Darren's Room
By: Drew Villano • @drew.normal
Like always, the hall outside his room was dark. It funneled him through its dim beige innards to the bathroom, the matte walls static and grainy like he could reach his arm inside and get trapped there. Darren made wide strides back to his room, hips twinging and strained, and closed the hollow-core door behind him. He dropped back into his chair, the stained fabric time-worn and cradling his shape.
Enshrouded by the blue light of his laptop, he faced away from the door. Darren liked to imagine himself in a room with no exit; beyond the glow, the outside world was foreboding. Nights like these, when no one was home, or worse, when someone was, but he couldn’t be sure, made him think of that experiment where the cat didn’t really exist trapped in the box if no one was there to acknowledge it. Where was the cat during the moments of its nonexistence?
He clicked a link in his inbox. A headline in tall black letters declared: Online Cult Convinces Teen to Kill Himself in Just 1 Hour. His bleary eyes skimmed the words biblical levels of evil.
He recognized the dead boy’s photos: Caleb’s chalky crooked teeth, close-cropped hair likely hacked into clumsy shape by Mall Cuts for $15. The article memorialized his fondness for animals and art, especially watercolor painting. It accused a nihilistic Satanic cult of preying on unsuspecting Caleb, luring him into their dark web chat room with false promises of friendship and camaraderie. Caleb, the article stated, was posting about watercolor techniques on a painting forum when he fell victim to this biblically sinister chat room -- proof that his demise was unpredictable and inevitable, like a rare degenerative disease.
One hour.
Darren and the few dozen others who populated the chat room he’d created were in contact with Caleb for nine full months before he killed himself. Each night after midnight, Caleb snuck online when his parents were in bed, to commiserate about his existential loneliness and feelings of self-loathing. Darren believed Caleb’s decision to engage with the chat were an expression of Caleb’s autonomy. Like picking up a shitstained dollar on the street, Darren knew that most people wasted their precious free will on frivolous and self-destructive indulgences.
If Caleb were to hang himself in the parking lot of a nearby thrift store, Darren reasoned, he should at least livestream it -- inspo for ppl scared to end the bullshit misery that is life, it’s p much the only meaningful thing u can leave behind.
If anyone was to blame, he thought, it was Caleb’s parents, dreaming while their son wept and typed. Wasn’t their blind trust a form of abandonment? To alleviate their guilt, they mystified the slow unfurling of Caleb’s final months with sensationalistic buzzwords like evil and unspeakable.
In spite of himself, he laughed. Darren felt a pang; he understood what it was like to hope someone would open your door, knowing they would not. If his parents were irresponsible enough to think Caleb’s suicide was the result of a one-hour conversation, he would take credit for it. He would gloat about it.
Darren File>saved the article into the same folder where he’d stored Calebdeth.mov and x’d out of it.
Someone commented, I feel bad for his dad.
Why are you moralfagging in a harm chat? He replied.
Hardly having moved except for his clammy hands shooting fingers out over the keyboard, the sun forged razor-thin lines around the cracks in his blinds. He clicked on a video link.
A montage of thin white girls cutting themselves, set to house music. The one who opened her thigh didn’t mean to go so deep, he thought. A thin black line appeared beneath her trembling hand. Then the flesh parted, a marbled yellow of fat glowing and limned with red, the opened chasm bisecting a forest of red and green partially healed scars.
A gentle knock at his door that he couldn’t be sure was in his house or in his video. He ignored it.
The video cut to the next clip, no context: a girl with long, straight brown hair wearing a neon pantsuit sat on a concrete floor, staring down at her right arm. She made fast hand motions with her left, the way one might rip off a band-aid, each motion sending a new rivulet of blood cascading onto her concrete floor.
He could tell how experienced they were by the number of scars they had. Some were surely institutionalized once before and would be again, if they lived that long. A limb that seemed constructed of scars, stiff with thick skin. The precise movement of a girl’s delicate hand opening a vein, the blood arcing out in a forceful stream.
His name was called, full of trepidation, contaminated by hope.
Darren?
He ignored it.
The girl drew spirals in the bathroom floor with herself. Some clips showed blood pulsing like music, blood moving in time to a heartbeat.
Listen — we’re doing a family trip to the shore tomorrow, with dad and your sister. Just for the weekend. Shower and pack a bag. Shower.
They peeled back their layers, searching for the next, then the next. Like something would surprise or enlighten them. But it was just more of the same blood. The video ended and offered him options: replay, comment, forward to a friend.
That was such a good one, he wrote.
Darren would not admit that the beach terrified him. The dark, undulating waters, its hidden slimes and spiny organisms writhing in the dark. Taking his shirt off was out of the question.
He flipped through his chats. A girl calling herself Dolly had sent him twenty messages, imploring him to respond. He’d ignored her all day, but now lit up her inbox, sending her $40 on Cashapp. Apology gift, he wrote, selecting the gift emoji, then the smiling emoji with one tear dripping from its remorseful eye. Hi bb, he wrote, sorry I was kinda depressed today...I no u understand.
He flipped back to videos; a man sawing through his dick with a serrated kitchen knife.
Why are some retards so obsessed with violating their own dick and balls? He snapped his laptop shut and stuffed it in a bag with some balled-up shorts and unwashed t-shirts.
The three-hour drive down to the beach was hot and bright. Darren squinted at his phone, ignoring the creeping nausea of car sickness as his parents punctured the silence with benign observations about roadside businesses that had changed or remained the same. When they arrived, his family checked into what his mother called a skank rat hotel. His parents took one bed, his sister the other, and Darren flung a sleeping bag onto the floor in the corner of the room. He unpacked his laptop and slipped it between the rustling polyester leaves.
At dinner at a chain restaurant with bright red signage depicting dancing lobsters and crabs, Darren pushed away a half-finished plate of sea critters chopped into unidentifiable segments and fried golden-brown. He wandered onto the boardwalk, squinting against daylight, passing through gift shops and under amusement park rides, glancing up at the gaping mouths of smiling and screaming passengers. He remembered a compilation of amusement park accidents: roller coaster cars flinging themselves off-track into an unforgiving blue sky; unstable videos of small figures bouncing off hard surfaces, thought impossible to bounce from.
When he made his way back to his parents and listless sister, his mother was drinking Crown and Coke, her swollen eyes swelling. She never seemed drunk to him. She only got quiet, said something at almost a whisper to him, patted him on the leg. There was nothing on the floor, but they looked at it a lot.
In the morning, his parents sat on the sagging balcony at 10 am, chain-smoking cigarettes. His mother poured herself a Crown and Coke.
We’re going to the beach, his father announced after another cigarette. It wasn’t an invitation but a command. His father’s skin was tough all over, like jerky. It was light pink in spots and brownish in others, thick and flaking. He refused sunscreen. Darren watched him pick at a scab on his arm. He thought about the palette hidden beneath -- reds, yellows. His father was like a slowly crumbling statue: remote, regal, and dignified despite his mild decrepitude. Knowing that refusal would be seen as defiance, and defiance an invitation for consequences worse than getting sunburned at some shitty beach, Darren slunk behind his family. They ambled toward the wide, hot boulevard separating their hotel from the beach.
Darren’s shirt clung to his soft, pillowy nipples as he waded into the frigid water, swirling with caps of grimy yellow foam. He forced himself further, feeling the waterline creep up his belly like an unwanted touch. He turned toward shore to see if he could identify their hotel room from a distance. The hotel was an enormous hive of identical squares, balconies dotted with rickety plastic lawn chairs and thinning towels drying in the wind.
The force of the world slammed into his back. The wave knocked him off pale, unstable feet. Submerged and gripped by animal panic, Darren inhaled seawater as sand grated first against his ass, then ground the skin from one knee. Unsure which direction promised oxygen, he thrashed his legs, his unclipped toenails clawing at water and foam. Seconds seemed like an eternity, the purgatory of anticipating a certain death but not the moment it would arrive. Darren rolled onto one knee and pushed his head out of the water.
The salt burned his eyes as he coughed. Darren squinted through the glare and glimpsed his father’s hand hanging by his leathered side, him standing three feet deep in the surf. Darren lurched forward and grabbed at the hand for leverage to pull himself up.
Darren’s father swung his arm back as if away from a lunging dog. He folded his arms.
Stand up. You don’t need my help.
He was right. Darren didn’t need his father’s help. He spat out the bitter water and pushed himself to his feet, looking away to hide an expression he knew would be seen as weak.
They went to a comedy show in the evening. The bar had high ceilings and harsh overhead lighting. A stage, two feet high, faced the room full of high chairs and bar seating. Hardly anyone laughed. One meandering set of lackluster jokes after another, it seemed that the comedians knew each other’s routines. They reinterpreted one another’s jokes, or said I stole this joke from so-and-so, so some jokes were told several times throughout the evening. Was this what people meant when they said they were living 'real life' in the ‘real world’? They stayed until the end, hungry for the company of everyone else in the room, even if they’d never speak to them. His mother ordered another Crown and Coke at last call and watched Darren’s sister staring at a lanky comedian, who stood in the corner of the bar and laughed with his comedian friends.
A man is not going to empower you with anything. He is going to enslave you, Darren’s mother said to her. Her boyfriend had broken up with her two days earlier, avoiding the trip. She smiled, more like a grimace, the tolerant face of someone biting their tongue.
That night, after everyone went to bed, Darren locked himself in the hotel bathroom. He balanced his laptop on the sink edge, butting up against the faucet’s calcium-encrusted mouth. He entered his chat. There were 23 people logged on, including Dolly.
yo i was thinking, someone said. u should make a sacrifice for us. u should get ur kitten and bite its little head fucking head off rn and let us all watch.
The little ellipses, signaling her typing, appeared, then disappeared. He imagined her parsing a response, trying to figure out whether they were joking.
ok well if not i’ll jus send this shit to ur school and also print it out n mail it to ur fam.
Darren knew she’d seen his name appear. He imagined her watching his name as he waited on her to respond, pushing his lips together into a thin line.
Pictures appeared — a closeup of her asshole between spread cheeks, her easily identifiable room in the background, a poorly focused full body picture which included half of her face — ones she’d sent exclusively, privately, to him, after promises of secrecy and love, intermittent gifts, long conversations about television shows and existential ennui.
The pictures were no different from dozens he’d received before. It was Dolly who seemed different, an acknowledgement that annoyed as much as it enticed him. Because he wanted someone to share the images with, he’d sent them to an older guy who called himself Bobby. Bobby was the one who taught Darren how to blackmail. He’d promised to let Darren do this one alone. Darren messaged him.
? why*
u r so obvious taking sooo fukin long. u want everyone to know ur a cuck? i can tell them if u want lol
The message stung, even though he knew he’d asked for it.
Darren was 8 years old when he witnessed his first murder. It was in a video, sent to him unsolicited by an unknown player in a farming simulator game he played online. The audio, like a song played in an empty room, sounded so close the event could have taken place in his room instead of in some nowhere barren field.
The video nestled inside of him like his own memory. The first time, Darren hadn’t known how to close out of it until the video finished, only ten seconds long. Had he known, maybe he would have watched anyway. He looped it dozens, maybe hundreds, of times.
The dull flash of a fat blade. The POV of a man’s hairy, coarse hand like his own might be if he were grown, reaching down to saw the flesh of another man’s neck like cutting open an uncooked sausage, sloppy but with little resistance. Funky Town played in the background off a dented, blown-out speaker. The dying man grimaced. Darren wasn’t sure if the grimace was from pain, or the body’s involuntary reaction, or maybe it was just the emotion one thinks they should express. The anticipation of pain, he knew, could be worse than the experience of it.
This false memory replayed itself over and over, punctuating the trajectory of his unfolding days. The question of who sent it and why was backstory and context that would never be filled in.
Darren sought out more videos. They stung and jarred him with a revulsion and adrenaline he craved. His fitful sleep was marred and indistinguishable from waking moments when he remembered flashes of carnage, felt transported to rooms and open spaces he’d never visited. Captivated, he watched unluckier versions of himself endure great bodily injury or death. Glimpsing those inflicting the pain, he felt nauseous with envy.
He knew he had to pick a side, and yearned to be the one meting out pain rather than the one having to endure it.
It was appropriate, Darren told himself now, to be the one who taught Dolly about betrayal, an act almost indistinguishable from love. He thought of his father, how omniscient and unforgiving his face looked when he glanced down at him with mild embarrassment in the wide gray sea.
Ten minutes later, Dolly was streaming. 23 viewers were audience to her poorly lit image. She hunched over, slouched and cross-legged in what looked like a closet. The ends of cheap polyester dresses hung down around the crown of her head. She clutched a small writhing animal by its black homunculus body. Darren activated his microphone.
Are you crying? He laughed. If she was too stupid to realize her reputation was the least valuable thing in her life, she deserved to continue this circle, which never seemed to close. There was always someone next in line. His throat tightened. The adrenaline made him hard, resulting in an anger at his unpredictable moods and pathetic desires that were somehow both weak and impossible to kill.
Dolly hesitated. Her uncertainty communicated trust, despite the words coming from his mouth. What would it be like to comfort a girl, her soft skin clammy and trembling under his hands? When he’d confessed to her that he locked himself in his room for weeks at a time, avoiding the barbed words and punishing stares from other people that made him so anxious he’d hide in the bathroom and vomit, she hadn’t acted surprised. He usually made up some bullshit to sound less extreme but still relatable — I hate going to school so I just sit in the back. But something about her stoic, curious demeanor inspired him to be honest, just this once. She’d nodded and said you just want to feel safe. Like a reflex, he put his lips against his microphone and spoke.
Hurry up retard.
She sobbed and, in one swift motion, brought the squirming thing to her mouth, bit and twisted, pulled until its body was a tiny headless horseman, flailing as she dropped it into the triangle between her crossed legs, her gaping mouth dropping the bulbous little head after it.
When he fell asleep at dawn, he dreamed he was inside a house on a too-steep hill surrounded by smaller hills. In the distance, a sprawling factory ground slabs of rock into dust, the tiny grains heaped into piles big as buildings. The machines emitted an unceasing grinding, as if they were devouring the earth itself. His friends were inside the house with him. He didn’t question that.
A storm descended, raining in enormous frigid sheets. He looked out of the window at the dips between the hills, filling with dark water, and knew he had to leave. The landscape was horrible. Unsure he had a home of his own, he was compelled to find out. Darren’s friends, the only thing he would miss (and he would miss them terribly), reclined on couches and chairs in the expansive living room. They waved as he headed out, the rain giving no sign of abating, ever.
He slept until two in the afternoon. When his parents woke him up, they’d already had lunch. He stumbled after them to a western-themed photoshoot booth for tourists where everyone dressed up in itchy, heavy costumes that smelled like the skin of a thousand strangers -- hats with feathers, garter belts, buttoned vests, fake oversized revolvers. When the photographer raised his camera, Darren put the gun to his head and smiled. His mother gasped. Cut it out, would you? Her displeasure elicited unexpected laughter. Like always, he thought, upset about the dumbest shit.
It was their last day there. In the evening, they sat at a seafood restaurant on the beach, the air filled with cigarette smoke and the rank stench of overused frying oil.
The water ebbed towards low tide under a bruised, mottled blue sky.
Darren folded his arms, staring across the water in the windless evening. There was so much of it. He tried to appreciate its infinite, unknowable depths. Was he doing it? He couldn’t tell.
Children stumbled after their mothers on the shore, windmilling their arms in dumb circles. A woman in a black bikini stood in the waves, speaking to a man, his hairy belly hanging over the waistband of his swim shorts. If he could get them alone, he knew, he could change their lives. False memories rose and receded inside of him like the tide; he imagined what the children would look like, gripped by fear, or vacant, glassy, and dead, their skin yellowing. He imagined the woman, now smiling and gesticulating, pinched and restrained by hard leather straps and rough plastic zip ties.
He thought of The Land Before Time, one of the few movies he remembered watching as a little kid in front of a fat gray television. A group of orphaned toddler dinosaurs searched for a promised land they were unaware had been scorched off their planet, a home that was still their home, but worse. The landscape, stripped of comforting qualities and replaced with nature’s indifference, promised only doom. He always thought it would have been better if they had died along with their mothers.