Guided Meditation W/ Space Drug

Down in the hollow, there are fifteen families, each of them in homesteads along the river in various states of disrepair. For visualization purposes, you can imagine them as little piles of flaming garbage situated equidistant along a gash filled with black paint or tar. They’re not garbage really, but from above, you couldn’t be faulted for thinking so. The flames are electricity, their porch lights and televisions. The tar is tar, though. The river is a mess, and threatening to harden over completely on the hot days, so much so that it’s become a sort of game for the families’ children to try to dash across it without losing a sneaker. They don’t have a name for it, this game, but it is a routine activity. 

Alternatively, you could think of a zippered pocket, its teeth as the tin of their roofs and most of them missing, so that there are fifteen in total; the pocket is permanently agape, black, and of incalculable depth, containing any number of objects: cast-off beer cans, sneakers, the husk of a rusted Oldsmobile, but nothing living, certainly no fish. That would be absurd, fish in a pocket, a pocket for fish.

While we’re up here, notice the trees. Maybe you have not seen that many before. Some fifteen feet from any one of the homestead’s sagging porch steps, their cover becomes dense enough to seem all-consuming, so much so that it’s a sort of game for the families’ children to see how far they can wander into the forest before it doesn’t feel like a game anymore. For visualization purposes, imagine a hall of mirrors in which the exit isn’t obvious and each reflective surface has been replaced with rough bark. After not all that long, imagine an approximation of your face in every groove and crenulation. See the needle of your compass as an airplane’s propellor. I’ve gone about as far into the forest as any one of the families’ children, to be with you, a person who has not seen so many trees, so much so that I’ve gotten older and can’t remember much about the hollow, except for details about its geographic situation and its tar river. And here you are. Still thinking about the fish pocket, aren’t you? I can tell. 

You know, if we up the dose a bit, we might could get a little closer. Is that something you’d want? Squeeze my hand if that’s something you’d want. Man, if that’s you squeezing, then I’m kind of concerned about your ability to handle a larger dose. Maybe you just got a weak grip is all. Alright, alright. I get it. You’re strong. 

Just brace yourself for some pressure around the injection site. Maybe some more when I’m checking the cables. Try not to jerk around too much, okay babe?

How’s the cloud cover? Is it dissipating? Are you seeing in higher fidelity the branches, the leaves? There might should be some figures moving amongst the piles of garbage. You should be seeing pretty clearly now they’re not garbage. They’re homes. We called them homesteads, in our persistent inclination to embrace the past. The figures are my family. You might should see some resemblance, maybe in the way they move. You make fun of how I limp around the kitchen; well, maybe you can see now it’s kind of congenital, hereditary. We were all limping around the hollow, which was what made getting across the tar the thrill and accomplishment that it was. And of course you had to come back, which, out of breath and maybe short a shoe, was a lot harder. You’d want to stop and fish for the lost footwear. This could be a fatal mistake.

You might now be at the eye-level of a very tall man. If so, see if you can see a homestead with blue paint on its metal siding. It might be peeling. It might actually be a kind of dull silver; it’s hard to say. I might just be thinking it was blue, because you know that’s my favorite color, when all the while it wasn’t even painted, just the same kind of dull silver the other homesteads were, but in my mind, imbued—imblued, yeah, I hear you. Laugh it up. 

What I’m saying is, this homestead was my homestead, my home. 

You think maybe you’d be able to tell which was mine just from having lived with me as long as you have. Like you’d think you’d be able to detect trace elements of my person, the way you could around the apartment, even if I was just a kid back then. But maybe that’s wishful thinking. Maybe that’s expecting too much from our contemporaneous personal-emotional connection, even if it is as well-established and fate-based as I think we’d both agree that it is. Squeeze my hand if you agree it’s both fate-based and well-established. I won’t say anything about your grip.

Well, so you could also be looking for a rusted Oldsmobile. It might still be parked outside. I mean just look for a car. An Oldsmobile was a type of car.

That pressure you’re feeling is another couple mLs. Just a little boost. I thought it’d be easier to take if I didn’t warn you, and I think I was right because you didn’t even flinch. Oh, don’t start convulsing now. Not funny.

Right, so you see it. Yeah, ma was a gardener alright. I mean, you can see she tried. There was a lot she was working against. Like her kids trying to kill themselves all the time, and the river being mainly tar and of a consistency not conducive to life. So I think maybe the plants were an exercise in the limitation of mitigating factors, if you know what I mean. Like she could be real deliberate with the watering and fertilizing, and like, aware of pH levels, and if the plants still died, say, “You know what? I did everything I could. This was not my fault.” 

Being able to say something was not your fault and believe it, was not something congenital or hereditary or even all that common in the hollow, let alone my family. I’m not sure I can even do it now. You know, like have something bad happen and not think, at least in some tiny way, that it was my fault, that I’m the reason. Maybe that’s self-absorbed. Maybe it’s self-absorbed to make you sit here and sift through all this stuff with me, but if it is, I certainly don’t feel like I’m benefitting from it. The self-absorption, if it is self-absorption, it kind of hurts, like I guess in the way that having your own stomach digest itself would hurt. Let’s be clear; I’m not having a good time. I just think having you go there and see it with your own eyes would help our relationship. Help you see where I’m coming from, I mean, when I’m being terrible to you. 

So you might now be at like a toddler’s height, short enough to go in through the dog door. Yeah, we had dogs. We also had cats, chickens, rabbits, and a hermit crab, all of which made frequent use of that door. The crab only once though. You can probably guess he didn’t come back. 

You’re free to stop and pet any that you see. Just know they won’t react, and you won’t feel anything. 

Thinking now, it’s probably unlikely that the hermit crab actually used the dog door. Seems like maybe that was a white lie on my mom’s part. You can’t exactly say a hermit crab went to live on a farm and have it be believed by anybody. But if you just so happen to pass a crab on your way in, do let me know. That would be good information. 

So let me just go ahead now and apologize for the state of things in there, but also just say I guess that’s kind of why I wanted to show it to you, so you could see how bad it was, and maybe understand why I’m such a freak about about keeping the apartment clean, and speck-free, and why I’m always scrubbing the kitchen down with abrasive chemicals that may or may not sometimes also be mood-altering, and why I won’t let you have a dog. The carpet, especially, is bad, because of all the animals, so I’m sorry you have to be so close to it. Also, we were never the type of family to take our shoes off at the door, our shoes being very dear objects to us, due to their near-daily loss in the river, which, as you might notice, also meant tracking in a lot of tar. The carpet may appear to you as simply black paint, or filth, but it’s tar; I can assure you and I’m sorry to say it, that even if we did remove our shoes, our soles would be blackened; our socks would be crust. Maybe it’s good you’re so close to it, so as to better illustrate my point. 

Notice, also, the scope and severity of the clutter. See a clear distinction between the tidiness of the apartment, the home-having quality of every object, and the hoard you see here. From your vantage, it might should be massive, a whole city hewn of cardboard, of towering stacks of disused electronic equipment, of garbage that really is garbage, like regular trash. My father was a packrat, and prepped, he thought, for any number of possible apocalypses, except, I should note, the one that was actually happening, actively, around him. See: the tar river, the ark-like accumulation of animals, what have you. If you draw near to his armchair, he may appear to you as having whiskers, coarse fur, a long tail, because that’s how I see him now. You might not see him at all. He might already be at the wheel of the rusted Oldsmobile. Time will tell. 

So but hang left along the path I’ve cleared for you, when I was a similar height. Know most of my earliest memories involve clearing debris, crawling through it, the way you are now. See tiny handprints with the pawprints in the tar, waypoints like Hansel’s in the woods. Know it wasn’t all bad, that sometimes it was actually like a game, to not get lost or crushed, that a city hewn of cardboard and spit wire was fertile ground for the imagination, that it could become, variably, an ancient tomb, a dungeon’s bowels, actually urban, with the right applied lens, all of which, being a far cry from the homesteads and the forest and the river, felt transportive and palliative and like magic. See the navigational skills and internal compass honed here as critical to my later escape, my ability to orient myself in a hall of bark mirrors. 

See my bedroom.

See how it was also my brothers’ and my sisters’ bedrooms. 

See how we were stacked in there. 

See the space above the bed, where from fishing line are suspended several model airplanes, fashioned from debris in increasingly skillful displays of technical proficiency, unto which, each night, we’d project our own growing desires for flight, for wings. My brothers made them, garnering more detail from each passing plane, until eventually they stopped altogether, or were traveling too high overhead to be seen. So inferences had to be drawn, sonic booms rendered in additional engines, in more exotic airframes, until the models were indistinguishable from the trash they were pieced from, convolved to the point of incoherence, still hung, scarily from the ceiling, as a mock mid-air crash. They were dead-eyed engineers, my brothers, by the time I left. 

So but know this and understand my aversion to projects, to your arts and crafts, why I won’t under any circumstance assemble the Ikea furniture we ordered. I know what’s in my blood. I know that when presented with instructions, I’ll inevitably deviate and produce something monstrous, something potentially dangerous that we don’t want in the apartment, that’s all sharp edges and could fall and impale you at any moment. I don’t want to impale you, is what I’m saying. 

No, I don’t think this intravenous drug we’re taking is a form of micro-impalement; I know what you’re thinking.

I also know what you’re feeling. I know that you’re sad, that this is making you sad, but I think it’s important. I think the impediments we’ve encountered on our path to a more healthy, less codependent relationship can no longer be helped by just talking. We’ve talked enough. We’ve sketched out rough cartographies of our personal-emotional traumas. What we need now is a review of the primary sources, the original documents. It’s what I’ve been saying for months, but saying something is just more talk. 

We can do you next, I promise. Maybe on the next day you have off.

But just one last thing, because I can feel you coming down a little bit. I am too, and we can pick out a movie or something. But just go outside, quick as you can and we might still have time. Follow the tire tracks to the tar river. See it distended like a bad vein. My father, in the Oldsmobile, reversing. Can you hear what he’s saying, babe?

Or is it just static?

Over a Vat of Acid

There’s a sort of uvula-like appendage present in the guts of grandfather clocks and some smaller, decorative timepieces I’ve seen, that I don’t know the name of, and now probably never will, that slices at the air inside the clock with a sure and steady frequency and has been not all I’ve thinking about, but a lot of what I’ve been thinking about, since I’ve been stuck up here, suspended over this vat of acid. 

I’m no chemist; it’s acid, I’ve had to infer, that roils, rust-orange, some ten feet below me. Though, of course, from my perspective, it’s up. If I tip my head back, it encompasses my entire field of view like the turbid surface of a sun, which makes me like an Icarus on pause in a malodorous curtain of steam. It’s funny how predictably one’s mind goes there, in times when disintegration is highly probable, or at least in close proximity: to Greece, I mean, when it always felt so far away, so mist-obscured; when I know as much about Greece as I do about death, which is to say, the principal characters, the gist. A crust is accumulating around my face. That’s an inference as well, from a tightening I feel around my T-zone. I’m itchy and, you guessed it, my hands are bound.

There’s a slight breeze here, or at least the suggestion of one, from my also sure and steady, swinging passage over the vat; no sunlight though, my captor has been careful to black out all the windows. His comings and goings are similarly hidden and follow a schedule that is fittingly psychopathic, which is to say, no schedule. He’s always dropping in unannounced, which I guess is his right, and cackling and making barely-coherent speeches, the politics of which I don’t agree with at all, but have to tolerate because of where he has me in relation to his acid, the general power imbalance, and his spidery-looking hand’s frequent hovering over the lever for mid-speech rhetorical effect. I still have no clue who he is. 

Among these complaints, the area of skin immediately around the iron anklet that secures me has grown ominously pale, has traversed the whole bright spectrum of pain, settling now on an acute numbness that radiates, advancing toward my right knee. My left knee has been at points drawn up around my midsection, at a range of clock hand intervals between ten and twelve, and rests, most comfortably, at what might look on my captor’s bank of security monitors like a kind of freeze-framed jackknife. There’s been no mention of where my shoes have gone, no talk of lunch. 

It might also be worth it to point out that I’m rotating, that every five minutes or so, the length of chain to which I’m affixed will reach the peak number of twists it can tolerate, and so, will begin to revolve in the opposite direction. The panoramic view I’m afforded of my captor’s warehouse digs will seem new again, on what must be the fiftieth pass. Previously unconsidered avenues of escape might all at once leap out, but sure enough, soon enough, will recede into the concrete walls, into the exposed network of pipes that support the chain, and I’ll just be left to unwind and wonder at what a waste of prime real estate his set-up here is, why he hadn’t converted it to lofts. He’d be out a lair, I guess is the obvious answer, but it still seems like poor business sense. 

Anyways, I’ve been thinking about clock parts and time generally, mainly because I have no idea how long I’ve been hanging up here, how much I’ve missed. There’s stuff I’ve got to do that my captor doesn’t seem concerned about at all. Like I have bills. When something like this happens to somebody in a movie, or on television, there’s always a rapidly expiring digital timer or a comically oversized hourglass that can be conveniently cut-away to, to build tension. That’s a luxury I don’t have. I’ve got to rely on rough estimates based on oscillation rates, on old-fashioned counting. I keep waiting for my captor to get bored. I’m afraid he’s not going to. He’s reliably, villainously engaged. I miss TV.