Nuclear Time Waste Heroes

Flesh Heroes

FLESH HEROES

Let's go to Lee and I lying naked in flesh tangle on a bed and the smell surrounding us is the color red. Cigarette burns and ash cover my bare chest and convulsions of post drug sickness toss me to the ground on all fours. My pounding head deep inside a trash can.

"I told you not to drink so much," Lee sits up brushing away ash. "But you never listen."

Fist wipes away trails of puke and I sit bare assed on the cold hardwood floor. "I can't even remember what happened last night."

Lee wastes time by lighting himself a cigarette in his cold shaking hands. "You were bored so you started drinking. You offered me some but I did some other stuff instead," Lee gives me a tired look through his dull grey eyes like the endless expanses of clouds above us. "Then we fucked until you passed out."

On aching legs I stand up and steal Lee's cigarette, too lazy to light my own.

Over the past few months Lee had started to look like a living corpse. Escaping his grave for substance and exchanging flesh for out of body experiences. Destroying his skin with drug scars and aftereffects. At that point he was every necrophiliac's dream.

"Is that it?" I shut my eyes. "I feel sore."

36 degree hands finger new scars left on my back from the night before. "It was a while before you passed out, Vikko."

I ask the almost rhetorical question of: "Did you sleep?" even though I know that Lee never sleeps for more than a few hours, maybe even less.

"I did for a few minutes. Yeah."

Lee is pretending death like a corpse in his room. He's fallen like Alice down K-hole and me, I'm halfway there, can't feel my face getting slapped by Lee's mother. Thoughts formulate slow as if I were picking words from a too tangible consciousness.

"Well, you're early," my mouth says.

"Que paso, Vikko?" her attention turns to Lee and his arms fall—thud, thud, thud—to the floor every time his mother's hands pick them up for signs of life. "Esta muerto?"

"No, he's not dead. Calmate," body rises. Mine does.

Lee's mother pulls out her cellphone. "I'm calling the police."

"No, turn on the car," I loom over her small figure like shadows in deserted streets, "We're going to the hospital. I'll get him there in a minute."

She gives me a curt nod, spins on her heel and leaves the room. The door shuts and worse than a junkie I get on all fours and snort the rest of the Ketamine.

Static pulls at the edges of anima and it spews out in inky blots floating in water sideways through time. My soft machine discarded to the trash heap of the false reality we'd been living in before. My ghost glowing washed out grey, its existence starts turning and turning cards of physical consciousness. Plucking at quickly unraveling tangles of the string that connects everything in this existence.

A face with the bottom of the sea reflected on it disconnected from memory appears, their voice devoid of vibration just a thought passing through existence. "What if god were one of us?"

And vertigo competes with silence. Black matter attaches itself like disrupted dust to my flesh eating me whole and white light explodes from my existential black hole as has never been done in this universe's history. But time is a mental construct that I can manipulate the same way I can break away fingers.

Blue electricity coils around me pulling and pulling apart my false god and false universe that's been shredded to pieces and all hell has escaped through the tears in its fabric. Beyond this, what I'd created, beyond the universe we can't question it reeks putrid stench of anarchy and exploded star brains.

Then calm like ocean waves after midnight pull me to look at the desolate image of fast-forward planet earth. The sky substance I'm floating in like water dries quick as a destructive lightning flash. And death cold hands crash me back to the soft machine like an angel fallen from heaven.

Time warps itself into knots and spits us onto a hospital bed. Static buzz feels like in absentia. And voices travel to our ears.

"El habla con los phantasmas," screams fearstruck mother on verge of emotional eruption. "No esta bien. He needs help."

Fast forward to hateful goodbyes and sorrowful tears. And Lee and I drowning in white walls and fuzz of soothing sounds. Lee has become a schizophrenic and I an MPD Bastard, because I really didn't feel like I had that much to drink that one time. Not enough for blackout at least. Brain tells me that I don't belong in white pad cells but the doctors do. Brain doctors, psychologists, whatever they're called. And every month we have to endure lectures about the sodomy sins because it's so obvious we're queer and I need a hit every time Lee mentions the Time Waste incident.

In asylum because of the universe imprinted on Lee's eyes, swirling galaxies of stardust dashed across like glitter. The Mentals have us dubbed the Universe Kids. Rumors like Lee's eyes could suck you in and spew you back out into dark matter and empty outer space circulated shortly after our arrival.

We had fallen down through more than just the K-hole. We'd shredded the third and fourth dimensions. We had seen the face of the Absolute God. And so explain: How could we not seem wack in the aftermath? Knowing that our emotions and sensations and concepts of humanity and right and wrong are simply constructs of the human brain. Our body is nothing but a soft machine running old restrictive software. Unplugged we're better than gods. We could be the deus ex machina for every one of our horror stories.

Knowing all of this and understanding it, really, really understanding it turned us to Wasted Youth pounding on our existence cages for a way out.