How shall I describe this tyranny, this sacrament of morning hygiene?

The sheer absurdity of ablution. There are days when the bristles on the toothbrush feel like nettles, when the toothpaste razes the gums like sulphuric acid. The very water that falls from the showerhead arrives too fast, too hard, too uncaring; it strikes the skin like a reprimand.

And still, I drag myself through it (rinse, lather, spit, scrape), because to  skip it entirely would be to out myself as unwell, to be denounced by the ever smiling Fresh-Faced Congregation (as if the sun were not accusatory enough, as if the morning did not already feel like an interrogation): those radiant keepers of matcha tea and early alarms, who mistake cleanliness and a smile for vitality and equate fatigue with moral lapse.

To take a shower is to stage a small Passion Play.

First, the stripping: humiliation.

Then comes the waiting (naked), as the water warms up and the bathroom fogs and my aging body braces for the scald.

And then, the deluge. No baptism, this; no spiritual renewal. An assault.  The droplets needle. The pressure bruises.

As for brushing the teeth twice in one day, it is not, as some would have it, a matter of mundane self-care.

It is Herculean. It is Sisyphean.

The mint toothpaste tastes of punishment; the spume seethes like rabies; the act of gargling, of spitting –  dear as bloodletting.

There are those who say, “It is the black dog upon your shoulders.” But I say this plainly: I love dogs. I love black dogs. Their eyes are kind. They bring news from beyond the hedge.

If I am beset, it is not by any loyal creature but by a noisome effluvium — what Burton, in An Anatomy of Melancholy, described as a “dark and obscure vapour” that “clouds the mind”—a mist with filthy fingers, a blanket steeped in vinegar and dread that clogs every intention, calcifies the valves of resolve, and backs up the sacred flow of will.

It resists all exorcisms.

No rite, no ritual of salt or smoke or Latin mumbling dislodges it. Not diet nor daylight nor any flint-eyed doctor prescribing vigour in pill-shaped increments. For this is no illness lodged politely in the body, waiting to be tended. It is a visitation, a possession, a haunting by means of industrial age spillage, a low-grade chemical leak rising from the old pipes beneath human consciousness.

The spectre does not howl. It leaks. It weeps in cisterns. It obstructs. It does not surge; it seeps malaise thick as marrow, a mood that coats and coagulates. It has schemes. It is cunning. It fashions sacraments from nausea and makes its creed of inertia known through the repetition of useless acts: the brushing, the bathing, the swallowing of capsules shaped like miniature tombstones.

It comes to audit my soul.

Not with scales or scrolls or flaming swords, but with clipboard and barcode scanner, with bureaucratic breath and the smell of laminate. It riffles through my spiritual accounts as though they were receipts from a defunct corner apothecary: faded, crumpled, half-legible.

It tallies the spoilt offerings: the unoffered milk of minor kindnesses, the curdled mercy I left too long unopened. It measures waste: the unused prayers gone sour in the cupboard, the squandered elan packed in childproof blister packs. It notes every spiritual expense that did not return dividends, including charity offered with ulterior motive and penance executed performatively.

Its agents wear tongue depressors and pocket pens like talismans.

They do not threaten when confronted with moral complexity. They chart. They whisper in acronyms. They not only ask questions. They highlight omissions. They flag inconsistencies. They ask me to answer on a one to ten scale, their clipboards splattered with the ghosts of former entries.

Under acrid fluorescents, they convene in hermetically sealed rooms of telling and taking and consult flowcharts bearing the sacred geometry of care. Their diagnostic manuals are bloated with epiphenomenal scribbles, corrections penned in frantic cursive, small prayers written in the margins.

And always, they return the same conclusion: insufficient inventory of will; surplus of dread; recommended action: adjust therapeutic index.

This is how the haunting persists, not as torment, but as endless paper scripts and recurring pilgrimages to the pharmacy. (Trade name: Moen™. Side  effects may include the sound of dripping — akin to relentless water torture — the compulsion to linger under scalding water, and a frightening awareness that something essential has quietly slipped away.)

If the oppression is bureaucratic in the morning, then by midday it turns ecclesiastical.

How ever shall I describe the rostrum of my mind, the small dais of my brain, where thoughts twist like serpents, and some inner elaborator of apocrypha and amphigories communes in a secret liturgy?

I axe at the mud-moron noise, but how long can the hive’s distracted buzz endure before the whole convocation shatters?

There is the boastful charlatan, the familiar liar, whose squirrely stomach spasms echo eternal mourning, a twitching relic affixed like a parade lacquey of the ambush-league, ever kickstarting me toward yet more mercantilities.

Not supply and demand but create a demand and supply it.

And there he is.

The truncated spokesman. Created by the Devil but inspirited by God.

With bicycle wheels fused to half-legs, a man held together by nervous wires and a mouth stuffed with last-words, more than any one mouth should bear.

And though he cannot stand, he rolls, a miracle of misdirected invention.

His limbs are sermons. His conduits, contrition. He preaches not with truth, but with leftover breath, an over-full mouthpiece. His Punch-Clock Gospel is not Good News, but News Exhausted, the failed evangelism of accumulated grief.

He is the Noonday Demon (daemonium meridianum) — the Spirit of Lunch Hour Torpor, as he’s best known in these Corporate times.

First identified by Evagrius Ponticus in the 4th century, he was listed among the logismoi the “evil thoughts,” early ancestors of psychic temptation and internal revolt.

But this demon is no metaphor. He is real, a spiritual adversary who crept into cloisters at the hour of sun-stupor, assailing monks with divine fatigue.

Evagrius called his influence acedia: sacred lethargy. Listlessness. Restlessness. Despair. A refusal to pray. Contempt for work. A dryness of soul so complete it withers even the will to weep.

But the world has since expanded his file.

He now answers to that which is suffixed to the end of sense, to Post Obit Overture, to Curtain’s Doom’s Doom.

I am his endnote embodied. Stapled together from epilogue, erratum, appendix, obituary. Spliced with useless citations. Burdened by what comes next, and what never quite manages to arrive, like the endless flipping of a flipbook.

This is not repetition.

It is compulsion.

I am his failed edit.

A reject from the bureaucracies of sorrow management: annual performance reviews, psychiatric assessments, clickbait eulogies.

I speak in his recombinant footnotes.

I reduplicate his redundancies.

I cross-index his despair.

I enumerate his stains—annotated into the afterlife of every page henceforth…

Rick Crilly the author of The Tablecloth Trick (ECW Press, 2007), which Rikki Ducornet described as “sweetly mysterious and clairvoyant.” My work has appeared in Litmus: The Neurological Issue, Zone Magazine, Molly Bloom, Blackbox Manifold, Taddle Creek, and Gone Lawn 3.