Author: Jeremy Robert Johnson
Date: 2005-02-10 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Science Fiction; Fantasy
Description: Meth-heads, man-made monsters, and murderous Neo-Nazis. Blissed out club kids dying at the speed of sound. The un-dead and the very soon-to-be-dead. They're all here, trying to claw their way free. From the radioactive streets of a war-scarred future, where the nuclear bombs have become self-aware, to the fallow fields of Nebraska where the kids are mainlining lightning bugs, this is a world both alien and intensely human. This is a place where self-discovery involves scalpels and horse tranquilizers; where the doctors are more doped-up than the patients; where obsessive-compulsive acid-freaks
Publisher: Eraserhead Pr

Praise for Jeremy Robert Johnson

&

ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE

“A dazzling writer. Seriously amazing short stories—and I love short stories. Like the best of Tobias Wolff. While I read them, they made time stand still. That’s great.”—CHUCK PALAHNIUK, author of Fight Club

“Jeremy Robert Johnson is dancing to a way different drummer. He loves language, he loves the edge, and he loves us people. This is entertainment... and literature.”—JACK KETCHUM, author of Off Season and The Girl Next Door

“What makes JRJ’s work stand out from his contemporaries’ is the strange sense of empathy—in that regard he is not unlike David Foster Wallace’s wicked and perhaps deranged younger brother. Sometimes the horror is so devastatingly understated that it’s almost deadly. JRJ has the ability to balance sheer humanity with sheer grotesquerie.”—21C MAGAZINE

“If you could marry well-crafted literature to stories of visceral horror, you would be holding Angel Dust Apocalypse in your hands... Johnson is probably a few books away from doing for horror what Jonathan Lethem did for science fiction. Plain and simple? Forget horror; this is good fiction. From stem to stern, each story will amaze you...”—GIRL ON DEMAND

“Jeremy Robert Johnson performs stand-up comedy for the gods.  And their laughter is a marvelous, terrible thing.  He's the kind of post-Lovecraftian genius berserker who makes the Great Old Ones new again.  As with Clive Barker, there is no glorious mutational eruption that Johnson can't nail directly through your gawping mind's eye.”—JOHN SKIPP

“Johnson weaves vivid and fascinatingly grotesque tales regarding such things as a group of extreme body modification addicts (one of whom is pretty much made out of vegetables) to a cockroach suit that helps its maker survive WWIII. These stories...have been given serious treatment and emerge as fantastic and often graphic scenarios full of characters you hate to love.”—BOOKGASM

“Johnson excels at pathology and perversity... A confirmed weirdo and authentic writer of uncommon emotional depth who deserves to be watched.”—CEMETERY DANCE

“Angel Dust Apocalypse hits the reader in the gut and goes to work... Within these pages the dark underbelly of the human subconscious is captured: those things that people think about but never mention... I could not put this book down...”—RAZORCAKE

“In its most twisted moments, Johnson’s writing is too gleeful to pigeon-hole as strictly ‘horror,’ and when he steps outside the gross-out game, he transcends most other straight literary writers. Angel Dust Apocalypse is every bit as smart as it is gut-churning, and every bit as moving and introspective as it is horrifying and humorous.”—VERBICIDE

“Where postmodern fails to offer direction, Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Angel Dust Apocalypse builds bright trail markers out of luminescent beetle guts and fetal sinew.”—THIRDEYE MAGAZINE

“Admirably devious, laugh-out-loud sick, and shockingly smart, Jeremy Robert Johnson blew me away with Angel Dust Apocalypse. Surrealist horror—absurdist excess—and pure postmodern fun. You absolutely must read this book right away. It’ll change you in a way you couldn’t imagine.”—MICHAEL A. ARNZEN, author of 100 Jolts and Play Dead

“In one inky scream Jeremy Robert Johnson has established himself as a virtuoso counter-culture voice that must be heard. You are guaranteed to enjoy this finely orchestrated literary Armageddon.”—JOHN EDWARD LAWSON, author of Last Burn in Hell

Angel Dust Apocalypse

By Jeremy Robert Johnson

Swallowdown Press

Portland, OR

Swallowdown Press

PO Box 86810

Portland, OR 97286-0810

WWW.SWALLOWDOWNPRESS.COM

ISBN: 978-0976249832

“Angel Dust Apocalypse” copyright ©2005 Jeremy Robert Johnson.

“League of Zeroes” copyright ©2004 Jeremy Robert Johnson. Originally appeared in Verbicide #11.”Dissociative Skills” copyright ©2004 Jeremy Robert Johnson. Originally appeared in City Slab #6.”Amniotic Shock in the Last Sacred Place” copyright ©2003 Jeremy Robert Johnson. Originally appeared in Pain and Other Petty Plots to Keep You in Stitches (IFD Publishing).”Snowfall” copyright ©2004 Jeremy Robert Johnson. Originally appeared in Verbicide #13.”Working at Home” copyright ©2004 Jeremy Robert Johnson. Originally appeared in THE EDGE: Tales of Suspense #18.“Luminary” copyright ©2004 Jeremy Robert Johnson. Originally appeared in Darker Than Tin, Brighter Than Sin (Rabe Phillips, Ed.)”Sparklers Burning” copyright ©2004 Jeremy Robert Johnson. Originally appeared at HORRORFIND: Fiction.”Wall of Sound: A Movement in Three Parts” copyright ©2004 Jeremy Robert Johnson. Originally appeared as “Liquidation” in Happy #15, “Deeper” in Glass Tesseract Vol. #3, and “A Number of Things Come to Mind” in Happy #17.”Branded” “Ex-hale” “Priapism” “Last Thoughts Drifting Down” “Precedents” “Swimming in the House of the Sea” “Saturn’s Game” “The Sharp Dressed Man at the End of the Line” and “Two Cages, One Moon” copyright ©2005 Jeremy Robert Johnson.

Interviews appear courtesy of the respective magazines in which they appeared, with thanks to Brian Freeman, Richard Chizmar, and Mikhail.

Copyright ©2012 Swallowdown Press

Introduction Copyright ©2012 Stephen Graham Jones

Cover art copyright ©2012 by Morten Bak

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental or for purposes of satire or parody. This is a work of fiction.

Printed in the USA.

Acknowledgements:

A Huge Thanks to CM3 and Rose at Eraserhead Press.

Thank you to the following Oregon writers for their wisdom and encouragement:

Nina K. Hoffman, Elizabeth Engstrom, Alan M. Clark, Bruce Holland Rogers, and Chuck Palahniuk.

Thank you to the following musical artists. These stories were written under the influence:

The Mars Volta, Glassjaw, El-P, The Roots, Saul Williams, Massive Attack, Civ, and DJ Dieselboy.

Table of Contents:

A Note About This Author’s Preferred Edition

An Introduction by Stephen Graham Jones

The League of Zeroes

Dissociative Skills

Amniotic Shock in the Last Sacred Place

Precedents

Snowfall

Ex-Hale

Working At Home

Priapism

Luminary

Saturn’s Game

Branded

The Sharp Dressed Man at the End of the Line

Two Cages, One Moon

Sparklers Burning

Last Thoughts Drifting Down

Swimming in the House of the Sea

Wall of Sound: A Movement in Three Parts

BURN/Liquidation

PURGE/Deeper

TRANCE END/ A Number of Things Come to Mind

Author’s Notes

About the Author

The Fallout: Bonus Material of Suspect Value

THE SHARP DRESSED MAN SPEAKS OUT: AN INTERVIEW WITH JEREMY ROBERT JOHNSON By Steve Vernon for CEMETERY DANCE MAGAZINE

AN INTERVIEW WITH JEREMY ROBERT JOHNSON By Mikhail for THE MEAT SOCKET

JUST THE WORST THING EVER: A TERRIBLE STORY YOU SHOULDN’T READ (WITH WRITER’S COMMENTARY)

AND FINALLY: A REAL BATCH OF NETWORK PITCHES FOR SHOWS WHICH YOU WILL PROBABLY NOT BE SEEING ANYTIME SOON

To Selby, Wallace, Burroughs, Vonnegut, Welsh, Williams, Palahniuk, Barker, King, and Ellroy—

For showing me what words can do.

A Note About This Author’s Preferred Edition

By Jeremy Robert Johnson

“I guess, like most things in my life, it was a combination of dumb luck and tactless bravado.”—From the Cemetery Dance #56 Interview

I’d submitted writing to Eraserhead Press in the past, sending them a novella I’d hoped would work great for their “two author split books.” But no dice—they were about to scrap that line and what I’d sent wasn’t weird enough for their M.O. They did, however, invite me to submit something for their First Book Contest. Of course they did, the greedy bastards, that contest had an entry fee. I was already keeping Zoetrope and Glimmer Train open and publishing thanks to the same gambit. Money was supposed to flow to the writer. I was tired of paying for the sensation of hope.

But I was also young, and hungry, and too all-over-the-map fiction-wise to build in-roads in any one market. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, these fucking weirdoes might be open to my genre-jumping proclivities and artiste affectations. So I slapped my collection and my money together and sent it their way.

And when I won the contest I was told we’d be going to print in two weeks. That was my introduction to the Roger Corman-esque pulp mill which we now call Bizarro Publishing. Come up with a more provocative title, they said (and they were so right—A STARING CONTEST WITH THE ABYSS clunks about as hard as any title can). Scour Deviant Art for covers which might work. See if some of your writer friends will say something nice about the book. Separate the wheat from the chaff and try to pick a first story which will tell people what you’re about.

We copy edited the thing to the best of our abilities at that time, but we weren’t exactly Strunk & White devotees. We designed the interior in one marathon pizza-and-beer-filled session.

One month later, at the Kennedy School bar in Portland, OR, Rose O’Keefe and Carlton Mellick III presented me with a box filled with copies of ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE. I don’t know if it was the Terminator Stout, or having listened to Mastodon’s Leviathan on the way there, but I still remember being so excited my hands were shaking. More stout, of course, would smooth out that malady. (I’ll spare you any further masturbatory reminiscence and just say that I never would have predicted that the book would have the success that it did, and I feel truly blessed to this day.)

So seven years later I received a Kindle as a birthday gift. And as much as I was opposed to the idea of the digital reader, despite how long I had fetishized the printed book as an art form…man, this thing was nice. I also knew that I held the digital rights to ANGEL DUST and that it was time for an e-book even if a cursory review of the text was likely to drive me mad. I was seven years further along in my career, and those stories were from such a tumultuous, angry, essentially fucked-up time in my life.

Plus, back then I didn’t know the difference between “which” and “that” (still not 100% on the usage, but I feel like I’m closer now than ever before). I used too many ellipses. And I couldn’t have been any more slavish regarding my influences (Homage? Pastiche? Cryptomnesia? Probably all of the above—an apprentice using teachers’ tools).

The trick would be to edit the book in a way which honored what I know now without betraying whatever earnestness and energy had allowed it to connect with readers in the first place.

I hope I’ve done that properly.

If not, at least I’ve added a lot of free bonus material at the far end of the book. And the always wonderful Stephen Graham Jones has written a wildly kind Introduction to set the stage.

So, to those reading the book for the first time, Thanks, and I hope you dig it. And to those returning for this new edition, Thanks for coming back, and I hope you like the tune-up and extra features. The engine still runs a little unpredictable and the ride is still a lot crazy, but you knew that going in.

Cheers,

JRJ

p.s. I’ve priced this Author’s Preferred Edition on the cheap end of the scale as a way of saying thanks for all the support ADA has received over the years. Even with the Less Than a Cup of Coffee Cost scheme, some of y’all are reading this as a pirated/cracked edition. And that’s fine, I guess. Your time is the truest form of payment, and this writing business is a fool’s game anyway. That being said—If you end up loving this book, it’s great if you tell your friends. Or write reviews. Or buy me a beer after a reading. Or, once society has fully collapsed and my family and I are roving a cannibal filled post-apocalyptic wasteland, you might offer to take us in and kick up food and board for a night. That would be cool too. Just sayin’.

p.p.s. If you own one of the first printed copies of ANGEL DUST, those sold between March 2005 and November 2005, featuring a blurb from Michael Arnzen (rather than Chuck Palahniuk) on the back cover, that copy might be edging toward collectible. There are 277 of those in existence, and only about 50 of those are signed. You still have to wait until my bizarre and tragic end before you can really hawk it for more than pennies, but you might want to keep it in an airtight titanium resistor home safe. Or just not set your morning coffee on top of it.

An Introduction

By Stephen Graham Jones

Jeremy Robert Johnson. His initials are a palindrome. That’s the first reason I’m jealous of him. The second reason is that he’s one of the smartest, most well-read and articulate dudes I’ve ever hung out with. Seriously. Him and Greg Bear—lock the two of them in a room, and they could crack into some unified theory territory, I suspect, and probably find dark matter along the way, but then they’d cash it all in just to tell a funny story.

The third reason is that he smokes me at Galaga, but then pretends it was just luck. It usually gives me enough time to collect the broken pieces of my heart from the arcade floor.

The fourth reason I’m jealous of him, and intimidated by him, it’s this book you’re holding right now.

I didn’t read it by choice, either.

One reason I read it was for the title alone. Like I was daring the stories not to live up.

Another reason was the cover. It was Giger, it was Lovecraft, it was a Species version of Medusa, but it was punk, too, it was Return of the Living Dead III, it was like a horror poster from the eighties, a movie I’d never seen, one that would have changed my life.

For better, for worse?

I had no idea.

I opened this book, found the third reason I was going to be reading it for the rest of my life: Jeremy Robert Johnson’s writing. His fiction. His mind. These worlds.

Coming up, I’d always read about the beats and the modernists and all the old groundbreakers, and felt a very specific kind of nostalgia, for an experience I’d never get to have. What must it have been like to find Lost in the Funhouse new on the shelf, or Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? or Ficciones, or Sixty Stories? Or to have been there for the Silver Age, when Mustangs and Beatles roamed the face of the earth? I could pretend I’d been there for cyberpunk and splatterpunk, for The Shining, for the Native American Renaissance, for Books of Blood, but I knew the truth, too.

This, though, what Jeremy Robert Johnson was doing on the page—I felt it, that this was the birth of some strange, important beast. That, instead of just reading about a movement, some well-documented, magical period, I was going to get to watch it from the sidelines.

We call it Bizarro, now.

Give it twenty-five or thirty years, though.

Let it shape a generation, let it seep through the cracks of society, send up its strange flowers.

Some of them are going to have a palindrome bleeding up through their petals. And some of those thorns, they’re going to already have Jeremy Robert Johnson’s blood on them. Because he’ll still be around, and he’ll still be foolish enough to reach down for beauty, get a handful of pain.

The stories in this collection, this Angel Dust Apocalypse, they haunt me still. I go back to them over and over. And my copy, which is the third or fifth or twentieth, it’s gone from my shelves this month, probably not to return. Again.

I understand.

When I first read it back in 2005, it was a copy not my own.

I ran away with it as fast I could.

I’m still running.

28 November 2012

Stephen Graham Jones

Boulder, CO

The League of Zeroes

It’s obvious she’s having a hard time sipping her coffee. No matter how delicately she raises her hand or how straight and elegant her posture, she can’t help looking awkward when she drinks. Half the damn cup of coffee is trickling its way to the spreading brown stain on the front of her white blouse.

It’s her fault, really. She’s the one who wanted to have her lips removed.

She’ll adapt. We all do.

She’ll figure out how to keep her gums moisturized with Vaseline, and she’ll carry a small container of it in her purse at all times.

She’ll learn to drink with a straw tucked into the side of her cheek. You can still get some good suction like that and the method cuts the mess to nothing.

She’ll get her teeth bonded and bleached to emphasize their newfound prominence.

She’ll figure out how to make plosive sounds with her tongue against the back of her gums.

She’ll be looking good and find it even easier to smile.

I think she’s gorgeous, sans shirtfront stain, but I don’t think she’d go for a guy like me. I consider crossing the coffee shop and trying a pick-up line, but the three prongs I’ve had my tongue split into feel swollen and tied up. Still healing, I guess.

Although she might find my iris-free eyes attractive. They’re all pupil; very black, mysterious and hard to read. That might work for her.

Deep down I know she’d never go for an amateur freak like me. She’s the type of elegant, slightly-modified trophy girlfriend I see hanging around with Body Modification Royalty.

I’ll save myself the embarrassment for now. Once I join the League of Zeroes, though, she’s mine.

The thought of being a freak show all-star brings my all-black eyes back to my sketchbook. I’m looking at the drawing of my modification design, wondering just how the hell my brain is going to look outside of my body. I hope it’s symmetrical. I never had to worry about brain aesthetics until I came up with my plan.

I want to detach my brain from my body. I want to polish it up and put it in a nice display case and carry it around with me, like a sidekick.

My Buddy the Brain.

I jot notes around the sketch.

How do I keep the brain clean and presentable?

What kind of fiber-optics can transmit neuro-signals to my spinal cord?

How do I do this and not die?

Is it worth it?

I look up and across the room at Our Lady of Liplessness. I picture her licking the box I will keep my brain in, asking me what it’s like to be in the League of Zeroes.

She’ll think I’m special.

It’s worth it.

I wonder for a moment longer about asking her for a date, see if she wants to check out the Italian Horror Movie Festival on Fifteenth. I pass on the idea. Maybe it’s just sublimated embarrassment, but she looks a little uptight. She might bite.

I head out of the coffee shop and kick over three blocks in the cold until I reach a telephone booth. I sweep the coin return for change and come back with a finger load of ketchup. At least I hope that it’s ketchup. I’m curious, but I skip the smell and taste test and smear the red goop on the glass of the phone booth wall in front of me. I drop in some coins, press seven buttons.

Raymond picks up the phone on the other end and says, “SaladMan here!”

The second I hear his voice I feel like I wasted eighty-five cents.

“Hey, Ray, it’s Jamie. Cool it on the SaladMan shit, you don’t have to market to me.”

“I know, Jamie, I’m just trying to stay on point. I’m picking up a lot of regional buzz and a couple of the BMR’s have mentioned me on the website.”

Ray, who is my best friend based only on our mutual lack of total resentment, is obsessed with joining the upper echelon of the League of Zeroes. He keeps talking.

“I’m serious, Jamie. I’m like days from becoming Body Modification Royalty. You know Aggie WoodSpine? He’s always putting in a good word for me on the circuit, and Marshall Le Crawl has said, and I’m almost quoting like verbatim here, that I have one of the most original modification schemes he’s ever seen. That’s on the damn website.”

“I know, Ray, I’m aware of the accolades. I’m not doubting you. I’ve got more pressing business, that’s all, so if I seem impatient it’s only because what you’re saying isn’t important.”

“Thanks, Jamie. What’s going on?”

“Meet me at the Italian Horror Movie Festival in twenty minutes, okay. We’ll check out some Fulci, watch some eyeballs burst, and then we’ll go get coffee and I’ll tell you about my new scheme. I think I’ve come up with something really special.”

“Cool, I’ll catch you later.”

“Oh, hey, Salad…hey, Ray.”

“Yeah.”

“I saw another chick with no lips today. I think that style’s about to blow up.”

“Yeah. I’ve seen that around lately. How’d she look?”

“Pretty sharp, man. Pretty sharp.”

We’re heading out of the theater halfway through the movie ‘cause we’ve already seen the best stuff; the scene where that kid gets the drill through his skull, and the one where the demon priest sucks out that girl’s organs just by staring at her.

Ray and I are walking in the flickering light of the faded theater marquee and I’m anxious, hoping for something more visceral in my life. No more celluloid thrills and vicarious rendering of the flesh. I’m ready for my next surgery and I can’t wait to tell Ray my plans.

I pop in to a Super Saver Mart while Ray waits out front. It costs me thirty bucks for a pack of Marlboro Chronics, a soda, two Charleston Chews, and a dropper of Visine. Half of the money goes to taxes. I have to give the government credit for that one. The same day they legalized weed they went and imposed a sin tax on candy and eye drops. It’s almost devious enough to be admirable.

We head over to D. Brewster’s Café and find some plush seats far from the speakers where we can have a conversation. I don’t order anything because I’ve already got my soda and chocolate, and Ray picks up an extra large mocha.

Ray is starting to smell. I think some of his vegetables have gone south again, even though Dr. Tikoshi soaked them in preservative this time. The lettuce sewn into his neck looks like it’s browning at the edges, and the tip of the carrot emerging unicorn-proud from his forehead has broken off. The sutures around the radish spliced into his right forearm look swollen and irritated.

Right from the beginning I told him SaladMan was a screwed-up scheme. I told him that perishables were always too high maintenance. He’s right about the attention he’s garnering though; even now people are staring at him. Still, on a purely olfactory level spending time with Ray is like hanging out with a big pile of compost.

Despite his odor, he gets big points for ambition. He’s got some respectable friends on the circuit and if he can get someone to endorse him as Body Modification Royalty he can do some tour time and then apply for the League of Zeroes.

The League. It’s the big money, the endorsements, the adulation, the weekly primetime broadcasts, and the outright worship of the people.

Ray’s got his goals set high. If he makes it big he’ll be able to buy fresh produce every day, and eventually he’ll be able to afford that platinum dressing decanter that he wants to have installed in his ribcage.

I’ve got him beat though. After my next modification I’ll be an indelible image in the public eye. My plan is the fourth ace nobody thought I had.

I lean in through a cloud of thick smoke and whisper my scheme into SaladMan’s cauliflowered right ear.

I’m alone and walking home with my thin jean jacket wrapped tight around my shoulders.

I hear Ray’s voice in the café whispering, “Jamie, that’s impossible. What makes you think you could live through that kind of modification?”

I try to brush off his comment, but the concern sounded genuine. I try not to take it to heart. I’m so excited about my imminent fame that mortality has become a second-string worry.

Maybe Ray’s just jealous.

I shake Ray’s doubts out of my head and remember how great my scheme is. It’s worth the gamble. I’ve never been one to swallow motivational speaker pablum but I’ve always nodded in agreement at the phrase, “You’ve got to play big to win big!” So, I’m choosing not to acknowledge the danger. Now entering Ostrich Mode, head firmly inserted in sand.

On my way home I walk past trashcan fires and drug deals and I hear sirens wailing and glass breaking and a bag lady nearby mumbles something about wires embedded in the Earth telling all of us what to do.

A League of Zeroes poster stapled to a telephone pole advertises an upcoming appearance by S. O. Faygus and his amazing translucent throat.

An ad beneath the poster promises a two-for-one deal on mail-order brides.

Another asks me if I really trust my gas mask.

It all leaves me with the impression that I’m living in some kind of ravaged nuclear wasteland. The problem with that diagnosis lies in the absence of any level of apocalypse. No one dropped any bombs; no great fire scorched the Earth.

We just ended up like this. We followed a natural progression from past to present. We’re not Post-Apocalyptic, we’re Post-Yesterday.

One look around, though, and I realize that we must have had some brutal kind of Yesterday.

Ray’s voice is still in my head, echoing doubt, stirring up stomach acid.

“Jamie, that’s impossible!”

It can’t be.

This plan is all I have. It’s my only chance of getting off these streets.

It’s the only way I’ll ever be special.

Dr. Tikoshi wouldn’t take me as a patient.

Dr. Komatsu had me ejected from his building.

I had to go to my old standby, Dr. Shinori. He’s the only one who likes to experiment. He’s the only one willing to push boundaries. He’s the only one who would take a credit card.

I’m moments from anesthesia and Dr. Shinori is sharpening his diamond bone saw. He has emphasized several times how difficult this will be. He hasn’t said anything, and I wouldn’t understand a single word he’d say, but we’ve been communicating with drawings.

I showed him a picture of my design, the new me, the guaranteed League of Zeroes member.

He sketched for a moment and showed me a picture. On the left there was a big, bright smiley face, and on the right there was a little stick figure drawing of my body resting in a casket.

I hope this means my chances are fifty/fifty.

I suspect this might mean he’d be happy to kill me. He gets my money either way. I signed the Goddamn waiver. I’m taking the dive.

I go over the reasons in my head, even though it’s too late to turn back. People would assume I take the risks and bear the public scrutiny because there’s money in it. They wouldn’t be totally wrong. The freak show industry pulls millions every year, and gets more lucrative as time passes. More fame, more attention. Those things don’t hurt. Before I started this, before I split my tongue into three prongs and had my irises removed and my toes extended, I was dirt poor and always felt like I was ugly anyway. Now I’m so ugly that people can’t look away, and I can pull advertising dollars.

The number one reason I do this? People jump to assumptions and whisper asides to each other about parental neglect or abuse or acid in my baby formula. They’re wrong.

I do this because when I was little my mom told me I was going to be someone special.

I asked her what special meant. She pointed to the TV screen. I thought “special” was Burt Reynolds, until she spoke up.

“Special means that people pay attention to you. Special means you have something that other people don’t. Special is having people love you without even knowing you. I know, and have known since the day you were born, that you are going to be special. That’s why I love you so much, Jamie.”

So, I waited to become special.

By the time I hit twenty, I was just like everyone else.

I still am.

Which is not to say that I’m Mr. Free Spirit Railing Against Conformity, because everyone else does that too. I just know that I’m not special, and I have to force the change.

Mom calls me less and less these days.

The hugs are shorter than they used to be.

So here I am, a product of forcible evolution trying to stay one step ahead of the other mutants, hoping my mommy pays attention.

Dr. Shinori puts the gas mask over my mouth and nose and doesn’t ask me to start counting backwards from a hundred. I know the routine. By ninety-five I’m floating in a soft yellow ocean made from rose petals. Somewhere further away I’m shaking as the bone saw hits meat.

The stage lights are especially bright tonight, but I can still make out the audience. The women with no lips always look pleased, grinning wide as the valley.

Ray is in the front row tonight. I flew him out here, even though he’s Body Modification Royalty now and could afford it himself. He’s not wearing a shirt and the baby tomatoes sewn into his chest spell out SaladMan, which is pretty sound promotion.

As the leader of the League of Zeroes I get to make a closing address to our national audience each Thursday.

My mom is in the crowd, like always, and I’m planning a great address tonight, something about how Love Evolves Us All.

They’ll eat it up, but they won’t understand the costs that come with being truly special. They won’t know about the white-fire headaches. They won’t know about the pressure that shoots down my spine when I change the oxygenated cerebrospinal fluid. They won’t know what it’s like when your brain signals get backed up and a dream hits you while your eyes are wide open. I keep these things to myself. I don’t even tell my mom. She thinks I’m perfect now.

The audience always likes to hear about how I’m doing, first thing in the show. I tell them my brain is getting a little hot under these stage lights and that gets a good, hearty laugh. I’m laughing with them, but inside I’m genuinely concerned and I shift my hands to the left and try to move the clear, titanium-laced plastic box I keep my brain in toward the shadows. It tugs on the fiber optic lines running into my neck at the top of my spinal cord, but I manage.

I adapt. We all do.

Dissociative Skills

Curt Lawson felt like a surgeon right up to the moment he snorted the horse tranquilizer. He sniffed hard and then raised his head to survey the scalpel/gauze/suture kit layout on the ratty orange shag carpet next to him. His vinyl bean-bag crinkled beneath him as he sat upright and set down his powder-dusted vanity mirror.

The digital clock across the room confirmed he had three hours before Mom and Dad would be back from their ballroom dancing class.

“Dance away, little parents.” Curt spoke the words slowly in his empty, Spartan bedroom and received no response. Curt’s face became Arctic-cold numb, and he looked around his room through the new eyes the ketamine had given him.

The previously drab white walls and wooden clothes closet now seemed sleek and stylish. His weathered, hand-me-down couch looked like a plush boat. The empty space between Curt’s bean-bag residence and his thin mattress across the room became desert-wide and arid. The normally shabby shag carpet beneath his bare feet took on a new puppy dog softness, and he clenched it in his numbing toes.

The brutal rubberband flavored drip and paint thinner burn in his sinuses sent his brain back to his powder purchase earlier that day. He’d found his dealer, Dave “The Wave” D’Amato, by the soda machine outside the drama room at Shelton High. Dave had been wearing a plain blue jumpsuit and a tan backpack.

“Parachuting later today?” Curt had asked.

Dave had smiled, a split second grin which faded away fast enough to let Curt know his medicine man wasn’t in a joking mood. “No, I’m afraid of heights, Curt. What do you need?”

“Well, I missed breakfast this morning and I was wondering if you happened to have some Special K.”

Dave gave the short smile again, all business.

“Yeah, Curt, I got some K, but it’s on some heavy Ketalar pharmy level shit, and it’s been cut with some diazepam for your blood pressure.”

“My blood pressure, Dave?”

“Yeah, dog, without that diazepam in there the K would make all your veins bulge out and your eyes would feel like they was going to pop. Also, this shit burns black super-quick, so it’s got some kind of speed, probably benzedrine, or something, up in it.”

“Is that bad?”

“Naw, dog, it’s all right ‘cause that shit’ll keep your heart beating even when the ketamine’s telling it to stop. So it’s actually a bonus. And, of course, there’s probably some GKWE in there.”

“GKWE?”

“Yup, GKWE. That’s some God Knows What Else. By the time I get my shit it’s been through more hands than I even know. And everybody cuts it a little. Everybody.”

Dave wasn’t a comforting drug dealer, but he was a straight shooter. Curt had never known another 16-year-old as honest. Or as driven. The kid put half his crooked income into a savings account for his eventual med school tuition.

A Portrait of the Anesthesiologist as a Young Man.

Back in the narcotic now Curt laughed to himself, bowed his head back to the beckoning yellow lines, and snorted another rail of K. He inhaled deep and a lungful of stale bedroom air chased the powder up the straw.

Curt leaned back in his bean-bag and let the straw drop from his nose onto his chest. The world went slow motion and the air got souped-up, thick with gravity.

“Am I breathing?” Curt wondered.

He tried to hold up a hand in front of his mouth to check for exhalation. His hand had other ideas and remained inert. The ketamine staple gun had him pinned as he lay.

Motion, for the moment, was a non-option.

Curt’s first thought was panic heavy. “What if I drop into a K-hole? If I go zombie right away then I can’t use the scalpel.”

Reason launched a sneak attack. “This is just the first wave of the high. Let it crest and then get to work. In the meantime, feel this.”

His reptile brain locked into the chemical vibe, and his cortex began to sizzle with bad electricity. Curt uttered a low “Gwaaaaah” as his eyes rolled back and began to twitch, blurring the rainbow spectrum of light provided by the string of Christmas bulbs circling the ceiling of his room.

His brain did the wrong things he’d hoped it would do.

Sound came into his system wrong. The classical music from his cheap plastic boom-box became tiny sonic wasps with sharp violin stingers. They buzzed around his head, a soundswarm that penetrated his ears and nose and mouth and injected him with disjointed musical notes until his skin shivered. Horns like repressed peasants moaning slow. Wrong.

The distance between Curt’s head and the surrounding walls fluctuated from fingernail-thin to epic-black-space wide.

He could smell the old sweat and dried semen on his bedding across the room. It was a human smell and made him feel small and weak for a moment. “Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe I should call the hospital or Mom’s cell phone or…”

The thought was cut off by another wave of anesthetic bliss.

Then the air of his spare, stale room became warm and safe, except for his moments of mental alarm.

Curt found himself thinking, with nagging frequency, “Am I breathing?” The question was easily written off once he noticed the tiny faces that lived in the wood-grain doors of his clothes closet.

The faces laughed, growled, knew Curt and smiled at him, grew bodies, fought, fucked, killed. It was a tip-top hallucination. Curt could barely look away until he realized that he had sat upright and could now move his limbs.

He inhaled deeply as he regained some level of physical control. He was not surprised when he smelled French fries, and realized that he had vomited his dinner onto his shirt.

The shirt was easily discarded. It had to go anyway. Curt needed access to the soft skin of his belly.

Curt reached over to the scalpel laid out by the bean-bag and managed to wrap his left hand around it.

“I thought I’d have a little more control than this. I’ll have to be extra careful. I can do this. I MUST DO THIS.”

His yell echoed against the plaster walls of the room. The faces in the wood-grain recoiled at the sound.

“Sorry, guys. I just, well, I need to do this sort of thing.”

He knew the little faces understood.

Every wrong thing done was a show of strength. An exercise in control. Proof that life could be contained and managed, down to the tiniest, strangest detail, if only for a moment.

“You know that. Right, little faces?”

A twisted wood-whorl face winked at Curt and confirmed the understanding. The liquid wood grain folks knew the secret score. They knew that with every wrong thing Curt did, he was separating himself from the predictable degradation of his gin-guzzling, Prozac-popping parents, from the random humanity of bad skin and poorly timed bowel movements, from the After School Special cliché of his generation’s own pre-packaged rebellion. The things Curt did were special, completely unique in their own way.

“I’m different,” Curt told himself.

Past exercises in control had been successful. Curt would think something, and if the next immediate thought was, “Well, I could never do that.” then he’d do it, whatever he’d thought, no matter how wrong. That was the litmus and the litany.

Curt knew how long it took to eat a pound of Crisco. He knew the nervous sweat that preceded smashing his own thumb with a hammer. He knew what it was like to go to a party in a wheelchair, wearing a Skynnrd t-shirt, asking girls if they wanted to “rollerfuck his freebird.” He knew the discomfort of spending an entire day with a travel toothbrush jammed up his ass. He knew what it was like to kill a fly, eat half of it, and deposit the remaining thorax and twitching wing into his left ear.

Sometimes he felt as if he was training towards a gold medal in the Dumbfuck Olympics. Sometimes he felt wonderful, like his acts, however bizarre, were taking him closer to some kind of greatness. He constantly reassured himself.

“No one else has ever done this. You are the only one strong enough to make it happen.” He stood proud and walked head high amongst the living dead, a man in control of his future, tossing fate aside.

Even his pain was unique. He sought it out and cultivated its strangeness. It trumped the boring pains of the everyday world. The bright burn that shot through his system while gouging his tonsils with a chopstick made his boring, human migraines seem lukewarm.

“Pre-emptive suffering makes me stronger,” he’d often thought.

Curt’s secret-subversive diet burned holes in his stomach lining. His belly never stopped grumbling. Indigestion was his constant companion. He wanted to re-write that “footsteps on the beach” poem and replace Jesus with indigestion.

So he did. The last line had read, “That was when I gurgled you.”

The experiments in control always had their harbingers. The Crisco-eating incident was set in motion by an embarrassing, in-class sneeze that had very publicly layered his hands with mucous. The toothbrush colonoscopy was predated by an uncontrollable erection Curt had failed to hide from his teacher in gym class.

Yesterday, Curt had sat down to breakfast with his parents. His dad’s hands had trembled until he popped the top of his breakfast beer. Curt’s mother had noted this and laughed, a dry, quiet laugh which reeked of acceptance. Her laugh seemed to Curt like the sound of a zoo animal finding the humor in its cage.

Curt fell asleep crying that night, unable to tear his mind away from his father’s softly shaking hands and the sound of his mother’s laugh, hating the dime-store pathos of the moment, hating himself for not being able to distance himself from it.

This morning he’d awakened to the thought, “I’ll never know what I look like inside.”

So Curt followed his own rules, copped the K, and borrowed the scalpel that now sat centimeters from his belly.

Curt delayed his self-surgery for a second, remembering to sterilize the instrument. The butane from his lighter heated the blade and seared carbon black on the silver surface.

He paused for a moment and pinched his face, which he had a hard time locating. Once he got a large chunk of cheek between his forefinger and thumb he squeezed as hard as he could.

He felt nothing. No skin against skin, only a dull pressure.

Perfect. Numb. Time to operate. Time to tour the belly.

His right hand shook but steadied as the scalpel met resistance. The wood faces flinched as the blade separated skin without a sound.

Curt hadn’t imagined there would be so much blood. He hadn’t planned on the mesentery tissue being so tenacious, even under the honed edge of the scalpel. He’d also thought that the small intestine would be, well, small. The three inches of tubing that he’d managed to pull through the incision were wider than two of his fingers side-by-side.

Curt stared at the bit of his insides that he’d excavated. He listened to the stream of orchestral music coming from his stereo and wondered if Amadeus had ever had the willpower to expose his own insides.

Curt seriously doubted it. He looked at his achievement with love and softly stroked the moist, red bit of intestine that jutted from his bleeding belly. He stared and watched the previously unknowable part of him shimmering in the colored Christmas lights.

“I am in control. I made this happen. I own my life,” he thought.

A tiny twinge of pain crept into the invaded area after a few minutes of intense observation.

“The ketamine’s starting to wear off,” Curt thought.

This thought was preceded in his mind by the sound of the front door opening and then closing.

“Oh, God. Mom and Dad are home.”

The knock on the door to his room came too quickly and sounded wrecking-ball heavy. He tried to speak; he wanted to say, “Stay out, I’m naked.”

The ketamine might as well have removed his tongue and wired his jaw shut. Total disconnect had set in.

His mother opened the door.

She stared and then shook her head as if to throw the image of her son from the surface of her eyes.

Then she screamed, the high, operatic shriek of a woman confronting something which cannot be real, something wrong. Curt could smell the vodka on her breath from across the room.

It was a nice, warm smell, and it stayed printed on his senses all the way to the hospital, a sensory presence hijacking a spot in his mind. It was the scent of her scream. It was proof that he’d done something incredible, something the world and certainly his mother had never seen.

Her vodka-soaked shriek was a trophy. It was the first real, intense emotion he’d heard from his medicated mother in a long time. The sound betrayed the smooth, idle complacency of her everyday life.

He wished that he could have spoken to her. He had wanted to say, “Try to accept this. Laugh at this, Mom.”

Even his father had been shocked sober, and jumped into action. Dad’s hands had held steady while trying in vain to push Curt’s intestine back into place.

For just a moment, Curt’s exercise in control had enveloped his whole family, and brought them together. He’d forced them to abandon their slow, slaughterhouse fattening for a moment and really live, and fight.

Had they slipped into drunken slumber without first checking in on him, Curt imagined he’d still be bleeding, numb, watching himself die in the Technicolor glow of his Christmas lights.

But they’d fought.

His parents had both held him, one at each side, until the ambulance arrived. Their hands clenched together over his belly, staunching the warm flow of his blood.

Though he couldn’t move his limbs or say a word during the ambulance ride, Curt began to feel again, and his own screams found their way into the world.

Despite the fire in his belly, beneath his wounded-animal bellowing, he felt proud.

Inside, and out.

Amniotic Shock in the Last Sacred Place

The drugs were wearing off. James Toddle’s mind slowly broke the surface of the soft purple ocean which had engulfed it. Consciousness crept back into his skull and threw its weight around, asserting its ugly but undeniable presence.

He felt straps pinning him to a cold metal table. He felt the persistent travel of insects across his skin. He felt reality setting in.

Reality was the last thing he wanted. Reality told him he was a grown man wearing a giant diaper. Reality told him he had a nasty habit of hurting the women from whom he so desperately desired love. Reality was adult judgments and adult institutions and adult terms like “pathological need” and “infantilism.” Reality was a place where his need and his hunger were becoming harder and harder to satiate.

James became so mired in self pity he didn’t even notice the pervasive slaughterhouse smell of the air around him. The sickness of his surroundings meant little next to his loneliness and ever-present need for love and attention.

He was weeping crocodile tears onto pudgy pink cheeks when the dope tube descended from the ceiling. The metal nozzle slid between his lips and pumped his mouth full of chemicals and protein pulp. Instinctively, he began to nurse.

Soon he was sleeping like a newborn baby, calm as a lamb despite the shrieks and wet screams and locust swarms of laughter that echoed throughout the Facility. His lips were wrapped leech-tight around the rusted metal nozzle that fed him and filled his body with pain-killer and his mind with fever dreams.

The dream was almost always the same and had been since he could remember. He was small again and he was being held tight and kept warm because he was special. A cuter, more wondrous child had never been born. He was feeding and he could close his eyes and feel his mother’s love flowing over him, and into him, through her soft milk.

Eventually, though, the feeding stopped, and he was still hungry. So hungry. He wanted more milk, more love, more attention. He bit down harder on the breast in his mouth. He clamped down until he felt flesh separate and a chunk of his mother was in his belly and then he felt something flowing, something hot and salty, and he swallowed deep and hoped it would never end.

It was the crinkling of the plastic diaper which gave her hope. Nurse Sebac turned toward the sound that echoed in the oily ear puddles on each side of her head. Her optic nerves, long since exposed by an accidental Procedure Frenzy, wiggled in the air before her face, and pulled in her sight like an extended snake’s tongue would pull in smell.

A vision of loveliness lay there before her, held to the floating storage table by thin straps of what appeared to be rhino hide. She twitched nervously for a second, looking around the room, wondering if it was possible to be attacked by a skinned rhino twice in one week. “Bad odds,” she whispered to herself, trying to remain calm enough to study the patient.

There on the table, wearing only an oversized plastic diaper, and smelling heavily of talcum powder, was one of the shiniest, softest men she’d ever seen. A cracked and leaking tube hung down from the ceiling and ended in the patient’s mouth. He was suckling at it, his lips pulling a combination of benzerol and somnambuline into his throat.

Nurse Sebac stamped the bony heel of her foot into the fleshy, ovular Pad that glowed yellow in front of the patient’s storage table. The Pad squeaked, glowed brighter yellow, and slimed away, leaving a shiny trail on the shattered formica flooring beneath it. It slithered back a minute later with a clipboard stuck to its top. She lifted the clipboard from the Pad and then kicked the glowing yellow globule across the room, where it sunk into the wall, whinnying as it dissipated.

She read the patient profile, which was written backwards and contained the words “parquet,” “luggage,” and “immolation.” The one important piece of information was located on the back of the profile sheet, spelled out with pink crayon. Below the heading marked “Your Name:” it read “James Toddle.”

She would need to know his name when he woke in her hidden apartment, high in the upper floors of the Facility. She would need to know what to call the man in the giant diaper before the procedure could begin.

Nurse Sebac dragged James Toddle behind her, being sure to let his table bump into the shifting walls around her. She had removed his tubes and hoped that the lack of anesthetic and constant jostling would wake him by the time they reached her secluded Facility hideaway in the swaying upper reaches. She passed Crew members and staff during her ascension. Any questions about her movement of the patient were covered with a prefabricated lie.

“Backscatter has requested that I saturate this man with various waste products and then oil him up and set him out on Veranda 8.”

At that point everyone who stopped her would ask the same question, to which she would respond, “Yes, that’s where we’re keeping the razor-beaked turtles these days.”

It seemed reasonable.

She continued up flight after flight of sticky stairs, and thought about her new project. Nurse Sebac had to have her hobbies, like any other victim of the nine to five to three to nine workdays. “Hobbies keep you sane,” she told herself.

“So I take a few patients here and there, what’s the harm? It’s not like a big Facility like this is going to miss a few piddling, worthless patients, what with the thousands they process every day. Especially after they cut my morphine back to the daily bucket, it’s like they owe me. I’m doing them a favor and keeping this place running more efficiently. They should thank me for working my fingers to the bone. In fact, this is my third set of hands this year!”

Filled with self-righteousness (and enough norepinephrine to seriously jack a small island civilization) she rushed up the remaining five flights of stairs. She inhaled deep as she passed through clouds of methane and mosquitoes, knowing she was close to her front door. As she approached the door she felt a series of sick, wracking spasms tear through her body with the heat of phosphor. She retched onto her feet and felt the fluid slide between her toes. Thick with protein and jellyfish nematocysts, the vomit stung her skin before the floor absorbed it.

“This is ridiculous!” she thought. “If they reduce my morphine ration one more time…” The thought was cut short by another string of dopesick gut explosions, all white fire and needles.

Eventually she composed herself and continued dragging the man in the diaper.

Once she and the patient were finally inside she closed the door of her secret apartment behind her. The slamming of the door woke James Toddle. His waking was brief. The moment he saw Nurse Sebac looking back at him with the waving stalks of her optic nerves he returned to his blessed unconsciousness.

The seeping purple lights that crawled across Nurse Sebac’s ceiling were infested with wasps, the result of a failed “Nest-to-Chest” hive transplant she’d tried to perform weeks before. She’d even coated the patient’s lungs with wasp pheromones, but once she set the hive free they instantly swarmed her overhead lighting and defiled it. Now her lighting had a strange buzz to it, worse than the old fluorescents in some of the surgical theaters. The constant, taunting sound of the buzz, amplified by her pain-killer withdrawals, crept into her head and haunted her.

Buzzbuzz you’ll never be a Doctor buzzbuzz you’ve failed again buzzbuzz nice legs, tadpole buzzbuzz who are you fooling buzzbuzz dilantin is for Doctors buzzbuzz ha, only twelve surgeries in and you couldn’t keep him alive buzzbuzz we’re reducing your dosage levels buzzbuzz you’ll just have to make do with less.

“Less” was eating her alive! She needed the steady, gratuitous supply of chemicals enjoyed by the Surgeons. And why not? She was just as creative as they were. She was the one that came up with Arterial Spraypainting. She was the one who fed hunger stimulants to patient’s tapeworms. Pearls before surgical swine.

She had toyed with the idea that appearing Surgeon-like might earn her some kind of sedative stipend. She had amputated her legs and rigged up an elaborate pulley system, trying to feign leglessness in the surgical theater. They spotted the ruse instantly and spent the afternoon playing tetherball with her suspended torso. When they were done playing with her they even reattached her damn legs, which was so embarrassing.

No, the only way to get any real attention around here was through the rendering of the patients. She’d have to create a true abomination, something so abhorrent that everyone would expect nature to destroy it at any moment.

She had a chance to show her superiors what she was capable of. That chance was resting on the floor with his thumb in his mouth, dreaming of something and nursing furiously hard. He was her grand and horrible infant, the perfect patient for her plan.

“Well,” she thought “I better get to gettin’ on with it.”

She ground her jaw in determination, spit out a shattered tooth, and swung her leg forward as fast as she could into the soft midsection of James Toddle, patient-at-large.

“Borf!” he exclaimed, followed by, “Oooooooohhhhhhh!”

Then he began to cry, all red-faced wailing and high decibel screeching.

He didn’t stop crying until she force-fed him a tube of high-powered verdalax, known for its ability to trigger violent, gushing outbursts of truth (after, of course, the horrible onset of gut cramping).

She waited a few minutes for the medicine to invade. Then she asked one question and watched the floodgates open.

“James, how did you get here?”

Glassy-eyed and hypnotized, James Toddle let it all out in a great cathartic babble, a torrent of nonsense that left impact ripples in Nurse Sebac’s ear puddles.

“I just, well, I like wearing diapers, and one of my Momma’s, one of them that I paid for, back when I was a popular baby, she paid for the electrolysis so I could be officially baby-like, and you can get awful poor buying these oversized diapers, and I just like to nurse and they wouldn’t let me wear my bonnet to work so I was all done for and the rubber pants were what I wanted and my little brother was born and they took away my diapers and gave them to him, and paid attention to him, and they didn’t care about me anymore, ‘cause I wasn’t in the diapers, so then I paid real close attention to my little brother until his head was black and then I ran away and I was all alone again and then I met one of my new Mommas and she took me in and I fell in love with her and one night she wouldn’t feed me so I had to eat some of her soft parts and then I got sent to a special hospital and they said I had an Edible Oedipal complex that was really complex, but at least at the hospital they let me wear my diapers as long as I kept making dirties in them, and then one day I woke up and the hospital wall was missing like it blew up, and the bricks were smoking, and a man with a metal cage over his mouth asked me if I wanted to go to a better hospital and then he stuck a pokey in me and I woke up here and now I’m with you and I hope you’re my new Momster, ‘cause I’m hungry, so hungry…”

James Toddle was drooling.

Nurse Sebac opened her arms and freed one sagging gray breast from her filthy scrubs. She leaned over James and put it in his mouth and squeezed it with her hand until thick black oil smelling of curdled milk sprayed into his throat. James lapped it up for his new Momster, basking in the udder attention until his throat grew numb and his brain was carpeted, and gravity lost its hold on everything.

The procedure went perfectly. Between periodic feedings of Nurse Sebac’s obsidian dark and highly anesthetic milk, James Toddle was shrinking. She was giving him super-doses of atropherone, a regressive growth hormone originally used to shrink cows to “Kickin’ Size.” After six successful super-dosings, James was just the right size to fit in her new machine. Smaller than a bread basket, bigger than the average human brain.

Even with an ocean of anesthetic in his system, James Toddle looked uncomfortable shrinking to his desired baby size. He began to scream when the plates in his skull de-fused and separated, but a mottled gray teat ended his tantrum.

Nurse Sebac made sure he was awake when she pulled back the tarps in the corner of her room to reveal the machine she had built but never had a chance to test.

James Toddle’s eyes flashed wide in their milky haze as he saw the unveiling.

“I call it The Woom, James. You, my lovely child, are the first to take it for a test drive.”

It floated three feet above the floor, a grotesque amalgam of human skin, horse hide, solidified secretions, mortar, brick, viscera, and plastic tubing.

The Woom began to quiver as Nurse Sebac brought James Toddle closer.

She pinched his right cheek and said, “See you in nine minutes.”

Nurse Sebac lifted a fleshy fold at the base of the machine and pushed James into The Woom.

A mucus plug coagulated into place beneath James Toddle and he felt the walls around him grow closer. Fluid rushed in and he found he could breathe the green and black ichors into his lungs. The fluid was filled with luminescent brine which labored away at creating the new James. He floated there, tiny, in the machine that was numbing him and re-shaping him, and thought, “Finally, back where I belong.”

Nine minutes later, he was re-born. A fissure opened in the base of the machine and belched him out with a few gallons of amniotic fluid. His eyes were fused together and his nose emerged from his forehead like an inverted sink spigot. His mouth was fish-thin, and he could barely breathe.

Nurse Sebac took one look at him and said, “Now, that simply won’t do. You won’t survive long enough for me to show the boys downstairs. I better run you through the seed cleaner.”

She opened a metal door at the top of The Woom and placed him inside again. Ropes of intestine slid around him, squeezing out his breath. Cone spiders scuttled around him and sucked away his vital fluids. The brick walls on each side of him throbbed with the heat of a blast furnace and dried him until he was just a husk. He felt one of the spiders bore into the side of his head and pull him out of his skull, and he felt his consciousness being carried along and dropped down a long tube, back into the warmth and darkness at the base of The Woom. His consciousness, the germ of him, planted its seed and he grew. As he gestated he pictured himself as the perfect man, with a newscaster’s hair and a car dealer’s smile, someone so normal that all Moms would have to love him, and care for him forever. He tried to grow just right. Nine minutes later he was back in his new Momster’s arms.

“Oh, James! The four external livers are fine, but that adorable blonde hair has got to go! Try harder this time. I’ve got to show those uppity floating fucks something spectacular or I’ll never be able to advance!”

James felt Nurse Sebac’s hands shaking as she picked him up.

No matter how many times James Toddle was born, he wouldn’t come out just right. Sure, he’d have a vestigal wing here, a monstrous case of hydropedalism there, but parts of him remained cherubic in contrast. It was never enough for Nurse Sebac, who credited herself as a perfectionist. The remaining will of James Toddle, the part of him that really wanted a Mom to love him, counteracted the designs of The Woom just enough to subvert its intentions. He wanted a Momster, Nurse Sebac wanted a monster.

He was born with a scaly foot sticking out of his abdomen and a button nose. He was born with rosy cheeks and assholes for eyes.

James felt hungrier and more alone with each birth. When he had limbs he would reach for his new Mom and try to cling to her. On the forty-eighth birth he managed to wind a white and jellied tentacle around her waist, but she clipped it off with a rib saw and forced him back into the seed cleaner. On the ninety-fourth birth he burrowed halfway into her thigh with his new circular mouth, but she poured salt on him and he shriveled.

After the hundredth birth James gave up hope and was sick of being born again.

He had no options. No matter how he felt, he was still born.

Hope left him. Despair filled The Woom and his incarnations became more and more horrible. His one hundred and forty-fifth birth went perfectly.

At last! He saw her eyes flash with adoration and a mother’s love.

“Oh my! Toothy phalluses, inverted eyes, an antler-shaped skull, and cleft palate! I’m the luckiest mother in the world! I can’t wait to show you off!”

He could see her infected injection points were salivating, anticipating oxycontin appetizers.

He watched her recognize the mirrored hunger and need in his new, jet-black eyes.

She picked him up to feed.

James Toddle fed for two days, then abandoned her corpse. After he ate her heart he was positive that she had no more love to give. He had swallowed the source.

He blamed the cold Mother-husk on the floor for his newfound loneliness. If she really loved him she’d keep on giving. All he needed was to be fed, and loved, and cherished.

His new Mom had grown cold to him after time, like the others before her. This Mom had grown cold and stiff, so once again he was on his own. He would need to find another Mother, one who would recognize him for the tiny miracle he was and never stop the flow of food and love that he required. He’d just have to try harder. He’d have to be the perfect child.

He shambled along the halls of the Facility in search of a new Mom. He tried, in spite of the prolapsed colon hanging wet from his neck and the stinking fluid ejaculated from the pulsing flesh protruding from his mouth, to feel wondrous and sweet and treasured.

Love, after all, was his birthright.

Precedents

The smell of toilet-brewed sterno fills Cell 5-11 of the LaGrange Penitentiary. Marcia Grable is watching her cell-mate, abusive baby-sitter Tracy Everton, take toxic slugs of the shit-tinged prison moonshine.

Marcia is not at all surprised when Tracy passes out and hits the concrete floor with a wet, fleshy smack. Marcia is surprised to find herself laughing, and hard, to the point where her chest aches from it and she feels half crazy. Something about that sound, the loose body slapping the ground, echoes deep inside of her.

It reminds her of the sound of Josh Grable’s last moment on Earth.

Back up.

Marcia presses her forehead against the cold window of the prison transit bus and watches the wheat fields roll by until they become a beige blur. She tries to contain the anger that burns holes in her stomach. The handcuffs, secured tight to the seat railing, twist against her wrists and rub her skin red and raw till it throbs.

She remembers the courtroom photograph of Josh’s corpse, his lips blue as Arctic glaciers, his hair much lighter than it had been the day before his death.

She tries to feel remorse. She knows it’s part of her sentence, but the feeling never comes.

“If they only knew him, if they saw the way he looked at me, with those eyes... nothing but shark eyes. Just empty. If they knew, I’d be a free woman. If they knew...”

She thinks like this for hours, as her stomach eats itself and bile rises in her throat.

“If they knew my husband like I did, they’d have done the same.”

Back up.

The jury foreman reads the sentence so calm you’d think he was reading lawnmower assembly instructions.

Then the monotone voice of the jury foreman drops the word “Guilty” and it hits Marcia’s heart sledgehammer-heavy.

A black veil pulls itself over her eyes.

She wakes seconds later, her body tingling as she regains consciousness, hearing her good-for-nothing state appointed lawyer yelling.

“Give her some room, she needs air.”

Guilty.

“Fuck air,” she thinks, “I need a new lawyer.” There is no humor in the thought, only despair on the verge of resignation.

Two days later she steps onto the prison bus and winces as they tighten her handcuffs to the seat railing.

Back up.

Marcia’s lawyer is going over the details, the ugly details, during her deposition. He says the state has a very strong case, and they’ve already secured the librarian and the store clerk to testify. He says the doorknob is an incredibly damaging piece of evidence. The jury will have to know everything, every nasty little detail of her private life, in order to build sympathy for her case.

It’s going to be rough, he says. The defense will play up Josh’s childhood, with its daily abuses and lingering scars. They’ll try to shift the blame back a generation, to Josh’s father, Darren. They’ll make Marcia the monster and turn Josh into a sympathetically scarred psyche incapable of escaping his childhood hell.

“And the jurors will eat it up, Marcia. This is a jury of your peers. They watch the same TV movies. They belong to Oprah’s Book Club. You can take any monster, slap a bad dad into his past, and all of a sudden he’s just another lost soul, lashing out. And you were the poor lady that got in the way. They’ll argue you lacked compassion. You were the one who took things too far.”

The defense’s plan makes sense to her. She can’t even count the number of nights she’d spent trying to blame her own mother for telling her, “Marriage demands compromise.” Shifting the blame is so easy. The cheapest freedom she’d ever found. But nothing can justify what Josh did.

“They can’t do that. I never even met his father. Everything Josh did, he did of his own free will.”

“You talk like that, Marcia, you put that point of view into your testimony and you’ll kill our case. If we can’t blame Josh for what you did…”

And her crime, he says, comes across as too calculated.

“I wish you could have committed a simple crime of passion. People who commit crimes of passion often get off with manslaughter. People can sympathize with lover’s rage. People can put themselves in that position, they can feel their own finger on the trigger, anxious to squeeze.”

Marcia says nothing.

“What you did, Marcia, will not be construed as a crime of passion. Your actions involved too much forethought. We’ll be lucky to get a life sentence. You have chosen to commit what will be perceived as a coldhearted murder in a state very fond of capital punishment.”

Marcia is staring at the tile floor, agonizing at the thought of airing her family’s dirty laundry. Her mind flashes on a syringe full of strychnine, a thumb hovering over the plunger.

“So, where do I begin?”

Back up.

Marcia is at her friend Theresa’s house when the police cruiser pulls up.

Her first thought creates a sick panic in her heart.

“I haven’t finished cleaning up yet...maybe they’re just here to ask questions... whereabouts...something...oh God...if they’ve been to the house...oh shit...I haven’t fixed the doorknob yet. That fucking doorknob...this is too soon. I was supposed to make the call. So who called? His boss? Was he supposed to work today? Oh, God. Oh, God, he was. Shit, okay, play it straight, ride this out. You were cleaning the house, then you spent the night here. That’s it. God, please...”

She has been preparing for this moment, and when the cop breaks the news about Josh’s death she shakes and her hands tremble, and the tears well up, and she mutters, “This just can’t be.”

She had read on the internet that denial was supposed to be her first response.

“This just can’t be, officer.”

She hopes her nervousness reads as shock. She fights back an incredibly strange urge to smile.

The urge to smile disappears as the handcuffs cut into her wrists.

Back up.

Marcia drives to her friend Theresa’s house at four in the morning. She is fighting back laughter, afraid the sound of her own voice would resonate as distant, crazy. She has her windows rolled down, hoping to cleanse herself of the smell. She drives just two miles over the speed limit, knowing that being pulled over right now would destroy her alibi.

“I’ll get to Theresa’s and we’ll have a cup of tea and we’ll watch the sun rise. How long has it been since I’ve seen the sunrise?”

Too damn long, she concludes, and she laughs, and it does make her feel crazy, but it feels better than being afraid.

Back up.

Marcia opens every window in every room of her small manufactured home. She grabs her keys off the kitchen counter, puts them in her pocket, and then heads back to the bathroom. She picks up the towel pressed tight against the bottom of the door and shuffles away, careful not to inhale deeply until she reaches the kitchen. She grabs a plastic container from beneath the kitchen sink, and carries it, along with the towel, to her backyard, where she has ignited a burn barrel. She drops the items in and watches as they both glow green. Her eyes follow the thick black plumes of swirling smoke as they rise towards the stars.

Back up.

Josh Grable suddenly sounds very sober as he yells, “Marcia, help me out here, let me out of this fucking bathroom or I swear to God...”

His screams are interrupted by violent, retching coughs, and he pounds on the door with enough force that she hears the wood splintering, and just for one second she thinks he may live, and oh God if he gets out of there he’s going to torture me, he’s going to tear me to pieces, he’s going to kill me.

“Please, God,” she thinks.

Her prayer is answered by the sound of his body hitting the ground with a wet, fleshy smack as the toilet flushes behind him.

She is confronted by an unexpected surge of tears, sitting cross-legged on the floor, waiting for him to die. Her tears dry quickly as she remembers why this must happen.

She waits for a few minutes to confirm his death, through his silence. Once she feels confident of the fact she cleans up, pulling the duct tape off of the outside of the bathroom window, opening the windows in every room of the house.

“My husband’s had a horrible accident,” she thinks.

“Thank God.”

Back up.

Marcia lies in the dark, feeling Josh’s sweat cool on her body. “He drank two bottles. He’ll have to piss sooner or later.”

She waits—heart beating hummingbird fast in the dark room—hoping he won’t pass out.

After twenty minutes he finally rises from the bed and staggers to the bathroom. She pads softly behind him, and when he closes the door she locks it quietly from the outside, and grabs the towel she’d placed in the nearby closet. She pushes the towel as tight as she can between the carpet and the door, knowing her life depends on covering that gap.

She hears his urine splattering against the porcelain, a few spurts and then a long steady stream. She hears him gasp for air, and then he makes a loud gagging noise. She sees the doorknob jiggle, then shake violently. It takes Josh a long, drunken moment to realize the doorknob’s been locked from the outside.

Marcia hears his voice, confused, desperate.

“Marsh, wake up! Help me out here!”

“I’m right here, Josh.”

“Marsh, I think I’m in trouble here! I can barely breathe! My fuckin’ eyes... oh shit... aaah... Marsh, open the door, it’s broke or somethin’!”

“No.”

“Oh shit, honey, I can’t...ah...I...what the fuck is going on here? Open the Goddamned door!”

Silence.

“Marsh... this isn’t funny... you’re gonna... I mean, is this about the other night... I’m sorry, Marsh, I’m real sorry about all that... now quit playing your little games and OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”

“Fuck you.”

“Marcia, help me out here...”

Back up.

Marcia’s day speeds by, and an almost giddy feeling fills her body as she does her shopping. At a Shop Rite she purchases a new lock for the bathroom door; a few tree-shaped air fresheners for her car, three bottles of Sheppard Springs merlot, and a box of Wheat Snacks.

She drives across town to the Home Value wholesalers and makes a few inquiries with a store clerk about cleaning products. She asks about their respective strengths, how concentrated they are, and which ones are really industrial potency. The look on the face of the store clerk says he’s never in his entire life seen anyone so excited about cleaning products.

Then Marcia drives home and works frantically, breaking out in cold sweats and hot flashes as she prepares for Josh to come home. She puts a gouge into her left thumb as she replaces the bathroom lock with the new one she purchased. It is the exact same model, but once she finishes installing it, the lock is on the outside.

She then heads into the bathroom and carefully bails out the toilet water currently sitting in the bowl. Cup by cup, she pours it down the sink. She uncaps her Home Value purchase and empties its contents into the bowl. The smell is so strong she recoils. It feels like a butane torch burning inside of her lungs, so she exits quickly and leaves the door just a tiny crack open.

By the time Josh gets home and takes off his Berwood Mall Security outfit she’s already got a bottle of red wine cracked and she nearly pours it down his throat and kisses his neck and tells him she wants it to be like old times, she wants to party and so they party and skip dinner and she drinks one bottle and he sucks down the other two and then he pulls her into the bedroom and he’s rubbing his crotch and mumbling to himself and she’s nervous cause he’s looking at her with those empty shark eyes and she doesn’t want to get hurt so she goes to him and he smashes himself into her and pushes down on top of her but he’s so drunk he can’t get it in and he tries and he wraps his arms around her and squeezes hard, too hard and she can’t breathe, and she starts to panic and he looks in her eyes like he wants to just crush her away into nothing and sweat drips from his forehead onto her face and he suddenly gives and rolls off of her and they lie there.

Marcia hates him more than ever.

Eventually he rises and stumbles to the bathroom.

Back up.

The librarian was very helpful, and showed Marcia how to use the internet properly, how to hold the mouse and enter keywords like “grieving process.”

The computer, intended for public use, records every page Marcia visits.

The page that talks about safety and cleaning products.

The page that teaches her the cogeners in red wines and dark alcoholic beverages increase the level of ammonia in urine.

The page about dealing with the loss of a loved one.

Marcia makes an impression.

Back up.

Theresa opens the door to her house and finds Marcia sobbing on her stoop.

Minutes later, after Marcia tells her story, Theresa makes a suggestion. Theresa says, “A man like that deserves to fucking die. I see this sort of thing on TV all the time. Drunken husband, abused wife. A lot of these wives, even if they leave, they’re the ones that end up dead.”

She then proceeds to make other suggestions, talking up counseling and police intervention. It doesn’t matter, because inside Marcia’s head she hears Theresa saying, over and over again, “A man like that deserves to fucking die.” These words echo deep. They set into her bones, take hold behind her eyes.

Theresa makes an impression.

Back up.

Marcia sits on the toilet, weeping, holding her bruised back and her belly.

The water in the toilet beneath her is dark crimson.

Her mind is sick with pain, trembling in her head as she thinks, “Oh, God, please let me have him back, please let me have Hollis back, I swear I’m sorry for whatever I’ve done that made this happen, I swear, God please let me have him back, he wasn’t even born and I would have loved him so good, and he would have loved me back, and loved me, nobody loves me, please God...”

She sits there for two hours as the water beneath her grows darker and her skin grows cold.

Back up.

She is asleep and doesn’t want to wake up. Josh comes home late and rotten with booze. He tries to crawl on top of her and she pushes him back.

His eyes change.

He changes. He leaves his heart in the space behind him and moves forward like a machine. He makes fists, his knuckles crack.

She curls up in a ball and lets him hit her until he collapses, like he always does.

He grunts and hisses out breath hot with alcohol as his hands crunch into her body.

He doesn’t know she’s six weeks late for her period.

He falls asleep with his knuckles purple, and doesn’t wake as Marcia crawls to the bathroom.

Back up.

Marcia is fifteen, and pays very close attention to her Home Ec. teacher when he emphasizes the danger of mixing ammonia and bleach when cleaning your house.

“They call it chlorine gas, people, and it killed thousands in World War I. Don’t let it kill you because you’re not paying attention.”

The lesson makes an impression.

Back up.

Marcia is five and asks her Mom what she dreamed of being when she grew up. Her mom says, “I just wanted to have a beautiful baby and a kind husband to take care of and love. That’s all I ever wanted, really.”

Marcia agrees that it’s about the loveliest dream she’s ever heard.

Snowfall

Despite Jake’s profound deafness, he swore for a moment that he’d heard something. He’d at least felt the sound, a tremble in his small, feather-light bones. This pushing noise that seemed for a moment to sit on his chest and trap breath in his lungs, it brought him from deep sleep to a sort of half-awake that didn’t feel real.

He stayed in this space between dream and waking for awhile, barely shaking in his hammock bed which was buoyed by a loose spring at each end. Deaf since age three, Jake had developed a “feel” for sound, and thought it best to ignore the immense noise that had tried to shake him from his warm slumber. The sound was too big, a sound for Mom and Dad to investigate and deal with.

There was a moment following the noise when the temperature in his basement room soared, and Jake shifted from side to side, sweltering in the heat and memories of the fever which had stolen sound from his young body. He stirred and gently cried, the tears rolling almost cool over his burning cheeks.

He woke three hours later, in a pitch black room full of stale air. He was sweating in his pajamas, and his lower back felt clammy, slick. He tossed aside the down comforter his parents bought him last year for his fifth birthday, eager to feel some cool air on his sticky skin. He swung his legs over the side of the hammock and dismounted with a small hop. His feet slapped the floor of the basement. Cold sank into the pads of his toes and his heels. He wished his whole body could be filled with that cold, and thought for a half-second about taking off his gray pajamas and lying naked on the floor. His stomach, grumbling and contracting tight, suggested another agenda.

Jake rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and flicked it off of his fingers. It took him twelve shuffling steps in the dark to find the far left wall where the staircase was. It was his staircase, the entrance to his lair, his room, his favorite place in the whole house. The wooden steps rising up to the kitchen entrance were trampled smooth by his constant trespass. Halfway up the stairs he knew he would find the light switch.

Jake stepped with care up to the middle of the staircase. His small hand reached through the dark and silence of the basement and he found comfort as he touched rigid plastic. He flipped the switch up, expecting to see the soft light of the bare bulb hanging central to the room. Instead he saw continued darkness, pervasive. He flipped the switch up and down, up and down, with the same result. This happened once before, and he had told Dad, and Dad had run down to the basement with a flashlight and put a fresh bulb in the socket while Jake sat upstairs slurping sugary cereal milk from the bottom of his favorite bowl, the one with the red fishes on it.

The thought of cereal reoriented Jake, and he padded up to the top of the stairs. He’d tell Dad about the light bulb later, and Dad would fix it because that’s all the light Jake got down there. Jake chose to live in the basement, even though it had no windows. To Jake it felt like a hideout, a secret dungeon, and it saved him from sharing a room with his two older brothers, Doug and Sean.

Jake opened the door and stepped into the kitchen, which was also dark, although not jet black like his room. The kitchen was awash in the soft gray light that slipped in through the cracks of the curtains.

He walked over to the light switch by the stove and flipped it. No result. He stood in the dim gray light, confused. He thought every light bulb in the house must have broken on the same day.

He opened the fridge and a soft wave of cool air embraced him, causing goosebumps. He couldn’t believe what he saw inside. The fridge light was out too. It didn’t matter; he knew exactly where Mom kept the chocolate milk. He opened the flaps, and even though he knew it was trouble, started drinking right from the carton. He gulped back the thick chocolate milk with his lips pressed tight against the waxed cardboard, to keep from getting a brown moustache. He closed the carton and stuck it back in the fridge.

With the sweet milk resting in his belly he became more curious than hungry, and wondered where his parents were. Either Mom or Dad usually waited around with him until Marcy showed up.

Jake loved Marcy, the lady that took care of him during the summer while his parents and brothers worked. She smelled like cucumbers and brown sugar, and Mom said she was the only nanny in the county who knew sign language. She also knew where Mom hid the Tootsie Rolls, and when Jake figured something out Marcy would give him a handful. Jake only ate a couple of them a day, relishing the thick texture and the way they filled his senses as he chewed. The surplus Tootsie Rolls he saved were stashed in a brown paper bag that he hid at the bottom of his toy chest.

Jake noticed that the house felt smaller in the dark. Mom said that the house was little and cheap since the Army used to keep soldiers in it. She said that when the base moved to the other side of town the old concrete soldier houses got fixed up and sold off. This made Jake feel safe, like he lived in a castle made for warriors. He thought maybe someday he’d be a soldier.

He began to feel strange as he crept through the house, looking for someone, anyone. He wished, as he often did, that he could hear. He would just tune his ears in and follow the sound of his Mom or his Dad to the source, like he used to before he got sick and hot and the world became silent.

Every room in the house was empty, and Jake began to worry, and figured that Marcy must be on her way. Otherwise his parents never would have left him alone.

He walked into the living room and sat down in front of the television. He thought he’d watch some cartoons and before he knew it Marcy would be at the door, smelling like sugar.

The T.V. wouldn’t work either, which was probably for the best. Mom and Dad didn’t let him watch any shows for the last couple of weeks. They said there was nothing on but the news anyway, and he got scared when he watched the news.

Anxious, and a little worried, Jake crawled over to the window at the front of the house. He reached up and pressed his hand to the heavy, dark green velvet drapes. He pushed them to the left, looked outside, and understood what was going on.

It was snowing, and in the middle of Summer no less! The electricity must not work when it gets cold in the Summer. Mom and Dad were probably outside, shoveling the driveway or the roof.

Jake placed his right palm, open, against the glass of the window to see how cold it was. The glass was warm, almost hot, and Jake noticed his breath wasn’t freezing on it.

The idea of a Summer snowstorm filled Jake with a sense of wonder and excitement. He thought for a second that maybe God was giving him this miracle to apologize for making him deaf, but he felt instantly guilty for thinking so.

Jake stood up and walked to the front door. His hand reached to the doorknob and found it was warm. Overjoyed at the thought of this unexpected Winter he threw the front door open and ran outside.

The snow was virgin, and rested a foot thick across the whole neighborhood. Clouds hung heavy and black across the sky, and Jake saw flashes of lightning trapped within them. He looked for the sun in every direction and saw only clouds, and the peculiar gray light that matched his pajamas. He wasn’t cold, and felt the shift of a warm breeze across his skin.

Jake didn’t see a single person outside, including his parents, but the miracle of Summertime Winter had filled his mind and he didn’t worry. He was amazed by the storm. The gray snowflakes were coming down so thick he couldn’t see across the street.

He held out his hands and caught some of the flakes in his palms. They would not melt, and when he blew his hot breath on them they didn’t turn to water. Instead they fell to pieces and swirled away.

He trudged out to the center of his front yard and turned around, gazing at his house in the dusky light.

He couldn’t believe his eyes. Someone had painted his whole house the darkest black he’d ever seen. On top of that, they’d painted people, beautiful, bright white people, on the front of his house. There were two people running, maybe playing, and standing closer to the door, near the front windows, the silhouettes of his parents stood with arms outstretched to the sky.

Jake was laughing as he looked at the mural, a soft, rasping laugh that felt good in his throat. Wouldn’t Marcy be surprised when she saw the painting?

Upon seeing the shapes of his parents Jake was filled with a sense of their absence, and couldn’t wait to see them after work. For now, he could play.

He lay down on his back in the warm sheet of snow which blanketed his front yard and began to move his legs and arms slowly, rhythmically, up and down.

As he packed the soft ground beneath him he felt the wind change directions, blowing fast and warm against the left side of his face.

Jake perfected his snow angel and took a moment to appreciate what he had created. He breathed deeply, instilled with a sense of calm as his chest rose.

Jake watched the snow drift down, blinking and laughing as it landed on his eyelashes.

He let the hot wind flow over him. It soon filled the air with color, and Jake inhaled its lullaby deep into his body.

He slept quiet in the arms of his angel, while the misplaced Winter stormed around him.

Ex-Hale

I see a lot of familiar faces out there in the audience tonight. Friends, family, co-workers, loved ones. I’m sure that Ray would be glad you all showed up. Ray really appreciated all of you. Well, except for Mark Clemont.

Mark, what are you doing here? Get out! We’re all waiting, Mark. Mark, just show some decency and go. Mark, Jesus Christ, no you can’t see the body. No, you know it’s closed casket only. Mark, do us all a favor and go before we have to call security. Are you drunk, Mark? Look, man, now Ray’s mom is crying. Yeah, well I guess we can’t pin that one on you, but you sure aren’t helping things. No, I don’t want to take this outside. Always the macho man, Mark. Big tough Mark, Mr. Tough Guy, you’re so sad, man. Oh, I’m the sad one? Well you’re sadder. Hey, fuck you! What does my wife have to do with this? Jesus Christ, Mark, you are such a liar. Look what you made me do, I just blasphemed in a church. I don’t care if you don’t believe in God, Mark, that has nothing to do with any of this. Well I’m sure you’ll believe when you are burning in hell. Say one more word, Mark, one more motherfucking word, and I swear to you the cemetery will clear a spot for you, right next to Ray. Yes, yes, you’re right, Mark, we’re the stupid ones, and you are Mr. Smart. Bye, Mark!

Okay, now that we got that over with, let’s remember Ray. Ray was a Morgy. Forthose of you out there who aren’t familiar with the jargon of Ray’s industry, that means he played corpses in the motion pictures. Ray did over 40 films in his day. He was amazing, I mean any of the other Morgy’s would tell you that. When it came to remaining inanimate for a long period of time Ray was like a praying mantis. Beautiful, man, beautiful. Unfortunately, like all of us who work too much, he started to make little flubs. You could see him breathing. The breathing corpse in The Devil’s Own, that was Ray. He had started to blink too, which is never good. Ray was such an overachiever, he just wanted to entertain, and when he started slipping, he took drastic measures. After he was fired from the set of Ilsa’s Seduction 3 for breathing, he had his lungs medically removed. The authorities are still looking for the doctor. Ray did not survive long without his lungs. Actually, three minutes was much longer than anyone expected him to live, so there’s even more proof of what an amazing guy he was.

The thing is, I think maybe Ray wanted it this way. I mean, this is his ultimate performance right here.

Immaculate. Perfect.

He has certainly convinced all of us that he is dead.

Congratulations, Ray! You’re the best, man.

The best.

Working At Home

A needle sharp moment of pain in Dr. Frank Challing’s ankle distracts him for less than a second, and is easily brushed off. His brain is otherwise occupied, a maelstrom of activity as he learns that his memories of the day’s events won’t wipe clean, no matter how hard he tries to ignore or deny them. He attempts to keep his brain free of thought through labor. He sweeps, mops, scrubs, polishes, and drips salt sweat from his slick forehead as he compulsively brings the entire kitchen to a smooth luster.

His hard work fails in the face of his memory, and every time his eyelids close he can see the nightmare in full color.

The girl is there, torn to tatters.

The strange doctors are there, holding him, watching her, waiting for the things to finish eating.

Mr. Devries had told him, “You mustn’t think too deeply about it, Frank.”

Mr. Devries hadn’t been present at the phlebotomy lab today, and had no idea how impossible executing his recommendation would be. Mr. Devries didn’t have to throw his clothes in the incinerator today. Mr. Devries did not spend three hours in quarantine. Mr. Devries had not had to watch them.

Dr. Frank Challing is suddenly racked with shudders and a greasy cold sweat.

He looks in desperation around the kitchen and finds it in immaculate status, clean enough to satisfy a legion of anal-retentive Martha Stewart acolytes. It takes him three seconds to reach the liquor cabinet. It is the first time he has ever felt like he lunged for something, and it shocks him. He grabs a bottle of Hennessey but does not bother to look through the cabinet for his favorite snifter, the one he got in his High Roller’s Suite at Luxor.

A rapid twist of his left thumb sends the cap of the bottle plunging to the floor, making a plastic click as it strikes the ground. The first slug goes back like water, as does the second, and it’s only on the fifth gulp that he feels flush, his skin tingling. Frank Challing almost makes a tight face in reaction to the gasoline burn in his belly and throat, but restrains himself. He has always seen the post-liquor cringe as a sign of weakness and lack of personal control.

You and your control, Frank! Just live for once.

He hasn’t heard the real thing in three years, but his ex-wife’s voice still gets on his nerves from time to time.

Oh, so you won’t talk to me about your work, huh? You sure don’t mind talking to that bottle.

“She was always so damned dramatic,” Frank thinks as he walks into his entertainment room and sets the bottle of cognac on the coffee table in front of him. He hangs his head and sighs. The sigh is stertorous and thick, and to Frank’s discomfort, more than a little shaky. “Jesus, calm down, Frank!” He can hear the slight electric hum of his refrigerator in the kitchen, and it makes him uneasy.

It is quiet enough for him to think.

I don’t even know what her name was. She never said anything. All she could do was scream while those things...

Frank Challing’s thoughts are interrupted by a sound he does not recognize. He picks up his bottle of cognac and walks toward the sound coming from the bay windows on the far west side of his loft.

“Is someone humming in here?” His feet tread softly across the cold floor as he approaches his windows. As he nears the edge of his loft a gust of wind speeds across the black-tinted surface of the bay windows, howling first, then reducing to a high-pitched whisper.

“The wind must be blowing sixty miles an hour out there. It’s making my damn windows vibrate,” he thinks. “Could the pressure suck my windows out of the building?”

He pictures himself sucked out with the windows, twisting like a leaf in the screaming winds until he and the glass panels hit the pavement at the same time. Rough cleanup. He shivers again.

Frank takes his ninth and tenth gulps off the bottle, which has grown significantly lighter. This sensation of decreased weight barely registers in his mind. Frank also pays little notice to the slight itch on his inner right ankle as it turns into a burning sensation. Frank is too buzzed to notice the small but spreading red spot on the side of his white Avia sock.

He sees a blinking red light in the corner of his left eye, and feels for a moment that he may pass out. He grabs onto a decorative Japanese hutch and steadies himself, lets the blood flow back into his head. “Thought I was about to go down. Better slow up on this shit.” He sets the bottle down hard on the hutch.

As he revolves his head his sight takes a moment to catch up with the movement and then whips into position, arriving in his eyes with a liquid slosh, the effect of which is nauseating. He still sees the blinking red light out of his peripheral, and then realizes it’s his answering machine. Blink, blink, pause: two messages.

His finger presses in the dust free plastic button marked “Play” and there are a few seconds of analog sounding hiss. At first he does not recognize the voice, and thinks it might be one of those damn telemarketers. Then, with a degree of shame, he realizes it is his daughter’s voice.

“Hello...well, I hope I’m leaving this message in the right place ‘cause there was no greeting or anything, your machine just beeps. Anyway, this message is for Frank Challing, and if I’ve got the right machine, then Hi, Dad! First of all I have to say I missed you at the wedding, and I totally disagree with Mom’s politics on this... she’s just... well, you know Mom. Enough of that, I just wanted to say thank you for the gift, Mark and I had a fabulous time in Nagano, and the skiing was absolutely gorgeous. So... thank you. Mom wouldn’t give me your new phone number, she’s burning bridges left
and right, so I found you on the internet. This call cost me twenty bucks! Kidding! I just had to call, I miss you and I had this dream... I don’t know... I just... never mind, now I feel kind of stupid. Anyway, again, thank you, and I miss you and love you! I can’t wait to see you again, Daddy! You owe me a hug. My number and my address are still the same. Call me.”

Frank, with one hand against the wall for balance, says, “I love you too, honey...” He feels grateful for her call. As another torrent of wind shakes the windows to his right he thinks, “Hell, I’m overjoyed if the phone company calls these days.” Before Frank can feel a moment of the self-pity which he loathes and sees approaching, the second message starts.

“Francis, it’s Devries. You must get a message on that machine of yours. I apologize for calling this time of the evening, but I must clarify a few things about today’s incident for you. Listen very carefully; this is a matter of utmost security. Top brass at the hospital have decided to let you know certain things about both the patient and the illness that afflicted her. We will be sending an escort to your residence at seven tomorrow morning. You will accompany him to the hospital and receive full disclosure of the facts in this case. In the meantime, I must demand that you do not speak to anyone in regards to this matter, even your family. To do so could mean the endangerment of both your position at our facility and the security of the facility itself. You may be aware of the financial backing we’ve been receiving from a third party in certain areas of research. I don’t feel anything else needs to be said. I will see you in the morning, Frank. Have a pleasant evening, and enjoy the storm. It should be quite dramatic.”

Frank finds the whole message incredulous, and anger grows in his alcohol-filled belly. He notices the strange lack of urgency in Devries’ voice, and wonders why he hadn’t said all this when he talked to Frank at his locker after quarantine earlier in the evening. “What’s all this shit about outside funding? And ‘Have a pleasant evening’? That asshole. He can’t just write off what that girl had as an illness!”

He remembers the way the girl had dived into his phlebotomy lab, her ropy veins extended to their limit all over her body, blood pressure obviously soaring. She crashed into Frank, and rushed back to the corner of his office as two doctors in scrub colors he didn’t recognize came in through his door and closed it behind them.

As the girl passed Frank he smelled blood, an electric, copper penny smell, and a deeper, earthier smell, like damp topsoil. The intruding doctor with the dark hair said something like, “Please step back, sir.” but Frank was too mesmerized by the girl in the corner to hear the request.

She was tearing herself apart. Her fingernails sank into the skin of her belly and tore upwards, leaving dark rivulets of torn matter. Her eyes were full of abject terror, and didn’t seem to focus on anything, just flitted from left to right, up and down. They made contact with Frank’s eyes for one second, and were full of pleading. Her eyes were screaming HELP ME! and Frank stepped forward to and was yanked back and placed in a stranglehold by the shorter intruding doctor. “Sir, you do not want to approach the patient. She is incredibly dangerous,” said the strange doctor as his bicep flexed tighter into Frank’s trachea.

Frank wanted so desperately to break free and help the girl, and he was attempting to shake loose and demand the two men help him when it happened. The young girl screamed, “THEY’RE INSIDE OF ME. GET THEM OUT! GET THEM OUT!” and was struck by some kind of seizure that flopped her back onto the floor, her head striking first and making a thick thud on the cold tile. Her back arched tight and blood bubbled from her mouth, running down the sides of her face, which then smeared with her sweat as she swung her head from left to right. As she arched her body her gown flopped back on to her face and muffled the gargling noises and panic filled grunts that her body forced out as she hemorrhaged. She managed to scream, “GET THEM OUT!” again and Frank had never been so afraid as when he saw what she was referring to.

He saw them then, hundreds of them, some kind of worm or parasite, snaking around just beneath the surface of her waxy white skin. She was seething with them. It looked like every inch of her body was crawling across her frame, all of her flesh in motion, and then Frank heard the sound, the sick tearing sound, and realized they were eating her, her connective tissues. These worm things were skinning her from the inside, eating everything that held her together, and Frank felt a sudden urge to vomit, and a stronger urge to run from the room, but he was still held tight by the man in the strange orange scrubs. Frank watched—the girl’s skin grew loose as if she had aged a hundred years in ten seconds, the flesh of her face now slack and drooping anywhere the worms weren’t moving beneath it.

She stilled and her back stopped arching and slapped wet to the tile and Frank thought that she was dead then but her body kept moving, shifting and bulging with the rapid snaking motions of the worms. One of her eyes, unencumbered by her drooping eyelids, pushed out onto her cheek, and Frank saw a mottled gray and pink worm slide out onto her face via the new hole.

The doctor guarding the door spoke in an almost jovial tone. “Rough cleanup, huh, Andolini?” He then stepped forward and pulled a spray bottle from a green pack that Frank hadn’t noticed him carrying. He looked at Frank from the corner of his eye, never taking his sights off the twitching, boiling infestation on the floor. “Andolini, get that guy out of here. She’s about to split.”

As two rough hands pulled him from the room Frank saw the other doctor poised with his sleek aluminum spray can over the dead girl on the floor. She was bleeding from every orifice, and her skin began to tear open in hundreds of places, little gray and pink segmented worms spilling out, blood-slick. Frank was jerked roughly into the hallway and heard the doctor still inside mutter, “Dear God...”

What the hell is going on?

It’s Frank’s ex-wife’s voice again, inside his head, and he resents the intrusion, but his rapid heartbeat and drunken confusion echo the sentiment. The contents of the day hit Frank with a unified impact, and his mind flashes over everything at once, his job, his loneliness, him nearly crying when he heard his daughter’s voice, his ridiculous cleaning routine, his spontaneous liquor binge, the doctors in the orange scrubs saying “rough cleanup,” and the girl, that poor girl being eaten alive from the inside. He had kept quiet about it, and just rolled right through quarantine without asking a single question, half of him feeling catatonic, the other half trapped in terror-induced denial. He tried to take Devries’ suggestion and not think too deeply about it, but he had watched those worms skin a girl inside in just a few minutes, and he didn’t help her, he couldn’t help her...

You could have helped her, Frank. You were afraid. So you watched her die and then you kept quiet about it for no good reason, and now you’re diving into a bottle of booze. You wonder why we got divorced? Look at you. You’re not a man.

Desperate to flush the voice out of his head, Frank turns away from the answering machine and makes a rush for the bottle sitting on the hutch. As he takes his second step forward he feels a strange, warm shift in his right ankle, followed by a pain so sharp he almost falls over from the white hot shock of it.

“What in Christ’s name did I do there? I must have stepped on my foot at the wrong angle. My fault for staggering around like this,” he thinks and he takes another step forward. He steps with care and as his right foot hits the carpet his ankle explodes in pain. Focus blurs until everything around him looks like it’s underwater and he falls to the ground, almost unconscious from the razor-sharp agony in his ankle. He cries out to the empty apartment and feels almost instantly embarrassed, somewhere past the immediacy of the pain. He gingerly pulls his right ankle in towards himself as he sits with his left leg splayed. He pulls back the cuff of his pant leg and expects another surge of pain. Instead he finds his sock soaking wet with blood.

“I’m bleeding. I’m bleeding. What the hell did I do to myself here?” he thinks, and as he reaches down and grabs the edge of his sock he prepares for the worst. The lights in his apartment flicker for a moment, throwing a tiny strobe effect on the floor that Frank mistakes for a drunken hallucination. He starts to roll back the fabric of his sock, which is now saturated with dark blood, and as he nears the base of his ankle he is struck by another shockwave of pain, this one strong enough to floor him. He flops back, unconscious as his head strikes the carpet with a muffled thud. As the wave of pain washes over and through and out of Frank he regains consciousness and feels a primal tingle in his extremities. He sits up slowly and waits for his pixelated vision to orient. For a moment he doesn’t know where he is or how he got into his position.

The apartment is now pitch black.

Frank feels like he’s at the bottom of a swimming pool filled with India ink. He can hardly breathe and his forehead is beaded with sweat. He hears another gust of wind whip through the street outside and realizes the storm must have knocked the power out. The thin crescent moon above sheds no light into skyscraper apartments, unless you have a penthouse.

“Great, just great! I got drunk, somehow broke my ankle, and now I’m blind,” he thinks, with little humor. His heartbeat picks up as he surveys the situation. “I’ve got to get to my flashlight and see exactly what’s going on with my ankle.”

Frank orients himself in the murk and pulls himself over toward a small utility closet near his kitchen. He gasps and grinds his teeth as he feels another shift in his ankle, this one up higher than the last. “Why would the pain be moving up my damn leg?” he wonders, and the answer his subconscious formulates makes his heart run at hummingbird speed.

Think about it, Franky Boy.

He feels the strange shift again and braces himself against another wave of pain, digging his elbows hard into the floor, clenching his abdominal muscles, and when he is content the pain has subsided he continues crawling towards the closet. Once there he pulls the thin door open and reaches into the back of the closet and grabs a bag containing his camping equipment. He digs into his neon orange duffle bag and pulls out most of the contents. At the very bottom he finds what he is looking for. He clicks the small rubber button and his Maglite glows bright on the camping debris around him. A parka, a butane torch, two pieces of Readystart kindling, an unfrozen packet of Blue Ice, a small hatchet, a wooly knit hat, a bungee cord, and a large First Aid kit.

He swings the light onto his ankle and very carefully pulls his foot in closer to his groin. His ankle is burning now and he winces as he pulls the cuff of his pant leg back. His sock is sodden with blood. Frank’s stomach curls over on itself and threatens to divest itself of its contents. Frank has been living with blood, often sixty hours a week, at the lab, but the sight of his own still makes him feel very small and fragile. He grimaces and pulls the sock back, expecting to see a jutting shard of bone sticking out, figuring a compound fracture would be the only thing that could hurt this much.

Just beneath his inner right ankle, oozing blood, is a perfectly round hole, about the circumference of a pencil. Frank’s heart squeezes tight and doesn’t release for three seconds, and he struggles, gasping to pull in fresh air. “Now how do I manage to get a puncture wound and not feel it for so long?” he says. Speaking out loud doesn’t provide the comfort that he thought it would.

Open your eyes, Franky boy. You brought your work home with you.

That was the phrase Frank’s wife used at the divorce hearing. “He brings his work home with him, your Honor. He internalizes all his work stress and brings it home with him and my daughter and I have to deal with his mood swings and tantrums. ... No, he’s never threatened either of us, your Honor, but you should see the look in his eyes after a long shift. ... No, he seldom has time for myself or my daughter. ... Yes, sir, he was a stable provider, but if that was all I wanted I would have married Amish.” Frank had been stunned when the judge laughed aloud. “Yes, sir, he just values his job more than he values his family.”

Frank sits on the floor in a state of disbelief, wondering how the hell he got to exactly where he is now. He knows that thinking about his divorce is morbid and pointless but he is growing more horrified by the second as he looks at the too perfect hole in his ankle, and he finds sadness somehow more comforting than terror.

He can barely get his hands to stop shaking long enough to unclasp the metal latch on the old First Aid kit. He opens the box and pulls out a few swabs, a small bottle of alcohol, a pair of scissors, a gauze pad, and a scalpel co-opted from his graduation at Penn State. He holds the Maglite in his mouth, and his breath rolls out rapidly around its metal base, hot and stale. He shifts his body to the right so that his leg rests on the tiled kitchen flooring, and he pulls the plastic parka underneath it to keep the blood from staining the ground.

His teeth press tight against the flashlight, almost to the point of chipping, as he wets a swab with alcohol and prepares to clean the wound. “Hold on,” he thinks as he pushes the swab down around the bleeding hole. The sting is instant, but nowhere near the sudden shock he feels when he sees motion beneath his skin. He thinks it is a vein at first, shifting as his foot moves, but then he realizes that no vein wraps around the ankle in a perfect circle.

There, beneath his skin, pulsing to a separate beat than Frank’s veins, is a small protrusion. The skin circling his ankle is loose and something thick and warm is moving slowly under the surface.

Frank is sitting still but nearly vomits as his stomach takes a roller-coaster-sized drop. He blinks to clear his sight, and moves the flashlight in closer. There is no doubt. Something foreign is under Frank’s skin, and it is making progress up his leg.

He hears the girl screaming.

GET THEM OUT!

Frank panics, heart racing, and strips off his shirt to check out his skin. His hands rush over the surface, crawl over his face, and he points the Maglite where he can, and he wonders how many are inside of him, right now, chewing away at the things that hold him together, unstitching him, eating him. He pulls his shoes off and throws them over his shoulders. One of them topples a glass vase with some old dried flowers in it, and it shatters as it strikes the floor. Frank barely notices. His panic becomes overwhelming as he strips off his socks and checks his feet.

“If there were any more of those things in me right now I’d feel them,” he hopes, thinking of the intense pain that this one small visitor is causing him.

There is another shift as the warm, soft intruder begins to move up towards Frank’s calf, and the pain hits him in the belly, and Frank turns his head to the left. This time he can’t hold back and the night’s booze gushes out of his mouth, the Maglite falling to the floor with the deluge. “Whatever this thing is doing under my skin, it’s toxic.” His heaving subsides.

Do something, Franky boy.

A bolt of adrenaline singes Frank’s nerves and he finds himself very anxious to get this thing out of his body before another wave of that sick gutfire pain hits. He remembers seeing the girl tearing away at herself with her own hands.

Oriented by the adrenaline, Frank decides to proceed in a more civilized manner.

He reaches down and picks up the alcohol swab and the scalpel and turns to his left and picks up the wet Maglite and puts it back between his teeth. He brings his right leg close again and swabs the area just above the intruder, and as he brings the scalpel closer he wishes both that he
had never drank that evening and that he were much more drunk.

The paradox of self-surgery, Franky. How do you stay alert and steady while anesthetized? Can you, Franky? Can you even do this? You couldn’t save our marriage, can you save your own life?

Frank feels like yelling “Shut up, you bitch!” but realizes there’s no one in the apartment but him.

The slow pulsing movement of the parasite chewing its way up the inside of Frank’s leg pulls him back into focus and he pushes the scalpel into the skin just above the worm’s path. Flooded with endorphins, Frank barely feels the metal blade slice into his skin, creating a ten centimeter wide cut through every layer. He sits and stares, repulsed as the worm moves closer to the hole, intent on its path. Sweat drips from Frank’s forehead as he reaches over and grabs a cheap, tarnished pair of tweezers from the First Aid kit. He sees a tiny movement in the wound he has spread open and watches as the worm’s head comes into view. It is grayish pink in the few spots that aren’t slick with blood, and at the head, where Frank expects to see tiny, razor sharp teeth, he instead sees a thin white mucus being secreted from the mouth of the worm. Frank has never heard of a parasite that actively melts its host’s tissues with a secreted acid, and he’s watched a lot of Discovery since the divorce.

“Someone made this. Why in the hell would someone make this?” he thinks and is fascinated and disgusted at the same time as he moves the tweezers in towards the head of the worm.

The worm seems to sense the tweezers as they approach, and it retracts itself a bit, the motion sending bolts of pain through Frank’s leg, like white phosphor burning under his skin. He seizes on the pain and pushes the tweezers in deep and clasps them down when he finds purchase. He has the tweezers an inch deep into the wound and they are clamped tight around the soft body of the worm.

The worm ruptures.

Frank swiftly pulls the tweezers out to discover they are holding onto only half of the worm, its thick gray pink segment still twisting above the metal. He pulls the segment closer to the flashlight and has to look at it almost cross-eyed to focus. Then he sees the nature of the parasite.

“This is how I am going to die.”

Inside the twisting segment clasped in the tweezers, just beneath the near translucent skin of the worm, Frank sees them. The babies. The thousands of tiny worms inside the larger one. The big one’s just their mother, the delivery system.

He can feel them, the army of tiny worms squirming loose from the torn carcass of the large one, and he realizes that this is what happened to the girl. They get under your skin, find a nice place to rest, and then they burst, and the thousands of newborns tear you to pieces, inside.

He internalizes his work, your Honor.

Frank feels a moment of nothing. He has never felt so empty and alone, hopeless and ready to die. Then, as the pain in his leg starts to spread like quicksilver, two sentences echo in his head, spurring him to action. He hears the voices of two girls.

The first voice screams, the sound of the violated.

“GET THEM OUT OF ME!”

The second voice speaks, the sound of love.

“I can’t wait to see you again, Daddy!”

Driven by an animal-level desire to survive, Frank reaches for the kindling hatchet that he had pulled out of his camping bag. He sits there, watching his leg seethe and squirm beneath the surface, and hesitates for one second before bringing the blade down on his leg just above the knee.

The first swing of the blade flays his leg wide open, exposing subcutaneous fat and the meat of his muscle. The second swing strikes marrow, and for a second the blade hesitates to release from his femur as he jerks it back up for another blow. The third swing shatters bone and tears all the way through his leg. The blade sticks into the floor beneath him.

He grabs the wooly knit hat in one hand and the butane torch in the other and pushes himself ten feet away from the remainder of his right leg, leaving a thick gout of blood behind him. He presses the cap onto the stump and tries to staunch the flow from his vast wound. He is close to shock and his blood pressure dips dangerously low as he ignites the butane torch. Acting on his last reserves he pulls the soaking wooly knit hat off of the stump and turns the butane torch to the wound, knowing that he’s more likely to survive a third degree burn than total blood loss.

He has never known such pain. His body is overcome with throbbing, absolute pain, pure as fire, and he stays in motion only by will and adrenaline.

He has never felt so alive as he does in each moment of this that he survives.

He drags himself over to the twitching, decimated leg in the kitchen and places the flame of the butane torch to the hive that was once part of his body, setting his Readystart kindling on each side of it.

As he watches the leg burn down to the blackened tile and hears the soft boiling sound of the worms bursting he feels shock settle in. He thinks, “Mr. Devries, I hereby tender my resignation,” and doesn’t recognize the sound of his own voice, laughing.

Frank wants to live and does what he can to survive. He tries to care for his wound as he prepares to leave the smoky apartment. A small blanket off the back of his couch is wrapped around his stump and secured triple tight by a bungee cord acting as a makeshift tourniquet. A handful of vicodan allow him to move in spite of the crippling pain. A varnished cypress walking stick with an ornate lion’s head handle keeps him from toppling.

As he leaves his apartment he grabs his hatchet, wipes it clean, and tucks it into the waist of his pants. He also collects his keys, his wallet, his hidden stash of large bills totaling four thousand dollars, and a small note with an address and phone number.

He carries the hatchet in case the escort Mr. Devries mentioned is waiting outside of his building. Mr. Devries, who wanted Frank to keep quiet. Mr. Devries, who had access to Frank’s locker, and knew about the parasites. Mr. Devries, who hadn’t been worried about Frank talking to anyone because he didn’t expect Frank to see the dawn of the next day.

He carries the cash so he can bribe the first taxi driver he can find in the aftermath of the storm to take him to a hospital three counties away, where Mr. Devries can’t find him, at least not right away.

He carries the note so he can call his daughter from the hospital and tell her he has some unexpected time off from work.

Priapism

I really think this lecture is warranted, Ron. Actually, don’t think of it as a lecture. Let’s not set up some sort of teacher/student dynamic, when it’s both of us who should be learning from what you have been doing. I mean, I know exactly what I’m talking about here, so I suppose I’m not actually learning anything, but I just don’t want you to think I’m condescending you. I have always tried to treat you as an equal Ron, regardless of our age difference and familial relationship. On the inside you have an intellect, and while it may not be as finely honed as mine, it must be respected. Intellect must be worshipped, Ron. It, and the opposable thumb, and maybe nuclear power, are the only things that save us from spending all day crawling about in the woods, foraging for berries and biting into boars with our little incisors.

Consider that a rhesus monkey one third my weight has muscles that are five times stronger. It’s my intellect versus his muscles. Look who won, Ronny! Of course our intellect saved us. The rhesus monkey is now relegated to carnival work, and in some cases, the care of quadriplegics. How’s that for the victory of the mind? A little cerebellum in the skull and you can make vicious, fetid animals serve and wipe the asses of invalids.

I’m trying to establish a respect in you, a respect for the power, the immense force that your mind can wield. As I was saying, even when you were in your crib, mewling and shitting your plastic diapers, I respected the mind that I knew you had. I read to you each night, fine works by Plato, and Pynchon, and Joyce, and I think maybe you understood. You had a look in your eyes when I was reading to you, although it was always post your evening breast feeding, so that look may have just been a symptom of gas. Or perhaps, as I believe, it was a combination of gas and understanding. Yes, that was it. You were tiny, but your mind was stewing to a head as swiftly as your bowels.

Oh, forgive my scatological way of speaking. I suppose by speaking as such I only hurt the thoughts and ideas I wish to serve. Ron, you must learn that ideas can be greater than the man who thinks them. Ideas are the finery we wrap our brains in, to hide the reptile core that we can’t escape. The reptile brain, Ron, is a vestige of the past from which we can’t seem to slip loose. We chug-chug-chug toward the future, and the world of ideas grows exponentially, but we are still base creatures at times. We all have those sad, tragic moments where we neglect thought and act on old, withered snippets of instinct.

Ron, never respect instinct. Look where instincts got the manatees. Every year, without thinking, they return to the same waters so they can be Ginsued to bloody shreds by my new outboard Yamaha motor. You remember how we always used to go to Florida? Killing those manatees was not just good fun, it was a statement, a bright red example of the superiority of man’s intellect. It’s a seamless statement really. There I am, with my loving nuclear family, sitting in a creation of man’s genius, of man’s hard work, and will, and intellect. Thanks to the mind, Ron, we were capable of attaining great speeds over an environment which humans have always found threatening, and as a result of our actions, those creatures controlled by instinct, by mechanical synaptic triggers, incapable of truly thinking, incapable of writing an immaculate Haiku, incapable of speaking five languages, those dull creatures were destroyed.

We survived, we enjoyed and consumed. We Goddamn transcended! We were in control!

Ron, you know your Dad can be a little passionate about things of this nature.

Right there, right there, that’s it though, Ron. That duplicitous mixture of physical passion and intellect, that’s where you have try to keep yourself. That’s where the genius comes from. Like Beethoven, he had the intellect, but until he felt the wave of beats and sound against his head, with his head on the piano, that’s when the genius happened. That mixture, Ron, once felt, is something you can really believe in. Then you search for it, and the more you search for it, the closer you get to the brilliance of yourself.

Ron, we really do need to address what you have been doing. Your mother recently brought to my attention that you have been violating yourself.

Masturbation, Ron.

Now I can see by the blood in your cheeks that this is true. I had hoped that your mother was misled, but now there’s no doubt. Ron, you are fourteen, so I don’t expect you to be engaging in sexual relations yet, and I’m certain you feel certain needs, but there has to be a better way of expressing those desires. Masturbation has nothing to do with thought, Ron, absolutely nothing to do with the intellect that I have tried to instill in you. It is a simple case of stimulus and response. Oh, I’m certain the mind comes into play at times, when your body needs some sort of stimulus maybe the mind has to create a fantasy, but that sort of thing doesn’t really count.

Worse yet, your mother has had to clean up for your filthy behavior. Your effluvia have managed to clog up the shower twice, and while in a certain way I can admire your raw physical tenacity, this is really just disgusting. Not thoughtful at all. Great men do not jerk off, son. Great men take that sexual tension which is now budding inside of you, and they control it. They subvert it.

Try to look at any great achievement of man and not find repressed sex, sublimated wants and needs. Pyramids, the “breasts” of mother Egypt, the music of Strauss, rife with sweat and lust, and look at skyscrapers for God’s sake. Nothing is a more obvious phallus than a skyscraper. That no architect ever had the honesty to attach some sort of testes to his building surprises me.

So, Ron, I need you to stop defiling yourself as soon as possible, and stay out of our room especially. Your mother’s high heels are never to be touched again!

You must be wondering what your punishment is Ronald. I don’t always see justice in parental punishment, and I would prefer to think that we could simply confer, mind to mind, and that would be that, but in this case, when your behavior involves such a gut-wrenchingly simian action, I feel that the punishment needs to be more direct, more Skinneresque. And I cannot forget the immense effectiveness of my father’s own methods, upon discovering me with one of his cigars. Smoking the lot nearly killed me, but I learned, damn it. I learned.

So, young man, now the time is at hand, pardon my dubious pun.

You are going to masturbate non-stop for the next five hours, while I play the complete works of Kenny Loggins on your mother’s piano. I can’t think of any music less erotic. You will have no lubricant; you will have no stimulating reading materials. You will not be allowed near any shoes. You are to go over into that bare corner and sit on the rough wooden floor, and you are to whack it for an immense duration of time. If your penis becomes flaccid, you must continue pumping. If you begin to bleed, then you may have a styptic pencil for sealing the wound, but this is the only concession I will grant you. Whenever you have an orgasm you must pray to your own intellect to forgive you. You must say to your mind, “I am sorry for being a dirty ape!” At the end of these five hours you will be put directly to sleep, regardless of the loss of fluids, proteins, and electrolytes. When you awake in the morning you may have sore genitals and extreme forearm fatigue, but you will be a better, brighter person. Perhaps you will even become a man. It can happen just like that, when you finally take control of your mind and your life.

I am going to grab some vermouth and my Kenny Loggins sheet music, and I think you should get into the corner right now. I will let you know as soon as I am ready to begin your healing. Tomorrow, Ron, you’ll thank me for this, but for now we begin our descent into the beast.

Whip it out, son; it is time to make some repairs to your mind.

Luminary

My brother burned to death in the summer of 1967. The doctors never found any evidence of the fire on his flesh, any scar on his skin.

I know the truth. I watched him burn.

My brother’s name was Martin Tally.

Marty was a young man prone to daydreaming, and had a distant quality that strangers mistook for carelessness. Those who spent any significant time with him could identify his drifting eyes and long moments of silence for what they really were—an intense thoughtfulness, the focused kind of calm needed to contain boundless energy. His deep brown eyes, often hidden below a furrowed brow, seemed permanently etched with question marks. At moments of understanding his eyes shone with blazing exclamation points.

His eyes were full of light the day he tried to explain the human body to me. He rattled off Latin words and the names of bones and tissues and organs until he was almost breathless, concluding with, “You and me, Petey, we’re the most magnificent machines ever built.” Then he laughed, this deep laugh, and he seemed to marvel that the sound was coming from his own body.

His eyes were on fire when he took me up to the roof of our one-story house to watch the stars fall. He ushered me up our rickety wooden ladder and climbed behind me, carrying three blankets, two cans of soda, and a pack of saltines. We sipped on our sodas and crunched our crackers until we were covered with crumbs and giddy from the sugar and we watched the night sky produce star after star. He had heard about an expected meteor shower, and laughed as he saw the first stone streak fire in a straight line towards the Earth. We watched for two hours as flaming rocks painted the sky with thin brushstrokes, our silence punctuated by the occasional sound of his laughter.

Toward the end of the meteor shower I turned onto my side and watched him observing the sky, his eyes shining. As if he could sense my eyes on him he said, “Pete, I know Mom didn’t raise us churchy, but I want you to always remember what you saw tonight, okay, Bud? ‘Cause that, that up there, what we just saw, is proof of God.”

My brother’s eyes were ablaze the time I got caught skipping school with Percy Brewston and Mark Bowling, and tried to shift the blame to my friends. I said, “Well, it was Mark’s idea and I just thought...”

Marty didn’t give me time to finish the sentence. “If it was Mark’s idea then you didn’t think anything, you followed. At least Mark had an idea, and he acted on it. You had no idea what you were doing. You acted without the conviction of you own decision, and now you have to suffer the consequences. Lemmings follow, Pete, and men think.”

At the time I didn’t even know what lemmings were, but from the sharp glint in his eyes I knew that it was far better to be a man.

I learned most of the lessons I still consider valuable from Marty, who, although only seven years older than me, was the closest thing I had to a father.

The real deal, the biological Pops, was a door-to-door salesman who Mom said became a door-to-door husband, rendering the service for women in need. After spending days looping through microfiche at the library, I discovered that Pops’ final sale was closed at a house in Cronston, Ohio where he was caught rendering his husbandry service with the wife of an infuriated carpenter. It turned out that the carpenter had enough energy for a little overtime, and a hammer to the face ended my father’s illustrious career.

I didn’t need my dad. Mom kept me warm and kept food in my belly. My sister Vanessa made me laugh. Marty taught me about science, and math, and writing, and during the summer of 1967 he taught me about miracles.

Marty was seventeen years old, I was ten, and Vanessa was five. We were all old enough to know something was seriously wrong with our cat, Teddy. Teddy had taken to pissing freely anywhere he felt like losing some fluids. He also maintained a Rip Van Winkle-esque sleep schedule, surprising for a cat that used to spend all hours chasing invisible antagonists and terrorizing birds in the acreage near our house.

One afternoon I found Teddy resting on his side in the front yard. He was mewling just loud enough for me to hear through the screen door. His furry chest was matted and was barely rising with his breath. His head was resting in a small, dark pink pool of his own vomit.

I didn’t expect Mom home from her job at the cannery for another three hours, and I couldn’t leave Teddy lying there in that condition, so I went and knocked on Marty’s door.

I never knocked on Marty’s door, especially after school. Marty tended to cloister himself away for long periods of time, focused on his books and his beloved chemistry set, and he didn’t take well to interruptions. The last time I had interrupted him it had taken me two minutes to un-lodge the resultant wedgie. Still, Teddy appeared to be knocking on death’s door with both paws.

Marty appeared at the door. “Aw, for Christ’s sake, Petey, don’t bother me. Go play with Vanessa or something. I have reading to do!”

I peeked past him and scoped out his always Spartan room, the small bed, the neatly kept wooden desk with the small desk lamp, the toddler-size stack of text books by his bed stand.

Tears welled to the surface. I sobbed, “Marty, you gotta see Teddy!”

Moments later we were in the front yard, crouched over the gaunt and barely breathing cat.

The question marks had entered Marty’s eyes, and I watched him watch Teddy, breathing calm as he softly stroked the cat’s head. He turned to me and said, “Bring me a blanket from your room, one you don’t mind not getting back.”

I ran to my room and grabbed an old ratty yellow blanket that made my skin itch upon contact. I ran back and presented it to Marty, who was whispering something to the cat that sounded like, “It could work, Teddy. It could really work.”

Marty used the blanket to clean the vomit away from Teddy and then pressed the fabric across his palms and scooped his hands softly under the cat’s neck and hindquarters. He wrapped the rest of the blanket around the body of the cat, who had stopped his sad mewling.

Marty carried the cat to his room and shut the door. I heard the lock tumble. I panicked and ran to Marty’s door and was about to yell, “What the hell are you doing to our cat?”when his voice came calmly from the other side. He said, “Pete, listen very closely. I am going to fix Teddy, but it’s going to take me a few days, and I’ll need your help. We can’t tell Mom about this because she’ll want to take Teddy to the vet, and they will want to kill him. They don’t know what I know, or at least what I think I know, and I think I might be Teddy’s only chance to live. Petey, will you swear, on Teddy, and God, and everything, that you won’t tell Mom?”

“Yes, I swear.”

For the next few days I played coy, suggesting to Mom that Teddy might have run away. She seemed less concerned than I expected. I guessed that three kids and a full time job was enough responsibility without having to worry about the disappearance of our incontinent cat.

Each night I asked Marty what was happening and each night he offered no answers, instead insisting that Vanessa and I follow him out into the rolling fields near our house.

Each night, for six nights in a row, the three of us walked into the field during the soft light of dusk and caught fireflies. Marty supplied us with bug catching nets and jars with metal lids that had holes punched in the top. We swung our nets through the air and captured the little flickers of light that buzzed around us. We coerced the glowing luminescent beetles into our jars, where they grew frantic and flickered even faster.

While we were in the field Marty taught us about our tiny prey. We learned that the males flashed every five seconds, the females every two. Vanessa laughed and devoted herself to catching only the fastest flickering of the bugs. We learned the fireflies came from the family Lampyridae, which I remember only because it has the word “lamp”in it. Marty said the beetles made light out of two chemicals, luciferin and luciferase, both named after Lucifer, the angel of fallen light.

Each night Marty took the bug filled jars from us and locked himself away in his room, occasionally appearing in the kitchen to grab a bag of cat food or some ice. Every once in awhile I would see a light green glow coming from beneath Marty’s locked door.

Things disappeared from around the house.

The fourth day after Teddy collapsed I noticed the absence of several items, most notably a card table, a small wooden chair, my mother’s razor from the bathroom, and my father’s old insulin injection kit from the medicine cabinet. It made no sense at the time, and I began to doubt Marty.

The seventh night after Teddy fell ill, my sister disappeared.

My mom had set out dinner, meat loaf with onions and mashed potatoes, and she called for us. Marty and I arrived at the table, but Vanessa was nowhere to be found. We walked the perimeter of our small residence. Marty noticed that the fireflies were out early that night. The exclamation points sparkled in his eyes. He ran to our tool shed, with me trailing behind.

Marty threw open the doors of the shed and gasped. Only two insect nets were on the rack.

“Oh, shit, Petey, she went firefly hunting without us.”

We ran back to the house and grabbed Mom, explaining to her about our nightly trips to the field to gather the glowing insects. She asked “Why?”and Marty offered no answer. He was too intent on getting to the field and finding Vanessa.

We trudged through the field as the sky grew ever blacker. I felt my heart drop into my toes and my stomach rise to my throat when I heard Vanessa’s voice, screaming somewhere far away. We followed the sound, the three of us now running, and I skinned my knees when I tripped on a downward slope in the field.

I looked behind me and saw the third insect net lying on the ground. Where the hell was Vanessa and why would she drop her net? My body was instantly soaked in sweat and my mouth dry as a tomb. I felt sick to my stomach but held the gorge back as Marty and my mom rushed towards the sound of my sister’s faint screams.

We found Vanessa on the far southeast end of the field, in the area just before a jutting line of trees at the edge of the thick and boggy marsh. She was trapped under a collapsed deadfall of old, heavy whisper oaks. We could see her little arm sticking out, torn with scratches. What I could see of her body was either incredibly pale or bleeding. Worse than that, she had stopped screaming as we reached her. There was no comfort in that quiet.

As my mom reached forward to grasp Vanessa’s hand she pushed aside a thick branch and the deadfall shifted. Trees crackled and smashed through each other, pinning Vanessa deeper and pulling a desperate scream from my mother’s throat.

In the growing darkness I saw the metal in Marty’s eyes, the calm and the wisdom beyond his years. He said, “It’s going to be okay. No one move. Any motion and those trees could collapse further. I am going back to the house, and when I return things are going to be okay.”

My mom and I stood silent. I felt a sudden calm as I watched Marty run up the field, his legs graceful beneath him.

The blanket of darkness dropped over the sky.

I agonized over each second that passed without Marty’s return. Each moment slammed into me, heavy and punctuated like the heartbeat of a giant.

I saw Marty first, out of my peripheral vision, and then my Mom saw him. “Look,” she said. Light filled our senses. Marty ran toward us at incredible speed, streaking sharp green light behind him. As he got closer to us, about halfway across the field, I could tell it was no illusion. He was glowing, bioluminescent. Tiny fireflies rose from the floor of the field and circled him, like planets orbiting the sun.

Marty’s veins were on fire, glowing bright green. Every artery, every twist and turn of his body through which blood flowed was emanating a blinding light, and his eyes were saturated with it. The whole field within thirty feet of my brother glowed like daylight. The left side of his chest was shimmering, too bright to look into where his heart was circulating the liquid fire of his blood, so filled with light that his chest had become translucent.

We watched him then, stunned.

We watched as he lifted the mass of shattered trees that hung over my sister.

We watched as he reached one glowing arm into the deadfall and gingerly eased my sister’s broken body out and placed her at my mother’s feet.

We watched as the deadfall finally crashed in on itself, splintering, sending shards of old wood flying around us.

We watched as my brother, his flesh on fire, pulled one of my father’s old insulin syringes from his pants pocket and slid it into his femoral artery, drawing blood. The blood shone so bright in the glass syringe that I couldn’t look at it directly. He carefully placed the needle in Vanessa’s left arm, at the bend, and depressed the plunger. Her breathing became steady, her color returned, and a faint glow came from her veins.

Marty spoke to us. He said, in a voice amplified with a strange, buzzing undercurrent, “Vanessa’s going to be all right. I must rest here for a moment, but you need to get Vanessa to a doctor right away. I think she’s bleeding on the inside. I love you so much, and I know you love me the same, so you have to trust me, and go now.”

My mom and I rushed Vanessa back to the house. I ran inside and grabbed a thick blanket off the back of the couch, which we used to keep Vanessa warm on the way to the hospital.

Mom and I remained silent the whole time Vanessa was with the doctors, both of us floating in a strange sort of daze, knowing we’d just witnessed something incredible, maybe impossible.

Later, when Vanessa had stabilized and we returned from the hospital, I ran around the house looking for Marty, searching for that bright glow. I found him in his bedroom, lying under his covers.

His chest did not rise or fall. His light, which hours before had burnt itself into my retinas, was now extinguished.

As I walked over to Marty and crouched down by his body I felt the first of a torrent of tears stream down my face, and hardly noticed the soft glow that had entered the room. It was Teddy, padding softly towards me and purring, his eyes glowing green.

I held onto Marty’s body and cried until my Mom pulled me away and we called an ambulance. The medical technicians arrived and placed him on a stretcher to take him away. To them Marty looked like a boy, barely a man.

I knew what he really was. I held on to my mother as they carried away our fallen angel of light.

Saturn’s Game

You could bite off Todd’s nose.

That’s the thought at the back of my head.

That’s the thought I ignore. I squelch the sinister sentiment and refocus on my friend.

Todd is saying this and that about motors and camshafts and gear shifts and custom something, and the whole time I’m nodding my head like one of those little plastic dogs people think add character to their dashboard.

My eyes focus on the little divot underneath his nose where today’s stubble is starting to grow, but I have these slick “Alien Eye” Arnet sunglasses on and it’s approaching sunset, so he can’t tell I’m not making eye contact.

Shadows are lengthening on the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop. My mind is wandering, making electric connections, chaotic. I’m thinking about the inadequate elastic in my sagging left sock, the razor burn sting by my Adam’s apple, the smell of barbecued chicken in the distance, the cool edge that’s creeping into the air. I can’t wait until Todd goes away, but I’m too polite to say anything.

The bad thought slingshots back into my brain, echo-heavy.

What if I grabbed Todd’s head and then bit off his nose?

It’s a poison thought, the kind no one is supposed to think, or at least no one is supposed to acknowledge thinking. The thought came from a different part of my brain, and it feels like a misfire, a stillborn idea.

Still, what if?

Could I do it? Could I bite off someone’s nose?

I’m trying to think something new but now I’m preoccupied with the idea of biting off Todd’s nose.

I wonder if he’s sensed the shift in my mentality, and how much danger he could potentially be in. I know I’m not supposed to think like this anymore, Dr. Marchand was pretty direct about that, but now the thought is looping, building speed, swirling down the brain drain.

It’s a sick thought. Squash it. Just my frontal lobe fucking up again. If I do something crazy tonight, then Saturn wins.

He’s been winning for twenty years.

Then the setting sun shifts one millimeter down in my field of sight, and one razor thin ray of light shoots directly into my optic cone and strikes the nerve like a match, and I’m overwhelmed by the smell of motor oil. Something...Oh God...and I look down and see a tiny green plant poking up through the crack in the sidewalk, and the plant sways a little bit in the breeze, and its motion blurs as it enters my eyes, and an electric jolt shoots up my spine and buries fire in my gut and I have to quench it.

So I grab Todd’s head.

I’ve never bitten off anyone’s nose before, but I figure that if I get a strong grip on the hair at each side of his head I could have a fair amount of leverage. From there, with the element of absolute surprise standing in my favor, all I have to do is open wide and clamp down.

My teeth sink through the skin of Todd’s face after a split second of resistance and the teeth at the left side of my mouth crunch something. It might be that bony ridge at the top of the nose, or maybe the thin sliver of cartilage running down to its tip. Regardless of anatomy, it really crunches.

Todd is screaming now, his warm breath is in my face, and his hands are at my wrists, trying to loosen my grip. But I’m too focused on the task at hand. I pull back as hard as I can, with my teeth sunk as deep as they can go into Todd’s nose, and I tear my mouth downward at the last of it. The motion doesn’t quite sever all the tissue so I have to make a couple of hard sawing motions with my incisors, like you do when you’re eating sinewy flank steak. Todd’s nose makes one last attempt to stay on his face before the wet tearing sound and the coppery taste in my mouth tell me I’ve succeeded.

Oh shit.

I just bit off Todd’s nose.

It’s in my mouth, and it is otherworldly warm. I spit it out onto the sidewalk where it lands with a moist plop. It looks fake, like it’s made of rubber. It looks smaller than it did on Todd’s face.

Todd is collapsed in a fetal ball on the ground. He’s moaning, mewling, groaning, screaming, something. I can’t quite tell. He doesn’t sound good, and a crimson pool spreads around his head.

Oh shit.

I don’t think either of us expected this, Todd or I.

The view out of my sunglasses is warped and liquid. A drop of Todd’s blood is on the right lens, smearing a trail toward the ground. The sunglasses are tight against my face, too tight, like they want to press into my skull and cleave the top third of my head. It reminds me of the time when I was five and I got my head stuck in a plastic wastebasket. I tear the glasses off my face and throw them to the ground. My view feels instantly improved, my skull is safe.

I look back down at Todd.

One of Todd’s Puma sneakers is unlaced, and I can still smell motor oil. My brain is buzzing, dull static numbing my ability to think. I’ve got to do something.

People will see Todd soon, police will come, medics will come.

I’ll be arrested.

I should just stand here.

My voice is falling out of my mouth and I sound all of twelve years old.

“Hey, Todd, oh fuck, Todd, I’m sorry, I’ll just, um, wait, just...” I say to Todd, but he seems to be in another world, and he’s making these horrible moist, gargle noises. I’m confused. Static. Interference. Synapses are not connecting. I’m sniffing the air, feeling like my nostrils are coated with something dirty, black factory air. That thick industrial smell is saturating my head, covering my skin.

“Fucking motor oil! Can you smell it, Todd? The motor oil?”

I look down at Todd, who I think just said something like, “Gwaaaah, uunnaaa reggg, God, uhhh.” Todd is definitely not smelling the motor oil.

I can’t take the scent anymore. It’s making my chest convulse, and I’m taking all these tiny excited breaths, like I’m trying to hyperventilate, only I don’t want to, and my heart is beating so fast now that it’s probably just vibrating, not even compressing, and I feel like passing out. My limbs are tingling and I’m sweating profusely, drips rolling down my face, and so I just shake my head back and forth, back and forth, fast and hard.

I’m trying to jar my brain into action.

I’m not dealing with this very well.

Todd’s trying to stand up. Someone just walked out the front door of Berenger’s Pub across the street, and I can feel them looking at Todd and me. I can hear a Foreigner song coming out of the jukebox inside the pub. “Cold Blooded,” I think, but I’m not sure. They all kind of sound the same to me. Songs do.

The man who just left the pub is looking at us and he’s crossing the street. He looks tubby, with big, meaty ham-hock arms, and if he sees Todd like this he might think the wrong thing. He might think I did this on purpose. He might not know I have problems, and try to beat me up. I don’t ever want to get hit again.

Now I am running.

Running to where?

Fuck it; I’m just running, pulse erratic, sweat streaming from every pore. I’m oozing sweat like a soggy sponge squeezed tight, positively soaking now, and my skin smells electric.

I’m still tasting Todd in my mouth. I have to run faster. Can I? My lungs are at capacity and then some. My eyes are burning and I think tears are coming out, but I can’t tell. It could just be sweat.

I’m about six blocks away from Todd and his severed sniffer, and I’m trying hard to run but it feels like someone just stuck a prison shank in my chest just below the heart. Damage to the port side, Captain!

I’m heaving myself forward, trying to ignore the pain, laughing at my own little joke in short gasps, slowing down, trying to get some air.

Stop. Stand still. Breathe deep. Where can I go?

There’s a defunct Sooper Saver-Mart to my left and a series of industry offices packed with cubicles and small green plants to my right. I can see inside one of the cubicles, past my reflection in the glass. The lady who occupies the box has a tiny porcelain picture frame on her desk. In the frame sits a photo of a house cat that looks like it might have eaten one too many servings of Atta-Kitty. A tiny, hand-written sticker on the picture frame says “MY GERGEN!” The lady has chosen that as her one tiny token of self. A picture of a morbidly obese cat called GERGEN is her life preserver; the one thing she has decided will save her from being sucked into the corporate undertow.

Maybe I’m not so bad off.

The Northside Liquor Store is only three blocks away from me. It is still open, and although I already feel sick and queasy I can’t help thinking that maybe a huge bottle of rum is just the thing to make a bad, bad day turn better.

Prescription, Doc? 750 ml of self-administered distilled spirits should fix your malady, my good man!

I can already taste it on my tongue as I walk into the air-conditioned booze shop.

DING-DONG!

Oh, Holy Lord Jesus they’ve got their customer alert bell turned up loud. The store clerk turns to look at me and as he rotates I see a hearing aid manufactured at some point in the late Seventies is wedged in his ear. A beige octopus made out of plastic appears to be burrowing into his ear in an attempt to suck out his brains. He seems to pay the grotesque plastic apparatus no mind, which somehow makes it look all the more malevolent, like maybe it already got to him.

Then the old guy with the non-ergonomic and mechanically malicious hearing device says, “Hey buddy, stop starin’ and buy something or I’ll call the cops and report your ass for loiterin’.”

Loiterin’. The worst of my crimes.

I hear him but aside from loitering I can’t make much sense of the words. He seems antagonistic. My brain is turning increasingly fudgy and I’m thinking, “Is he going to bite me?”

I turn to my left and the wall trails by me in slow motion. Colors are blurring together like I did the wash wrong again. Things are not up to speed in my brain.

Another psychotic break, Doc?

I grab the first bottle of cheap, rotten rum that I see and boom up to the front counter.

I move forward so fast and so intently that the clerk shrinks back a bit. The strange and worried look spreading across his grill says he can’t wait for me to leave. Can he sense I’m not right today?

The total bill comes to $14.56 and I’ve got a jug of shit rum in my left hand and a pack of Mini-Thins in my left pocket.

Pop pop fizz fizz and I’m washing back cheap, legal speed with liquid fire.

Walking faster now, towards the park two blocks away, hoping to God that the shit I just swallowed will clear my head and help me to deal with this situation. Do I have a way out? Do I have to deal with this? Will they put me back in the fucking hospital? Can’t I just see straight and fly right for once?

Too late, kid. Done is done.

Yeah, and I’m pissed, feeling like this was never in my control. Blaming Saturn.

Your excuses won’t reattach Todd’s nose, will they?

The voice in my head is louder and somehow not my own.

My insides warm up, which is good because the sun is setting and the air will cool. Swigs off the bottle, two three four, in rapid succession, and now the world looks a little friendlier.

Then I hear the squelch and beep of a police car’s radio and everything runs ugly. The air is alive with white noise and my eyes have static on their surface. I look back over my left shoulder and see a black and white patrol car rounding the corner of Ward and Meeks. Adrenaline flushes through my system. My eyes burn, instantly dry. My throat fills up with booze and acid and I have to re-swallow, hard, to keep my liquid lunch from relocating.

Options: few to none. A voice at the back of my head says, “Stand very still. He will not see you if you stand very still.” Fucking five-year-old logic, I can’t escape it.

The cop car is closer with every split-second and my brain’s not coughing up the goods.

Throw a rock at the car? Why?

Duck down, lay low? I’d look even more conspicuous if spotted.

Wait for the officer to hop out of the car and get within biting distance, see if I can claim nose number two for the day? Low odds for survival, smashed in a locust swarm of lawmen.

Run?

Again? Well, it worked before...

I hear the bottle of rum smash to the concrete behind me and my legs are kicking doubletime. Crazy white heat is searing in my gut—this is all too much for one day—and I want to stop and throw up, but it’s a fair bet that even if the patrol car wasn’t looking for me before, they are interested in me now. They are awfully suspicious of people who flee their presence. They make assumptions. Draw conclusions.

I’m running down a thin alleyway now, taking in deep lung-stretching loads of stale garbage stink, and I’m laughing like a kid. Oh boy, a chase! Only when I look over my left shoulder—Grandpa always told me I’d see Death coming for me over my left shoulder—all I see is the alleyway receding behind me. No cops. Maybe I am invisible, or maybe the cop was changing radio stations or looking at his fingernails or something else as I ran across the street. No trail.

No pursuit. Deus ex machina in my favor.

Especially since her house is only four blocks away.

I feel light in my shoes as my Mini-Thin engine goes into overdrive. I’m so close to a safe place, if she’ll let me in. God, what an If.

Four blocks of footwork and three knocks on a pale red door connected to a cheap stucco apartment complex determine my fate. Will she or won’t she let me in? Has she forgiven me?

The thin door creaks as it opens, and standing there in an old pair of Guess pajamas and an older pair of fuzzy white slippers is the sister I haven’t seen for five years.

I’m speechless. My lower jaw has dropped open on its hinge and I can’t move my diaphragm or expand my chest or vibrate my larynx or make plosive sounds with my lips or anything. What do I say?

“Come in, I guess,” she says as she turns slowly back towards the couch and the bowl of popcorn on it. “I’m watching this episode of Real World for the fourth time, but it’s not getting any better. Don’t ask me for money ‘cause I won’t give you shit. I’m barely making it as is.”

One quick look around her place pins a verification on the statement. There are Salvation Army blankets up instead of drapes, a broken down futon at the center of the room, movie posters on the walls (Switchblade Sisters, Reform School Girls, Bound), cheap Target dishes, the anodized kind that stay almost ruthlessly cold, and stacked Ramen packets on the dusty countertop. Trailer park chic minus the porcelain unicorns and the “Hottest Men in Firefighting” calendar. Still, she let me in.

“What’s up, Tyler?” she asks as she sits back down on the futon and tucks a thin afghan over her lap.

“Um...”

Long pause. Beat...beat...beat...beat. I can’t just waltz in here after five years incognito and tell her I’m on the lam because I just bit off my friend’s nose for no good reason. “I was just in the neighborhood...”

“Bullshit, Ty. Fucking bullshit.” She’s still not looking at me, her eyes stay on the television, not blinking. “Ty, look down at your shirt. You fucked up again, huh?”

My shirt is plastered to me, the collar loose with sweat, and the front is saturated with crusting blood. My chest is a red waterfall that smells like moonshine. She’s right: I most definitely fucked up again.

“First of all, Ty, if you’re crazy again I want you to stay right where you are and understand that if you try anything I will pepper spray you until you choke on your own vomit. Second, I’ve heard the police sirens, and if you think I’m going to harbor you, well, you’re crazier than you ever were. Well?... Talk, Ty, I’m not in the mood for games... listen, stop mouth breathing and tell me something.”

Shit, she’s amped up and I’m slowed to a crawl. I’m terribly confused and I’m thinking they switched her Paxil to methamphetamine, ‘cause I’ve never seen her this aggressive.

There used to be days when she wouldn’t even get out of bed, she’d just lay there and stare at whatever was past the ceiling in her room.

“Sis, I’m scared.”

“What’d you do?” she asks, but the undercurrent in her voice says she’s sick of this already.

“I...uh...well...there was this smell like motor oil, and the little plant was sending electricity to me, and I...well, I’m fucking sorry now, so sorry...and I think he’s okay...things...I mean...I know what I did was...I know that I am sorry...I’m sorry, I’m so sorry and I really mean it...I’m so...” and then it’s all too much for me and for the first time in weeks I’m really feeling something, and my breath is hitching and my knees are going weak and I’m sobbing as I hit the cracked linoleum and curl up on my side, and then the story spills out in between sick, wet sobs and snotsniffles, and tears so hot they feel like rubbing alcohol on my face.

I tell her about Todd’s nose, and then his lack of a nose, and I tell her about the smell, the motor oil, and the angry man, and GERGEN, and the octopus eating the old man’s head, and the booze, and the pills, and the panic, and somewhere in all of this mess I tell her that I miss her terribly, like every day, and that I miss the way she smells. She kind of laughs and cries at that at the same time, and now she’s getting off the couch, moving towards me.

She’s standing above me, looking down and mumbling something like, “Saturn’s reign never ends, right?”

Saturn....

It’s her nickname for Dad. The first time I was in the hospital, she brought me a book of paintings by this Spanish guy, and on one of the pages there was this seriously fucked, black painting of the God Saturn chewing a big hole in his Son. Next to it was a Post-it Note that said, “Kind of reminds you of him, huh?” Ever since then, he’s been Saturn.

Ever since then I’ve been playing his game. Trying to control myself, trying to deny what he did to me, trying to exist despite the scars on my brain that fucked up the wet-wiring.

Now she’s crouching down over me and I do love the way she smells, like green apples, and I kind of want her to hold me, but I know she’s going to blame him and talk about him now, and I’m sick of her treating our past like this great tragedy, because we are not a fucking heavy metal song, we are not a Goddamn Oprah Book-of-the-Month story, and we’re not a made-for-T.V.-movie. We don’t have to be weak and afflicted like those people, like those songs and stories and now her arms are around me and I can tell that I’m shaking and she’s rocking me just a little bit, just enough.

Something switches inside of me and my brain kicks out feedback and I’m smelling the dust embedded deep in the shag carpet in my bedroom, seeing the tiny droplets of blood that hung on the end of my eyelashes, hearing the sound of Dad snoring, passed out on the floor across the room, oblivious to what he has just done and already forgetting. I’m remembering the look on Mom’s face when she came into the room and saw that the claw of Dad’s hammer was buried in my skull.

What then? Doctor after doctor, surgical specialist, mental specialist, anger therapist, chemical dependency specialist, none of them explaining to me exactly how a Dad, a Buddy, can turn into Saturn and chomp down on his kid.

It’s all noise now, right? He made his choices. I’ve tried to make mine.

Sis is kind of crying now, holding on to me. Maybe she’s just shaking. She’s so full of anger; I think maybe she took mine into storage when I got too crazy to deal with it. Yeah, maybe I am a heavy metal song.

So I’m curled up, and she pulls the afghan off the futon and drapes it over me, and I push my fingers through the little holes in the fabric and I try to make a cocoon, and I fall asleep there, with her running her fingers through my hair, the smell of green apples floating between us.

And when I wake up the first thing I see is blue and red flashing across my sister’s plaster ceiling. I know she called them. Deep down I knew she would when I walked in the door. I’m not angry at her, she’s just big on consequences, closure, whatever.

I’ll go without conflict. They’ll take me in and they’ll call me a monster, and they won’t be all that wrong.

They’ll put me in the hospital. The staff will hear what I’ve done. They’ll sweat fear when they stand near me. I’ll try to prove to them that they’re wrong.

Maybe I’ll learn to control myself in there. I’ll have the time. I’ll practice. I’ll try to focus.

For myself. For my sister. She’ll visit. I know she will. Please.

There’s a knock at the door.

I hope they’ll let me take the afghan with me. It keeps away the cold.

I press her blanket to my face, inhaling deep with my eyes closed, so that my nose and throat and mind are filled with green apples, sweet to bursting and wonderful. Then I open my eyes, steady my hands, and unlock the front door.

Branded

The fucking mark. Raised, ropy-white and red-rimmed. A thick, knotty scar. Had it been a simple straight line, like an incision scar, I certainly could have moved beyond my revulsion. Love would have overcome and all that. Of course, this wasn’t any simple incision scar. It was a fully 3-D scar that looked worse than the initial wound, and it was in the exact shape of the McDonald’s logo. Goddamned Golden Arches. Only the scar was more sickly white than golden, and clear of any of the tiny, downy blonde hairs that rested near it. Upon first finding the scar, which was just to the inside of her right thigh, I laughed. AHA, so she tried to play a joke on me. A real josher, using prosthetic scars to gross me out. Ha-ha, very funny, now TAKE IT OFF!

One look in her eyes and I see that the scar is real, and there’s no way in hell she wants to tell me about how she got it. Now she looks worried, like this is when guys always bail out. I can’t leave her, as much as my guts churn and threaten to spill out of my mouth. Plus, I’m stuck in a weird spot. To initiate a sort of deepening of our sexual relationship I had promised to go down on her. I mean, that’s how I found the scar in the first place, when I was taking her shorts off. So there I was, nauseous and obligated to cunnilingus because I didn’t want to be the millionth asshole guy in her life.

I closed my eyes as I began, trying to erase the image of the Golden Arches scar. As my tongue separated labia and found the clit I suddenly saw Ronald McDonald behind my closed eyelids. As my tongue urged her on my brain was awash in all things McDonald’s. Grimace and the Hamburglar, sizzling greasy beef being flipped with a scummy spatula by a pimple face kid whose acne leaked yellow-red onto the skillet, smoking trails coming off the beef and pus mixture, the killing floor for McDonald’s Inc, where the blood and shit rushed from millions of Heifers as they mooed their last terrified moo, a boy covered in burn scars asking me if I wanted fries with that, chickens shitting into six slightly similar McNugget molds, lick lick back and forth surging in to suppress my scar-induced nausea.

The more my tongue pressed the pink the more she tasted like fancy ketchup. When she came she tightened her thighs and the scar pressed deep into my left cheek. For a moment I was marked too. I flinched. She noticed.

She was a wonderful human being, with a laugh that you’d want to hear at the gates of heaven.

And I am weak for leaving her.

The Sharp Dressed Man at the End of the Line

He was collecting roaches. They moved faster than he’d expected. They’d be within centimeters of Dean’s fingers and suddenly speed left or right with quarterback maneuverability. Crafty fuckers. Even more survival driven than he gave them credit for.

Survival, Dean’s modus operandi. He understood the cockroaches on that level. Both of them had a clearly established Goal One:

Do Not Die.

He left out muffins. They swarmed the muffins. Dean harvested the unsuspecting bugs by the handful.

He replaced his regular bulbs with UV black lights, so he could see, but the roaches didn’t scatter like they would under normal apartment light.

In between roach round-ups, he watched television. He grimaced. He cringed. Every image on the screen was a fat, flashing sign that read WWIII.

The news showed Conflict with a capital C, international and senseless.

It caused Dean to sweat stress and stink up his flop pad, the worst in all of D.C. Check the rotting floorboards, the dripping faucets. Noise-aholic neighbor bass and baby screams as the soundscape. Swinging bare-bulb ambience. Mildew and asbestos fighting for airspace. Punctured pipes leaking slow into linoleum cracks. Plastered pellets of roach shit as the common denominator.

Living cheap. Barely living.

He watched television. The President poked angry bears with sharp sticks.

We will not relent to this Axis of Assholes!

Take that Iraqi-Bear!

They’re hoarding weapons and plannin’ rape missions!

Yield before us Korea-Bear!

Commie baby-killers, pure and simple!

Oh, China-Bear, you’ll rue the day!

The President was up in the polls. The populace—petrified and war weary, but strangely supportive, Dean included. He’d back a bully as long as El Presidente could guarantee a win. It was that possibility of a loss that spooked Dean to screeching simian defense levels. A loss, at this heavily armed and nuclear point in world history, meant Apocalypse.

Dean’s answer—Cockroach Suit. Thousands of cockroaches hand stitched through the thorax, tightly sewn to a Penney’s business suit bought on the cheap.

Dean’s days and nights were occupied with the spreading of wings and the careful puncturing of his pathogenic pals with needle and thread. He positioned them all feet-out, so their mouths could still feed.

Dead roaches were of no use to Dean. The live ones carried the instinct.

The instinct had kept them alive for four hundred million years. Their bodies were natural radiation shock absorbers. They could live for ten days after being decapitated. Dean knew that in the event of Apocalypse, he’d be rolling with the right crew.

He knew they were training him for war, and for suffering. He’d already borne the brunt of their bacterial ballast. He’d coped with clostridium. He’d dealt with dysentery.

He was becoming impervious to disease, like them.

He kept and catalogued the roaches, separated into clusters of speedy Smokybrowns, ravenous Germans, and over-eating Americans.

Jars upon jars of the bugs were stored in his deep freezer. They slowed down in the chill. The cold goofed them like opium, kept them still.

It kept them from eating each other.

That insatiable appetite had been the primary problem with the first cockroach suit. Dean had left it out in the muggy tenement warmth at night, stored along with some chocolate cereal in a microwave-sized cardboard box. When he opened the box in the morning the cockroaches had not only eaten all the cereal, but had ravaged each other. His carefully crafted suit had gone cannibalistic.

He bought another suit. Dean didn’t sweat his cash flow. Daddy Dean Sr.’s estate was still kicking out cash in steady intervals. The primary source of cash—royalties from the sale of Daddy Dean’s Ivy League approved books on entomology.

Daddy Dean Sr. had been a big time bug man and serious scholar until his car accident. A deer had run into the road. Daddy Dean Sr. swerved hard with his right hand on the wheel. His left hand gripped a cherry Slurpee with a thick red straw. Daddy Dean Sr.’s car hit an elm tree straight on. The dependable airbag exploded and jammed the fortified Slurpee straw straight into Daddy Dean Sr.’s left nostril and right on through to his frontal lobe.

Dean had shown up at the scene in time to see the cops detach the straw and blood-filled cup.

Dean had heard one cop on the accident scene call it a “straw-botomy.”

Dean didn’t think it was funny.

Dean didn’t think a single fucking thing was funny for quite a while, and resolved to find happiness however he could.

For a long while that meant spending Daddy’s textbook royalties on hallucinogens. The “straw-botomy” had taught him that the world made no sense anyway, so he traveled the world hunting head-trips. He tongued toads. He feasted on fungus. He inhaled ayahuasca. A bad encounter with a sodomizing shaman and some industrial strength desert peyote finally scared Dean straight.

Then he moved back to the states and began his survival training.

He knew the world wanted to erase him. He’d seen it in visions. He’d seen it in the eyes of the priapic shaman. He saw flash frames of his own father felled by a plastic straw.

Dean moved to the slums of D.C. He wanted to move to a place that resisted and destroyed life. He knew there were survival secrets in the daily struggle.

He holed up and watched television. He watched El Presidente taunting nuclear armed countries anxious to see if they could one-up Hiroshima.

Y’all ain’t got the bomb, or maybe y’all just ain’t got the balls to use it!

C’mon Korea-Bear, show us you got a pair!

Dean read books about roaches. He studied sewing and stitch types. He bought spools of thread and heat sterilized needles.

Dean developed his cockroach suit and watched it fail.

He cried and sucked up the sick, musty attar of roaches when his first suit dined on itself.

He cursed himself when the second suit crawled through a hole in the crumbling apartment drywall. Fifty seconds to piss. That’s all he’d taken. That was all they’d needed. He heard his roach-riddled jacket and pants skittering around in the crawlspace above his kitchen.

Every time he failed, he felt as if Apocalypse was seconds away. He got weak, the blood flow to his head lagged. He thought he could hear the roar of approaching bombs overhead. He worked harder, his hands shaking with fear.

He ignored the doubt that crept into his skull and took up permanent residence.

Dean, don’t you know the bomb is coming for you? You think some bugs and some cheap threads can stop a holocaust?

He ignored the fists that pounded on his door, the angry screams, the vulgar notes slipped through the crack of his mail slot.

The note last Tuesday read: Mister room 308, you are the cockroach man and ever since you came all up in here they’ve gone crazy. My little sister has to wear cotton balls in her ears to keep them roaches from digging into her head and laying eggs, like they did with Brian. You ain’t right at all Mister room 308, and you ought to leave and take your roaches with you. I see them coming out from under your front door right now. My dad says if Brian has eggs in his brain, then you die. Go away. Love, Maysie.

The neighbors thought Dean was bad mojo. They threatened litigation. They threatened worse. Dean knew it was part of the world’s plan to erase him. He kept working.

Dean actually saw the first bomb hit. He knew it was coming.

He knew from the silence. El Presidente had gone silent for three days. No more TV broadcasts promising patriotic retribution. No more shots on CNN of El Presidente grabbing his balls and shouting, “Eat this, Iran!”

El Presidente was quiet because he was hiding, somewhere, from the grief he saw coming America’s way. El Presidente was crafty, even more survival driven than Dean had given him credit for.

In the calm before the atomic shit-storm, Dean finished his third cockroach suit.

It was perfect. A living tapestry of twitching legs and chittering mandibles. Add to the threads a pair of Kroeg blast goggles, a crash helmet, a refillable oxygen tank, and a thick pair of foil-lined tan work boots, and Dean was suited for survival.

When the first newscaster started crying on air, Dean geared up and walked from his apartment to the street. He didn’t want to be inside that roach trap when the Earth started shaking.

Dean walked by apartments, heard the crying of the tenants. They could sense the bomb was coming. Their cries were weird and strangely complacent, the mewling of doomed animals with no options. Baby seals, waiting for the spiked bat to spread their skulls wide.

It made Dean sad. He cried and fogged up his goggles. He felt the suit writhing around his body, taking in his warmth, seething. He stayed in motion.

Dean made it into the street and turned to his left, not sure quite where to go, hoping the cockroaches’ instinct would take over soon. Then he would just lay down on his belly or his back and let them carry him to survival, like a God.

The D.C. streets were packed with people looking up at the sky, waiting. Dean expected chaos and conflict. No one even gave him a second glance. They were waiting for the Big Delivery from above.

They got it, twenty seconds later.

The flash blinded Dean, even with the goggles and helmet on.

He crouched behind a cement stoop and heard the most cohesive and unified scream any dying species had ever let loose.

Then there was silence, and heat, terrible heat.

And, of course, darkness.

The cockroaches carried Dean, like a God. He woke to dark clouds and electrical storms and drifting gray ash. His retinas were blast burnt, but functional.

He was alive.

That was the part he could not comprehend.

He was fucking alive.

The roaches were too, and they were moving quickly towards a perceived food source. Dean felt them moving, swift and single-minded, driven by constant hunger.

His hands were cold. Nuclear winter was just beginning and the air already approached frosty. He’d forgotten to buy gloves. He hunched his shoulders, pulled his hands inside the living suit. He relaxed and enjoyed the eerie quiet, and reveled in being alive. Being a survivor.

He moved without effort through the ash of nuclear winter. His suit surged beneath him as it crawled up onto a sidewalk. The legion of tiny legs pushed onward as Dean zoned out on the gray snowfall floating down from the sky.

He watched the sky darken. He saw thick red and green clouds of nuclear dust float above him. He saw an obelisk in the distance, stark and tarred jet black by the bomb blast.

It was the Washington Monument, just like he’d seen on T.V. There was something walking back and forth at the base of the monument. It moved like a human, but glowed bright yellow.

Dean let the suit carry him closer, and then stood up when he was within ten feet of the yellow shifting mass.

Dean lifted the visor of his helmet and de-fogged his goggles. He could see clearly after that, aside from the bright imprint of the blast that wouldn’t leave his sight.

The peripatetic figure was a man. A man in a Twinkie suit. The thousands of Twinkies were half charred and oozing cream filling.

The man turned to face Dean.

The man’s face was slack, and the eyes were empty of thought or feeling. Despite this lack of emotion, El Presidente was still the most recognizable man on Earth.

He looked at Dean and started to weep.

Dean opened his arms, offering a hug.

El Presidente stepped forward, and then hesitated. It was too late. The cockroach suit was upon him, a thousand mouths demanding to be fed.

Dean looked into El Presidente’s eyes, caught dilated pupils, animal-level fear.

The eyes no longer promised Dean’s destruction, as they had from the static screen of his television. The world’s plan to erase Dean had failed; it was vaporized to dust, silt in sick Strontium-19 winds.

The scarred sky above Dean grew darker, the air around him even colder. Dean shivered; El Presidente screamed.

Dean reached up and warmed his hands around El Presidente’s throat. He felt the pulse under his hands drop to zero.

The weeping had ended, and the feasting had begun.

Two Cages, One Moon

Karen had finally found a level of comfort in the trunk when Steven slowed the car and brought it to a rumbling stop. She had been so comfortable that the empty motor oil container lodged into her lower back didn’t hurt anymore and had become a dull presence. In contrast, the handcuffs that bound her were still causing discomfort, as they always did. “Nine months in these damn things and they still hurt.”

She heard him rounding the car, coming to the rear with his keys jingling. She sucked down fresh air as he opened the trunk, knowing she wouldn’t be out of the stale prison for long.

She was grateful that he took her out for bathroom breaks, even if it was at his convenience. Within the first month after he abducted her from her studio apartment in Boise he had learned it was best to let her out every three or four hours. For practical reasons Karen now received less water and food than she used to. The urine smell had been heavy and floated from the trunk through the upholstery and eventually to Steven’s nose whenever she emptied her bladder as a desperate measure. Steven had tried putting her in adult diapers, but Karen had developed a nasty rash and he hadn’t like the way it looked or smelled. So, every three or four hours, if there happened to be a rest stop or gas station with bathrooms in the rear he pulled over and let her out for a few minutes. Karen felt Steven’s arms sliding under her back and the crook of her legs. He picked her up, grunting, and set her on the ground.

There wasn’t anyone else at the rest stop. Karen thought Steven was very good at this, at keeping her, and he never stopped if there was someone who could spot them and see what he was up to. He was desperate to have her, to own her, and somewhere at the back of her head she enjoyed his need.

She held her hands out in front of her. It was part of their ritual. He inserted the tiny silver key and twisted it. He unlatched the cuffs and let her hands loose, knowing she wouldn’t strike him or try to run. She had learned her lessons.

The first lesson was “Don’t try to run.” A blow to her head with his pistol had taught her this.

The second lesson was “Don’t scream for help.” A fist to her mouth had taught her this. Steven kept the two teeth she had spit out in his right pants pocket.

The third lesson was “Don’t fight back.” The thick razor scars in the webbing between her fingers had taught her this.

She was docile now, soft as a lamb. She had given up hope of escape after the first brutal week of her abduction.

He didn’t hurt her anymore, not like he used to. She found she didn’t fear him much, after a while. When he did hurt her it was usually quick and she found she was able to block out most of the pain. Her suffering, like any day-in, day-out routine, now bored her.

The full moons of each month still brought trouble, but other than that their relationship had become strangely placid.

Karen walked into the restroom. She enjoyed it as an oasis from the dark of her mobile prison. It was the only time she was ever alone, physically. Steven was waiting right outside the door for her, with the pistol tucked into the back of his pants, so she never felt free, but being out of the trunk and away from Steven for a few minutes was something she had grown to cherish.

She entered the stall and latched the door shut behind her. She dropped her underwear, the new, poorly fitting underwear that Steven had purchased a few weeks ago, and rested on the cool porcelain with her elbows on her knees and her face cupped in her hands.

Karen saw the lipstick on the ground after she flushed, and until she grasped it she was sure it was a tiny mirage.

She thought for a moment about the content of her days with Steven. She thought about the beatings, and the trunk, the hot trunk full of stale air and rotten smells, and the dehydration, and the way that Steven would try to have sex with her and then hit her when he couldn’t get hard, and she felt the anger in her belly turning to fire. She thought about the approaching full moon and wondered how many more cycles she could survive. She seized upon her chance and started writing with the lipstick on the beige wall of the bathroom stall.

She knew Steven would be getting impatient, and when he got nervous he got rough with her, so she acted swiftly, scrawling, “Help! Kidnapped! His name is Steven! We are in a burgundy Impala! Not a joke!”

She wanted to write more but the waxy lipstick ran out before she could get her name on the wall. She tried to lift some excess lipstick from the message with her fingertips, but it began to smear beneath her shaking hands, and she gave up. She was a victim with no name, easier to forget and ignore.

Karen tried to act cool as she exited the bathroom. She had cleaned the makeup from her fingers and wrapped the lipstick container in half a roll of toilet paper and thrown it in the trash. She prayed Steven hadn’t grown suspicious.

If he went into the bathroom and checked the stall, what then? She didn’t believe he’d kill her. He needed her too much. Still, he could be cruel, and she didn’t want to learn any more lessons at the edge of his razor.

She found Steven outside the door, looking at the palm of his hand where her two previously punched-out teeth rested. He was looking at them with adoration. Love.

Karen held out her hands and felt the steel of the handcuffs bite into her raw, chafed wrists.

The next week passed quickly for Karen. She spent most of her time in darkness, cradled in the trunk of the car, sweating and sleeping, stirring through fever dreams. She didn’t know what state they were in, but the air in the trunk smelled like onions. She didn’t know what month it was, but she knew a full moon must be approaching because Steven was very agitated.

A few months back Steven told Karen that the spirits he trapped in his blood chewed on his insides during a full moon. Steven was weird like that. Karen was fascinated by just how broken and disjointed his mind was, and often sympathized with him even though she didn’t know how he had become so twisted up inside. There were hints, and glimpses of strange scars on his belly, but she never asked him questions. She feared the ugly answers would make her care about him more than she already did.

Karen felt hope burning away inside of her, and passed her time wondering if anyone had seen her lipstick message. Did anyone believe it? Was the message too vague? Did some janitor wash it away? Would anyone call the police? Could she really be condemned to spend the rest of her life in a trunk, the carefully tended baggage of a lunatic?

Another full moon came and went, and the legion of deep bite marks covering the back of her legs throbbed and oozed. The biting was the only thing that calmed Steven down on a full moon. He fed her horse-size penicillin pills to keep the bites from getting infected, but she was allergic to them and broke out in hives. She was itching herself by rubbing back and forth on the rough carpet of the Impala when she heard the police sirens.

She felt the Impala speed up for a moment and she thought Steven might try to outrun the cop. Then she felt the car shake as it crested onto the rough shoulder of the road to stop.

Karen heard Steven yell to her, sternly.

“Don’t say a word, not one Goddamn thing. I love you and they can’t have you. Don’t make me prove it.”

Karen heard the crunch of the officer’s boots on the roadway as he approached the car, and she pressed her head against the upholstery, straining to hear whatever she could.

Her heart was thumping in her head and she could barely hear a word over her own pulse and the idle of the boat-size car.

She heard both of their voices growing loud; Steven’s taking on an incredulous and angry tone. She prayed Steven wouldn’t shoot the cop.

Hope rushed through her whole body and she felt like screaming, “I’m in here! I’m in the trunk!”

The officer would save her and then she’d be free!

Free.

Free to return home to her thankless job and her overwhelming debt and her resentful kids who never called. Free to re-enter the dating scene as a scarred, forty-two-year-old ex-abductee. Free to fall asleep, crying and alone, between cold sheets. Free to be avoided and scorned. Free to be unwanted, unneeded.

Free to be alone.

She found herself silent, her scream for help stillborn as a sigh.

The concept of freedom became terrible. She found herself praying for the meddling police officer to go away.

She pressed tighter against the back of the seat and heard Steven’s voice.

“Yes, sir, absolutely, and thank you for pointing that out! I appreciate your concern!”

Later that night, while Steven carefully tended to Karen’s bite wounds, he told her about the blown tail light on the Impala. They both laughed at their unexpected brush with the outside world.

As Karen drifted off to sleep she smelled iodine and felt it soaking into her wounds. The moon was thin outside, and her pain was at low tide. She found herself taking the strangest comfort in the fact that Steven kept her teeth in his pants pocket.

Such was love.

Sparklers Burning

Martin set down the shoebox full of fingers that he was carrying to the kitchen and picked up the remote. He thought, “I’ve been working hard today. Why not relax for a moment and see who’s talking on my box?”

The T.V. sparked on with a static crackle, shedding vivid light into the previously jet black room. Martin couldn’t believe his luck. He thought, “I didn’t even have to flip no channels and there you are. Yes, yes, yes. There you are.”

The perfectly bland face of Sunny Potterton smiled its chipper and highly marketable smile right at Martin. Sunny’s teeth were so bright they seemed to glow between her thin, red lips. Her bob-cut, blonde hair hung silky aside from the straight-placed part down the center. Sunny was saying something about the alkaline levels in a good garden, and Martin was listening intently.

“Oh, God I love you, Sunny!” Martin said it aloud in his living room, loving the way her name felt as he manifested it with breath. “Sunny, Sunny, Sunny!”

Martin did love her, and to prove it to Sunny he watched her whenever she was on the talking box, and he bought all of her magazines, the home craft ones, and the wedding ones, and even the baby ones, in spite of the fact that babies gave him the willies to hell and back. Martin even bought some of the Sunny Potterton stock the day it hit the market, and he didn’t get mad when it tanked just days later.

Sunny was clean, polite, well spoken, and almost universally loved. Martin realized that he was none of these things, but he was willing to improve, and he worked hard to make his life something special.

He stood in his living room, slack-jawed, wearing a pair of blood-stained tan boxer shorts, watching Sunny Potterton plant tulips.

Martin’s left eyelid began to twitch and pulse with his heartbeat, causing him to grimace. The room was quickly filling up with the chemical smell of hot metal, and Martin recoiled, taking a step back from the T.V. The talking box was starting to glow, giving Martin an instant and pounding pain in his chest. Martin thought that it might be sending out some kind of signal that would erase his heart.

The unpleasant thought passed when he heard Sunny’s voice speaking to him from the television.

“Martin, do you mind if I come in?”

The thought of having Sunny Potterton over for a visit overwhelmed Martin and he felt faint, but managed to nod Yes.

The talking box began to glow even brighter, and Martin watched it give birth to Sunny Potterton. The image of the garden on the television was rendered down the middle, cleaved in half, and out of the dark static oval at the center a hand emerged, shiny with fluid. The hand was delicate and had beautiful purple finger nails. It was followed by a shoulder and a head, pushing out with great exertion, and then there was an explosive belching sound followed by a wet thud as Sunny was birthed into Martin’s living room, soaking wet on his old shag carpet.

Sunny began to dry immediately, sloughing off the shiny sac that she arrived in. She vomited up a puddle of what appeared to be television static and turned to Martin.

“So good of you to have me to your house!” she said with a voice that Martin knew must be full of Christmas cheer all year round.

“So, Martin, what have you been up to?”

“Well…Sunny…”

He couldn’t believe this was happening, and reached his right hand out to touch Sunny. His finger was greeted by a strong electric shock that relayed itself to his brain and extremities and nearly floored him.

“Sorry, Martin, I’m still an electronic transmission.”

Martin frowned, realizing he couldn’t get as close to Sunny as he wanted to without taking a nasty jolt. He wondered if an electronic transmission could bleed.

“No, I won’t bleed, Martin. I can tell what you’re thinking and I don’t have to tell you I frown on discourtesy.”

“Sorry, Sunny. Why have you come to visit me?”

“Well, Martin, I’ve come to help you with your spring cleaning.”

Martin wondered at Sunny’s perfect timing. He’d already been cleaning for days, and now he had the world’s foremost cleaning expert in his own house as a special helper.

Martin thought that God must finally be rewarding him for all the hard work he’d done on his Sparkle Shrine. This electronic Sunny was his prize for years of working in the shadows, carving skin and bone and muscle, killing only those who would not be missed. The Sparkle Shrine was not yet completed, so Martin was surprised that God had responded so prematurely. Maybe this was a test…

“Okay, Sunny, you can help me with my spring cleaning, and then I’ll show you what you were sent here to see.”

Sunny smiled, sunshine bleach bright teeth gleaming.

“Okay, Martin, let’s get to work.”

Martin and digital Sunny scoured the house, soaking floors in bleach, spreading potpourri, and opening windows to let in the cool night air. Martin did most of the manual labor while Sunny gave instructions and offered advice.

“You can get rid of all that hair in the dishwasher by adding a saline solution next time you run a hot cycle.”

And

“A heavy cologne, one with a real musk to it, will not only cover up the smell of the cordite but mask any traces.”

And

“You know a simple flower trim would really make that vat of acid more of a centerpiece and bring a sense of light to your basement.”

And

“If you shift these body parts to Tupperware and refrigerate them they’ll last much longer than in your standard shoebox.”

Martin was glowing, bright with his own sweat and reflecting the static shimmer of Sunny Potterton’s electric skin.

After six steady hours of intensive cleaning Martin was wiped out, aching at every joint. Sunny urged him toward further work but he was fatigued beyond his limits, and believed he had proven himself. He was ready to show Sunny the Sparkle Shrine.

At his request, Sunny followed Martin up to his bedroom. Her feet singed the carpet beneath her, trailing tiny wisps of smoke.

Once upstairs, Martin led Sunny to his bedroom. He opened the door for her and walked past the large man who was tied to his bed. The man was bald, naked, soaked to the bone with sweat, and bleeding from the inside of his left eye where Martin had previously performed a home lobotomy. He was bound to the bed with piano wire sunk deep into his wrists and ankles, and his mouth was gagged with duct tape and an oven mitt. Part of the man’s small intestine had been pulled through an incision in the skin of his belly, and hung wet to his left side.

The man was surrounded by arts and crafts supplies, poster boards, twine, glue sticks, stamps, pinking shears, and shiny star stickers, the same kind that Sunny used on her show. The man woke as Sunny and Martin entered the room, and passed back into unconsciousness seconds later, his eyes rolling, showing their whites.

Martin paid no attention to the man. He knelt before Sunny and asked if she wanted to see his Shrine. She sighed and said, “Yes.”

Martin looked to the sky, whispered, “Please let her love it,” and opened the door to the converted closet.

The black pixels at the center of Sunny’s electronic eyes multiplied as her pupils dilated. She was the first witness to Martin’s life’s work.

Flesh was tanned and strapped around bones, bones were bound by tendons, tendons crisscrossed and were nailed into the wall with pushpins. Bowls sat in a perfect circle around the mass of tissue, each bowl containing a preserved body part. There were shriveled eyes, lips, noses, testicles, labia, fingers, ears, nipples, tongues.

Martin’s favorite part of the whole thing was the glitter. He had covered everything in glitter, gold and purple and green glitter, so that it sparkled in even the faintest light. He felt his face flush with blood and pride as he turned to Sunny for approval.

Martin felt the world turn to liquid beneath his feet when he saw Sunny frowning.

Martin felt the world turn to shame as Sunny’s face changed and twisted, darkened. Sunny’s bronzed skin and high cheekbones had become sullen and scrunched.

“Well, Martin, I can appreciate your work ethic here. You’ve certainly been laboring away, and I appreciate the symmetry, but…”

Martin’s heart kept sinking, deeper and deeper still.

“…but, frankly, it’s sub-par work. The glitter seems, well, amateurish, and the arrangement of bits and pieces is ultimately distracting. It takes away from whatever meager power the main attraction may have had. Also, and I hope you’ve picked up on this too, it reeks of death. Bleach is a must, my friend.”

“But, Sunny…”

“Please don’t interrupt me, Martin. I’ve enjoyed our time together, and I hope you have too, but I’ve got to be going. Just one final bit of cleaning to be done…”

The look in Sunny’s eyes changed. Her brow furrowed and shadows filled her eye sockets.

“Martin, do you know what an aberration is?”

“Nope, Sunny. Why? Do I have one? If I show you my aberration will you stay here?”

“No, Martin. An aberration is something that must be cleansed from every surface. It is something so dirty that the world can’t tolerate it.”

Sunny took another carpet-singe step towards Martin.

“The weird thing about aberrations is that they’re supposed to be self-destructive, but every once in a while they mutate and survive. It’s very…un-tidy. So, someone else must clean them up. I’m a professional, trust me on this.”

She reached out and touched Martin’s chest. His heart seized up and rattled his ribcage with tight tremors. He collapsed to the floor, sending shock-spirals of glitter into the air. He couldn’t move. He struggled for breath and watched Sunny clean his bedroom.

He watched, weak and helpless, as Sunny Potterton gingerly disassembled his life’s work. He watched her static soaked hands systematically shatter the carefully bound bones of his Sparkle Shrine.

He watched as Sunny delicately opened the mouth of the man in his bed. She pried his jaw wide with one hand and then inserted the index finger of her right hand deep into his mouth, as if to pluck out a pimento that had lodged in his trachea. The man began to blister immediately as the electricity brought him a quick death.

Martin’s chest tightened again, and he had to gulp down breath between pounding heartbeats. He hung his head and struggled to breathe as the electric Sunny destroyed all he had created.

He was shocked to find he could feel everything she was doing in his hands and body.

In the aftermath of the attack the air was thick with the cloying smell of exposed rot. Martin was curled into fetal position on the floor. He could no longer see Sunny and wondered where she had gone.

He heard a voice, familiar and somehow still comforting, calling to him.

“Martin…Martin…”

It was Sunny. She was calling to him from his living room.

He stood and stumbled toward her. He followed her burning footsteps in the carpet down the stairs and into the living room, where he saw her crouched in front of the television, one hand already immersed in its glowing surface.

“I’ve got to go back, Martin. I’ve got a rigorous schedule, and I feel my work is done here. Overall I love what you’ve done with the place. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

The black oval in the center of Martin’s talking box opened wide and pulled Sunny back in, sealing off with the sound of Sunny’s cold, business-like laughter.

Martin reached out to the glowing screen where Sunny was talking about the seasonal life of orchids. He wanted so badly to be in there with her, especially now that his life here had been destroyed. He watched her soft, blonde hair lilting in the autumn wind; saw her hands diving into black soil to make room for seeds. He wanted to be with her. He thought that he might be able to make Sunny bleed in that world, if he could get in. He grabbed the sides of the talking box, reared his head back, and swung it forward.

A corona of fire bloomed from the glass where his head shattered the screen. Electricity sparkled across the surface of his blackened flesh like so much glitter.

Last Thoughts Drifting Down

I.mpact bears fruit. A great blossom of fire is given to the world in one billionheat moment. So fast, and full, and the sky knows what it is to be swallowed up, to be designed and undone, to give power to heat as a parasite, to fail in the face of a formula that solves itself (600 billionths of a second to make the introduction, uranium-233 a seed to bloom to tree to cloud).

And something above becomes nothing below, feathers to dust, and with the taste, that first life, the introduction to other creates

I

Am. and the feeling is not one of being torn apart but rather of being put together, as if all the matter before me was part of the whole and just misunderstood the potential for growth.

But I educate.

And everything that was I, and tried to run, is torn to Us, loose atoms at last, joining me, slipping back fast to the ever expanding

I
of the storm.

To be perceived is to be understood. Those that become part of I leave traces, thoughts, and though nothing slows there is a feeling of moving backwards, of understanding that I have been

Made. in the minds first. My initial vibrations created synaptic tremors, bred obsessions, turned thoughts black and spread logicancer. Hot, slick foreheads dripped sweat on blueprints, the fluid from flesh trying to blot the ink that would undo it. But the concept was indelible.

We could make this. It could work.

Should we?

Nervous laughter, shifting in chairs. They have nightmares that go unspoken, sweatdrenched fever dreams of black birds, dripping fire, tongues expanding until skulls burst. None of it stops the vibration.

A rose blooms in the desert, child of a new Trinity. Proud fathers show photos. It is an introduction.

Should we? The world applauds with fear in its bellies. It is a strange vindication for a life’s pursuit.

Photos can be doctored.

I
vibrate in the minds of millions.

We want proof.

An island washed clean by my birth. My afterbirth scars the air. The land itself becomes sacred and heavy with reminders of my birthday.

As tribute the witnesses shed what had turned black inside, scream, and their cells promise to bear no children.

The. people think I am an end, but they remain as long as I do. Last thoughts move from the electric to the sub-atomic and grow dense at my center where they collide.

I can’t see, how come I can’t see   Our Father who art in heaven

If I can just get underground, if I can dig then   No

Wake up, wake up, wake up      I thought I’d be holding you when this happened

He owes me twenty dollars  I love you, I love you, I lo

She never got to see my face or anything     Shit, my hair, am I burning

It’s about time    Great, now the T.V. won’t work  I can’t even remember         Where’s mom, oh

Breathe, just close your eyes, and bre

Destroyer. Some think it (even those who view my birth as a blessing think it at the moment I touch them and sink white silhouettes into stone behind them).

An old man with a placard predicting my arrival yells “Destroyer, unholy light, bringer of death” before I wash through him.

He’s smiling as he yells, as if I am an old friend. His last thought is thankful.

You finally came.

I deliver him to dust, and slow. The feeling throughout my body is heavy and

I
drift
down
and spin within my own winds. I move with siltskin and vomit ash from a million mouths.

Last thoughts turn to lightning in purple bruiseblack clouds. Few remain to witness my glory.

Of. those who still breathe, no lungs go untouched. Alveoli implode, hearts boil.

I
change but never stop growing.

Each cell introduced becomes part of a chain. Eyes burn, blood coughed to the ground is granted a new purpose.

To contain what I have become. To radiate and sing my secrets to anyone who passes, to spin a siren song as old as seawater and promise change.

Worlds. are within me now, the knowledge of every cell that spins to earth as ash and falls to soak the soil with my legacy.

Others exist within me, cradled in my heat, moving stones and breathing with new plastic insect faces. In concrete rooms beneath the soil there are mothers sneaking potassium iodide into baby formula and cursing now extinct world leaders. Some steal televisions that will never run again. Some stab, some rape, some run forward as if I have an end just beyond the horizon. Their skin soon knows my secrets and learns to sing, each cell vibrating in tune. A woman weeps next to a dog kennel filled with dust. A man is carried across the ground in a suit made from cockroaches. A small boy makes snow angels in the ash and smiles at the clouds.

There is an echo, a question whispered beneath my swirling winds.

Should we?

There are cities painted black, populated by blast-shadows.

From the cities, no response.

Swimming in the House of the Sea

The retard is finally asleep, which is great because now I can head down to the hotel swimming pool and relax. I can finish off this gut punch of a day without thinking about the blown engine on my sedan, or the lung-sucking heat tomorrow’s sunshine will bring.

It’s time to get this nasty, reeking desert sweat off my skin and just float in the clear, chlorinated water. I picture myself, arms and legs extended wide, a big floating X in Hawaiian print shorts. I’ll close my eyes and hover there in the safe, sanitized water, floating static and alone while the world rotates around me. I can let the cool water roll into my ears and amplify the sound of my heart.

I grab my plastic key card with its generic sun-and-palm-tree logo and the words “Casa Del Mar Resort Hotel—Bakersfield, CA” across the top. I slip it into my swim shorts pocket and seal the Velcro shut. I don’t grab one of our ratty, dishrag-thick room towels; there should be some plushies down by the pool.

I take a quick look at my brother, Dude, who is seventeen and still wearing pajamas with Looney Tunes on them. His too-far-apart eyes are twitching beneath his eyelids, which I read as deep sleep. The sound of his breathing fills up the room, eclipsing even the hum of the air conditioner. His thick snore is the final nail in the coffin of my evening’s eligible bachelorhood. Even if I could find a girl to hook up with in this festering armpit of a city, I can’t bring her back to the Snore Suite at Casa Del Mar.

I close the hotel door behind me, clipping off the sound of my retarded brother’s stertoric breathing. I hate the sound of Dude’s breathing, when he’s asleep. It’s like he has to fight the air to pull it in, all sniffles and snoring and open-mouth rasping. Or, as my dad once said to my mom, before their divorce two years ago, “Maybe Dude can’t breathe right because God wants him to stop.”

“Stop what?” asked Mom.

“Stop breathing, living, all of it. Maybe God’s hoping he’ll give up and die.”

Dad was a charmer back then, right before the marriage fell from its hippie foundation. Mom decided that Jesus was her new savior, and told Dad that he had to stop making acid in the tub. Dad got turned off by Mom’s newfound fire-and-brimstone, her nightly Bible readings, her orthodox self-improvement. He shuttled his drug engineering to placate her and secretly reinvested his energies in the pursuit of free love.

Free love turned out to be an ex-Hell’s Angel harem member who claimed to have been in a gang-bang with Sonny Barger and Bob Dylan back in ‘65. Her name was Jasmine and she still lived in LaLaLand, Dad’s preferred real estate.

Jasmine lets my dad drink Jack Daniels from her cooch.

Dads will tell you this kind of shit after a divorce. They think it affirms a newfound buddyhood. The illicit info just bugs me out, but I don’t tell him. He seems happy, to a degree. The older I get, the harder it is for me to question the guy’s decisions. He’s just some older version of me that got caught up in responsibility barbwire.

My Mom’s Christ fixation popped the wheel on their party bus. Dad scoped out the life ahead of him, realized living with a bum, a mongoloid, and a Bible-thumper wasn’t going to cut it, and bailed. His decision to run makes sense to me, but it kills the odds on us ever being buddy-buddy.

I only have to see him once a month anyway, when I pick up Dude in L.A. and bring him back to my Mom’s place in Modesto.

I run the errand for Mom, Dude’s custody deal stays smooth, and I get free rent at my Mom’s townhouse in lovely northern Cali.

The free rent soothes the sting of being a twenty-one-year-old college drop-out, and it opens up a lot of bonus cash for things like clothes, weed, and new tattoos. So, to supplement my video store clerk income, I make this long, hot drive once a month.

It’s retard trafficking, and I dig the kickbacks.

Casa Del Mar is a shade short of seedy. The wallpaper varies, floor-to-floor, and there’s an odor hovering in the air, with the particles of carpet sanitizer. It’s the smell of trapped people, desperation; it’s the smell of nervous drug deals, inescapable affairs, lonely masturbation, junk-food binges that spray the air with fructose and crumbs. It’s the smell that’s coming from me, the stale sweat that a bad auto-breakdown in the middle of the desert has soaked me with.

I can’t wait to get clean; there’s just one more set of stairs till I hit the lobby floor and the swimming pool. The elevator is, of course, stationary for the time being, although a lovely computer-printed sign did apologize for the inconvenience.

I get to the pool entrance, scan my room card, unlatch the door, and walk onto the tile floor. The pool is standard hotel issue, nothing fancy, and the depth tops out at six feet, which means no diving unless I want to surface sans teeth. There’s a hot tub to my right, full of foamy bubbles. Someone must have had laundry detergent on their shorts when they went in.

There’s a large, square skylight over the pool, but it’s been steamed opaque by the overactive hot tub, and I can’t see all the stars. Shit, the star view’s got to be one of the only reasons to inhabit a Godless desert like this.

There aren’t any plush hotel towels in the area, so I’ll have to drip dry on the walk back to my room. Hopefully the hotel catches a little carpet mildew as a trade off for my inconvenience.

The chlorine smell to the air is pervasive, which I find comforting. Caustic chemical odors make me feel safe inside, protected from the bacterial traces of other hotel residents.

I set my key card on the tile in the far left corner of the pool area, looking over my shoulder as I do it, despite the absence of any other pool-goers. Then I jump into the deep end, feet first, and the water splashes up and feels perfect on my skin. Cool, and clean, and mildly astringent. I dip my head under and push off of the wall with my feet, shooting to the other end of the pool with a few strokes of my arms. I open my eyes just before I hit the wall, and the chlorine burns, but the view saves me from smashing headfirst into the circular light mounted at the shallow end of the pool. I close my eyes again, and stand up.

My heart is beating fast as I surface, and I feel the water rolling down my skin, sloughing off the sweat, and engine stink, and frustration of the day. I reach up to push the excess water away from my eyes with the back of my hands. I hear the door to the pool area slide open, then hard, flat shoes on tile. Then, a voice.

“All right, sport, up and out. Pool’s closin’.”

I open my eyes and see an eighty-year-old man wearing a hotel security outfit, the type of outfit that’s vaguely cop-like, but not so derivative the guy could spend his after work hours impersonating a real officer. For example, there’s a white iron-on reading “Casa Del Mar Security—Rollins” where a badge would normally be. Still the guy’s got a take-no-shit demeanor to his creaky, old voice, and his shoes are so spit-shined I can see my pale face reflected in the tips. I’m confused by what the geriatric justice dealer is croaking at me so I ask him a question.

“Excuse me, Rollins…”

“Mr. Rollins, young man.”

“Okay. Yeah, sorry about that. Mr. Rollins, the brochure up in my hotel room said adult swim is until eleven.”

I can see the guy looking me up and down, catching the tattoos, the earrings, making quick judgments, deciding to take the zero bullshit approach.

“Brochure’s wrong. Pool’s till ten, hot tub’s till eleven.”

I’m not sure how I can respond to this, but I know that I need to swim more, that one lap hasn’t shaken the dirty aura of the day off me. I smile and shoot for polite, even though inside my head every single one of my friends is laughing at how soft I’m playing this situation.

“Okay, Mr. Rollins, I certainly understand hotel guidelines, and intend to respect them, but do you think I can swim for maybe twenty more minutes? I swear I won’t drown or make a mess, and I’ll be a happy hotel resident. I could be here for days, you know, my transmission blew out today and I’m pretty much stranded until my Mom FedEx’s some cash.”

Rollins looks like he wants to throw up on me, on my hokey obsequiousness, on my reliance on my mother. I can see inside his head.

The little puke needs money from his Mommy. When I was his age I’d already fought in the Great War and started a 400-acre dairy.

“Nope, hotel needs you out of the pool at ten. We’ve got automatic chlorine. Stay in past ten and you’ll get burnt. Up and out.”

So there I am, up and out, dripping but not ready to go back to the room; back to Dude and his loud, sickly breathing. I turn away from Mr. Rollins like a sullen thirteen-year-old, walk past him with my feet slapping wet on the tile like soggy fish, and twist the bubble-jet knob by the hot tub. I can hear his ancient voice-box rattling behind me again.

“Hot tub’s only till eleven. Then it’s up and out.”

I don’t even respond. I stare down at the mountain of foamy bubbles and wait for the old bastard to hobble on to other duties. It’s a relief when I hear the door close again.

The hot tub is a poor substitute for the calm, cleansing waters of the pool. The heated water doesn’t smell half as chlorinated and there’s a dead wasp floating near the drainage bucket, little legs raised to the sky, frozen in a permanent backstroke.

The water feels too hot; the steam from the surface is on my skin like new sweat. Unclean. Hot and unclean. Too many Goddamn bubbles; I’m waiting for a floating Lawrence Welk to pop up and play me a tune. I consider making a beard out of the bubbles, Abe Lincoln-style, but the urge passes. Mr. Rollins already infantilized me enough. I lean forward with my hands in front of me and watch the bubbles squiggle through the interstices of my fingers. It is mildly soothing, and I start to relax until I hear the pool door opening again.

I’m ready to fight Mr. Rollins tooth-and-nail to stay in this rotten little tub. Maybe if I splash him he’ll melt like that witch from Oz.

I crane my neck and notice with a little relief that Mr. Rollins has not returned. My new pool buddies are a couple of guys. The guy on the right is bald, with ruddy red cheeks, white chest hair, and a bit of a paunch above his black swim trunks. The guy on the left is younger, maybe my age, and has a full head of black hair, a slim moustache, a flat, nearly concave chest, and is wearing a pair of long, green surf shorts.

The young one’s carrying an inflated beach ball, which seems a little off. Screw it, maybe people are really into beach balls out in Bakersfield. This is definitely the kind of town where you have to make your own fun. Earlier today I was spitting on the hot concrete beside my broken down ride, timing how long the saliva sizzled before evaporating.

I watch the new guys for a moment, to make sure they don’t steal my room card. My paranoia goes into overdrive when I travel. Everyone wants to steal everything I own. I relax and remind myself that all I really have right now is my gimpy brother, some stale bagels, and a business card for the auto shop I left the sedan at earlier today. Not exactly the Ark of the Covenant, but you never know what some people will try to steal.

The two guys step into the pool, and I contemplate telling them about the automated chlorine, but decide not to. It could have been a deviant lie on behalf of Mr. Rollins. Besides, it might be more fun to watch these guys get a chemical burn before Rollins comes back to lay down the law.

I turn back to my tiny bubbles and try to ignore the splashing noises to my right. I massage my right leg, aching from the pedal pushing I’d done until the tranny blew out on the highway. The jets seem to have cooled down the water in the hot tub a few degrees, so I decide to put my face under the water. I want to let the water rush into my ears so that all I can hear is my heart and the movement of the water around me.

The water seems a little grimy, so I just hover there, with my face an inch from the surface of the water, running my hands through my hair. The warmth of the water and the mist from the bursting bubbles is actually pretty soothing, and pushes me towards drowsy. I snap out of that right away, and lean back against the tub wall. The idea of passing out in the tub spooks me to the marrow. What if I didn’t wake up? Would the hotel staff find me in the morning, a skinny, tattooed slab of roast beef, pink flesh floating off the bone ready to carve? I picture Mr. Rollins throwing a sprig of parsley on my corpse, then gesturing to the hotel staff. “All right, he’s done. Up and out.”

My guts are starting to heat up and the tub doesn’t feel fun anymore, but if I bail too soon I’ll feel like Mr. Rollins has won. Won what?

I start to look for an answer in my head but I’m distracted by the sound of my new pool buddies batting the beach ball back and forth. They’re laughing and saying things to each other, but the weird tile acoustics in here muffle everything. They seem happy.

I wonder if Dude would like to play a game like that? Simple fucker, I’m sure he would. I could wake him up, bring him down here and introduce him. The beach ball guys would laugh when I introduced my brother as Dude, myself as Wolf. People always laugh at our names. I don’t bother to explain the situation to them, how our parents spent the seventies on some tripped out Kahlil Prophet shit and decided, in all their addled wisdom, to let us name ourselves. If I ever bother to breed, I’m naming the kid before it even pops out the womb. Some nice, Biblical name. I’m sure Mom could help me come up with something.

The paunchy older guy gives the beach ball a good whack and sends it flying above the pool, a high arc of rotating color, blue, to white, to yellow, to white, to red, to white, to green, and it lands outside of the pool, rolling towards me. The heat of the tub and the noise from the Gidget brothers has killed any chance I had at relaxation, and as the ball gets closer to me I swear I’ll pop it if I get the chance.

The twentysomething kid with the scrappy little moustache jumps out of the pool and picks up the ball before it has a chance to reach me. He regards me quickly as he grabs the ball, and I give him a hard look, the good old aimless ice grill.

Aggression without reason is a bit of a stress reliever in itself. Let somebody else absorb the shit I’ve been through today.

The kid nearly runs back to the pool, and jumps in with a splash. I’m sure Mr. Rollins would consider that horseplay. I wish there was a convenience phone right by the hot tub so I could rat these guys out and simmer in peace.

I lower my shoulders beneath the water. I sink my head so that my eye-line is just above the tile border of the hot tub and watch Paunchy and the Moustache Kid play their mutant beach ball game. There are no apparent rules, they’re just batting the thing back and forth, but the Moustache Kid asserts he is winning. He screams it up at the skylight. “I’m winning! I’m winning!”

Watching them play makes me think about Dude, about how we used to kick a soccer ball back and forth for hours in the back yard while Mom and Dad sat on the porch and roasted J’s and listened to Iron Butterfly. Special times, right? Didn’t last though, because I kept growing and Dude didn’t, really. By the time I hit high school Dude had left standard issue brother status behind and become My Retarded Brother. Our parent’s marriage was beginning to crack around the acid-fried edges, and a lot of the responsibility for Dude got sent my way.

I dodged it, begged out, and abandoned the duty. I figured I’d only be young once, what right did my parents have to saddle me with their mutant chromosomes. I hadn’t even really talked to Dude for two years, when Mom offered me the free rent/mongoloid transport trade off.

We still don’t talk much, although Dude likes the sound of his own voice, and will go on at length about cartoons, and sailboats, and his beloved Elton John. When he gets agitated on car rides, we listen to Elton John’s “Carla Etude” over and over again till he chills out.

I hate Elton John. I hate “Carla Etude.” I hate bad transmissions and overpriced mechanics and crying brothers that can’t be reasoned with because the Elton John tape is stuck in the deck of my broke-ass sedan. I hate all these movies that make retards look like saints and idiot savants, because I spend a lot of time with Dude, and all he seems like to me is a fucking broke-ass person whose brain won’t click over and work. Yeah, I sort of hate Dude.

I hate these guys to my right, playing baby games in the pool I was supposed to be relaxing in.

I keep watching them and now they’re wrestling with each other, and I wonder if this place is turning into a Roman bath house. They’re smiling, and laughing, and pulling each other’s hair. The Moustache Kid leaves long scratch marks on Paunchy’s back.

I couldn’t see it before, but I do now. I thought they might be business men ending a long day of conferences, or some kind of daffy foreign sports enthusiasts.

No, these guys are together.

This beach ball business is foreplay. Some kind of weird, childish foreplay killing my last shot at chilling out.

My dogshit day has fully invested itself in me. I’m seething, angry in my bones.

I have to do something.

I pop out of the hot tub, jump into the pool, and snatch the multi-colored beach ball from the Moustache Kid’s hands before he can even comprehend what’s going on. Then, as quickly as I got in, I’m out, dripping on the tile with their ball clutched under my left arm. I turn to face the guys.

The Moustache Kid looks five seconds from crying, and it’s a weird, questioning look on his face that I can’t fathom, so I turn to Paunchy and say, “Pool time’s over. Up and out.”

I pop their beach ball between my hands, and feel the stale air move across my wet skin. Paunchy is coming towards me, his face and bald scalp bright red.

I hit the light switch and bail out of the pool entrance, leaving the buddies back in blackness. I begin to run, wanting to enjoy this but not quite able to bring any laughter to the surface.

I hear the pool entrance open behind me, then slam shut. I run a little faster as heavy, bounding footsteps rush up behind me.

Before I can react, there are wide, heavy hands upon my shoulders, spinning me around a like a little top and grabbing me firm again. Then I’m being slammed into the wall behind me, and I’m face to face with Paunchy, feeling cheap plaster tinkling down on my scalp where my head impacted the wall.

Paunchy’s breath is on my face, hot, and he’s got me looking right into his wide, brown eyes.

“Why?” he asks.

“Why what?” I play dumb. Paunchy won’t stand for it and gives me another good smack into the wall.

“Why? Why do people like you have to ruin everything?”

“Ruin what? Your stupid little game? Your faggy little pool party?” I’m about to piss myself, but Paunchy’s reaction is so unexpected that part of me is still tweeking, playing tough. And I don’t know where the “faggy” business comes from. The whole straight/gay thing is a non-issue to me. Pick a hole, have at it. I don’t care.

Paunchy shakes me again, demanding my attention, his eyes on the verge of tears.

“You think we’re gay? What do you know? You don’t know anything; people like you just want to take things away, to hurt people like me, like my son. My son is crying now, back in that pool, and I’ve left him alone.”

I’m nervous, beginning to stammer, confused. “Yeah, but the guy should be able to handle himself, he’s like twenty…”

“You fucking jerk, my son is schizophrenic. He can’t handle things like a normal twenty-year old. That’s why he’s crying right now. Because of you. The kid never has fun, his brain’s got him all twisted up, and he’s scared all the time, like he’s stuck in hell. But he was smiling tonight, he liked the game, he liked the pool, and you took that away. And for what? I mean, can you tell me why?”

I have no answer for the man. Which is bad, because he’s balling one of his fists and I’m thinking he might want to beat an answer out of me. Where’s Mr. Rollins when I’m about to be maimed?

Paunchy shakes me again, just short of furious.

“Why did you have to mess with us?”

I have no answer for the man.

His son exits the pool and approaches us, stops just short of my right shoulder. His eyes are red and bleary. He speaks. “Hey, Dad?”

Paunchy takes a deep breath, then responds, “Yes, Michael?”

“Dad, there aren’t any towels by the pool.”

“Well, there should be some back at the room. Do you know where that is?”

“Yeah, Dad.”

“Okay, well, head on up and I’ll meet you in a sec’, okay?”

“Okay.” The Moustache Kid walks away and turns to the stairwell. He is shivering, although the hotel is stifling hot.

The kid is shivering because of me, because I popped his ball and left him behind, in the dark. His dad leans in close to my face, our lips almost touching, his eyes deadlocked to mine.

“I’m going to go take care of my son.”

I want to say sorry, to say something, but nothing comes across my lips.

Paunchy throws his meaty right fist into my soft belly and I hit the floor. He spits a quick, harsh “Fuck you” before turning to the stairwell.

I manage to retain my lunch and start breathing again. I half walk, half crawl my way up the stairs to my floor.

I reach into my Velcro shorts pocket and come up with nada. My Casa Del Mar room key is still down at the locked pool, but I don’t want to risk running across Mr. Rollins, or head to the front desk and ask for a replacement.

I knock on the door for two minutes before Dude wakes and opens it. He’s confused, and tired, and wants to know why I’m bleeding.

I tell him I took a bad dive, down at the pool, that the deep end wasn’t deep enough. I don’t mention the large, angry man who decided to crack some drywall with my skull.

Dude walks me over to our bathroom, the legs of his rayon pajamas whisping against each other. I sit down on the toilet and Dude puts a towel to my head, which has developed a steady, jackhammer throb. Dude presses the towel down too hard, while he’s trying to staunch the blood seeping from my split scalp. It hurts, sending quick, white-fire pain down my spine, and I lash out with my left arm, pushing Dude into the bathroom counter.

“Stay away from me, you fucking retard.” He’s out the door quick, and I flop off the toilet, then re-position myself to vomit.

I take off my clothes and crawl into the shower. I start the water up, sharp and cold, to try and wash away the whole day, the whole evening, everything. I can hear Dude crying in the other room. I’m good at that, I guess. I try, but I can’t work up any crocodile tears for myself.

The shower isn’t helping. I’m trying to make things right inside my head, trying to replay the pool situation in a way that doesn’t make me feel like a total asshole. The cold water isn’t helping my noxious headache.

I get out of the shower and dry off. I throw on some flannel pants and wrap the last clean, ratty towel around my head, and hope my scalp wound will clot soon.

I walk out to the air-conditioned hotel room and see that Dude has cried himself to sleep in his twin bed on the left side of the room. I sit on the edge of my bed and look at my brother.

My vision is blurring, and I probably have a concussion, but it feels right to look at him like this, like for once I’m the vigilant and caring older brother. I think for a moment about all the times I’ve told My Poor Retarded Brother stories, playing the pity card to get into some drunk girl’s pants. I think about the times I’ve seriously considered abandoning Dude at some rest stop along the highway, picturing the guilty relief that would spread across my parent’s faces when I tell them Dude had disappeared.

For the first time, the thoughts feel like poison in my bruised belly. I don’t know how to shake the feeling. The digital clock on the bed stand reads 3:23. I collapse into my bed.

I can’t sleep. Things are too wrong to sleep.

So, at 3:27 I slip out of my bed and into Dude’s. I let one of my arms flop onto his thin chest. He wakes for a moment; his thick, unsteady breathing smoothes out. He turns his head towards me, and opens his eyes, surprised that I’m there.

“Wolf?”

“Yeah, Dude, it’s me.”

“Okay. Are you going to sleep by me?”

“Yeah, Dude.”

“Okay. Hey, Wolf?”

“Yeah, Dude.” The irritation I’m trying to shake comes back into my voice.

“Sorry I hurt your head earlier, Wolf. I didn’t mean to.”

I’m thinking, “It’s okay, I know you didn’t mean to, and I’m sorry I hit you, I’m sorry for so many things.” I can’t get the words out of my mouth. Looking at Dude’s wide eyes, hearing the care in his voice, I’m almost paralyzed.

Then my whole body is shaking, and I can tell I’m a moment away from sobbing. I wrap my arms tight around Dude, and shake against my will. I don’t cry out loud, because I don’t want to upset him anymore. I hold the tears in and feel heat radiating from my face.

He can tell I’m upset and he runs his fingers through my hair for a moment, each finger tracing a soft line across the side of my head. Dude whispers to me.

“I know, Wolf. I know it hurts. But you’re going to be okay.”

It’s like the little fucker wants me to cry. So I do, I break, and I cry for longer than I ever have before, and Dude just keeps running his fingers through my hair until I stop shaking.

When I’m done, all I can think to say is, “Thanks, bro.”

Dude repeats it back to me. “Thanks, bro.”

Those are the last words we speak before Dude slips back into sleep. I want to pass out, but I consider my probable concussion and fight to stay awake, while my brother fights to breathe.

Should he stop breathing, I’d be there to save him.

This is the oath that I swear into the too-bright sunrise, as the desert heat returns and our room at the Casa del Mar fills with new light.

Wall of Sound:

A Movement in Three Parts

Entrance

Right at the fucking kick-off, I’ve got to ask you to do something you’re not going to want to do.

I’ve got one issue before we go any further.

It’s that friend you’ve brought with you; the friend who always carries you through darker times like this; the one who helps you wake up in the morning; the one who feeds you breakfast and better aspirations; the one who makes tomorrow seems like a birthday cake filled with cash.

Yeah, that friend.

You’re going to have to kill him.

End him.

Push him to the ground and crack his mouth wide open; slide his teeth onto the curb until you hear enamel chipping against Reddi-Mix pavement. Start stomping.

Kill your friend. It’s for your own good.

If somebody like that ever stepped foot in here, in a place like this, they’d chew a fucking hole through you to escape. He takes one step over this threshold, you won’t survive.

I’m not the bad guy here. I’m a realist. And I’m asking you to do me a favor.

Just one favor, and we can proceed…

I. BURN/Liquidation

“E-bomb?”

“Yeah, right here, yo,” drops out of my mouth in response, even though I promised just about everybody I know I would go straight for a while, and even though my serotonin levels are so dangerously low I’m too depressed to even bother to kill myself, and even though, and this strikes me as particularly fucked, the kid dealing looks a lot like the old bearded Christ, and smells of cold beef and paint thinner.

The stinky guy scopes over his shoulders, digs the scene. Digs on me, a very long, sly look. He’s not gay, just clockin’ to make sure I’m not El Narco Federali. He checks out my gigantic denims, the tattoos, the sunken eyes, sunken chest, sunken general demeanor, makes his assessment.

“What you need, dog?” rolls out of his mouth, low and greasy sounding over his thin, chewed on lips. Damn! Breath like hot turpentine on this guy. Flash second passes, I wonder if he’s dealing to support a hardcore paint huffer habit, but then I check myself. Those types are so low rent they could never get up the capital to start dealing. Spend half their fucking time with “Gold Glitter” Dacryl spray paint flecked on their mugs, vomit in their hair. You get near them and you can smell the burning brain cells and hear the sizzle in the cerebellum, the screams of the million vanquished bits of gray matter. Huffing is like a fucking Personal Mental Genocide Program. Is that a band name? Probably. I bet...

BUY THE PILLS AND TAKE THEM!

I’ve got a vicious mental drift problem, so I have to force myself to focus. Get the drug, the drug is what matters here. The e-bomb, MDMA, ecstasy. Definitely more important. Get, acquire, consume, start the party, put the jumper cables to the old kicker for one more stretch of beats and dancing. Dig on the lasers. Stinky Christ is getting impatient with my spacey behavior, so I ask, “Got any Mitsubishis of Applejacks?” Dependable old favorites.

“Nah, man, nah, you don’t want that shit, that shit is old, old old, played out,” he says, slow, with emphasis on the fact that my favorite drugs are now “old old” which I guess is about as old as shit can get these days. “Nah, for twenty-five I can get you these double stack Karaoke e-bombs, or you can try the new shit.”

My first reflection is this—Do I want to play guinea pig for some backwoods chemist?

Second reflection—Is this bitch-looking doper just trying to pass his bunk goods off on me so he can give his quality pills to his regular customers?

Third—Is looking like Jesus a real aesthetic choice, or just something that happens to skinny white kids that don’t take care of themselves, hygiene-wise?

Fourth—Why am I talking to this flipped out Christ cat when the party is really starting to go off. Especially when I could be right up by the main speakers catching some basswaves and putting some moves on that blonde doll with the pink hair and translucent angel wings?

Final reflection—None. Thoughtless. Urgency and impulse kick in, thought replaced by need for the pill, the pleasure, and now, now, now, NOW, NOW!

“Yeah, lemme see the new stuff, yo.” As Stinky Christ pulls his little knit (from hemp, I’m positive) satchel out from under his natty jacket I wonder when I started talking this stupid. Ending sentences with “yo” cannot sound good or reflect on me positively, in any way. Not even in a smirking ironic asshole kind of way. I have to squat to get to my secret pocket hidden on the inner, upper right leg of my big-ass pants.

I pull out a little wad of cash, a couple of twenties and eight one dollar bills, which I will spend later on bottles of water to be consumed almost perpetually throughout the night. I have “The Dehydration” brand of drug fear, ecstasy and coke specific. The quantity and frantic quality of my e-bomb generated dance moves causes me to sweat in profusion, and I’m not sure of all the details, but I heard some shit once about liver necrosis and electrolyte washout that sounded crazy ill. Of course, on the flipside I heard
about the roller who drank so much fucking water he got hydrotoxification, and died from drinking too much water. I only bring in eight bucks, so that I drink a lot, but don’t drink so much that my body bloats like a loofah.

I unroll the twenties, make a final scope for John Law or those steroid sucking pricks that run security for these parties, and make my purchase. In the Unkempt Dealer’s hand, forty bucks. In mine, two clear gel caps filled with an unknown yellow and black powder.

Quick thought. “Yo, what’s in these, dog?”

The skinny kid is all smile, more of an Aum Shinrikyo smile than a Loving Savior smile. “You’re gonna dig it. Some pure MDMA, some DMT, and little bit of mutant type-A streptococcus. I call ‘em Roman Candles. They light you up and blow you the fuck out, yo. Peace. If you like ‘em, tell your friends. I’m the ice cream man.”

Funny guy, stepping up to me with that copped “yo” shit, and he has the nerve to tell me he put bacteria in my drugs. HA HA HA, that’s one class act sense of humor you’ve got there, you fucking jerk. Laugh it up. Back in the day I would have rolled him, but now I have to kick all this peace, love, unity, and respect shit, so I walk away, towards the beats and the girls. I’m thinking, for some reason, “I’m a bigger dumb-ass than that guy.”

Backlash for the violent thoughts. I’ve done too many drugs to play tough any more. Spell it, B-U-R-N-O-U-T. No one constant emotion, no steady thoughts.

Kicking out the rave-style stroll now, part dance/part walk. Big bounce in my step, head nodding with the four on the floor basswaves being dropped by DJ Northern Light. The music is percussive, tight and jazzy. Standard bass, snare, and cymbal House arrangement, with some nice distorted bass arpeggios under it, and every third measure there’s a fat keyboard stab. I’m feeling it, locked into the beat and I’m not even rolling yet. Best to play cool early, bust out a couple of dance moves, but don’t get crazy. I have to save that for when everybody is high, because, ugly truth be told, I’m not the tightest dancer and I know my moves will better represent to those who are deeply and chemically fucked. If you get high enough you can watch a guy wearing a Winnie the Pooh backpack slowly spinning some glow sticks on strings, and actually think, “WOW! I am genuinely amazed at this display of talent! Hooray for this!” Which, I’m sober enough to recognize right now, is fucking ridiculous.

I go up by the speakers and scope out the party. Buzzed, majorly buzzed now, just off the music, and maybe the presence of so many girls who I know will never ask me for commitment. The right kinds of girls treat me like a party favor. They use me, then the party’s over, lights go up, the drugs wear off, and I’m discarded along with the no longer glowing plastic tubes, unwanted flyers, empty water bottles, and countless wads of bubble gum.

Which is fine by me. I don’t really need them as long as I’ve got the drugs.

JESUS H., MAN. YOU ARE A FUCKING BURNOUT! Listen to yourself.

Yeah, I better reprioritize soon, but I have parties laid out for at least the next three months. I’ll get on that priority shit later, yo.

No worries. No unnecessary judgment of self. Every once in awhile my conscience likes to kick thoughts up without asking me to think them first. Like Jiminy Cricket with no Goddamn tact.

“I fucking hate myself,” I’m thinking, and suddenly, too suddenly. If I’m not bi-polar, I’m working on it. I try to ignore the thought, feel the music, close my eyes and move. The place is too hot, the venue sucks, and although I like DJ Northern Light I’m not vibing off the House any more. I want some Speed Garage, some Jungle, even some Happy Hardcore, anything that will push me harder, push out the thought, make me just feel.

Time to hit up the Roman Candles.

I’m hating this party so bad I decide to give myself a good, brutal brainfuck, and I slip both of the pills into my hand. They sit there in the soft, lazy flesh of my hand, and they feel warm. The lasers above my head reflect dimly off the smooth gelcaps. I get a big, fat smile, and I’m thinking (or maybe just feeling), “Yeah, here we go!”

As I lift the pills to my mouth I hesitate for one tiny moment as I feel both of the e-bombs shift unexpectedly in my hand, like Mexican jumping beans. “Come on dumbfuck, there are no insects in your pills. Goddamn burnout! Eat ‘em!”

Down the tubes, and it feels like they shift inside my throat too. I shouldn’t
have dry swallowed. Secondary gag reflex, then it passes.

Downtime. I’m waiting for the pills to kick. I’ve had DMT before and I’m starting to hope there’s not too much in these Roman Candles, but done is done. I saw a guy on T.V. once who could purposefully regurgitate any item he swallowed, be it car keys, marbles, whole eggs, prophylactics, whatever. I do not possess this skill, so the pills will remain in my belly. Swimming in the nervous acid.

I’m really starting to sketch on the DMT, hoping I won’t see God, or cherubim, or anything too otherworldly. People who see that type of shit have a tendency to forget to breathe. I’m a lifetime respirator. Breathing is life. I love feeling my lungs expand, sucking in the air.

Shit, now I’m thinking on it too much; I’ve become aware of my breathing. I have to mentally contract my diaphragm. I have to will each breath. In and out, in and out, try to circular breathe, in through the nose, hold three seconds, out through the mouth. In three, hold three, out three, the magic three. Focused. Relaxing. Let the autonomic system take over, you dumb bastard.

The percussive waves pushing through the room speed up, gaining the steady stomp of sixteenths. Nice. The DJ just segued into some Hardcore. Yeah, I’m feeling this. I start walking around, spying the mean-ass grimaces on the people’s collective faces, diggin’ it big time. Hands in the air, frantic limbs twisting, heads really bopping, sweat dripping, some peoples eyes closing, just really feeling it. My nervousness assuages a little, mellows out, although I briefly get the What If This Hallucinogen Makes Me Claw My Fucking Eyes Out Because I Think I Can Never Come Down fear.

It is a valid fear; I’ve seen the fallout of a bad trip before.

Two years ago, at a house party in Eugene, I saw a girl trip so hard on her own mug in the mirror that she flipped permanent-style. She’d been staring at her face for too long, maybe five minutes, and then she started brushing her teeth with someone’s old, blue toothbrush, the kind with the little red rubber thing at the end that looks like a perfect chocolate chip. She murmured something about circles, and something else about her never being clean again, none of us ever being clean, and then she started scrubbing her teeth. No water involved in this, just a big glob of Aquafresh Whitening and that old plastic hygiene utensil. The look on her face was so intense I had to bail, even though the bathroom was the one quiet place in the party where a kid could really just bug out on shit. Anyway, a few minutes later I’m out on the back porch, seeing purple eyeballs in the sky and all that, and I hear a girl inside screaming these awful, wet screams. Typically good blotter renders me mad coward, but I charged into the house anyway.

Mistake. In the living room, backed into the corner, was my toothbrush girl. The front of her white tank top was covered in red and white, blood and toothpaste foam. Her right hand was wrapped like a claw around the brush and the plastic bristles had been flattened. Her fingers, the utensil, and her face were all soaking crimson. Her mouth was a big black hole, oozing blood over her lower lip and down her neck, where some of it had already coagulated, thick like jelly, in the hollow of her throat. She looked like a trapped animal, deeply sad, deeply scared, and most of all confused.

She looked around the room, and then she dropped the toothbrush. Backed against the corner, she sunk to the floor, slow, face oozing bubbly red paste. My brain and my stomach flipped, and I darted outside, knowing that nothing good was going to happen in that room. Out on the deck I heard her start to sob, and sort of scream at the same time. “Mommy, mommy, uagghh, I, I, I’m cleeeeeaaaann now! Clean!”

I vomited on the way to my car, smelled Chicken Noodle Soup, spilled beer, copper pennies and bile. I was too high to drive, but way, way too high to be anywhere near that nightmare. Too much ill shit. Too much reality. Too much of a fucking After School Special “Tragic Moment of the Week.” I hope I never bug like that, but they don’t call DMT “The Rocketship” due to its lack of effectiveness, so I have to focus, remember that nobody trips forever, except for schizos and Italian film directors.

“So,” I think to myself, “what’s the agenda, old sport, old chum, pally of mine?” I can’t answer, figuring that it is kind of too late to do any planning, knowing that I just have to go along with the ride, check the vibe, maybe dance a little later, when the bomb really hits. Maybe, a couple of hours after that, find a girl, whatever, just to talk, maybe a little more. Maybe find some “buddies” doing coke. It’s amazing how fast I can become close friends with somebody I spy chopping out some fat, white rails. The duration of the friendship usually lasts from the moment I find out they have coke, to the moment I start tasting that nasty, acetone-type drip. Then I run away. I actually run sometimes. Fucking tweeker. I simply cannot be trusted.

I decide to kick around the party some more, purchase some water, enough to keep me hydrated for at least an hour. I hang on for an extra second at the bar, hoping to catch a little lingering eye contact with the hottie in the silk looking haltertop with the Japanese/Chinese/Taiwanese/Pekinese/etc. symbol on it. She’s too busy, no go. Fuck it, just keep moving. Pondering the current club kid fetish with all things Eastern, wondering how many kids out there are tattooed and variously adorned with Asian symbols that don’t mean what the kids think. Like my friend Perry, the dumbfuck gets a huge, black and green tattoo of a Japanese kanji symbol between his shoulder blades. Guy at the shop told him it means “courage.” Two weeks later an exchange student from Daihatsu or wherever spies Perry by the Olympic size pool at the university, asks him why he has the word “eggplant” tattooed on his back. Perry was crazy pissed. Too ashamed to do anything about it, though. He trusted the lousy biker fuck at the shop, and now, barring any highly expensive laser surgery, he will spend the rest of his life proudly festooned with the word EGGPLANT in bold ink on flesh.

I decide it’s time to dig on some Jungle, and at thinking this I suddenly get this deep, blood-level urge to hear some hard, dark, rapid beats. I really need it. The power of self-suggestion renders me frantic.

I see kids headed down a narrow staircase towards, I hope and pray, some sort of Jungle DJ room. Shit, I didn’t even check the flyer. I never do anymore. What if there’s no fucking Jungle, just a bunch of Goddamn sissy ass disco-fuck booty fucking House? Fucking useless, prancy worthless disco redux bullshit!

Whoa! Whoa there, boy! Just feeling the speed of my drugs kicking in. Check pulse, verify it as way above average. Need some beats to match it. Jungle definitely, maybe even some Breakbeat. Need audio saturation, waves upon waves, the old Phil Spector Wall of Sound.

I push my old Vans down the staircase, stepping around two fucking e-tards who clearly took their pills way too early and will probably be lying dazed and sedate in each others arms by three in the morning. The two are making out crazy fierce, sweat pouring down both of them, hips smashed together, tongues playing. Just for a moment I start to jones, then I remember, “I’m here for the music, for the party.” Still, it looks like a real thrill ride. I probably wouldn’t have the easiest time playing pick-up with all this DMT that’s supposedly in my system, anyway. Waiting for it to hit, tick...tock...I want to be interstellar high in the next twenty minutes, I’m ready. I hit the bottom floor.

“This DJ is really punishing, man!” says the candy kid at the base of the stairs. I can’t focus, the room is too hot, way too dank, and I’m sure that with each breath I’m sucking down a couple of liters of other people’s vaporized sweat. These beats are so distorted, I can’t even figure out what’s spinning. Shit, the walls are tight, no room to dance. I’ll probably pass out if I spend one more moment in here.

Fuck it, I’m heading back up topside. Out of this moist little cavity, this bacterial barn filled with kids too high to notice just how nasty it is in here. I pass the e-tard couple on the way back up. Christ, it looks like a conjugal visit. As I roll by I say, “Yo, the Olympic Dry Humping Team try-outs are next week. Damn!” It sounded kind of clever in the split second where I generated the thought and decided to speak it, but as it’s coming out of my mouth I can’t help feeling oafish, gawky, and weird. I guess I get kind of bitchy when I’m waiting for pills to kick.

I head back into the main room, which is now definitely where it is at. The kid up top is still spinning Hardcore, some real rough, You Are All Going To Be Killed By Giant Robots Owned By Multi-National Corporations kind of Hardcore, with distortion that is just ripping my face off. I scope around, see kids sitting down already. Probably whacked some ketamine, forgot how to move. Dumb.

I’m trying to dance, starting to hop a little bit, getting the arms into it, putting on a big smile. Problem is, the Hardcore, combined with the rising sensation of being vaguely high is just making me mean. I feel like throwing up a fist or something, some kind of Slayer concert aggression. Knowing that any particular type of testosterone induced behavior would be frowned upon amidst this neutered “New Disco” set, I chill and head up towards the front to watch the DJ. Maybe he’s really cutting it up.

Here at the front of the room the DJ is oblivious to his audience. He seems to be concentrating on one knob on the mixer in particular, although with each of his manipulations I hear no actual change in the track. Wanker DJ style, making dramatic motions for the crowd while in actuality afraid to really mess with the mix, and make the song his own. Timid DJ’s deserve no credit. The records are spinning fast, the BPM on the mixer looks outrageous, and it looks like one of the records is by an artist called “Darkstep” which for some reason puts a feeling of terror in my belly. I realize I have about five seconds before my Rocketship takes off, the vibe is rising like electric waves. My nerves are acid tight and I can feel a strange burn just under the skin, like you get from eating too much niacin before a tox screen.

Finally, here we are. Highsville, USA.

Population: Me.

Mad pressure behind my eyes, like my systolic and diastolic just found out they were going to have an unwanted baby. I hope my blood pressure isn’t swelling the veins on my neck and forehead because it makes me look like the fucking devil, and I’m still thinking of getting my mack on, or at least finding a girl to get a back rub from, if I get too bugged out. Tingling on my scalp, like that “egg crack” thing kids used to do on top of each others heads back in second grade.

For one moment everything in my peripheral stops moving, like painted walls close on each side of me, and then, a moment later everything moves into top speed, playing catch up. Big grin from me, face spread tight, too happy, almost like a rictus, a grimace. Unnatural happy, like I can’t shake it. Fuck it, even a overbearingly dumb grin is better than the typical hallucinogen addled expression a.k.a. The Zoned Out Space Case Look. The empty “I just whacked back a brick of dusted cat tranquilizer and now I don’t know where I am, who I am, or how to move/ Dawn of the Dead” type look.

I don’t ever want to rock that style, and shit, now I’m thinking about zombies, ashen faces, bloody toothbrushes, etc. Which is bad under normal circumstances and tragic on DMT so I rush over to a speaker bank to try and clean my brain out. The good old Sonic Chimney Sweep.

Concentrate on the beats, focus, hear the layers, don’t think in circles. I grab the speaker grill right in front of one of the bass reflex areas, feel the waves, the warm air expelled across my forehead feels perfect, like a light breeze on a sunny day. I close my eyes and there’s swirling sunshine trapped beneath the lids, shifting, bright, with little purple and green bubbles in it. YES. The breeze from the speaker is giving me full body tingles, every inch is pulled tight, every tiny little hair on my head, my arms, the back of my neck is feeling the basslines, and I want to throw my head back in some sort of exaltation, but I fear that any tiny movement will alter the body high.

How long can I stand here like this, mated to the goddamn speaker? How long before some coked-out little candy raver tries to give me some Vicks? How long before I get bumped into? How long until some concerned little rave citizen asks me if I’m okay, do I need some water, or some gum, or something? Which of course I don’t need, and yes I’m perfectly okay, unbelievably okay right here in my little e-tard womb, as long as nobody messes with me.

I am content, and I imagine that this is what people who achieve Zen feel like, and then realize that if it is, I’ve really cheated my way into it. Forty dollars for perfect Zen. What a great fucking deal! Wait, I can feel eyes on me now. Bad eyes watching. What? Oh, don’t let me get the Fear, I’m like praying to whoever is up there and presides over tripped out little guys who get in too deep. Re-focus, catch the music again, trap it inside my head. New agenda: MOVE!

I can’t.

Which is bad.

Which is so very fucking deeply bad.

Um, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Move, move move move move move!

This feels wrong. My eyes won’t open. I know my heart is beating, I can feel it in my neck, along the carotid and jugular, and I must be breathing, although I can’t feel much shift in my chest.

MOVE! My body is not receiving commands. Fucking synapses aren’t connecting or something.

A new body high hits me. Right up my spine, sharp. Strychnine? No, not an option, don’t overthink, don’t panic. MOVE! A new skin tingle, like tacks being shot into me, then melting away. Not painful, but bad. Maybe. PLEASE MOVE! Shit, this is hazy. I keep fading my thoughts out. Just as I almost have one, really grasp it and think it, it blasts away with my pulse. PLEASE JUST MOVE! ANYTHING! DON’T FREEZE LIKE THIS!

Across my arms I feel these alien tickles, like insect motion, and I can’t brush it away. Then it whips through my arms, up the front of my chest (am I breathing?) and surges up behind my eyelids, pregnant with unwanted visions. In front of my eyes there is some kind of tapestry, seventies style, lots of pastels, paisley, some ornate horse drawings. Yes, definitely horses, with dark black scales. Fucking...what... lizard horses? MOVE! This is not good. I don’t like this. I can’t control this. The lizard horses start to run, black scales dropping off their rib cages, exposing dark blue liquid innards. They are charging away from me, hooves kicking up purple spots that rotate and smash into each other as they speed by my head, wherever that is. JUST FUCKING MOVE NOW! Just a toe, or an eyelid, or my feet or something. Maybe I’m okay. No. Can’t remain inactive. Why can’t I hear anything? Where did the music go?

Then.............BAM!.............and the music screams back into my head, my eyes pop open. OhthankGod! Eyes under control, move something else. I shift my head up slowly, it feels dense, and there’s more pressure behind my eyes, like weights stitched to the optic nerve, seeking the ground. I want to get to the restroom, throw some water on my face, maybe sit down further away from the music. Oh shit, my hands burn. I must have been smashing them into the speaker grates. I peep at them, and know I must be out-of-my-noggin fried, because it looks like they are bleeding, like the speaker grates sunk right into them, the criss-cross pattern pushed into my skin. I recall the sage old Geto Boys, realize my mind must be playing tricks on me. It really looks likes I’m bleeding though. Fuck it, even if it is real I’ll just suffer the wound, and remember not to press against the grate so hard next time. I head towards the restroom.

Everyone I walk past seems made of plastic, even though they are moving. Like little machines, each engineered for one specific task. Look, there’s the machine that hops up and down, and over there is the little thing that just nods its head, and there’s the good old “passed out in a puddle of his own vomit” machine, and to my left is the “chewing holes through her own cheeks because she forgot the fucking bubblegum and is clearly remiss about it, and doesn’t know quite what to do” machine, and by the wall we have the “stretching-its-calves” machine, number 112558.

My little world, everyone else is plastic.

Shove my hands in my pocket, and they really do hurt, sharply. Damn. I’m probably bleeding all over my sixty dollar denims. As I walk away the DJ looks sinister, hunched over the decks like he has some kind of weapon inside and he is just waiting for the perfect time to unleash it. Diabolical DJ and his Sinister Set.

I have taken some very bad pills, and I would now like some help, some comfort, some anything but this. I’ve got it bad now, The Fear, but I’ve had it before, and I can ride it out.

How? I’m surrounded by machines. Bits of plastic, minds of silicon/carbon composite. The floor feels like it is yielding too much. Quicksand? Picturing: slow death, no one reaching in to help me out, water and sand down my gullet, in my eyes. Out think this, damn it! Get to the bathroom.

I finally get to the restroom door, or rather it rushes up to meet me after a few confused and nauseous moments of staggering, and as I head in I remember one of my rules, which is to never go near mirrors while tripping. Monsters in there, monsters in me. I flush water into my face, turn away from the mirror and dig on two shirtless guys, absolutely glitter-soaked, licking each other’s hands. E-tard shit is almost enough to make me smile, but something seems desperate about their passion, empty, and besides, I’ve suddenly realized I need to piss.

I push past the licking buddies and into the bowels of the restroom, which is, of course, already flooding, and reeks of vomit.

Focus, unbutton my pants. Say howdy to the unit, give it the ol’ wink like “ ‘Ello there, chap.” I can feel pressure in my bladder, but the urine won’t flow. Staring at the wall in front of me, I spy a fucking old, green booger somebody was clever enough to smear there. There is a thick black nostril hair caked into it, with a crusty white follicle hanging pendulously at its end. My eyes can feel the weight at the base of the follicle, the slight urgings of gravity versus the co-efficient of friction that holds the follicle and hair firmly to the snot. I’m seeing in too much detail. The wall suddenly seems forty feet away; the trip is distorting my depth perception. I don’t want to force a piss, but there will be people waiting behind me soon, and the muffled sound of the beats is somehow scary in this florescent lit little hole. I look down at my dick again, try to visualize myself urinating. Like coach said, “Picture it inside your head and then make it happen.” There we go. It’s warm, too warm and sort of burning. More bad, just more and more bad from these pills.

“If I fucking find that dealer...” I think, but the pain at the head of my unit stops me from even thinking. I look down and see that the tail end of my stream of urine is rose colored. Shit. Blood from my hands? No. More and more bad, and now my dick feels like it’s on fire, like somebody opened up my urethra and jammed in a habanero pepper. My hands are bloody waffles and now I might have an STD or some shit. I’ve got to sit down and just drown out the world until this trip ends.

I’m wondering if the e-bomb is going to accentuate my current pain as much as it used to accentuate the pleasure. I shiver, shove my hands into my pockets, and head back out, body on fire from the inside.

People are looking at me.

All of them.

Even the people with their eyes closed. I can feel it, waves of paranoia, sticking to me like molasses. The room smells like fried meat now, and aftershave. Mixed signals everywhere have me scared, twitching and tweeking. I spot the PartySmart table and stagger over, thinking I can ask them for help or something. The PartySmart group shows up at the parties and tries to encourage kids to abstain from drugs (or at least use them wisely), provides information on safer drug use, and offers free candy, condoms, and other miscellaneous well-intended services. As far as their actual effectiveness they are kind of the equivalent of a band-aid over a cancer sore. They don’t do much, but it’s nice to have them there. It looks better, PR-wise.

At the table there are flyers with information about drugs I’ve never even heard of before, or maybe I’ve heard of them under different names. Blood of a Wig, Morning Glory Seeds, and Datura? What? Doesn’t matter. Focus, come down, get help.

A kid with a blue goatee and a Rainbow Brite visor on sees me, and says something, but I can’t understand what he says, through my panic. Sounds like maybe he said, “Treble morph de dealy whopper, man.” It doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters in light of what my eyes just focused on. I’m staring at the light blue flyer taped to the fake wood surfacing, and my heart is about to explode.

It’s right there, and I touch it, real as day, I can feel the paper fibers, see the black ink lightly reflecting the pulse of a far off strobe. Too real, in bold print.

“WARNING—DO NOT PURCHASE DRUGS FROM THIS MAN. HE IS A KNOWN FELON, AND HAS SOLD HIGHLY DANGEROUS AND POTENTIALLY LETHAL DRUGS DURING AT LEAST THREE PARTIES IN THE LAST YEAR. HE IS A MEMBER OF THE NEO-NAZI GROUP KNOWN AS ‘THE LIGHTNING REICH’ WHICH HAS BEEN SPECIFICALLY TARGETING THE RAVE COMMUNITY FOR HATE CRIMES. IF YOU SEE THIS INDIVIDUAL PLEASE IMMEDIATELY ALERT LOCAL AUTHORITIES, OR LET SOMEONE AT PARTYSMART KNOW! THANKS, P.L.U.R.”

Underneath the text, ugly as when I met him, is the one-and-only Stinky Christ, my chosen-at-random dealer for tonight’s little get together. His name is apparently “Morton Greens,” although that has to be an alias. I just can’t imagine a Nazi I could call “Morty” for short. Less facial hair, but still definitely him, definitely, and I think I can smell him, even through the picture. I need to throw up, and the PartySmart kid can tell something is wrong with me. I’m probably five shades of white right now, but I can’t talk, I have to run away. To anywhere else. This is too real.

On the way into the main area I run into a door and my left hand leaves a smear of red, still oozing blood. I can feel the head of my dick, one hundred percent on fire now, like how I imagine a steam burn would feel, and I might be crying. Things are blurry, the music is too loud, relentless. I’m confused, fumbling, trying to think about the Stinky Christ, trying to convince myself that I’m having a deeply bad trip and that in reality I’m probably just curled up in a corner somewhere, shaking, but the pain is too real, too sharp. How could that guy be a Nazi? He had so much hair! Nazis can’t have hair! Shit, everything I’m trying to dig on is so blurry. Not a dream, my guts are fucking burning, really, incontrovertibly burning. I’ve eaten poison. My heart is going so fast now I can’t even differentiate beats, panic through my whole chest.

Then I look around, and see hell, only this hell comes equipped with lasers, and strobes, and disco balls, and beats, which is all somehow much worse than a traditional fire and brimstone brand of hell.

Kids everywhere are doubled over; the one closest to me has a string of bloody vomit hanging from his lip. It looks like his little plastic necklace is sinking into his neck, scraping into his trachea. What did Stinky Christ a.k.a. “Morton Greens” feed us? Flashback on his joke, “...mutant streptococcus...”

NOT A JOKE! FUCKING SHIT!

My ankles roll out from under me. The floor is carpeted but I feel the concrete slap right into my skull. My skull gives too much, crusted red hands reach up and bring back new, wet blood. I can barely do it, but I shift my head across the ground, crane my neck, and see him behind the DJ booth.

It has to be him, fucking “Morton Greens” wearing an old World War II gas mask now, along with his hippie “camouflage,” grabbing the live P.A. microphone. It’s clear he wants to speak, but he seems to be having trouble finding the right switch with that mask on. I don’t want to hear his voice, I just want a fucking ambulance, some help, anything.

Oh shit, “Morton Greens” found the switch.

The proud Aryan brothers of the Lightning Reich have a message to deliver to those of our race who seek to escape their duty...

What duty?! Fucking vapid Nazi bullshit, man! My head is throbbing, it feels thick, heavy, and loose on my neck, like if I move it any more my head will separate from my neck, accompanied by the sound of tearing paper.

Oh, God, please let me come out of this, I’m done tripping, done tripping, give me back control, fuck all these drugs, fuck Nazis and turntables and giant pants and stillborn relationships based on mutual drug abuse.

...to the Great White Crusade, to The Cause. Those of you before me this evening are suffering because you seek escape from the responsibility of our great brotherhood. You will die tonight because you chose to.

You will die tonight...

Fuck the candy kids with fake angel wings and candy jewelry and even all the
beats. Fuck all this bullshit and give me back my life and take away this pain.

Let me wake up.

Nobody is listening. “Come on,” I’m thinking, as I see security rushing around, as freaked out kids step over my body in a rush to the door, “I repent, man, let me come out of this.” My head feels like it is burning now too, and I can’t see anything anymore. I try to open my eyes. I have to see, have to crawl to help. I reach up gingerly to open my eyelids with my fingers and the tissue has too much give. Too much pain everywhere in my body, I didn’t even feel my eyes rupture. They are soft in the sockets, like warm, wet, rotten little peaches. In my right eye socket my finger pushes up against the lens itself, hard yet yielding like a Superball, and now I feel the pain there…

...because you and your regressive and pagan behavior are contributing to the weakening of our race. The members of the Lightning Reich have decided that you race traitors have contributed to our decline long enough. Now, we are cleaning up the mess, before the next generation is affected by your weakness, your ignorance, and your lack of desire for true societal advancement according to the rules laid out by The Turner Diaries.

Enjoy your last trip.

…and the top of my head is burning white hot, like an insanely sharp ache somehow, the whole head feeling rotten and close to caving with each throb, and “Morton Greens” seems to have stopped talking, and now I can hear screams, too many screams, too many of them pitched up ridiculously high, like the squeals and bleats of the slaughterhouse my aunt took me by when I was eight, and it feels like maybe my guts just spilled out, but I’m too afraid to reach down and feel, I just want to wake up, and I think God’s a real bastard for allowing me to trip this hard, oh please let this all be a trip, and someone is screaming for their daddy across the room, and I want to cry but my eyes exploded so I just scream and scream, and realize that the DJ likely ran from the building but he left the albums spinning, and I can feel the beats through the floor, vibrating my flesh and quickly rendering it into something less and less substantive, and I’m hoping now that if this is real I will die, and soon, and I’m also thinking, somewhere much further off, “Welcome to my After School Special,” and I want to laugh, but my throat just dripped to the floor,

and

I

cannot

breathe.

Passage

Of course, there’s more to it than just that, than just the suffering, the screaming.

There are worse circles I could have shown you. Places where the physical doesn’t even have a chance to manifest. Places with razor-filled wombs, acidic air.

Places with nothing at all.

I could have left you there.

But you did me that favor. You abandoned your friend at the door, and with quite a bit of gusto.

How did you know your fist would fit down his throat?

No response? That’s okay. You’ve seen a lot today.

Best to remain quiet, even as we leave this place. You don’t belong here with these charred remains. But mistakes have been made before. Quicksand seldom pushes people back up to the air.

So let’s move quickly, eh?

This next place were headed to, it’s almost as bad. Worse, in my opinion. Hope can be torture.

The people here, they think they’ve got a fucking chance to get out, to move up to the next level.

Sometimes I come here just to watch them. Just to laugh.

II. PURGE/Deeper

1 deep

[mdma/dextromethorphan/methamphetamine]

and I’m still feeling everything (too much) and I’m waiting, with a bitter taste at the back of my mouth like a whisper, its soft voice promising “Things will improve.” Tick tock tick tock tick tock... my heart beat is faster, but good odds say it’s psychosomatic (shit, if I could get a psychosomatic high all the time I wouldn’t need to eat this poison every weekend; just a clean placebo buzz burning through my system).

So the DJ bombs us with bass and everything is BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM (God, it’s got to be easy to produce trance, house, techno, jungle, any of it, just turn on the drum machine and strap a monkey to it, then hook that monkey up to an amphetamine drip, teach it to twist knobs, tap buttons, nod head with meaning) BOOM (no variety please, it might upset these regressive e-tards, any kind of musical spontaneity might just overload the pill-addled, pacifier-riddled waste around me, just keep it steady, straight and thorough, four to the floor, whip these constant beats down this corridor of escape, slap us into this sonic womb where the bass is so maternal) BOOM-BOOM-BOOM and we submit to the barrage.

WITNESS THE AMAZING ANTI-SOCIAL ASSHOLE WHO BITCHES ENDLESSLY ABOUT THE NATURE OF HIS PEERS WHEN HE SHOULD JUST SHUT THE HELL UP OR GO SOMEWHERE ELSE!

Yeah, where is this bullshit cynicism coming from? This used to be fun, right? I ought to head for the chill room, find my girl, do something.

I’m going to need another

2 deep

[dextromethorphan/pma/pseudoephedrine/guafenisin sulfate]

and I’ve found Mary talking to some guy who’s like twice as big as me with a neck like a Goddamn telephone pole, who also happens to be dressed like an Abercrombie frat boy and I want to just pop him, but like I mentioned, the girth is in his corner, and I’m two pills into my evening, just waiting, hands gripping the wheel at the front of my cerebral cortex, ready for that ZOOM, BAM, BOOM, BADDA-BING kick off, the moment where my veins all fill up with sex and my eyes close over and do that

squiggle squiggle squiggle flutter leftright leftright leftright
tremble/vibration shit that makes the world look like a perfume commercial, all soft and filtered and essentially perfect, but the pills have me agitated more than anything, so I grab her arm and spit,

“C’mon, Mary!”

“Oh, hey, Steve, hey, oh hey” and the eye contact from her is guilty for a split second, like maybe she was too interested in what this frat boy had to say, and then she turns it on, the fucking beams, all green iris and dark pupil and long eyelashes and pouting lips and that smile like whiplash and I cave in, all the aggression gone (have my pills just kicked in?) and I’m kind of okay so,

“Who’s your friend?”

“Oh, this is Dane. He’s very sweet, he’s a good soul.”

Her pills have already kicked in. Once she’s whacked everyone is “sweet.”

I picture it, sort of mad again, and she’s saying to me, “Honey, this is John Wayne…what was you last name?” “Gacey.” from the clown’s blood red lips. “Oh yes,” she sighs softly, “John Wayne Gacey. He’s oh so very sweet, a real gentle creature.”

Being innocent and naive and high all the time is about as safe as jogging next to the Grand Canyon with a blindfold on.

And people throwing rocks at you.

And strong winds pervading.

I say a little prayer for her every time we come to these “parties.”

“Nice to meet you, Dane. Mary and I have some very important business to attend to somewhere else in the warehouse. Peace.”

I grab her arm to pull her away and ask her why she’s fucking with me, but there’s instant resistance and Dane is puffing his chest out. I let the hand slide and turn away.

Bitches.

I need another

3 deep

[hydrobromide/dextromethorphan/baking soda/methylcloroisothiazolinone/mdma]

...and I’m thinking, “Only at a party this wack, shitty, played out, etc. would I ever have to buy a dirty looking disco biscuit pill of specious content from some Ketamine-soaked, half-assed drug middleman who has no idea personally what’s inside the pill that he just charged me twenty bucks for. He also apparently has no grasp on the fact that wearing glow-in-the-dark jewelry, a surgical mask, and a Scooby Doo backpack will never, ever, ever look cool, no matter how many drugs are ingested by the collective party consciousness.”

HEY, OLD SPORT! MAYBE THIS GUY DOESN’T CARE ABOUT LOOKING COOL! MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, THIS GUY HAS A WAY FUCKED UP HOMELIFE WHERE POPS IS BASHING HIM ALL OVER THE HOUSE WHILE MOMS IS OFF SCREWING THE ROTO-ROOTER MAN, AND ALL HE DOES DURING THE WEEK IS TRY TO LAY LOW, HEAL, AND HIDE! MAYBE THIS “BULLSHIT” IS HIS ONE WAY OF ESCAPE, HIS TINY, GLITTER SOAKED RELEASE THAT HE VISITS FOR JUST A COUPLE OF HOURS EVERY WEEKEND BEFORE HEADING BACK TO HIS VARIATION ON THE DOMESTIC NIGHTMARE! MAYBE THIS MUSIC, AND THESE DRUGS, AND HIS WEEKEND COSTUME, AND HIS WEEKEND PERSONALITY KEEP HIM FROM TAKING HIMSELF OUT HEMINGWAY GUTBLAST STYLE!

Yeah, yeah. Bored with it. My conscience. Hasn’t said anything in my favor for a long time.

Where the hell did Mary go? I look back to where she was chatting it up with Dane the Suburban Neanderthal and spot nothing but empty carpet-space.

It’s four in the ay em, I’ve eaten sixty dollars worth of ecstasy, and I can’t find my girlfriend.

Fucked.

Quiet for a moment, thinking about loyalty until I realize that I’m three BOOM-BOOM pills BOOM down and the music the Music THE MUSIC(!) is sounding so good I just want to sink it into the base of my fucking skull and vibrate with it like that sequence in that one cartoon (the one with the replicating brooms) where all those strands of color start dancing around with the sonic waves, the red and the green and the blue all shimmering and smashing into each other and they like BOOM what the... oh ... oooooh leftright leftright squiggle squiggle leftright BOOM oh SHIT! and my one way flight to Highsville just blasted off at 747 speed so my brain is burning electric and all I can do is listen and dance, pounding feet, pumping heart, and it’s all so good, sososodamnright
just dance  just dance just dance faster

yes, this feels right just dance the music is G.O.D. here
just

keep

moving

heart beat BOOM-BOOM please don’t stop
it’s all fucking  all of this is fucking

BOOM overandover BOOM-BOOM-BOOM

high

don’t stop yes, so      (finally) keep dancing

replace my heart with a twelve inch polyurethane cone and turn up the bass just BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM overandover
head nodding, self approval and sweat dripping

burning.

just dancejustdancejustdancedancedancedancedance

HEY, ISN’T YOUR HEART BEATING A LITTLE FAST!? MAYBE YOU SHOULD RELAX, GET SOME WATER! DO YOU FEEL OKAY? WHAT WAS IN THOSE PILLS? WHERE’S YOUR GIRLFRIEND? WHAT’S YOUR GIRLFRIEND’S NAME? WHERE’S DANE? WHAT ARE THEY DOING? WHAT DID YOU EAT TONIGHT?

...fucking conscience.

BOOM this is all too good, I don’t feel like thinking about myself ANYMORE! (I don’t feel like thinking).

Escape.

Where’s that kid in the surgical mask, he’s my brother now and

I need another

4 deep

[dextromethorphan]

What a riot, buying a pill from a fourteen year old girl wearing tin foil angel wings. Looked a bit like my little sister so I felt guilty for wanting to run my tongue down the crack of her ass.

YOU ARE LOW CLASS AND LOST, MY FRIEND! PLEASE GET SOME WATER! JUST ONE BOTTLE OF WATER AND I’LL BE QUIET! YOU ARE COOKING YOUR BRAIN! DON’T PUSH IT!

Oh, wait, don’t move for a second and let my eyes re-orient themselves, I can’t see straight and it’s leftright leftright leftright leftright leftright leftright leftright leftright leftright leftright it won’t stop now, I can’t focus leftright leftright leftright
leftright leftright leftright leftright leftright leftright leftright leftright.

I want to dance/I can’t even see. No match up. Dysfunction. Lacking the proper means.

SUNBURST behind my eyes, FLASH like a punch to the skull, only it came from inside my head, and I want to throw up.

WHERE THE HELL IS MARY?

I have to sit down (I feel five years old right now and I’m scared and I’m shaking).

So hot, just curl up, maybe someone will bring me water, I’m sweating so hard, I can feel it pooling at my lower back, dripping from my armpits, and I have to close up (pill bug, HA) and shut down for a little bit, and I close my eyes and thousands of crystal castles are being built and destroyed on the inside of my eyelids but it’s not comforting or beautiful, it’s not real at all, it’s not the reason I came here (right?) and now I’m not dancing and there’s Mary standing ten feet away and she doesn’t see me and she’s not alone and oh my God there’s that frat boy and he’s got his hand on her ass and she’s kissing his neck like she used to kiss mine and I can’t see where her hands are but one of her elbows is moving with a steady rhythm that breaks my heart and aren’t they both so Goddamned sweet and healthy and why isn’t she looking for me I’m right over here on the floor and there’s another SUNBURST and my head, my head, my head oh

oh
oh

fuck

oh God   forgive me.

I want to rest now.

{shutdown, stasis, near myocardial failure, distension of vessels proximal to the brain, fluctuating consciousness, regurgitation}

I HATE TO COME OFF AS A SELF-RIGHTEOUS CONSCIENCE HERE PAL, BUT YOU’VE NEARLY KILLED US TONIGHT SO I FEEL JUSTIFIED WHEN I SAY,

“I TOLD YOU SO!”

shut up

Eight ay em in the morning.

Lonely, biologically toxic, near dead.

Smiling because I just found an accidentally discarded pill on the floor.

I open my mouth, close my mouth, swallow my poison escape route.

I step into the morning sun and pray that I burn today and shed these corrupted cells, this weak shell.

From the ashes, the million tiny phoenixes of my flesh,
pure and skybound.

Ascendance

This last place bothers me. Everything breaks down when you go inside.

Even you. You will collapse, but you’ll see the rest of what you’ve been looking for. There are no explanations in there. Only an unfolding.

No pain, but no real joy either. It’s almost nothing.

But it’s a better kind of nothing than I could show you in the lower circles.

There’s a weird hum to the place that makes my ears feel like they’re bleeding even though they are not.

Whatever you thought you knew, it’ll melt down in there.

It’ll liquefy and start humming. Vibrating. There’s a sequence to it I can’t peg, a rhythm under the buzz.

Listen to it, and maybe for once, the world will make sense.

Maybe, if you listen close, things will add up.

Maybe there’s an answer in there.

What’s that? Oh, “What’s the question?” Well, not to go Zen on you here, but what isn’t the question?

Clean the blood off your hands before you go.

Good luck in there.

III. TRANCE END/A Number of Things Come to Mind

The Clearing At the End

4 Morning of August 23, 2002, 7:06am

When Quincy woke on the twenty-third of August in Our Year of the Lord 2002, his mind had been overcome with numbers. All he could think was one, two, three, over and over again. Those three numbers, the first we learn, the first things drawn in chalk after A, B, and C, were all Quincy had left in his mind, repeating in an endless loop, a mathematic mantra stuck in the skipping record of Quincy’s gray matter. Quincy could not find a reason, or the will, or even the physical control to rise from his bed and greet the day. Quincy’s mind had become the VCR that God never bothered to read the instructions to, flashing over and over in the dark. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three...

The Path...

1 Morning of August 22, 2002, 12:31pm

12:31 will work. 12:32 will work. 12:33 has a Trinity in it, as in two plus one is three, and within the rules these two can be added since they are separated by the colon, and then the produced three is placed next to the two additional threes forming the digital Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. God in the numbers. You feel kind of pure if you rise when the alarm clock reads 12:33, like maybe if you let the Trinity into your head God won’t fuck you up so bad this particular day. Good odds.

12:34 though, that’s the winner. Sequential, one plus two is three, one plus three is four, and their reversals, and the whole batch adds up to ten, as in base ten, the foundation of our system, which put all these numbers in my brain in the first place. 12:34 is classic. Absolutely classic.

I watch the little digital figures realign, then 12:34, in all its perfection, is right there in my face, and I’ve got 60 seconds to roll myself out of bed before the less than ideal 12:35 clicks on and ruins my day.

I’m trapped in the shower for 48 minutes until 1:23 hits, allowing my exit. I occupy the time by memorizing shampoo ingredients (methylchlorisothiazolinone is a favorite, it’s all prefix and has the same number of letters as the alphabet) and counting the holes in the shower head as the steam turns me pruny and leaves red streaks where the water courses down my shoulders, back, ass, and legs.

I stayed at my friend Chris’ apartment two months ago and got “stuck” in the shower. I counted tiles for close to an hour, until his hot water became so frigid it sucked my breath down the drain with it. I emerged dead white and when he asked what took me so long the first thing that came to mind to respond with was, “Masturbation. I was masturbating. It was great!”

Keeping an obsession secret means “engaging in subterfuge.” I prefer calling it that. Lying is haggard.

Lying is fucking necessary. Lying is the oil that keeps my duplicitous little lifestyle from overheating and turning into a grand and messy debacle. When you’re an obsessive-compulsive, pill popping raver who works forty hours a week as a commercial loan analyst for a very reputable company, lying becomes your life’s blood. I’d dry up and die without it, i.e.:

Do they have the credit to support that kind of debt?

Absolutely.

Are these e-bombs clean?

Clean as rocky mountain waters, man.

So you’d recommend I avoid the annuities in favor of increased debt?

Ultimately, in this kind of tumultuous financial atmosphere, this kind of loan is the only sure thing. So yes, and I’m telling you this as a favor.

What’d you think of my set, dude?

Best fucking psy-trance, deep house, gay French happy hardcore combo I’ve ever heard. Fucking royal, man. Plus you got the chicks fucking dripping for you. The best. A-number-fucking-1 brilliant man!

The debt to income ratio seems a little rough. Can they afford this loan?

You have to look at the context on this one. Trust me, pigmy goats will outsell even the Bavarian grass-seed this year. It’s a boom market.

Tell me it’s not the pills. Will you tell me you really love me, baby?

Butterfly Jasmine Moonbeam, you are the most radiant, genuine, beautiful person I’ve ever met, and for me not to love you would be like asking God to reach down and pull my soul out and stomp it into a hundred ugly pieces. Of course I love you. Of course. Of course, of course, Oh God, OF COURSE! It’s impossible not to love you, you have so much energy, and even though we’ve just met tonight, I know that for us to not share this energy would be a tragedy, and I’d regret it forever. In fact, I need to be closer to your energy right now.

What took you so long in the shower?

I was masturbating. It was great!

Lies are the shortest way to reach one’s goals, fulfill needs. I’m not devious, just efficient.

Psychopath is a label.

My late afternoon breakfast is Cocoa Crunch. I eat 88 inflated sugar puffs, eight per spoonful, eleven bites total. 88 works for me, and although I love the balance of the figure I always feel an unnecessary guilt in regards to the whole associative Nazi thing. The eighth letter of the alphabet is H. 88=HH. 88=Heil Hitler. My cereal consumption has no sublimated Hitler love in its pattern. 88 puffs fills me up. That’s it.

The proper time rolls over on my watch and I’m out the door with my car keys jangling.

2 Afternoon of August 22, 2002, 2:34pm

As Quincy drove across the South Belton Bypass on his way to work his mind clouded over and familiarity navigated. His subconscious was at the steering wheel, his autonomic system was regulating each breath and beat, his conscious mind was barely registering the passage of time and space. Every day, five days a week, he spent an average of fourteen minutes on the road to work, barring unforeseen circumstances like auto wrecks, construction, or the sudden metamorphosis of the pavement into a raging, great-white-shark-filled ocean. This last circumstance was unlikely, but Quincy harbored the irrational fear that the world could someday suddenly turn to liquid beneath him. In this liquid he knew they were waiting for him, the sharks, the great beasts, swimming in circles, staring black-eyed soulless stares at the surface, hungry, razor-sharp, and ready to consume him.

Solid pavement rushes underneath Quincy’s car as he zones out to a near meditation level on the Bypass. The thirty two beat/four measure syncopation of Jungle music blasting from his speakers pulls his brain into a level of sedate stasis. The density of the sound, the constant nature of the beats, over and over and over again with very little change barring the occasional machine breakdown noise, all of this feels right to Quincy’s brain. It matches his thought patterns, frantic and repetitious at the same time. One hundred and sixty beats per minute is Quincy’s preferred tempo. Quincy has, on five separate occasions, had his heart beating at the exact same tempo for periods of time long enough to exhaust most hummingbirds. The third time this occurred Quincy suffered a severe case of “ratchet jaw” and nearly ground his teeth away. He could taste the enamel chips and tiny shreds of old fillings as he noshed away his face. As Quincy ground his teeth to the smoothness of river rock his brain was stuck repeating the alliteration, “Many milligrams of meth, many milligrams of meth...” The shady e-bombs he bought often contained more meth than trailer park ground water.

Quincy wakes up from his drive-induced stupor just in time to park his Hyundai very attentively between the two faded yellow lines that indicate his spot at Sycorp Financing. Quincy loves the symmetry of a good parking job.

The next three hours find Quincy going through his motions. He processes, annotates, inquires, faxes, copies, designates, allocates, designs, aligns, contacts, files, piles, and manipulates. He twists numbers that illustrate weak income until they represent a sterling borrowing base. He smiles at co-workers and laughs at jokes without really listening to them. Quincy is not at work to interact. He is here because he loves numbers, and stability, and patterns, and dependability. He loves acronyms and tries to construct sentences out of them, which phonetically sound like gibberish. We’re gonna have to hepmar the roa if we don’t want a deeker off the admin pee icey, right?

As the right side of Quincy’s brain tabulates fourteen months of collected gross income adjusted in relation to five years of projected annual overhead, the left side of Quincy’s brain blackens. The blackness spreads in his mind, nulling and voiding what were once creative synaptic spaces, bits of colorful gray matter that lived outside of patterns and contained beauty and inspiration. The blackness spreads rapidly, like an ignited charcoal snake. The right side of Quincy’s brain, where Quincy’s soul had recently taken up residence in order to avoid the logicancer that ravished the left lobe, could not care less about the loss of the creative forces.

“Fuck it,” Quincy thought rationally, “I’ve got a 401k.”

“I’ve got my numbers,” Quincy thought, and the part of his character that still resided in the atrophied wasteland of his creative mind caused him to break out in goosebumps.

After working a tiny bit of overtime Quincy gets ready to head home, already anticipating the ordered chaos of the night’s rave in nearby Salem. As the clock clicks over to 6:23pm (reverse multipliers always work for Quincy) the automatic doors that open onto Sycorp Financing’s foyer close behind him, and he’s headed home.

3 Evening of August 22, 2002 11:11pm

Rats live on no evil star.

Picture, then, the virtuous star, swarming with vermin. Like this place. This fucking place is hip deep in vermin of homo sapiens appearance. The reverse palindromic logic plays out.

RADAR is the name of this party. Right now every element of the evening is soaked in palindromes, the time, the date, even the damn year, which is rare. I haven’t been this excited about a year since 1991.

I arrived at the warehouse at 10:11 (a beautiful spoken sequential) and was greeted by the familiar sight of speaker towers, sacramentally lit DJ booths, and hundreds of bodies moving in mathematically precise patterns.

It’s always the same at these raves, the same bodies, stuck in the same motions, the same minds locked into the same patterns of urge and abuse. It’s just like my work, all process, no progress. We move in these patterns, we manipulate them, but we never force the answers out of them. I’m looking for something in the patterns, during my more hopeful moments. I’d say data catharsis, but that’s not quite right.

Digital cleansing is closer.

When the acid hits me quick like this the connection speed goes way up. The Lucy I bought from Mortis the Tortoise is racing through my brain like a power line dropped in a bucket of salt water.

A boy who appears to be about fifteen is standing to the right of me. He is nodding his head mechanically and holding his left hand over his heart. His right hand is stiff, fingers outstretched, and as he shuffles his feet with the music his hand traces the form of the cross from his head to his belly and then shoulder to shoulder. The Catholic raver is easy to spot. They swallow their MDMA communion and then wash over with guilt and serotonin at the same time. Thus, the rhythmic supplication.

The girl in the baby blue tank top to my left has made the same figure eight motion with her arms over two hundred times.

I’m not the only one stuck in these patterns. I’m aware of it, that’s the difference.

I’m dancing listlessly to some boring four/four tech house, trying to get my brain deeper into its patterns, but it seems to be too simple. It’s just one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, over and over again, the least inventive drum pattern on Earth.

Bored. Four hits of acid deep and I’m bored.

I’m watching a golden frog make love to a gorgeous Aboriginal woman with purple eyes. This is happening on my left shoe. It’s a worthless, meaning free visual, and I’m bored with it. This tech house is intolerable and the inevitable stink of rave sweat is bringing my dinner back up my throat for a second appearance.

Time to up the ante and try it. Time to give in to the temptation that always hits me at these parties. Time to exercise my affinity for all things Trinity, the big 3 x 3, tres squared, nine hits of liquid. Three threes, nine at once. If I can ingest nine hits of acid at one time, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost will all jump behind my eyes and show me some pulsing, blinding, “tear it all down and restructure the fiber of reality in a new and superior way” type glory. The numbers work. Nothing beats the Trinity.

I’ve got the money for it. I do the footwork and spot my target, who appears to be selling some ecstasy to a family of four, two teens, a nervous dad, and a soccer mom.

Some say the rave scene has gone mainstream.

I wait for the Bradys to bail with their dope and then I make my transaction. Thirty dollars in Mortis the Tortoise’s pocket later I’ve got a carefully dropped puddle of liquid Lucy in the palm of my left hand. Mortis thought I was crazy, but he’s ultimately a capitalist, and has a hard time placing ethics or the safety of others above profit. So, he’s got enough money to buy a couple of CD’s and I’ve got enough acid to fry a herd of elephants.

I hesitate for twenty two seconds, pulse slamming with fear, the kind easily overcome by desire. Then I drop my face to my palm and quickly lap up my path to righteous digital cleansing.

3 x 3. A perfect triangle consuming my mind.

As if my act of faith had been rewarded the music slamming into us from the speakers speeds up and increases in density. The beats get faster and faster, grow closer and closer together, until they seem like dots forming a straight line of sound. I rush up to the front right speaker bank, and just as I get within two feet of the bass cones the interminable build crashes like a wave and a breakbeat almost knocks the air out of me. These piston driven speakers force the beats into my bones and vibrate my connective tissue. The sound is so thick here. I’m on the edge of a roaring forest fire, and for a moment I smell smoke. Then cotton candy, and I’m smelling it with every pore on my face, sucking in the smell through a million tiny mouths on the surface of my flesh.

“Oh fucking shit! Yeaaah!!!” someone screams to the right of me. My thoughts exactly. Jungle makes me feel like that, it contains ecstatic patterns, vortexes and sound-whorls. Being this close to the speakers gives me the sensation of being tossed around by a sonic tornado. The decibels are giving the mathematic and relentless jungle music substance, flesh. It is here to deliver us.

I stand erect in front of the speakers with my palms facing towards the sound, subject to it.

I close my eyes, and for one second I recognize the madness (123) of what I’ve done. There are thirteen total hits of acid doing God knows what in my brain right now. I have done this in pursuit of a vision, an escape. Part of me wants to run to the hospital right now and hook up a thorazine drip before this chemical roller coaster hits the drop.

I ingested the Trinity. It is too late.

I can feel the air from the bass impact cooling me in my ocean of acid-sweat, vibrating every tiny hair on my body. In my head it sounds like a high pitch whine is being run through a vocoder, getting louder and louder...

eeeee...eeeeeeeeeee...eeeeeeeeeeeeeee...eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...

Then the doses hit at once and the world blurs thick in front of me like clear wax had just been poured into my eyes and when it washes away there are three trees in front of me dropping fruit and the fruit itself is made of crystals, millions of tiny, precise, and exact crystals, and I see people with no legs dragging themselves up to the trees and trying to bite into the fruit, which then whirls at blurring speed and shreds their faces into mists of bone and

“Oh shit! This dude’s eyes are rolling back in his head. Dude, are...”

blood, and the blood gets pulled into the soil by these tiny blue veins that twitch like surfacing worms and grow thick with the blood of the legless people, whose bodies are decomposing into soft puddles, which are

“Rachel just ignore that. Some loady always has to fuck up the vibe, huh?”

themselves absorbed into the roots of the tree, and I look up from the ground and see these armless people walking in perfect circles around the tree, bellowing these low, threnodic moans, and some of them are staring at me, their eyes emptied of hope, and I’m trying to make sense of this when suddenly I’m looking at my hands, and they are moving without control, each

“Just fucking back up here, people! He needs air. Somebody get the EMT...”

of them in front of me, tracing patterns that emit sound, like crystal humming, and I realize my hands are chasing each other along the infinite path of a Mobius Strip, and I feel something opening up in my head, and then I’m falling backwards and when I land and regain my footing I am

“..repeat, we are in transit to Mercy Central, we should arrive within...”

looking at two identical versions of myself, there are three of me in this small, black room, and I am inside each of us, all three of me (123), and we are pushing small wooden pegs into our hands, through the tissue, which welts around the wooden pegs until the surface can’t bear the tension, and the peg pushes into our burst hands and numbers swirl out of the hole and rush up my arm and the numbers (123), millions of them, a vast legion of crawling

“...we need a chemstat CPC, and intubate him if he continues to...”

numbers are seething over our/my skin, eating away at it, chewing down to the bones, chewing in through my eyes to my brain, where they begin to circle, trapped, storming and then all I can see is a huge, dark orange sky

“Please restrain his arms, Peters, he could seriously harm himself if...”

swimming in numbers (123), and the pattern formed by the endless millions is pushing directly into me, into I, into my eye, which is perfect because eye is the name of the Trinity, Zeyeon, Eyesis, Oseyeris, I and Eye, three letters, each with three extensions when printed EYE, that perfect three at the center

“That’s not possible. How can there be no brain signal at all? He’s breathing.”

of it all, every element of my existence has always been here in my mind, there is nowhere else worth being but here, God and eye are one, three in one, three in 1, 3 in 1, 3,2,1,1,1,1,...

1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3,1,2,3,

1,

2,

3

1

These numbers are all I ever needed. It is all I am. I am One. Two. Three.

Author’s Notes:

The League of Zeroes—When this story first appeared in Verbicide magazine, one of the accompanying illustrations featured the main character, onstage with his brain in a box, wearing a crown of thorns. This struck me as both unexpected and intriguing. I mean, this guy’s not offering to absorb anybody’s sins, but he’s certainly gone through a lot of pain to be blindly worshipped by the television hoards, so he’s got martyr status, I guess. But that assumed martyrdom shit would not fly in the Heartland.

Dissociative Skills—I was in the parking lot of the Lancaster Mall in Salem, Oregon, about to go over a speed bump in the parking lot, when this idea came to me: Guy gets high and guts himself for fun. Then I thought: You should not write this. So I wrote it that night.

Amniotic Shock in the Last Sacred Place—This story originally appeared in Pain and Other Petty Plots to Keep You in Stitches, a themed anthology centered on the hideous surgical art of acclaimed painter Alan M. Clark. In his “Pain Doctors” series of paintings a crew of cruel doctors experiment with human maladies and suffering in new and innovative ways. Knowing this may help you make more sense of the story. But probably not. There are two paintings that originally accompanied this story, “Terrible Infant” and “The Indifference of Heaven.” You can see both of them, and more of the brilliant art work of Alan M. Clark, at www.alanmclark.com.

Precedents—Okay, I know the whole backwards thing has been done with Memento, and Irreversible, and Nas’ song “Rewind,” but this story just works better in reverse. You can, however, start at the end and read it from the bottom up to get a more traditional mystery, but you lose the emotional impact. I’m pretty proud of the murder method, too, since I’m a fan of closed-room mysteries.

Snowfall—This is me on valium, trying to alleviate my own fear of impending nuclear disaster. The style is so much more sedate than my other stories, but for some reason this is a lot of people’s favorite. It’s pretty, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Ex-Hale—I always watch the supposedly dead people in films. Tom Hanks flubbed his first feature film role by blinking after he’d been shot dead. And there’s a very powerful scene in Mystic River that was pretty much ruined for me when I spotted the corpse taking some subtle breaths. You’d think they’d have decided to use dummies by now.

Working At Home—I was raised on Stephen King. And I’m obsessed with parasites. And Cronenberg. So now you’ve got this traditional and ultimately nasty story of wormy body-horror. Keith Minnion did a great piece of cover artwork (one white wriggly worm perched on an eyelid above an open peeper) when this was originally the Featured Fiction in THE EDGE: Tales of Suspense.

Priapism—Manatees make me sad. The ending to this really bothers some people. Personally, I probably could have aced the father’s “punishment” when I was fourteen, with no damage. Calling fourteen-year-old me “hormonally driven” is like calling Citizen Kane “slightly influential.”

Luminary—I mainlined an ounce of crushed ants once, and briefly entered the “hive-mind.” It turns out they mostly think about food, sex, and shelter. And strangely enough, dentistry. This is the only “nice” story I’ve ever written. It makes overly-sentimental people get misty, but I just like the imagery and Rockwell-meets-Twilight Zone tone of the thing.

Saturn’s Game—C’mon, you know you’ve had thoughts like this guy. Someone once told me that there’s no such thing as morality, and that it was just a social construct to eliminate a person’s willingness to do hideous things. Or maybe I just made that up.

Branded—Deep social commentary about the invasion of corporate America into the fiber of our lives, or emotionally immature gross-out piece? You decide. Makes me feel downhearted, either way.

The Sharp Dressed Man At The End of The Line—I think that technically the quote goes, “There are two things that will survive the nuclear apocalypse: cockroaches and Cher.” But the idea of having this fictional president walking around in Cher’s skin struck me as too unpleasant, even for this story. So you’ve got Twinkies, which I’ll wager also have a fair shot at survival. As a side note, any avid James Ellroy Fan can guess which of his books I’d read just a week before writing this.

Two Cages, One Moon—One of those “ripped from the headlines” pieces that I took and made into my own, only slightly weirder, story. And to people seeing some sort of childbirth metaphor with the nine-month-long kidnapping period in this story, stop looking so deep. What are you, fucking grad students? It was nine months in the real story. I kept it for my tale.

Sparklers Burning—Pour out a little liquor for M. Stewart, locked in the belly of the beast, making doilies with her new bitch Edna. For some reason I’ve always found arts and crafts materials sort of creepy. Do I owe Cronenberg for the momentary Videodrome imagery jack here? Yes, but don’t tell him. He’s vicious.

Last Thoughts Drifting Down—More nuclear terror, this time written under the influence of so many Mini-thins that I was literally dripping sweat while I wrote it.

Swimming in the House of the Sea—Probably the most traditional “literary” story here. No one dies, no one gets high, and nothing gets eviscerated, but I still like it.

Wall of Sound: A Movement in Three Parts—There’s an homage to Dante’s Divine Comedy here, but it’s nebulous and set in the Northwest rave scene. These are fun for people like me who love reading about people on drugs doing fucked-up shit. Now I could throw the standard literary terms around, the ones critics always associate with drug fiction, like transgressive, subversive, anarchic, cathartic, etc. but the fact is, people like to read about other people doing drugs and committing crimes. Vicarious kicks are great, even if they’re typically tempered by tragedy at the end of the tales. Thompson, Welsh, Selby, Ellis, Carroll… these guys have nailed it. I set this contribution at the base of that pantheon. I hope you enjoyed it.

About the Author

Jeremy Robert Johnson is the author of the Wonderland Award Winning WE LIVE INSIDE YOU, the cult hit ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE, the Stoker Nominated novel SIREN PROMISED (w/Alan M. Clark), and the end-of-the-world freak-out EXTINCTION JOURNALS. His fiction has been acclaimed by authors like Jack Ketchum and Chuck Palahniuk and has appeared internationally in numerous anthologies and magazines. In 2008 he worked with The Mars Volta to tell the story behind their Grammy Winning album The Bedlam in Goliath. In 2010 he spoke about weirdness and metaphor as a survival tool at the Fractal 10 conference in Medellin, Colombia (where fellow speakers included DJ Spooky, an MIT bio-engineer, and a doctor who explained the neurological aspirations of a sponge). He is working on a number of new books. You’ll just have to trust him on this.

www.jeremyrobertjohnson.com
www.swallowdownpress.com

About the Artist

Morten Bak a.k.a. ketchup-suicide is a resident of Denmark (Copenhagen), and a multi-faceted artist whose work includes: cartoon concept/coloring, computer game character design/concept art/background art/coloring, freelance CD covers, book covers, and book illustration. Morten’s ability to work in a variety of styles and media stem from his extensive art education, and his desire to create a look and feel to his dark art that is his alone. He credits the people around him, and the general craziness of the world, as great inspirations. To contact Morten, or to see more of his incredible art, you can visit:

www.ketchup-suicide.deviantart.com
www.artstar.dk

THE FALLOUT:

Bonus Material of Suspect Value

If you’re contemplating digging into this section without having first read the collection itself, please reconsider. The collection is my “online profile,” carefully and sociopathically designed to elicit certain feelings and perceptions. These addendums are more like the creepy, real-life things you find out about a person when you actually meet them offline.

The hubris fumes coming off of the Cemetery Dance interview are enough to make the modern day, old timey me want to go back and slap myself. And then maybe high five myself for the sheer youthful moxy of the thing. And then I’d snuggle with me and leave a note reading, “Do not buy a house in 2007. The market will crash.”

And the Meat Socket interview: Well, I’d figured that thing would only be read by Canadian snuff gore fans (a thriving demographic of 12!), but here it is, chock full of crazy.

“Dilation” is a story which should rightly never see print, and yet again, here it is (with debt owed to Peter Straub’s scathing self-critiques).

And the pitches, those silly, jibberjabber-addled pitches, they are an object lesson in ridiculousness.

But, hey: It’s all FREE!

POW!

Love, JRJ

THE SHARP DRESSED MAN SPEAKS OUT:

AN INTERVIEW WITH JEREMY ROBERT JOHNSON

By Steve Vernon for

CEMETERY DANCE MAGAZINE

I first read your work in that big, fat gorgeous picture-book of the damned—SIREN PROMISED. How’d a young fellow from Portland, Oregon hook up with a great illustrator like Alan M. Clark?

Well, we’d both been frequenting this website, killthemanatees.com, and we happened to have linked up in this Oregon group hauling speedboats down to Florida…hold on…just having a James Frey moment…must tell truth…

The real version:

I guess, like most things in my life, it was a combination of dumb luck and tactless bravado. I was living in Eugene at the time, one of Oregon’s two writing Meccas along with Portland, and I was blessed to have signed up for community college classes with both Nina K. Hoffman and Liz Engstrom. I’d sold a few short stories at that point and really wanted to buckle down and learn the craft. So I attended a Ghost Story Weekend with Liz, this really lovely event where you camp out and write a story in two days and then all the writers read them by candle-light. It’s a great time and I believe Liz is still doing it.

During the event, on my way to go fishing off a train trestle (where I nearly snagged an ocelot), I stopped and spoke with Liz for a while and asked her who’d done the illustrations for a book of hers. It was Alan Clark, who she then went on to tell me was this southern-fried madman who kept mummified animals in his studio and was obsessed with painting evil doctors. I was intrigued.

I checked out his website and, of course, totally loved his work and started to recognize him as the guy who’d done all those CD covers. Then, somehow, I got it in my head that he was probably dying to read some of my work, and just didn’t know it. Yes, I was “that guy.” I asked Liz if she could introduce me and she said, “Just call him.” Which sounded crazy to me because I was still in this phase where I believed all published writers and artists lived in gated mansions full of coke and hookers. Just call him? Are you nuts? But I did it.

So somehow (after a vaguely awkward phone call where I said things like “You really know Joe Lansdale?”), Alan was gracious enough to take me on a tour of his estate and show me a ton of his incredible work, and even listened to me read a couple of my short stories. Why he chose to be so angelic, I’ve no idea.

And on top of that, he liked my stories enough to ask me if I’d want to collaborate with him on his new Pain Doctors book. And while we worked on that together we really hit it off and realized we had this great manic energy between us and didn’t want to stop working. Thus, SIREN PROMISED.

How’s the feedback on SIREN PROMISED? Have readers responded well? Do you have any future work planned with Alan M. Clark?

I always have to knock on wood before answering a question like this, because so far the feedback on SIREN PROMISED has been outstanding. The reviewers have been able to see past the emotional brutality of it and really seemed to get the story of hope and perseverance that’s under all the dark, nasty business. Readers always end up telling us that once you start it you can’t stop until it’s over; that it’s very cinematic; that they love the art. Some people have been asking for a sequel, although I don’t know if I could stomach putting these characters through any more pain. And our compatriots in the field have been pretty glowing in their response, including the great intro from Simon Clark and a blurb we actually got yesterday from the ever-incredible Tom Piccirilli. Pic’s A CHOIR OF ILL CHILDREN is the best Southern Gothic I’ve ever read, so having his blessing on our surreal take on that sub-genre means a lot.

One unexpected reader response is that now people I’ve never met want to do drugs with me. Clark and I were both pretty frank about our history with drugs and alcohol in the beginning of the book, and addiction plays a crucial role in the story. So now I’ve gotten a couple of emails from people saying they can’t wait to party with me. And one guy offered to mail me some recreational psycho-actives he’d made in his tub. I guess I should have indicated that I’m pretty reformed now. I mean, I run marathons. I’ve got an awesome kid nephew to be a role model for. So while part of me appreciates that spirit of camaraderie and sharing, and the fact that they loved the book, I have to politely decline. Besides, it’s a huge stretch to call SIREN PROMISED a pro-drug novel.

As far as future work with Alan goes, I’m excited to announce that I’m headed to Eugene this month to do a lengthy book re-design session with him for the paperback version of SIREN PROMISED. The Bloodletting Press edition is the prettiest book I’ve seen in a long time, but it’s almost sold out and we wanted to make a less collector-oriented version for the general readership; for people who just want the experience of the thing. I’ll be writing a new Afterword for it, and we’ll be reorienting the intricately designed text and images so they’ll still be effective in a smaller form, and that’s a real project. But with Clark, it’s always fun. We’ll take some croquet breaks, down a bunch of soda, maybe play some Xbox. It’s like a really weird clubhouse atmosphere at his place. Mummies and bones and horrific paintings everywhere. It’s the Clubhouse of the Damned.

I was thumbing through your bibliography. It seems your earliest work was published in the year 2000, making you a true author of the 21st century. Tell us a bit about those early years in writing.

The early early years are interesting because of what a morbid fixation I had from the beginning. I was crazy for books and got bored with the kid’s stuff around seven years old and managed to convince my mom to buy me King’s CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF. Then SALEM’S LOT in the second grade and so on. I can still remember my first embarrassing public “arousal” which happened in the fifth grade, as a result of the human/wolf transformation sex scene in the middle of McCammon’s THE WOLF’S HOUR. What I’m trying to say is that I was a hopelessly horror-bound kid from the get go. And those early writings, man… zombies, shotguns, vampires, lunatics, rabid dogs. I still have a lot of it in storage and it’s hilarious. And I’d like to note that I’d written a zombie orca long before THE RISING hit. And it could fly. Put that in your pipe, Keene.

Then there was my renegade writer phase. I was obsessed with Hunter S. Thompson, Carlos Castaneda, Kesey, Welsh, Burroughs, Mailer. Drugs. That whole image. Dropped out of college to write. To travel the world. Ended up in my parent’s garage and various shitty apartments getting high and occasionally typing out the sort of stuff you’d hesitate to call “stories.” It was writing, but it wasn’t stories. Tried to sell that stuff to various lit journals, and never did.

Then there was the “holy-shit-my-life-is-out-of-control-and-this-has-to-change” phase where I shut myself off from the world for a number of reasons and decided I was either going to commit to this writing thing or…I don’t know. And luckily I’d started to read more about the craft itself and started doing some better work. Things with rising conflict and first sentences that I hoped would hook people.

The work still didn’t sell. I moved to Eugene, got back into drugs. It was a rough time and I was pretty disheartened. I had one story, “Liquidation” that I still kept on the market. Editors had come close to buying it, so I kept flogging it.

Then the Lizard Prophet came. I wish I was making this up, because it is ridiculous, but here’s how it happened. I was at an outdoor rave called Galactic Tribes outside of Eugene, blasted on ecstasy and acid, and pretty much laid out on a dirty piece of carpet on the forest floor. I was staring at the sky when suddenly a great purple rift appeared and my consciousness was sucked into it. I was transported through blackness and over a craggy ice wasteland until I stopped before a figure sitting cross-legged on a floating chunk of glacier. It was an Eskimo with a lizard’s face. He told me that I was one of the World’s Great Storytellers. Then I blacked out.

The next day I had struggled my way back home and the only piece of a mail waiting for me was an acceptance for “Liquidation” from the New York lit magazine Happy.

I freaked out. It was a sign. Universal providence, whatever. Plus, a sale.

Later I got sober enough to realize that the Lizard Prophet probably didn’t exist, but I still took it as a sign. From that point on I redoubled my efforts, finally had a sale on my cover letters, and was lucky enough to start really learning about writing from Nina and Liz and Alan and Bruce H. Rogers. Eugene was definitely the right place to be at that time.

I know that nobody really “becomes” a writer, but what did you do before you became a published writer? Were you a beach bum? A tattoo artist? A geek in a carnival show? Inquiring minds don’t really need to know, but tell us anyway.

In chronological order—landscape maintenance (mostly raking things up), cart pusher at Fred Meyers (a step below bottle boy), five years as a video clerk for a mom and pop joint in Bend called Movietyme, and then five years in various banking positions including, somehow, client rep for agricultural loans. I still know too much about dairy mastitis.

I would love to do tattoos but I don’t have the artistic ability for it. The tattoo of Alan Clark’s “No Bones Will Be Found” that covers my right forearm is almost complete. Twenty-nine hours of needle time so far, and it’s looking fantastic.

On the homepage of your website you describe yourself as an author of “bizarro” fiction. What’s up with that? I thought Bizarro was that fellow with the chunky white complexion and the Superman suit? Tell us what “bizarro” means to you. Why do you think you qualify as a “bizarro” writer?

Well, someone wanting to hear the party line on Bizarro should check out the FAQ over at mondobizarrorforum.net or the Bizarro page at my site. Carlton has really done a great job of laying it all out there. Instead of repeating the propaganda I’ll tell you what it means to me.

Bizarro is a batch of great writers (including Carlton Mellick III, Steve Aylett, John Lawson, Kevin Donihe, D. Harlan Wilson, and Chris Genoa) who’ve come together under a label to try and dig out a niche for themselves and their admittedly very strange work. It’s a way to let fans of weird cross-genre fiction (or even no-genre fiction, stuff that truly fits only under a Bizarro banner) know that there are a troop of folks out there making it. Before we were all out there on our own, doing guerilla marketing and trying to connect with the people who liked our fiction. Now that we’ve coalesced it’s easier to become known as a source for “the weird.” It’s tough to wholly classify as a genre, too, although I now can’t think of Carlton Mellick III’s work as anything but Bizarro.

As far as it being a “movement” I think that’s way off target and a total waste of time. I think lit movements come from great fiction made by individuals, the similarities come out of the zeitgeist, and the media labels it after the fact. To announce a movement in advance is pretty presumptuous. But some of the more bombastic folks who’ve attached themselves to the Bizarro title would like you to believe it’s this great and holy literary fire that will clear mediocre fiction from the world, which is crazy talk, and I don’t dig it. Hopefully that will die out soon and we can all just write books.

Once our crew gets more work out there I feel like the Bizarro label will be better defined. Right now it’s just sort of a dream we’re going to chase down and try to make babies with.

Am I Bizarro myself? Sort of. I’m like the white sheep of the Bizarros. I have a decent cross-over in the horror audience. I publish in horror mags, lit mags, wherever I can. I write mystery, literary work, thrillers, dark comedy. Some days I don’t feel like I’m Bizarro enough and Carlton reminds me to read my reviews. Because, as it turns out, people think my work is much stranger than I perceive it to be. I guess my often surreal or gonzo bent pushes my work into that “weird” category.

I understand Chuck Palahniuk is a bit of a fan of your writing. How’d this come about, and what has he got to say about you?

Well, what he said, and I know this without looking at any sources because I’ve memorized the quote and stopped just short of having it permanently tattooed, is "A dazzling writer. Seriously amazing short stories—and I love short stories. Like the best of Tobias Wolff. While I read them, they made time stand still. That’s great." Which is a dynamite blurb from a guy who seldom gives them out, and has probably been 99% responsible for any cross-over sales I get in the non-genre market. I mean, with a heavy metal cover and a title like ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE, the book is a thousand miles away from Oprah-ready, but Chuck’s advocacy has really opened it up for a whole new audience. I can’t thank him enough and just hope that the book lives up to the reader expectations that his blurb puts out there.

The blurb came about in an ultra-standard way. We had some excellent correspondence; he read a batch of my stories and responded in a very supportive manner. I gave him a copy of my collection at his HAUNTED signing here in Portland, and then a month later I wrote and politely requested a blurb based on his earlier comments. And—in another case of serendipitous mail arrivals—his letter clearing the promotional blurb arrived the day my wife and I returned from our honeymoon. I carried my wife over the threshold, set her down, and picked up Chuck’s letter. It was surreal.

Chuck has long been a literary hero of mine and he and his website (chuckpalahniuk.net aka The Cult) have been central to my thriving and surviving as a writer. Right before I wrote the second story I ever sold I’d read CHOKE, which really opened up my idea of how stylized and funny something could be and still have this very dark emotional core. That was a big influence. Then, when I was working as a farm loan guy I discovered The Cult and started lurking there constantly, taking in all these incredible lessons in the minimalist craft that Chuck was providing each month. And I noticed the more I used the tools from his essays, the better my stories were turning out and the quicker they were selling. Soon after that I managed to sell my collection, and through some level of miracle got that quote from Chuck. Then I bought a banner ad for the book at The Cult and got this huge response, something like a 400% increase in readers each month.

And the train is still in motion, so I owe a great deal to Chucky P. I’ve also got to give a shout out to Dennis Widmyer, the guy who created The Cult, which has now become this huge resource for writers. I’d probably still be working farm loans if it wasn’t for Chuck and The Cult.

What else can we expect from Jeremy Robert Johnson in 2006?

I’ve got a line-up of antho contributions and magazine appearances scheduled. And I’m on a mission to get the word out about Craig Davidson, whose RUST AND BONE is some of the best work I’ve read in a long time. Seriously knockout fiction.

The next really big thing, for me, will be the release of the SIREN PROMISED paperback on my new Bizarro imprint (trumpets please) Swallowdown Press. That will hit in May of ‘06, just in time for World Horror in San Francisco.

The second Swallowdown Press release, SKULLCRACK CITY, will be available in the next half of the year. I’m not saying much about it yet, but it’ll be my first solo novel and a fun book for fans of minimalist crime noir, surrealism, and a very unconventional take on the brain-eating zombie trope (in fact I’d hesitate to call them zombies but somebody told me that phrase is money in the bank—God Bless Romero).

WASTELANDS WITHIN—a three author collection with myself, horror editor/writer Michael Heffernan, and the amazing (read Radiant Dawn!) Cody Goodfellow—is currently unscheduled but sitting before a very interested publisher. Cody’s work in it is fantastic and I can proudly say that it also contains my most gruesome story, my most experimental story, and the most heartfelt story I’ve ever written. So I hope that hits in ‘06.

I’ve got a couple of marathons scheduled, which is deeply grueling but equally rewarding, and I’m also going to see if I can buoy up any cinematic interest for my fiction. And I know I’ll read a lot, and write a lot in ‘06.

Beyond that, you’d have to ask the Lizard Prophet.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JEREMY ROBERT JOHNSON

By Mikhail
for THE MEAT SOCKET

Jeremy, every artist brings with them an arsenal of personal experience to help craft their work. Sometimes that bit of intimacy can shine through and take a form of its own amongst the words. If someone were to ask me what I took with me after reading your short story collection ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE I would say that you really fucking hate your parents. Comment?

That’s hilarious. So far everybody who reads it likes to point out that I have an obsession with control, but nobody’s spotted just how many rotten parents there are in the book. There’s an epidemic of no-account or abusive parenting in this thing. And as much as it would be all super-metal and talk about how my mom was a prostitute who put out her johns’ cigars on my back, or how my dad used to numb my o-ring with moonshine before the serial buggering, I’ve got to say that I’m actually blessed with pretty righteous parents. Ex-hippies, maybe, but really decent folks. There’s been some struggle with alcoholism, for years and years, but hell, that’s like 90% of American families right there, and we’ve dealt with it okay. And that aspect of bad parenting, the booze, is definitely in the book and those pieces were written at a time when they were cathartic.

I think shitty parents are just a really workable trope that rings true with readers. Read that non-fiction CANNIBAL KILLERS book and find me one good parent in the bunch. A twisted mom or dad really can unleash a mutant on the populace. Part of writing about terrible parents is coming to terms with the idea that these people are just an older version of myself, and as fallible as I am. It’s about ending the illusion that parents are anything other than human.

Although I bet my parents are to blame, to a degree, for the general twisted nature of the book. My dad used to do medical work and would come home with cancer-riddled lungs to teach me not to smoke, and tell me the occasional story about chunky mucous buckets and brains liquefying and that sort of thing. And my mom bought me my first King book, CYCLE OF THE WEREWOLF, when I was seven. My first Gorezone magazine subscription, too. I can still remember opening that mag up for the first time and seeing shots from Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust and just thinking, “Awesome.”

Interesting enough I read Moira Martingale’s CANNIBAL KILLERS while researching Ordeal IV. Like most true-crime books, it was a little dry. The only ‘character’ who really didn’t fit with what you say about poor parenting I believe was Issei Sagawa, who killed and ate a girl. However, I don’t remember if his home life was full of strife or not. And I don’t find his pathology fascinating so much as the fact that he is now a celebrity in Japan...

Yeah, he’s as much a celebrity as say, Dahmer was over here, but what’s interesting is the more lighthearted way they view him there. Here we revile our killer celebrities, but there it’s more of an honest fascination. Imagine if Sagawa had all the lunatic charm of a Charles Manson—they’d probably give him some kooky game show where people have to pretend to be rabbits and chase electric carrots or something.

The cannibal case that I’m still fixated on is the Armin Meiwes deal. I mean, there’s footage of Armin and his victim hanging out eating the victim’s dick together. Amicably. Jesus-Christ-With-a-Hover-Pack, that’s just so messed up. And that his victim willingly offered himself up like that, it’s a mind boggler. Creeps my ass out. If Poppy ever does an EXQUISITE CORPSE 2, she’s got to feature that somehow. Again, though, my cannibal point is proven out—Armin said he was constantly ignored by his father and thus always thought of eating his more handsome brother to assimilate him and gain his father’s attention.

I’m thinking of opening up an Armin Meiwes Hot Dog Stand. I bet Armin’s dad is paying attention to him now. Way to go, Meiwes.

I felt that the entire ‘parents hating thing’ tied in rather nice with the fabrication of the ideal that no one is truly special. Comment?

Well, no one is special, not in the grand cosmic sense. You know, when I take a step back, or say, take a lot of acid, I get that big perspective wherein we’re just the current expression of stardust on its path to an eventual collapse. Just matter, twitching, replicating, viral. It’s tough to feel like anything’s special inside a perspective that vast.

But more than that, I’m just revolted by the current obsession with fame, with everyone having to be the one bright shining star in the global marketplace. Or more than that, the people who feel like they’re entitled to that adoration just because they exist. That’s why I love the part in Todd Solondz’ Storytelling where the kid who wants to be famous finally gets to be a talk show host and tanks. Because just being on TV is not enough. Being on TV eating a donkey dick for a potential $50,000 reward is not enough. But people think that makes them important.

People forget that talent and hard work and luck and blow jobs all have a lot to do with being famous. And it’s not, “I want to be truly great at this one skill” whether that’s singing or sports or writing or whatever. That’s not the dream anymore, to live sustainably from your art and do it the best you can before you die. The dream is to be famous and have tie-in products and really great points on your contract and your ring-tone is hot in the streets. And the worst part is that the people who are good at being famous are now more successful and generally respected over people who really hone their craft and do something incredible with it. Part of the problem are the untalented anomalies, the Britney Spears and 99% of rap on your radio and the other corporate products, who really have no talent and are this groomed, shellacked creation that’s manufactured out of hacks with good management. They set the bar lower. Much lower.

Thanks for providing the soap-box there. Hopefully I was as incoherent as your average street prophet. But on a more humble level I feel like most Olympians are kind of special because they can do really difficult things better than any other human on the planet. To be able to run faster than any other human you encounter, that is pretty cool. It’s almost like being a super-hero. And ManOWar are special, because they live in a magical world of steel and wind and metal and as far as I can tell they really think that they are the greatest band on Earth. And Alejandro Jodorowsky is special because he just is.

Also, I’d like to send this message to the folks who go on Fear Factor every week—Read an almanac for two weeks, go on Jeopardy for two days, and you can win more than $50 grand without ever having ingested a sheep’s colon. And by the way, boiling a sheep’s colon doesn’t purge the fecal matter, it just makes it hot and wet.

Jeremy you’re making me hot and wet with that little diatribe. Luckily the whores around here will eat my colon for only $20—and that includes a reach-around!

Yeah, but there’s not much upside to a haphazardly executed reach-around by someone who’s more committed to other activities at hand. A person who executes a really great reach-around has to multi-task damn it! Speaking of colons...since this is a porn issue I wanted to give props to that crazy German porn chick, Mila, who can forcibly prolapse her colon and push out the “pink donut.” It’s disgusting, this pink ring of semi-wet flesh that twitches with the efforts of her distended abdomen muscles. But hey, she took lemons (in this case “lemons” being defined as: too many double anal scenes resulting in a collapsed colon) and made lemonade. What a hustler!

I’m opening up Mila’s Pink Donut Shop right next to my Armin Meiwes Hot Dog Stand.

If we all close our eyes and wish really hard maybe Jodorowsky will film the new ManOWar video...

Don’t tease me Mikhail. I’d imagine that that would be the film they show outside of heaven’s gate while you’re waiting to get in. Jodo meets ManOWar—that might just melt my brain. WITH MOLTEN STEEL! And then my spirit would be blown on mighty winds to the halls of Valhalla, so that I might battle on!

When we talked just before the interview you stated that the work is “a pretty chaotic assemblage.” And yet even eliminating your patricidal rage I see many themes reappearing. Comment?

Well, you take a kid whose brain is barely wired together anymore and put him in front of a keyboard for a month, you’re going to get a lot of repetition. I’m just venting my obsessions here, like any other writer, and I try to vary it enough to keep the reader entertained. To paraphrase the great James Ellroy, I’m just writing about my own weird shit. Control (and the loss of it), parasites, drugs, redemption, surgery, NUCLEAR WAR. Man, I could write a hundred stories about nuclear war and still never shake that fear. Writing’s a really good way to find out how you actually feel about something. There have been times when there was a topic I didn’t want to touch, whether it was familial relations, or racism, or infidelity, because I wasn’t sure exactly where I sat on all those issues, and once I started writing I was just letting my subconscious battle it out and hoping the story would tell me how I felt. It usually works.

The nature of the stories themselves, the number of genres or non-genre experiments the book runs through is pretty chaotic. But in the end it’s all me.

I don’t really want to die just yet. However, nuclear war isn’t a fear of mine simply because I live a few blocks away from a company that works with uranium—therefore I know that it is already a target for a bomb. So if the missiles go out, I will be instantly vaporized. Perhaps you should move closer to a nuclear power generator and it will assuage your fears somewhat...

That’s not a terrible idea, but I’m on this whole staying-alive-no-matter-what trip now, so maybe my solution is to move to a place that’s not even worth bombing. Like North or South Dakota.

I think I do live in relative proximity to both a nuclear power plant and a nuclear dumping ground (that might be closer to eastern Oregon), so if the shit goes down, I’m probably a goner. Dusted. If I do manage to survive the blast, though, I wouldn’t mind some sort of mutant powers. That would be a nice bonus.

I like the idea of self-mutilation (The League of Zeros, Dissociative Skills, Working At Home) not as self-destructive but as a form of self-preservation. Comment?

Well, I’ve always found doing things that really shouldn’t be done very liberating and transforming, like the kid in “Dissociative Skills,” but again, part of that’s just me being a control freak. Controlling the terms and nature of your pain makes you feel really powerful, and then putting that mutilation on display can give you power over others, whether through admiration or revulsion. And in each of those stories the characters controlled the situation, they owned it, because they took control of their bodies and did whatever they felt needed to be done to survive, whether that’s evisceration or limb removal. Also, the idea of writing stories about people sitting around carving themselves up until they died, that’s kind of generic gothic shit, and I try to keep my narrators alive. Sometimes they don’t make it, and sometimes they wish they hadn’t made it to the end, but I like to see my central characters make it to the last page.

And part of the mutilation stuff is in there because I’m a Cronenberg freak and love that sort of intimate body horror. People freak over that shit... like in Land of the Dead, you’ve got shotgun decapitations and gut munching galore, but nobody really screams or twitches in the crowd until that close up shot of the belly-button ring being ripped out. That’s probably where the parasite fixation comes from too. Got to love Cronenberg.

Corpses cannot feel blinding hot agony nor explain how it feels. Survivors do tell much better tales than the dead...

Exactly. From a nerd-logic perspective, even someone that survives for a couple of hours could maybe jot their story down on a napkin. With third person this rule goes out the door, especially if you’ve gone omniscient. But I do a lot of first person work, and typically present tense, so hopefully people can just jump into the narrator’s head and go for the ride and if that ride happens to end in death, then that was the experience and they can take it as a trip in someone else’s last moments and not nitpick the technically there’s no way the story could exist.

But if you let your character survive you can even bring them back for another story and torture them some more.

And following in that dynamic, pain is really the only feeling that tells you that you are alive. Comment?

I’d put pain in first place, nausea in second, and euphoria, sexual or otherwise, in third. But on a corporal level, yeah, pain’s the big feeling to confirm that you’re in the here and now. You can’t shut out the pain as a garbage signal, like a lot of other stimuli. Pain makes you pay attention to the concerns of the living body. I have this insane “quantity theory of pain” that I harbor, that there’s always this floating miasma of pain hovering among all living creatures, and that one can direct and cultivate pain in the self in order to remove the pain from others, and that on some metaphysical level we are capable of choosing who we pull that pain from.

I know it’s fucking crazy, but if it were true we could arrange this sort of Pain Corp, pros at suffering who could act as a sort of global opiate. It’s a cool idea.

And if you put your body through the right types of pain, in a calculating way, by, say, running over ten miles at about seven miles per hour, you can get these really great organic highs. There are so many awesome drugs floating in our brains and we just have to know how to farm them into use.

“One can direct and cultivate pain in the self in order to remove the pain from others....” Would that be for altruistic or selfish purposes? What I mean is: pain lets you know that you are alive—so then, are you taking away someone’s pain to help them (but antithetically taking away their confirmation that they are in the here and now) or to horde it all for yourself to attain an ‘artificial’ organic high?

I think that all depends on the motive of the pain harvester. Some hippie hospice worker capable of the act would consider it purely altruistic and see themselves as some sort of Christ-like martyr. But a pain junkie, or a person who preferred the endorphins resultant from pain, they’d be coming from that selfish perspective. The optimal role here would be that of the kindly masochist who both wants to help humanity and gets off on the sensation. Jack into someone’s gut cancer throbbing and let them have their last moments in peace while you’re busting a nut off the agony.

As far as taking away people’s pain, that’s what a lot of folks want anyway. Just to float quickly through life surrounded by purchased products. Most people shun pain—look at the billion dollar serotonin reuptake inhibitor market. I’m just waiting for Numbtrex to come along, for us all to be hooked into pleasure receptor stimulators like rats, pressing a button for the juice every once on a while as we whither. A lot of people look around at the world we live in and their subconscious is smart enough to recognize that this isn’t an easy place to “live.” So why bother?

Sorry, I’ve got a bad case of the old clichéd Angry Young Man syndrome. Read too many copies of AdBusters.

Narcotics play a large role in many of your characters’ lives. That must be your favorite type of research, huh?

Yeah, you could say that I’m addicted to that research and have devoted a fair and filthy chunk of my life to it. But much like the narrative arc of the stories you mentioned, that research started out really fun and crazy and just ended up fucked with a capital F. That’s the curse of most drug fiction—If you’re going to be true to it, things get bad at the end. And it makes you mad, because you’ve had so many incredibly fun times on drugs, like Bill Hicks used to say, and they are wonderful. But things get messy. People go crazy. People die. Friends sell each other out. People go to jail. Things happen that are so fucked up you don’t even want to write stories about them. And you have to reflect that too. Makes for good horror stories, and the reader gets some cool vicarious kicks from the early fun part, which I think brings a lot of people running back to drug fiction. I enjoy the “stoney” parts of an Irvine Welsh book, but I know that inevitably, something nasty is about to happen. You have to go to erotica or anthropology books for vicarious drug kicks without the eventual downfall.

SIREN PROMISED, my collaboration with Alan M. Clark, has addiction as one of its central themes, and it’s pretty brutal. BloodyMary at Horror-Web gave it a four star review but said, “By the time I was done reading I was wondering about the purpose in my own life; they left me with an emptiness I didn’t even know existed.” We thought that was pretty great. And one time a girl was genuinely angry with me after reading one of the stories in ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE because she really felt like she was trapped in a bad acid flashback. I totally took that as a compliment; it made my day.

As far as continuing research, I can tell you that a very severe, mindcrushing mushroom trip at last year’s Burning Man has been turned into a piece called “A Flood of Harriers” that’ll be featured along with three other of my stories in an upcoming horror anthology. Cody Goodfellow’s got four pieces in that one too, and if you don’t mind I’d like to give a shout-out to Cody right now and say that he is one of the best authors I have ever read and his RADIANT DAWN and RAVENOUS DUSK are exceptional. I mean, they don’t touch ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE, but they’re pretty dope in their own right.

Is writing an exciting and as lucrative profession as it appears from the outside looking in?

That’s hilarious, man. Seriously. Does it even look like that to anybody on the outside? It can be very exciting, as long as you don’t mind intermittent rewards. Writing can be exciting, if lonely work, and sometimes you really get going on the keyboard and sort of start floating and it can be a pretty thrilling. And doing readings is exciting because you finally get to interact directly with some other human beings and it’s fun to watch them flinch and laugh and get nauseated and all that. But financially, man, it’s rough. I’m just now learning the ropes and surviving without a desk job for the first time ever. The worst, absolute shittiest player in the NBA probably makes more cash than 99% of the best writers on Earth. Literacy is dwindling. Unless you’re pumping out romance or doing script work in Hollywood, there’s not much lucrative going on in this game.

Rappers are the new storytellers, like the old oral tradition coming back for illiterate times, but most of them don’t have a story worth listening to unless you really give a shit about some other guy’s jewelry or fictitious drug deals. And the good storytellers, like the Def Jux crew, or Immortal Technique, or Saul Williams, or Ill Bill in this issue, they remain relegated to the underground. So even for a more lucrative form of storytelling, shit’s not that lucrative. If I could do hip-hop instead I probably would because typing gives you carpal and rappers get better groupies. But the world doesn’t need another nasal white kid with grotesque stuff to say. Those bases are covered.

Meeting people who read your stuff is genuinely exciting. It’s always cool to know that someone’s enjoyed what you labored on. It’s nice to make that connection.

You didn’t mention the literature groupies...

Well, they’re few and far between, but they’re out there. And most of them are very sweet and also very fucking CRAZY—but in a good way. I’m a committed monogamist (see also: total fucking idiot denying his basic anthropological urgings) so my girl gets mad when these girls make contact with me. There’s this demographic, young-ish girls with piercings and nautical star tattoos who want to live this avant-garde life on the edge, and they pick up ANGEL DUST and think that I’m some tortured artist, some emo drug addict asshole, and that’s appealing to them for some reason. And lit groupies are appealing, too, because not only do they make you feel like what you’re doing is worth reading, but they know how to fucking read. So I love them dearly, but I do not touch them because my girlfriend has this volcano temper and would quite literally gut me and leave me to bleed-out if there was an appearance of impropriety.

I was really proud the first time I saw my name and book mentioned in a Suicide Girls profile, though. That was great.

Your work is quite eclectic. Drama, horror, sci-fi. It’s all there. And you have a new project coming out. I know we all love being labeled so please label your newest work...

BIZARRO! ANGEL DUST APOCALYPSE and the just released hardcover of SIREN PROMISED are definitely Bizarro, which is this pre-existing phrase that a group of us are co-opting and choosing to label our weird shit with. I’ve linked up, “In the Hills, The Cities”-style, with a collective of weirdoes like Carlton Mellick III, Chris Genoa, John Lawson, Kevin Donihe, Steve Aylett, etc. in order to form a cohesive Bizarro front. We’ve all been making these weird, sort of indefinable books for some time, and we wanted one word that would let people know what they were in for. For example, in the past I’d have to describe my next book as a “meta-zombie-noir-hallucination” and people would be agitated. So now I just say, “It’s Bizarro” and they know they’re in for some strange reading. There’s more information and Bizarro shenanigans at www.mondobizarroforum.net and my site, the cleverly named www.jeremyrobertjohnson.com. Bizarro’s like this really ugly little baby right now, but we’re going to nurture it and feed it motor oil and datura and keep it locked in a closet for twelve years, and when it gets out it will be The Great Berzerker. That’s the hope and the dream.

JUST THE WORST THING EVER:

A TERRIBLE STORY

YOU SHOULDN’T READ

(WITH WRITER’S COMMENTARY)

There were 15 other stories which I had considered including in ANGEL DUST. One titled “Frank and Dots” was about a mall security guard who was so obsessed with watching television game shows that he became unable to see any human interaction outside of that pixelated context.

It was bad. Very bad. It ended, “Then I’ll aim my remote at them and…POW!”

“POW!”

But it was nowhere near as brain-throttling awful as the drudgery I now present for your “enjoyment.”

“Dilation” was written on a ’96 Toshiba Satellite Laptop, using the program WordPad. The young man who wrote this story was at the “Suddenly Realizing Ayn Rand’s Line of Thinking Was Probably Toxic Bullshit” stage of his life. As such, he had recently reverted to writing his stories while drinking Tussin and sitting in a 1969 stereo-equipped egg chair in a black lit garage. Not, it turns out, an environment conducive to good writing. Only the bravest souls dare proceed…

Dilation

October 13—Another perfect day! [Oh, dear. Starting with a faux journal structure and the first sentence ends in an exclamation point. We are in trouble.] The whole day, accompanied by that sensation. The electricity. The waves of energy that come out of my body, razor sharp, lightning fast and perfect. Too much energy, too much brilliance to be contained, even by me. [Hello, Narrator I Already Can’t Stand. I hope this is a very short story. Oh, it’s almost 7,000 words long…]

People look at me different. They know what I am, at the back of their little reptile brains [ADA probably did not need more than the pre-existing 23 reptile brain references.]. They react to it, whether it registers right at the front of their thoughts or not. They look at me and they know and they say to themselves, “Whoa, there goes someone better than me!”

I am the Alpha male. Actually, what comes before Alpha? That’s me. Superior to Alpha. Above Alpha, Ultra Alpha, etc. I can’t tell whether it’s in my form and the way that I move, or whether the sensation of superiority comes directly from my brain, like willpower focused and broadcast out of me and through the people around me. Whatever it is, it works. It rolls out of my body like seismic waves. The energy smashes people in their soft little heads and lets them know that they can never ever even think of being what I am. They are too petty, too fucking less than me. People can try to be like me, but it’s like putting a monkey in a business suit. Still the same shit at the core. Still... Not Me. [Very early in my career I got the following advice from a reputable horror editor: “An asshole receives his comeuppance after spending a long time being an asshole” isn’t much of a story.] My name should always be accompanied by this symbol (>) to the right of it. I’m always better. I feel like this damn near all the time. When I pass my reflection I have to stop and smile, and I look at the other me like, “Hey, being me is too Goddamn RIGHT!” The other me looks back at me like he knows, like it’s our secret, like nobody else will ever fucking get it. But they will feel it. I can feel it when they catch the vibrations coming off of me. I can see people watching me for a second, and then I look through them, like they were never there. [Wait, do you get it yet? This guy’s a self-centered jerk. Maybe I need to pile more same on same.] I allow them to exist near me, and then, one finite second after I take my eyes off of them, they just stop being.

Which is as it should be.

October 25—I tried to explain my feelings about myself to my friend Riley last night. [I used to think Riley was such a cool name, though I have no idea why. I think now it’s more popular as a porn star name.] Riley, with his weak chin and small arms and small dick (I haven’t seen it, but I can just tell when I look at the guy) and small legs and no chest to be spoken of, and he just doesn’t get it! He thinks that the way I feel about myself is unhealthy, and I’m like, come on here, the paragon of mental and physical health. People act so petty in the face of confidence like mine. Empty people do. Empty people with their jealousy, and their little claws, mounting their little attacks, telling their little lies, crawling inside their little holes and throwing rocks that I don’t even feel, sitting around staring at the fucking television, laughing at little jokes, crying at fake little deaths, [Oh, boy, he’s really riffing here, and the repetition is turning this into a rich chorus of…nope, just more time inside the mind of an asshole.] living little lives, hating their own little minds for not being as grand as mine, watching their little bodies get greasy and fatty and corrupted, collapsing in old age, getting a few little sentences in a Goddamn little townie newspaper obituary, their lives having meant little, or even less than that. It used to make me sick to think of them, but every now and then I hand them my pity, like seed to pigeons. They try and scratch me, but I exist in like a whole other dimension, so it never really bothers me. The knowledge that my friend Riley doubts me allows me to see him clearer.

I have on occasion thought of Riley as better than most, possessing a fair brain and a positive nature, but now I know he’s just another one of them, the Empty ones. I think his criticism of me was sublimated self-loathing. Well, FUCK HIM! [Lots and lots of exclamation points to follow. I was a big fan of the journal entries in SEVEN and in only a semi-related way I somehow thought that exclamation points would make this guy seem crazier.] Riley, my Empty friend, I’m better off not knowing you now! Soon I’ll meet somebody who understands, someone with as much personal meaning as myself.

Besides, Riley drove a Daewoo Hatchback! No pride in that.

October 28—I don’t even know why I write this shit down! Maybe I should spend more of my time achieving, getting things done, leaving a legacy. It’s just that I feel these emotions so strongly and it seems like whenever I try to tell people about myself they turn a deaf ear in my direction. Denial. They think my ego is out of control. Yesterday I walked by some kids at the outlet mall and they actually started making fun of me, walking behind me like little roosters with their chests puffed out. Already (!) they’ve been trained to fear and mock confidence. What kind of messed up sub-ciety is this where grandeur and greatness are mocked? Why do they want me to stoop down to their level? I refuse to. I can’t, I don’t know how, it’s not in the fiber of what I am! Screw those kids! [What’s become eerie as I read this is how close much of this text hews to the tone of some folks’ Facebook posts. And brace yourselves for another “crazy” batch of negative riffing, just in case you didn’t have the character pegged yet.] They’ll just end up at dead end jobs anyway, drinking Old Crow on the plastic front stoop of their aluminum Airstreams, smelling like chewed-on teriyaki beef jerky, stuffing their limp pink dicks into the rotten cauliflower-wart encrusted snatches of women so vast and large and bloated on Ring Dings [Are these still a real thing?] and cellulite sandwiches that they could earn a fair price as livestock. When I let myself feel insulted by the Empty like this, it brings me down to their level. I’ll have no more of it. From now on I’ll laugh, directly into the grey little faces of those who would mess with He Who Should Not Be Messed With, the Prime, the Alpha, Mr. Marcus [Wait, is this a porn name too? Jesus.] Pendleton![!]

November 4 [22 days with this guy already, when not even one would be tolerable. Hey, folks, take some time out of your day and share it with an asshole. It’s an escapist romp!]—As I was parking outside of a Hampton Burger today I noticed a guy staring at me. He had a look on his face like I had just cut him off in traffic or stepped on his arch or eaten the last ice cream sandwich in his freezer, etc. I wasn’t sure on what course to proceed. I stared back. I waited for him to initiate something. Of course, his stare broke first. I could feel the power coming from behind my eyes again, the feeling of Absolute Superiority [To be fair, I do think that crazy people use A Lot of Caps.]. I realized moments later that he might have been looking at me not out of anger, but out of lust.

That’s how good I looked today!

He’ll probably think of me when he jerks off tonight. [Why no exclamation point here? The usage seems a bit arbitrary.]

November 8—I got stuck in the mirror again! [Oh, holy shit, I totally forgot the central idea behind this whole story. I was starting to think that maybe I was still a big fan of Bret Easton Ellis or something, but that’s not it. No, my goal had been to write a “modern day body horror retelling of the myth of Narcissus which skewers the outsize Randian ego while having a kind of Nine Inch Nails-y edge.” And yes, I hate me too, just for having typed that.]

Two and a half hours (!!!) this time. Lately it seems to start with the grooming process. The application of exfoliant, scrub, cleanser, lotion, all the minutiae checked out. Making sure the details all fit in seamlessly. No visible dead skin cells allowed, no unnecessary redness apparent, blemishes most definitely not permitted in any form. Pores have to look damn near invisible, eyebrows must be straightened. If a single lash of one of my eyebrows is out of place I can feel it. I make sure my sideburns are perfectly symmetrical in relation to both my jaw line and my ears. All hairs south of the designated sideburn line must be reduced to the same level of stubble, no stragglers. The eyes must be clear of any mucous or residue, pure white around the blue center. The ears and the ridge behind the ear must be cleaned with hot water and then swabbed. The cheeks, chin, and upper lip must be uniformly shaven, without any razor burn or erratic stubble. I keep my hair short and simple, so it essentially styles itself, but I always use a magnified mirror to make sure the hair looks clean and that nothing is awry. After I have checked all these things I always take a moment to observe myself, get charged up for the day ahead, recognize my own beauty, and try and think of what ways it can best serve me. [Okay, maybe I still did have a hard-on for AMERICAN PSYCHO. But at least I didn’t make you read all the brand names.]

It’s at these times of quiet and reverent self-observation that the paralysis happens. [Three pages in and we’ve got our first hint of conflict. Well-paced, genius.] I get trapped. [Like Narcissus, get it? Only modern?] I just can’t think of anything greater than looking into those two clear, focused, brilliant eyes. It’s the energy behind them that holds me there, captures me like magnets or something, compels me to continue looking. The whole time that I’m looking at myself my head feels empty except for the energy. Thought peels back and reveals...what? Is it my essence, the thing which is in me and so lacking in others?

At these times, when my eyes are locked down on themselves, there is a kind of burning in them, a tightness at their surface that is only mildly uncomfortable. [And, cue accidentally funny line…] I figure that the burning is just added dryness since, after all, I’m staring at myself for long minutes at a time without blinking. I am looking at my eyes but I can somehow see the rest of my face in incredible detail. The perfect angles of my aquiline [To be fair, a great word.] jaw. The strong but not overbearing cleft in my chin. The meticulously groomed eyebrows. The damn near majestic hair. The ears of perfect symmetry and proportion. All of it, every last piece of the puzzle locked together, the final image shining.

If I look further into my eyes I can see other things too.

The things which I can have. The way I will become.

I see myself awash in a sea of the blood of other men, [Okay, at last, a burgeoning sense of conflict. But it’s still just an intolerable guy talking about himself.] blood which I have rightfully spilled. I see smashed faces, wet, distorted faces, broken and split open because of me, because of what I am becoming. Because of the will. The divine right in it. I see a million cunts [Ooh, a c-bomb. EDGY.] with a million empty heads attached, dripping at the thought of me, spread open and gorged with the pressure of the blood behind their walls. I see all those cunts [TWICE! DOUBLE-EDGY!] spent up and used, devoured and thrown aside, delighting at the fact that they were near me, my energy now in them like seed, spilling out like fire [I was a big fan of the Nine Inch Nails song “Reptile” and for some reason felt like this imagery really captured the tone of the song. It doesn’t.]. I see people quietly worshipping me from afar, afraid to say my name aloud, thinking it will consume their tongues, that their minds will burn in the thinking of it. Afraid and amazed at the same time with each thought of me.

During all of this, when I see these things, my heart grows overjoyed, and occasionally skips beats [Lots of skipped beats in ADA, lots of hearts running at hummingbird speed. The phrase repetition in your work really pops out more when collected.], and I feel like laughing, but I don’t want to stop seeing all of it, my glory, blooming. These things, I am beginning to think, are my future.

November 10—Two hours wasted on Riley today. He still insists on spending time with me. He’s like a little parasite, trying to sap away my energy, just by being near me. He probably gets off on having people see us together, but he must understand that we are not together in any way whatsoever, that he and I are creatures of such disparate content that no affinity or commonality may be shared. He is just in proximity to me, near my power, hoping he can catch a fucking wave. He always wants to meet me at a bar, desperate to sneak away some of the slag pussy that inevitably drifts towards me. I am the shark, tearing away at my prey, leaving little bits of flesh in my wake, and Riley is the little remora fish suction cupped to my belly, gulping down bits of chum.

Today, at the Bearing Heights Bar and Grill, a girl named Toni, or Romy, or some shit like that, tried to talk to me. I took one look at her doublewide hips and stared straight through her, rendering her existence null and void.

I’m sure Riley took the leftovers home.

Riley the Remora. Friends make me queasy. [Well, this isn’t the worst of the entries, but it’s becoming more apparent to me that what doesn’t work here is primarily a structural issue. I’ve got this pseudo-Bateman who only journals. He never vivisects anybody. It’s Bateman sans Psycho, as groomer and bar patron only.]

November 13—I got back from Tracy’s house tonight and got lost in the mirror again. This time it was...different.

My eyes had never looked this feral before, the energy behind them now beyond my control. The electricity was soaring through my head, whipping around, pushing behind my eyes until I felt they would burst so that the energy could flow out of them and slam to the ground, saturate the earth, make me Known to All. Nothing greater than me in that moment. The Power must have been too much for my body. I overloaded.

I overdosed on my own Power.

The Power behind my eyes.

I was out for three hours, and when I woke up, a small, snaking blood vessel had burst in my left eye. [A THING HAPPENED! Oh, sweet, heavenly Lord, A THING HAPPENED!]

November 14—[So, how about more vapid journaling?] All day long I tried to pretend it wasn’t there. This ugly, reprehensible red streak across my left eye. It does not look good. The blood vessel looked even more swollen as I fell asleep last night, and at some point during my rest, it must have exploded. Half my damn eye is discolored now. Are eye patches a fashionable accessory for the fall season? HAHA! My eye better look right by tomorrow!

November 16—I can barely even write right now! I am so Goddamn angry! Tracy [I’ve long had a lazy habit of naming female characters Tracy. So many Tracy’s, so many archetypal placeholders. Sigh. This is a rough experiment.]  is NOTHING!!! Just a superficial bitch.

Two minutes after I picked her up she said, “Oh my god, Marcus, what happened to your eye?”

I didn’t think she was worth speaking to about my visions, or the mounting sensation of Power in my body, or the sense of meaning and potency that had recently overwhelmed me. I told her it was none of her business.

She said, almost sounding revolted, “Well, whatever happened, you look like shit. You should have somebody look at that eye before it gets worse.”

I remained silent, boiling on the inside, not quite believing that this dishrag of a woman would even think of telling me what to do.

She continued, “I mean, your eye is really gross looking Marcus, I can’t even look at it directly. You just don’t look right. It makes you look like a crackhead or something.”

Then she laughed. At her own “joke.” Maybe she was laughing at me. It doesn’t matter. She was wrong to disrespect me.

My hand is still burning from slapping her face. I hope she had a good walk home. [What? Why the “good walk home” line? Is it sarcastic? Has to be. Still, it lessens the already minimal impact of Marcus beginning to fall apart and lash out. Just does not fit.]

The eye does look pretty bad.

November 18—The perfect white of my eye is now corrupted by a rheumy [Again, lovely word. But I can’t take the credit for that, now can I?] tint of dark red, the tiny and open tributary of blood ruining the Image, making my face worthless. I cannot leave the house until it heals. No one must ever see this Image, this broken, imperfect vision of me. The messy crimson [Remember horror writers of the world: What is not red is always crimson. Because vermillion sounds fussy.] eye looks hideous and separate from the rest of my face. It is now my one dominant feature. It is not me. It is a punishment. I have been overwhelmed by my own greatness, my will has grown angry. I must find some way to let the energy out of me or this will happen again. It is time to Become.

Become what?

No, there is no room for doubt or for questioning the self. I have been given a gift and others must soon see it. They must see me, and my perfection. They must know. They will know. It’s undeniable.

They will worship me.

They will worship what I am.

Their eyes will burn at the sight of me. [First, why don’t these sentences get exclamation points? Second: There’s supposed to be this escalating sense that Marcus believes he may actually become some kind of God-like power, and I was hoping that I could keep the truth of that ambiguous for the reader, but I didn’t pull that off. So, The Journal of the Asshole With the Funky Eye continues…]

November 22—Every inch of my body feels bruised. My eye is swelling, and the surface feels like it has sand in it, especially where the blood vessels have burst. I took my last three Vicodin today.

Tracy hasn’t returned my calls. I have called over twenty times. Maybe she’s on a vacation somewhere.

I’m not sure what to do with my day.

I tried using eye drops. I might as well have poured sulfuric acid in my eye. It burned for hours.

I thought about calling Mom, but she changed her number. I don’t even know what state she’s in anymore.

I stared at the fridge for awhile, listening to the hum get louder and louder.

Daytime T.V. makes me want to die. [Fuck it. I like this entry. There’s some space and readability to it and it’s kind of sad in a way that would be more resonant if I hadn’t spent such a prolonged period making the guy insufferable. Maybe.]

November 26—What the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK? Whatthefuckishappeninginsidemyhead? [Oh, artsy!] It’s 3:00AM now, on a Sunday morning, and my head has been aching for almost two weeks now. I’m being torn into by constant waves of threnodic [Hello, pet word of 2005.] pain, electric surges, up and down my spine, circular pain on a permanent loop throughout my body, echoing, but like some sort of reverse echo, where the first wave of pain is only part of the phrase and as the pain moves up, screaming [Lots of screaming back then, too. I think we had to find and replace about 300 “screaming”s in SIREN PROMISED] through my body to my head, I learn the whole word [Wait, it’s been reduced from a phrase to a word?], in a great scream, pressing against my blood vessels and veins and arteries [And capillaries and, um, kidneys, and…], urging them to explode, to burst open and empty themselves of the pain, to empty themselves out in one great, torrential wave over my brain and stop the circuit.

I won’t let that happen.

I have to admit that the presence of this pain and the mutinous nature of my flesh turned against me have caused me to doubt myself. [When there’s only one thread of conflict as in this story, it feels rather thin. Far too thin for this length and my skill-set at least.] I wonder how much Power I have beyond this Image. Then there are other moments where I feel the Power again, and I am awash in my own greatness, swimming in its electric currents, waiting for my Power to save me instead of striking me down. In these moments I know that my doubts are the greatest illness, greater than the pain in my belly, than the ache along my spine (like someone is slowly trying to pull out my vertebrae, inch by inch). I must also admit to some degree of pain in my bowels, which makes me feel utterly human and low [Universal detail first encountered in text in DFW’s GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR, appropriated here to much lesser effect. I could really use a drink at this point. Whose idea was this anyway? Mine? It’ll be like MST3K! How fun! What a cheeky bonus feature. But it’s beginning to feel painful and self-indulgent, like jerking off for the 8th time in one day. Still, I carry on, a wayward son of bad ideas.], simple and simian. I am trying to will these things into not happening, but my body seems to be charting its own course now. I refuse to believe that this is uncontrollable, but it seems to be getting worse, and I would sort of like to see a doctor, but no one can ever see me like this [Probably worth noting that any emotional truth to this stretch stems from me being an incredibly awkward young man who struggled with cystic acne, funny haircuts, and general nerdishness]. What I am at this moment is not me. It is lesser, the Image is broken. I will take this pain and I will beat it, conquer it and own it like everything else in my life.

My left eye is getting WORSE...

December 4—The mirror is telling me lies that I refuse to believe. What I see now is not me. I am perfect. The mirror reflects a false image. I’d like a refund. My right eye, the only one that can see now, is lying to me. I am not falling apart. [That horse has to be dead by now, right? I’m beginning to think there’s a 2,000 word short somewhere in here, maybe after a radical redundancy-ectomy.]

December 6—The more I look at the mirror the more I believe this is really happening. My left eye has turned entirely black. Not the area around the eye. The eye itself. There is no pain in it, although it does seem swollen and a little distended. The skin around my left eye is red rimmed now, and has a thin layer of mucosal secretion at each corner. I have been staring at this eye for three hours now, looking for answers. Hating it, hating the eye, hating myself, hating whatever is doing this to me. I have been staring for hours, but nothing changes. My other eye is fine, perhaps even better than ever, seeing everything in more detail, compensating for the loss of the left. Eye see, I see, oh shit, oh pardon me, I’m a little lost here. [Begin hamfisted pun phase of story!]  Losing focus. Fuck us. Fuck me. What? Oh shit. I can see the veins, the tiny, snaky little veins in my left eye. They are floating there, in the murk thicker than ever, all of them threatening to burst. They float there, in what could appear to be a gigantic pupil, although if it were that I would suffer from the great intake of light, wouldn’t I. No, the eye seems to be covered in something, swollen, bulging, and at times its surface reflects the spectrum, like an oil slick, but there is no beauty in it, only the slow death of my Image, of what I was to Become. [One of the central issues with writing while on cough syrup is that typing is fun and words are pretty, so you just end up making a lot of them and feeling very comfortable and happy. And if you’re already prone to stream-of-consciousness runs, you end up going to town. Crap town.]

December 6 (morning)-Up from a dream. It left knots in my belly, queasy fear. Yellow light in this room, even the light is stale. Smells like sweat and old fabric and the surface of my mirror [I have sniffed mirrors before. They often have an odd smell.], a strange animal smell.

In the dream [Oh God, there’s nothing so lame duck in horror fiction as the prolonged nightmare sequence. Not that it can’t be done well, or hasn’t, but it’s a delicate balance to create dread once the real world risk has been eliminated. Here, I just very clearly wanted to insert a parasitic worm sequence. Our obsessions rule us, yes?] I am on a medical table, wrists strapped tightly down. One doctor in the room, unsanitary, so unclean. Wearing scrubs that look like sackcloth. He asks if I want to see “The Birth.” I can’t move, can’t open my mouth. I hear him walk over to me, feet on the floor loud and heavy like pistons on sheet metal. I smell him getting nearer, and my nose recoils. He smells like compost and burning hair. I am about to see his eyes when he puts a small beauty mirror in front of my face, tells me that I’m lucky to get to watch “The Birth”. He tells me that most people never make it this far. He’s happy about it, laughing with wet sounds at the back of his throat, like he’s about to vomit on me. He pushes gauze cylinders up my nose, and I can barely breath, and the back of my throat feels toxic. He demands, WATCH! I see it then, the birth he is so overjoyed to witness. The worms are there. The baby worms are in my eye. Hundreds of tiny white worms floating in the opaque fluid. They are swimming in my eye, it is their egg now, and I am their mother, and they start to push through and the pain is screeching [Used the synonym feature to replace screaming, that’s my bet.] down my body and pulsing in my head, and the doctor is laughing, and the first worm chews through the center of my eye, and then the surface tears like tissue and they are all rushing out, boiling out, diseased, squirming, into my nose, into my ears, and I can feel them burrowing into the corner of my right eye, ready to start the cycle all over again. My face turned into an incubator, empty, mouth slack, black oil dripping down my face from the dead eye.

No more dreams like this! [Amen.]

I need to get better.

I need to see a doctor. I can’t leave the house.

I am going blind (maybe crazy too).

I was suppose to Become something?

Wasn’t eye? [Again? AGAIN!]

December 7—WWW.MEDQUEST.COM was enlightening, to a degree. Although I’m wary of self-diagnosis, there is a tie between certain steroids and angle closure glaucoma, which could be what I have, right? I mean, I’ve been suffering from intense pain and swelling of the eye, accompanied by nausea and vomiting, and the loss of vision definitely indicates some form of optic nerve damage. [I used to have to run fifty feet of phone line from my attic office to “jack-in” to my AOL dial-up account and do medical research. All that super slow internet time spent researching the interaction of steroids with ocular health, all for not.]

Yes, there was a period of time where I did not have the strength of self that I do now, and I used steroids as a tool to become something better. I looked back at my old cycling schedules for the Durabolin and the Hybolin Decanoate, and looked further back and realized I probably injected far beyond the recommended amount of Anadrol, but I’ve been off that shit for at least two years. To suffer from this kind of amplified, apocalyptic glaucoma this much later does not fit. Plus, the steroids couldn’t have caused the visions or the mental sense of superiority that has invested itself in me. Maybe the Power that I feel is some kind of internal steroid and I am afflicted with this pain because I have not directed it correctly. [Really should have planted this info earlier, to at least, maybe, introduce an unreliable narrator element.]

Have I ever had a direction?

Have I ever even had a reason? For anything?

Maybe someone will call over here and come help me. I’ve been laying on my side, staring at the phone for like two hours.

It won’t ring, no matter how hard I stare at it.

December 8—Last night the guy from the Pink Dot [I think this a real place that I heard the RZA mention in a song. He also mentioned he was a big fan of Bjork as a lyricist. The RZA.] on Chambers delivered a week’s worth of groceries to my house. I slipped the money through the mail slot so that he couldn’t look at me, but I could feel his little eyes on me, even through the door. He could feel my Power, sense it. The Power is still here, within me. I have to find a way to Become what I must be, this greater creature. Maybe the Power is changing me, some kind of extreme and painful alchemy turning me into gold. I will endure the change. I must figure a way to look in the mirror now and not see the loss of what I was, but instead see...metamorphosis? Yes, I am Becoming, and when I am finished, I can begin crushing everything that I see, everything that does not possess my great beauty. Every last petty, mundane, mediocre little thing will be destroyed, and in my wake, anything that remains will thank me.

For the cleansing.

For the fire with which I will burn the soft and ugly flesh of this earth, and for the magnificence that I will leave behind.

The glory of Me. [Wait, so you’re telling me we just endured all of those entries showing Marcus growing weaker and more doubtful and more human, only to have him return to this delusional state from earlier in the story? Why? Why would we do that? It feels like betrayal. It fucks up the arc. Oh, man, is this like one of those DVD commentaries where the director just points out what we already know is happening on screen? I hope not. Here’s another behind the scenes anecdote: When I was 22 I used to have conversations with the moon while I was running. I thought the moon was a reasonable substitute for God (who I’d abandoned for not existing).]

December 10—I vomited for three hours this morning. [Okay, back to The Interminable Collapse of Funky Eye.] I threw up until I couldn’t breathe, until my stomach was wrenched into the tightest knot, and felt seconds from bursting [Lots of bursting in ADA too]. I saw my own bile [Oh, not your mom’s bile?] come out of my mouth. It was bright green. The taste reminded me of the time I stuck my tongue to a nine volt battery. After a while it didn’t smell so bad. [Calling Dr. Superfluous! We’ve got a severe case of An Account of the Gradual Reduction of Vomit Odor.] I rested my head against the white porcelain, curled up in the fetal position, waiting for the next cramp in my gut, the next explosion, the next guttural noise, like a crippled animal in my throat. I wasn’t sweating but I felt so cold and so wet, trapped under my own skin like a diseased blanket. Seething. Watching the calm white, the water against it, wanting to cover myself in that water, wanting it to clean me. [Welcome to the “Dilation” Pity party!] I just wanted something to wash over me, to peel away my flesh, every bit of sinew and shred of tissue. I wanted something to burn out my eyes, so I can grow new ones. I wanted to feel my Mom’s cool hand on the back of my neck.

When I saw my reflection in the water, I cried. I can’t even close my left eye now. The gummy, blackened eye is so tight and swollen that my eyelids can’t close over the entire surface. You can see the blackness between the two thin, irritated folds of flesh, like a tiny crescent moon. I am being eclipsed. Covered with weakness. I didn’t even mind crying today, although it sounded so weak and small that I wanted to crush my own windpipe to quiet the useless noise. Not worth the effort. The pity sound, so dead over my lips. Empty. Fucking shit. I want out of this house. The air in here has passed through stale and stagnant and become full of something. It smells like old dairy products. The air is fermenting. It is gelling around me, swarming with bacteria that knit the oxygen into this rotten secretion that I can’t quite seem to breathe at times.

I want to see another human being.

I want someone to tell me I’m beautiful. [Don’t forget your Pity Party gift bags! We’ve thrown in a Growing Sense of Ennui!]

December 14—I decided to do something. [Oh, please do.] I needed a distraction, a respite from the pain in my head. I’ve become too focused on it, and it felt like I was helping it. There has been too much thinking, in this stillness, and not enough action. I felt incredibly weak moving around. I felt smaller, like my whole body had atrophied.

I wasn’t sure exactly what I could do, and I began to rummage around in my stale closet. I took down a small cardboard box from the upper right corner of my closet. “X-Mas Stuff” was written across the top in thick black ink. It was sealed with packing tape, so I shambled to the kitchen and grabbed and old box cutter that I used to employ [Awkward. But I’d guess it replaced “used to use.”] as a grocery clerk at DARI-RITE. At first the box made me feel guilty. I haven’t even celebrated Christmas in years. No calls to family, no exchange of gifts, no well wishing. It seemed petty, beneath me.

I carried the box into the living room and set it down on the glass top coffee table in front of my black leather couch. As I broke the seal with my box cutter a flood of smells washed over me. Had I known what the box had in store for me, I may have been afraid to open it.

All those smells, like instant memories. The smells of candle wax and pine needles and old wrapping paper and plush Santa dolls came to me in a medley that made my heart ache. I was overwhelmed by all of it, intruded upon by these memories of a time when everything made sense, and my mom would still talk to me, and dad hadn’t left us yet, and I was just a boy and people brought me gifts and tousled my hair and asked me if I’d been a good boy this year and of course I’d said, “Yes!” because that prompted the gift giving.

Worthless nostalgia, right? [Well, now that you mention it…]Still, touching these things felt good, and I hadn’t felt good in a long time. I’ve either been numb, delusional, or depressed. Looking at this gathering of holiday flotsam gave me something, and I wanted to keep feeling it. [Anything else you’d like to telegraph to the reader?]

I decorated my little tomb. A monster dropping flower petals, trying to ignore the morbidity of it.

Then I sat down on [How] my couch feeling a strange sense of comfort. I was sitting there, sinking into the soft leather, the [am] smell of my old holly candle rich in the air, “Little Drummer Boy” playing on the Bose system, trying to remember the last time I’d seen [I] a movie, and then I saw the reflection. I caught a [still] glimpse of myself in the cellophane [working on this. DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK, I’VE BEEN HERE FOR YEARS! His deodorant is clumping live onstage. Ladies Love Cool Non-Sequiturs and Random Factlets.] wrapped box of ornaments that was sitting on my coffee table.

My reflection was changing colors, red to green, green to red, with the lights I’d plugged in minutes ago. I’d forgotten, somehow. I’d forgotten what I looked like. I leaned forward to see my new face reflected in the bright green ornament. I remember not believing it at first. It didn’t seem fair; I was just beginning to feel human again.

The blackness, the horrible, pulsing black was beginning to cover my right eye. I could see it there, like a drop of ink by my right tear duct, tiny black tendrils already reaching out towards my iris. [Tendril is such a wonderful word. It is too late to go back. Too much time invested in an ill-advised experiment. Sometimes you just have to dig in deeper and grunt your way through. Close the file. Tap that little house in the corner. Go now. Get to dee choppa!] The left eye was staring ahead blankly, a helpless bystander to the consumption of my face.

I closed my right eye and felt tears dripping from it like white phosphor [Yup.]. It...wasn’t...FAIR!!! [An unexpected appearance by the classic Triple Exclamation. Now you really have to feel this sentence.]

I wanted to vomit, to scream, to bludgeon my own face so as never to see it again. I wanted to be swallowed up and forgotten. Erased.

I wondered if anyone would mourn me. I shuddered against the answer.

I wanted to fight it, the blackness in my face, the dark that had hidden itself behind my eyes. I wanted to survive and never feel this again, this terrible absence of hope, or purpose. [This last sentence perfectly synopsizes the experience of reading this story. It’s like the central thesis of what has happened here.]

My reaction became primal, guided by desire [?]. I became so overwhelmed with adrenaline that I didn’t even feel anything as I slammed my fist into the box of ornaments. I didn’t feel the fragments of shattered glass lacerating my knuckles, or the deep gouge created by the piece that I tore from the box. I didn’t feel anything until I slammed that jagged piece of ornament glass into the grotesque, swollen black eye. [All quite unlikely, from a sensory perspective, and very over-dramatic. But he was guided by desire, so…]

Then I felt everything. [BOOM! POW!]

First there was the exquisitely precise sensation of the glass pushing into the eye, which put up a split second of resistance before the glass separated the soft tissue and slid in further. Then I felt the kind of pain you always wonder about but hope you never feel. It caused me to convulse, and I flopped onto the carpet, onto my hands and knees, submissive to the fire in my head, burning like hundreds of angry wasps all stinging in the exact same spot. [WHOA!]

Without thought, motivated by a feral [?] need to get rid of the pain, I reached up my right hand and pulled the colored shard of glass from my left eye, and for a split second I could see the Christmas lights above me twinkling in its curves. Then my eye exploded. [KABOOM!]

My swollen black eye let loose, its tissue torn beyond redemption. Black fluid was gushing out of it, soaking the carpet beneath my head like India ink, incredibly dark. The pain was gone and I felt my whole body opening up. I heard myself growling, and the growl turned to a low moan as my mouth opened wide.

I felt the Power then, and I hated it. [Final change in character represents comedic outcome.]

The Power was soaring through the infinite network of my nerves, pregnant and ugly with my visions, and my body felt like it was going to be torn in every direction at once, as my flesh surged with all of the hate and pain that my visions demanded.

I wanted to be clean of it, this darkness that was consuming me from the inside out, eating away at the face that had once served it. I thought about how I used to feel when I was a kid, so clean and light, and I knew that I have been wrong, so wrong, for a long time, and that at some point my love for myself had twisted itself into hate for everyone else, and then I just wanted to be a kid again, to feel that light and turn away from the person I had created, the false God I had made out of myself and worshipped blindly [Please, narrator, just give us some clue as to what’s going on and how we’re supposed to feel. This subtlety is driving us to fits.]. I knew I couldn’t ever go back, and as another wave of pain snapped my body inwards I gasped, “I’m sorry.”

My body began to convulse until I thought my bones would shatter, and I felt the Power, the darkest elements of it, crawling to the surface of my skin. [The anomalous dark power hates nothing more than suffering-induced realizations and apologies. That’s pretty much the silver bullet when it comes to anomalous dark powers.]

Then I ruptured.

The fluid was oozing from my blown eye socket, seeping from my nostrils, burning its way out of my pores. Then there was a final seizure and I felt sick and scared beyond my knowledge, and the darkness began spraying from my mouth, splattering the carpet beneath me, until the ground was a slick, black puddle around me, all viscera and shadow. I collapsed and thought I felt the fluid moving beneath me, trying to crawl back into me. I felt tiny arms reaching up from the puddle to pull me through the floor and then...nothing. [Wait, the guy was literally infested by an oily manifestation of a False Ego God? Heavy, bro. So how many NIN Halos are in your collection, exactly? I think Guy Ritchie could just direct the hell out of this. Teeth trapped in drywall. No one has ever made it this far. You are the first to read this sentence.]

Three hours later I awoke in the sickness, which still seemed to emanate a diseased heat from the carpet. I was curled up in the fetal position with one hand over my blasted socket. I felt incredibly weak but I managed to crawl to the bathroom and roll my body into the shower. [And yeah, I know that at some point a reviewer will say something to the effect of, “The only time I could enjoy the book was when the author was honest enough to savage his own hackery in an addendum, though even that carried with it a hint of clunking post-modern faux-honesty. If he was truly being honest, he’d cease to force any of this tripe on the populace and go back to smoking cloves and playing D&D with the other Bizarro nerds. Or he’d delve into the same treatment for each of the no-less-awful pieces which were actually included in the collection.” Because that’s what angry people do—they show people how unhappy they are, using the internet as a tool for shared suffering. But they’d be wrong anyway. I don’t play D&D with the other Bizarro nerds. We prefer Halo.] I sat there, curled up, and let the shower pound down on me, washing away the sickness I was saturated with. [Prior comment not intended to begrudge anyone their opinion regarding my writing, by the way. Make the art, set it free, choose whether or not to absorb any of the feedback. A glowing review can be just as disingenuous as a specious chunk of trollery. Guessing at the intent and desire of others is crazy. I love a lot of art that people hate, and vice versa. Why would anyone believe their own art so precious as to engender universal love? And if they managed that, would they have made baby food?] I felt small, and light, and even as the shower’s spray became icy cold I sat there. It took awhile to feel clean. [Is it possible to write a prolonged “shower after trauma” scene without thinking of Leaving Las Vegas? I just don’t think so.]

December 17—There I am in the mirror. [Wait, are we shifting tense? Are you writing this in front of the mirror, looking down to your journal between each glance?]

I’m gaunt and unshaven, but I’m smiling. It looks kind of gruesome, with the missing eye, but there is joy in my face.

My left eye socket has felt no pain since the night I excavated it.[?] A strange, incredibly black scar tissue has covered the blasted tissue and exposed optic nerve, and the eyelids, now useless, have tapered inward. The hole is deep and dark, but I don’t want an eye patch or fake glass optic. I want to remember. [So you wouldn’t remember what happened if you were wearing an eyepatch? Or is this just an over-wrought symbol of your new humility?]

One good eye is staring back at me, asking me to understand that I’ve been given a final grasp at redemption.

I’m going to make things right.

I tire of looking at myself. I close my eye and feel the sun coming in through the small window above the shower, and I listen to the pulse of my heart. The heart beat is swift and steady. It is a child’s heart beat, pounding at its own walls, hungry for light and divinity.

I travelled through attempted self-sacrifice and rediscovered myself.

An eye for an I. [WHOA! GODDAMN! That’s just incomprehensibly bad, an arsenic cherry on a shit sundae. And did you really lean back in the egg chair and give yourself the self-approving “Another Gem Is Written” nod after typing these last three ultra-garbage lines? Sweet Lord, man. Sweet Lord.]

Well. I warned you, right there in the title to this section. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Now go give your brain a nice, soapy scrub, and forgive me when and if you can.

AND FINALLY:

A REAL BATCH OF NETWORK PITCHES FOR SHOWS WHICH YOU WILL PROBABLY NOT BE SEEING ANYTIME SOON

Fantastic opportunities have long had a habit of rolling my way, and I’ve long felt that it’s my duty to squander those opportunities as vigorously as possible.

As opportunities go, this was a big one. A chance to run a bunch of pitches by a major network. Maybe for a series, maybe for an anthology show, maybe for a one-off project, who knew? But the interest was there with one caveat: The network primarily traffics in absurdist comedy and they were shopping for more of same.

The funny stuff is not my forte. And I was on a very tight deadline (they wanted something the next day), so I grabbed a 22oz of Stone IPA and threw myself at this with what could either be called “abandon” or “wild, flailing ridiculousness.”

The network, to date, has not called back.

POTENTIAL SERIES HOST: CLANCY PEPPERWOOD ©

Description: CLANCY is a bright red anthropomorphic pepper and is styled similarly to a certain advertising peanut. CLANCY’s legs are absent and he is wheelchair bound. CLANCY has a monocle, a fancy moustache, a semi-busted top hat, and a cane (with extra laser sword feature, periodically used for defense against ravening animals which attack him at random; he is a food). He also carries a deep and abiding hatred for Mr. Peanut, whom he blames for the loss of his legs during “the event in Lisbon” (to be explained much later).

Setting: Traditional setting is a Masterpiece Theatre-style abode, book-lined walls, tiny stand for beverages, and a crackling/blazing fire in the background. Periodically the face of a long-forgotten D-list celebrity (Tempestt Bledsoe, Steve Railsback, Shannon Tweed, Martin Mull, etc. but Tempestt Bledsoe more frequently than any other!) will appear and rotate in the flames. CLANCY will never acknowledge this occurrence.

Catchphrase:  “Oh, hello there, Peppers!” (“Oh” as if having been caught at something, “hello” in a smarmy/insinuating way with an extended O at the end, and “peppers” with camaraderie and relish.) Spoken to fourth wall, addressing the audience.

Catchphrase Application: To be delivered shortly after any return from break. Upon immediate return CLANCY will always be addressing someone to his side (can later, at random intervals, be revealed to be a mirror, a poster of Dale Earnhardt, a gigantic man’s jean-clad crotch, a ground beef sculpture of Corey Feldman, etc.). His statements have the flavor of inappropriateness or absurdity without being too overt. Then, upon being “caught off guard” by the audience, he will turn to them with, “Oh, hello there, Peppers!”

Intro Phrases: Here is a short sample of the types of things CLANCY could be saying upon return from break-

“…so we travel back in time, kill Bakula, and BAM! Quantum Leap never happened!”

“…well, if they don’t run the media, then will someone please explain why it’s been years since I’ve seen Ernie Borgnine in anything?”

“… so I ate her husband’s ashes with a spoon, right there in front of her, and that’s how we fell in love.”

“…you have to understand the whole Binks family was like that. It wasn’t just Jar Jar. The lot of them were dumb as [beep]ing mallards.”

“… I swear on my Grandpepper’s grave, Kenny Loggins will not stop mudsharking on tour. He took the whole fish, snout to tail, after Red Rocks. [shakes head incredulously, then whispers] The whole fish.”

“…his best idea was to print a book titled Read This Book or You Will Be Slapped by Me, but he kept insisting the title was a catch-22 and I told him that technically it was just a threat.”

“…more than the infection and the lizard attack, it’s all the Sammy Haggar videos that keep me from going back to Cabo.”

And so on.

Variations/Opportunities:

CLANCY PEPPERWOOD’s format should be rigid enough for the first few episodes, and then begin to mutate after that.

Tiny peeks at his dark history with Mr. Peanut will be revealed, creating a separate plot arc leading to a brutal conflict in the season finale (CLANCY and Mr. Peanut are both hit by a glowing Pink Beam emitted from the face of a senile pug named Mr. Pickles/The beam gives each of them the knowledge to destroy the other/They leap into mid-air and as they reach each other they are absorbed into the Flaming Hand of God from The Stand, which then belches out a Space Baby with Ron Silver’s head who declares, “Never the twain shall meet!” And then he explodes into a thousand peppers.).

His wheelchair can be customized with different features (hydraulics, X-mas lights, the head of Tempestt Bledsoe on a stick).

After the audience has come to expect the “Oh, hello there, peppers!” we can also periodically alter the audio or delivery.

Examples: The “Oh” is extended into infinity and pitch-shifted high as we swirl-zoom in tight on CLANCY’s eyes.

He barely makes it past the “hello” and then turns and vomits tiny peanuts.

He is interrupted by a walking boom box playing The Doobie Brothers’ “Taking It To The Street” and he falls out of his chair and starts doing push-ups.

(In any such scenario the catchphrase should not be completed. We simply jump to the next scene in the episode.)

Yeah, he’s food. So what? Peppers are funny, as food goes.

EPISODE/SERIES PITCH (based on pre-existing JRJ property):

Title: PuddingQuest (action/comedy)

Pitch: An even funnier version of The Road meets The Bourne Identity meets Godzilla meets Pudding and Maybe Pudding Pops and Possibly Even Their Bootleg Mexican Version “Pops of Pudding Muy Sabor.”

Concept: Dean awakes in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with no memory of who he is or how he got there. But he’s wearing a suit made of cockroaches and he’s surrounded by splattered Twinkies and he’s got an intense desire (possibly even a hankering) for pudding that must be sated.

On his PuddingQuest he meets a confused rainbow god that rides an invisible chariot (and keeps shifting the very nature of reality and physical law in ways which are funnier than how Q did it on ST:TNG), a coy love interest named Mave who is covered in fungus and ants, and a variety of adversaries he must battle (a man in a suit made of 7 layer burritos, a giant sandworm, Cher, etc.).

Can Dean unravel the mysteries of his past and his bizarre suit? Is a world without pudding a world worth living in? Why is Bill Cosby following Dean and then running away while making owl noises when spotted?

EPISODE/SERIES PITCH (based on pre-existing JRJ property):

Title: The League of Zeroes (comedy)

Pitch: It’s Jersey Shore meets Tod Browning’s Freaks

Concept: In the near future one of the most popular shows on television pits competitors in a battle to see who can most radically re-design themselves through experimental surgery. Jamie, a young man whose brain is in a portable see-through box, and Ray, his best friend (better known as SaladMan—his body features a changing variety of salad ingredients and accoutrements) have recently been voted in to the Champion’s Party House.

And due to a station merger the Champion’s Party House now also houses the stars of the equally popular show Skanks and Morons. D-bags doused in Hatchet Body Spray, triflin’ hoes (and, in one very special episode, triffid hoes), medical miracles and insipid intra-house trivia games abound.

Can a carrot contract herpes? Why can’t Jamie’s brain bench press things? If Greta and Kryztall can’t make the triceratops with a saddle go away by humping it, how will we start the Pool Challenge?

Guaranteed to feature exactly zero special guest appearances by KRS-One.

EPISODE/SERIES PITCH

Title: Babycrom 1(comedy/action)

Pitch: It’s Assault on Precinct 13 meets Excalibur... WITH A FINAL CONFLICT SET ON A FUCKING GIANT PLANET DESTROYING BABY!  (seriously)

Concept: In a time of steel and dwarves and steel dwarves, in a land where myth and magyck are both spelled with Y’s, in a galaxy where everything keeps being eaten by a giant fucking baby, there roams a rogue band of terrible and voracious aspect, a group of harriers called Thee Stabby Dragyns (Helgrid the Conan Ripoff, Percival The Nebbish Elf Archer, and Soupcox the Dwarven). Long known for their blood-quenched blades and the pieces beneath their cods, these soldiers of doom have pledged their fists, feet, and steel to a final quest, to assail the dark and vertiginous heights of Mount Xyyvvzx, where lay the final virgin of the land, known as The Big Fat One With the Diabetes Who Always Wants to Do It to Hall and Oates Songs and Is Very Permissive Re: Back Door Access.

But this is one quest that may not have a happy ending. Because some virgins have brothers who don’t have diabetes but do have things like That One Spikey Ball on a Chain or That Lightning Bolt Magyck That Comes Out of the Hand.

And worst of all, a magnificently large baby with an even larger appetite is descending on the land. The First Gumming was ages ago, and destroyed most dragyns. The Second Gumming approaches with the rapidity of a racing ostrich and the shadow of Babycrom looms ever larger.

By the time the four (count ‘em FOUR!) moons of Jazzlebrox a-light the sky Thee Stabby Dragons will find the tables turned, brotherhoods tested, and body parts gummed and digested.

Will the discovery of The Only Firebreathing Dragyn to Survive the First Gumming provide a third act deus ex machina and satisfy people’s love for revenge? Sure. Will anyone question that a baby so massive would have the gravitational heft to create its own atmosphere? Maybe!

Prepare to venture from verdant and black lands of yore to the drooly exteriors of a giant destructive baby in the ultimate fantasy epic Babycrom 1.

EPISODE/SERIES PITCH

Title: The Wobbler (comedy/action)

Pitch: It’s Bottle Rocket meets Watchmen in the weirdest crime caper since Muppets drove motorcycles.

Concept: Chip St. Duggins was low on cash and lower on self-esteem until a freak accident as a pharmacological test subject changed his life forever. Waking from a coma with a righteous beard and the ability to psychokinetically make people mildly dizzy (at a close distance and at the cost of severe headaches and nosebleeds and occasional self-urination) Chip declares himself The Wobbler and gathers his friends to launch an unrelenting crime spree.

The Wobbler’s Gang:

Dale St. Garamond aka Mr. One Wheel Only aka Dutchie—Special Ability= Unicycle Street Performer/Morning Omelet Maker

Ro St. Bo aka Diesel Clock aka DeathHammer—Special Ability= Mother Owns a Minivan (with two drop down TV’s)

Pete St. Martins aka Fuck You I Don’t Want a Nickname aka Fussy Pete—Special Ability= Once knocked out a very agitated goat

The opposition:

Johnny Law, logic, goats, bears and people with really solid balance and no inner ear issues.

The training missions:

Convince (via exterior unicycle distraction and/or dizziness) the cute girl at Applebee’s to provide (at least!) one free beer refill.

Never let any aliens into bath tub.

Each member must give an impromptu speech to a Post Office employee. Topic will always be “Antonio Banderas Jr.”

The heist:

FuzzyBalls comes to The Wobbler’s town once a year and the all-bear circus always impresses with feats of ball balancing and pistol marksmanship. But this year The Wobbler and his crew have other plans for the opening night door sales. And when your “other plans” involve infiltrating a circus and psychokinetically dizzyfying gun-wielding bears off of balls, SHIT’S ABOUT TO GET CRAZY! SO CRAZY I HAVE TO USE CAPS FOR EMPHASIS!

Fin.

WINNER OF THE 2011 WONDERLAND AWARD FOR BEST COLLECTION!

“WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is fucking terrific.”—JACK KETCHUM

“A haunting collection from a wildly talented author, WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is composed of nineteen perfectly-wrought nightmares, every one of which will stay with you long after you've finished reading.”—PETER CRAIG, author of Hot Plastic and Blood Father, co-screenwriter of The Town

“The people populating these stories are real and vital and you WILL care, deeply, about what becomes of them... and in JRJ's harsh universe, baaaaad things happen. Often. Prepare thyself.”—CRAIG DAVIDSON, author of Rust and Bone, The Fighter, and Sarah Court

“Favorite collection for 2011: WE LIVE INSIDE YOU.”—STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES, author of The Ones That Got Away and It Came From Del Rio

Table of Contents

- Copyright

- Acknowledgements:

- Table of Contents:

- A Note About This Author’s Preferred Edition

- An Introduction
- The League of Zeroes
- Dissociative Skills
- Amniotic Shock in the Last Sacred Place
- Precedents
- Snowfall
- Ex-Hale
- Working At Home
- Priapism
- Luminary
- Saturn’s Game
- Branded

- The Sharp Dressed Man at the End of the Line

- Two Cages, One Moon
- Sparklers Burning
- Last Thoughts Drifting Down
- Swimming in the House of the Sea
- Wall of Sound:
- I. BURN/Liquidation
- II. PURGE/Deeper

- III. TRANCE END/A Number of Things Come to Mind

- Author’s Notes:
- About the Author
- About the Artist