pathos hous

lost trails

 Tangled mess of memory, descending into evening, mutating into a sunless scheme, post pass out. What do I remember? What have I perceived? Dirty clothes are as scattered as my restfulness as I turn to see the pulsing signal of the computer. It’s up, for some unfathomable reason (Was it even shut it down?) and the screen is glaring at me with a 404. How many days had it been like that?  What was I doing before?  

Slowly, there is recall, in bursts and fragments. There is the café, Wednesday morning, $17 dollars spent, waiting on nothing. Maybe the father didn’t intend to sell his daughter’s intimates. Maybe he didn’t trust me enough or feared a certain obsession on my part (would I ask for more and more after that once the transactions had started?)

I wasn’t sure if there were plain-clothes cops there in the café or journalists or social workers of some kind. Something had happened. Beneath the goings and comings of the café clientele, of money exchanging hands, there was an undercurrent of disturbed stress, something that was throbbing and writhing creating a vacancy in the air. Something like a loss hung like lights or a feeling of derailment of the everyday sureness of the mundane. I heard the investigators exchanging notes and suggestions, speculations, inductive/reductive reasoning, looking like they’ve been there for the long haul.

Questions weaved in and out of the ambient noise, among noisy kids and lunch time chatter. “When did you last see that customer?” “Were the cleaning men screened before hiring?” “Who else has the keys to the café?

What the hell was going on?

 My instinct for the feminine drew me straight to the woman, I chose to recall her the best. A new one, probably a month or so on the job. She took no notes, recorded no messages, she just sat there listening, watching. At times, I think she watched me too when she thought I wasn’t looking, but I could feel her. I could sense her eyes on me.  Was I a suspect? Was my presence not calm and collected enough?  She seemed reserved, unsure, searching everyone that came in and out with an inner instinct. Our instincts clashed at certain heartbeats, when I was pondering the situation or making fantasy with what I heard.  A missing person I reckoned. A ‘she.’ Has she been kidnapped? Killed? Twisted thoughts surfaced, swam in the bowels of my head stirring the flavors in my groin. I returned to the site in my mind, seeing the daughter bound and gagged. Had the same thing happened to this woman who is now missing? Is the father involved??

Now, sitting in my room, I check the date, the clock, refresh the site. 404. I had lost a day and a half to some phenomena of sleep. On my bedside table lay open boxes, black orbs. Programmable mindphasers. Memory blocked, partially at least. Feelings come back, that irresistible high. Images retaining, now flashing, exposing various thoughts I had when ‘on the orb.’ I had wanted to connect to her, the girl, the daughter. That picture on site, she was about to consume a black orb. I wanted to be her; to experience the same thing as much as possible, but what was she thinking of in the end? What was the programming about? Did her father set up the druq for her with his own fantasies? Was it all her idea? With no guess as to what they did after activation, I could only speculate, trust my instincts and go down that same path, same as far as the model of the druq was concerned. That black, open-ended system in a small ball-pill, swallowed, expanded in consciousness with the help of beer and water.  I found no physical scrawling about the trip but maybe I had done something online and was now forgetting it. The last update on the computer was 17 hours ago. Pulling up the ‘prior strokes’ program, I saw that I had written something for an online extreme erotica blog. Something bad was shivering in my spine. I followed the links, looking for the thing I had released into net-reality. Somehow, I felt that whatever I had written was connected or caused in some way, my memory loss (other than being the side effects of black orbs) As I waited for the page to load, some other energy of mind was within me. Vague, subliminal but almost breaking through to conscious thought. The page loaded, I scrolled down the forums, entered story division and saw my post trending at the top.

 ‘The daughter deal’ had a four star rating.

It was brutal, unforgiving. Sickening you could say.  First person rapist p.o.v.  Terrible. Those words, descriptions, and actions as it were, I didn’t recall writing them. Something inside me motioned towards the idea that I had channeled the work. Some kind of psychotic contact had been made I think. With whom? The father? Towards the end of the 3000-word work, it was written that the whole scene was witnessed by the father (the same father from the café? Was this even the same girl I’m reading about?) Confusion, a racket, a noise in my head. One part of me wanted to believe that everything that happened, from receiving the name card at the café, from watching the site, that twisted family drama – I wanted to believe it was all part of the orb druq sequence. The black programming was utterly responsible and now it has done my head in, mistaking fantasy for reality for fiction for memory for dream. I wasn’t sure any more, really. Everything was not reliable and I was feeling sickly.