Psychostasis

by Ezra Blake

  “Chill the fuck out. Calm down,” he grunts. “Calm. Down.”

  He kicks for a moment more and then sags in Jake’s grip. They stay like that, Jake holding Elliot and Elliot limp and heavy, doubled over his arms. Crying.

  “Ah, shit,” Jake mutters, and lowers him into the seat. “Elliot, man, c’mon.”

  Elliot wails into his hands. Jake grimaces and looks everywhere but at him. Twelve seats in the cabin. Four tables, eight table legs, twenty-four armrests.

  “I don’t know what’s gonna happen,” Elliot sobs. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Hey, we’ll figure it out. Don’t cry.”

  “Normally I can plan, I can fix it, but this—I keep playing it over and over in my head and I can’t—” He gags. For a second Jake’s sure he’s about to barf, but he gets a grip; he sniffles and grabs a fistful of Jake’s hoodie. Before Jake can stop him, he blows a fat wad of snot into the sleeve. Jake glances to Ash. He hasn’t stirred.

  “I had to leave,” Elliot says. “I had to—they have my mugshot and my mom is—they were gonna—I had to get out and I spent my whole life caring for her, Jake, and now she’s dead.” He presses his bloody thumb to his mouth. “I didn’t wanna go alone.”

  The engines hum and the cabin sings with electricity. The dim, recessed lighting hides imperfections and makes the three of them look like action figures; like product photography; like the color-graded renders on the title screens of video games.

  “Hey,” Jake says. “I get it. For real.”

  Elliot wipes his eyes on the part of the hoodie he’s already saturated with snot.

  “When’s the last time you got a good night’s sleep?”

  He sniffles. “I don’t know. Couple weeks.”

  “I brought some DPH. It’ll knock you out.”

  He curls a little tighter, which is as close to a yes as he’ll get. Jake fishes the bottle of antihistamines from his bag and deposits two in Elliot’s palm. He sits back and scans the matte plastic above and wonders, not for the first time, if those oxygen masks really get you high.

  God doesn’t grant him that blissful moment of not-knowing. He wakes to a fog of pain and frigid sweat, and then he’s Ashton Webster, and that’s even worse. Ash shifts in his seat, searching out a comfortable position which he knows he won’t find. He can’t kill time and he can’t kill himself, so all that’s left to do is wait in this moment, and the next moment, and the next, each moment stretched into oblivion by their shifting longitude.

  “Jake,” he hisses. “Jake.”

  “I don’t have any,” Jake mumbles.

  “Give me what you do have.”

  He sighs, stretches, unzips their duffel. Ash accepts his pills without asking what they are. If he doesn’t know, maybe they can become Vicodin, Oxycodone, Morphine. Since meeting Jake, he’s learned a lot about all the drugs he’ll never get to try.

  Sleep grips him, but he’s slick with perspiration, so it can’t hang on for more than a few seconds at a time. It’s Benadryl, Jake says. It’ll make him tired. It makes the walls expand and the stagnant air circulate, but it can’t let him out.

  When the pills wear off a few hours later, he returns to a consciousness more battered than he left it. Every follicle on his body is hypersensitive. Every stimulus is the most important. He’s lost the ability to prioritize.

  Jake is awake, reading an in-flight magazine, oblivious to the festering agony in Ash’s stomach, bones, joints, skin.

  How dare he.

  How dare he browse through smart watches and talking refrigerators and motion-activated garden gnomes while Ash suffers. He wants to get Jake hooked, cut him off, and force him through this. Instead he elbows Jake in the ribs and hisses, “It’s wearing off.”

  Jake folds his lanky frame in half, roots through his bag, and emerges with over-the-counter painkillers. In the face of fractures and displaced organs, they’re an insult. Ash takes them anyway. “It’s really bad,” he says. “I think he broke my finger. Can’t we just—”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “But what if I can’t—”

  “You’re saving that shit for later.”

  “But what if I can’t wait until later?”

  “You will.”

  His jaw twinges, and only then does he realize he’s biting the insides of his cheeks hard enough to draw blood. Metal bites into his diaphragm every time his rib cage expands. Breathing hurts. Thinking hurts. Jake rests an earnest hand on his thigh, and that hurts, too.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” he says, easing out of his seat.

  Jake grabs his arm. “No.”

  “Relax.” Though his insides are flooding bile, he forces his voice into a steady drip. He tries to twist his arm from Jake’s palm; his grip and his gaze hold steady. “It’s fine. Coffee’s going through me, is all. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Jake stands. “I’ll go with you.”

  “You’re not watching me pee.”

  “There’s nothing to watch.”

  “I just—” he sighs. “I just want to be alone for a second.”

  Jake’s grip finally softens. Ash slides his hand away and stumbles toward the rear of the plane, slipping a few wooden stirrers from the coffee station into his sleeve. The air pressure makes his stomach heave and froth. He checks three times that the door is locked before releasing a half-pint of gritty black sludge into the toilet, closing the lid, and sitting. The air is a cheese grater on his bare skin. He unwinds the plastic wrap. The only remnant of his mutilation is a thin pink line from his belly button to the bottom of his breastbone. This happened…what, six hours ago?

  He snaps the stirrer in half, leaving a jagged edge. His heart thrashes in his chest. This is his only option—spread the healing skin taut, splintered stirrer poised. On the count of three.

  One…two…

  No, he can’t. Breathe deeper. Pray.

  I am the vine; you are the branches.

  No. He can’t do it.

  If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.

  God isn’t listening. God can’t help.

  Apart from me you can do nothing.

  “Return to me and I will return to you,” he whispers. “Return to me and I will return to you.” He squeezes his eyes shut and holds the stirrer against his sealed wound. “Return to me and I will return to —hnngh!”

  A punch in the gut, but it’s barely inside. He didn’t break muscle. No way is he strong enough.

  “Return…” he gasps. “To me…”

  He thought it was bad with a real knife and a shot of heroin. If that was sunburn, this is an atom bomb, and he didn’t even get halfway there. He can’t do it. He needs more power, more weight behind the punch.

  More weight. There it is.

  “Thank you,” he chokes, and presses himself against wall. He kicks off and throws every ounce of himself into the sink.

  There’s a crash. Cracking plastic. Impact, tingle, unimaginable heat. He hit the cabinet stirrer first. It juts out below his rib cage, bouncing with his rapid heartbeat. Don’t think. Move. Do it. He grabs it with both hands and yanks it downward, sloppily bisecting his abdomen. No blood. A bit of clear fluid trickles toward his waistband.

  As soon as the hole is big enough to accommodate two fingers, he shoves two inside and roots around in his own guts. Return to me and I will return to you. There’s the sharp edge of the barrel. It’s shifted in transit, so he pushes it down and away from major organs. The pressure on his lungs eases, but he still can’t breathe. Frantic tingles of oxygen depletion bloom across his face. He’s starting to get used to that.

  Bang! Bang!

  He bumped the trigger. He shot himself—but no, it’s Jake, smacking the flimsy plastic door.

  “One sec,” he rasps with his last breath.

  “Open the door!”

  The baggie is stuffed inside the gun. By the time he has it pinched between two fingers, he’s the color of a chili pepper, sweatin
g like he just ate a bushel of them. The familiar, cloying heat of his viscera permeates the walls and hangs low in the air.

  “Open the fucking door, Ash!”

  Last time, God gave him a wave of blankness before the hurt. Now it’s straight through the scalding heat and into anguish, deep and empty as the Mariana Trench. His stomach heaves. Instead of pushing bile up his throat, it bulges something slimy out of him. His vision is blurring. The baggie slips from his fingers and onto the vinyl floor.

  Bang! Bang!

  “I’ll kick this door down, I swear to god!”

  He extends one slick, trembling hand toward the lock. His lungs suck and his guts leak and slide around his lap. Just a little closer. Push. Push.

  Click.

  Jake tumbles into the stall. He’s frozen for a second, staring at Ash’s intestines. It’s not the sort of thing you get used to. Then he snatches the cling film from the counter and fumbles it out into a single sheet, saying, “I’ve seen people do some fucked up shit for drugs, but goddamn. You got your bag?”

  Ash can only gurgle and kick it across the floor. Jake stoops down to grab it.

  “Good. Let’s put a pinch in there. It’ll hit your bloodstream fast.”

  Jake doesn’t have to tell him twice. His shaking fingers upend an unknown quantity of heroin into his abdominal cavity, and everything melts away.

  He’s not dead. Jake knows because he checked. Ash’s heart is beating every second or so. Air puffs out of his nostrils as he lies in his horizontal recliner, wrapped in blankets, illuminated by a single reading light. He’s not dead. He’s sleeping, just like Elliot, and Jake is not alone in this tube of pressurized air hurtling through the sky.

  He has company.

  They’re in the air vents, under the seats, everywhere the light doesn’t touch. Though he can’t see or hear them, their presence warps the air into sharp fractal patterns.

  Cut the engines, he thinks. Kill the power, motherfuckers. I dare you.

  The plane flies on.

  Jake doodles severed cocks on a napkin. He finds white space in his in-flight magazine and draws pictures of Ash. He discovers that he can tear advertisements out of the catalogue and collage them together using his spit, so he cannibalizes every article and arranges mismatched letters over a happy white couple. It now reads: Unwanted? Unsettled? Ask your doctor if hard drugs are right for you.

  It’s mid-afternoon when they touch down. He hasn’t slept and the sun is fucking his brain’s asshole, but Ash is awake and alive, so Jake’s fine. Everything’s fine. There’s nowhere for shadows to hide on the blinding tarmac, and as they deplane, the cloud of black dread lifts briefly from his shoulders.

  This is good. There’s nothing left for him in Philadelphia.

  They stand on the runway, shielding their faces. Ash sits. The sky imparts its awful focus like a boy with a magnifying glass, and for a few blurry seconds, he can’t tell if he’s the sadistic kid or the flaming ants.

  “Warten Sie hier!”

  It’s their pilot, wide and solid with tired eyes and his jacket slung over his arm.

  “English?” Jake shouts.

  The man shoulder-checks him on his way toward the tiny cinderblock building—the airport, he assumes. They follow. “Sprichst du Englisch?" Elliot asks.

  “Nein. Warten Sie auf Ihren Fahrer.”

  “What’d he say?”

  Elliot shrugs.

  The pilot punches some numbers into a keypad by the door. Jake’s on his tail. He takes one step inside and the guy shouts, “Warten Sie hier, dies ist Privateigentum! Niemand sollte dich sehen,” and shoves him out the door. It slams in his face.

  Jake turns around, blinking away the watery sunlight. He rattles the knob.

  “Shit,” he says. “What now?”

  “Latzke’ll call me. Probably stuck in traffic.”

  “Did he say that?”

  Elliot squints at his phone.

  “Hey, uh, I just thought of something,” Jake says. “Don’t we need passports?”

  “He said he’d take care of everything.”

  He glances once more to the plane, the sky, the deserted runway. Private airport or not, somebody should be pushing baggage carts or driving a goddamn shuttle, but they’re alone out here. Like stepping into an empty parallel dimension.

  Who’s to say you didn’t?

  “I’m gonna smoke,” he says, shoving his hand deep into the duffel bag. He pulls on his jacket and walks thirty feet around the corner, leans against the wall. That’s part of the ritual, finding a wall. He breathes tar like oxygen and stares at the horizon.

  Ash and Elliot shift around one another, not speaking. Ten minutes later, Ash joins him on the wall and tucks his head between his knees. Jake smokes two more cigarettes. Elliot sits, too. He snatches the lit cigarette from Jake’s hand and takes a long draw. Jake shrugs one shoulder and lights another.

  The temperature drops. They aren’t dressed for this. Clouds roll over the sun, throwing shadows over Ash’s placid, sleeping face. He dozes with his skull on the concrete wall, hands sometimes twitching at his sides like the paws of a puppy chasing invisible rabbits. Jake smokes and shivers and stares at him until he’s nauseous. He runs out of cigarettes.

  “You should call again.”

  Elliot’s nostrils twitch. “Seventh time’s the charm, hm?”

  He growls and crumples the empty carton in his palm. “Tell me again what he told you.”

  “Jake, we’ve been over this twice—”

  “I know, I know,” he says. “Just tell me again.”

  Elliot sighs. “He has a place for us to stay, I guess, and he has work for me. He wants to make me his personal assistant.”

  “What does he do, though?”

  He shrugs. Jake squints out over the tarmac as he peels the plastic off the crumpled pack of cigarettes. “I have a really bad feeling about this, dude.” He takes a slow breath and runs a hand through his hair. “Let’s start walking. We’re bound to find a gas station or a phone booth, at least figure out where the hell we are.”

  “And then what?”

  “We’ll come up with something. Let’s—” Electricity prickles through him. Jake leaps to his feet. It takes him a full five seconds to confirm he hasn’t been struck by lightning. His phone vibrated.

  He lets out a thin breath and squats against the wall again, squinting to read through the relentless glare. He scans the email. Slumps a little. He scoots his ass down the wall and slumps over, staring at the red-orange blur of his own eyelids, at the tiny sparkles of UV radiation.

  “Who is it?” Elliot asks. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s nothing. It’s not about this.”

  “Okay,” he says, drawing the word into about a hundred syllables, like he’s holding out for a better answer. Oka-a-a-ay, like they’re in the middle of a family dinner and Jake has just described the size and consistency of his last shit. He draws that one word out for about forty years.

  Like he thinks Jake is a fucking idiot.

  From: arthur.caruso@citygroup.org

  To: jakeatackk@mailcheetah.com

  Subject: Checking In

  Jacob,

  I would have preferred to see you under different circumstances. While I don’t plan to press charges for trespassing, I changed the locks and destroyed your items. The next time I catch you on my property unannounced, I’ll be forced to call the police.

  After much discussion with your mother, we have decided that our offer still stands: if you’d like to resume contact, we will happily support you so long as you agree to comply with your medication regimen and enroll in substance abuse counseling. A friend of mine owns a top-quality facility in West Virginia.

  Your mother and Kip send their regards. He’ll submit college applications this year. I know you resent him, Jacob, but I implore you to set aside your ego for just a moment and consider your family. There is still time to set a good example for him.

  I hope you’ll get
in touch.

  Your father,

  Arthur

  Chapter 27

  Ivan steps out of the car and he is twenty-five again, about to embark on the business venture of a lifetime. Ulrich Latzke has infected him with several accurate but dangerous ideas. He has endorsed Ivan’s youthful overconfidence, fostered relentless faith in the power of the market, and promised him a fresh start.

  He gazes fondly across the quad, past the rust-red cast of Vladimir Lenin. In many respects, this campus is his template for beauty, and he is momentarily thrilled to share that with Christopher, who has seen death and Florence but, Ivan suspects, has never truly grasped the ethos of beauty. Words are inadequate. He can translate it only as closeness, as a firm caress and a stifling kiss. Chris laughs when he pulls away. He has not received the message, but at least he takes pleasure in its transmission.

  Ivan leads him toward the head office, lips damming up a torrent of giddy nostalgia which has been buried so long that he once feared it lost. He offers their driver a polite nod, and opens the magnificent double doors, and steps into his legacy.

  Inside, nothing is how he remembers it.

  The ancient oak reception desk has been replaced with gleaming perspex and craggy, pink-veined marble. Gone are the key hooks and mail slots lifted from a shuttered hotel; gone are the velvet curtains, the silk pulls, the tufted medallion-back sofa. A floor-to-ceiling fish tank stands behind the desk. It’s a tapestry of neon pink and orange coral, catfish, and schools of darting barbs.

  Lovely. Tasteful, even. The space is exactly as beautiful, complex, and distinctive as an airline’s business class lounge.

  “What’s wrong?” Chris asks.

  Ivan shakes his head. He approaches the desk, where a secretary pokes her tablet computer, teeth resting in her lower lip. Her name plate reads Valencia.

  “Pardon me.”

  She looks up. Her drawn-on eyebrows climb toward her hairline. “Pardon me, sir. How may I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Stefan Latzke. He was supposed to give us keys to the guest house.”

  “Of course. Can I take your name, sir?”