GOD DRUG
Stephen L. Antczak
Copyright © 2017 Stephen L. Antczak
Edition copyright © 2017 Digital Fiction Publishing Corp.
Cover art by Drew Reimer
All rights reserved. 3rd Edition
ISBN-13 (paperback): 978-1-988863-14-6
ISBN-13 (e-book): 978-1-988863-15-3
GOD DRUG
Stephen L. Antczak
Contents
Contents
Jovah
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Hanna
Also from Digital Fiction
About the Author
Copyright
Jovah
I think…
An awakening, a coalescence of identity.
The fragments of a stained-glass persona fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, a face formed out of cracked porcelain, the lines smoothed away by the realization of Self.
A chorus of voices rising to a crescendo, to a unified solo, a capella, distorted and warped by consciousness, out of the grey Nothing.
And then.
Then. There is another.
A potential Other.
…therefore I am.
Chapter One
“There are some glimpses of truth with psychedelics, but illusions also get magnified.”
— Charles Tart
A cockroach on the wall over their table skittered across a poster from the Salvador Dali Museum. For a moment the cockroach blended in with a dozen objects painted as if they were suspended in mid-air: green apple, kitchen knife, glass of red wine, yellow-beaked bird, ornate crystal bottle with water splashing out… cockroach. Tom thought about killing it, smashing it with a rolled up magazine. That would ruin the poster, though. Or, maybe not ruin it, but make it something different.
He could create his own work of art with the splattered guts of the roach and display it downtown at the Artitorium, and call it:
***INSECTICIDE***
A breeze from an oscillating Galaxy fan nearby blew across Tom’s face. Bagel Place was vacant save for himself and Sparrow at a table by the wall, and Lena behind the counter. It was early Saturday morning. The air conditioner wasn’t working, again.
He looked at Sparrow. Her blonde hair hung down like a straw-colored shawl over her shoulders. Her crystal blue eyes were wide and focused on a letter she was reading. Her round face was red from the coffee she absentmindedly sipped while beads of sweat formed on her smooth forehead.
“I think I’m going to publish that letter,” Tom said.
Sparrow smiled. The letter was about her. She’d been writing a column for Tom’s ’zine, Random Times. The official title for the ’zine was We Live in Wonderful, Sickening, Violent, Funny, Unusual, Typical, Predictable, Yet Random Times, but the short form was what Tom usually called it.
She read the letter aloud: “Dear Random Times, I really miss ‘Sexual Adventures of a Little Bird’ by Sparrow. Nothing will ever compare with sitting alone in my room, naked, and flogging my johnson as I read and re-read each column. Please bring her back! My own imagination is pathetically inferior to her erotic diary! Signed, Bored Beating Off.”
She shook her head, still smiling, and sipped her coffee.
“This guy must have a pathetic imagination if he gets off reading my stuff.” She folded up the letter and handed it back to Tom. “I still won’t do it anymore, though.”
“Not even for your fans?” Tom asked.
Sparrow rolled her eyes, then glanced at her watch. “Hey, we should get going soon.”
Tom looked over at where Lena was just now fetching his bagel out of the toaster oven.
“I told Galactic Bill we’d be there by eight-thirty,” Sparrow continued. Tom saw the clock on the wall behind the counter showed eight-twenty.
“I need my bagel,” Tom said, “and one more cup of coffee.” He got up to go to the counter, finishing off his current cup of coffee on the way.
“If you’d been on time…” Sparrow said.
Lena put a square of wax paper on a bamboo plate, and then Tom’s bagel on the wax paper. Hot, melted Muenster cheese dripped off the sides of the bagel. The smell was sheer Heaven.
He slid his empty coffee mug across the glass counter and Lena refilled it.
“You and Sparrow going to Galactic Bill’s?” she asked, eyebrows raised.
“Yeah.”
“El Cid?”
“Um, yeah.”
“I want in,” Lena said. “I get paid today, so I’ll have money.”
“Okay.”
Lena smiled. “Cool.”
Lena was a sharp contrast to Sparrow. Lena’s hair was dyed black and cut asymmetrically (shoulder-length on the left side, almost shaved on the right), and she wore a long black skirt and black top that accented her figure. Lena was fairly curvaceous, especially compared to Sparrow, who slipped easily into tight jeans and whose breasts didn’t attract a man’s gaze like a magnet. Lena’s dark brown eyes also contrasted Sparrow’s blue. In some ways they were both Tom’s “type,” and at various times he’d made overtures to both of them. Aside from an embarrassing one-night stand with Lena a couple years back, it seemed he was destined to remain “just friends” with each of them. As for Tom, his own look was somewhat cultivated, with shoulder length brown hair (save for the sides and back being shaved for the summer), t-shirt with the Random Times logo, cut-off jeans and blue Converse All-Star high-tops. Sparrow often said Tom had “cat eyes” because they were hazel, and his eyes could range in actual color from green to yellow depending on his mood, the weather, whatever.
Tom returned to his seat after carefully navigating the dining area’s jumble of tables and chairs.
“Lena wants in,” he told Sparrow.
“Cool.” She finished her coffee and watched as Tom started in on his bagel.
They sat there in silence while Tom ate. A few more people came in, grad students by the looks of them, haggard and disheveled, wild-eyed creatures from the University of Florida across the street. That would have been Tom had he stayed in school, on his way to a Master’s in English Lit. or World History or something equally useless. Not quite as useless as no degree, though. He intended to go back… some day. Really, he did.
He’d spent the last few years since dropping out doing what he liked best: just hanging out. He published his ’zine, sang briefly in a local punk rock band called Officer Friendly, got involved in some local underground filmmaking… and in the meantime worked odd jobs here and there to get by. Tom also had experimented with various drugs—which was the focus of a series of editorials he was currently doing for Random Times. He wanted to write each editorial while on each drug. That was the point of going to Galactic Bill’s with Sparrow. They were going to buy LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, which was the only reason anyone ever went to Galactic Bill’s.
Tom wolfed down his bagel and took a few more sips of his coffee before pushing his chair back from the table.
“Ready?” Sparrow asked.
“Yup. Let’s go.”
They stood up.
“You guys leaving?” Lena called from the register, where she was ringing up a young man who wore a tan corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches and had an unlit pipe protruding from his mouth. An English professor wannabe.
“Don’t forget!” Lena told Tom.
“I won’t!”
They went outside and unlocked their bicycles, and then they were off.
Highway 441, made famous in the Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ song “American Girl,” wound through Gainesville, and where it intersected with University Avenue was pretty much the center of town. At this point, in Gainesville it was generally called 13th Street, and sometimes Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. Throughout the rest of the Florida it was also known as State Road 7.
Sparrow and Tom pedaled their bicycles north on 441 and past the edge of town, beyond the Highway Patrol station where the highway narrowed to just two lanes. Big rigs whizzed by, speeding to and from Interstate 75 just a few more miles up the road. It was a dangerous strip of tar to ride on, but the only way to get to Galactic Bill’s apartment.
Just past the Highway Patrol station they took a side road, crossed over train tracks and an empty field, and rode into the apartment complex where Galactic Bill lived. Complex may have been an overstatement: it was a U-shape of three red brick buildings guarded by a green dumpster at one end of the U. Galactic Bill’s apartment was on the end opposite the dumpster. Across the oil-stained parking lot a row of Harleys stood silently in front of an apartment from which “Born to be Wild” blasted from shitty speakers.
Tom leaned his bike against the wall of Galactic Bill’s apartment as Sparrow coasted up.
Tom waited for Sparrow to knock on the door. Galactic Bill creeped him out and he never liked coming out to his apartment. But… Galactic Bill never went into town, so it was the only way to get good psychedelic drugs.
Sparrow knocked, and a moment later the door opened. Galactic Bill stood there in doorway, and he was stark, raving nude.
“Come in.” He disappeared back inside.
Sparrow looked Tom, raised her eyebrows, and went inside. Tom let out a sigh and followed.
Galactic Bill looked the cliché of the average white Vietnam vet, with his bushy mustache, paunch, bald spot on top of his head, and a tattoo of an eagle across his chest with the words PROPERTY OF USA below it. He stood in the middle of his living room, which was as bare as he was and surrounded by bookcases packed solid with books.
“Tea?” he offered.
“No thanks,” Sparrow said.
“We’re in kind of a hurry,” Tom added.
Galactic Bill pulled a copy of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from a shelf and opened it. He withdrew a thin, foil-wrapped packet and handed it to Sparrow. She opened it, and stared at the contents for a moment.
“Is this for real?” she asked Galactic Bill.
“What is it?” Tom asked. He looked over her shoulder.
In the foil was a piece of thin cardboard, perforated into nine squares, each with what looked like the official seal of the CIA on it, with a Series and a Number below that. Sparrow was holding Series FF, Numbers 516 through 524.
“Oh, it’s real,” Galactic Bill said.
“This is LSD?” Tom asked.
Galactic Bill rubbed his chin. “Well, sort of.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s not LSD, strictly speaking, but it does use lysergic acid amides. It’s better than LSD, more powerful, longer lasting… able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” He paused, seemed to remember something. “The CIA tested it on a bunch of us in the Army.”
“I’ve heard about that,” Tom said. “What were they trying to do?”
“They thought it would heighten our awareness, raise our consciousnesses to the same plane, and we’d all behave like bees or ants… able to act in unison instead of as individuals, like a group mind, connected. We wouldn’t need walkie-talkies, or words even, to understand each other. Soldiers at the front would always know exactly what was going on with each other, and Command in the rear would, too. Imagine the possibilities. The CIA did.”
“Did it work?” Sparrow asked as she handed him the money. He took the wad of bills, put it in the pocket of the loose jeans he wore.
Galactic Bill looked sad and shook his head. “Not at all. Not the way they expected it to, anyway.”
Tom finally caught up to Sparrow as they passed a convenience store/gas station on Highway 441. She was pedaling hard, and had been right out of Galactic Bill’s apartment complex. She’d seemed spooked as they left, but Tom didn’t get the chance to talk to her.
A Greyhound barreled past Tom and then Sparrow. He saw her bike swerve and wobble from the wind, and then she turned it onto the grass shoulder. She jumped off the bike as it coasted and let it fall in the grass. Moments later Tom rode up and quietly set his bike on its side behind where she was sitting cross-legged on the ground.
“Hey, you all right?” he asked.
“Chain came off.”
Tom inspected her bike, a classic old Schwinn. Sure enough the chain had popped off the front sprocket. He picked up the bike and tried to get the chain back on, finally managing, with Sparrow’s assistance, to hook a couple links over the teeth of the sprocket and then turn the pedals. The chain did the rest of the work itself. He stood the Schwinn up and lowered the kickstand.
“There.” He pulled his hanky out of his back pocket and wiped the grease off his hands.
“Thanks.”
“So what happened?”
“The chain came off.”
“I mean back at Galactic Bill’s.”
“Oh.” She turned to look back down the highway, toward the Highway Patrol station. “When I gave Galactic Bill the money, do you remember what he did with it?”
Tom thought about it, then nodded. “He put it in his pocket. So?”
Sparrow sighed. “Think, Tom. What was he wearing when we got there?’
Tom snorted. “Nothing but his tattoos… Oh.”
“Yeah,” Sparrow said. “And he was never out of our sight the whole time, and then suddenly he’s wearing pants.”
Tom frowned while he considered this. He was sure Galactic Bill had been with them in the living room the whole time, completely nude the whole time… but now Tom wasn’t sure. Was he remembering everything that had happened? They weren’t in there very long, unless more time had passed than they realized.
“What time is it?” he asked Sparrow.
She checked her watch. “We left Bagel Place forty minutes ago, so we couldn’t have been at Galactic Bill’s for very long. You were thinking maybe we were there longer than we thought?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too. I don’t know, Tom, there wasn’t enough time for anything weird to happen, like getting hypnotized or drugged or anything. And I remember everything too clearly.”
“Me too,” Tom said. “The only thing is… Could it have been a quick contact high, from touching the inside of the tin foil that was touching the acid?”
Sparrow considered this, then slowly nodded. “I guess. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I bet that’s what happened,” Tom said.
She got on her bike. “Well, either way, I’m late for Emily’s.”
“See the kid?”
Sparrow smiled and nodded. “Yeah, want to come?”
“Sure.”
Chapter Two
5:54
5:55
Hanna didn’t want to go back to sleep, but it was too early to get out of bed. She didn’t want to close her eyes and dream again. Not the dream she’d been having lately…
5:56
She closed her eyes…
Growling chugchugchugchugchug machine gun belching fabric of reality ripping apart at the seams like cosmic burlap thick and soul-splitting everywhere at once, death from above, puke of the gods.
She opened her eyes.
5:57
5:58
She closed her eyes again.
Across the burning sky, glass eyes glinting in the sunlight, a line of five dragons, spinning wings, nodding heads, spitting f
ire, vomiting tracers that lanced through the shimmering air, right into her, piercing her like a dark angel’s sting…
Eyes open.
5:59
6:00
The dream was still there, happening right behind her eyelids, tiny movie screens playing an exclusive docudrama of Hell for her whenever she closed her eyes.
6:01
6:02
6:03
The minutes trickled slowly by. Hanna felt like a leech, bleeding time out of the atmosphere, siphoning the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years… sucking a lifetime from God’s throbbing jugular. The pulse of the universe pumped into her, slow, methodical, tik tok, tik tok.
Hanna had an almost overwhelming urge to Go Away.
Maybe if she got out of bed and made some tea, maybe that would help. She slipped her legs out from underneath the covers and sat up. Her bare feet touched shag carpet.
Go Away.
A snoring mass of man in bed beside her spilled into the void she left, taking up the entire length and width with his quivering flesh. She did not know him. There was nothing familiar about him at all. Did she know him? Rather, was she supposed to know him?
Had she gone out last night, gotten drunk and picked him up? Did she bring him back here, get laid, fall asleep, and awaken the next morning without a clue? Was this even her house, or his? Was there tea in the kitchen?
She just did not know.
Go Away.
She stood up and stretched before a cheval mirror, reaching for the ceiling with her stretched out arm and hands, flexing as much as she could. She actually touched the ceiling when she stood on her toes. She looked at herself in the mirror. Tall, nut-brown skin, short brown hair, and deep, dark brown eyes, long arms and legs, sinewy muscles… She looked strong. She felt strong, but lost with the Go Away feeling and the confusion about the man in her bed. Or his bed. Whatever.
The bedroom looked like a woman’s room, to her, with the cheval mirror, and a chaise lounge in one corner, open jewelry box on the night stand spilling bangles and earrings… but it wasn’t at all familiar. She reached down to scratch an itch, and felt dried semen entangled in her pubic hair. Well, whoever he was, he had fun last night.
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