BLAST 02: LIMBO

LOGOS

The walls went sideways, went crooked while still maintaining their hold on the floor and ceiling respectively, bending left then right in exact opposition to the direction my head was lolling. I didn’t blame the walls for this─walls, in theory, had as much autonomy over their physics as I did mine, though I might have had a sterner viewpoint if said wall’s mind-bending geometry was something more indicative a world gone mad than a perceptual invention of mine due to, in equal parts, an overactive imagination and catastrophic boredom.

“Motherfuckers be trippin’.”

We all deal with frustration in our own way. While I watched the counter open like the mouth of rabid dog, with ropes of saliva glistening in the fluorescent lights like connective tissue, gnashing in a jagged-metal aria of, at best, misplaced aggression─some felt the need to express themselves verbally.

“Y’all be motherfuckers.”

The counter-mouth snapped shut and slapped me out of my intentional hallucination, returning me to a world of angry words and increasingly pained faces.

“And y’all be trippin’.”

I tried to busy myself with a further exploration of my surroundings as they weren’t─werewolves behind the counter barking orders at the sweaty mob rapidly advancing upon them; trees rooted to the ground in place of the tables mired taupefully in their ever-welcoming positions, growing angrily into that which had oppressed them─but reality, in all its messy hopelessness, intruded too powerfully for me to ignore it.

“TRIPPIN’!”

It began with that most basic of human desires: cheap food. And there wasn’t─still isn’t?─anything around cheaper or foodier than Cheapster’s Burgerarium, home of the Cheapster Chungo─“Eleven-Tenths the Burger for Three-Eighths the Price”─which was about the size of a fully-grown cat, a comparison explicitly endorsed by the company and its crudely-drawn-yet-inescapably-charming mascot, Chungo the Cat, smiling coquettishly under its garish yellow rain-slicker and the adorably oversized ski-goggles affixed to its forehead, oh-so-adroitly flattening whichever ear was at the backside of the reversible image. I loved that cat, its food, and even the digestive discomfort that inevitably followed any deep dive into its greasy delights, and I wasn’t alone: I originally approached this Cheapster’s alongside an otherwise-unaffiliated army of likeminded food hounds in what was an uncoordinated yet unified attack of appetite in prodigious and apparently crippling proportions.

“IMMA EAT CHUNGO OFF THE WALL IF Y’ALL DON’T FEED MY ASS.”

I don’t know for certain that our inadvertent collective was the cause of the infrastructural collapse that followed, but the sheer lack of momentum, the all-encompassing inertia, since we arrived was nothing short of mind-bending. Logic couldn’t touch it; there was no sense to be made of the almost magical stasis in evidence all around me. Just . . . nothing was happening. Nothing. Not even the guy yelling about eating logos off the wall was moving in any appreciable way. It was as though the realization that we had been trapped inside a burger joint had a paralytic effect on the mob-psyche, and that was far more disconcerting than just a couple of locked doors and the failure of one lousy power-grid.

I tried to rally the group with a sculpture of ketchup and hot-sauce packets that was meant to evoke the image of soldiers hoisting a flag atop an embattled hill, but the motherfuckers-guy just sneered and said, “I’m so hungry.”

IBID.

Hunger was an issue, sure, but that wouldn’t really be a problem for another couple of days . . . or weeks, judging by the level of girthiness evident in many of my fellow captives. More concerning was twenty people─twenty-six including staff─trapped in a dark, unventilated burger joint with a severe lack of toiletries and, somehow, no food. The power had been cut between the lunch and dinner rushes, which left the staff with no ready food, an unopenable freezer, and, apparently, nothing in the employee handbook that even resembled a solution. Another problem was the people themselves: everyone appeared to be operating under the impression that the best course of action was a distinct lack thereof; that to go forward required no movement but that of their plaintive gobs wishing sustenance upon themselves. Chungo helps those who help themselves, and if that greasy cat wasn’t having this then neither was I.

Chungo was a symbol of cartoonish joy, of hungry anticipation, of goggles-and-raincoat preparedness in the face of life’s travails, but the restaurant itself never quite lived up to the ideals set forth by its longstanding mascot, as its failures were many and miserable. Much like the current whimpering crowd surrounding me like a clutch of spiritless elephants on loan from the saddest circus imaginable, this was no unforeseen debacle; this was just the latest result in a decades-long string of corporate ineptitude so total that your average burger-consumer would be forgiven for not presuming it a fictional account.

The history of Cheapster’s Burgerarium was as rich with instances of odd occurrences as its Chompitty-Chomp-Cheese Fries were with chest-clogging chompitty-chomp. It began with the Horse Frenzy, I believe, in which it was reported that horses by the hundreds had descended upon Cheapster’s like a four-legged apocalypse of unbridled force, and despite being unfounded and incredibly unlikely considering this area’s distinct lack of farmland, the story was behind the rationale to equip the restaurant with something akin to unbreakable glass for its windows, which of course helped keep the horses from customers in the great uprising that never took place. There was the Great Squatting a little while later, wherein a family of complete idiots managed to infiltrate Cheapster’s by setting a fire in the kitchen and then locking the doors once all the employees had fled. This incident was almost inspired in its stupidity, as said family was not only unable to put out the fire they had begun, thus necessitating the unlocking of doors to allow firefighters to squash the flames, but also in that their later-stated plan was to live off the endless shipments of Chungos that would doubtlessly continue to arrive during their years-long occupation. Inexplicably, however, Cheapster’s countered with a strategy that appeared to be the exact opposite of a preventative measure: the implementation of remotely locking doors to be controlled by an unseen overseer in contact with our brave little franchise only by way of radio. Because brilliance begets brilliance, I guess, just as inaction begets inaction, and confinement begets mania.

MANIA

“Y’ALL BE BOOLSHIT.”

High in volume but low in exclamation, I thought the motherfuckers-guy was dead before he let loose with that from his place on the floor, curled up in the fetal position between the pop machine and self-ordering kiosk. A woman clawed at the windows lethargically, like a cat showing off its new but unwanted scratching post to a disappointed owner; a teenager was repeatedly gagging on their own spit, on purpose, leaning their head back and loudly choking themselves entertained, mouth agape and eyes crossed at the completion of each self-waterboarding, drooling in the interim like a lobotomized hyena; another woman had progressed from chewing the loose skin from her fingers to biting off slivers of paint from the wall-mounted fire extinguisher, gnawing and pawing at it like it was log one of the beaver’s dam she was erecting, wide-eyed and tittering disconcertingly with excitement; one man spent his time circling the restaurant with a looping gait, wiggling his fingers and whispering I’m a eunuch while staring at the ceiling, nodding occasionally to acknowledge the completion of another circumnavigation; another stood at the counter and pulled at his own nipples through his ill-fitting t-shirt, staring into the middle-distance while carrying on a conversation with the restaurant itself, it seemed, as I only heard two half-sentences: you’re past your prime, old man and I can feed em all if you just give me the chance, neither of which made me feel particularly good about the general mental state of my fellow captives.

“Boolshit.”

There was defeat in that voice, in the slumping inertia of bodies strewn about the place, in the ambiance─like a crushing batch of soulless muzak in an ever-descending elevator. We had been there for two hours─two itty bitty burgerless hours was all it took for the mob to collectively shake off their civility like a badly-laced straight-jacket─and a girl had come from behind the counter to signify the occasion by poking at her teeth with a ruddy pinky, bent forward at the waist and aggressively eyeing the man attempting to juggle his pockets with varying levels of success, switching her gaze to a woman scratching pictures of rabbits with a safety-pin on her forearm whenever things with the pocket-juggler got stale.

There was always going to be a way to escape, I knew; it was unthinkable that Cheapster’s lockdown measures were less faulty than the decision-making process that spawned them. But that spectacle─everything coming apart at the seams so quickly, so uniformly, surprised me with its yet-unverified but reasonable thesis of humanity at large being one burger away from a nasty, feral uprising, and made me appreciate the lengths to which we will go to abide by societal norms.

This thought was interrupted by the wild-eyed offer of a gently chewed fire extinguisher, pulled off the wall for convenience, so that I might partake in some glorious, enamel-chipping madness, but as I happened to be no more than a couple of burgers short myself─hiding my own mania behind this veneer of detached reportage─I considered it only slightly and began properly looking for an exit.

BLIND

Night fell like paving stone on my boot, bringing further encumbrances along for the ride: first, of course, was the dark; a close second, however, was the apparent widespread fear of said dark, causing irrational fear to burp out of those gathered around me in rhythmless yelps of teeth-chattering terror. It was like a gaggle of chickens being squeezed at odd intervals had surrounded me, demanding attention be paid to their awful circumstances, and it was not a little bit irritating; then again, shrill noises in the dark when I’m trying to concentrate had always annoyed me, though I can’t imagine many having the opposite opinion, so I’ll move on.

The emergency lights lit exactly nothing but their own casings, leaving boxy silhouettes hovering above our heads like harbingers of rectangular doom; phones restaurant-wide had run out of juice almost simultaneously, which was strange, but no stranger than watching a guy play tag with a mop bucket and lose─which had actually happened twice─so I let it slide; and the moon had seemingly given up on us entirely, as its reflected rays were evident insomuch as they existed, but provided nothing by way of usable light. There was a tub of anguish pleading with some other sort of tub─wet and snarky, like spoiled mayonnaise─over ketchup packets and the fair distribution thereof, which would have been fine had they not been bickering in the area between me and the roof’s access door. As such, I kicked one of them in the shins, which dropped them like a bad habit and left the other to declare victory and ownership of the spoils, which turned out to be a truly mammoth amount of ketchup shot like missiles directly into their mailbox-sized gob. None of it mattered in the slightest but for the fact that the curtain was drawn on their story in a location out of the fucking way of the stairs.

As dark as Cheapster’s was, the stairwell hosted a complete and total absence of light; the kind of darkness that makes you forget the length of your own limbs . . . or perhaps that was just my rationalization for falling up a good portion of the stairs. Regardless, the door to the roof popped open with the jaunty slack of a well-oiled but underused passageway, and here it should be mentioned that, not only was there a fire-escape leaning off the side of the building like a goddamned yellow brick road of freedom, but that it provided an unimpeded path both in and out of the building while the main doors, the washrooms, even the fucking freezer, were electronically locked up and awaiting cease-and-desist orders from an undisclosed location somewhere else.

But whatever. I clambered back down the then slightly lit stairwell to alert the others of our impending freedom, falling only a little─once or twice─but found myself instead at the centre of a discussion regarding the viability of fleeing vs. the dwindling fortitude of the burgerless. Blind, they couldn’t see the exit for the burgers.

OUTRO

“There’s a Cheapster’s three blocks north,” I said, pointing as if they didn’t know where it was. “And another about a click east.”

“OOOhhhh,” someone moaned.

“What, and I mean this in all sincerity, the shit?”

“HUNGRY,” someone groused.

“We can leave,” I said, shrugging. “Escape? It’s ours.”

“OOOhhhh,” someone else moaned.

“You’re telling me that nobody here has the wherewithal to stand up and leave this burger joint?”

“But,” someone said, raising their hand like I was taking questions. “I’m pretty hungry.”

“Mm-hm,” I nodded. “No, I get that.”

“And,” someone else said. “I’m pretty hungry too.”

“We can leave,” I said, pointing at the door. “And after we leave? We can eat all the food we want.”

“They got food in the back, there,” someone else said crisply, like the realization of their proximity to inaccessible Chungos had lit a spark.

“Them’s frozen,” someone else said, sadly.

“Oh,” said the first, spark doused.

“Holy shit,” I said. “We can leave. Like, leave.” I swung my hands toward the stairs like an usher. “Leave leave.”

Seconds of silence followed, eyes blinking in─what, disbelief? Incomprehension? Sheer fucking stupidity? Then finally someone said, “Leave?”

“Yes─YES! We can leave!”

“What do you mean?” someone else said, pulling at their lower lip with their thumb.

“We just walk out that door,” I said, motioning again to the stairs.

“Yeah?” someone asked enthusiastically.

“And we climb the stairs─”

“OOOhhhh,” someone groaned, which began a chorus of moans that hung in the air like a colony of whiny bats.

“If we leave,” someone asked, raising their hand for permission to continue.

“Yes?”

“If we leave,” they continued, “will they let us back in to get some food?”

“Holy fuck,” I said, dropping my head in disgust. I tried to fake a smile but failed badly, sinking my chin back into my chest. “Holy fuck.”

“MAN,” someone yelled. “I’M HUNGRY.”

It was like trying to roust cats; by that point every single person in the restaurant was lying akimbo in a lethargic soup of bad smells and sweaty sadness. I attempted hypnosis by twirling my hands on my wrists but without a solid background in the psychiatric arts I only succeeded in making a couple of people involuntarily kick their legs like they were in a chorus line─and vertical─which made the subsequent horizontal movement less reminiscent of cheer and much more of violence.

“Ow,” someone said, the victim of a kick in the neck that changed nothing about their placid disposition.

“OW!” someone else said, nowhere near the kickers but more a result of having bitten through the skin of their own hand, for whatever reason, and with that I was done with the whole thing.

I had tried, despite not wanting to even a little bit, and climbed the stairs wondering if this was something to worry about. Not specifically the mess in Cheapster’s, but the implications of the micro in the macro, of humanity as an enormous blob of inert and useless fat populated by bones and a staggering lack of awareness.

Eh, I thought, falling down the fire escape and brushing myself off like I was straightening my shirt and not feeling my bruised arms for fractures. Probably just a bad bunch, them.