19 posts tagged “drugs”

5.10.09
Last night(rough estimates):

-9:45PM: Got off work
-9:45 + however it long it takes me to get to and surmount the hills on Riverside: Noticed untrue back wheel, didn't notice parked car. 
-10:02: Hobble around cursing myself.  Leave in a hurry.
-10:30ish: I am home.  There is a grinning sweat stain on my shirt, a deluge of sweat down my back.

-10:45: Porter comes over

-Ambiguous(~): Tommy and friend come over.  Friend's name is Brooke

~Sit around and smoke.  Brooke asks who is reading Infinite Jest.  Her brother is a physicist.  She is smart and has a tiny bladder.  1100 sucks and so do the people living inside-- there is no TP.

~I tell her to use gauze.  This makes sense, gauze are just far more expensive.

~ + ~/10 minutes: Brooke needs to pee again.  There are no more gauze so I look through my closet and find a large shirt with the silhouette of a head shot in, trimmed in green.  The white figure has green eyes and headphones.  There are two CDs on the back of the shirt and a tape deck on the front with some advertisement in Russian along the bottom.  I hand it to her.  It is Luke Koftan's shirt and I haven't seen the guy in years.

Midnight?: Nicole and Wes come over.  They make small talk and I decide to sit on the stoop.

Midnight plus: Introduction to World War and the fallout that endures.  Some scrawny straight edge spits in a neighbor's face.  She comes out with a base ball bat and starts screaming.  They run off only to return with reinforcements.  Several run to the center of the confrontation, one of them remains.  To watch us and make sure we don't get involved or something.  Adrian brims with hatred. 

    I dream of suffocating vision, binding tunnel vision strangling my eyes.  I dream I am drunk and high and there are puzzle pieces strewn across my otherwise empty floor in my otherwise empty room.  A former roommate looms over the pieces and stares at me with dark circles under his eyes. The majority of puzzle pieces form a picture of a lighthouse.  I realize this should be in the bathroom down the hall, framed in ancient drift-wood and having 4 pieces misplaced at the bottom.  Not that it matters, in this puzzle, there are merely two shapes.  Every other piece is identical-- in waking and dreaming states. 

    You can still fit in even if you don't belong.

    My diminished key-hole sight causes me to panic.  I lose control of my body and drunkenly stumble out of the room.  What the hell is wrong with me, I ask myself.  I make it to the bathroom and begin urinating in the toilet.  The toilet relays the news, "You're piss is dirty.  You're going to fail."  A current roommate, Graham, apologizes, somewhere off in a distant nadir of my mind, for blowing smoke in my face.

    The toilet grimaces and becomes the Great Pit of Carkoon.  I fall and it consumes me.  Darkness and exudate outline rigid spikes as I dangle from a giant tongue(I hope).   Despair overwhelms me.  Tinges of thought, prickles of suggestion, move my mind to believe I am in hell.  And this, when this thing pukes me out, I'll be in heaven. 

    Apparently that is a terrace outside of Versailles Palace, lit by barely pre-crepuscular light.  Gold receding into silver blue into black.   I sit in silence overlooking courtyards below much as I did in waking state, looking down at the end of Richmond, the bend in the James and a traveling commercial train. 

    I wake up shivering and drink several glasses of water.  I have to go pee for the last time.  I get there, wait for what, to my bladder, seems like forever and in the end it's diluted.

   

Mainframe
-tell story of the mainframe.  Purpose? To run society.  Character works on "anthropoidal exchange" program, which simulates all known DNA "constructs" in hyper-realistic test runs.  Determining what, writers of the program are unsure.
-at the end, narrator witnesses Elz's murder

Every Murder Needs a Murderer
-tell story of Elz's death, address narrator's later concern / suspicion of them copying her. 

State Sanctioned
I swipe my hand past the scanner.  The mechanized box-- plugged into the wall, the wall into a grid, the grid into the network-- lights up from black.  White light shines on my hand and a spinning gear whirs.  With a click, the door opens.  My door.  To my house.  Mine and everyone elses-- all the same box, lined up the same distance apart. 
I step inside my world, my prison, beyond the foyeur and into the living room.  Papers clutter the coffee table. The couch opposes the table, green with arm rests three times that of what you would need.  The home is the only place where excess is allowed.

Excess.  Like a wealthy class.  Like poverty.  We had enough of both to fill multiple Earths.  Maybe that's what they did, started Earth A: Upper Class, Earth B: Original Earth and Middle Class, and Earth C: The Forsaken.  It's not a big deal, space colonization.  My father, if you can really call those cold machines "paternal," showed me captures of the first lunar city.  His speech, staggered by contrived fragments, told me this was the beginning.  His prerogative was to, like all parental units, teach without compassion.  To train youth, detached.  As a boy, I believed in our ability to reach out into the universe and change.  Now I only see the reaching.    

Excess.  Like animals we don't eat.  They were pets.  No longer allowed.  Shipped off to the Sun, all of them. Launched, in missile caskets, to the depths of blanketed nothingness.  Maybe burned in a big heap, burried in a large ditch.  If it is possible for humans to sell out individuals from their own species, what makes dogs exempt?

Excess.  Like listing off another crime of permittance or domination, authored by the human race.

And here I am, standing at the edge of my living room, my suit still on.  There is a photo of some of my friends on the coffee table, hidden almost entirely by legal papers.  I grab it and head to the kitchen.  The papers slide over top of each other.  Some float to the floor behind me, reading "State Sanctioned" at the top.

I don't know one of the persons in this picture.  The one at the center, the one everyone crowds around.  That is me, that guy in the center, with black hair, grey eyes, and a smile like everyone else.  But I don't know him, because I've never really ever seen myself.  Not for who I am, anyway, just who I want to be.  But that's the same with everyone in this picture.  I don't really know them behind their grey and green eyes.  I just see them and interact how I feel I should.  It doesn't really go any deeper than that.  These people, my friends, are nothing more than fractal images, rearranging, shifting, combining to become absolute in their projection.

I set the staged smiles on the counter.  Eyes look back, but they don't see me.  I go to my refrigerator wall unit and type in a string of numbers.  My order to the machine is five-three-six, a rare strip with mashed red-skin potatoes.  And water.   It begins humming, replicating the biology of yeast. A molecular structure is laced within, and soon I will have a perfect copy of something delicious.  A perfect copy, just like Elz, this girl coworker of mine.  She's dead now, a copy in her place.  No one should know this, but I know this.  I am not sure why, but I know this.  Something in me, something separate from the deterministic circuits.  

I am a digital gene pasting associate for the Hub. I sit down at my desk and submit a new thinking code into the mainframe.  An evolving code.  It is telescoping, refining itself through failures, finding an efficient rhythm of progression.  Within an hour, this code will know simple addition.  Within days, it will know the self, have an ego, and think, perhaps, it should eat something.  I add a line for recognition.  If this contributes to the overall mainframe experience, maybe it will seek its creator.  My grin is brief. 

I take a break and breathe. I, God in exile, think of Elz, who left me shortly after we met.  I remember the first time I ever saw human skin on another body.  It is hers.  Inexcusable that she enter my home without express permission from the Hub! So she dies.  Assisted suicide.  She dies and they copy.  A replacement takes over and the syntax of society continues, missing not a single fabric of code.

My meal takes a few minutes for the processor to work out, so I head back to the bedroom.  I unzip my suit.  From head to toe, my body emerges from its Shell.  Shells, these suits we all wear, projecting what viewers want to see.  You might think I'm blonde, you might think I'm "white," or "black," but you'll never think wrong, because everyone is correct in perceiving.  Projections are always what you want to see.  Biologically, there's something we are most comfortable with seeing in other people.  Usually ourselves, sometimes the exact opposite.  Whatever restricted life conditions have created our desire for sensory comfort, these suits provide.  Neural pathways all networked, anchored to the shores of a bigger system.  The system of monitors and analyzation.  Assessments.  Assessments on what we need, relayed to all other suits.  In our hands, unique digital addresses bind to everything we do.  Our bodies, networked, like a microcosm of God's perfection.

The last of my suit drifts to my feet and I step out.  I look out the window, dust settling in the sunlight, and the world is everything I can imagine.  I see the steel walls that enclose this six block neighborhood.  Six houses each block.  Six neighborhoods every Trans exit. A perfect social dynamic.  Easy to witness. Easy to calculate.

My steak is done and my opaque water is cold. I set them down on some papers and pick up the important legal ones from the floor as I sit on my big couch.  It is comfortable and I am happy that this is my last meal.  A simple favorite of mine.  It feels false though.  There are no cows.

Just us. 

And them. 

I look at the last paper I pick up.  It reads "State Sanctioned."  There is a line for my signature at the bottom, right under the final letters.

Highly advanced, near-human intelligence automates information centers.  Computers.  Sorting, watching, reviewing.  Making sure everything is in place.  Make sure we make it through to reach further into the depths of blanketed, muted oblivion.  Safety and the progression of humanity is assured.  At least, for everyone that chooses to partake.  Treatments exist for those who don't.  All of them.

I sign the document with a finger-tip pen.  The LCD-paper processes my action and thus follows a delayed dance of lines and curves.  I look at my calligraphic identity under the last line.  It reads:    

"State Sanctioned Self-Termination."

Afterworld

I ride in my hearse.  It is a square cell.  My chest and upper back touch cold metal as I inhale.  The compartment hovers out of the neighborhood and down the street, passing smiling faces.  They see a maintenance vehicle.  Or a tour bus, ha!  Whatever it is, I am suffocating inside this tiny tortoise.  "Shells are there to protect you when you need them most.  Should you ever cross the road."  My unit teaches me this when I am a child.  

The hearse arrives in a large garage and rumbles.  My clamped feet and waist allow little movement.  I strain to twist my face to a grate. Shutters close behind the vehicle.  Darkness enchroaches.  One sense gone.  The hum of the undercarriage evaporates.  Two senses.  I feel a pinch in my spine.  I struggle to reach the small of my back as my arms go limp.  Three senses, and I fall to a helpless lean.  An acrid primer thins across my tongue.  A burning hair smell drifts up my nostrils.  Overwhelmed, they too shut down. My mind lingers for a moment.  I will see her light skin again, I think.  I pass into darkness.

I dream a floating conveyor in the sky, transporting my skeleton over the tip of an icy mountain.  The other side is a smeared blackness across an open canvas.  The world closes behind, consuming the conveyor, siphoning the sky.  A sutured wound.  Before me, a giant bipedal canine growls, "I am Surma.  You may never leave this place."  His tail, a hissing serpent, coils in my direction and stares. 

"You chose this chaosss, and now you will sssuffer.  Forever," Surma's tail licks, tasting the brittle air.  The belt ends and I descend into the gaping maw of God, screaming.    

I wake up naked, faint needles pushing at my back.  I open my eyes.  I look down and see my uncovered skin, dark against the hairy emerald earth.  I sit up, resting my hands by my side.  I am confused and squint in the brightness.  The sky is patchy.  In the distance, a great wall of clouds surge-- marching.  The air rumbles and vibrates from a distant wave of thunder.  I jump up and scramble for a nearby tree.  I am almost entirely exposed.  I gaze across the open field, the whole ground bent and moving in my direction.  No walls.  Nothing.  Just my tiny frame against a large tree, an open field, and a looming storm in the distance.

  Her suit unzipped and powered down, I could see through the tight translucent skin that she was pale.  She had blonde hair and blue eyes.  I had never seen such a pulchritudinous geometry.  I had never seen a nose, eyes.  I had never seen a face.

  "What's wrong," she sang, staring into my bright suit, her eyes hooked to the reel.

  "You're pale." My monotonous statement reverberated within my suit.

  "Oh, no.  This was a mistake.  Let's stop," she pleaded, her suit halfway down her chest.  Draped on one shoulder.

  "No! You. You're beautiful.  It's just that," I hesitated, but unziped my suit.  "I'm dark." 

She gasped, trembling, "You too."

  I asked her what she meant.

"You are beautiful."

At that moment, we shed our Shells and embraced.  No amount of Supplement could have enthralled us so.  Without Shells, the windows explained a crying world.  Rain pelted the window and thunder tiptoed across Earth's ceiling.  Neon flickers lit our bodies on the floor, illuminating unfettered smiles.  We became the children we would never have, elated and giggling.  Our heart beat rhythm matched-- we had never known the sinking drip of love as anything more than calculated lines and taboo.  Captures, screens, and noise. 

A round face swings into view, upside down.  It connects to a scrawny body.  The body to hands and feet.  Hands and feet to a branch. The face's tongue dangles.  Saliva oozes from the ringent gawk.  I yelp and scuttle around the tree.  Right into the trunk of a man-- two wide-spread sets of long, skeletal roots.  I stare at them for perhaps a moment longer than comfort allows.  He shifts his weight.

"They're toes," he sings.  I look to his mouth in awe.

"Dog!  It's a dog!  All fours!"  The swinging ghoul drops and waddles round the tree, hunched and panting.

"Don't mind him.  He doesn't recognize humans. This is why he is here."  He pauses, gazes across the open field, his khaki face airy and pleasant, relaxed and comfortable.  His gaze pierces the imposing storm and he frowns.  "Here.  In Afterworld.  The road to Neverwhere." 

His eyes nearly disappear in a fleshy trench as he squints.  A cone of hair drops with his chin.  And a sigh, "Come with us," he looks to me, "all iterations are of use to us.  Many are special.  But few, a handful, hold the truth."

"Seen your fur before, seen your fur," barks the ghoul.  "Seen hers too, seen hers." 

I ask what they mean.

"We will explain everything when we return to the Enclave.  We must go now."  He points to the sable clouds, "Today's test."

Alone and confused, I follow my only connections to this new world.   
 

Delirium Written

I inquire to their names.  One, the bearded watcher, is Gage.  The dog with visual form agnosia, that's Phin.  They do not ask for my name.  Instead, Gage tells me he was born here.  Born.  He was little.  No one in the mainframe is ever little.  This is why the Enclave allows Gage a name.  I ask him why Phin has a name.  Phin, who pants as we walk.  Gage looks at me and grins.  Phin bends, scratches behind his ears with his foot and continues trotting on all fours.  I nod to Gage, Phin is special. A hiccup in paradise.  

"Always hot when furry," Phin pants. 

"You don't have fur though.  You're free," I tell him.  Free from the wires. Thrall to nothing digital.  The weather here touches skin.  The wind.  Thin droplets wet my hair.  No facade.

Phin yelps, "My fur stands!  God pulls it!"  He gallops on all fours, passes Gage.

Looking over his shoulder, Gage agrees and quickens his pace, saying, "We waited too long."  Quickened pace becomes a full-on sprint.  I let them go and stare into the storm.  I am planted, transfixed.  "Newcomer!" I ignore.  Gage stomps to a stop, grabs my bare shoulder, and begins to run again.  This breaks the hex.  "Come, we run for the cave ahead!"

Behind and above, a groan mounts the air.  Charges it.    Fear floods my blood.  Each raindrop pelts against my naked body, stinging.  No protection.  I hold my genitalia lest it bounce and slow my pace.  Lest it suffer exposure. Like the tortoise, humans have a natural defense against the elements.  Logic and emotion.  We settled on only one ages ago.

A stream of light hammers the ground, blasting bits of earth in all directions.  The groaning air thins into something like a laugh and dissipates. Dust to water, smoke to air, the clouds retreat into themselves and disappear.  It reminds me of the sky in my dream, before arriving here.  A wound, stitching itself up.  The sky clears and the rumbles cease.  Nothing now but the sound of weeping. 

Phin cradles Gage in his arms, squeaking with tears.  "Why did he take him?"

"He?"

"God." 

"He refers to the Hub," a voice strains from behind.  A woman with grey lumps of hair on her head.  "We seek to destroy it.  Today."  She pauses. "Phin.  Take Gage to the burial grounds."  Desperation taints her voice for a moment.  She then composes herself and continues to speak with Phin as he passes, Gage in his arms.  "Are you ready for your job?"  She looks into Gage's eyes and closes them with a light press of her light, wrinkled hand.

"'Course, 'course I am, Elz-2," he barks.

"Elz? You work at the mainframe!  I have known you," I urge her to remember. 

Her eyebrows disagree, arched.

"Perhaps it was another iteration.  My model has failed numerous times in the system.  And look at me now.  I age.  I choose this.  Remove the chip in your hand.  Sever its ties to your brain, young one.  That is what I did, and now I see.  I age, but I see.  My eyes are free from the reel." She looks to her shoulder, her peripheral.  A crowd staggers from the darkness of the cave into the light, shielding their eyes, massaging them.  Elz-2 continues, "We plan to destroy the Bulwark first and then move into the mainframe.  From there, we will march to the Hub."  The crowd behind her, their eyes cleansed, stands fully erect, listening intently.  "Since Gage," she swallows, "cannot speak for your entrance into this realm, you must stay behind."

"I am looking for someone.  A girl.  A, uh," I hesitate,"an Elz.  She terminated herself.  Even if we are dead here, if this is a stage set for suffering, testing-- I will remain.  If it means I see her again."

She laughs, "Dead! Then you have no reason to protest, tyro.  Stay.  Find her.  I have known love, too."  She smiles, tears in her eyes, and nods to the cave.  She begins walking, passes me.  Phin returns from the cave and trots alongside. The crowd marches onward, a snake of humans from within the cave.  For a good hour of standard time, they emerge.  I sit next to the cave and watch their faceless backs.  I take a nap and awake to the tail rattling over a hill and beyond sight.  Soon, the head of the snake will reach its destination.  As this thought reaches my mind, they do. 

The ground trembles and little beams of light crack through the blue sky.  Clouds swirl to the top of a radiant blue ceiling, evaporate, and burst into water.  More and more clouds to the top.  A backward sink.  Up, up, up.  Rain begins to fall as the clouds burst.  They immediately rise passed the popped clouds and into the invisible sink.  Trees uproot.  Blades of green hair rip from the ground.  A fury of pastels reach upward.  Twisting, they blend.  A familiar groan expands and echoes through the air.  This time, there is no doubt this is a voice. 

"This is no beginning to revolution.  This is the final chapter in this world.  Stasis, all of you in stasis."  A blinding light detonates in the foothills of what could be the icy mountain range I passed on my way here. 

I rush into the cave for cover.  A rock separates from the rocky wall and knocks me out.  When I come to, I am on a flat plane of grey and white, welded panels.  They stretch into the distance, upward, into a dome.  In the distance, I see a man crawling toward me.  I squint, strain my eyes, reach out with my sight.  It is Phin. 

"Phin! What happened?" 

"Newcomer!"  he runs up, grunting.  "Elz-2 made me useful.  Let me defeat Surma."  Most of the inhabitants of Afterworld refuse to give up their agelessness, and thus, they will never see the truth, if lies project.  Elz-2 needed substantiation from someone else that Surma was, in fact, not a horrible monster.  "And they said they learned of a bitch.  Pregnant.  They can't terminate them, never do.  They all stay.  Your bitch.  Your bitch and now you're trapped in here!  They destroyed the bridge.  Prevented evil dogs from catching them."

"Bitch?"

"Girl dog.  Elz.  Elz twenty-one!"  He smiles and wags his butt in the air. 

I grind my ivory teeth.  "I don't need a bridge.  I need a computer," I tell him, adding that I once programmed for the mainframe.  "If you can climb a tree, if the rain here can soak us, if lightning can electrocute us, I don't need a bridge.  I'll write one."  

"Writers can tell any tale!  Tail, I have a tail!"

"But first.  I need something to cover my body with."

And As He Thought, He Did

-original narrator builds bridge in the sky, arcing over the mountain range. Hub authors a cataclysmic event in "Afterworld," and Surma's replacement, a grotesque hybrid(almost unfathomable being), tells [original narrator] this world is ending, that everyone who passed before died, that what he sees before him is truth(the hybrid is real and this is supposed to be confirmed by Phin, who is unsure as to what he is seeing). 

-plant the seed of doubt that this is all one mind, that maybe this person(the narrator for the first half, that is) is nothing more than one part of a whole.  Integral, yes, but simply a piece of what's actually going on.  Reveal true purpose of "Afterworld."   Narrator for second half is a mystery.

Grotesque Hybrid

-nightmarish chapter in which the [new narrator]  replays the countless victories of the grotesque hybrid.

-Fill with gore

    I took two showers today, and I can still feel the sweat stains on my body.  I washed my clothes, but the smell of sickness lingers.  A hard sniff, one that grinds my sinus, rattles and flaps into a huge hacking mucus bomb that I swallow and later shit in yellow-green.  My dreams are filled with menial tasks made indomitable by constant wakening.  She fills them also, in every form from long blonde hair and short bangs to elephants marching through arid desert flame.

    I go to see the new Indiana Jones today after buying jean and camo shorts with my mom-rather, she bought them- expecting the worst CG trilogy homicide I have ever seen.  I am pleasantly surprised with the direction of the movie.  The embrace of age, and the preservation of style.  Harrison Ford refused to dye his hair for the movie.  What earned him this privilege?  He is the same healthy waist size now as he was decades ago.   I remember, decade ago, being at Camp Piankatank, I wore my dad's wide brimmed hat, and encouraged all the kids to call me "Indy."  And they did.  I was so cool and badass, climbing trees on that island we canoed to one night to spy on the "haunted" dock house.  I fell out of the tree and scraped my arm.  Bloodied, I was a hero in my hat, all the other kids crowding around me to make sure Indy was okay.

    In my head, though, I am no hero.  I am villain.  I am demon.  I am the fuzzy asshole of my parents' cat, Kopa.  He must be nearing his demise, as he was a kitten when The Lion King had come out and the sequel was in the works.  He was the runt(no longer) that we named after Simba's son. 
    His tangled, matted doo-doo butt-hair, with hairballs and leaves all stuck like this helpless ant still stuck in a spider's webbing on the wall at the head of my bed.  I managed to kill the spider in time for one of the ants to cut and climb free.  Climbing free, I thought I was doing.  Instead, I am trapped.  Wrapped with silky nostalgic regret.  Stung paralyzed with fear, self-hating in my mistakes. 

    Like my ear.

    I go to the doctor Friday and explain that I have been feeling pressure on my right ear for a little over a month, and since it went away, what harm would it do?  He just takes a deep breath, like they tell you to do and EXHALE AS HARD AS YOU CAN, and says "Well, you're on the verge of pneumonia.  Luckily, if there is liquid in your lung at this point, it isn't significant."  I leave with a double Rx for Pseudovent(fake vent?)  and Clarithromycin. 

    In between bouts of sickness and health, I listen to the television with my father.  That's all we seem to do in my family.  Stare at screens in unison, silent. It's a real bonding experience. Even on the way home tonight to drop me off in the city, the windshield was our unreality screen, allowing us to blur eachother, and say nothing.  I won't say I didn't try, but perhaps I could open up and try harder. Did you ever wake up next to anyone you hardly knew? My father tells me,  "I knew all of them."
    In any case, the television cuts down the middle, the leaders of the leading gas companies, some of which(Exxon Mobile's Stephen Simon) who make over 10 million dollars a year personally, claiming they must raise gas prices and this special committee of Dems and Pubs on the attack. When the guy from Exxon or Chevron or BP answer questions all I hear are pigs on a farm, selling corn and wheat to make more money for a windmill.  For whiskey.  All at the expense of the people.  The one from Exxonn, his name is Squealer, and he just holds his ground, telling the untruth.  Oh, I just found a video, if you're interested: Oil Execs Asked to Justify Huge Profits(and because VOX is fucked up right now and won't link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8gBBEKkbKc&feature=related)

    Just watch it if you want to know why gas prices are so high. 

    My body will heal.  Despite hours of tossing and turning, head throbbing nights.  Waking up half-hourly in cold sweat, only to burn up, uncomfortably soaked.  Dowsed in self-hating regret, watching this Hilton commercial(which features the voices of Joshua Radin and Schuyler[SKY-ler] Fisk[the girlfriend in Orange County) over and over again to feel something encouraging.  From life or whatever. If I can't get it from that or listening to The Weepies song "Love Doesn't Last Too Long,"  I read.  I can't stop reading.  I picked up this book I Was Told There'd Be Cake a few days ago when it was delivered via Amazon.com, and I'm a little over halfway done.  It's a great book of essays, by a young "lax" Jew woman named Sloane Crosley, that you can pick up and read any time you want.  It's about love, work, growing up, youth, life, all written with a staccato style that disregards many rules in writing.  The style is in the strain of Chuck Palahniuk.  If Chucky P were happier and less cryptic in his writing.

    If only I were a little happier and less cryptic right now.  If I didn't miss you.  And all I want is to go out and be equal, to not stay in, to be out.  But, haven't I had enough.  Hasn't my body had enough of that?  Clearly.

I sat beside you and became myself.
   

    Against a brick wall, my body hardly able to stand, my mind runs a list.  There was that time in the park, when Jeff was on acid, Yetti and I high.  They wanted to run, but of course we got off because we didn't.  Once, when Jeff was sober, a cop pulled us over because he was serving.  I was wasted, and the cop could totally smell me-- he was called off to something more important.  There was that time I was on mushrooms on my roof with Lenora, when I confidently dealt with a cop for fifteen minutes.  And, of course, at JMU, Patrick basically puking on the boots of a tempered veteran cop.  Wasted, and breathalyzed, I got us out of that one too.

    I take my backpack off and with as much discretion as I can muster, I slide it across the floor with my leg.  I nearly fall over, doing this, but no one notices.  My limited carry-on party stash is safely not associated with me anymore.
   
    My back to the brick, I think to myself that every time I run into cops while I'm fucked up, I get off-- free.  The only time I have ever been 'caught' was for my illegal U-Turn violation at 2 in the morning.  When I was sober.  In the swirling nexus of beer, wine, and pot, I think tonight will again try the theory that being fucked up makes me more supple, and thus, less susceptible to arrest. 

    I reassure the girl next to me, "We'll be fine," more for my comfort than hers.  The bulldog hardass cop that has my ID is using someone's phone to take a panoramic of the scene.  Piles of beer cans on this one table and the bulldog, breathing heavily, says, "Oooh, that's a good one."  Everyone who is not a cop scowls and looks around the room to each other-- This is fucked up, right?  What else can you think about cop porn?

    And then the cop's phone goes off, blaring.  He desperately shuffles to squelch Fall Out Boy's "Dance Dance," losing credibility by the millisecond.  I chuckle to myself.  Another cop, some kid who looks much younger than me, flips through a book of charges.  They're charging one of the guys that lives here with 405 of an unscheduled drug.  That's possession of alcohol, and he is 21.  Which means he'll be fine.  These cops suck.  Sucks that the guy has to go to court, but I am out the door in the next few minutes with my ID and my backpack.
   

    Today was weird.  And when I mean weird, I mean really weird.  When reality sinks in, when you think you've got nothing, you become psychic, telepathic, and shameless. 

    These two days have been weird.  Longer, stretched thinly across the daylight and faint day-time moon.  That giant rock.  Every minute lasts. 

    For some reason, I think of Ali as Jred and I are traversing the campus.  And then there he was, that broad bearded Muslim, grinning happily as he approaches me.  I tell him, genuinely, "I was just thinking of you."  He tells me he is catching up on school work before going to work work.  Everyone here is catching up to work before they really go to work-- pursuing.  I am.

    I go to the DMV today.  Mr. and Mrs. Anyone fill the rows of chairs built for an endured stay.  Every Anyone is disgruntled.  Of course, OF COURSE, a baby is balling.  A cop tells the 20-some-year-old mother he will get the child a clipboard to play with.  The cop hands her a standard issue clipboard with a standard issue pen to match.  She marches past. 

    I sit calmly undisturbed as one dude sits and cheers people on.  Go, A077! GOOD LUCK, YOU CAN DO IT.  I get no such encouragement when the robot voice beckons.  It has been like twenty minutes, he's probably gone, back into his own world "apart" from mine.  I saunter up to the desk where a black lady glares at me.  Her glasses focus the beam of disdain and burn me.  Before I say anything, I notice this kid, probably about my age, with his sunken, time-tried mother.  He is bitching the employee out, exclaiming to his mother that they don't understand.  Someone calls and he walks away, leaving his mother to deal with it.  I watch him pass with his velvet-padded sandals and swishing gym pants, his baggy shirt and a lack of sun where his sunglasses, which rest atop his crown, once were. 

    Turning to the lady in front of me, I shake my head and remember a sentiment Malcom X expresses when traveling to Europe for the first time-- Americans act like they're doing eachother some favor by not interacting humanely.  Or humanly, he says.  Like ignoring the fact that we are all peers. 
    I ask the lady how she is, because I actually care, and we get off to a great start.  I know I have done the right thing when, after my assessment, she tries to help me get my birth certificate.  "There's a place by Willow Lawn that can do it," she points through walls.  "You can ride the bus there," she says in response to "I don't have a car."
    Why do they even need a piece of paper?  Am I not proof enough of my birth?

    So I have a running date with Jred and Basshead.  It is too hot outside and Basshead has been on adderall for two days and just vaporized.  We decide we will bike.  Before I walk home to get my bike, I stop in Pleasant's Hardware to buy a crowbar(for crushing zombie skulls) and gold spray paint(to paint the Dino Rider.

  The reason I need to spray paint the bike is because it is obviously not mine-- a shitty girl's bike with Pollak splotches of blue on a purple base.  Don't fool yourself when you see me riding it though.  That thing is more hardcore than any vehicle I've ever used-- it defeated me five times today.  Rattling itself to pieces.  Its shitty back-pedal breaks and loose handlebars almost killing me at every intersection.  I'll ride it until it falls apart.  Which it will.
    I learn the bike belongs to a crackhead, which adds more points to the dangerous factor.  Thanks Mills.  And, of course, I forgot the spray paint. 

    At Belle Isle I am hanging out with Basshead, Jred, Graham, Rock, and GrapeJuice.  We're on Dead Rock, where all the delinquents go.  I am gulping down wine from Basshead's "Just Be Yoga" water bottle when I hear some shrieks and yelps from behind me.  Too much is going on in my world for me to care.  Until Graham "Irwin" Wilson walks over with a water moccasin or cottonmouth dangling from two pinched fingers.  Everyone claims differently as to the nature of the snake. After it bit him.  Blood seeping from his hand, several people insist that he go to the hospital.  It was A RIVER SNAKE!  EVEN IF IT IS NOT POISONOUS, IT WAS IN THE JAMES.  IT CAN'T BE GOOD.  Everyone was saying something about it.  IT HAD A DIAMOND HEAD.  We discuss the nature of the snake only after Graham tosses the thing.  Sailing through the air, head over tail and straight as a dowel rod, the creature splashes into the current, gone from our ability to classify.  
The sun pushes on us and Basshead cries, "WE SHOULD HAVE EXAMINED IT MORE CLOSELY!"

    Concern settles as Graham's drunk ass gets too pissed or worried or whatever to hear any more of it.  He isn't going to a hospital, and now I wonder what happened to him. 

    In any case, my crowning achievement of the day was riding my bike up that huge hill from Belle Isle, Tredegar or 5th, or whatever.  Jred and I are pushing ourselves, him on his old BMX bike and me on the Dino Rider.  To our left, a procession of about twenty middle to old aged, affluent looking men filter through a gate, down the hill ON SEGWAYS!  Sweating profusely, I yell, "AHH I LOVE PHYSICAL ACTIVITY.  IT FEELS SO GOOD TO MOVE MY BODY."  For a split second their looks make me feel like a dick.  But, whatever, they're being lazy.  I guess trying to make them feel bad for having fun is wrong of me.  But, honestly, I don't feel bad about it.  They just don't know.
    By the time I reach the top of the hill, I am heaving.  I have worked for something, earned it.  It does feel good.

    At work, someone says they sat two people.  I hear them say three, and tell them.  They say, "I was thinking three, because three people just left. . . Get out of my head."  I ride home from work on the Dino Rider.  A piece falls off and clicks on the ground, bouncing.  I am one step closer to dying on this thing.

    EDIT: I did go back to the hardware store and get spray paint.  The Dino Rider is now the Golden POS or, The Ram Rider, as my college uses the same colors and are known as the Rams. 

    
   

  

       

This is the complete frame for the story I want to tell.  Thematically I am displeased with myself, but at least I got this out of my system.

FLAMBIES: Zombies Aflame.

"I just needed to get some fresh air.  Away from him.  He just never stops."
    "Yeeeah,"  says Samantha, elongating and trailing her words with a sigh.  "Can't we just have a conversation?"
    "Exactly. Enough staring into a computer screen, Jesus Christ."
The cold punctuates their words.  As they push the words through the air, so exits warm moisture.  It is the driest, coldest November for the region.  On the West Coast, this is especially prevalent as wildfires encroach ever so slowly from the southern tip of California, north and east.  It is on the news nearly every day, but neither of these individuals are aware of it.  Miles away, the all-consuming fire is of little consequence to them.  So, so far away. 

    "I should really get going," she says, annoyed at the presence of Jake, their mutual friend, who is on FACEBOOK, a company that poses to "connect you" and make you "closer" to your friends, when really they're selling something out of the back.  That something is your information.  When you list information about yourself, it is leased to the highest bidder.  Once that happens, FACEBOOK allows the advertisers to link ads to your login, specifically targeting you.  Jake is still on FACEBOOK, having his soul siphoned out, hours after they leave.
    "Alright, yeah, I've really got to get up early anyway," she adds. 
    Cabel and Samantha put their cigarettes out together, both having finished within exactly two minutes-- inhaling an entire cigarette, burned. 

Scuttling
    "So, you still haven't told me why we're here, Fisher. Or why I couldn't come the first time," Kristopher hisses through his pearly teeth.
    "Ampulex compressa," Dr. Fisher responds.
    "The wasp?"
    "The wasp."
    "What about it?"
    "It evolved in tandem with roaches-- developed a toxin that it injects into their brains.  Inducing the toxin makes the roaches follow a scent back to the wasp's nest, where it becomes an incubator for the wasp's eggs, who hatch and eventually utilize more roaches for procreation."
    "Well, we're not going to find any wasps in a dark cave."
    Dr. Fisher grins with crooked yellow teeth. He cuts at the skeleton of a Fuji with a rusty knife.
    "That's disgusting."  His friend and more formally apprentice, Kristopher, sits on a damp mound of granite.  Staring in concern for his mentor, not friend, he iterates his point, adding, "You're going to get lockjaw or something."
    Dr. Fisher uses the force of a thumb opposite the rusty, though sharp blade, sliding it toward him.  "You know nothing.  Apples are good for you, clean out your teeth.  And I'll be fine."
    Kristopher continues to stare, annoyed.  He sighs and looks up at the sky of rock.  A drop of water drips.  Drips right into his eye.  Putting up with moments of eternity, Kristopher reminds himself this is worth it.  Misery and his mind wander to gold watches and beautiful women. "You know, we should probably be doing work. You've been carving for thirty minutes."
    "Twenty-six, and what's your hurry?  I could cut this forever, given the right sharpness. You can always get smaller pieces, if you understand how.  We need to understand how to find what we're looking for.   And we'll find it when we find it."
    Kristopher begins a retort, but the air is knocked out of him, as the granite stump gives way to his weight.  Dr. Fisher rises cautiously.  His understanding of caves shaken, just not as much as Kristopher's. 
    "What the fuck?!"  Kristopher belches angrily from within a sunken rock formation.  "That is not supposed to fucking happen.  Is this one of your tests, one of your tricks... I am so sick--"
    "Wait!"  A scuttling noise echoes, and Dr. Fisher continues over discontented whispers from Kristopher, "Do you hear that?"  Kristopher's hands push down on the outer rim of his accidental rock fox-hole, and he pauses.
    "Yeah. I do.  What is it?" he whispers, calmly excited.
    "It's what we're looking for."
    Dr. Fisher turns his helmet-light to full and Kristopher is blinded.  He returns the favor, but Fisher is already creeping down to a nearby pool.  "In there," he says, pointing through a hole in the wall.
    "What about in there?"
    "You're climbing in there."
    Normally one for confrontation, Kristopher trades his grief for anticipated glory and fortune. He begins to move himself forward in the crawlspace to the pool.  He promptly sticks himself the wrong way, and can't move forward.
    "I'm stuck!" he yelps.  Frantically shifting his weight, he continues, "I think I can get out, but I can't go forward anymore"
    "Wait! What can you see?"
    Kristopher stops panicking and remembers the new car he needs.  "Just a wall."  He turns his head.  The light moves with him, panning the wall.  Outside of the hole, Dr. Fisher paces.  Bites his nails. 
    "Anything yet?" Fisher ponders aloud.  Before Kristopher responds, Fisher gets his answer.  Light beams outward from the hole, enveloping Kristopher and startling Fisher.  He shields his eyes and asks Kristopher if he can see it.
    "Yes," he breathes, "it's beautiful."  
   
Consumer
     Cabel's iPod boombox blankets the noisy television in the next room, blasting her favorite song.  The speakers, busted, screech during the higher pitches, while the Media makes hopeless attempts to educate Cabel.  From across the kitchen, she sees shocked eyes on gaping anchor-faces, and thinks little of it.  Shit happens every day.  Every day, shit happens. 
    Bing, microwave ravioli is done.  She reads the nutrition facts.   Fourteen grams of protein, Eight-point-one grams of sugar, and Two-thousand-nineteen milligrams of sodium.  Eighty-four percent, she reads and thinks, Oh well, it's been worse. 
     Years ago, when Cabel is fifteen, she fails a drug test for the last time.  Unable to tolerate it any longer, her mother kicks her out of the house, changes the locks, and nails the windows shut.  For the next week, Cabel lives in a neon-pink and yellow Fisher Price tent in the woods.  The forgotten woods between a new apartment complex and ancient rail-road tracks.  The sewer water leaks through to the creek, and she lives off of fast food.  Her friends tell her she looks pale and malnourished.  Three things go through her fifteen-year-old head:  1) Burning those effigies of my mom in the back yard with my friends, our little arms beating it with lead pipes and sticks,  seems retroactively justified.  2)Maybe I should quit smoking pot.  3) Maybe I should quit getting caught for smoking pot.

     She never quits.  She is high right now, in fact. 

    Her Crest-whitened teeth take their first bite of the faux-violi. If it's better than it was, it's best.  She lowers the volume on her boom box and catches the end of shocked words from a shocked mouth, "Our prayers are with the missing Dr. Bernard Fisher and all of those suffering in California."  Cabel straddles her couch, flipping her left leg over.  She carefully lands on the cushions, facing the television.  She thinks about Dr. Fisher missing and is, inexplicably,  unable to cry as the news fades to commercials.  Pushing her lack of empathy to the back of her mind, she turns the volume up.  Cars overpower cheetahs and horses, victorious, even, over Earth itself.  Medicine cures the minor and embarrassing--  backaches and heartburn, flatulence,  anxiety and confidence issues.  Lose weight, follow our god, monitor your neighbors.  Beware.   A cyclical tale of kindness shows last on the screen-- everyone seeing everyone else lend a hand, and everyone continuing the cycle, until it returns to the first person.  Some music accompanies it and then the logo of a large company fades in and it says, "We care about you."   Cabel begins to weep uncontrollably.
    The news returns, ending the commercials. The ads continue, with a voice conditioned to sell ideas. "Now we return to our story on why breastfeeding may be harmful to your child."

    Later that night, she rolls a spliff and smokes it out of her bedroom window, alone.  Off in the faded black, she hears a train and thinks of her father, who used to take her to chase and photograph trains when she was younger, back before he left her mother.  A wailing metal ghost groans, for it is inclined to keep going in one direction, forced to remain on a set path.  The conductor of the ghost pulls its vocal chord, and it lets out a smaller and smaller call.  And then, when she can no longer hear it any more, off in that dark distance, she tries to cry.  She tries so hard, because she feels that it means so much.  So much now that it's gone.  And it's gone.  
   
 Flambies
     John Goh  lies face down at the foot of the forest.  His skin, stripped from his body, oozes out from under his retardant yellow fatigues.   The hair on his body burns, emanating a bad smell, and no one but the trees, engulfed in cones of fire, claim witness.  John's mind painfully wanders to the edge of sense, and he passes out, dead and still burning. 
   
    Earlier, John tells his compatriots of Buddhist Monks who, protesting the Vietnam war, doused themselves in gasoline.  They lit matches and sat, lips sealed, burning.  Like that guy who loads his shotgun and goes down to the ashes of the twin towers and hops the fence, John says.  Wearing a sign that details why he is about to do what he is about to do, he positions the barrel against his throat and pulls the trigger, splattering himself on the grave that launched a war. 
    John and his group of firefighters get off of their transport vehicle and gear up.  They stand gazing into the perimeter of flame.  Dwarfing them, it gradually advances its will across the California soil, stretching upward to burn a hole in the sky.  Stretching to reunite with the gods of fire in the night sky.  Fighting this fire is a constant struggle, and there is no sleep for those who wish it halted. 

    It is a moonless night, one of the firefighters notes, and John thinks of how maybe it is just a sunless night.  Either way the moon is out there, imperturbably lording some bit of fate over the world, its oceans, its fish and its fishers.  Somewhere higher than John and the firefighters but lower than the moon, fire and gravity play fiend to the group, and a branch, incinerated,  snaps.  It careens, inexorably, as a spear on fire, through the skull of Todd Jennings.  He drops to his knees, his eyes bursting with blood.  He throws up and lands in it. 
   
    The firefighters stand, paralyzed.  John begins to move in to check the body, no longer Todd Jennings, when the body writhes and squirms, launching itself upward.  John falters backward and falls on his ass, as the firefighters, their feet made of concrete or lead, watch in horror as Jennings' body stops flailing and stares, eyeless, through them. 

    John scrambles for his radio. 
    "DISPATCH!  We've run into trouble, CHRIST!" is the understatement he manages before the body begins acting up again.

  The body, with its antenna of flame and face covered in burst over-easy eyes and sizzling blood, stands more erect and hisses.  Then screeches and yelps.
     "This is Dispatch, what's wrong Goh?"
    It clicks and clacks its jaw and rushes forward, rearing his right arm backward.  With an arc of his arm and a claw of a hand, the body effortlessly punctures the eyes of Cameron Dollio and rips down and outward.  John, thinking of the madness on Black Friday, the crowds rushing and violently pushing and breaking eachother to get the better deal first, is unable to respond to the radio.
     Dollio's lip comes with the hand as the body continues to tear.  The body reaches around and sputters blood into Dollio's ear before eviscerating it with its teeth.  Though wearing retardant gear, Dollio's body soon catches fire from the increasingly engulfed body attacking him.  Dollio's corpse crumples to the ground. 

    John gets up, stumbles, and begins to run, as do the four others remaining.   Two bodies chase and catch them with ease.  One down, and fire is spreading more quickly toward the road they took to get here.  The road where more firefighters, from the last shift, rest and recuperate.  Two down, this time three bodies mutilating one, setting it aflame.  Three down.  Four down.  John can see the road ahead where firetrucks and lights and tents with coffee and food wait idly.  He begins hyperventilating, and removes his mask.  Sputtering, he collapses.

The Elephant
    Snuggled tightly in a cocoon of Thomas Lee sheets and blankets, Samantha happily watches a movie at midnight.  The IKEA lights dimmed behind an IKEA shelf, she peers over blankets, her eyes fixed upon her wall-mounted 60" Sony Bravia.  She is watching George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead. 
    Outside her window, down the alley and in the next yard, a man swings open a gate and slams it shut.  Hearing this and terrified of the undead on the screen, Sam cuddles closer to a favorite Beanie Baby.  A Beanie Baby that was fifty dollars, and the one she wanted most for Christmas one year. Current Value: six dollars or "priceless memory."
    The man outside takes a moment to catch his breath and gather his thoughts.  He stares at the ground.  Through the cracks of the fence, and off the walls of the cobble-stone alleyway, orange light filters into his mind.  He runs through the yard and up a flight of wooden stairs, spinning around to look over the fence.  A wall of bodies, aflame, rush through the beginning of the alley way, arms flailing outward.  
    All this commotion has Sam up and out of her bed, staring out her window.  She sees the man ripping up wooden steps and throwing them into her yard.  Her condensed moisture words smash against the window, "Fucking lunatic."  Assuming it is one of the city's ill-minded street denizens, she exits her room, the movie paused with the hero pressing a pea-shooter to his temple. 

    On her back deck Sam, oblivious to the fires several yards down to her left, yells across to the man, "What the hell do you think you're doing?!"  Un-phased, the man readies a hose over the railing facing the yard, leaving it on full blast.  He begins banging on the door, but these people are out of town.  He smashes his hand through the door and unlocks it.  Baffled, Sam turns to go inside to get her cell phone to call the police.  As she does this, she immediately understands the nature of the man's behavior.  Standing there, in the cold night air, with the encroaching fire there in front of her, she is unable to move.  Something about the sight of fire, whether vast or small but especially of this magnitude,  renders a human transfixed.  In awe.

    An inhuman screech comes from across the yard.  Crashing through a window is the man, hands gripping the shoulders of a flaming person.  He falls on his back and yells out.  With built adrenaline, he heaves the person up and through the railings of the deck opposite of Samantha.  He picks the hose up and douses himself, putting out patches of flame.  Finally he notices her.  He begins to say something when the wall of flame reaches the back of their apartments. The man's gate busts open, several bodies falling through to the ground, which, covered in dry brush, catches immediately.  In seconds, ten bodies pour through the opening and more climb over the fence.  Scrambling to keep up with the larger bodies, children run with the pack, their flame flickering like a strobe light.  The man directs the hose to them.  Hearing the water sizzle, he realizes the amount of water he can utilize is fruitless and begins to run back into the apartment as bodies attempt to jump the gap in the stairs or climb the pillars of wood.  This sets the deck on fire. 

    Sam, seeing several flaming bodies jump her own fence, runs back inside.  She runs through the apartment, which seems enveloped in daylight.  Reaching her front door, she swings it open and heads downstairs.  Outside, Samantha witnesses a condensed demonstration of human nature. 
    On the street several friends are running for a car.  The foremost friend stretches out his arm and unlocks his car ten feet away.  This allows he and all but one of his friends to jump in the car.  The leave him, halted by a horde of flaming zoo animals.  A fiery elephant slaps the hood with a crimson trunk and the driver crashes through the windshield, his body sailing through the air and into the fire.  The driver catches flame, and runs for his car toward his friends who are fighting each other to exit the vehicle.   
    "Over here," someone yells on Samantha's side of the street.  The yeller, "Tom" perhaps, struggles with a handful of keys, searching for the right one.  The left-behind friend, maybe "Fred," runs across the street.  Eventually Tom gets it and they enter, not noticing her, and drive away. 
   
   The car takes a right turn past a CVS and 7-11 where the lights are off.  They prematurely disappear from sight when the man from the back deck steps in front of her, saying, "FOLLOW ME, WE NEED TO GET IN THE BASEMENT!" as loud as he can.  Samantha pees a little and passes out in the man's arms. 

    "Shit," he says.

Answers
    Samantha awakens, her face smushed against cold slate.  She pushes herself up and rubs her eyes.  Her stranger-savior rocks back and forth, hands on his knees.  She looks behind him, where the ancient iron doors are sealed.
      "You can't begin to imagine the drugs they pumped into these things.  Hunger amplification, high concentrations of melatonin, I don't know what they were trying to accomplish," Kristopher shakes words from his bruised head.  "No, I didn't think this would happen." 
    Samantha contorts her face, puzzled.  "Isn't that the stuff in your skin?"
    "No," he responds.  "Melatonin is in your brain.  Regulates your rhythm, uh," he pauses-- straining his eyes in the darkness of the basement.  He continues, "Sleep patterns, dreaming, belief in the supernatural even.  Might be linked to the God gene, I don't know.  Melatonin is triggered at night, in our brains.  I remember when I was a kid, I got frightened by the dancing stuffed animals on the shelf next to my bed-- kids have a hard time discerning between reality at night because of melatonin and the developmental level of their brain."

    Samantha pouts, remembering the flickering children.   She thinks of something--How can insects have melatonin?-- to ask him to keep him talking.  She is comforted by his knowledge.

    Kristopher begins again, knowing that telling her something about how it started will release him of the burden.  The longer winded he is about how it happened, the longer he can keep from thinking how it is happening.  "Nearly all life has it, regulates the circadian rhythm, you know, the physiological cycle of day and night, night and day.  They first discovered melatonin in insects back in the seventies--in the compound eyes of crickets. And when inducing more than was 'natural,'" he says, using facetious air-quotes with his fingers, "their night activity increased substantially."  He chuckles, "Eventually eliminating day-time activity.  Not the case, here, though.  Not completely."

    Samantha brews.  At this point, Kristopher has run out of things to say to her.  He doesn't feel he can communicate on her level, which, for him, is much lower than he is willing to venture.  Able only to see dim reflections off his eyes and protruding cliff-face of a nose, she wonders aloud, "Why in their eyes?  Is that the only way we can tell whether it is day or night?  Can't we feel the sunlight or lack thereof on our skin?"

    At this, Kristopher perks up, remembering the gruesomely bloody candle-wax face of a body, dripping gaps in the face, six inches from his own face.  "They don't have eyes, he says."
    They launch into a verbal foray.    
    "You said you found these in a cave, right?"
    "Right."
    "Was there any light down there?"
    "No, we had these heavy fucking helmets mounted with lights.  You know, like Hollywood."
    "You were in California,"  she smiles.
    "Yeah, not twenty miles from the edge of the wild-fires."
    The conversation dies with Samantha's last, sleepy thought, "Will they ever burn out?"

    Kristopher begins to fall asleep as fire sweeps through the city, conforming the minds of all willing beings.  His last thought is of the helicopter, bursting into flame--fading into the clouds. With Samantha asleep, he removes a translucent box from the inside of his coat.  Within the box, a white mantis-like creature is stretched by hexagonal distortions on the outside.  Kristopher shakes his head as the inside of the box ignites and extinguishes several times.    

Abednego
    Cabel peers across an empty ocean.  Antarctica is supposed to be here somewhere.  It would be hard to miss, but it is missing.  One day, the flaming bodies collectively decide to rush for the oceans.  Every survivor of the immortal flame that were the mysterious bodies, now stands alone, against a tide of change-- across the face of their planet, they must soon learn to survive.  No longer will they subsist. 
    Visible gusts of air exit her lungs, and her lips begin to crack and bleed.  She looks to her right, to her father who stands looking out into the blue oblivion with her.  Words have yet to jump his perfect ivory gap.  Puffs of air cannot be seen coming from his mouth.  Cabel does not notice.  She just leans against the wall of the deck and rubs her gloved hands together and against her body.  She cannot remember arriving on the boat.  Her last clear memory is of the man who head butts her in an attempt to force her aboard a helicopter.  It happened so fast, she thinks.

    "Abednego, goddamnit!  Abednego!"  Cabel shakes a chain-linked fence with meat-hook fingers.  A security camera watches the sidewalk where she shakes the fence.  It pans to the surrounded parking lot. "HEY, HEY, I'M RIGHT HERE!  YOU LET ME IN YOU PIECE OF SHIT!" 
     "Yelling at the camera won't get you inside."  Two rows of perfectly straight pearly teeth meet her teary-eyed gaze as she spins around.  A man faces her, unreadable behind huge bug-eyed reflective lenses.  Red eyes and a pouting mouth mirror her own.
   
    "My father is missing, and they need to let me in here.  Now."
    "I understand," say the pearly teeth. A hand extends for hers.  "My name is Kristopher Elijah and I work here."  They shake hands.  Before she can introduce herself, he continues.  "What has your father told you about Abednego?"  He smiles for an answer.
     "It's our code-word.  When I was little, he gave us a code-word, for safety. He said if I ever needed him, I could come to his lab, and if I said Abednego, the guards would have to let me in."
    "Drag you in, maybe.  Who did you say your father was?" he asks her.
    "I didn't.  I'm Cabel Fisher."
    At this, Kristopher's smile evaporates.
    "Follow me," he says.
    Kristopher approaches a box on the gate.  He retrieves a key from his pocket and uses it to open the box.  He removes his sunglasses and hunches forward to place his eyes in front of the box. 
    "These things destroy your vision." 
    The gate creaks sideways, dragging itself on rolling wheels.
"I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but you should know," Kristopher begins.  "I saw it.  I experienced it.  Everything I saw profoundly changed me."  He laughs, "And your father, him too.  But he actually has one.  Or maybe one has him."
     "What did you see?"  Confusion strikes Cabel blind to Kristopher's actions.  They enter completely black room.  Kristopher paces to the back wall and plucks something from a rack.  It clinks the keys in his pocket, sounds like glass.  They exit and keep walking.
    "Where are we going?" 
    "To the roof?"
    The building seems empty except for a few rooms they pass to the elevator.  In one, Cabel glimpses a man strapped to a bed, his muscle exposed to the air.  In another room a man is pulling organs out of a body and placing them on a table.  The body squirms but makes no sound she can hear through the door.  She throws up a little in her mouth and grabs Kristopher's arm. 
    "What is this place," she says muffled, her hand over her mouth. 
    "We just wanted to make money off of suffering.  That's the human way."  Before she can respond, he says they have reached the elevator.  He enters, but she does not.  "Do you want to see your father?"
    "Yes."  She enters.  The doors slide shut as a clicking and screeching noise bellows somewhere in the hallway.  The crashing sound of metal against stone is the last thing they hear before the doors shut.  They look at each other.
    Kristopher presses 5 and says, "I saw everything beautiful in this world.  Everything right.  I got this feeling, in the pit of my stomach, that we, as humans once had it right.  The oceans were crystal pools on the face of a green rock. Before Prometheus, before the first revolution, we were not separate from this world.  I was stuck in this tiny hole down in a deep cave with your father.  We were looking to make money off of this new species we had discovered.  Incredible evolutionary abilities.  We're not even sure how what it does is possible, but we've witnessed it.  And, there I am, seeing into myself, my father, his father, our kind.  All our sins replayed in an instant.  In that eerie mirror, where only the light in my mind exists, I am overwhelmed with the horror I witness.  Our world burns as our moon tosses itself, crashes into our surface, shattering.  Splintering.  I see the lives of each person, each ancestor, played out and destroyed.  I scream and tell your father to pull me out, but he has gone.  I don't know where.  A few days later, he shows up here--"
    "But?"
    The doors open to the fifth floor, which is essentially a hallway leading to a ladder.   
    "Your father is waiting for you on the roof" is the second to last thing he says to her, pointing to the ladder.  The last thing he says to her, after she comes scrambling down the ladder minutes later is, "You have to go," right before head butting her.

    On the boat, her father begins to speak, slowly.
    "The bonding trestle of heart and mind.  If only you could see as your Leviathan sees, perhaps you would would understand as I do.  As gods do.  Your fractious construction of lineage, your muddled perception.  Darkened shadow compressed to brilliant diamond threads, all for you, undeserved." 
    "Dad."
    No response.
    "Father."
    Nothing.
    "Abednego"
     Nothing.
    She rears back.  "I don't understand."
    "You're not meant to understand.  You never were.  You are a flashlight in the dark.  We are the dark."

The Ward
I work with mental patients.  Most people send these people here because they can't deal with it at home.  The breakdown of their loved ones is just too much. Out on the streets of the city, more of them roam, gathering up trash and scraps.  But those people, they don't have anyone to care for them, especially not themselves.   In here, though, there are white walls, pale pills, and me.  Everyone's seen me.  I'm the big, bearded bouncer of the ward.  I'm the bear-like creature that wrestles patients to the ground when they get out of control.  On TV and in movies, I wear white and I am portrayed as a reason you don't want to be in the ward.  In real life, I wear a faded brown uniform and I am actually one of the nicer people you will meet here.  I won't disregard what you say until you're shot up with sodium pentothal, like all the doctors here.  But I'm not a doctor.  No, I'm like a nurse-bouncer.

I believe in listening.  I believe, as long as you aren't hurting anyone, your reality is yours alone.  If you asked me what I thought about the Bible, I would tell you it is an interesting story.  A good story, a good version of reality, is more entertaining than anything else.  Seeing the universe through someone else's eyes.  Living vicariously.  These are ways to reach out beyond our internal experience.  Every patient I see has their own volume.  A reality they author.  Sometimes through incoherent babbling, sometimes through art, and sometimes through violence.   There is only one particularly violent case here at Saint Dympna's Ward.  A man I call "Hero."  Muscles ripple over his body and hatred fuels his motives.  And now I understand why.  We were keeping him from something important in his life.

Rounds
At the beginning of the day, I make my rounds through the building. Nothing interesting or significant happens.  The afternoons are where I enjoy my job.  It is art and social therapy time in the cafeteria.  In one corner, child-minds doped up on some prescribed lifestyle, they fingerpaint.  One of them manages to make a turkey with her hand.  I tell her it's cool, but one of the other nurses just stands there looking past his nose and he says, "It's not Thanksgiving yet."  His parents were probably condescending to him, too.

In the middle of the room three patients idly drop red or black discs into a yellow frame.  They are playing Connect-Four, a two player game.  Click. The first player, Jones, drops his red disc into an empty slot.  Click-click, two black discs fall, one from Tamera and one from Doc.  I guess if you expanded the constraints, you know, the yellow grid, more people could play.  The two players with black, Tamera and Doc, aren't using what amounts to a two-turn-in-a-row option(?).  They're playing against each other with the same color.  They're playing by their own rules.

And then, by the windows, Strawberry and Hero.  The windows are the kind you see in bathrooms with the pattern that disallows viewing, but still lets light in.  When they constructed Saint Dympna's Ward, they decided the outdoors would distract from what was going on inside.  They may as well have built the complex underground and set up a synthesized sunlight system.  Real or otherwise, the light is hitting Strawberry's flaming red hair, and you immediately understand her name.  She wasn't bald upon birth.  She had one single strand of the most crimson-red hair, so her parents named her Strawberry.  The day the father was driving the family back from the hospital, they got twenty feet from the parking lot.  And a Ford pickup slammed them.  No one died, but both parents were sent right back to the hospital, twenty feet back.  Both in a vegetative state on arrival.  The grandparents of Strawberry put her up for adoption, but kept her parents on feeding tubes until she was twenty one.  Then they sent her a letter.  "Your parents are alive," it said.  Well sort of, they meant.  And she broke down.  And she's here.

I am talking to one of the patients about their awesome rendition of the human hand via finger paints when a table flips from the other side of the room, crashing into the wall.  I turn to the noise of a splintering wooden table.  Against the wall is Strawberry, her head facing upward towards the heavens, eyes closed.  Around her neck is a hand.  Hero's hand, gripping tightly, fingers pressed inward on her skin.  Inside, her wind pipes begin to strain under the pressure.  Choking.  The owner of the hand, Hero, his brow is smushed in on itself.  His eyebrows tell her that he hates her.  His eyes are ablaze with the reflection of her hair-- now dancing up from her back, situated over an air vent.  It rises and falls.  Rises, oscillates, falls.  Extends itself outward, reaching maximum buoyancy, and falls.  In this split second image, I am rushing over to bear-hug Hero and wrestle him to the ground.  Before I can, a doctor gets there and tries to negotiate.  She is strong-armed to the floor with a swift, balled up fist.  I step over her crumpled body.  The next thing I know, there is a colored pencil in my throat and I am laid out.

Roommate
It is a day before my neck covers a sea-green colored pencil in blood.  A day before Hero grabs a single, makeshift weapon from a box of seventy-two potential tools, I am lying in bed-- naked.  Next to me is my girlfriend, a beautiful blonde-in-disguise, with a voice angels envy.  She writes her own songs and sings them to me.  Sometimes they're about me, and how, in the past, I have been a stupid dick to her, but, it's okay, because here and now is what matters, and here and now is perfect.  Here and now, she is snoring.  Her incredible range is being utilized by runner's lungs, keeping me awake.

Before getting out of bed, I lean to her and kiss her on the forehead.  In spite of her snoring, she is the most devine creature know to man.  To God, or this, or whatever anything is.  I stumble through the ambient light from the street, looking for my boxers.  They are hidden under a sheet that was, with my boxers, kicked off the bed earlier in the night.  I wiggle them up my waist, and grab my girlfriend's pack of cigarettes.  Be right back, I say to her snores.  I crack the door and slide through, sideways.  I walk to the back of the apartment.  I notice her roommate's door is open.  That means she's not here.  She's never here.  Only in the mornings, when her alarm is blaring for hours, is she here-- sleeping.  My girlfriend tells me near-insomnia is the only means she has left to get fucked up.  She tells me she has a bad past.  She killed people.  Not on purpose, but on accident.  She had been speed balling one night.  This is when you mix heroine and cocaine.  One is basically a downer, the other an upper.  In addition, she was drunk.  And driving.  Swerving across the road one night, she slammed the right side of the car into a tree.  The car wraps around, metal frame hugging wooden trunk, and two of her friends die instantly.  Now she goes to AA meetings.  Now she stays up until her body can't handle the sleep deprivation anymore, and she just passes out.  Now she does art therapy.  Just like a case at Saint Dympna.

I reach the kitchen in the back of the apartment.  To my left, the microwave reads 0:18 where it should say 2:48AM.   To my right is the door.  Before I exit and smoke, I light my cigarette with the oven.  This singes my eyebrow and the room fills with that burnt-hair-smell that no one seems to like.  One of my feet rests in a black square while the other rests within a white one.  At the door, I slide locks from left to right, and twist the door knob.  From left to right.  It opens and I am through, to a world of light pollution.  Living in the city, you don't really see the stars.  It's like being in a mental ward where the windows are only partially translucent.  You get some light-- a fraction of the big picture.  You are only graced with a relative abundance of stars on clear nights like this, when the air is thin and cold.  I shiver momentarily, but the head rush of nicotine quickly comes to my body's aid.  Aid.  I am a cigarette's patient today.

I focus on the cherry, which is glowing brightly against the wind.  In French, they call it le fraise.  "The Strawberry."  It makes me happy that some things are naturally universal, like this. Fire.  The color of it, the idea of it, is intertwined in human history, I think.  But now, though not everywhere, there's electricity to give us warmth.  Century old technology.  Wires in the sky.  Big cylinders, converting energy.  These things aren't beautiful.  We don't relate to power plants.  Fire is so basic, so elemental, that its beauty is ingrained in us.  Especially now, as I shiver on the back porch of the third floor, 2425 E. Fields, apartment six.  Alone, sharing my experience.

The faux-gold emblem of a camel on the side of my cigarette isn't wearing scrubs or a lab coat, but right now, he is my doctor.  With every deep drag, the cold retreats from my skin.  Doctor Camel will be with you shortly.  With a sufficient headrush I go back inside.  The roommate's door is closed as I walk by.

I lay down next to my girlfriend and wrap my arms around her.  In the bathroom adjoining the two bedrooms, a light is on.  The roommate is in there, taking a shit.  Plop, is the last sound I hear before a blaring alarm wakes me up in the morning.  My girlfriend is gone to work, having woken me up briefly to say goodbye.  I don't remember this clearly, but I remember it happening as the alarm was going off in the background.

My girlfriend leaves for work at six in the morning.  It is now seven thirty.  The alarm has been active for an hour and a half.  Before leaving, I put my clothes on and go into the roommate's room.  Blankets cover her windows, making it dark, but trapping the sound.  The constant beep, beep, beep gives me a headache.  I can't imagine what it is doing to her dreams.  Several prescription drugs lie on her dresser, filled in those transparent orange bottles you get from pharmacies.  One of them has pot in it, the only thing she didn't quit.  Medicine bottles are like the next step up from your standard issue sandwich bag.

I hit the off button.  Next to the alarm, I notice a box of colored pencils.  A sea-green pencil is upside-down in the box.  I flip it around to be right-side-up.  I get the idea that I will bring this for my two favorite patients at the ward, so I leave a note for the roommate.  In the note I am telling her they are being put to good use and that I will have them back to her at the end of the night.  Or, the beginning of her day.

Physics and Biology
Two ideas cannot occupy the same space simultaneously.  This is why I have a hole in my neck.  A sea-green pencil and my neck had a dispute over who should be where. Over the hole is a big white bandage framed in surgical tape.  In the ward's cafeteria, there are also holes.  In the walls.  From Hero and his massive fists.

Hero, the patient that stabbed me, he tells me he is sorry, but she had to die.  The other nurses and doctors believe he is only sorry because he is now in a sort of solitary confinement.  Fettered to the walls with some metal covered in nylon, something they use in special cases like this.  Special cases that also call for a muzzle.  A face mask, situated around the back of the skull like a belt on a waist.

After I was stabbed, Hero was quickly surrounded by the rest of the staff and backup is summoned.  There are now five individuals encircling him.  He punches the wall behind him to, they assume, show his strength.  These are those cinder-block walls painted over white that you see in nearly every institution.  They are strong, but where his fist lands, the wall crumbles in around his arm like a sand castle.  The surrounding crowd takes a collective step backward.  Hero has frightened a ten legged monster.  A mob.

The monster rears its head forward, toward Hero.  It is another nurse, breaking from the crest of the outward semi-circle, making his way for the center.  Everyone calls this nurse Big Mac.  This is because every day, at lunch, he has a hamburger from a burger chain.  Every day, a standard helping of processed perfection.  On Wednesdays, that's today, he shares his number seven selection with millions of other Big Mac guys out there.

"And then he bit my ear off.  He bit my fucking ear off," Big Mac tells me.  "He cups my chin with his big hand and lifts me.  I am two-twenty-five, man!"

It's true, he's a big guy.  You don't eat number fours for breakfast every day and lose weight.  He turns to me and hands me his pack of cigarettes, saying, "I know you're not ready to admit that you're a smoker.  Here."   His bandage, a painted window frame on his face, covers a sewn up ear.  His smile nearly reaches it as I take the cigarette.

Yeah, I tell him, I smoke, but I'm not a smoker.  Buying my own pack, that would make me a smoker.  A prisoner.

"Oh yeah," he says, "they want you inside.  Something to do with the maniac."  He's referring to our very own Mike Tyson.  I go inside and start my Wednesday morning in the ward's basement.

Odds
"Four-hundred-to-one odds is what I'm up against," he says, "and I can't defeat four men in brown suits because they have shock-sticks and stinging spray cans."

My superior tells me I am the only one Hero will talk to, and here I am, listening to the tail end of his story.  Being surrounded and tasered is the last image Hero remembers before waking up bound to a metal-dungeon in the basement of Saint Dympna's Ward. I ask him what he means by four-hundred-to-one odds.

"These are numbers I have no problem with," he says.

No problem with doing what, I ask.

"Killing."

Oh, I say, killing four hundred innocent people without a thought.  Like Strawberry.  He takes offense.

"I'm sorry, but she had to die.  Just like everyone I've killed."

Why?  Why is the red-head that likes colored pencils dead?  Why couldn't she live.  She was the soul survivor of a car accident, an orphan, a smoker.  Why couldn't Strawberry live, I ask him again and again.  He is silent for several minutes, refusing to tell me anything beyond "she had to die."  I ready myself to leave and motion to the guard at the door.  The guard is going to put the muzzle back on.  Before he does, Hero, he says, "Wait."  He'll tell me.

Strawberry sits across from him, happily dazed by the day's regimen of drugs, coloring.  She draws a bronze sword and says, "You're going to have to kill me."  Hero looks up from his blank page, but she remains coloring.  Now she is drawing a deeply tanned hand gripping a hilt of a bronze sword.   She barely colors in the lines.  It's all blurred.

"What did you say," Hero asks her, reaching across the table to put his hand on hers, stopping the colored pencil.  She looks up and, using her other hand, removes his.  She goes back to drawing an arm, saying, "She is waiting for you, but you have to get out of here first.  And then you have to be led."

Hero says he can get out himself.  He can make it on his own, as he has before.  He has used rocks to crush skulls.  He has toppled war elephants.  He has traveled countless distances.  But this is different.  Strawberry explains to him that he needs guidance, and there is only one person in the ward that can help.  One person he can rely on.

"And that one person," he says in the metal dungeon, chained to the wall, "is you."

Gods
"Isn't that what we are?" she asks, looking past the steering wheel in her hands.  This is my girlfriend driving me back to her place.  We get off of work at roughly the same time, and there she is, outside in her Red Honda.  It faces away from me, so I sneak up and push on the trunk, rocking the car.  She twists around and looks out the window, laughing.  I smile at her and open the passenger door.

Now we're on the road, heading to her place to cook dinner.  I have just told her about Hero and she seems overly interested.  Any man that can usurp her attention from me in any form and I suddenly feel less confident.  And, Hero isn't just any man.  He has served in World War I, II, Korea, and Vietnam.  He has used swords, pikes, and the occasional axe.  A battle-axe, like his body.  God, his body.  A tank build.  And she, unlike everyone else, doesn't think he's crazy.

"I mean, we're talking about Gods here," I remind her, "powerful entities who control the course of mankind."

She says, "I know."  What we are, she thinks, are individual gods, encapsulated within our minds.  "Just listen," she says, "willpower."  She looks over, her black-hole pupils radiating to amber.  Amber stretching, in tendrils, to blue-green.  She looks at me, her crinkled forehead accentuating her word, Willpower.  My eyes meet hers.  I see the whole universe in a split second glance.  And then it is refocused on the road.

"Willpower?" I ask.  Willpower, as defined by American Heritage Dictionary, is "the strength of will to carry out one's decisions, wishes, or plans."  She tells me this, her driftwood-brown hair streaming through the invisible wind.  The wind streaming through her hair.  The wind streaming through rolled down windows, outside to in.  The mind streaming through it all.

"And what makes us different from ants?" she prompts me.

"Well, in regard to willpower?

"Yeah."

"We have more."

Right, she says, we have more willpower.  From an ant's perspective, humans and larger animals are gods, who have the ability to exert their unstoppable will over them. We can smash them, burn them, save them, arrange them. Through our imagination and innovation, we wield unending power over them.  So, above us, out there, is there anything advanced enough, through tool use or mental/physical prowess, to play god with us?  At parks, this is why she tip-toes through blades of grass.  Why her eyes are focused on the ground more than ahead.  She doesn't want to arbitrarily end the life of a lesser being.  Because why couldn't a galactic foot just snuff out our life?

She asks me what's so hard to believe about a goddess watching over Hero, using him for the benefit of mankind. She asks me if I think it's as romantic as she does.  She asks me if I'm going to help him.

Paranoia
One of the patients here has a severe case of psychosis.  The third player in Connect-Four.  The second black disc.  His name is Doc.  The reason his name is Doc is obvious.  He was a doctor at a local college campus, taking care of students.  In student health, it's pretty much the same thing every day.  Kids worry about having unprotected sex with more than three people in the last couple of months, and they need to get tested.  Suspicious partners looking for proof.  Others with concerns about the heroine they shot last night.  Some not worried at all, carried in on stretchers from alcohol overdose.  And then there's Doc, who worries alongside them-- for them and himself.

Some of the time he is genuinely concerned about his patients.  Other times, he is genuinely concerned about his patients suing him.  His patients, with their rich mommies and daddies and their combined law degrees.  Or worse, political backgrounds.  Mafia ties.  Alien descent.  And it started with simple auditory hallucinations.  The kind of thing you can write off as a mistake.  Hearing your name whispered in the wind is nothing.  Suddenly your name becomes a list of things-- everything but the name itself.  "James" becomes: fame, tame, maim, trains, feign, blame, anything to convince yourself you're not crazy.  You're in a crowded room and everyone's talking, someone must have been talking to another "Greg" over by the window. The high pitched police siren and distant jackhammer sounds you just heard combined to make a sound similar to "Monica."  Having a more unique name makes all of this self-convincing difficult.

After the initial stages of auditory hallucinations, then come the delusions.  The conspiracies.  Doc, he says he would change his route to work every day, just in case someone was watching him.  Ex-Special Forces do this, he says.  They're powerful tools, and just because they're not in use anymore doesn't mean the government is just going to let them live out their lives.  What if they snap and kill innocent people?  They could.  What's from stopping them?  Knowing that they are always watched by someone, that's what.  So what's to stop them from watching Doc, he thinks.  Maybe they worry he'll start removing people's innards to sell on some Chinese black market.

And near the campus, there's a tobacco manufacterer's headquarters.  The name's not as important as the placement.  It is two blocks from where Doc works.   He says it's ironic, and comments on the smoke stacks around the city.  The tobacco company owns all of them.  They're all venting nicotine into the air, getting us addicted.  And that's controlled by the Bildeberg Conferences.  And those by the lizard men at the center of the earth.  And that's about the time that he checked himself into Saint Dympna's Ward.  Not because he thought he was crazy, but because he knew it would be one of the last places they would look for him.  And here I am, watching him from across the room, thinking to myself about the nature of paranoia.  Paranoia like my fear of Hero, and my girlfriend's fixation on him.  It is not so much Hero that threatens me, but the idea of someone being better in her eyes.  Hero fights for his Goddess over the course of eons, in hallmark conflicts across the globe, and I help loose realities focus on dabbing fingers in paint.

Sword And Shield
Through the fractal cafeteria windows, I see a pastel smudge of red.  It is my girlfriend's Honda, colored outside the lines.  I walk outside, sneaking up.  Only the eyes of the tail-lights know I'm there.  I press my hands, palms down, on the trunk, and rock the car.  My girlfriend laughs.  I get inside the car.  This is the part where I tell my girlfriend everything Hero told me.  Right before she goes off on what it means to be a god, and whether or not I'm going to help him.

Goddess was the shield, Hero the sword.  Sort of like Christianity- of truth, and of faith, but less about spreading a belief.  They were armaments for the good of mankind.  And these gods, they're real, every last one of them.  These gods don't have specific affinities, they work more like a loose net of visitors to our planet Earth.  They don't always stay, unless they like what they see.  Some came too early, seeing basic creatures--humanity in its early stages-- and left for more fruitful ventures.  Others have come, set up shop, making business of the human condition.  Others come bearing pity.  Some genuinely care.

To think that Earth was so special that it would only have the one and only god, and that god would make Earth the pinnacle of all creation, this is absurd.  Earth is just another spinning atom.  Another wave on the beach.  

Goddess visited Earth first as a spectator of the great battles humans would wage.  Because Gods don't have warfare, this was sport. Gods don't do battle in the physical sense, they just deny each other joy.  This is worse than death.  Human warfare began small, with boney fists and hurled rocks.  This is when Goddess enters the picture.  She witnesses Hero.  Hero, standing tall over the body of a little girl, bruises all down her cheek like bludgeon-tears.  All around him, four men, bigger and broader than Hero himself.  The girl stole something from the men, a fruit.  So they beat her.  And Hero stepped in.  But it wasn't enough.  Hero's tall body takes blows for the girl.  One man falls, eyes gouged to mush.  Grapes smashed, red wine spilt.  The other three men bring rocks down on Hero's back, his body wrapped tightly around the girl, protecting her.  And then Goddess steps in.  And ever since, he has been her sword.  Defending the defenseless here and there.  Acting as Aegis.

At this point in the story, the Red Honda has stopped, dead, at a red-light.  My girlfriend leans in and kisses me on the lips.  She looks up from closed lids and asks, What happened next?  I tell her, You'll love this.

Hero fell in love.  Unfortunately, to be with her, he would have to die.  But she was his shield, and thus made him invulnerable.  It was torture.  She was just an echo.  A shadow.  To have her exist seperate from himself, he became detached and angry.  In battle, this served as his edge.  He would slay a million men putting himself in impossible situations.  To die.  But now she loved him, too.  And she wanted him to experience what he had given so many defenseless individuals.  Life.  So they were both unhappy, serving each other.

One day, in the last couple of decades Hero says, other Earth overseers hear of Goddess and Hero's love affair.  Repulsive.  God and man.  An abomination.  So the gods, they take away Goddess' joy.  They made her mortal, no longer able to protect Hero.  It was his turn to play shield.

My girlfriend urges me to continue.  But that's all he told me, I say.  The next thing I know, he's complaining about being downed by nurses in faded brown uniforms.  We talk about Hero's idea of gods, she asks me if I'm going to help him.  It depends on what he wants me to help him with, I tell her.  Then she asks me what I was thinking about cooking for dinner.  Some sort of seafood, I say.  Shrimp, she agrees.  We head to the market before going home to her place.

Applause
A room full of applause, and the only sound is my girlfriend's high heels clack, clack, clacking her up to a stage.  Through a field of waving hands, she struts, down a swath cut in black foldable chairs.  She is accepting an award at a local elementary school.  This is where she works.  Not here in this particular room, we're in the cafeteria-- a large room with high ceilings and white tiled flooring.  The windows are tall, crystal clear gateways to the outside world.  The outside world covered in bright green grass and metal playgrounds.  The kind with bridges that connect towers, with little useless steering wheels made out of plastic.  And those steering wheels, they take you nowhere, except in your head.

My girlfriend reaches the front and scales the stairs stage-left.  She looks out over the crowd.  A multitude of individuals, clapping silently for her.  I wave my hands too, back and forth, rotating to a point, stopping, and rotating back across the air.  I clap the same clap that a girls' chorus might use in one of their songs in an elementary school just like this one.  But not this one.  There is no singing here.  But there are spirit fingers.  Applause.

Waving hands begin to descend against laps as my girlfriend raises an open palm out toward the crowd.  Her right hand, thumb crossed inward, reaches her chin and then up away from her body.  She says, "Hello."  She goes into her wordless speech about art.  This is what her award is about-- art.  She is getting an award for revitalizing the school's once-dying art program.  Dying, like the deaf community itself.

With advanced hearing aids, the deaf needn't learn a sub-culture so detached from normalcy.  Hearing is important.  And they can fix what's wrong with you.  With advanced procedures, stem cell research, transplants.  They want to help you, restore your ability to experience the world.  What little perception we do have, it is to be cherished, and everyone sitting around me, they're missing out.  Missing out on tone.  They're missing out on music.  And sirens  and distant trains in the night.  Babies crying.  Lovers grunting.  Girlfriends snoring.  They're missing out on the obnoxious alarm going off in the next room for an hour and thirty minutes.  

While they're missing out on sound, we're missing out on heightened reliance on sight, smell, touch.  The nuances of tone have nothing on the nuances of facial expressions and hand gestures.  Maybe we're missing out.   But the numbers don't lie.  Majority is normal.  If not that, then plurality.  If not that, whoever's in charge of things is dictator of Province Normal.  High arbiter of all things usual.  

Dying or not, this packed room of the hearing-impaired is all focused on the woman at the front of the room, high above us on stage.  Single-handedly, she saved the art program at this school.  She struck a deal between the school and a local church.  On weekends the local church would use the school for one of those twelve step programs.  This quasi-religious recovery-program off-shoot of the church would help fund the school's need for art classes.

I went to Glorify Recovery, the twelve step program, only once.  I went because my girlfriend wanted me to.  She was going to show her support for the program.  More like her support of their support, I told her when  we entered that cafeteria a few years ago.  She scowls at this remark.  This is the kind of thing that got her writing songs about me with phrases like "You're a stupid dick. . ."

My girlfriend, the tower on stage, links everyone's mind to a single concept--intent.  She says art is intent.  The physical embodiment of your art aside, intention is, in and of itself, art.  Expression, something these kids need to understand is not limited because of their "disability," she says, is the essence of art.  Her intent was to save the art program, so, during Glorify Recovery, the twelve step programs on weekends, she sells art.  All proceeds then go back into the school's art program, and she sees none of it.

Glorify Recovery was on its first step when she sold four paintings.  The first and most difficult step-- admitting you have a problem.  Four people went up on stage that first meeting.  They all left with a painting.  All of them feeling relieved of some pressure, and wanting to help a good cause.  One guy, a sex addict, he goes home with a transitional piece about a goldfish that was squished.  He really hit it off with my girl.  Being a sex addict, I didn't trust him.  Infuriated that she would even talk to him, I walked back to my apartment.  A twelve block walk, because my girlfriend wanted to draw people in and sell art, to fund the expanding horizons of her students.

The guy, he said he was going to give it to his wife, whom he had cheated on.  She didn't know.  She wasn't there for his soliloquy on that.  She was at home fucking his best friend.  The goldfish guy would find them and leave, infuriated like me.  I saw him in a gun shop that day, while walking those twelve blocks.  I couldn't imagine why. He had just discovered he had a problem and he can work through it with the support and love of his new found recovery group.  I couldn't imagine why he was in the gun shop until I read the paper the next day.

I didn't kill anyone and I didn't need a gun.  I was just a stupid, jealous dick who disappointed his girlfriend.  Time and time again.  And she broke up with me.  It wasn't until I started working at Saint Dympna a year ago that I realized my problem, admitted it, and got back together with her.

 
Ceilings Don't Exist
Something strange happens before I exit the bathroom in the cafeteria here at Saint Dympna's Ward.  When I exit, everyone in the cafeteria is staring up at the ceiling.

It is May 18th, Thursday, when I go into the bathroom in the cafeteria.  The bathroom door is wooden, with a metal plate drilled into the middle, on the right side.  This is for hands to push, but all around the plate, there is evidence to the contrary.  Grease stains from a thousand hands, avoiding the metal, pressing the wood.  I avoid all of it, and press the top right corner of the door.  Probably still contributing to the expanding stain of hand oil.

Inside the bathroom, I now wash my hands.

With furtive grace, a silent giant creeps.

All movement outside the bathroom ceases.  Through the thick wooden door, I can't hear this, but it is happening, going on without my involvement.  I go to exit.  On this side of the door, there are no grease stains from hand oil.  Just a metal handle.  The door only opens one way, and on the inside, you have little choice as to how you will open it.  How you'll get out.

Met with gaping mouths, I then look up.  Before words can spill from my mouth to ask the others what happened, everyone falls to the ground in unison as a blast of air explodes against our bodies.  Chairs and tables shatter and little game pieces go flying.  Paints splatter and mix together against the patients, nurses, the walls, the floor-- everything covered in a sick mix of brownish orange.

The cafeteria is ceiling-less.  The blue sky and clouds are now fixed within a blank box.  On every edge of where the ceiling would meet the rising walls, there are flames slowly rolling down the white paint.  This probably releases some sickeningly toxic fumes, because several people are throwing up on themselves.

Hero once told me, "The gods won't hesitate to cleave the tops of mountains in order to crush the misbehaving villages in the valley.  They don't view humanity as a group of individuals.  When they punish a small group by killing them, that's like kicking your dog.  Where you kick the dog, that's where it's going to hurt, but only because it sends a message to its brain telling it that it's going to hurt.  If the gods punish one group, the rest of humanity is supposed to learn.  And like a dog having been kicked many times throughout its life, it's supposed to fear."

City officials would later tell us it was two low currents of air that ripped our roof off.  Riding one of those currents was a low flying jet.  The jet was flying fast enough to cause a delayed sonic boom.  That's what knocks us all down.  They didn't comment on the flaming walls or the toxic paint.  Our problem, they said.  Dressed up with a tie and suit, but Our Problem was the message.

A problem my superiors didn't address was that of a missing patient.  The building's foundation somehow shook and loosed Hero from his shackles.  Fearing him, no one said anything.  His prison lie cracked and empty.        
 
 
The Sea
"Imagine your home by the sea.  Standing on the beach, feet deep in the water, your home before you-- in flames," she tells me.  This is Tamera telling me a story.

Quick-sand recession as your weight buries your feet, the air all salty around you, clean and clear in your lungs on the intake.  Chest rising, chest sinking.  Exhale.

Waves are strange the way they lap up, slide up on and in and around your toes.  The glass of water seems flat.  From space, the brilliant diamond eyes see flat water atop Earth, but everywhere, close enough, there it is-- choppy.  Up, down, up, down.  Expand, contract, expand, contract. To that glass of water, that little ocean, we are gods--like the sun, and it's daughter, Luna, the moon.

"There is a storm in Hero's lungs," she says, "Push-pulling in the fire by the sea."

Another story Hero has told someone about his struggle.  How did he convince Tamera?  Science.
This is Tamera's idea of romance.

"Imagine you were engineered, genetically and behaviorally to need someone.  You would roam the earth with emptiness until you found them.  Every detail matters in the equation, especially the eyes."

Eyes, the window to the soul, she tells me, are the most important physical feature for this engineered person.  Once they lock with another's, they can tell one thing about them--whether or not they are their match.

"And the person you seek is the same way.  Engineered like you.  All of your attributes are the most attractive possible in that person's mind.  Everything you say matches what they would ask."

Like signals and receptors in the body, she tells me.  Biology.  I took that, I tell her, in college.  That and psychology.  I know how it works.

"And imagine standing there, on the beach, sinking.  Watching your home go up in flames.  Your life sabotaged by those who created it, those involved in the project to bring you and your lover together.  Sabotaged because it was becoming beyond their reach, beyond their abilities to stop.  And that person you have been searching for your whole life, burning up inside.  Your receptor gone, and now you have nothing left.  What do you do with your life?"

You find your offspring, she tells me.  Find the child born to human and goddess, birthed right there on the beach.  Make sure it's alive, she tells me, and you will be whole.  And make sure your creators suffer.

Final Vignette
It has been three days since the roof of Saint Dympna's Ward was torn off.  Unexplained as it was, the only thing I can believe now is what they have given us.  Maybe a god really did swoop in an shave the top of the building off, capturing Hero in the process.  Maybe a top secret special forces team took him back to the lab where he was created.  I am too small a man to say one way or the other on such big concepts.  Too big are they to examine objectively.  Too close am I.

I realize that Goddess and Hero, they weren't serving each other by being sword and shield. They weren't created in some lab to fall in love.  They just were in love.  And maybe that makes some people crazy.  It makes me insecure, I know.  But with her, I am stronger.  Able to take on more stress, more pain.  More joy than I ever thought possible.  I realize you don't have to be a hero or a god to overcome the problems you create in your life.

I look at her in the kitchen doing the dishes all alone.  I get up from my chair and put my book face down, stopping the story mid-sentence-- characters frozen at my will.   I walk up to the sink and stop.  My right foot is in a black square, my left in a white.  I roll up my sleeves, tucking them into themselves and pick up a bowl.  I turn on the faucet and begin washing it with  soap and a sponge.  She looks over, sees my soapy and wet hands, and smiles at me. This is worth my time. This is worth my time and we don't have to be saving the world for that to be so.

For B-B

if I were to continue this story(WHICH I AM NOT GOING TO, SO DO NOT READ BELOW, I would begin with the ending, and the end would begin like this. . .
Control Theory
People would like to think they can control things.  More than that, they believe they control themselves.  They feel like their actions are not just a series of circumstantial events that narrow their reality.   I believe that, too, now, faced with the end of the universe.  

"You are important," he tells me. 

I don't believe him, but he tells me he knows me better than I think.  My soul is bound to the same fate as his.  The same as the love of his life.

When I was sixteen, my older brother told me something disturbing.  Our parents got married on the basis of a "psychic feeling." 

Hero showed up three days ago and told us, "You have to come with me.  Both of you."
He shows up at my girlfriend's apartment while I'm helping her with the dishes and says we have to leave, immediately.  I don't know why we listen to him, but we do.

My parents were married after six months of seeing eachother.  This is not the strange part.  My mother met my father once, at a party in college.  It was the only party she went to.  My father and her hardly exchanged words.  The next week, my father gets a phone call.  My mother had spent days looking him up.  Trying to figure out his number.  My father picks up the phone, and it is my mother.  She tells him, "I think we are meant to be together."  He says he feels the same way. 

Three days ago, we tell Hero to wait while we discuss it in the kitchen.  He tells us we will come with him because it is our destiny.  And he seems certain, like it has already happened.  In the kitchen, I disagree with what my girlfriend says is a "feeling."  An inclination.  A draw to him.  I tell her I have a draw to her, and that going with him, I would be abandoning that draw.  That sense of protection.  But she says she feels more strongly about this than anything else in her life.  I get a sick sinking-into-myself feeling.  Does she mean she feels more strongly about going with him than staying with me?  She goes.  And I, of course, go with her.

And now I am faced with the end of the universe.  Whatever authored all of this set up safety nets in case the lifeforms living within attempted to gain control, Hero tells us.  We are in the middle of a field, where it is now raining.  My girlfriend, she is screaming at Hero to stop.

"You are important," he repeats with a new inflection, "does not mean you are good."  He shakes the gun in my face.  Killing me is the only solution, he says, and I am almost. 

"I'm over my jealousy," I tell him.  I swear, I am.   But it is not good enough for him.  My jealousy is the result of an experiment that controlled two human beings, from birth.  It made them believe they were meant to be together, and the result was me.  The first child, my parents planned.  The second child was me.  I was an accident.  I was meant to look like an accident, he tells me, raindropps splattering on his lips as he speaks. 

Whomever I have a child with will die.  My seed is virus ridden, he says.  I tell him I've been having sex with her.  "Only upon birthing the child, severing from your love, will she die," is his rebuttle.

The gods had left Earth a long time ago, and they set in place an agreement with several governments of this world.  To ensure the safety of Earth, they must devise a way to destroy Hero and Goddess' child.  Their child, my girlfriend, and I, the weapon intended for her destruction.  Hero tells me she is his daughter.  And I must die. 

He squeezes the trigger and I am shot.  As I lay bleeding, reality begins to shatter around me.  My girlfriend is screaming, holding my head up, blood on her hands, and in the distance I hear Hero sobbing, muttering that he had misinterpreted the situation.  Everything was safe, until the daughter, my girlfriend lost or was severed from that which she loved.  A child would have continued the love, as it did for Hero and Goddess.  My girlfriend was the last thing holding this world together.  My world.  And I was the last thing holding her world together.  Our world.

(But since the story was already finished, this is just an interesting, overly complicated backstory to where I was eventually headed if I hadn't stopped writing when I did.  I think it's fun to make things more epic than they really are, but in regards to this, I realized that epic or not, true love is a special rarity that few people ever witness or take part in.  I am a part of it.  A part of something meaningful.)

 

So I was talking with my friend, Jeff, and he told me you can actually trip off of benadryl.  I didn't know this about antihistamines, and thought I'd try it.  I had a bottle of Simply Sleep, which is a pretty safe sleeping aid.   Because it doesn't have any acetaminophen in it, I figured it'd be fine.  I looked up how much I should take and decided I would just test with 150mg(6 pills), as it was my first time.  Of course, I end up taking seven pills, because, hey, one pill is not that much less safe.  Here are the events as I remember them.

I am fixing a bowl of ramen while waiting for the effects to kick in.  I put two packs in a large bowl, crush it up a little so it fits, pour water into the bowl, and shove the bowl into the microwave.  I repeatedly hit the "30 Second" button until it adds up to 3 minutes.  But, by the time I've hit it enough, it only adds up to 2:59. 

I have to take a piss, so I go to the bathroom.  There is a large spider on the wall, a type I've never seen before.  It looks like a cylinder with really long legs.  I blow on it, but it doesn't react, it just sways on its web.  I quickly tuck my penis back into my pants, because I hate spiders and, with legs like that, I believe it can jump from the wall to my pants.  I wash my hands and exit, closing the door behind me.  I go to watch some Comedy Central.  Some red-haired douche is on the screen. I hear my mom upstairs saying something, but it doesn't pertain to me, so I continue scoffing at the unfunny Irish guy on the television.  At some point, there is a closeup of him, and I notice a smudge on the screen.  Because he is wearing a bright shirt, the smudge is apparent.  I go "Goddamnit," and get up to go wipe it off.  By the time I reach the screen, the smudge is gone.  I think, "Shit, it's working," and the microwave beeps at me in the next room.

I am eating ramen and am very tired.  I decide, because nothing particularly awesome is happening, that I should just go to sleep.  I do.  While falling asleep several things happen.  I whole-heartedly believe the remote is on the couch with me, as I FEEL IT AGAINST MY BODY.  I search frantically for a couple of minutes for something that isn't there.  I look to my right, and it sits idle on the coffee table.  This happens twice. 

As I am drifting off to sleep, I start having a dream, and in it, I go something like, "You something I got you for."  It makes so little sense to me that it ejects me from the dreamworld.  I sit up and immediately forget what just happened and fall back to sleep.

I can't wait to do a higher dosage.

I wish I could have recorded my experience and the images that went through my head.  I wish I could convey and project my understanding onto you, but all I have are words.  They are insufficient in describing this particular encounter with salvia.  And, I'll start off by saying I've done salvia several times and that I am not inexperienced.  Granted, I have never done 15x, but I knew I could handle it.  Or, at least, thought I could.  This is that story:

The night began when Horatio and Yetti show up.  I know exactly why.  Our friend, PK, his house has been empty for two days, this being the second.  Last night I was over there getting rather drunk on shitty beer(See: Natty Ice).  Tonight is the night of the actual party, in which a lot of people are showing up.  Horatio's nose dons a bandage.  We went to a Children of Bodom show recently, and someone's fist or head met up with Horatio's nose, crushing it a bit to the side.  He went to the doctor to get it fixed.  His bandage says, "I'm on hydrocodone and feel good!"

We head outside to Yetti's vehicle and hop in.  We have to stop by his house to grab a GB cap.  I'm excited, I only expected shitty beer to be at the party.  When we get to the party, though, I am less excited, because no one has pot, just salvia. I notice a bubbler sitting on a table.  I remember John Lee telling me a story of how he acquired a bubbler, and since he's sitting on the couch opposite it, I assume it's his.  I ask him about it and he retells the story to everyone.
John Lee: "Nick Volante just gave it too me.  He was just like, 'John, I never use this unless you're around, here, take it.'" I was like 'Sweet!'"
Horatio: "He was high as shit wasn't he?"
John Lee: "Yeah, Nick was high as shit and I was drunk as shit."
Hunter: "Wait so, you have your bubbler here, that implies that there's pot.  Is there?"
John Lee: "Nah, [PK] and Alex have some salvia, though."

I have done salvia many times, and none of them were particularly interesting: 

The first time I did it, Horatio and I went down to this place in the city, AfricaHouse, and bought some really overpriced shit.  We mixed it with pot and took GBs of the concoction on the rail-road tracks near our house.  The effect was smooth and nice, I saw colors that I wouldn't have normally, you know, purples instead of blues.  And, the trees lining the railroad tracks bent in towards eachother and formed a tunnel of brances. 

The second time I did it, I did it with Yetti and PK on Horatio's back porch while he was gone for the weekend, which is kind of fucked up. It was purely salvia, sans pot.  We packed it tight and took GBs.  I laughed really hard for about 10 seconds before I started choking.  I had to remove myself from the situation and sit on the steps, because I was "Choking on the spheres that we're all made of."  It was a brief trip, and not worth choking for. 

The third time I did it was terrible and made me hate salvia.  My friend Chocolate gets some and we decide to smoke it.  He has a small piece that has a hole too big for salvia's fine, ground up leaves.  Theft, being the boyscout and theif that he is, goes into the bathroom on our dorm floor and whips out his knife.  He pries a faucet guard out from the sink.  He feels accomplished, and fails to inspect the guard.  We go outside and light up.  It hits incredibly hard.  We are all gasping by the end of it, and I fumble the piece.  Something hard and charred falls out of the piece.  We look at it like dogs look at the source of a high pitched noise, our heads all cocked to the side.  I pick it up and go, "Guys, I think we were smoking plastic."  THE GUARD WAS FUCKING PLASTIC, AND WE SMOKED IT.  Knock about 10 years off my life.

Flashbacks aside, I am standing in PK's kitchen playing Drink The Beer.  With myself.  John Lee stands next to me, visibly drunk.  He is standing on a ledge of stairs, and I tell him to be careful.  He only says, "That ledge is my bitch." 
The typical beer vs. liquor argument breaks out.
Horatio: "You know who is the only person on earth to have thrown up on beer alone?" 
He points to me.
Schwemmer: "Haha, really?"
Hunter: "Hey, hey, hey.  Now, that was all under an hour.  We're talking 40 minutes or less."
Horatio: "It was like seven beers dude."
Hunter: "In like 30-40 minutes."
Schwemmer: "Damn, that fast."
Horatio: "Well, yeah, he did throw them back pretty fast."
Hunter: "And beer does terrible things to me.  I am a liquor fan."
Schwemmer: "I can understand that.  I mean, genetically, we respond to things differently, all of us."
I am impressed and agree.  PK is offended that I am knocking beer, because that's all he has.  I reassure him that it's cool and I'm not complaining.  Just defending my pride.

By my third beer, another group of people shows up.  Clay, back from the military, carting two large party packs of Smirnoff bitch drinks.  Lot of good the military did in teaching him to be a man.  Behind him, two girls follow with a small group of gothic characters. Black, red.  Some pink on one of the girls.  She is quiet and reserved, and heads immediately downstairs with her group.  Only one of them is sociable, other than Clay.  It is the other girl, and she seems cool enough, but I notice she has a hollow-point bullet on her necklace.  I slowly back away while Horatio hits it off talking about guns and her shirt, which is of the band Yellowcard. 

I am in the dining room where a piano is.  John Lee is playing it rather drunkenly and I am attempting to communicate good vibes to the other group.  They are angsty and resist.  I give up and start talking to Clay.  He gives me a stern handshake that not many people can muster and I ask him:
Hunter: "So, how is 'it' going?"
Clay: "Have you ever blown up a tank with a rocket launcher?"
Hunter: "Uh, no, have you?"
Clay: "Oh yeah."
Hunter: "Oh, the perks of being in the military."

Basically, because there is no group cohesion, Yetti, Horatio, and myself head outside to smoke some of the Salvia Yetti has been saving.  He snatches John Lee's bubbler on the way out.  I chug my third beer and grab a bitch drink because I am a hypocrite. It is Smirnoff Ice, and it is delicious.  We sit in a circle... triangle really, and Yetti loads it up.  Before we start, he notices my drink and goes to grab one.  He comes back and we light up.  Yetti hits it first, passes it to Horatio, and then to me.  My reality dampens as I exhale.  Salvia hits really fast, by the way.  I put the bubbler down on the concrete.  On its side.  So, now, there is water in a small puddle in the middle of us.  No one notices but me, and I don't actually care at this point.  It's refillable.  No big deal.

Everyone is quiet for a second.  Yetti is staring at the ground when Horatio asks him a question.  I don't understand the question.  Apparently, Yetti understand it less, as his only response is a two-syllable word in what seems like tongues:
Horatio: "[questioning tone]"
A pause ensues.  Yetti looks up.
Yetti: "Barr-haw!"
Another pause ensues as everyone, even Yetti, runs the interaction through their head a second time. 
Hunter: "Did you... did... What the fuck was that?"
I am laughing uncontrollably at this point, which spurs laughter in them.  We errupt and sit for about three minutes just laughing.  We manage to get a few words out inbetween breaths, but they only serve to feed the raging fire of hilarity.  I have never laughed this hard.  Ever in my life.  I am seriously ROLLING on the ground.  Suddenly Yetti is worried:

Yetti: "Guys, oh shit."
Hunter and Horatio in unison: "What?"
Yetti: "We broke the bubbler."
Hunter: "What?"
Yetti: "Yeah, look, it's broken, there's water everywhere."
I explain and talk him down for like ten seconds.  He grabs his now empty Smirnoff, holding it opposite the hand clenching the bubbler and says, "Then what's this?"
Hunter: "That is your empty bottle, it's fine dude."
Yetti inspects it and goes, "Oh, oh yeah."
At some point he calls Horatio a motherfucker which is really out of character for him.  He is joking of course, but it's a sure sign that he's still riding the high.  He explains his experience as Horatio becoming part of the background and me as a laughing enigma.

We go inside, but within minutes are back outside with a larger group of people, drinking more.  Schwemmer, PK, Horatio, Yetti, and myself.  Also, this kid Alex, who is drunk as shit, stumbles all over the place.  I ask him what he would do if I drop-kicked him into oblivion.  He just laughs at me and falls down on his face, unable to get up.  He stays down for a few minutes while the big boys talk.  Then he gets up and decides to go inside.  A few of the others do too, and then there are three: Horatio, Yetti, and myself.  Again, ready to smoke more.  We sit down in our "circle" and begin.

For greens, Horatio and I play Rock, Paper, Scissors.  It is a hard fought battle, us matching eachother 4 or 5 times in a row, but I eventually win.  I take notice of the bowl.  It is packed to legendary standards.  I ignite the patch of green, inhale for several seconds, and hold.  I pause for a few more seconds and exhale.  I cannot emphasize enough how much I took from this one hit.  A heroic sized cloud rolls from my lips, and I say, "Guys, I might die," jokingly, but the next thing I know Yetti and Horatio have evaporated, interwoven into the scenery.  They have, as Yetti said earlier, become a "part of the background."  They become part of the fence, the ridges.  Small, individual slivers that make up a whole.  I am a very visual person, and sometimes it is hard to describe what I experience.  This experience boarders on impossible-to-describe.  For 30 minutes, head time, I am flying around the back yard, which is about 100 times as large as it actually was. The weird part is I see myself doing these things, as I am a plane.  A plane with a face.  And a propellar for a nose. I am swooping by the fences(made up of Horatio, Yetti, and the shed I see in the background).  I am pretty sure that I fly into the sky, and suicide drop to the ground.  I stretch, endlessly against a black backdrop of time and space.  My thirty minutes of head time take about 10 seconds of real time, and I swoop back into the shell of Hunter Caldwell, my body.  My mind has returned, and now I am standing up, facing Horatio.  I run my hand against my forehead and back beyond my hair.  I am sweating, and Horatio is talking to me.  I am pretty sure he is trying to get me to fuck a vehicle.  He might as well be speaking in a foreign language, I can't understand anything he is saying. 

I asked Horatio what he saw from his perspective and he said this: "Yeah we were all sitting down and then you burst out nervous laughing and stood up and just started roaming around babbling incoherently. And you would grab various objects which I termed 'anchors.'  Like, to keep you in this world"

It's true, I do vaguely remember grabbing things, because I felt like my world was being torn apart, like my reality and actual reality were at odds, fighting for their place.  And my strange reality was slipping back to normalcy, and I was coming down.  I stand, staring at Yetti, not truly recognizing him.  I head to the front of the house, bumping into the fence and a van. Yetti somehow makes it to the front door before I can, slips inside, poking his head out and says, "Dude, I am going to find you a pen and some paper.  Just don't wander off."  I tell him I am probably going to.  I have no idea where a portion of my time went, and I am confused and still buzzed off of the beer and bitch drinks I have consumed.  I head inside, say peace to a few good people and leave.  I give John Lee the power fist before I go, because I don't feel up for much more contact than that.

I am speed walking down the street, terrified out of my mind at what just occurred.  Nothing seems real in this blanketed  world of cold air and blaring gas giants.  It is night time and a pick up truck is slowing down in front of me.  Its lights are aimed at me, but I walk past it. 

"HUUUUUUUNTER CAAAAAAALDWELLLLL!!!!"  A voice emanates through the thick shadow.  I am going to die tonight.

"It's NICK, man, what's up!"

My heart pounding, I wave and continue walking.  Things are still too real and this is totally unexpected.  Nick Volante, the guy whose bubbler it was originally. That I smoked out of, was calling my name from an ominous pick up truck.  He was heading to the party, and I was heading home.  Heading home, afraid that I would never be normal again.  Afraid that life was going to turn on me, and all the taking I have done from the universe would reverse itself, and start taking back.  Afraid that my future was doomed.  Afraid. 

But, by the time I had marched home, I was normal again.