2017:
It feels like I'm stumbling home drunk again. It's raining, but the raindrops are syringe needles. They don't fall with the force of a thrown dart; they hit the skin and bounce right off. They don't hurt, but where they touch the skin they itch. They litter the ground and it's a struggle to coordinate each drunken step. Wouldn't want one sliding through my boots, heaven's no.
Why do I feel so intoxicated?
The man on the corner has a laced-on face. The edges of it are lined with metal eyelets and the eyelets are pulled back taut with black shoestring. The back of his head glistens red wet muscle beneath the network of string. He is smiling at me, but the smile is the result of his streched face and not at all genuine. Below the face lies menace.
I see my reflection in his sunken masked eyes: I am huddled fetally in a too-white room drooling into a puddle that gathers around my cheek, unmoving, unblinking eyes staring at nothing.
The man with the laced-on face tilts his head and the reflection is gone. I frantically scratch myself everywhere it itches. It itches everywhere.
"This is the only the edge," the man says. I see the shadow of his real mouth moving behind the too-widely-grinning mask mouth. "Just the tip. Just to see if you like it."
I've never heard a chuckle that sounded predatory before.
He steps back and I can see the road rise up to meet the horizon. I walk toward it and he blocks my path.
"Not today," he says.
My first tangible thought is "moisture". My face is coated in it. My mouth is absent of it. I'm still itchy, but less now than I was.
Dr. Sutton is sitting on a folding chair beside me, writing on his clipboard. "Can you describe your experience for me?" he says over his glasses. I roar wordlessly and reach for him. My hands are zip-tied together. As are my feet. I don't get very far.
"You haven't converted," he says. "That's a good start. Very promising." He rises. "Are you sure you don't want to add your perspective? For posterity?"
I tell him to fuck himself. He writes on his clipboard, then leaves.
I'm left with my thoughts. What the fuck was that place? How could a little bit of blood leave me in such a pathetic, delusional state? A side-effect of a disease? Hell?
All I know is that tonight when I close my eyes I'm going to see the man with the laced-on face and it terrifies me.
The lights go out. I sit up, awake, staring into the darkness. My head nods here and there, but I jerk myself awake every time.
Eventually the lights come back on. Time drags by. The doctor comes back in with his little clipboard. The soldiers hold me down while he takes a blood sample. I don't bother fighting. I'm too tired. I'm too beaten. The doctor takes my blood sample and leaves. The soldiers leave behind him.
I haven't seen Bacchus or Starin in days. Maybe I did dream them.
The food tray/waste bucket combo make their appearance. I eat. I shit. This is me, reduced to my most basic functions. At some point I drift off to a dreamless sleep.
The opening of the door wakes me. The doctor is in.
"Your body is completely free of contaminants. Not overly surprising given how small the dose was." He is holding a larger needle. "Shall we try twice the dosage?"
I fight back. Hard. I don't want that in me. I surge against the soldiers. I buck and I thrash. The needle jabs in painfully and the burning comes back. The itching spreads like fire. And I scream.
The man with the laced-on face is still standing on his corner. He is waiting for me. The needle rainstorm is gone. Instead, everything is crawling with insects. Thick black beetles with men's faces and long jagged tusk-like mandibles. Their hairy legs scuttle across my skin.
The man with the laced-on face smiles behind his fleshy mask. "A double dose of Communion today," he says. "Take this and drink. This is my blood."
I feel drunk. Like everything is happening to me too quickly for me to process.
"What is this place?" I ask.
"How would you ever trust my answer?" he says. "If your psyche, than I don't know any more than you. If hell, then I'm a demon and can't be trusted. If heaven...well, you wouldn't believe me if I told you this was heaven."
"Is it heaven?" I ask.
"Hell if I know." He roars laughter at his joke.
I scratch and slap at the scuttling insects. They take cumbersome flight with armor wings and settle back exactly as they were. The insects scuttle on him, too. They crawl on him, they crawl in and out of the space between his mask and face. They bulge beneath the tautly stretched skin. They don't seem to bother him. Of course they don't bother him.
He steps aside and that road rises up again, to taste of the horizon. "We can walk a ways today," he says. "Not far, but a little."
I step onto the street and we walk together side-by-side.
"I know this place," I say. It's the street I grew up on. This could still be either my psyche or hell. "I've ruled out heaven, though" I say.
The shitty apartment buildings stare down at me with their craggy-bricked facades, grinning broken-stooped grins. A kid comes running from a building. It's Christian Diangelo. He's got on that stupid denim jacket he always wore and his ears are still sticking out the side of his head like Mickey Mouse ears.
"Hey Smallfry," Christian yells to me. It seems ridiculous; I've got twenty years on this kid. But twenty years ago, I looked up to Christian Diangelo. Usually from street level, through my arms as I cowered in the fetal position and tried to block his fists and feet. "My dad says your old man owes him rent." Papa Diangelo was our lazy slumlord landlord. He trained his kids to be muscle. That's how pathetic that worthless fuckstick was.
"Yeah?" I say. "Your old man owes us a working furnace. Your mom's tits get rock hard whenever she spends the night." This is me now responding in a way that me then could only have dreamed of. Christian seems stunned into silence. For a second. Before he lets loose a youthful battlecry and launches himself at me with a savage fury. He gets in three wide swings before I plant my boot in his chest and send him sprawling.
He lands facefirst.
All of the impotent rage that defined my youth comes crashing back with the force of a swinging I-beam. I bring my booted foot thundering down on his twelve-year-old head and watch the ketchup-packet reaction it induces. I do this again and again and again while the man with the laced-on face watches and laughs.
I wake up screaming shrill, maniacal laughter that quickly breaks down into body-wrenching sobs. What is happening to me?
Doctor Sutton is there, monitoring me. I call him a cunt and he makes note of it on his clipboard. I call him a soulless beauracrat and his eyebrow raises a bit. He writes that down, too.
"His blood takes you to hell," I say. "I saw your mother there, sucking cocks. Your mother sucks cocks in hell, Mengele."
"Quoting Exorcist," he says. "Shall I attribute that as a side effect?"
I want to projectile-vomit all over his stupid fucking clipboard.
"Rest up," he says. "Tomorrow there will be more tests."
Thirty cc's takes me to the corner gas-station and the owner that caught me stealing candy bars. The young me had cried. The dream me threw the old man through the plate-glass window and beat him to death with the bat he kept behind the counter. I pulped him for three days until Dante's blood worked its way out of my system.
Forty cc's brought me to the park where some older kids had constantly chased my brother and I off of the basketball courts. I tore through them now like a force of nature, and picked bits of them from my nails and teeth for a week while the intoxicating blood surged through my veins.
I am wheeled back to the operating theater for fifty cc's. The audience wants a show. The straps dig into my skin, but I ignore them. I'm a junky. I strain toward the needles when they're brought into view. My mouth is open, mumbing nonsense in broken tongues, eyes wildly rolling like a spooked horse. The first needle sinks in and I sink into it.
The man with the laced-on face is standing beside the gurney. I am where I had been: in the operating theater with the suits standing on high, looking down on me.
"This one will be fun," the man with the laced-on face says to me as he undoes my straps. I grin broadly as a shark. I take the needles from Doctor Mengele and I stab, stab, stab him. I puncture his eyes so that a thick gelatal goo runs down his cheeks like tears. I drag the points of the needles down his face like claws. And I stab. And I stab. And I stab.
And I'm on the upper level. I hold the needles like knives. I leap onto victims like a tiger. I throw them like an enraged ape. I clamp teeth upon their neck-tied jugulars and I shake my head like a wolf. I taste blood. It fills me.
And when I've torn through them, I scratch at the itch that fills me. I scratch until skin gives way beneath my fingertips. I scratch until the skin peels back. But the itch is in the blood, in the veins, and I scratch my way to it. I tear away my flesh in chunks. I rip out my hair in chunks. I pick at my eyes like they were scabs. So much of that burning blood inside of me. Too much. I'll be trapped in here forever.
A sharp pain on my cheek. Someone has slapped me awake. I am still strapped to the gurney, but I'm being pushed down a hallway at full gallop. Bacchus' smiling face looking down.
"You were right," he says. "They insisted that we bring you." I can barely hear him over the gunshots. Gunshots? I look right and left and see Guillermo and Lucas, flanking me, armed to the teeth. Occasionally they turn and fire backward. We round a corner.
The man with the laced-on face looks upon me with pity. "Not enough time," he says. He reaches behind his head and begins untying. The laced-on face slackens.
Another slap. "Stay here," Bacchus says. Gunshots everywhere. Someone cries out and I hear a thud. "Grab that gurney," Bacchus says, and I realize that Dante and I are dragracing. Whoever was pushing him dropped out of the race, apparently.
As the laced-on face slackens, it relaxes into a familiar shape. Minus the long white hair, this is Dante. "Maybe I'm done wearing his face," the man behind Dante's face says. He lowers the eyelet-ringed Dante-mask. His head is glistening red muscle, a horror right out of an anatomy textbook. "Maybe," he says with fleshless lips "I want to wear yours for awhile."
We crash into daylight.
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