by Jae Vogel
"You know as well as I do,” he said, “that ever since Solis came into power that this whole place has practically transformed into a surveillance state." He gestured around us, which was an inappropriate thing to do. There was no surveillance state around us, because we were in what was essentially a microcosm suburb of the larger city. However, once you got in toward downtown, and out of the outer slums, it was true that every single action was recorded by camera.
The integration of holographic advertising and retinal scanners had essentially normalized the level of comfort that most people felt with having a camera in their face. I remember the transition myself. The problem and invasion of privacy that I felt initially was quickly replaced by a numb form of acceptance. Obviously, the heroin helped, but the same process of deteriorated privacy had happened with checkpoints and travel terminals.
I smiled as the two of us walked, though it was more of a listless smile than anything else. I had little or nothing to smile about, but at least I had Hep, and that was something to enjoy for the moment.
"I think I'll fuck off for a while," I told him.
I had said something similar before, though I usually didn't go through with it. The problem this time was that there were factors going on that I didn't even understand myself. I felt sick, thinking about how I had involved Hep. A flash of guilt deepened as I realized that Hep's uncle had covered for us tonight. Covered for me.
"After tonight,” I said, “I’m going to get the fuck out of here for a while. I don't know what's going on, but I can't afford to put you at risk."
His hand tightened around mine, and then he started to run. Caught up in the moment, I followed, and felt my heart beating fast as we splashed through the narrow gutter between the rows of houses. At the end, we reached a drainpipe. Without pausing, Hep climbed up on top of it and vaulted himself over. I followed suit, and when I landed on the other side, he pinned me against the wall and kissed me once more. This time, when he backed off, his smile was sad, but accepting.
"Then let's have a good time tonight, and give you one final send off..."
He was so charming when he looked at me that way.
"I'm buying. Then, tomorrow, you can fuck off in whatever direction you like. And whatever happens, I'll know that we at least had a chance to celebrate our friendship before moving into different directions."
There was an element of melodramatic theatrics throughout the whole exchange, but when I actually thought about it, there was an element of truth in the foundation of everything. I wasn't very good at being vulnerable with Hep, or anyone for that matter. Whether it was my own addictions talking, or if it was a real desire to connect with Hep and try to forget what was going on, I kissed him back in affirmation.
"Lead the way,” I said.
He smiled, and the two of us walked down the sidewalks of the darkened suburban streets. Evening had settled in on us, and the houses around looked sleepy compared to our awakened and mischievous state.
"Just leave it to me and I'll get us where we need to go. By the end of the night, you won't know what hit you."
"Captain, my captain."
I figured that the very least I could do was entertain him one last time. Surely, one last blast off into the night couldn't be a bad thing.
The way forward was twisted, but also somehow pleasingly familiar.
I became aware that over the last few years, Hep and I had actually grown farther apart. We didn't really go out and paint the town red like we used to. There were a handful of nights that had been formative in our relationship, but at that point, there were no recent outings that I could think of. Even the time when we had gone out drinking all night and then recorded alarms for one another's alarm clocks had to have happened at least six months ago.
The amount of clarity in my mind was uncomfortable.
Whenever I stopped using drugs for any period of time, there was always an uncomfortable rush of information that came to me. It was a like a flood of awareness that I had been desperately trying to hold back. And now it came to me while we were walking toward whatever pick-up location Hep had in mind.
As the landscape changed between quiet suburbia, back into downtrodden, filthy slums, my mind also moved into a more sullen direction. The distinct possibility washed over my mind that the drugs that I had been using were not actually providing me with any sort of barriers between myself and the storm of emotional shit that threatened to swallow me whole at any moment. Regardless of whether or not the storm was composed of personal content, or complications from being socially present within whatever society this happened to be, I was getting the distinct impression that the drugs were only modifying my perceptions and not actually addressing the problem.
To conventional wisdom, this is nothing new. If I thought about it with any sense of seriousness, the real answer came to me in a very clear format. Drugs are a way of numbing the pain. Hell, there were pop songs throughout history which extolled the virtues of heroin for addressing problems in such a way.
However, there had been this narrative in my mind that I was somehow keeping the rest of the world at bay, in spite of myself, through the mechanism of my own addictive patterns of abuse. The analogy became clear to me at that point. I was still drowning in problems. I had simply managed to find a way to turn off my autonomous danger response.
When we got to the buy location, I hung out across the street outside of neighborhood liquor store. Just standing there looked totally sketchy, but I didn't have any money to go in and buy something, and I didn't feel like going with him.
Hep's friends weren’t necessarily my friends, and at the present moment, I had no desire to entrench myself in any new social network of drug acquisition. Just more fucking faces that I was going to have to run away from. More people that I didn't know if I would bring trouble to.
Instead of loitering around, I slumped down on the ground and brought my sweater hood up over my face. I imagined I looked like one of the gutter punks that roved around the city, begging people for spare change so they could pick up some alcohol, not really caring about much of anything except how they were going to get their own fix.
Not two minutes after I sat down, someone threw a crumpled up dollar at my feet on their way out of the liquor store. I didn't have any reason to pick up the bill, but I knew I could get a tall boy for that much. For a minute, I just stared at the crumpled note, not bothering to even move and pick up the thing. I stayed that way, motionless for a solid half hour, just sitting on the sidewalk and staring, until Hep came back into view.
He had already gotten high and was considerably more fucked up than when I saw him last. He had also brought with him another friend of his. The two of them were holding hands and standing close by to one another.
"This is Rae. They're going to hang out with us for the night, if that's ok."
I picked up the dollar, only to realize that while I had been spaced, the money had multiplied into enough for three drinks.
"Looks like God wants me to buy you a beer, Rae."
They offered a hand out to shake mine, and introduced themselves.
Rae was obviously a man, but in the circles that Hep ran in, it was more common than not to use gender-neutral pronouns when referring to people, just to be on the safe side, in case they preferred one or the other. The effect was similar to dissolving cultural identities that were wrapped up in pre-existing perceptions of gender and sexuality.
I didn't bother with it much one way or another, and I just walked into the store to buy us all a drink.
When I got out, the two of them were already making out, leaning up on the wall of the building, much to the displeasure of the people that happened to be passing by.
I shook my head.
"I don't fucking get it..."
"What's that?" Hep said.
"We supposedly live in this age of sexual liberation where drugs are common and our society is progressive, and yet, people still get weirded out when the
y see anything that looks remotely queer."
"You can't worry about them too much, Daux. Here..." he said and offered me a small package of brown powder, wrapped up carefully in a twisted up piece of colorful tissue paper.
One look at the two of them, and I knew it wasn't junk. They were all over each other, in the most sensitive and sensually excessive way possible. I knew you could parachute the stuff, but I wanted a more immediate rush, so I dumped the contents on the back of my hand, and carefully put one bump up each side of my nose. I finished it off by licking my hand, and letting the rush of the drug overtake me.
My perceptions started to change, and from that point forward, the evening carried a very different tone.
Chapter 6
The lights and colors grew more intense. I had the sensation that the world around me is growing more vivid by the moment. I felt sorry for the people around me who weren't experiencing this level of sensory overload, until the peak threatened to overtake me, and I was desperately pounding alcohol in order to offset the anxiety which came from the increased energy flowing through my body. But the alcohol didn’t help - it only made me more disoriented and careless.
Hep offered me a drink and I pounded it without consideration for the consequences. Both he and Rae were looking at me in amazement. Apparently I wasn't supposed to drink all of that at once.
"Jesus fucking Christ, Daux, that was enough for all three of us."
I cocked my head to the side, totally at a loss for what just happened, and then I felt a bitter burp coming up from my gut. The after taste in my mouth was intensely alkaline, reminding me of some sort of chemical. The taste had initially been covered up by a strong rush of orange juice.
We had been walking together for quite some time now, and I had lost track of the distance between where we were at now, and the liquor store where we had initially started. All I knew was that I was now walking between the two friends, and we were all loosely holding onto one another.
The lights around us were bright as hell, and colorful in contrast to the tall buildings, and that’s when I realized that we had wandered straight into the heart of downtown.
“Fuck.”
I stopped in my tracks, but Hep had kept his head cool the entire time, and he pulled me along until we got lost into the crowds of people in the Red Light District.
“They won’t expect you to come here, which is exactly why this is the ideal place for us to party.”
I wasn’t certain of the logic, but I was in no position to argue.
Quarantine was a place that reminded me distinctly of a rat den in the middle of a posh neighborhood. In fact, the Red Light District was anything but a posh neighborhood, but it was a place where there were a lot of high-scaled pretensions pertaining to class - and Quarantine held none of that.
While Hep and his new friend made out and grinder on one another on the dance floor, I stayed off to the side in the shadows. If I had been with anyone else, there would have been some possibilities of discomfort concerning whether or not the people I was with would have pulled me into the middle of the scene, just to fuck with me, or because they had some idea of what was good for me as a person.
Hep wanted no part of any of that, and never did during the entire time I knew him. In a sense, I imagine he had actually brought Rae along for the specific purpose that I might not find it in me to let totally loose tonight. I doubt that he suspected that on a conscious level, because he tends to be the ever-optimistic type — particularly if he’s loaded. However, as I leaned up against the back wall of Quarantine, and looked out at the dance floor, it seemed only natural that he should have someone with him that would be able to be as extroverted and indulgent as he desired.
As for me, it had become clear to me over the passage of time, that the substance that I had taken was effectively three full doses of mescaline. Familiar as I was with the different categories of drugs, I had been able to narrow it down quickly within a matter of moments. It had been the bitter taste that had really cued things off for me — that and the fact that mescaline can be condensed into a powder and dissolved in liquid. Most other hallucinogens that are able to be dissolved into liquid are either tasteless, or have murky organic tastes that stay with you for a while. I have no idea where Hep got the stuff, but the change from the Moli I had taken at the beginning of the night, to the Mescaline I was currently riding out was something fierce, for sure.
The music rose up inside of me, but instead of compelling me to move, I was simply allowing my thoughts to move in any direction they chose. The lights streamed in front of my eyes, so even the kitschy party lights above the dance floor were interesting as hell. The room was dark enough, and my hood was low enough to where I didn’t really feel too bad about being there — though I couldn’t shake the thought that there was something terribly wrong about this whole evening.
Something about having my place raided, and then six hours later being more loaded at the club than I had been in recent memory just seemed irresponsible. The joy of the party was gone, and a terminal, heightened state of anxiety and perception seemed to have replaced any good feelings that may have been intended by the night.
A man left the room, leaving his cigarette still going strong on the table next to me. I looked at it, and thought about bringing it to my lips, but I couldn’t. The smoke was rising sinister into the air, and for the first time, I was seeing the deteriorated health of the people around me in this place. There was no radiance here, in and of itself. All of the warmth was based in consumption of alcohol, and dancing. All of the light in people’s eyes had to do with the consumption of drugs, which either contracted or expanded their pupils, consequentially pushing the light to reflect in startling ways on the surface of their cornea. Faces which I had been familiar with over the course of years were no longer familiar to me. No matter how hard I tried to clear my mind of the terrors that rose to face me, I was never able to get anywhere except a state of impending dread.
I stepped outside for a bit of air, and as soon as I walked outside, some asshole literally ran into me and knocked me down off of my feet.
If I was to be real about it, I didn’t have the best balance at the time, and it was probably just a byproduct of the crowds that moved through the Solis Red Light District. The man stopped, however, and leaned over me to offer a hand. Without thinking, I grabbed it, and when I was pulled back up to my feet, I came face to face with Mavis.
His expression changed immediately from concern to shock. The apology that was already on his lips, died in mid-sentence, leaving me to stare at him uncomfortably, with far too easily accessed intuition as to why he was not his usual, cheerful self. I saw a quick calculation cross his face, and then the expression changed once more to an expression of warmth.
“Daux… How’s it going? Haven’t seen you around.”
The way he talked was fascinating. I watched the words come out of his mouth and realized that they held no meaning whatsoever.
“So that’s what a lie looks like…”
The message hadn’t exactly been intended for him.
As a matter of fact, the words had poured out of my mouth without knowledge, but once they were gone, I saw little reason to care that they had been said. After all, at least my words had meant something in and of themselves. The words Mavis had used actually seemed intended to fill space, by creating a noisy distraction of nothingness.
I could wave the nothingness to the side with my mind, and stare into his eyes. While I was there, I saw more information about him than I had ever cared to know in my entire career at Solis.
I saw his attraction to me as a person, as well as his historical reticence to share any of those feelings with me. I saw the hardness in his heart, because of the obvious drug abuse that I constantly used to distance myself emotionally, and I saw how that emotional distance modified his concept of who I was as a person. As I continued to stare into his eyes, I saw the clarity of his own selfishness.
&nb
sp; He was evaluating in front of me whether or not I was stoned, and how easily he could use the information and power at his disposal for his personal benefit. I saw him sell me out, or try to seduce me, in less than a fraction of a second, and I watched him continue forward under the impression that he was in the know about why I was staring at him, compared to what I was actually realizing.
The information downloaded into my consciousness in little more than a drop, and suddenly, the entire landscape around me grew crystal clear in its presentation. The details of the fabric of each person that passed me by, as well as every ripple in each puddle under their feet. The most violent and loudest of emotions in the crowd became immediately available to me, and from that point, the strongest sexual lures that were being thrown out into the street… hookers with fishnets, and every pun that betrayed the confidences of reality by its very existence.
“Daux…”
His hands were on each of my shoulders.
“Daux, can you hear me?”
I took a deep breath and allowed myself to refocus on the sound of his voice. The rest of the information around me was dimmed down to a muted roar, and for a moment, I saw genuine concern in his eyes. I was confused, and all of a sudden, I collapsed to the ground, taking a seat on the damp asphalt outside of Quarantine.
Whether he was being theatrical or not, Mavis squatted down and helped me up to my feet. He wasn’t a big guy, but he had a fair amount of strength for his size. Soon enough, he was carrying me out of the way of foot traffic, and back over toward the side of the Quarantine. I leaned up against the wall and tried to process the confusion that permeated my reality.
“How can something be so clear one minute, and so obscure the next?”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know if I can relate entirely, but I have a feeling that whatever you’re on right now is really doing a number on your head.”
I narrowed my eyes and thought about what he had just told me. It was true, but then again, it also wasn’t. In the deepest part of my perception of reality, there was an inviolable truth, and as long as I kept that in focus, everything else seemed to fall into place. The moment I allowed myself to become distracted by the noise around me, I lost touch with that center, and everything became more confusing and difficult to manage.