Entropy in Bloom

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  Moments later she found herself on the mossy shore near the base of the cascade, vomiting gouts of water and pulling thin breaths into her crushed chest. She was shattered and bone cold. Her skin wore the deep lacerations of the pale women’s rage. In spite of all this, she was alive. With each breath, pain sunk its teeth through her splintered ribs and reminded her she was still in danger. The cold of night was sinking in. She imagined that if she died here the women would crawl from the water and drag her back in, back down to where they were hidden.

  She stood and wavered, fawn-like, and stumbled towards Tony’s car, away from Benham Falls. Halfway back to the car she stooped and picked up a fist-sized stone. “Please let one of the car windows break easily. Let me remember how to hot-wire the ignition without getting shocked.” Laura felt like if there was ever a night someone was answering her prayers, this was it.

  As she reached the clearing, and Tony’s car, Laura heard a noise, thin and high pitched. She was bleeding from her left ear and turned her right towards the sound. The laughter of a small boy, a sweet echo from her childhood, drifted through the trees.

  Somehow, Laura found the strength to laugh along.

  “Goodnight, Michael.”

  Moments later she was in Tony’s car, listening to the engine rumble, wondering how far away any hospital was, and how much money she could get for a vintage Camaro with a busted window and a scrapped ignition. Most importantly she thought of home, of holding her father.

  She wheeled the car around and slammed the gas pedal. The entrance to Benham Falls became dust, then darkness.

  Dissociative Skills

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

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

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

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

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

  “Parachuting later today?” Curt had asked.

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

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

  Dave gave the short smile again, all business.

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

  “My blood pressure, Dave?”

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

  “Is that bad?”

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

  “GKWE?”

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

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

  A Portrait of the Anesthesiologist as a Young Man.

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

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

  “Am I breathing?” Curt wondered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He knew the little faces understood.

  Every wrong thing done was a show of strength. An exercise in control. Proof that life could be contained and managed, down to the tiniest, strangest detail, if only for a moment.
/>   “You know that. Right, little faces?”

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

  “I’m different,” Curt told himself.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Preemptive suffering makes me stronger,” he’d often thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh, God. Mom and Dad are home.”

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

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

  His mother opened the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But they’d fought.

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

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

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

  Inside, and out.

  Snowfall

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

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

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

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

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

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