New Texas.
Hung around doing lots of absolute cocaine while Greg, Chris and Tim stared out from the root hut smoking more old technology. What they called Dos1 found yesterday in the Lavahouse. It was mostly motherboards, simple circuits. They said they liked the high. They got the screen flicker effect, the electric tech that never did sync up with human’s eyes, with light proper either. Forgot to figure in the relativity effect they did. Dos1 caused oral fixation, a fattening of the belly, desire for communication. They even rolled fake cigarettes with leaves from around the edges of the root tent. All they needed was a ‘bag of chips’ they said. This was the maddening effect of the drug, its personal little red herring, or rosebud. The Twentyzeroes-specter, they called it (even though the drug was far older.) This bag of chips is a fairly obvious need, some kind of food, but some of the machine food from the day. A specific kind that doesn’t occur any more. I noticed some of the same effects from the cocaine I was rubbing into my receptor gland, left cheek. Had it stylized to look like an old USB port, little tiger stripes around the border. Fashionably tacky, but it’s all that my girlfriend could really do with her biopaste. She wasn’t much for art.
They became one dark group in the three o clock sun as I darted in and out of the roots, feeling the absolute cocaine in my gums and mid neck, right where it hit the best. I knew Greg was probably in the middle of the group, but it was hard to tell in the shade of the browngold root tent when I came back from my darting exercise. I tried to keep one eye closed like a pirate to get it to adjust to the dark faster, but it didn’t help much. I jolted at a cold breeze from the direction of the forest before a dark flabby arm reached out for me from the haze of burning circuit boards and stale sour dough smell, grabbed me by a leg. It spoke:
“Carpet. Safety in dry places. Dirt in wet ones. Disease in wet ones. Dark rooms with projectors. Pictures in light. Dry warmth. We desire dry warmth with occasional aycee and hidden spaces. Do you have any carpet?”
“What’s cappit?” Chris coughed from the back of the pile.
“Carpet,” Greg and Tim’s voice continued like a duotone markerbrush, red and brown. One line. “Air conditioning and blankets. A comfortable high.”
They were far gone. I snapped my leg out from under them and focused through the dome of roots. The breeze from the forest brought too many smells for me to focus on them. A million leaves rustling out of pattern in the field far down the road. The road always hurt to walk on. A face was peeking from behind it, I was sure. I tried to stand up a bit for perspective, but it worked like a picture. No movement of viewpoint. I was frustrated, but understood that it wasn’t the absolute cocaine’s fault, no way. It heightened all the senses. This was the work of some creature’s defense mechanism. It didn’t seem threatening.
Absolute Cocaine mostly helps us to build houses. It contains the direct information for it. Just like an old book would contain it, but there it’s cased in the old technology of language, something we still learn to round out our senses. They are careful though, not to let us trap ourselves in it. It’s a tough cocoon to hatch from unless you’re me and all your required service time was with the New Order of the Silent Amish. Their dial ups and smoking drove me insane. “The pitfall of entertainment format” was all I had written in my notebook while I was there, covered a page with it. Made little monsters out of the phrase written over and over.
I turned on the balls of my feet, ground the dirt down a little bit. The gregchristim mass was still rolling softly in it’s cloud of smoke, each kid trying to get on the top of the pile, to get away from the wet dirt. The Dos1 was a half-spent burning square in the dirt. The figure in the middle of the pile was laughing now because top and bottom were switching so fast that he didn’t have to move. They still hadn’t noticed his laughter. My left hand twitched. Forest breeze again. It blew the mass of Dos1 smoke over to me. It smelled like the burning husk of a foot callus now, some soggy bread smell still clinging. I didn’t try to duck the smoke, stayed in my squat position. The huts and seed houses blew up with sun behind them, made the gregchristim pile look silly, shameful. Greg Chris and Tim were piling leaves now, tracing name brands into each stem with a slow fingernail, mouthing ‘comforter’ like some kind of incantation.
Invisible, I realized looking past them at the beetle-scab houses. Some vines were sticking up like unruly hair, but most were the same absolute cocaine root model we had. Invisible, that’s what the comforter was, there but not visible. They were surrounding themselves with shining silk-ghost circuits organized into grids, control and the warmth of an old feeling from a ghost world decomposed and departed, separated in time but kept on file, sliced off evenly as if by guillotine, slapped down to melt over us when we put it’s artifacts into us. I picked at my own port and stumbled away from Chris, Greg, and Tim.
For the first time ever I left without saying bye and without the urge to return home.
Smeared.
I am living proof. I am dust under the nails. I am male hands sprouting from unzipped pants. I am abused dog who pees on the carpet when master comes home. I am cracked voice, flushed face, laughter suppressed.
I am touch that cannot be un-touched. I am dinner conversation that pushed her all the way back to his bed. I am the rustle in his sheets, un-aged.
Fancy tickles from simple men. Tender lips on a chapped face. Bow struck against strings and then held there by female hand, made to move along them, against them, to chord, to draw them out like one draws water from a well. Cat in heat yowl pulled up in jerks by braided rope, rippling in its wooden bucket. Lapped afterwards by hairy tongues, beaded and brought up to swallow.
Deep stink fur on a hiding thing, woven belly pressed to floor. Kinky wet carpet that I made myself, un-squelched by boot, left to stale by the window. I look up in loops with ears held back like retracted airplane wings. I have head of least resistance, hair patted flat and wet so that eyes glance off it it.
Let out: scream caught by man-hands again, held out from opened pant-crotches, shoved back down throat into pocket behind Adam's apple. Scream felt there for fourteen years, crammed like wet string, crawling like ants. Bowed and drawn out, never removed.
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