Plunge

A fairy lives next door, and she shoots meth between her toes. In the dark crevices of her feet, the marks are hidden from her son—the changeling child that never leaves his room. She tells me he’s allergic to light. All light but blue light which his skin feeds on and incorporates into his being. I look at her and feel lust, because I took three hits of ecstasy. The needle is between her big toe and the long, snaking toe beside it. She says that toe is bigger than her pinky finger. Her changeling son has big toes too but they are gnarled and look like damaged trees. She flaps her translucent purple wings, touches her fiery, curling hair, and something twists in her eyes. The futility of light. Sunshine in a void. It’s as if all the flames exist atop her head and everything inside was snuffed out.

I am still sweating and jittery from the music and the MDMA. At the rave, the lights moved in luminous, blooming patterns—flowers swooping and dancing across the walls and over the ceiling. A universality consumed us so we breathed and grooved and felt as one, flailing arms raised upward, moving like time-lapsed plants, our legs as roots running deep with mycelium consciousness. There was an OD in the bathroom behind a locked door. The security guards kicked it in with steel-toed boots. Just a boy with clumped hair that fell down over his ears. They carried him by hands and feet to the curb where someone called an ambulance. No one left with him. Every breath struggled to enter my body. It was filling, thick with human physicality—sensual, pleasing. The lights from the mixers and laptops and keyboards illuminated the faces of the DJ as they guided us with a trail of sonic crumbs to overwhelming moments of auditory orgies, sounds moving within one another. We levitated. Then the lights came up and everything looked like a squalid basement, trash and unconscious bodies. Blood. A few people tucking their heads in the corner, hiding away from the sensory overload and sobbing or talking to themselves. The wind through the window on the drive home blew the sad images from my mind and all that’s left is the beauty.

The smell of fresh sweat is on my shirt. Everyone has gone to bed, but I’m sensitive to uppers. I’ll be awake for another four hours. I’m glad the fairy banged on the door. Glad she invited herself in. My house has some irremovable filth to it. Something in the walls and the wood floor that cannot be washed away with Pine Sol or Windex—more than smoke or wine stains or water rings. She blends into it like camouflage. She is not as small as I would imagine a fairy. Her legs are long and they unfold from her skirt like rockets blasting from Cape Canaveral. I wonder if she has ever been to Florida. I wonder if she liked it.

“Have you been to Florida?”

She says no but doesn’t elaborate.

The fairy doesn’t drink. She shoots substances that make her feel more. She has a sign on her porch that says, “Welcome to Fairyland. Watch out for falling pixie dust.” Of course, her pixie dust is meth. She amputated the ancient ways, because they atrophied and felt like dead weight. She has no use for old ideas or magic. I ask her if she ever wants to go back and live with fairies and mystical things.

She says no but doesn’t elaborate.

We talk. I watch the light wilt inside the void. She says, “You got a connect on crystal?” It’s real bubbly the way she says it.

“I know a guy who sells it, but I wouldn’t call him a connect.”

“I need to find someone else. The dude I go to now always makes me suck his dick.”

“You suck his dick for meth?”

“No, I suck his dick so I can buy the meth.”

I understand performing sexual favors to satiate addiction. I have considered it myself. But pleasuring a dealer just to fork over the cash for some crystal is an exploitative dynamic I’d never considered. It’s mind-boggling and nags at my vague, undefined sense of morality in a way that I haven’t felt before.

She came from the Darkwood Forest east of the City where everything grows from some deformed fungus placed by misguided alien ancestors from Messier 81. Another product of a failed panspermia project. We have that in common. She was adopted by a hillbilly family called the Satchets. Momma Satchet chain-smoked Virginia Slims, and when the fairy was a baby fairy the dogs attacked her. She has a scar from it on her right arm just below her elbow. She shows me, and I watch it move. Fairy scars move like worms hidden under rocks.

The ashtray overflows with cigarettes. When she takes a drag the smoke flows from her ears so she looks like a deranged cartoon, but she smiles and her mouth is the shape of a butterfly. Her teeth have an incandescent coating on them. No sign of meth mouth.

She tells me that her family doesn’t fuck with her anymore. They want nothing to do with her. She says it’s a lot like people who adopt wolf puppies and want to get rid of them when destroy their couch. Human families have no business raising fairies she says.

We walk through the neighborhood to the 7/11 to get more cigarettes and beer. The guy who lives two blocks down recycles cans. He leaves them all out in the road so that cars run over them and they get flattened. He once looked at me and said, “You could walk down this block once and find a story to write.” I always feel good when I think about that. We turn the corner and there they are, the cans, at least a hundred of them flat as old, dead squirrels in the road. There is a honeysuckle bush in his backyard and we stop to smell them and suck on the stems. The flowers pop and dance when she comes near and when she sucks on them her skin glows golden.

“I’ve got a green thumb, you know. I think it’s in my genes. My real parents probably lived off honeysuckle juice or some shit. I grew weed once, but I couldn’t keep it low-key. It smelled up the neighborhood. The plants got too tall and the buds were massive.”

“I remember that.”

We run into Terrible Ty outside wearing no shoes. We are both pretty geeked up, but so is Ty.

“Yo, y’all got a ciggie?”

“Sure do, sweetie.”

The fairy rustles through her purse. It must be bottomless because she is buried up to her waist before she pulls herself back out with a pack of Marlboro menthols. I tell her there is still some magic left in her life. She insists it is just a normal purse, a knockoff Michael Kors, but I know what I saw.

She does another bump and her eyes have a darkness that glows and her skin lights up red among the pitch black night.

“So, is popular fairy representation just some bullshit, or what? Like in Disney movies and shit?”

“How the fuck should I know? I mean, I can tell you that I’m not like Tinkerbelle. But I don’t think I need to.”

“You’ve never seen another fairy?”

She says no, but doesn’t elaborate.

We walk through the graveyard together and she talks to things that I can’t see. Ghosts, wraiths, and banshees I imagine. We walk below a birch tree, and the shadows cast from the street lights move. They look like her scars. I tell her that I wish I was a fairy or something more interesting. She laughs at that but doesn’t elaborate.

A light flashes from the other side of the graveyard beyond the headstones marked with dates from the 1800s. Night security comes running to scare us off thinking we’re robbers or necrophiliacs. The fairy grabs me, her wings becoming a rubbery sack flowing over my whole body, enveloping me, moving into my orifices and follicles. We vanish from the human dimension, tucked away somewhere arcane and hidden, disappearing from the guard. The last thing I see is the beam of his flashlight weaving through the limbs of the birch and illuminating a great horned owl. It lets out a long hoo that reverberates through every speck of empty space before the world fades entirely and becomes a great pure white like the soul of the big bang. Everything undulates in geometric patterns before my eyes adjust and I see a new world. There is color and life. The trees are very alive and they move. Every limb is flowering in these stargazer patterns that spin and dance so the whole thing breaths, limbs moving in and out of one another, causing the trees to levitate from the ground. There is a river that’s a thousand feet deep, but the water is clear and you can see the bottom. The fish are the size of speedboats.

“What is this place?”

“I mean…I thought you knew. Fairies are interdimensional creatures. This is where I come from. We don’t exist in a place like Fairyland or some shit, dude.”

“So you’re not stuck in the human dimension?”

“What? No. Not at all.”

“How often do you come back here?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a while.”

“Why don’t you stay here?”

“I like the suffering of the human world.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Have you ever read Philip K. Dick?”

“I saw Bladerunner 2049.”

“Right…well, PKD started recording his Exegesis in 1973. It was filled with a lot of repetitive meandering shit but he had a few points of philosophical clarity. He wrote Absolute suffering leads to—is a means to—absolute beauty.”

A dragon-bird creature flies above us. Its wings stretch wider than my field of vision. Its scale-feathers are filled with rainbow particles that move in dissipating patterns like a diamond mist. It lets out a long trumpeting noise like it’s are about to make a divine declaration.

“So, yeah, it’s easy here, and it’s beautiful and shit, but it can’t be absolute beauty because it has never seen or felt or internalized real suffering to the point where it transcends and becomes beauty. That fucking dragon-bird up there sustains itself entirely on water. It can’t even shoot flames and burn shit.”

“Where are the fairies?”

“In our dimension, the one this one exists on top of, they’d live somewhere around 23^rd street near Bobo’s Chicken. Actually, right by where I buy crystal. I’ve never been there though.”

“Can we please just check it out? I have to know what other fairies are like.”

“Fine.”

They live in the flying trees. The fairies wear smiles over their frowns, and all of it is held together by this substance that seems like vague boredom. They are on autopilot. There is nothing left to feel. No pleasure that hasn’t been tapped out. There is a honeysuckle fountain that never runs dry. It’s like they’re on a speed binge that never ends—they never come down—they have never felt a hangover or been strung out. What’s more, they don’t see me at all, but they cannot stop looking at this fairy from the other world. They can sense the stain. The humanity on her. The suffering. She’s tainted. It is the closest they get to performing something other than these mechanistic expressions of joy and happiness.

As she looks over her kin, I can see the contentment filling her. A docile takeover of her stream of consciousness. She coalesces with her addiction, her exploitation, her suffering. The amalgamation of all these things rises inside her so she lights up like a great flare blasted from the heart of the mega-machine. I see then a pinpoint of light coming from the void of her pupils. It is almost imperceptible but it strikes at my senses. I am seeing a sliver of satori—real like the light at the beginning of the universe. We spend some time watching the trees dance while the dragons swoop and howl above us. We swim. The water is sweet and there is something inside it that feeds oxygen through your skin so you can stay submerged forever. I want to be here and die here and never leave. Then it all fades and an afterburn of delight simmers in layers over the bent street signs, the garbage-lined parking lots, the pulsing shadows of junk-sick hobos, and the 23^rd street squat with the boarded up windows.

We walk to her dealer’s house, and she tells me to wait outside. I can feel the fairies moving through me, carrying on in their monotonous bliss. Just before dawn, I watch a boy on a bicycle riding through the street, doing bunny hops from the park benches at the bus stop. The wind moves through him, through his spokes. He hits a crack in the sidewalk and loses control of his bike, face planting on the street, skidding several feet over a curb and into a retaining wall. The scrape on his chin bleeds. There are teeth on the asphalt, and I can see the hole in his smile as he gets up muttering something to himself. There is a daisy planted in a pothole with the kid’s incisors scattered around it. The fairy spends a long time in the house, and when she gets back I don’t ask questions. What’s there to ask? She’s told me everything already. Been as transparent as her wings, as the simmering image that’s left in my mind of the place I exist on top of but can never see. There is still a sadness there in the void running deep like her magic purse, but what I saw crawling from her eyes in the fairy dimension is anchored inside me. A sigil burned into my mind’s eye. I cannot scrape it away. In a flash, I was lifted from cosmic blindness, muteness, deafness.

On our way home, we walk along the edge of the cemetery. The limbs of the birch hang over the black wrought iron fence, against the ivy that grows up its rails. The owl sits higher among the tangled branches than it did before. It hoos and I hear it differently—it sounds like the distended trumpeting of the dragons filled with diamond dust, a stretching sound of agony and joy.

At home, I watch her prep her rig. My stomach churns as the needle sticks between her toes, into scabs, and through scars, but I see some spirit there as the dropper plunges. I want something better for her. I don’t want her to suffer on purpose. Even for beauty. She’s the only fairy I’ve ever known.

“Do you feel better?” I ask.

She says no but doesn’t elaborate.