Take the moment. Grab it, twist it around your fingers like bubble gum. Roll it around, like a savored taste. Time contains no full stops. Let it dress you in it’s finest clothes, carry you down the river and past the last levee, breathing life in your face like a gentle lover. Wait.
Cold, begotten soul.
Breathe.
Taste the face of your fears and swallow your tears. Under the broken Braille sign of the Bridge of Knives. Blink. In the crack-house built into the stone blocks, and the drug dealer by the water’s edge. He’s smoking a cigarette outside. I remember now. Blink. He had the new shipment in, from those Russian sailors. Five kilos of a new strand nobody had a name for yet.
I. Can’t. Feel. My. Arms. I. Can’t. Feel. My. Arms. I. Cant. Feel. My. Arms.
Panic like panic like panic like panic. Can’t think straight. Repeat.
Blink:
I hear the cars rushing over, like drones going on and on, battering me until I’m rolled over, subdued. It’s like counting sheep counting the cars, until I’ve counted so many I don’t hear them anymore, and I wonder if it’s nighttime or if I’m dead. If I’m dead, I hope I see Snapple.
Blink:
This morning, I tried on an Armani suit in front of my mirror and cried a little because it didn’t fit anymore. It stretched a bit, but around the gut it clung like smoke. Pissing three-hundred dollars away on cheeseburgers and milkshakes since Charlene left, and I hadn’t realized until it was too late. I had to wear a cheap suit, and it didn’t go with the tie or the belt, and I had a meeting, a big fucking meeting, the kind of meetings that make or break the corporate man, head on shoulders, uptight, with a dab of cover-up type of man. Because humans can’t get enough cover-up. Blink. Blink. Blink. Because I had a big nasty pimple and if I didn’t look like Jesus Christ on a good day, no sale. First rule of sales, look like the sale. If you’re selling a surf-board, look like you belong on it. If you’re arbitrating a Fortune-500 company into a major merger, look like a gold Rolex, and a platinum chain above a double breasted suit and look like a monocle and crafted slicked back hair and have fingers like a classical pianist manicured in Little Korea, and have tiny beads of sweat on your forehead because you’ve got a handkerchief in your jacket pocket. Look like the eighth-fucking-wonder of the world. A pimple doesn’t look like a fortune.
Problems don’t seem like problems when a Russian man is pressing a gun up against your temple. They seem like worn shoes you toss out after they get too muddy, or a second cigarette. Who needs them?
Blink.
Pictures. There’s pictures on a table covered in blow, and needles. A woman. A kid. A balloon. A giraffe hovering over the young boy’s shoulder, eating a cracker out of his hand. He’s smiling, and she’s smiling and I remember when my wife used to smile. I remember taking pictures together, and a trip to Paris. No, no none of it matters. I feel the face of my fears. Dress me up in my finest clothes, ye gentle executioner. May I dine with you at my last supper?
If I could only move, but I feel tied up, and the blood rushes through me, beating and swelling as if each part of me has a heart-beat. I didn’t know if it was the drugs, what did he call it, Saline R, or the adrenaline slowly kicking in. Or was it the fear, or my broken heart, or the chemical imbalance of dopamine and serotonin. Maybe I really am tied up, to face my death like some concentration camp victim.
I am the rising pillars of Auschwitz, oh Lord, my God, set me free.
Maybe it’s all a dream, just a hallucination induced by some side-effect. If it is, I’ll wake up tomorrow and be right as rain, in my bed. Maybe Charlene will still be there, and my leg will touch hers, and her eyes will open and I’ll kiss her cheek. Maybe I’ll be a kid again and Snapple will be there, with his tail wagging, and a bone in between his teeth. Maybe my mother will be singing songs to me, old lullaby’s from some pre-dawn era, and it was all just one bad fever pitch dream gone off-rails.
But it’s not.
This is hell.
Blink.
Lying on the floor like some rotting sarcophagus, wondering if I’ll ever be able to move again. The drugs did this to me. The drugs they gave me. Their little guinea pig. Like a rat trapped in a cage. Someone tell them I’m vice-president of sales operations. Which company? A big one, with lots of people under me. Tell them I’m a white-collar, upper class man who drives a Porsche, and wears expensive sunglasses. Tell them I live in a three story house in a nice neighborhood, with a trimmed lawn, that I’m a member of the local homeowners association. Tell them I’ve got a white picket fence. Tell them I’m a machine with it’s cogs greased and its motor running. Tell them I am the center of the fucking universe.
But instead of talking, when they come over to me, they put the gun to my head:
“Some test dummy you are, tripped out on skag,” they say, tall and dark, and their words are hushed by the river. “Can’t even fucking speak,”
I gurgle something out. My tongue like a switchblade cutting my words to pieces.
“Start speaking English or I will blow the brains out of your skull,”
I know this; I was this. It’s a sample group. I was kidnapped to be a sample group. In sales, before a product hits market, it must be tried and perfected. Over and over. Until they get it right.
The men don’t wear masks. Because they think I’m already a dead man. Did they expect their drug to work? Or were they just going to kill me after, tying up their loose ends? I wonder how many people have done this.
One man turns to the other:
“If he dies from the drug, we will have trouble making the sale,” he says. “We’ll have to start testing on your family to get them to trust us overseas again,”
Big business. A and B must equal C. It’s a ruthless business, and I’m subject A.
I feel chills come over me, waves and waves of them. I thought these drugs were supposed to make you feel good. Like Superman. I can still feel the hole where they put the needle into my arm. It burns, sears, of hell and a cesspool of demons in the Gardens of Eden.
The bigger man picked up the picture of his family and threw it to the ground. I could see their faces in the photo, ersatz flavored in the photograph.
“Nobody is touching my family,” he says.
Then he opens my mouth, slack, and frothing and rams the muzzle into it.
“Just end him. Put him out of his misery,”
End me. Put me out of my misery.
Charlene is gone. So is my pride. There is nothing left.
And then they pull the trigger. And then black.
But before everything goes, I look at the picture of his family. All nice and cute and sweet and loving against each other at a day at the zoo. San Diego Zoo, imprinted on the balloon. Sand Diego, they live in San Diego.
And I know that if by some miracle I survive, I will end his pretty wife, and their little son. I would end them, and I would paint the skyline of San Diego red, and I would make him watch.
Vengeance, oh brother, seeks to create only wounds.
And everyman is capable.
And I hold no pacifier.
And then black--it swallows me whole.
And then. Blink.
