Ismail bends over and pinches my nose shut, forcing my mouth open, and he sprays something into my throat. It comes on like Chloraseptic, cherry flavored, but I can taste something else in there. A psychedelic.
The lid closes over me. I would try to fight my way out, but I know better. I’m much better off riding out a psychedelic trip than trying to escape.
Time is perception more than space. Sure, things seem big when they’re not; you remember your childhood home as a gargantuan building and when you see it as an adult, it’s a two-bedroom shack. There’s also body dysmorphia, where anorexics think they’re fat and enormous bodybuilders think they’re scrawny. But what I’m talking about is how you perceive time passing.
You think you know how long it’s been between events, but you measure them by a number of other events happening. You don’t actually feel the time pass. You feel the temperature of the day change. A movie seems short or long by how well the events are written. The ice in your glass melts. But take away the outside stimulus, all light and touch and taste and sound and smell, and your sense of time disappears. The way you think of time is only a sensory collage.
Thus the deprivation tank. Take the senses away, and you’re left with a blind grasp at time.
Chuck? The voice from the intercom has returned. Relax. The LIZA procedure will begin soon. You likely won’t notice a thing. It will feel like a long dream. Your responses to the stimulus will be recorded for use for playback with our androids later. All of us at the LIZA project are extremely grateful for your volunteering. We would also like to let you know that you have tested positive for herpes. Upon completion of the exercise, we also recommend you have treatment for your liver and pancreas. Thank you.
I’m floating above the earth, but I don’t dare turn around. If I turn around, I may fall back to the planet, burn up in the atmosphere. Space is warmer than I thought it would be; Elton John said it was cold as hell, but he’s wrong. It’s like a heated swimming pool at midnight. And there’s not supposed to be any oxygen, but it’s no problem breathing. Shouldn’t my face and eyeballs swell until they pop out like in Total Recall? Space is kind, forgiving, and bigger than anything you’ve ever thought of.
The moon is the size of a nickel and getting bigger. It’s chrome like the trim on a ’59 Cadillac. It’s brighter out in space than from the earth. Looks like a drop of mercury against the indescribable blackness of nothing.
I can see cracks and bumps in its surface, but it’s not the moon at all. It’s a whale, a perfect white whale reflecting silver light back to me. A sliver of darkness forms as its mouth opens. It’s trying to speak to me.
Time is a motherfucker, Chuck.
Man once thought his future was predetermined by God, what was called predestination. Entire sects of Christianity adhered to this idea. Other religions have destiny and fate, the inevitable futures of each individual. The entire concept of free will was debated.
As man evolved, his concept of the future evolved as well. We have a choice. We can do what we want. We can alter our future with any number of choices, some small, some gargantuan in consequence.
But what of his past? Can’t our past be as undetermined as our future? The idea of a solitary past is archaic as Calvinistic predestination ideas.
Your past is like a kite’s tail, whipping violently behind your present. You only remember it one way, but your memory is constantly changing, moving with it across different events and times.
Your past is like a dog’s tail, and you’re fucking with the dog. You’re moving the dog, and the tail is moving with it, into pasts you’ve never had and away from the past you want.
Your past is like a snake’s tail, and you’re shoving its tail into its mouth. You’re making an ouroboros out of your existence.
Your existence is a film, and you’re splicing the end to the beginning, making a loop that will never end, an infinite, futile movie.
You’re fucking up, Chuck. You have to make this right before you can’t undo it. You need to get back to the beginning of your troubles, go back and straighten out your timeline the best you can, and quit fucking with it.
BACK TO THE BUS
I’M WALKING UP to the party-bus rental place. I have to get back to that bus. The party bus. With Eirean and his techtard friends. Then I have to smoke out on it. That’s the plan.
Something’s wrong. Things don’t look quite right. I’m still high from something. I can’t pin it down, though. I’m really fucked up. I would wait for later, but I feel like I’m being pulled this way. How did I get here? Does it matter?
The receptionist hangs up when she sees me. Then she yells into the intercom.
Ron, we have a crazy homeless guy in here.
I look around, don’t see anyone. She’s talking about me.
No, I’m not homeless. Well, technically I am, but not in the spirit of the term.
She points mace at me. The guy that must be Ron runs in the room. Ron is a big guy, early fifties, but looks like he’s seen some bad days. Like a guy that got huge in prison but has been out for a long time. His hair is white and gray, like Spider-Man’s boss. He puts his open palms to me.
Take it easy, guy. Don’t do anything dumb.
I want to rent a party bus.
Sure you do. Let’s just go outside and talk about it.
Seriously, I have money.
I reach down for my wallet. I realize I’m not wearing a shirt. And I’m dirty, covered in something, I don’t know what. The woman yells. Ron freaks out. Woman’s on phone again. She’s crying and screaming.
Hey hey hey!
Oh, I’m just reaching for my wallet . . .
I pat where the wallet should be. The twenty-five is there instead. Fuck.
Stay cool, bro!
I’m cool. We’re all cool. I just need to rent a party bus.
I’m waving the Raven around. I didn’t mean to pull it out.
Siren. Fuck.
There’s some kind of disconnect here, Ron. I know I look bad, but I really need to rent a bus.
Two cops run in. They keep a distance from me, but their Tasers are out. Taser prongs fly at me in slow motion. I hear the other cop talking in sixteen RPM.
We have another one. Covered in fecal matter.
The prongs hit me, bites like a snake. Flash of light. Toes-to-hair pain. Zero G. The floor is the sky, and I’m flying.
Ambulance. Looking at me, two guys, tattoos on their necks, shaved heads. Throat tight. Can’t inhale.
Fuck, is he dead, bro?
Not sure. He’s on a lot of shit.
He’s got a lot of shit on him.
Ha. Yes. Fucking weird.
This is my first shit zombie. Have you seen one of these yet?
Yeah, got one on Sixth Street last week.
You hear we’re getting hoses so we can just wash ’em on the spot?
Too little, too late. If the management fucks drove the wagons, they’d fucking have hoses already.
You got that Giants tickets hookup still?
Nah, I broke up with Amanda, and broke up with the hookup in the process.
Fuck. You couldn’t wait till the season was over to dump her?
Ha, no. Brutal. Would be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind though. Oh shit.
What?
Check that. Seizure. Don’t give him the normal shit though. It’s been giving them heart attacks and killing them. Give him a shot of whiteout.
What’s in this shit?
No idea. Management says to give ’em this stuff.
In a vein?
No. Do you ever pay attention in meetings? Like an EpiPen. Jam it in his heart. He’s more or less OD’ing off whatever he took. Do it. NOW.
Fuck, okay, relax.
He brings what looks like a miniflashlight out, slings it over his head, and jams it into my chest. It’s like a pot of boiling water in the face. My stomach swells; my ass fires like a cannon.
Whoa!
Oh god
. Oh god.
What the fuck.
Open the back door.
I’m going to fucking hurl. Get an oxygen mask.
He’s breathing okay.
For us, shit head, god.
HOSPITAL
WHITE. BRIGHT. FLUORESCENT lights overhead. Like school. Ceiling tiles with tiny holes in a grid pattern.
Pain. All over. Pain. Headache that runs down my spine. Skin numb but pain on inside.
Can’t move. Head moves. Arms don’t. Legs don’t.
Mouth filled with chalk and cigarette ash.
Fuck. I’m in the hospital. I’m strapped down.
Oh yes. Taser.
Is he awake?
I’m not sure. His eyes are open. Not responding completely. Did his results come back?
Yes. Cocaine, and a lot of other substances we can’t identify. Experimental street garbage.
We really need to figure out what these guys are taking.
Fading. Numbness. Dry mouth. Ammonia. Sleep.
Wake. Aching. Constricted.
A blurry man comes into view.
Are you awake? Yes, but no. Still out of it, huh? Tasered, sedated, and coming down off whatever’s in your system. Horrible combination. Look on the bright side: this is probably the worst you’ll ever feel without being dead. Every day from now on, you’ll feel better. Can’t talk though? I’ll come back later.
He leaves. Who was that? Nurse? Doctor? Cop?
Sinking. Lying in a bed of white mud. Sleep.
Moving. Rolling. Bed rolling.
Gut hurts. Feels like Tyson punched me twice. Fucking Taser.
Tongue thick. Open mouth. Air tastes like smoke. Close mouth. Tongue raw, swollen, sore. Teeth sharp.
Must ask where I’m going. Nothing comes out.
Easy there, son, you’ll be okay.
Pinprick. Fire. Water. Ice cream. Sleep.
I’m in a cell of some kind. It’s a simple room with a toilet and sink. Doesn’t look like jail though. Something different.
I’m not strapped down anymore. Stiff. Hurts to move, compelled to not stay still.
Stand. Stumble. Catch myself against the wall. Feel tall.
Scream. Throat dry.
Get a drink from the sink. Cup the water to my hand. Good as drugs when you’re this thirsty.
Hey, how you doin?
It’s a raggedy voice. Harsh, gargling.
Who are you?
Janitor. We were all worried about you.
I see him, looking through the food slot. Yellow eyes with dark brown orbs in the center. Black guy.
Where am I?
SF General. Psych unit. Suicide watch.
I didn’t try to kill myself.
I know. We all know. You was 5150 for sure. Smeared in shit and shirtless. 5150 for sure. Talking crazy that you wanted a party bus. 5150 for sure. Had a water gun on you filled with pee. 5150 for sure.
He laughs like I said something funny. Amuses himself, I guess. Water gun? What the fuck?
Stomach rumbles. Knife in the guts.
Detox is a bitch. The pain I can handle. It’s the feeling of every bad piece of news you’ve ever heard coming to you at once. It’s a sadness you soak in. It’s lead-lined pajamas. It’s a dull, heavy nothing matters. The worst is knowing it all goes away with the push of one button. More drugs, and this stops.
Okay, Death, come for me. I’m ready. From all the bullshit times I cheated you, I’m ready now. I won’t fight. Just get me out of this mess and turn me off forever.
I wait. Twenty minutes. An hour? I can’t tell the passage of time. Fuck. Bored. I’m here for days, or just a little while. I don’t know anymore.
I wish it all would stop. This whole thing. The hustle of all this. It’s like one of those Chinese finger trap things. The more I struggle to get out, the more I get stuck. I need to make not even the big score, just a good one and split. I have to get out of here. Start over. Go somewhere where no one knows me, some piece-of-shit small town where you can get by working at the gas station or the video store or whatever, some small town where they still have video stores, I guess.
I used to want to be something, something bigger than regular life. I thought I’d be a famous writer or a screenwriter or something. Not someone huge, you know, just cool. Like a B-list guy. I didn’t even dream big. I just dreamed above average. Not a bestselling author but one with a dedicated following. Someone with name recognition.
I would travel to different cities and give readings, and it wouldn’t be packed but it would be full. In one of those places, a woman would be there who really understood me through the Rorschach tests that my books were. She’d really be able to see deep into me. Me. The real me.
Fuck. I was at least supposed to be good at something. I’m not. I’m good at taking care of MiniWhales, and there’s no job for that anymore.
I was at least supposed to be cool. I think I was for a little while. I was a bit of a guy. A scenester. God help me, I was a fucking hipster, although I never would’ve admitted that at the time.
I was cool between the ages of about twenty-two and twenty-eight, and then it all slid into the shitslide of middle age, early. I got a job at a cool bar at twenty-two and suddenly I was cool. I got in free to cool shows. I met cool girls. I got to stay after hours at other cool bars. I lived in a cool party flat with cool roommates. Cool places with cool people doing cool things and fucking each other later in cool apartments. That’s all being cool is—surrounding yourself with other people and having everyone agree that everything you’re doing is fucking cool.
Six years of that shit. Being cool. That bar went out of business, and when I tried to get more work, everything was DJs and shit. No more rock clubs. No more being cool.
Young people didn’t want bands anymore; they wanted a jackass with a box of fucking records. Not even good music. I went to an ’80s night, thinking it would be the good tracks of punk and new wave and what used to be called college rock and then became alternative rock in the next decade.
Washed up at twenty-eight. Done. I kept trying, though. One bullshit gig after another, and every year I got further away from cool. My thirties? Forget it. I hated what was cool. I stopped going to places other people liked. If it got too popular, fuck it.
My cool friends bailed out. They got married, had ironic weddings, and had kids and named them Damien or Exene, or they went with vintage names like Ezekiel and Malachi. Now every grade school is full of Zacks and no one is named John or Dave anymore and every PTA meeting is full of parents with full sleeve tattoos and retro haircuts. Funny, all those fuckers who played poor until it came time to buy a house, and then they had money from somewhere, they had a kid and bought a Subaru Outback, they bought a house in Bernal or Glen Park and talked about equity and interest rates like they used to talk about record labels.
Some died and some became homeless; others disappeared into the chaos, filling the state prisons and haunting the basements of their relatives’ houses. They’re the junkies on Capp Street and the dead-eyed bums in the Civic Center. They’re the zombies on Jones Street and the creeping undead of San Pablo Avenue. They’re annoyances and smells and things in the way of rich people walking down the sidewalk. They made poor neighborhoods interesting, so the wealthy moved in, and now they’re the scourge of the same streets. They’re John and Jane Does that are found in ditches and pulled out of lakes. They’re the donated cadavers for medical students, cremated by the state, and the only club they’ll ever be in is the potter’s field.
They’re gone now, they’re all dead to me as far as I’m concerned, and I’m dead to them. Maybe I’m a picture in a scrapbook no one looks at anymore, or a part of a group-therapy story someone tells and they can’t remember my name. I’m a guy they got a tattoo with, the guy who let them into the show when it was sold out, that one roommate that only lived here a month, what was his name?
For a while, it seemed like everyone knew me and I knew everyone who mattered. Now I kn
ow a couple of people here and there, enough to get by, but no one really close to me. I’m stuck in here and no one is going to miss me—someday someone might ask, Whatever happened to that guy? and they’ll look it up on the computer or phone app or whatever people are using to keep up with those they don’t care about, and they won’t find out anything.
Now here I am in the psych ward at SF General on suicide watch or some shit. Fuck this. Really. How did I get from there to here? I’m technically homeless now. I’m a homeless drug addict who was covered in shit and is now in the Nutty Buddy.
I’m in the day room watching Seinfeld. It’s the one where George eats an éclair out of the trash. The walls are the color of a nicotine stain. It smells like Mountain Dew and Pine-Sol in here. Sweet, artificial, over the faint odor of microwave-heated marinara sauce.
They’re calling a name over and over on the intercom. I can’t hear the show. Dallas Luxury, a transgender nightclub singer, taps me on the shoulder.
Sweetie, she says, they’re calling your name.
She has a bruise running from the middle of her forearm all the way past the elbow. She fought the cops, and the cops won. She gotten 86’d from a bar and had refused to leave. The cops were called, and she put up a fight. She got slammed to the sidewalk and the full MMA treatment from some meathead cops. She’s a pain in the ass, but it’s totally unnecessary to hurt someone like that.
I make my way to the front desk.
I pass Larry, who smells like he’s been hotboxing cigarettes, although he never has any and we wouldn’t be allowed to smoke them even if we were allowed to have them. He has a stash somewhere and a smoke spot. I have to find out where it is.
There’s a guy at the front desk waiting for me. He’s in a suit and is either a detective or works for the AVN Awards. Has a mustache like a drive-through car wash.
He’s saying something, but I can’t really understand what it is. Catching one out of every four or five words. Too fast or too loud or something. Fuck, it must be the meds.
He’s going to get me out of here. Like now. He signs a paper and asks me something. He repeats it. I finally get it.
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