Psychostasis

by Ezra Blake

  “I was worried I’d lose you.”

  His eyes are fixed on his mother’s hands. Her nails are a deep navy blue. She must have painted them while he was away.

  “I wish you’d just tell me the truth. I already know. It’s the money,” she says. “And the drawing. I know what my boy looks like.”

  Bitter cold sweeps through him as all his blood pumps gathers to his middle again, preparing him to fight or flee. Nowhere to run, no threat to disarm. He draws his knees up to his chest and closes his eyes.

  “I’ve been in your room, too.”

  Blood thunders through his veins. Lightning bursts through the dark sky. “When?” He asks.

  “Plenty. You’re always at the damn library—but listen, don’t worry. I don’t care what you did.”

  Elliot is slowly shaking his head. His bones are nitroglycerine, waiting for a shock to set them off. He needs justice. He needs rage. He doesn’t need this.

  “When you told me you were a boy, did I kick you out?” She smiles. Her voice is soft. “I love you no matter what, baby. You should know that by now.”

  The phone rings. He scrambles away from her to pick it up, but it’s only Jake. Decline.

  “Don’t worry about that, Eli, come up here.” A tinge of hysteria creeps into her voice. “I don’t care what you did. You think I never did something I regret? I could have called the cops on your brother. I knew what was happening.”

  He wipes a tear on the back of his arm. She’s crying too, grainy black streaks of mascara. A flash, an image, his mother applying makeup for nobody, confined to her bed. He says, “I need to go.”

  “Come here.” She pats her lap.

  “Are you—”

  “Come here. Sit.”

  He climbs onto her lap. He’s too big. He’s crushing her—but he’s four years old and weighs next to nothing; he’s bouncing on her lap while they shop for groceries. He’s sitting in their new stroller shrieking, look Mommy, I have a chair like you!

  She strokes his hair and removes his glasses, clips them over the collar of her shirt. “My sweet boy…” she says.

  Then she kisses him.

  Her lips are soft and damp with gloss. Her tongue slips out between them, and he’s safe, trapped in her embrace.

  In those endless seconds of slick heat, everything makes sense. She knew. She was awake that night when he was thirteen and female and he slipped his fingers inside her. She couldn’t have understood his motivations at the time, but she didn’t stop him. Why would she? Who else does she have?

  Nobody. And neither does he.

  Their future expands from that point: Bonnie and Clyde, black market Baclofen, new names and new faces and new lives in Mexico. He’d be her young caretaker, she his fond charge, and they would survive, immersed each other. When she fell ill, he’d be her doctor. She’d be his pain and he’d be her narcotic. He’d be her mother, her world, her veil when she mourned all the doors they locked behind them—and when she got sicker, he’d spare no expense. He’d find private care. He’d sit at her side and console her while every cell in her body stopped moving. That’s how he would love her. That’s how she’d love him. They’d lie together in her hospital bed, kissing until the world ended.

  He could be forty or fifty by then.

  “Mom,” he says, pulling away. “Mom.”

  “It’s okay. It’s okay. Stay with me, we’ll—”

  Elliot scrambles off the chair and presses himself flat against the wall. A sudden chill spreads through his abdomen and his heart flutters through another pericardial catch. His phone rings.

  “I’m sorry.” She raises her voice to be heard over the default ringtone. “I didn’t mean—we don’t have to do any more of that. You be my son and I’ll be your mom if that’s still how you want it, and we can get a bus somewhere tonight. We’ll get by as long as we stick together.”

  He’s shaking his head. The tears are flowing freely now and he’s shaking his head no, Mom, we can’t do that.

  “Are you worried about my pills? They’re just to keep me comfortable. I don’t need comfort when I’m with you.”

  The phone stops. She wheels toward him. Reaches toward him.

  “I promise it’s okay, baby. I don’t care who you hurt.” Drags her hand from his hip to his knee. “And besides, you’re a better person than your father ever—”

  He shoves her.

  The chair careens into the center of the room. The wheel hits the plastic toy box and she topples backward. Her head slams into the edge of the desk.

  His phone rings.

  Chapter 22

  Jake pulls the trigger. Splat. Black blood explodes from his skull.

  Then time skips, and he’s watching from the popcorn ceiling. Two corpses curl together on the rumpled guest bed, melting into each other.

  He leaks into the overhead light and through the wires, and here’s Elliot staring stricken at a silent phone. Faster. Elliot behind bars. Elliot pinned to the bed in a two-berth cell, his eye blackened, his legs spread, weeping.

  Between the window bars, soaring through Strawberry Mansion. A gaunt woman leans over a fire escape, silhouetted against the foggy sunrise. He follows her to the kitchen. She takes a crusted spoon from the counter, clicks on the gas burner.

  Down the gas line, underground. Through the sewer and up the pipes, film of brown powder floating on the surface of a toilet. Ammonia. Barking. Gavin’s swinging dick.

  Flush.

  Chapter 23

  The body jerks. Jake leaps off the bed and drops the gun, and then Ash is wheezing and clutching his throat, blooming color, thrashing like the drunkest guy at a death metal show.

  “WHAT THE FUCK?” Jake bellows. “Fucking—Ash, what the hell! What the hell? Jesus shitting fuck!”

  Ash flails, a puppet with its strings cut. Beautiful wet gurgles spill from his throat.

  “What the—you were dead! Are you dead? Holy shit, Ash, you were fucking dead. How are you alive?”

  Ash spasms and clutches his neck.

  Jake pinches his nose, presses his mouth to Ash’s gasping mouth, and exhales into his lungs. Laughter. The only thought in his mind is dead, he should be dead, but he’s making human sounds when his lungs deflate, wet syllables bubbling between his teeth, and he is not dead.

  “Hel…J…Jake…”

  He rips the sheets off Ash’s nude body, finds the divot of his sternum, and punches life into him. Every compression sprays them with some sort of clear fluid. “Breathe, motherfucker!”

  But each time he pulls away, the breaths stop. His eyes roll back in his head and he opens and closes his blue mouth.

  Bottom floor! Kitchen drawer!

  “Hang on!” Jake gives him another breath and sprints down the stairs—and then he’s falling, crash, waterfall of broken glass. Back on his bloody feet, into the kitchen, gasping, “What do I need?”

  No answer. Murmuring, laughter.

  “God damn it, just tell me!”

  Laughter. Shuffling. He presses his nostril to the cutting board and before he can sniff they say, ing-clay ilm-fay.

  “What the fuck does that—”

  Ing-clay ilm-fay! Astic-play app-wray!

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Rip drawers off their tracks. Here, half a roll of plastic wrap. The bottom two steps are cracked, the third shattered. How did this happen? How can he get back to Ash? He gulps down air and braces himself against a sudden wave of vertigo. “Help,” he groans. “No games, please, I just want—”

  Black sulfurous smoke erupts from the wall. Jake stumbles back, slips on broken glass, cracks his tailbone on the floor. Stands up. The smoke clears, and there’s a jagged arrow of soot pointing from the couch to the fourth step.

  He scrambles up the armrest, shoves the roll of cling wrap in his mouth and grabs the banister, pulls—more more more just a little harder—and then he’s up, he’s up the stairs, he’s slamming into Ash’s room and breathing into his blue mouth.

&nb
sp; “Stay with me.” Exhale. “Almost there.” Exhale.

  He lifts Ash’s hips onto his lap and feeds the roll around his lower back, but Ash’s guts don’t fit inside him anymore. They’re too big. They’re spasming and slapping around like octopus tentacles and they don’t fucking fit.

  Snip snip! Make them fit!

  He grunts and bares his teeth. “Just hang on. Hang on.” Even as he speaks, Jake is cramming intestines under his liver, into his rib cage. It’s impossible to do this wrong because it isn’t happening. It can’t be happening.

  He tugs the skin flaps over the mess of viscera. He holds them in place with one hand and wraps everything in layers and layers of cling film. Ash looks like a disaster at a meat-packing plant, but his guts are mostly inside his body and that’s really the best they can do, so he wraps and wraps until the seal is tight enough for him to draw breath on his own.

  Ash does, a shuddering death rattle. He vomits yellowish fluid all over Jake’s shirt.

  “YES!” He punches the air. “Yes, keep doing that!”

  Oxygen collects in his lungs. His thrashing stills. His breaths are staccato at first, but they settle into a pained rhythm as Jake wraps him in towels and mummifies them in duct tape.

  The chattering voices fall silent. Ash breathes.

  Jake catches sight of the wardrobe mirror. His face is a mess; his deep-set eyes have turned cherry red. “Holy shit,” he whispers, over and over and over.

  And aside from the subtle rise and fall of his chest, Ash isn’t moving.

  “…Tell me you can hear me,” he says. “Please. Tell me you’re alive.”

  Nothing.

  “Ash. It’s me. It’s Jake. Ash—” his voice cracks “—please.”

  Ash’s gaze settles on the dripping pool of ink on the ceiling above.

  “Can you hear me?” He shifts up the bed, his entire body trembling, and puts his face in Ash’s line of vision. “Say something. Please.”

  Ash opens his mouth and whispers, “Fuck.”

  Elliot’s mother doesn’t drink, but she’s kept a bottle of Merlot on top of the fridge for the past fifteen years or so. A gift from someone who didn’t stay in contact. He clambers onto the counter and spends fifteen minutes prying the cork loose with a steak knife. It’s fermented into a bitter mess. He lies in her bed until he’s good and drunk, and then he pilfers her debit card and withdraws as much cash as the ATM down the street will allow. Two hundred bucks.

  “I’ve been thinking about God,” he tells her, stringing untouched costume jewelry around her throat. “Sometimes I wish you’d raised me with religion. I don’t know if I would have bought into it, but I sort of wish I’d had that option.”

  His distorted reflection stares back at him from a plastic emerald. She used to take them to estate sales, where he and Travis would liberate frayed teddy bears, books, cake tins, and the like from their deceased owners. His mother thought this junk might be real, and he finds perverse comfort in passing that mistake to another generation of indiscriminate bargain hunters.

  “You look beautiful,” he says.

  She doesn’t. She looks cold and grey, but he isn’t speaking to his mother here, in his bed. He’s speaking to her in the park, feeding pigeons and talking to strangers. She took photographs of those afternoons, but she was never in them. They’re all Travis and Elizabeth Alvarez. Two people he doesn’t know.

  “Mom, I need…” He snaps closed the lid of her jewelry box. “I need to check my phone. Be right back.”

  It waits on the dining room table, collecting unread texts. One from Latzke, asking if he’s on schedule for midnight. The rest are from Jake: an awkward apology. Some good news.

  He reads and rereads the messages, waiting for the letters to scramble themselves into a threat, an insult, or something that makes sense. He even restarts his phone. His dark, drooping reflection gives way to the same letters in the same order.

  Elliot laughs. It starts as a chuckle but sinks down into his belly. He laughs while he powders and dilutes the rest of his pills and fills himself with the imperfect solution. He laughs all the way to the bed and presses a kiss to his mother’s dead lips.

  The dugout is empty. For the first time ever, Elliot is a team of one.

  He leaves his neighborhood for the last time, past the payday loan shops, the artisan pizza joint, the neon orange signs shouting Cash 4 Cribz! He walks all the way to East Falls with his backpack stuffed full and with two hundred bucks in his back pocket. If he runs into muggers, he plans to provoke them.

  Nobody is outside in the rain. That leaves plenty of time to figure out what he’s going to say, but he can’t think. He can only watch as his thoughts crumble into pseudo-religious garbage:

  The storm rolled in to delay your flight. The storm knows.

  It’s just weather. It’s just weather. It’s just weather.

  Look, couple with the dog. They’re watching you. They know. You can outsmart them.

  Delusions of reference. Delusions of grandeur. He balls his fists and walks faster.

  You’re crazy on purpose. You need to think like them. You have to convince them.

  God, he’s losing his fucking mind.

  Jake refuses to leave his side. That means no stairs, no toilet, no shower. It doesn’t matter that they look like a crime in progress; it doesn’t matter that they’re both victims of a horrifying, ineffable miracle. They’re here.

  “It hurts,” Ash whispers. “I can feel things moving.” He gestures stiffly to his abdomen.

  Without a word, Jake picks a scrap of crumpled foil from the trash can and flattens it against his jeans. His thumbnail leaves irreversible creases in the mirrored surface.

  “What, you kept it?”

  “I got more,” Jake says. He slips the baggie from his pocket and adds, “Make a tube with your hands.”

  “Elliot brought a needle.”

  Jake swallows the lump in his throat. “Did you OD or did he…what happened?”

  “I don’t remember,” he says.

  And it isn’t worth another crisis, so Jake fetches the dirty needle and they cook two silent shots. He’d gladly acquire every blood infection in the book in exchange for this one moment: relief softening Ash’s face, his open mouth pressed against Jake’s collar bone. He swabs his own arm and massages the veins to hardness.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Jake says, and slips the needle into the crook of his own elbow. The syringe clatters to the ground. This must be how babies feel in the womb, before they’re squeezed out and learn that their old home is closed indefinitely.

  Ash presses closer. He’s still untouchable, but grace is seeping back into his movements. Jake thinks about the pulsing mess beneath that cling film.

  Something wet touches his mouth. His eyes flicker open. Ash’s are closed; his long black eyelashes brush his cheeks—it’s too overwhelming to watch and feel and smell at the same time, so he blots out his senses and focuses on the acidic heat of Ash’s tongue on the backs of his teeth.

  When he pulls away, Jake says, “I’m breaking the lease.”

  Ash sighs into the crook of his shoulder.

  “My deposit is gone anyway. I’ll sell everything. I think I have some stock or bonds or something, I’ll liquidate that and pawn my speakers and consoles and we’ll be out by next week.” His fingers slip into Ash’s fine hair. Its blunt edges have twirled out into a shaggy, uneven mess. “We’ll change our names. Get fake IDs.”

  “Mmhm.”

  “I’ll keep you safe, and we can tour the country with you as a miracle, make money—”

  He presses a finger to Jake’s lips.

  “This is a sign, Ash. The Universe doesn’t want you dead—”

  “Shh.”

  Jake falls silent. They breathe.

  A few minutes later, his soft voice brushes Jake’s hairline:

  Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

  That saved a wretch like me

  I onc
e was lost but now am found

  Was blind, but now, I see.

  Part III

  Discernment and the State Beneath

  “Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them.”

  ~ Aleister Crowley

  Chapter 24

  Household items:

  water bottles

  rope (cotton or jute)

  2x4 lumber, 6-8ft x2

  measuring tape

  circular saw

  sandpaper

  chisel

  Phillips head structural screws (No. 9, 2.5 in, hardened steel)

  wood glue

  handscrew clamp

  pencils

  dark wood stain

  brushes

  needle and thread

  duct tape

  plastic bags

  assorted rags

  needles, multiple sizes

  dental pliers

  push pins

  heat lamps

  handcuffs

  radio antenna, bamboo cane, or similar

  morphine sulfate 10mg/ml injectable (or equivalent)

  assorted gear, to taste

  Specialty items:

  electric spatula

  hemostats

  autoclave

  jennings gag

  capsaicin concentrate

  eyecups

  needle injector

  retractor

  trocar

  needles and suture (catgut preferred)

  Thank you again for accommodating our requests. Please don’t trouble yourself if you don’t have everything on hand. We’re happy to improvise if the need arises.

  Chapter 25

  He opens his sticky eyes and takes his first breath ever.

  Clean, quiet air fills his weightless body, and for a moment he can’t remember who he is or where he came from. Ash is asleep on his arm. He’s warm, breathing evenly. He looks down at his hands and they’re broad with bungee cord tendons. Looks up at the black TV screen, and he’s Jacob Caruso, obviously. Jake blinks at his reflection.