I’d been here before, but that did not make the place familiar. The heat, the red haze, the high-back booths and the bar, all the same, all as mysterious as the last time. An enigma I’d seen before, and was no closer to understanding. No, familiarity was not a feeling that this place engendered. At least this time I wasn’t quite as surprised by the scene, I turned to look, and expected to find underworld denizens muttering to one another in a corner. And I expected her.

I sat down at the bar again, only she hadn’t appeared yet. I sat a while, just looking and not really seeing. I allowed my eyes to drift over surfaces, imagining my gaze was like water, flowing. I could stay here a while, I thought. Wait for a bit. Not that I felt safe here, but it was somewhere I could stop, to see if my shadow would come close enough for me to see him.

I’d felt a bizarre presence for weeks now. One of those feelings that sound all too cliché when written down, until experienced first-hand, and is finally understood. A genuine sense of being tailed, watched, observed and noted. Some obsessive pair of eyes that never left my back, never missed anything, never saw anything but me. I could feel it haunting my days and my nights, and finally, I decided it had to stop. Something had to be done. So I came here. And waited.

My patience paid off before long. He walked in casually, not attempting subtlety. In fact, other than my instantaneous gut feeling it was him, there was no real reason to believe it was him. Little could be said about him at this point, other than he was male, in a man’s overcoat and hat, presumably to keep the rain out. Seemed like it rained every time I came through this place. With the ambience in the bar what it was, I couldn’t see any more clearly than what I’ve already described.

He surprised me by seating himself on the stool directly beside mine. His coat still dripped on the floor, his hat he placed on the bar, to his right. Water pooled on the brim. I was more drawn to his face, though, as that was something familiar. Too familiar. It was my own – or at least a very good imitation of me. His eyes were a little darker, deeper set maybe, or the eyebrows a little more prominent. And his hair and stubble had more grey tone than mine did. But it was a close match. Very close.

We said nothing, he and I. When he looked up at me, I only looked back at him. There were no words that came to me. We just stared. For how long, I couldn’t say, but it may have been quite significant. Something happened to my thoughts, some kind of suspension, because when the Voodoo Lady finally appeared, or, when I finally became aware of her, it was like waking from a trance.

"I bin stan’in heah fo’ ‘most fi’ minutes you know? Wat you be starin at?" she said. I furrowed my brow in reply.

"Dis deh way you talk to e’rybody?" she asked. "Or am I sommin special?" I could hear her, but her words didn’t seem to require a response, until she smacked her hand down on the table with a startling crack. Suddenly I felt I was able to speak, or needed to speak, either way, I spoke.

"Can’t you see him?" I asked.

"See who?"

"The man, sitting here. He looks just like me," I said. "All he does is follow me around, and now, he’s finally here, and he just stares at me."

"Sho’ honey." She paused, taking measure of me. I finally turned to look at her, and was surprised at the gravity of her expression. Her great white eyes bored deeply into mine, looking for something.

"You ain’ crazey are you?" she was confirming with herself more than with me. "No you be seein sommin sho’."

"Yeah," I said. "I see him."

"An all he do is follow you ’round?" she asked.

"And stare at me. Glare at me a little I guess. I don’t know, he looks, not angry exactly. But something close. Impatient maybe."

"Sho’ I see," she said.

She leaned back, resting her hip against the back cupboards, and lit a cigarette from her little wooden box.

"Yeah I see," she said again after taking a drag. I looked between her and the man beside me. He hadn’t moved an inch. I even watched to see if he blinked, and he did, eventually.

"It’s like he’s waiting for something," I said. "Waiting for me to do something maybe."

"Well," she tapped some ash into a tray. "You waitin’ fo’ anytin’ baby?"

"What? Me?"

"Yeah you! Wat you been waitin’ fo’ lately?"

"I don’t know," I replied.

"Well baby, mayhap is you we all waitin’ fo’" she said. "Maybe evin you is waitin fo’ you."

"Me? What about him?"

She smiled, that enormous crescent moon smile that only the darkest humans can command.

"E’rybady’s got a ghost," she said. "Yours ain’ like mine, sho’ but we all gat em."

"What ghosts? A ghost is following me around?"

"Well baby I sho cayn’ see him! So he mus’ be a ghost! Yo’ ghost. One all made up fo’ you especial. Trayn’ tell you summin sho’."

"But he hasn’t said anything! What am I supposed to do with him?"

"You sayin he look like he be waitin fo’ sommin. He’s yo’ ghost, he lookin at’choo. Do I hav’a put a dem pieces all togetha’ fo’ you boy?"

I felt like a child being lectured. I guess I was, in a way. It made sense the way a magic trick makes sense when you learn the trick. Simple, so simple its disappointing.

"Yo’ ghost is jes’ you. He is you. You waitin fo’ y’own self. Wat’choo waitin’ fo’ baby? Wat’choo trayn t’do that you ain’ done yit?"

I knew then. There were dozens of things I wished I’d done, but really, it was the wishing. It was the warring. All the time, I was chastising myself for not doing things, for wasting my time. I fought myself, berated myself mercilessly. Yet I got nowhere. I only spent my energy fruitlessly. In an endless circle of chasing myself. And here I was. I’d finally caught up to myself, finally I was chastising myself for chastising myself.

"How," I asked after a long spell of quiet. "How do I stop the spiral?"

"Das’ yo’ question, not mine. But, I migh’ sejest dah shortest way to get ‘newhere is to start out in dat direction to begin wit."

"You look like shit baby, are you all right?"

My wife’s concern didn’t surprise me, I felt like shit too. Burning eyes, heavy head, and general surly mood are to be expected after the kind of night I’d had.

"I’m okay, just slept really badly last night," I replied, finishing off my cup of coffee. Early morning sunlight filtered through the miniblinds, scything into my eyes as I stood at the sink rinsing my dishes. I shut them for a minute, trying to coax some of the roughness out of their surface.

"Well, I hope everything goes well today," she said.

"So do I. What a great day to have to get up and go on so little sleep," I replied.

Driving to work in the sluggish morning traffic freed my mind, or forced it rather, to wander ahead to the series of meetings I had lined up today to attempt to deal with the situation that had finally come to a head between Kevin and myself. He’d been causing me grief for weeks now, but the circulation of a survey and the subsequent publication of the review of my team had finally crossed the line. Not only did he not have any semblance of the authority to conduct such a survey, but he’d gone about it in such an unprofessional manner that the results were outright slander. I’d had enough, and had called in the legal team and my surperiours and his to have a chat about the situation. It was time for that bastard to face the music.

**

A chill passed through my body as I turned my key in the door. The knob moved as though it hadn’t been locked in the first place, which was not a good feeling. I was the first one home today, unusually, but that meant the door most definitely should have been locked. Cautiously I proceeded inside, my nerves electric. Who knew what would be waiting for me in here, I thought. Maybe I’d surprise whoever it was, which I wasn’t sure would be a good thing or not.

I crept slowly through my house, avoiding the squeaky parts of the wooden floor- though surely anyone inside would have heard the door opening. The air was deathly still. I checked every room anyway, every corner sending waves of goosebumps up my neck and down my arms. I didn’t find anyone, or see anything obvious missing. I shook my head, trying to shrug off the growing sense that I was not as alone as I appeared to be.

"I need to get some sleep tonight," I muttered to the empty house.

**

"Hi honey," I said to my daughter as she returned home from school. My Theresa, my little angel, smiled at me.

"Hello daddy." She was surprised to see me home early from work, and still young enough that it made her happy. Only a year or two more, I figured, before she’d rather have the house to herself for a couple hours after school… doing God knows what. Let’s not think about that right now, I decided.

"How was your day?" I put down the newspaper.

"It was good, I handed out the invitations like mummy said, after school," she said. "Only Sasha wasn’t there, so I will give her one tomorrow."

"Sounds good," I replied. Theresa’s eleventh birthday was next weekend, and we were going to have a handful of her school friends over for a dress-up birthday party. A house full of squealing pre-teens I thought, won’t that be fun! Really, I hoped it would be, a few of the parents might come, we invited them on the invitations as well, so perhaps Robyn and myself would have the chance to socialise with non-workmates. Wouldn’t that be nice! To shoot the breeze with someone my own age, or thereabouts, without having to talk shop.

"Be sure you tell me if any of your friends tell you they are coming or not, okay?" I asked.

"Okay," she said. I smiled. Her life could be so simple, I thought. No one was mounting some kind of campaign to blacken her name and ruin her career. She didn’t have a career to protect. Oh to be ten again, I chuckled. I watched from the family room as she fixed herself a snack and sat down to do some homework. I wondered how long it would be until she would protest that ritual.

**

I bolted upright in bed, the dark instantly crushing me with blackness. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear anything but my own breathing, ragged and dry. Cold sweat made me shiver where the blankets had fallen down my bare body. Fuck. So naked and enveloped in darkness that felt like a death shroud. That laughter echoing out of my subconscious, my ears run as if I’d actually heard it. That’s all I could remember of the dream, the nightmare, was a laugh. A maniacal cackling, and a vague sense it was directed at me. Two a.m. could feel so heavy when you wake up alone to your own fear.

**

"Damn John, you coming down with something?" Wil asked. "Your eyes look pretty terrible."

"Nothing more than insomnia," I replied. "About a week now, I’ve been sleeping really badly."

"Oh right, yeah that’ll do it. Maybe its all the shit flying around with Kevin you know, stressing you out a bit?"

"I’ve thought of that, its the only thing that’s sorta bothering me, so I guess it explains it," I said.

"Well it should be cleared up soon, one way or the other," Wil replied.

"Yeah," I said, not altogether satisfied. The meetings hadn’t all gone my way, a lot of effort was being put into political correctness, which all seemed structured to protect the offender, rather than the defendant. Bullshit bureaucracy, I thought, but there was very little I could do about it. I was a small cog in a very large machine. I wanted my damn oil, but more so I wanted to see Kevin get what he deserved, and I wasn’t sure he was going to. That pissed me off. He had done some damage already, and it present it seemed the best result I could get would be the cessation of his hostilities, not the disciplinary action I craved.

**

I couldn’t make out the sign, it was supposed to have neon lights on it, but they were broken, and so what might have been a happy clown face was dark, with lines of shadow that looked a little like scars across it. The words were there, but I couldn’t force myself to read them. The street was dark, black really, as if it were midnight during a blackout- except for one window of the brick-front store. A metal bathtub, sort of a strange Gothic/Victorian flavoured monstrosity was bathed in warm orangish light. I took a step closer, and saw that it was Kevin sitting naked in the half-full tub. His bald head was crimson glowing almost white from the light that looked more like what they use in take-away shops to keep food warm than a display window’s halogen. The off-grey water came up to the middle of his hairy paunch, and the rest of him was dripping, only it looked a little more like sweat than water. He wasn’t moving. He stared, straight out of his window, not moving, not even blinking. Just staring. Staring past me, I thought, not registering what his wide-eyes should have been.

I realised I was walking, very slowly, towards the window. I stopped, standing about three feet away, and just as I was leaning a little bit to maybe catch his eye, the light flared a little, and Kevin exploded in a gory mess of flesh and fat and dirty grey water.

The laughter followed me into waking.

**

"Another dream?" Robyn asked.

I was sitting, leaning a little on my knees. "Yeah. Bad one. Kevin was in a bathtub and exploded like he was in a microwave. And there was this laughing, it was disturbing. Fucking disturbing."

"That… yeah, that’s terrible baby." She put her arms around me.

"This is getting bad," I said. "I need to get a decent night’s sleep." I knew I wouldn’t get much that night, that dream was a bad one. Shaken me up pretty good, and I didn’t imagine I would want to close my eyes again for a while.

"Go back to sleep Rob," I said as I stood. "I just need to walk this one off okay?"

"All right, come back soon," she hugged my legs.

I walked out into the kitchen and turned on the lights to chase the shadows out of the room. It had been a long time since a dream had shaken me as badly as that one had. The ones I’d been having up to now I didn’t remember very well, and so all they could do was wake me up, but this one was different. This one was mean, ugly. Violent. And I’m still so tired.

I took out the bottle of scotch, hoping it might mellow my nerves a little. When I took a tumbler out from under the bench, it was all I could do to keep from dropping it. Quickly, loudly, I put it on the table, and stepped back, staring at it in horror. A playing card, a single card, in the tumbler. A joker.

**

"Why would someone break into your house and do nothing but put a card in your glass?" Wil asked.

"I don’t know!" I said. "Do I look like I know? Its insane. It doesn’t make any sense at all."

"No, no it doesn’t. Maybe it was just Theresa playing a game that she forgot about, and you forgot about," he replied.

"What kind of a game? Why a joker, just like the one in my dream," I said.

"You said it was a clown face in the sign, and even that you couldn’t be sure cause you didn’t see it properly," he said.

"A clown, a joker is a clown, isn’t it?"

Before he replied, Anderson walked in, looking a little pale. He stood there in the doorway just looking at us for a minute. Anderson was one of the execs who was going through the case between me and Kevin.

"What’s up Anderson?" Wil asked.

"Kevin," he replied after a too-long pause, "won’t be joining us for this meeting."

I let out an explosive sigh and was about to wax on about his uselessness, but Anderson continued.

"He was in a car accident, his car, it caught fire, and he was trapped. It went up, and he didn’t make it," Anderson said, and made his way slowly back out of the meeting room.

"Holy shit," Wil said, and looked back at me.

**

"What about plates? Do we still have plastic plates at home?" Robyn asked.

"Yeah I think so. I bought a ridiculously huge pack for that thing at work, and only used maybe ten of them," I replied. "We should be fine."

"Okay, that’s it then," she said. Our cart was full of junk food and meat and other party necessities. We headed for the checkout together.

"Hey can you handle this? I’ve really gotta take a leak," I said.

"Sure."

Three minutes later I was sighing in relief as the pungeant cascade of yellow washed down the drain. I heard someone making a bit too much noise to be pleasant in a stall, and wrinkled my nose. Really, they should play really loud music in public restrooms, to block out that kind of thing.

No sooner had the thought completed itself in my mind, than I could hear music coming in from outside. It was growing louder, like a marching band approaching. They were playing that music I could only call ‘the circus theme’ for lack of a more accurate title. Though it was better than hearing someone else’s bowel movement, I would have picked any other song, at the moment. Circuses were bound to involve clowns, and those were not my favorite thing right now.

I zipped up, rinsed my hands, and stepped outside, bracing for the impact of an unmuffled marching band.

Instead there was nothing. No band, no music, just the normal beeps and babble of a grocery store.

**

"I don’t know babe, what the fuck is going on, but its not fucking good," I said. My voice was shaking a little, as I tried to keep at a whisper. "Someone is fucking around, or something, its all too coincidental."

"Shh, yes, coincidental is all it is. Creepy as hell, but that’s all."

"I don’t get it though, that card had to have come from somewhere, I’d really feel better knowing where," I said.

"Where is it now?" she asked. "Can I see it?"

"Yeah let me go get it," I went to the kitchen to get the card out of the drawer I’d put it in. I opened the drawer to find nothing but silverware. No card. I checked the other drawers. Nothing. I checked every drawer in the house, my underwear drawer, the little one on the bathroom vanity, even in the fridge. Nothing.

"Jesus fucking Christ," I whispered to myself.

**

"How long has it been since you were able to get a full night’s rest?" the doctor asked me.

"Two weeks," I said. My head hurt, my eyes hurt, my lips were dry, and I was beyond tired. I took a couple of days off work, trying to sleep through the day, but couldn’t close my eyes. The dreams had continued, alternating between the sort I could remember, and the sort I couldn’t, but all laughing at me.

"And these dreams continue to wake you?"

"Yes."

"I’ll give you a script for some sleeping pills. You haven’t tried any over-the-counter products yet have you? Some of them could actually give you bad dreams if they react badly," he said.

"Okay. No, I haven’t tried any," I said.

"Good. These are more effective, safer, but stronger. They’ll knock you out quick," and he scrawled on a pad.

**

At home, I swallowed two of the white discs before bed, praying that they would get me through the night.

"Rob, are you sure we should have a party tomorrow?" I said. "I mean with all the weird shit that’s been happening . . ."

"Weird shit?" she asked. "It’s not weird like that babe, you’re just having a really bad couple weeks. Nothing we can’t handle."

"I know, but the kids, what if . . ." The drug took hold without waiting for me to finish.

**

I was dreaming again, but this time it was daylight, and I was at home. Probably about noon, on the weekend. It was quiet, strangely muffled, like maybe I had cotton in my ears. There was some distant laughter in the backyard, but I was in the house, so couldn’t tell who it was. A few people from the sounds of it. As I passed the entryway into the kitchen, I saw the light spilling below the front door wobble. Someone was coming in. Someone was coming in the house. Not knocking, just coming in.

I ducked into the kitchen, and around the corner to the family room. I moved as fast as I could, as quietly, so whoever it was wouldn’t hear me. I had to find it. Quick, before they got in, before they could get me off guard. Found it. The bat made me feel better. I knew I’d be able to defend myself, because they wouldn’t be expecting me.

I stood, still with cotton in my ears, just around the corner that hid me from the entryway. I heard the muffled door open, and the squeak of the floorboard. One, two, three. I swung, hard, at the hips, and instead of belting the thief in the gut, I caught the joker right in the throat. Even better, I thought. He hit the floor on his back, his legs going up in the air. I chopped at them, and heard a sickening snap. I swung again, and caught his knee, and sunk the bat into the drywall. I stumbled with that sudden change of momentum, and tripped. I hit my head and that was the one sound that didn’t sound muffled.

I sat up a little bit dizzy, with a weird shrill buzzing in my ears. My vision was doubling a little bit, but I could make out a little crowd of people filling up my living room. I sort of crawled towards them, and the shrill buzz got worse. Two people, or was it four? Maybe just one, turned around and grabbed me, but I could see what they were all gathered around, just before I was thrown back against the wall and held there. A kid, a little kid, with flaming red hair, a wig? And white make-up. And a fluffy collar. A kid. A wig. A clown wig. I coughed, gagging a little on bile. I was thrown against the wall, and when my head hit it, the dizziness was overwhelming. I slumped down and all I could see was a spherical red piece of foam laying in front of my face.

**

I woke up, or at least my eyes did, and they saw a ceiling I could not recognise. It was white particle board with fluerescant lights in it, like at a school, or a hospital. Hospital, of course, I was laying in a hospital bed. Why the hell was I in a hospital bed? What happened to my legs, why did my knees hurt so bad? I tried to turn my head and pain shot through my neck and down into my chest. My head was pounding on top of everything else.

Robyn came into view, above me, not looking happy. She didn’t have on makeup, and she looked incredibly tired. She didn’t seem to want to ay anything to me, she just looked.

"What happened?" I stopped talking suddenly before asking where I was or what I was doing here. My voice was not my own, it was one of those buzzing robot voices. What the hell? "What the hell?" I tried to say it, but it buzzed anyway.

"Why do I sound like this? What am I doing here?" Robyn suddenly started crying, and shook her head. "Rob, what the fuck?" My eyes teared up, but I was caught between anger and fear. I took a deep breath, and forced air to flow out through my mouth, trying to yell. I could feel it, my throat was so dry, but I could feel that I still had all the parts I remembered having. I shouldn’t have this robot thing in my throat, I could feel my normal voice there somewhere.

"What the hell is going on!" I growled with half robot, half hoarse real-voice.

Robyn did not reply. I tried to sit up, even thought it sent waves of crimson agony through my neck and head. I sat forward, and threw the sheet back, so I could swing off the bed and grab Robyn, make her tell me what was going on. But I threw the sheet back off my legs only to find they weren’t there. I stared at the bruised stumps and almost threw up all over myself. I looked up in desperation at Robyn, who would only look at me through teary, red eyes. And behind her, on the table was a wilting bouquet. In the plastic claw where a get well card should have been, was a different kind of card. A playing card. The joker.

This world is spinning wildly out of control- and that is nothing new. Action, reaction, cause and effect, no guiding light influences the course of humankind, no external force shunts and harries our path. Those which we would bestow with power are but figments of our collective imagination, not real at all, or entirely real, in that we exist in a world of imagination. Nations, religions, economies, gods, devils, celebrities, politicians, none more real than the next, and each exerting more control over humanity than the humans themselves. Imagined constructs, hallucinations maintained collectively by millions, billions of people, to excuse them from thinking.

What the Catholic church has been, capitalist business is now. The over-reaching standard of what should be, below every fundamental of life that our modernity relies upon is underscored by the illusion of motivation generated by a system imagined into reality. Cyclical, collossal, it gyrates perpetually- inherant to its being is consumption, assimilation of what is useful, annihilation of what is not, through sheer ignorance, blindness, refusal to acknowledge that anything outside its own purview even exists. Sociopathic non-entities control our lives. A corporation would murder its kindred and eat our children, and think nothing of the act. Heinous acts of destruction are its bylaws, its fundamentals, and they are nothing but chimerae. There is no thing that is Coca-Cola. No body that is Microsoft. No block of stone or chunk of flesh or pool of water that is Time Warner. These things are fabricated. We are told they are there, like God, and we accept this as true. We must, because there simply is no option.

I have no sympathy for a business. I would not cry to watch one die, I could not! It was never alive in the first place, and cannot die- just the humans fervantly worshipping their deity wavering, cracking, running out of sacrifices to maintain their demonic overlord until it is wiped out by another more steadfast, resourceful group of zealots. The name disappears, to be replaced in name by another name. Nothing changes but the name. The devotion is the same, the delusion.

They are parasites, these corporations. We have breathed life into them, and they suck the life out of us. They rip out of us the flicker of humanity, stripping us of our basic peculiarity that makes us human: creation. Business does not create, it revolves. An ouroboros sucking its own tail down its throat in an insane circle which will never cease, only grow thicker, hungrier, more impossible to escape. To abscond is to shatter the being, to starve it of itself, and watch it dissolve. So they blind us, shroud our heads in layer upon layer of delusional advertising, stuffing every channel of perception with garbage, noise to keep anything else from penetrating. Like strapping a star to each eye to distract them from anything else, everything else. So innundated with this deluge of undiluted filth, our conditioned, our crippled minds are not allowed a moment’s respite. The process of reception robs our faculties for creation, even interpretation is not allowed. Everything is as it is presented, we must believe everything we are told, we must swallow the smut and faeces that is fed to us, for that is all these things can produce. They sit on our faces and shit in our eyes, and tell us its two for fucking one today only. Today only! Buy now! Believe it, buy it, forget tomorrow so we can say it all again! Buy ever more, work ever more to produce more of what you can’t use to make money to buy more of what you don’t need so they can put ever shinier ever faster ever more useful bullshit on the shelves in the aisles on the screen in the air. Everywhere. And whatever you do, don’t stop to think about it.

Just buy.

Just need. Not want, need. We aren’t responsible for our needs, no one is. Need must be filled. Need must not be denied. Need must not be examined. Need is want we don’t want to admit to. Humans do not need, cannot need, that is what makes us human. People want. Animals need. To live only with what we need is animal. But where is the limit? This superflux grows top heavy. The boundary to absurdity draws ever closer, and the structure will inevitably fall. As a tower, with a hundred floors, each collapsing downwards into the next gathers weight, momentum building to bring down the next floor with even greater force must eventually run out of floors- the whole thing will eventually hit the ground and destroy itself.

The system devours itself. Already the consumer, the individual is the minor role. Businesses feed on each other- whoring their own bodies to keep themselves alive. One business advertising another on its own skin, its flesh rent in twain by the tattooists needle. Drilling new channels into our consciousness by inventing new technologies, to fill with even more filthy demon-spun lies. The simple individual is already long stretched beyond his means, credit and debt extend his ability into the abstract, the imagined, and his only escape is death (which is a hard time for any family. Have you thought about the financial future of your family after you die? You should be. For only three dollars a week you can secure their future…). Life is no longer affordable, as it has been defined by this neurosis. The house the car the phone the computer the television the boat the investment property the stock portfolio the Swedish furniture the German electronics is all designed to be unaffordable. The price has nothing to do with the value. The price is always always, just over what is affordable. And you always need it. That is the fundamental. That is the doctrine. The mantra. You need this.

Lies.

No one needs a thing. Everyone wants everything. The one thing, if it can be called that, which no one wants is to think. Time, perhaps. Peace. Anyone who wants that would have it, as I do. Stubbornly, steadfastly refuse to need everything all the time. Think. I dare you.

Take a step back and watch the millions throw away their self-control like those who step into the carnival ride, spinning ever faster, an insane revolution that crushes each one of them against the walls of their prison. Their system, their diety, is their co-operative hallucination, spread like a virus through every orifice of our bodies, corrupting every cell and mutating like a cancer. Watch as they destroy themselves with the routine, the revolution, the centripitol forces squeezing the life from their bodies. Inescapable routine. Today to pay for yesterday. Spend what you do not have in order to gain what will kill you. Inescapable while you need it. While you believe in it.

What happens when the ride hits terminal velocity? How fast does it have to go before your bones are liquid? Before you flesh becomes energy, atomic? Will I be able to survive the implosion? I smell the catastrophe on the wind, and only hope I am still alive, still awake, when it happens.

I am wrapped in an aural cocoon in the belly of this giant silver intestine, hurtling along the track towards my destination with all the agonising slowness of a glacier. My heart thunders in my chest like a hummingbird the size of a helicopter. The anticipation! The choking power of my desire silences every competitor. My thoughts leaping one after the other from my mind, are scything through the dark night like spears forged of light.

My body is filled with longing. Desire inflates my muscles to the point of explosion. My skin screams for her touch and cries out memories of yesterday. Everywhere her hands have touched is swept with waves of needles. My fingers ache with emptiness. I shut my eyes and try to rein the stallion within, but am no match for the power of my love. The attempt is half-hearted, admittedly, because there is no true desire in me to slake the pull towards her, only to endure. To outlast circumstance, and prove fate. I clench my jaw; it seems as though my voracious skin will tear free of my flesh and go racing ahead to reach her more quickly.

It seems unfair, at times, to focus my powerful desire on her, to target this girl and unleash the unrestrained force of my heart on her. Like pouring the atomic fury of the sun into a single light bulb. I feel as though I would do just that, by placing my hand on hers, my lips to her lips, she would be consumed by the inferno I am stoking within. Even by merely locking my gaze, arcs of electric energy would burst forth from me to find purchase in her eyes. But hold my gaze she does, and my hands, and wrap me in her arms and draw me even closer. She accepts the challenge that is my love, and the fire that I bring.

Happiness ripples over my skin like cool waters of absolution. I smile as though I am already in her arms, the tide surging forward to spill from my eyes in tiny waves of infinite ecstasy.

I woke up, staring at a ceiling I felt I recognised. Only my eyes were awake, or so it seemed: I felt drained, depleted. My limbs were just so much meat laying on this bed I also found familiar. I blinked a few times very slowly, testing out the muscles in my face. They seemed to react normally, but it was hard to be sure. I remembered Serai then. She surfaced in my memory like a wraith stepping into the revealing glow of a streetlight. No memory in particular, just her.

Just as I was about to attempt speaking, my skin exploded into pins and needles. My entire body, not just one limb as one normally expects, but my whole system was suddenly electrified, stabbed at a million points with an itching tingling that would have driven me insane had it lasted more than the twenty seconds or so it did. Much to my relief, I found that my arms and legs felt reletively normal after that rush of discomfort. I curled my arms up around my chest, sliding my hands up and down. My skin was icy cold.

I began shivering quite violently then, a deep sort of racking shudder that erupted in waves from my stomach, and emanated out into my limbs and jaw. I curled into the fetal position, and held onto myself, begging silently for some warmth. I could tell, through my distraction, that the room wasn’t cold, it was definitely me. I was far, far below room temperature. As I moved, my joints protested with hot spots of pain and though it hurt, I welcomed the sensation of heat that seemed to spread out from my elbows, knees, knuckles as I worked them gingerly.

I felt so clinical, detatched, I was very aware of every sensation, but not perturbed in the slightest by it. I simply took each in turn, and tried the best method I could think of to relieve the problem. I could only guess that I’d been lying entirely motionless for quite some time, and my circulation had slowed to a crawl, which dropped my body temperature, played havoc on my nervous system, and caused my joints to stiffen beyond all usefulness. So there was nothing to do but warm up at a cautious pace, as to bring my systems back into normal working order. I couldn’t explain the calm I felt. Reflecting on the moment, I should by all rights have been screaming in terror from the moment I opened my eyes and couldn’t feel myself, but I never felt frightened.

"Hello Jarrod. Welcome back," Serai said as she entered the room. I rolled to my other side to bring her into my field of vision. I winced with the movement. Just the brush of fabric against my skin was painful. She approached, and sat beside me on the bed I now placed as hers, below the ceiling that also belonged to her. I sat up after inordinate effort, and replied.

I managed to croak out a harsh "Hi," in an unintentional sort of whisper. My throat was parched. She had anticipated this, and handed me a warm cup of tea. I took it, hoping that my fingers would behave. It seemed they were back to operating on that level of reliability at least. As I took my first sip of the tea, Serai placed a hand on my neck. Either the tea she’d brewed had some sort of supernatural qualities, or her touch did. I literally felt warmth rush through my body, through the skin and muscles and deeper. The pain slid away. The stiffness melted. I could breathe easier, and my throat was wet again.

"Hi," I said again, sounding much closer to normal.

"You’ve scared me twice now," she said.

"I’m sorry," I replied. It was only then that I remembered.

Doctor Thomason’s breath was slow, steady. It wasn’t time to get excited yet, there were still steps to be taken. He eased his SUV out into freeway traffic, though inside you would hardly know he had accellerated up to seventy miles per hour. The interior of the truck was a calm vacuum hurtling down the road towards the bayou. There was always a bayou at hand in the panhandle of Florida, and it would be a short trip for the Doctor and his passenger.

He didn’t know her name, what did the name matter anyway? She was slumped in the passenger seat, asleep until one peered closer and noticed her open eyes. They blinked occasionally, a spinal cord reflex curve that even the curare couldn’t entirely stop. Mostly curare handled big muscles, the ones we know we’re using, not the involuntary mechanisms like breathing, heartbeat, and blinking. It was an utterly perfect pair of handcuffs.

Thomason glanced at his companion briefly, and a thin smile flickered across his thin lips. He’d encountered the little tramp while volunteering at a free clinic only two months ago. Since then he’d invited her to meet him on a number of occasions, at the same clinic, where he provided some much-needed care, and also some much un-needed vicodin. Those were simply a pleasant bait and hook in one little bottle. Homeless girls rarely have the benefits of good health cover and the doctor treated her well. He gave her vaccines and vitamins, checked her blood for various conditions that could have been life-threatening. Ironically enough, she was healthier than a lot of Thomason’s more typical patients.

Healthier and far more delectable.

The swamp was off the freeway, at a rest-stop exit leading to a frontage road that ran about three miles straight off the map. He had to hurry so it wouldn’t be completely dark when they got there, but be equally careful in driving through the treacherous terrain. No time to get unduly excited yet, he thought.

Only a few more minutes put Thomason on the frontage road, and cruising through the isolation. The sun was just brushing the top of the scrub, as he approached the lowlands. His SUV slid into the wilder parts calmly. The doctor did not look at the girl anymore. This road grew less and less reliable as it drew farther from civilisation. There was nothing but swampy pools of water, massive moss-choked trees, and various forms of wildlife never any bigger than a shoe.

Finally, the doctor was standing beside his truck’s passenger door. He carefully opened it, ensuring the girl didn’t tumble out. She was effectively held in by the seatbelt, he noted, and so opened the door fully and stepped back. He just looked at her for a few minutes, finally letting the moment fill him with emotion. That thin smile creapt across his lips as he just stared at the girl, who couldn’t help but stare back. The doctor stepped forward, and reached across the girl, behind the driver’s seat and pulled out one of his medical bags and a blanket. He slung the bag on one shoulder, and the blanket over the other. Leaning back, he gently unfastened the seatbelt, and took the girl in his arms. Even her dead weight was that of a feather. She was so slight, so fragile, so beautiful that when he’d first seen her, he stared for simple pleasure. And now, she was in his arms, and he was approaching euphoria.

Ten minutes later she didn’t feel any heavier, but they were sufficiently off the beaten track as to make the doctor feel completely secluded. Every step was one away from servitude, imprisonment, and towards power and control. He wasn’t walking across a swamp, no, he was climbing Mount Olympus. Ascending to heaven to reclaim his position of godly powers. He laid the girl down on top of the blanket and stood over her, just looking, just absorbing the beauty that was her flesh and blood, skin and bone. Still staring, never taking his eyes from some part of her body or another, he stripped.

Standing there in the waning sunlight, the doctor peered past his ever-expanding paunch, and waited for his erection grow until it extended far enough to see. On her back, the girl had no choice but to witness the birth of the doctor’s hard-on with him. Kneeling beside her prone body, the doctor moved his hands just above her, not quite willing to break the trance of anticipation yet. It seemed his hands were motionless at times; it took several minutes for him to progress from her throat to breasts to stomach and back again. It was as if he could feel her presence in the ether surrounding her body, as if not touching her was the first step in touching her. Connecting to her. Controlling her.

After nearly a quarter of an hour, Thomason extracted a pair of medical scissors from his black bag and began cutting from the bottom of her baggy T-shirt, upwards. Now his breathing was somewhat more ragged, but his years of medical training sprang up like a circus safety net to guide his hands. The cut was straight, and her breasts were his. Clenching his stomach to control the excitement, the doctor turned his attention to her tattered sweatpants. These he cut twice, once from the waistband all the way down each leg. He set his scissors down, and savoured the moment. There was nothing but his own hand, reaching and lifting, between him and her cunt. He just stared at her crotch for a while, letting his eyes want it just that much more. The swamp was swathed in silence. The same hush filled an auditorium in the half second before the symphony starts- as comfortable as a starched tuxedo shirt.

Thomason ran his fingers over her skin until the moon was high enough to illuminate them both in a ghostly phosphoresance. The hair on his back and stomach lit up an angelic halo around him. He hadn’t let himself touch any more than her nipples, waiting for the transition from twilight to night to become complete. When he did let his fingertips caress the soft folds of skin between her legs, Thomason had to suck in a sharp breath and clench every muscle from his stomach down to keep from ejaculating. He held his hand there, motionless, riding the crest of an orgasm, but not allowing it to spurt forth for several more minutes, then withdrew. His breath was fast and shallow as he looked back to the girl’s eyes. He smiled and bent down to her, and placed his lips on hers. Hers were dry, so he licked them until they were moist. Delectable.

Unable to withdraw that time, the doctor kept his mouth against her skin, kissing it, biting it, licking her across her entire body, tasting every inch of her exposed skin, and seeking every crevice hidden from view. Nothing would escape his touch. Nothing would be off-limits. There were no limits.

Jumping like an attacking cat, Thomason settled to his knees between the girl’s legs. He pulled her ankles apart, then got a grip on her hips. He pulled her forcefully closer, and rested her on his thighs. He stopped then, and first reached for her head, to turn it, and position her arms so that she would continue to look towards him, and second, extracted a scalpel from his black bag. The penetrations were simultaneous. One with his flesh into the yeilding space between her legs, and the steel into the soft taut surface of her belly.

He didn’t cut her deeply, just enough to sink his blade so it would not fall away when he let go. With both hands on her hips, he fucked her while the blood flowed out of her stomach, up her body. He watched the blood follow the contours his tongue had traced only moments ago. She weighed nothing it seemed; he could lift and lower her hips to skewer her on his dick as easily as jerking off had ever been.

After only a few seconds, this was not enough. He withdrew, and tried to enter her anally, but found it too dry. Removing his scalpel from its sheath in her stomach, he made a long incision in her thigh, and as the blood ran down her leg, used it to lubricate himself. It went in much easier after that.

Several seconds later, this too was not enough. This was still too easy; Thomason knew he could do more. Leaning forward, the doctor studied her bleeding stomach for a moment, and cut a much deeper, straight line upwards from his original gash. Withdrawing his prick from the girl, he slid it into this new opening, between two strong muscles and into her abdomen. He looked down a long way and could see her head, unmoving, witnessing his power. His absolute control.

It took several more hours for the girl to bleed dry. Thomason didn’t count the orgasms, the spurts of white seman he pumped into her. He sat exhausted, with strained muscles just above the base of his penis he’d never even felt before. Finally, he rose, and wrapped the girl, his clothes, and instruments in the blanket, and sank her in one of the larger pools nearby.

He watched her sink, contemplating his erasure of her existance. It had only taken three hours to accomplish. He stood still for so long that the fauna around him began to return to their normal habits. A loud croak startled Thomason from his trance. He looked up, farther out in the pool, at the bullfrog who alone bore witness.

Finally the realisation struck me one night as I stared stupified at the wall, bored beyond all comprehension. My mind was blank, I was letting it drift of its own accord- something I had neglected to do, as it turns out, in months. Constantly distracting myself with trivialities, I’d dodged the bullet with cunning grace and blinding speed, up until I remembered the book I hadn’t finished. I picked it up and only needed another half-dozen pages before everything caught up with me. The realisation struck me like the lightning whip of some spiny demon, with wrath and pure energy. The fantastic punisher for time wasted, spawned to thrash me into some kind of action.

Months wasted in directionless motion, perpetual sort of self-sustataining rhythms that ate their own tail. My life was becoming an oruboros, leading nowhere, coming from nothing and looking the same everywhere in between. I spent hours watching hundreds of numbers clock upwards at varying rates, XP, agility, professions, copper, silver, gold, armour, dollars, megabytes- all just incrementing at their own pace. All except one: time. Time was decreasing, I was running out. Eventually there would be none left, and then none of those other numbers would matter.

It bent me over, my demon, and took its retribution in sudden searing glimpses of awareness.

I knew I had been trying to do something with my fantasies. I knew I wasn’t entirely aimless, I was however misguided in the extreme. The fantasies, they were a refuge. A shelter from the reality of my constant refusal to accept the charge of life: to live. I lacked the resolve to actually pick up the pen and do what I thought I wanted to, and so I merely fantasized my way through the time. Something had to keep my mind off the fact that I wasn’t actually doing anything, so I filled it with meaningless garbage that didn’t carry weight for anyone, and only I was gullible enough to pay attention to it at all.

The clouds, the haze, the lethargy were all of my own making. I never gave myself the time to actually compose. The fantasies proved that I had the energy, the sheer power, the raw materials for creation, but no discipline. Not an iota of will power that would guide that magic towards some sort of meaning. Some sort of solid resolution that I could point at and call my own. Something I could be proud of. And was that not what I sought? Pride, justification for the space I occupy. There are people who can’t do that, they are vacuums in society that suck everything they touch down into the black hole never to be seen again. Collapsing forever into less and less.

Suddenly I realised I was a black hole. I was drifting through ever-emptying space, with less and less surrounding me to fuel my consumption. Fewer stars drew close enough for me to draw in and crush, and so my isolation grew. The solitude I lamented in my self-indulgent moments, that I blamed for my lack of spontenaiety when I recalled my supposed role as writer. I wanted to be a beacon, and I was the opposite, and that rankled.

In my sudden moment of clarity, I realised, and I shattered the lassitude. I crushed the walls of lethargy that had come in gradually with the tide, and threw back the levees of habit. There was nothing stopping me, I realised, but myself, and I am proven to be an awesome force, a great weight that not even I could overcome without the impetus of a man struck as I have been by the explosion of clairvoyance that does not happen to everyone. Those slugs who meander through the tunnels dug in the ant hill by countless generations before them will not understand. They will not pause to wonder at the momentary nova that occurs inside the head of one in a hundred million people. They will not pause to wonder at the miracle of the world. They will not pause to wonder at the beauty of a storm. They will not even pause and wonder and the intricacies of their own bodies, let alone the infinite complex capacity of their minds.

I had lapsed into the endless automotaun cycle of animal reproduction. Every beast has the instinct to fuck, and like them, I occupied myself with it. Sex is so easy to simplify. To reach an orgasm does not require the cooperation of the intellect, nor of the spirit. And an orgasm feels a little like inspiration. But only a little. Here and now I have the power of a god. I have creation at my fingertips. With but a flutter of my irreplicable digits I can summon worlds, vast cities of modernity, or the fields of fantasy, any man, woman or child I can concieve so can I create. I am God of the mind, so long as I put the words to the page.

With a head full of ego, I attack the blankness. That white expanse that sickens my heart and ignites my passion (or crushes it like a beetle when I let it) will not outlast me. Giddy with excitement, I am flush with potential, but more, I am tense with exertion. Nothing is beyond the determined person. We are the lords of the land, should we put our minds to it. No president, no king, not tzar or pharoh was a more remarkable creature than I am. The test is determination, can we outlast ourselves? Within each of us is the potential monarch, and the potential pauper. No pharoh was any different to the slave he whipped. No millionaire had any greater powers than that of the transient.

Accuse me of over-simplification, I invite you. Yet anyone reading this work now has already triumphed over the circumstances that they would cite to excuse the fallen, the failed. Would they degrade that accomplishment? Would they admit to doing nothing with their fortunes? Or would they accept their responsibility, their singular opportunity to escape failure by acting? Any act, every act is a miracle in that it will never be replicated. Nothing can be duplicated for every one who acts is unique. Should that not be celebrated? The very fact of individual existance is utterly incomprehensibly unlikely that it demands an effort of supreme proportions to mould into the most wonderous existance possible. No laziness can be justified, no inaction can ever be excused because there is no return! There is no chance to set right was is wasted.

The only numbers that matter are the seconds that tick down on life’s clock. Mankind has sought to dilute their importance, by first making them increment, rather than decrement, and then by placing them on a circle. Clocks create the illusion that tomorrow is just like today. Every day has a ten o’clock in the morning. We refer to them all in the same way, except that none of them bear any resemblance to those that came before. Mankind crouches in fear of time, trying to harness it in incrementation, but cannot escape it. Eventually the clock winds out and the countdown is realised.

What a mind-blow it would be for a person of this world to glimpse the world of a men who know how long they will live. They are given an allotment, an allocation of days months and years with which to make something of themselves, known commonly throughout their life. What then? Would even a fraction of a second be wasted? Such a world would destroy the word leisure. Recreation would be a sort of religious practice. The enjoyment of life would be absolutely paramount! Why waste a finite time in sadness or boredom or lassitude? How much more determined would those men be. Nothing would be put off until tomorrow, ever. Every person’s goal would constantly remain common, that goal to fulfill one’s dreams and throwing what we would call obligations to the wind.

Every creative explosion would be honoured for its uniqueness, so obvious to a man who knows on what day he will die. Each individual crystalline perfect moment would be drunk like the finest wine. And the finest wine would be drunk without exception- who would spend their finite life guzzling cheap piss?

A man who knows his day is coming would have no fear. No chance could be ignored. No desire unattempted. No curiousity unexplored. The risk of failure would be nothing as compared to the risk of losing the one opportunity that will ever present itself. With dogged determination such a man would pursue his dreams, with reckless abandon he would throw himself towards his goals. Without restraint. Without fear.

To know death’s date is to annihilate its only power.

Man fears death. We are terrified of that great unknown, the finality from which there is no return. Like the journey overseas to a foreign land from which we do not have the means to return. It looms over us like a slowly approaching flood, wavering in the distance, difficult to see, and promises absolute irradication. It is far easier, tremendously easier to turn our backs to it, and pretend death does not exist, that we are immortal. Easier to live in delusion than face fear. And so billions of lives are pissed away in terror- in thousands of fears that replace the one we choose to ignore.

What is embarassment against the fear of death? I know the nervous paralysis that asphixiates a young man too fearful of rejection to bring himself to ask a girl out. Yet if that man knew he had a finite time on the planet in which to find that one woman he could love, his fear would vanish faster than a flash of lightning. What is risk? Would a man approaching his end hesitate to throw his lot in and sail that boat across the Carribbean? What has he to lose? Not time, time is worthless because it is finite. Only experience is infinite. Every moment is utterly unique and must be treated as such, tasted like a vintage found only in one bottle. One bottle, one second. Time is known, because each man knows he will die. Every man is mortal- could anyone really live in true denial? A matter of time then, a question of quantity. How long? How little time would one have to hold in reserve, before he throws caution out the window? Fifty years? If you are to live only fifty more years, would you ask her, would you buy the boat? Thirty years? Ten years? Ten minutes? Where is the turning point? At what exact duration does life become worth living? Justify that.

Control. Is there anything more attractive, more inflaming than a woman in control of her own cunt? I thought as I stared at her. I wasn’t her only admirer either. She sat alone for now, across the bar lounge from me, sipping chardonnay and reading something. Beneath the calm demeanor simmered the great sexual heat, ready to explode forth and consume the next man she chose in a visceral, orgiastic conflaguration.

I could see it in her- I was unfairly advantaged of course, I had been watching her for quite some time now -but every man in the room was compelled to allow his eyes to rest upon her for longer than normal. We could all detect the something, the something in the way her lips brushed the glass that her fingers encircled so intimately. Something that made us scream to be touched by the those same delicate fingers. A subtle, one piece black dress left enough to the imagination to allow us to fantasize far ahead of ourselves. No- she wasn’t like the obvious tarts who put their goods on display by donning too little fabric. It wasn’t exactly her body on offer. It was the energy. That enigmatic female energy that emanated from a woman’s crotch, and filled her with radiance. The energy that lent them preternatural strength up to and during orgasm; the energy that overwhelmed them and whipped their spines and forces screams from their lungs. The energer, the fire- just below the surface.

I watched her carefully enough to notice how occasionally and very briefly her eyes flitted up, to ensure she was being watched. The delicious elfin smile, a tiny provocative grin teased her lips upwards. The imagination ran wild. Total control. So unlike a man. She would not ask for what she wanted. It would be offered to her by one of us. She would not have to lift a finger. She held a power over that which we craved, and that awareness made what she held all the more desireable. Any woman possessed the ability to incite a man, but those who understood us, and our addiction, our carnal needs, their allure was tenfold. The temptation was incomprehensible.

I tried to douse the excited tingle in my stomach with a freezing belt of martini, but to no avail. The plunging V of her neckline stabbed me in the gut and the shadows arresting my eyes left me wanting more. Teased by what I couldn’t see but knew was there. I was forced to bore my vision straight through the fabric, past the lace, and dove greedily into the tight, round flesh beneath. I could almost feel her warm breasts against my cheeks, I could almost taste the equisite delicacy of her nipple on my tongue. It tingled. And she, she had not done a thing, she was just there.

Being here as she was almost every day, waiting nights, I supposed, for a worthy suitor to approach. She did not always deign to take one- not every day. I was not the only one who’d noticed the habit either. There were those who were here watching her regularly, and those who came to try their hand more than once. Some were successful repeatedly, others were not. She was a clandestine celebrity. No one talked openly about her, that I could see, though the bartender always delivered her at least one glass of wine without charge. I suspected that he knew enough to realise she was keeping handfuls of men here watching and drinking for far longer than they otherwise would. Much like me. I chuckled and sank the rest of my martini. I preferred vodka, it always tasted cleaner.

After some indeterminate length of time (I always felt lost in a sort of limbo while I observed her) a man approached her. I could feel the whole room tense, like taking a collective breath before leaping off a precipice. I didn’t hear their conversation, that wasn’t the point. Whatever they were talking about resembled in no way what they were saying. All that meant anything was whether he sat down beside her or not. He did. She had snared him, like a hypnotized tiger, the predator sat beside his intended prey as meek as a kitten, trying to quell the deluge of adrenaline that was exploding in his veins. She surveyed him coolly throughout.

I imagined her beginning that way in bed. Cool, non-chalant, even dispassionate. Lying on her back with the man’s head in her hand, firmly lodged between her legs. Observing his technique? Making comparisons? Or just revelling in her power like some lascivious despot. Very rarely did I manage to conjure an image of her actually being fucked by her chosen partner. Fucking him, yes, but not being fucked. She was always on top, in command. The man helplessly looked upwards at the diabolical beauty of his invulnerable queen as she used his flesh to achiever her own private nirvana. Her eyes were always closed. When she came, he inevitably would; all his fantasies going off like a geyser.

Being controlled was the fantasy. Being used. Men have always been in control of women. Society indoctrinates it: to be on top is to be in power. Always taking the pleasure from a cunt, and leaving. Leaving a puddle of semen, and leaving it behind. Always the stronger. Always fucking something weaker than yourself. Taking what is desired, and being free to move on. The true desire of mankind is to fuck an equal. To fuck and be fucked simultaneously, however impossible that may indeed be, a woman in control is a step away from the norm. Flawed but fulfilling to a man. To experience the opposite of control has some merit. Indeed, this very experience may lead to a reconfiguration which allows a man one step closer to egalitarian intercourse. A genderless sex which implies no control or roles to play.

This equality is not what she allows. She, I know, fucks like a man would, for herself. Even when pleasuring a woman, a man is pleasuring himself. Masterbating his ego by achieving the mark of male heroism that is the female orgasm. When a woman clims atop our rigid cocks to bring the orgasm on herself, we are stripped of the masculine. She is no longer waiting for us to hit that perfect spot, she is actively bringing it out herself. She takes control of her own cunt- away from us. She desires the orgasm as we do, as a man does. Where the woman will wait, she never does.

Ultimately her control is no more true than ours- than mine. I am, we are, helpelssly drawn here like so many horny moths to her salacious flame. And she to ours. In controlling her cunt, she has lost control of herself. An illusionary control that I crave in her to be rid of it myself. I know it to be false, and can’t bear the lie. Fucking whoever she wants is no power. She is out of control, forced to return here day after day, to fill her cunt with flesh- and let no one deeper than that. She must satisfy a craving she cannot sate, and cannot escape.

Blind to her fault as I am consumed by mine, we suffer. She drowns the pain in endorphins and sweaty screams, always hiding from the fact that control is not about who you fuck, but about who you do not. But wrapped in our cocoons of novocaine, we cannot be reached. The deepest intensity I have known is sex. The darkest secrets I know are within folds of skin, shallow, only just beyond the surface. The only pinprick of feeling that pierces the fog of anaesthetic is the brief moment we call an orgasm. A dull imitation of genuine feeling, of deep perception. Of body mind and soul, I have yet only discovered the first. The latter remain as mysterious as the cosmos, but I try to pretend otherwise. I decieve myself. I live in the lie I see perpetrated all around me by every man in this room as we all gaze in wonder at the false idol seated across from me. What she offers is not the meaning of life.

There is more, I am resolute. I do not question it. But I can’t get to it, I can’t understand it, and that rankles. I feel deprived, I feel crippled. A sort of incomplete being in an emotional coma, that is unable to feel anything beyond what my body experiences. My corporeal existance so overdeveloped that I have lost a sense of the inner being, the spirit that dwells within. Anyone can come, who can say they have touched their own soul? Who can say they have reached another’s? I cannot even say I have mastery over my body, not hardly. My addiction to my own hormones blinds me to itself, and I am lost in an endless cycle. Spiralling downwards away from freedom, into the pits of debauched pursuits of pointless physical reactions only a step removed from knee-jerk reflexes.

I feel there is something abnormal in me. Either I am an invalid missing some fundamental characteristic that proves me something more than an animal with the instinct to reproduce, or these ideas are a cancer spreading through me. They grow and compound on themselves until I cannot escape my questioning. Am I insane? Somehow flawed into thinking I should be more than I am? If all humans carry this inescapable instinct to fuck one another, does my objection to it in me make me something other than human? Sub-human or super-human? I certainly do not feel super. I feel weak, I feel incapacitated. All I can do is lament my torn resolve. On the one hand I am the animal needing to feed on the flesh of another, seeing what I see and lusting. On the other, I am disgusted with the preoccupation. The schism is widening.

So she sits, oblivious to my trauma. My love for her breeds self-loathing in waves. It is not love. It is lust. False lust, indoctrinated into my rhythms by decades of immersion therapy. I feel victimised by an emotion within me not of my own making, followed by the repugnance it fosters. Where is the key? What is the answer? How do I balance the pleasure of sex with the need for truth? Not knowing, to not understand myself nauseates me. What other purpose can I truly serve, if I cannot even comprehend what it is to be me? To be human? Am I the only one who is even trying?

No… no, I know that I am not the only one. That much I do know. And yet that one struggles not with it. She knows who she is and I admire her conviction. I fear the conviction that I once held, which was bound by niavety, and am therefore terrified of faith. I cannot tolerate faith because I am driven to understand. Faith does not require understanding, in fact, truth is the anathema of faith. Once understanding is achieved, there is no room for faith, only for acceptance. I seek that knowledge. I seek an explanation, and cannot abide faith for it has fooled me already. Yet is serves me no better to distrust that which I cannot understand, when I understand nothing.

So I remain motionless, staring at her, and seeing myself reflected back in all my ugliness waiting for understanding to come so I may accept, or for the courage to again have faith.

We both admitted it was silly, but we both did it anyway. Valentine’s Day is perhaps the single-most obviously manufactured holiday that we celebrate, and yet it was a good excuse to express a little love- a little extra love. Not that we lacked the expression to begin with, not at all, in fact, we were two very clingy people, clinging very tightly to one another, and loving every moment of it. I’d never had someone so happy to be close to me, to just put her hand on my leg, or lay her head on my shoulder so readily in my life. She was wonderful that way. Such small gestures, really, that were so clearly absent when we were apart.

I loved her slowly, I remember that. We met and things moved very fast, too fast for me, I tried to slow it all down unsuccessfully. I was scared, I guess, but she was so happy, she made me feel so good without even trying, I couldn’t help myself. Every time I caught her eye I had to force myself to look away or I’d never stop. She could hold me there, almost in a trance, in a sort of fluffy pink happiness that kept me insulated from everything that was going on around me. Once I admitted it to myself, we were swept away by the force of our love.

I didn’t have to say I loved her often. She didn’t need me to say it, she had believed it long before I said it anyway, she told me. That made me laugh, a girl who could read me when I was trying to stay a little hidden, a little protected. It really was the right thing then, I figured being with someone who knew me so well wasn’t bad at all. I needed it, needed the caring, needed the attention that she could so readily supply. I couldn’t help but do things for her myself. It seemed harder not to, than to extend a helping hand when she stumbled. We grew strong together. None of the setbacks we suffered slowed us down. We just kept on feeding off each other’s energy; I never ran out of strength to lend her, even when I felt like I had none myself. She could always pour some of hers into me, just by holding my hand.

So we would always spend Valentine’s day doing stupid love things together. We walked in the park. We ate ice cream. We talked, slowly, staring into each other’s eyes and ignoring for the most part the words we were saying. We preferred the language of bodies. Our fingers would touch, tips to tips as we sat opposite a small round table in the gelato store. Her tiny figure nestled so perfectly against mine while we rested on park benches. Her arm encircled my hips and my hand found its way into her back pocket as we walked as one. It all fit. And on Valentine’s day, you have an excuse to enjoy it, just for the sake of being in love.

It really isn’t fair to place so much importance on living a certain way at a given time, what about the ones who… was the last thought that crackled across the landscape of Jason’s synapses before the 8,000mg of Valium finally took hold. Night closed in over him, and the clock beside his bed ticked over to 12:00 a.m., February 15.

I sat at at a table not exactly in the corner, but positioned in such a way as that I could see the majority of the cafe, its other tables, and the entrance without turning my head. I watched them, watched them all, as they carried on their conversations. Few people turned up to cafes alone these days, almost as bad as going to the movies alone it would seem. I didn’t mind either way, each had its appeal. Attending with company was of course pleasantly conversational, but also ran the risk that all human interaction ran, that one’s party would become somehow unpredictably uncomfortable. Dining alone gave me a chance to study the human animal in various stages of the mating ritual, during feeding, and their drinking habits.

My own drinking habit lent me the supernatural microscopic vision I was enjoying now. Despite alcohol’s apparently depressive effects on the body, my mind seemed to have sped up. Or time had slowed, either way, I was able to observe real-time actions and spin multiple thoughts around each one before the next action had occurred. The way that man’s hand rested on the table, reaching towards the girl opposite, but never quite touching. Was he really reaching? Or was he simply resting? Was it his sister? A long-time partner, their need for physical contact having since faded? An old friend who didn’t stir the need for a touch at all? And of course my own overlain bias, my own feeling that i’d like to touch that woman myself, leading me to believe that the man there does too.

There were three girls eating together across the way from me. And smoking; I really didn’t care for the taste of cigarettes on someone’s mouth, but the one in the middle was good looking. I wondered which of them would be going home to get fucked, which would be alone, and which was jealous of the other. Women were so fascinating, in their professed openness an honesty, and their practiced espionage and deceit. Not that men weren’t liars, but in my experience most of the time, they didn’t pretend to be otherwise. Everyone was a liar by omission. Their secret little lives that they kept at the back of their heads as if they weren’t ever there. The way that I was sitting here for all intents and purposes eating a plate of spaghetti, when I was imagining what I’d do to the girl in the middle if she came home with me and Celeste. Memory merging with fantasy, as I injected the girl in the middle into the midst of a wild night of debauchery that I’d actually known with Celeste.

They concealed it all from each other, maybe forgot about it for a time themselves, but I knew it was always there. Humans don’t really change, they just adjust temporarily to what they think they should be. In fact, everything that makes them up at any given time is always, constantly present. Unshakable, indefatigueable. We cannot escape ourselves no matter how hard we try. The same man who downloads torrents of Russian gangbangs is the same creature who delivers boardroom meetings and takes his family to the beach. He’s the same when he undresses the teenagers on that beach with his eyes. I wondered which one he was, as I surveyed the cafe patrons.

I wondered which person had the darkest secret among them all. Was it the one there with deepset eyes and the scar just above her hipbone? She was a little too thin. I wondered, where had the scar come from? I wondered who’d touched that skin before it was scarred. I looked through time, to imagine her at fifteen, flesh unblemished, unbroken, the first time a male hand slunk nervously below her waist and into the softest of her skin. I imagined the fear, the excitement that raced between the two innocents as they set out to discover what all the fuss was about. How many had it been since then? A lot of years had passed since fifteen, more than she was comfortable admitting, and probably more men than years. What was her secret? Who was she when she wasn’t her, here?

Was it that one, the man there, with the expensive shirt and cufflinks? What had he done in the so-called lifetimes ago? Had he been someone’s first? Someone’s last? Had he taken what cannot be returned? Had he struck a man? A woman? Killed? What taboos were his fetish to break? A drinker? A bi-sexual? Gambler? Was he a religious man who glorified God in order to bask in that self-righteous glory himself? That sort always brought bile to my throat.

Maybe the darkest secrets were my own. I, the one who couldn’t help but transcend the superficial, who felt driven to drill past the facades worn by millions, to find the commonalities shared by all, the same visceral, bloody, messy secrets we all hide from everyone in order to pretend we don’t have them at all. Everything from the cum that’s swallowed to the xenophobic tendancy that can’t quite be shaken. Everything that emanates from the deep-seated fear of truly knowing ourselves, lest anyone catch on that we’re not perfect. To know our imperfect selves is to admit to it, and to surrender to being a real human, which in this post-post-modernity, is unforgivable.