Munter 13: The Final

'All real living is meeting.'

Martin Buber

There was no going to sleep. He pulled himself out of the dusty couch and stood up. The couch was a mess, like a sack of broken bones. He picked up two empty cans of beer and went to the kitchen to put them in the bin.

*

The memories of people returned to swamp his mind. They weren’t names this time, only faces. The names weren’t there anymore. He was still wondering if any of them had died without him knowing it. As he was also an invisible traveller of the universe, these people would not have known if he was dead or not. They weren’t thinking about him anyway. They were too busy with the people who were relevant in their lives at that moment. Why would they be interested in him? He wasn’t relevant in their lives. These faces he remembered belonged to people he didn’t care to remember anyway. He was losing the faces that mattered.

*

He noticed a crumpled paper bag shooting out from under the doomed dusty couch. The bottom corners of the bag were spiked upwards looking like the sharp brown boots of some witch trapped underneath. Inside the paper bag was the sticky-taped shoe and its long-suffering partner, and the severed trouser-leg of his worn old cords. He couldn’t understand why he’d brought them home with him. He thought he’d disposed of them somewhere. He took them out of the bag and put them in the bin amongst the cans and bottles. He watched a memory of himself inside the bin wearing the torn and battered clothes and drinking the dregs from the cans and bottles. A very messy picture indeed.

*

If there was a place where the dead went, then Munter fancied going there somehow, to join Nobuko, and his sister, and Mieko, and the other dead ones. Thoughts of corporeal reunions had disappeared. Thoughts of further unions in the world of the living appeared before him as an angry mob of thoughts. He was considering union in the nightfall of existence. He’d always thought suicide a cruel enterprise embarked upon by those too spoiled by immediacy, too impetuous to complete the self-making themselves. But now he was feeling empty, save for a desire to harm himself. And if he harmed himself to a degree, he would no longer be conscious of this emptiness. But no matter how much Munter experienced these feelings of self-destruction, he was always stuck with a distracting physical cowardice he'd been awarded at birth. He didn’t want to stab himself. The thought of a knife plunging into him made him feel uncomfortable. He was a squeamish person. He couldn’t have drowned himself like Nobuko either. He was afraid of the water. It just would have added to the discomfort. Pills? He didn’t like the taste of them. He didn’t want to cease to be with a bad taste in his mouth. He couldn’t jump off a building either. He was certain he would not have been conscious to witness the totality of the splat, but he was in no doubt that he would at least be conscious for some of it, and he didn’t want to experience even part of that. The same could be said for running out in front of a bus. The only thing he could think to do was throw down him the remaining whiskey in the cathedral of Jack Daniel’s he spotted standing imperially in the city, then bang his head hard against the wall until there was no consciousness left inside him and no mechanism to power his body anymore.

*

He grabbed the bottle of whiskey. He wondered when he’d begun this particular bottle. He’d had so much to drink over the past week or so that he couldn’t be sure about it. He took the lid off it, and took a big swig. It was difficult to take such great gulps of whiskey. It was a strong alcoholic drink. Finally it all went down the canyon and he coughed and spluttered for a second. The back of his throat felt like it had suffered an excess of beestings. He threw the empty bottle to the floor, went to the far wall of the sitting room, and slowly started to bang his head against it. As the numbing pain of it grew, he began to bang it harder and faster until the blood cells in his head boiled with anger and ran through the rest of his body appealing for calm amongst the other blood cells. He kept banging until that was all there was to him. A man banging his head against a wall. The names and faces and objects and events which were filed in his memory and which fuelled his existence slowly disappeared one by one.

*

When you bang your head against a wall, you are doing something harmful to your head. Munter knew this, but there was something inside him telling him that his head didn’t matter anymore. There'd been too much head-stuff. His head and all it contained needed to be binned. He could feel blood pouring out with the memories.

&

He'd left the television on. It soundtracked the abuse of head. What better soundtrack for abuse of head, he remarked to himself. Friends/Will & Grace (repeats). His memories trembled and crashed, and he wept because of unanswered prayers for his welfare. Will & Grace/Friends (more repeats).

*

Munter was hoping to enter the world of ghosts soon, but as he made his final collision and began to fall slowly to the floor, he imagined no afterlife waiting for him. Maybe this afterlife of conjecture, the ghosts, were simply misshapen manifestations of human experience, strange occurrences in experience married uneasily to the complications of memory. There would be no further encounter with Mieko, the ghost. No encounters of any kind. Just nothing. As his body met the floor, he cursed himself for his actions. Suicide made no sense. Why had he gone and done such a stupid fucking thing?

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Munter lay quietly on the floor. The house was silent. He could smell food cooking somewhere. He couldn’t feel his head, couldn’t think, yet there were breaths coming out of his mouth and he could see with his eyes. He could see more eyes with his eyes, two pairs of eyeballs in the window, looking down at him. They were jerking back and forth quickly and squinting as they peered inside. The eyeballs belonged to the O’Rourke’s from next door. Beginning with these eyeballs, Munter slowly began to recall names and faces. The O’Rourke’s called his name. He couldn’t say anything. Then the eyeballs moved away from the window and there was a rapid heavy knocking at his front door.

*

Munter was able to crawl towards the front door. He managed to stand nearly upright by holding on to what remained of the dusty couch, but then fell again. The knocking at the door continued. He crawled some more and eventually got to the knocking. He pushed himself up against the door, eventually getting a hand to reach the lock. Roy and Rita O’Rourke came crashing into the hallway to find Munter, slumped and bruised and whiskey-ridden. They were both dressed up for an occasion of some kind. At first, through his upset vision, he thought it was a funeral they were dressed for. But there was too much of a show in Rita’s appearance for that. It must have been a wedding they were on their way to.
Hey, who’s getting married? Munter asked.
Never mind that, said Rita. Jesus, let’s get you up. My God, what have you done to yourself?
I decided to hurt myself. I didn’t mind at first. But now I feel pretty sore and I don’t know what I was thinking.
Roy took off his waistcoat and it dropped to the floor like a barn owl landing in slow motion in a wildlife documentary.
Shit, mate, said Roy, putting one of Munter’s arms over his shoulder as Rita took the other. They brought him to the dusty couch, but when they saw the state it was in decided to bring him into the kitchen and sit him down at the table instead.

*

There was something cooking in the oven, under the grill drawer. Fish fingers.
We heard banging on the wall, said Roy, taking out his mobile phone to ring for an ambulance. What were you doing?
I was banging my head, said Munter, as he sat down at the kitchen table.
What? asked Rita.
I thought I’d commit suicide, so I started banging my head against the wall after I drank some whiskey. Fucking ridiculous, eh?
Jesus Christ, pal! said Roy. Hello? Can I get an ambulance please? Eh, 7 Cornwell Terrace. A man banged his head. He’s bleeding very heavily and he’s been drinking.
Why did you try to kill yourself? asked Rita, who had found a cloth in the bitsbobsdrawer, soaked it with water, and begun washing the blood from Munter’s head.
I’m not sure. I was sad that I was lonely. I was sad because of memories. But I think I got rid of some of them when I was banging my head.
That was a stupid thing to do. Do you know how lucky you are we heard the banging?
How much whiskey did you drink? asked Roy.
A lot of it. Judge for yourself how much from the way I walk.
Munter stood up to demonstrate his style of walk, but he didn’t even manage a single step. He just fell down again into the chair.
Jesus, mate, what have you been doing to yourself? said Roy. You don’t need to be at this craic, you know. We live next door to you, for Christ’s sake. Call on us if you’re feeling down in the dumps. We’re your friends, you know.
I’ve been afraid. I’ve been afraid of doing anything for a long time.
What is he talking about? asked Rita. His head’s silly. I’m going to make some coffee. Where do you keep the coffee, Padraig?
Up there, replied Munter, pointing to the cupboard directly above the fridge.
Rita opened the cupboard door and took out a jar of Maxwell House. As she did so, she noticed the overheated grill drawer containing the fish fingers.
For God’s sake, you left your oven on! she cried. You could have burned the house down, you know that. You could have burned our feckin’ house down too. You would have been bleeding to death on the floor in there and all our feckin’ houses would be burning down.
Sorry, said Munter. I must have forgotten.

************************************************end

The event was an overall success. Those who attended enjoyed a rare evening. Munter listened to many ghost stories that night. Each one told a fascinating history, of past-led lives lingering in the world. Munter was glad he’d attended the event. He enjoyed listening to ghost stories being told. He didn’t get through the whole hundred of them that evening. Nobody did. A hundred ghost stories would have been too much for anybody to sit through. Munter considered imparting one of his own ghost stories at one point, but then decided against the idea. As he was leaving ‘A Celebration of the Ghost Story’, Munter was stopped by a small bow-tied gentleman. He congratulated Munter for a graphic novel he'd just published. Munter thanked the gentleman. But tell me, added the gentleman, what’s the moose all about? Does it have some meaning in the story? I didn’t quite get that bit. Well, replied Munter, it’s a moose. That’s about it. You may have begun your journey of inquiry at the moment of the moose. But, really and truly, once you know what a moose is, your journey has ended.