in any situation where your real thoughts would be betrayed (you began using your father’s beer cans as ice to lessen the bruises, learned how to keep your face passive and your mouth shut). And look how that’s turned out for you! A certified agoraphobe — but hey, at least you’re the only one here.
He enjoyed the presence of the Wireface more than he expected, not in spite of the language barrier, but because of it. At one point, he’d written his name on paper and alternated between pointing to it, and to himself. In turn, the Wireface also scribbled something on the sheet in an alphabet he couldn’t recognise and then pointed to himself. That indecipherable arrangement of characters made up the identity of the man before him.
He was surprisingly calm for someone who had a dozen holes dotted around his lips from where the stitches had cut into the skin, leaving raw zigzagged scars over the tender flesh. He didn’t even seem to be bothered when his host had pointed a gun to the cashier girl beside him, curled up in the back of the storage room.
She shuddered, her right shoulder trembling harder than the stiffer left one. The signs had been there from the very start: perfect teeth, red eyes, dirty fingernails, and now the armpits. He would be a fool not to heed them. He stepped past the Wireface, steadying the tremble in his hands as his finger curled over the trigger.
A terrified wheeze escaped the cashier, who oscillated between the acceptance of her inevitable death, and the natural fear of death within any living creature. “Can I at least wear a blindfold—”
The shot resonated around the house, the sound bouncing on the floor and ricocheting across the walls to all the tenants. A geyser of blood erupted from where her head used to be, coating the storage room in viscous crimson. The body fell into the corner, crumpling in on itself, spasming and twitching and writhing in agony.
He staggered back, ears ringing from the shot. Blood stained the cuffs of his sweater a purple colour. He turned back, trying to remember where he had last left the garbage bags, as the body would have to be kept inside till nightfall, when it would be safe enough to open the window and toss it outside.
Wordlessly, the Wireface reached for the pack of garbage bags on one of the shelves, already knowing the procedure after spotting the disposal of the coated man’s body a day earlier, and held it out to him. He accepted it, letting his gun hand fall limply by his side as the cashier’s body continued to seize up in premature rigor mortis. The Wireface have a nod of understanding, and together they stuffed the remains into the bags, the inhuman shape of broken limbs protruding from the stretchy black plastic. It was the second body in the house, the other being the mangled corpse of the hunter, its flesh shredded into strips, features torn beyond recognition.
When they were done, dreading the eight hours they’d have to spend with the corpses before nightfall, he caught the Wireface’s manic eye, also splattered with blood. In the humid air of the storage room, they suddenly understood each other as if they had spoken a million words together, they who could not even exchange one between them; they knew the fear that what they said would be lost in translation to others, who either pretended to understand, or lashed out in their ignorance.
No one would know them as well ever again after that moment.
It’s not that you don’t crave human connection. You loved your mother and grandmother, you liked some of your acquaintances; you even loved a wife, for the brief stint that you two were happy together. Being away from all that is really more of a utilitarian calculation, you think. The agony of being around others just isn’t worth the momentary bliss you get from genuine connection.
You learned that a few months before the cataclysm, when your neighbor invited you to dinner with his family. Had your and his houses not been in such close proximity, you probably wouldn’t have shown up — it’s not as if you dislike the guy, quite the opposite, in fact. It’s nice to have him over once in a while, drinking beers in the kitchen or watching whatever football game was on the TV. Given your, for lack of a better term, friendship, it’s not surprising why he invited you over. What is a mystery, however, is what compelled you to accept.
The next night, you trekked downhill to his home, where his daughter bubbly greeted you at the door. You were let in without a second thought. The wife had cooked a pheasant, presented before you on a platter.
For a while, you fooled yourself into thinking that this was where joy was — wolfing down a home-cooked meal with a friend and his family, recounting a funny story or joke, while the radio crackled out some tune and the delicious meal warmed you to your core. Perhaps people weren’t so bad, maybe you could one day look into the eyes of your fellow man and know that you are truly understood.
What a fucking joke.
A silence fell across the table, and you were reminded of the inescapability of your situation: if you were to leave right then, they’d all look at you in disappointment. You were trapped. Stringy pheasant flesh clogged your mouth, a suffocating heat festered in the room, everyone’s voices were too shrill and loud, and you were painfully aware of the shift of your bowels. A shadow passed across the mantle, the weight of the universe crushed down upon you, enveloping you. People became warped, malignant mirrors. Time had stopped, freezing you in hell.
Once you manage to get through the night, endorphins high, you end up hurling out the half-digested meal over the toilet bowl, coughing out the sick feeling in your stomach you’d been suppressing at the dinner table. You had just barely made it out of the house with your dignity still intact, your neighbor none the wiser to your torment.
No, you didn’t belong with them, no matter how much you wanted to. Your wants and your needs are two distinct things, and what you needed was safety. What you needed was isolation. Home — your inner sanctum, the private dwelling place of warmth and security.
Here, you were master, hidden behind the security of a flimsy wooden door, free to pass judgement on whatever aspect of the house you so wished to do. All your needs could be met there: sleep, toiletry, food, recreation, communication (so long as your landline was still working). There was no need to leave, to venture out into the uncertain, unpredictable world of human beings. Just you and your thoughts — you unbridled, you unhindered, free to indulge in your own solitary humanity to your lonely heart’s content.
He rubbed his eyes, groggy from his new nocturnal schedule, and peeked through the window blinds.
The Pale Man stood crooked, his skin pulled taut over the strange concave dips in his body. His right arm stretched down long enough to reach his knees, his left held out the head of a FEMA worker, dangling from the loop of his helmet. A wide grin stretched unnaturally across his face, exposing glistening gums and a row of impossibly impeccable white teeth.
Worst yet were his eyes — piercing through the smoke and dust in the air, passing in between the blinds and bearing directly into the homeowner, as if to say I see you. You.
He ducked below the window, heart knocking against his ribs, though he still felt the gaze of the Pale Man invading his home, surveying for other signs of life. The blinds were closed, but the thing outside remained, unable to be ignored. Its gaze would always be there, staring at him, past his windows and walls, carving him out for all to see, revealing to the world one of his most private thoughts: complete and total fear.
All-encompassing fear, betrayed by hyperventilation and tears.
Holy fear, he must not show it.
You don’t think you’ll ever change. It’s unlikely you’ll get married again, you’ll probably never make any new friends.
But who knows? When you see all those people outside, a nuclear family at the park, teenagers meeting up in clusters to skateboard, children trading playing cards, businessmen picking up their toddlers from daycare, women walking their elderly mothers down the street — when you look past your fear, you realise that what you’re left with is longing.
When was the last time anyone ever looked at you like the fisherman looks up at the full moon?
It seems you really are a human after all. A freakishly paranoid one, sure, but a human nonetheless. Every moment you spend in isolation is another moment that every single person on the planet is deprived of proof of your humanity. Without them, you can’t be seen, not in the way human beings are meant to be seen.
Have at thee, then. Take a walk outside, while the weather’s still cool. Go to the beach, adopt a cat, join a running club. Didn’t your mom ever tell you it was rude to take without giving back?; let others see you for a change.