c:\windows\system32\shutdown -s -f -t 129600
The first story.
Johnny B. Good taps abstractly at the syringe’s side, its perfect brown haze oozing about (his nail a similar color and ever so jagged and chewed on and what is probably blood underneath [picked up picking on pick pick needle scar going gangrene {like his eyes} but his arm will not be chopped off because he will live far too long for that] not dry enough for comfort). His hair is long blonde-once-now-black and parched and crinkled and falling out even now in big clumps pulled out by the rats as across the room below the window Sally Sarasota looks at him empty eyed her arm already tied off just ready to get kicked straight up and out and over like the greatest fucking, room flooding over through window aforementioned with hazy neon red and blue and their faces cast like that look like this and this is dead gods, last begotten,(neon sign outside is a cross in read and “REPENT” in blue and it’s all rain sicked, the window’s rain slickness protracting about the light) and on the floor apart from the needles and the trash and the all the rest the neon highlights a large MADE IN USA handgun, coated half in rust, and less than half a magazine and like every gun it longs only to be fired.
And as Johnny B. Good taps taps taps he mutters like he’s talking through a mouth full of shit (though to her his mouth is full of diamonds [and to him all his words are prophetic {the true American Gods the needle and the joint and the rolled up twenty and the television}) and he says
“So yeah this dude... Alexander Scriabin... Russian. anyway, like... I swear to fuck I need this [speaking to the needle and to the audience as much as to her] his last concerto was meant to end the world upon its being played in its entirety... everyone always says it wasn’t finished but that’s fuckin’ bullshit... would never tell us if it was... end of the world and all that... and you know what I think, I think they fuckin’ played it so here we are [outside sirens wail off towards another overdose as this one here sits waiting on tomorrow’s episode of the American dream become as the American berserk] and god I need to fuckin...”
And then he pulls tight a belt about his arm and he jabs the needle down unto himself and he melts and he is god and god is he. The lights outside are mystic and the lights outside are inside and REPENTANCE is here down the eye of that needle, beautiful auburn haze melting out and down into skin, blossoming through veins like a great fungus through the earth.
Then through their fourth floor window three pairs of eyes look in and dare to judge them on the dirt and grime and shit and torn mattress and the no other furniture and the garbage and the empty needles and the just emptied needles and the “dead” eyes and he sees their eyes out their fourth floor window and he judges them straight back, how can he and his love be the dead ones if they are standing outwith looking in a fourth story window? and then he looks off down a hall just appeared leading out from where the window once was and it stretches on a ways as far as that red and blue neon flooding in through the window which is now a hall will permit and towards the light’s terminus the light is swallowed whole by a vast and yawning darkness and then the darkness begins to rush forth towards them and he screams out for his love,she now lying back flat on the floor, the wall disappeared out from behind her now an endless hall and she looks at him and their eyes lock and in that moment he has his her and he has his heroin and he has his REPENTANCE and the darkness is racing down the hall towards him and life is perfect and this is not a metaphor and
light races in through the naked window 6am first rays and it cuts through that disgusting yellow gunk that builds up on your eyes and pastes them shut especially when you go to bed fucked up and it jars them awake and they wake up holding one another because whatever else the junk does it pulls out the truth and the truth is that they love each other
And they’re holding each other half naked eyes junk yellowed and arms scarring and going gangrene and skin half rotting off (though not yet to the ticking krokodil when their skin will rot off for real) but none of the rest matters because they are holding each other and they are in love and when they walk down the street holding hands people cross the city to avoid them and they’re what’s wrong with America nowadays because nobody is allowed to be that in love and they’re holding each other.
And an epic pounding at the door.
And Sally Sarasota is just a little bit more present in her eyes and her skin than Johnny B. Good aso she picks up the gun in her hand and chambers a round (it just scraping in through the rust, a horrific crinkling of raised metal against metal that eats straight down through the skin and into the bones and burrowing past something deeper and right out again the other side) and she has no shirt and no bra but this isn’t sexy, this isn’t erotic, this ain’t anything but desperate (and a more attentive narrator might note her breasts are saggy and they belong to a woman who is 83 and she ain’t hardly 27 but this narrator isn’t about all that, more interested in objectification of Johnny B. Good’s Jesus abs and over elongated member flapping about, needle marks all along it,now - enough sex - back to the drugs and ultraviolence) and speaking of ultraviolence as soon as Sally Sarasota reaches the door and looks through the peephole the door comes splintering inwards and Sally goes flying backwards but she’s stronger than she looks, more with it than her sad, dead, American honey-meets-heroin eyes would ever say and she’s back on her feet before the fucker’s through the door and they’ve got guns facing each other like 81’ all over again, his dead eyed Israeli machine pistol and her looming American handgun, straight up, straight out, errecter than Johnny B. Good has ever been and the man with the uzi is tall and wide and he doesn’t get high on his own shit and that’s why he’s on the end of the carefully polished hardware and her gun is so choked with decay that it's as likely to blow back as forth.His magazine hangs down long, 35 rounds, and she’s got six if she’s lucky, probably more like three so she holds fire, and he isn’t here to get off, pays people for that shit, he’s here for the money you fucking junkies I don’t know how you got this far but I’m here for the fucking MONEY! and she looks down at Johnny B. Good and his flaccid member and up at her rusted out pistol and remembers that service station just down the road a little ways and then remembers that there ain’t likely to be more than a few hundred and she needs a few thousand and then she looks at the thug across from him and she sees deep into his blue, sniper’s eyes, and thinks of all he never will get to be and then she fires three times before he can breathe and he falls back through the just shattered door frame, blood pouring from his chest and he shits himself,such a horrific smell, that, and Johnny B. Good is finally up and at em’ and he sees Sally Sarasota standing like that hips like a gunfighter arms like a soldier breasts hanging out all sexy and his dick rises a little bit then sits back down, clearly exhausted by the effort.
She looks down on him and she says put on some pants and she sticks the gun in the back of her panties and it bulges by her butt and Johnny B. Good notices this but this can’t even get a rise out of him and he looks down abjectly and she’s bending over pulling in the body, it leaving a trail of blood and shit. And then she stands up and he struggles on with his pants and he stands up and she goes for pants and a bra and a shirt and then darkness falls suddenly with a crash and the sun is gone and all that can be seen outside is a darkness is a red cross far in the distance. Tick tock tick tock goes the krokodil.
Their lover’s eyes meet and they hold each other and they look down at the body and its eyes are glowing neon blue, now shooting shafts of light straight for the ceiling, then it sits up and begins to look for them and then it fixes Johnny B. Good with a perfect neon stare and he begins to scream and Sally Sarasota pulls him for the door or where the door once was and grabs a shirt and their shoes on the way.
The hallway is near dark as pitch and from the pocket of her jeans (torn to tatters and patched to pieces and just generally falling a’fuckingpart) she pulls a small flashlight and shines it around and the walls are covered with something that would be shit if it wasn’t so black and the floors the same and she pulls on her shoes quick as she can and helps Johnny B. Good with his and then they start walking fast as they can from the body which they can both be sure from a feeling deep inside has now stood up (erect) and is wandering after them, its neon blue eyes casting the occasional distant hallucinogenic shadow,the junkie dreams mixing with the raw terror and the decaying junk and bad eyes and the not quite dead gangster so that every vaguest glance of anything but darkness is an ant by the side of a highway view of something unimaginably vast and terrible. And then of course in the darkness itself is something even worse.
They walk for a long time. Somewhere a woman cries. A child dies. And a man jumps from a roof. His watch shatters upon landing and the hands fly off and are washed by his pooling blood straight into the sewer.
Intermission
Wherever you are. And whoever you love. I’ll always be by your side. I am the thing which you can never discard. I am your dragon. I am your god. I am your pure heroin.
-Sally Sarasota
June 21st, 2043
After she misread the title of Lordes’ first album
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1000 count=1000000 | gzip > test.gz
-Author Unknown
An Explanation of All That Has Come Before
Audience Members, Please Return to Your Seats
(the doors have now been barricaded from the outside)
The second story.
They have been walking for almost not hours. Sometimes the hallway slopes up. Sometimes it slopes up for thousands of miles. Sometimes it slopes down. It slopes down further than the total depth of the radius² of the earth. Sometimes it curves back and forth and all around itself so that they know they should have walked back through where they just were but they didn’t. Sometimes they just walk straight for a long time.
And then after they have been walking for exactly almost not hours, they reach the front door of the dilapidated, abandoned apartment building and walk outside into the blinding neon American night.
Sally Sarasota looks at Johnny B. Good and Johnny B. Good looks at Sally Sarasota and they’re both shaking a little bit and it’s half because they’ve just walked through hell and the shadows got closer and the angles of the impossible got taller and the flashlight went out for a few hours in the middle there before randomly coming back on (and then dying totally once the exit was finally in sight), and the other half because they are junkies and they need a hit and have no money and nothing besides the clothes on their back and two rounds in a near rusted shut handgun.
And written on his lintels:
Fuck me.
Love me.
Take me up.
Put me down.
Love me.
Fuck me.
Just fucking kill me.
And written on the ink carved across his back:
May the lord deliver me to evil.
And on the butt of his gun and on the cover of his bible and on the red hot screaming muscle car across the American night and the raw fucking terror of hammer back bang bang all fall down and the depression of the plunger and the swirling in the syringe and the bubbling in the bent back spoon:
this is not a pipe
Breaking down on nightclub floor just coke and could’awould’ashould’a,blood splash baseline spraying mac with a long clip (magazine he things half angry half crazed at the rap lyric) her face was hot pink and his was dehydrated-piss yellow and the music went badump badump badump badump badump badump and then the lights strobed and everything was the color of sunset then the color of sunrise then the color of an ice storm then the color of the new Mustang parked in the lot behind the club (the sun just beginning to rise above it) then everyone was the color of blood and they grabbed each other and he grabbed her ass and she grabbed his and coke doesn’t make you ugly so fast and they were hot then and she wasn’t much but she was coming up and he was a whole hell of a lot and he was on his way down and they were gonna’ meet in the middle and grab each other tight about the waists (asses) and fall like hot lead pastthe mile marker and they’d burn bright like the same hot lead (tracer fire at least) and they’d hit their mark and rip through flesh and cut through bone and the city would scream in orgasmic ecstasy at their falling down, pitch black velvet night turned to day in a million shades of incandescent and fluorescent and halogen and most of all FUCKING NEON, they always fucked to neon, LEDs plastered around the succession of rooms each more decayed than the last, first that minimalist perfection of bichromatic ecstasy and expensive stereo system and good cocaine and shit weed and then the perfect middle class cream coloured tile in the kitchen and a stain here and there on the carpet and just try heroin the once baby, just the once, nothing on this earth better,and then pretty quick after that the south side dump with all the roaches who may or may not have been all in their heads and hell, at that point it was still heroin thank god (tick tock) and when the roaches got too much to bear it was the motel which rented rooms by the hour with suspiciously colored stains all up and down the walls and across the matted carpet and seeped deep into the bed sheets but the motel’s sign was neon a thousand colors and it shined in right through their window and they fucked under its lights and they held each other under its lights and they come up under its lights and they crashed down again under its lights and somewhere along there they started in on the fentanyl and then it was the room with all the shit and garbage and the hallway that went on forever andat that point it was still heroin thank god (tick tock) and when the roaches got too much to bear it was the motel which rented rooms by the hour with suspiciously colored stains all up and down the walls and across the matted carpet and seeped deep into the bed sheets but the motel’s sign was neon a thousand colors and it shined in right through their window and they fucked under its lights and they held each other under its lights and they come up under its lights and they crashed down again under its lights and somewhere along there they started in on the fentanyl and then it was the room with all the shit and garbage and the hallway that went on forever andat that point it was still heroin thank god (tick tock) and when the roaches got too much to bear it was the motel which rented rooms by the hour with suspiciously colored stains all up and down the walls and across the matted carpet and seeped deep into the bed sheets but the motel’s sign was neon a thousand colors and it shined in right through their window and they fucked under its lights and they held each other under its lights and they come up under its lights and they crashed down again under its lights and somewhere along there they started in on the fentanyl and then it was the room with all the shit and garbage and the hallway that went on forever andand across the matted carpet and seeped deep into the bed sheets but the motel’s sign was neon a thousand colors and it shined in right through their window and they fucked under its lights and they held each other under its lights and they come up under its lights and they crashed down again under its lights and somewhere along there they started in on the fentanyl and then it was the room with all the shit and garbage and the hallway that went on forever andand across the matted carpet and seeped deep into the bed sheets but the motel’s sign was neon a thousand colors and it shined in right through their window and they fucked under its lights and they held each other under its lights and they come up under its lights and they crashed down again under its lights and somewhere along there they started in on the fentanyl and then it was the room with all the shit and garbage and the hallway that went on forever andall the shit and garbage and the hallway that went on forever andall the shit and garbage and the hallway that went on forever and
now the city lights of early winter rip up above them chrystal on satin, and neon spelling out a hundred million American dreams, fast food hamburgers and cheap liquor, coca cola and beautifully carved models in perfect makeup, get clean, quit now, smoke American Spirits, denim jeans around perfectly carved asses, male and female both, 21st century, it don’t matter who you fuck so long as you fuck someone, come to god for judgment day is coming, magnum condoms - for the overcompensator in all of us, puddles of rain all around them and it still coming down like Molly at five in the morning on a Sunday and in the rain all the colors of the rainbow reflected, the words and the images, the sex and the drugs and the junk food,and she pushes him up against a wall of dirty brick and she puts one leg up in that way she does that makes him just so hot and she kisses him and their lips explore each other and their tongues fuck each others throats as their eyes, though closed, fuck each other, and their hands explore each others bodies for what might as well be the first time
and they walk on down that rain slicked sidewalk, hand in hand, stepping bout empty food wrappers and old cigarettes and all the rest swept up by the rain, being carried now in torrential speed towards terminus point deep in the city’s bowels, so many chevrolets rushing down the 60 late at night, horizon chasing
A rat runs out from an alley and appraises our heroes, his little hands pressed together, and he sits back on his haunches in that way that rats do that makes them look like they know just that little bit more than us (and we all know it’s the little bit that counts). And this rat, after careful contemplation decides they’ll be dead inside of twenty four hours, and when they are he will feast on their dead junkie eyes.
They come across a homeless man, he slumped up against a wall, just below a sign proclaiming in what else that JESUS SAVES, and the symbolism obvious and Sally Sarsaparilla sees it and chuckles and Johnny B. Good fishes around in his pocket and finds the last dollar they have between them and tries to toss it into the homeless man’s cup but he misses and the floodwaters rushing the sidewalk take it and it is washed into some far off gutter, to be dumped eventually into the sea.
Then Sally Sarsaparilla takes Johnny B. Good in both hands and fixes on his eyes and both of them their eyes clear and his are gold with flecks of green and hers are green with flecks of gold and all the junk disappears from their blood and from their brains and they are children again and far off a car backfires and a woman screams and an ambulance cries. And she says to him:
“We need to run.” and he says I know, and she says “So we need money” and he says yes and she says “the gas station just down the way - we have a gun, we can steal a car - we can die here on these streets or we can do this like we always said we would and die long and hard, protracted across heartland’s mirror scape, white phosphorus and heat and automobile engines on fire and blood” and then he kisses her and she kisses him and they are both about sixteen hours sober and the shakes are starting to set in and rational thinking has almost entirely flown the coop. From somewhere down the road a church old and magnificent, worm-holed, teleported in from a different time, a different city, lets out a choral groan a hundred strong and the air in between the piss and the acid rain and the regret and the heroin smells faintly of Christmas.
Then there it is, the gas station, that smell faintly wafting up like a childhood high, a swift kick to the head from between booze slicked teenage hangovers, red sex and a cold shower and screams the light ecstatic about a million stars. And all around them shadows loom in between the city’s great flood lights, pulling out in harsh relief the corpse of every junky and every patch of piss and pile of shit, human and animal all bled together, five million people and ten million dogs all living on top of one another.
They stride towards the store and the clerk catches them up in his stoner’s hazy perceptions and he clocks them as something funny but, like, petty shoplifting funny, stuff it in your pockets and run funny, but it vaguely occurs to him that they have no pockets. Or car. Or chance in hell at all as somewhere a clock ticks down.
They walk inside. Johnny B. Good holds Sally Sarsaparilla’s right arm tight, and Sally Sarsaparilla’s left hand rests on the butt of her gun (poking out just ever so seductively above her butt, it still... Johnny B. Good can’t keep his eyes off her, not ever). The clerk fixes them wary and his mind is turning, brow is sweaty, hands are a little clammy, too late, too early, too something. He turns his eyes back to his phone and with that steel clears denim and porthole to darkness watches him and he watches it, gone a bit cross eyed, it more beautiful than anyone he’s ever tried to fuck (can’t keep his eyes off it, not ever). The side of Sally Sarsaparilla’s mouth twitches just ever so slightly and the clerk knows what to do and he opens the register and
Then roaring through the night, the best minds of their generation, petrolhead gun thugs, coked up stoned out, bringing heat and fire and el infierno, car screaming like a cheap porno actress just about over that last edge of her career, screaming for a future she never really had. And it rolls up outside and Johnny B. Good sees its driver and sees its passenger and he knows both of them and he tugs ever so slightly on Sally’s arm and she swings around and Johnny leaps the counter, pushes the clerk out of the way and starts grabbing money and Sally Sarsaparilla goes from kid with her daddy’s pistol getting ready to get dead, middle of the cul de sac middle of the day, leave some young deputy to pick up shell casings from amidst his blood to Doc Holliday-Do-Not-Fuck-With-Me, gun in two hands, stance perfect, has three rounds, only needs two. FIres once, shatters plate glass and the driver goes down, blood pouring from his chest,and the passenger is reaching for his own gun (blinged out beyond recognition, invisible for all its shine), and he manages to get off a few wild rounds and on hits the clerk in the neck and bloods spraying like a garden hose, coats em’ all baptismal and Sally fires off a second round and the gun thug drops his gun and stumbles back a bit, puts his hand to his chest, looks at his own blood wet upon it, looks down, looks at Sally, voids himself, stumbles over the sidewalk, falls. The urban night howls, sirens cry, women scream, children just sit rocking back and forth, eyes tired, old, dead, tired, for all the things they’ve seen at age seven that no one should have to see ever, and two men lay dead, and the brides ofand he manages to get off a few wild rounds and on hits the clerk in the neck and bloods spraying like a garden hose, coats em’ all baptismal and Sally fires off a second round and the gun thug drops his gun and stumbles back a bit, puts his hand to his chest, looks at his own blood wet upon it, looks down, looks at Sally, voids himself, stumbles over the sidewalk, falls. The urban night howls, sirens cry, women scream, children just sit rocking back and forth, eyes tired, old, dead, tired, for all the things they’ve seen at age seven that no one should have to see ever, and two men lay dead, and the brides ofand he manages to get off a few wild rounds and on hits the clerk in the neck and bloods spraying like a garden hose, coats em’ all baptismal and Sally fires off a second round and the gun thug drops his gun and stumbles back a bit, puts his hand to his chest, looks at his own blood wet upon it, looks down, looks at Sally, voids himself, stumbles over the sidewalk, falls. The urban night howls, sirens cry, women scream, children just sit rocking back and forth, eyes tired, old, dead, tired, for all the things they’ve seen at age seven that no one should have to see ever, and two men lay dead, and the brides ofvoids himself, stumbles over the sidewalk, falls. The urban night howls, sirens cry, women scream, children just sit rocking back and forth, eyes tired, old, dead, tired, for all the things they’ve seen at age seven that no one should have to see ever, and two men lay dead, and the brides ofvoids himself, stumbles over the sidewalk, falls. The urban night howls, sirens cry, women scream, children just sit rocking back and forth, eyes tired, old, dead, tired, for all the things they’ve seen at age seven that no one should have to see ever, and two men lay dead, and the brides ofpistoleros wailing by their grave side as a great typhoon washes it all away, and a third lays dying, and no one will wail for him because no one will remember him and between the rain and the hazy neon everything is passing a piss yellow straight on to gold, sick and apocalyptic and grand.
Sally Sarsaparilla, slick with sweat, Johnny B. Good, slick with blood, go to each other now, embrace each other. They do not kiss. This moment calls for a different kind of love. She brushes the blood from his eyes and cheeks and mouth and looks at him and he looks at her and this moment, unlike most every other moment this night, is pure.
From somewhere in the deep back employee’s only of the gas station, some low and old calls out to them. They look towards it. Then the sirens grow louder. They step through the door (it’s glass gone - who knows whose bullet), hands held tight, and Johnny B. Good steps lightly over the dead gangster (tears tattooed under his eyes - every brother and every friend, all dead and now he too, chasing the American dream like his daddy always knew he would, came to this country for it, and now dead just like all the rest of them, all American boys dead of the dream by way of lead poisoning to the same post-death paradise, where muscle cars rumble and Bruce Springsteen plays long into the night). Sally Sarsaparilla bends down to pick up his gun. Johnny B. Good drives. Sally Sarsparilla holds the gun (slick, metallic, cold, hard, soon to be hot,all ready to blow its load, but not him).
Second Intermission
She’s like looking up and finding one’s eyes upon a bright neutron star, she a phantasmagorical miasma of light and color and energy, her whole body and self and soul pulsating to the beat, her eyes like so many dreams, dreams we all have, of love, of simple, ecstatic love without compromise or compare. I knew the second I saw her. I could have been anything but I just wanted her. And that’s I suppose where it all went a little wrong.
-Johnny B. Good
February 29th, 2043
Upon dropping out of Yale
“You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative”
May 24, 2040
Naked Lunch
Cock.
The second to last story.
Light at 95 is like star trails and in the desert at night all there are is stars (and sand and far off howling coyotes and low, rumbling machines that only now how to SCREAM), and her eyes flit back and forth between star trails and his eyes, dead ahead to immortal future, knuckles white playing with that gearshift like, well, you know, and she puts his hand on his and his hand is icy cold and she kisses him on the cheek and then she turns to look back out the window. Both of them are sweating profusely and they know the withdrawals are going to start getting bad in not too long but they haven’t hit yet.
She studies now the stars like she studied his face back then on that night in that nightclub she was three steps from sober and two steps from out, good job painting houses in the most literal of ways when all she ever really dreamed of as a kid was painting houses the figurative way but life ain’t a movie, she knew that, so she’d paint houses and the money was good, in the long run better money in literal house painting than in the alternative. She saw him and he was slender and tall and dark and his hair was cut all hipster and his eyes shone all serious, a million colors with little spots of onyx and emerald amongst the irises, they a different color in their totality in each and every different kind of light,and yet despite the constant shift of nightclub cyberpunk homage they still shone out in all their complexity and she fixed herself to him and pushed him to a corner and they made out like high schoolers under the bleachers and she put her hand under his shirt and he put a hand on her ass and she hiked her leg up like girls do in a certain kind of movie and she felt like everyone was looking at them and she hated it so she asked him back to hers and he was nervous, could feel it in him, arms buzzing, veins alive, didn’t really quite get it - he was gorgeous and he was young and he dressed like she figured he fucked. No reason to buzz like that but she buzzed like that too so who the fuck was she to judge? And as soon as they crossed her threshold she was ripping his clothes off because god,she was a human being and she was allowed to want a good fuck once in awhile wasn’t she? and she was sure now - he really was nervous about something and she got him down to his underwear and she was in a bra and jeans and he stopped her. Put his hands on her shoulders looked at her standing there, the way the light seemed to vanish into her pale blue eyes, miniature black holes. The way her mouth was fixed just so. He went to his knees, unbuttoned her jeans, pulled them down. Her underwear, gazed at them. Calvin Klein boy shorts. He was always so into that shit. And yet there was something that should have been pitching itself in his own pants that wasn’t, something that should have been tugging its way up from his own groin straight up through him, into his every tingling nerve ending and yet that something was not there.He tugged those Calvin Klein boy shorts (grey) over her bony hips, gazed now at her womanhood, perfect, pubic triangle trimmed just shy of hairless, the absolute western beauty ideal, as passed down from old Grecian marble works (which are actually Roman reproductions of statues that were originally bronze, but eh, the imagery is all that matters - and still the Riace Warriors survive, that chiseled male form, those perfect calves, those small, flaccid, hard as iron dicks) and gently he licks at her womanhood and she begins to pitch and heave and then scream for it and right as she’s on the bleeding edge... she stands him up and pushes him down onto the couch and pulls down his boxer briefs (black, like everything he wore) and then... oh. Uh. Sorry... fuck. Sorry. It’s not... you don’t have to...and then he buries his shame (and his face) in her sex and she screams and she cums like... like that light stretched out at 95 to star trails, and hell if it isn’t good enough for her. And so it thus it goes for the two, for a little while, at least, he pleasuring her and she never quite able to pleasure him, but that being okay because he’s not after his pleasure, he’s happy enough giving her hers. As long as he had her love, of course. And then the heroin. And he found that if he injected it straight into his flaccid cock, sometimes he could get hard, and then they could finally fuck like “normal people” (his words). And she never told him but he was always better with his tongue than he was with his junk-filled member.and hell if it isn’t good enough for her. And so it thus it goes for the two, for a little while, at least, he pleasuring her and she never quite able to pleasure him, but that being okay because he’s not after his pleasure, he’s happy enough giving her hers. As long as he had her love, of course. And then the heroin. And he found that if he injected it straight into his flaccid cock, sometimes he could get hard, and then they could finally fuck like “normal people” (his words). And she never told him but he was always better with his tongue than he was with his junk-filled member.and hell if it isn’t good enough for her. And so it thus it goes for the two, for a little while, at least, he pleasuring her and she never quite able to pleasure him, but that being okay because he’s not after his pleasure, he’s happy enough giving her hers. As long as he had her love, of course. And then the heroin. And he found that if he injected it straight into his flaccid cock, sometimes he could get hard, and then they could finally fuck like “normal people” (his words). And she never told him but he was always better with his tongue than he was with his junk-filled member.And then the heroin. And he found that if he injected it straight into his flaccid cock, sometimes he could get hard, and then they could finally fuck like “normal people” (his words). And she never told him but he was always better with his tongue than he was with his junk-filled member.And then the heroin. And he found that if he injected it straight into his flaccid cock, sometimes he could get hard, and then they could finally fuck like “normal people” (his words). And she never told him but he was always better with his tongue than he was with his junk-filled member.
And then Sally Sarsaparilla is pulled back to the future all at once like a freight train coming to a stop from full speed to rest up against (in severely contracted form) a fallen mountain by the stars, which she realizes have just blinked out and left them surrounded in darkness, but for the car headlights before them and the brake lights trailing out behind them, and also by Johnny B. Good, who is now screaming. Above is clear black sky and all there is is darkness eternal and the car screams along at 95 but in the pitch black velvet darkness of night once They come back for us and we are all made to totally and finally confront our discharged firearms, and then 95 feels just like standing still.
And then suddenly Sally Sarsaparilla can hear Johnny B. Good’s screaming no more, as he is drowned out by a great roaring cry all around them, it echoing about the mountains they know lie just on the other side of the desert, then sweeping down low across the sands to run straight into them, before arcing back off into the sky. Not a scream like that. Nor like that. Nothing orgasmic. No fear or pain or rage. But something older, an emotion left behind almost entirely by modern humanity, but for bizarre backwoods bible humpers, held in the holiest grip by his benevolent spirit, fucking them ass-ways straight up to their promised land, that scream. He’d heard it once in a documentary and he stops screaming and just lets the tears pour from his eyes. She has her hands pressed to her ears and she is crying too. He wrestles with the car, but no matter how low he gears it, no matter how hard he slams on the brakes, it just seems to go faster, and he knows that their is something leviathanic before them somewhere close in the darkness and he knows that they are only moments from it and he knows that it would be optimistic to think that the crash would kill them.
And then that thing leviathanic comes from them from the darkness and in those moments they see it, and they understand it, but they cannot or will not remember it, antimemetic in its furiosity, for to remember it would be to give in to an insanity beyond suicide, beyond the black heart of the rainbow, an oblivion beyond perceiving, to give one’s mind entirely to an immortal void. And then they pass through that leviathanic thing and out the other side.
And above them the stars appear all at once back and the car is slowing down now to thirty, then twenty, then ten, and he notices the gas gauge reads empty, and he looks over at her and she is white as a sheet and then she looks over at him and he is white as a sheet and then they both laugh in just that way. Ther heroin shakes and chills are gone. Addiction shall not trouble them again. Nor sleep. Ten. By the side of the road now is an old, abandoned gas station, the prices and fixtures not changed since the fifties. But at least it’s something besides empty desert, so he turns off and they glide to a stop before its little store, and look through the windows and the little store is bigger on the inside.
Intermission
DATA CORRUPTED
THefinal story.
Widows are eyes to the sOle. I’s are all mine.
To love and be loved by she. If she would have me and if she would take me, swallow me all up and let me fall unto her and I know I can’t quite but I don’t need to, right?
This is about more than that, but what’s more than that?
Anyone can fuck and get fucked. Anyone but me, it seems.
I’d kill for her, but she always holds the gun, as mine will not go off. And she often holds my gun, even if my gun will not go off.
And rather than anyone holding anyone’s guns (take your revolver and cock it), I’d rather we just lay here next to one another in our nakedness-as-purity and hold one another tight in our touch-as-tenderness us-against-the-universe fifteen-again-absolute-love.
And so many times I wished for that and it was finally she who let me have it.
And then the junk came along and I needed to worry for these things no longer, for I could finally fuck right, so I could finally love her like I was supposed to.
And yet somehow I know I loved her so much more truly before the junk (took my revolver and cocked it for me).
And then Johnny B. Good and Sally Sarsaparilla exit the car (which they will never do again), and they walk towards the door to the shop (which they will do a billion times more) and then they open the door and walk through it (which they will never do again) and they close it behind them.
It is 1953 and he kisses her on the stoop of their new-bought home, fresh glistening lead paint smell, asbestos lined walls, even in the guzzoline, total toxicity, in the air and in the water, and when he goes to fuck her that night he rapes her and such is love under the American Dream!
The station is old and dust choked and the shelves are lined with rotting food made to never rot (twinkies do eventually go bad, un-American not to, a nation founded on principles of planned-obsolescence). They head for the back of the store because the only way is forward even when the only way forwards is back. And leaned up against the back wall: two backpacks, a pile of pre-packaged food not quite rotted, a few gallons of water, big, camping backpacks. Sleeping bags. Upon the wall. Writ in blood.
Hark. The door is closed. The path is shut. So before you doors ∞
nothing ever ends
which did not someday start
fuck your mothers
So he says I already did and she looks at him and he smirks and she looks at him again and sometimes their humor does not quite match. They do not try the door behind them for they know it is closed and will not open so they pick up the bags and pack the food and water and they try the door before them and it is closed but it opens and before them is a hallway dark and gloaming. And from down it somewhere a gentle wail like a sea’s pounding reversed and dropped an octave and a half.
Not enough whiskey in the world he says to his first love, they in her bed in a college dorm and he far too old for this and she just looks at him like that and he kisses her once more and she walks on out the door.
And they step through this second door. Amongst the food were too heavy flashlights, extra batteries a-plenty. So through this second door they step and it is pitch black until they flick the flashlights on (at which point the walls and floor and ceiling resolve themselves as so black that they may as well be in pitch black [but for the gentle glow of each others faces, warm and loving even now] and for a moment (brief like a teenage orgasm) the gentle roaring resolves itself into an off key rendition of Kim Wilde’s Kids in America, lyrics flipped about all sideways but the tune the same:
The young ones are cuming
(Downtown) the old ones are gloaming
Everyone dies in America (whoa)
Everyone dies in America (whoa)
We’re dying in the music-go-round...
Then a sound two hundred decibles phonography scratch, and all is silent but for the muffled padding of their footfalls as if in heavy ash, though the floor has only the faintest layer of dust.His hand is in hers and hers is in his and behind them they leave the door open and they walk twenty-thirty steps and they turn around and behind them is only a passageway as impenetrable as the one before them so they keep down the one before them and they reach corners and turn them and they come to curves and they follow them and after a while they emerge through an opening into a space that stretches up to the stars and whose all walls are invisible (though made obvious by the echoes) but there is a door just besides the opening they just came from so they open this door and go through this doorway and they come upon a passageway indistinguishable from the one they came through.
And they continue like this after a fashion and for a while.
And days pass. The temperature is never quite comfortable, a steady misery of just a little too cold, and they eat their food quickly at first then slowly, as nothing changes, and they drink their water first as a flood, then as a trickle. And at first they talk after everything, as they used to back when they first met, and then they talk hardly at all, as they did in the months before the gunfire in the dark room and the blood and the excrement.
They don’t try to have sex. Not that there would be any point. But they know without saying that the darkness (and the space so much bigger on the inside than the outside) would not have it. And in this he feels a certain sense of relief, a certain unmountable pressure taken off him, for the first time since adolescence, and they lie down every not-night (every six to twelve hours, more fundamentally exhausted every day), and every not-night they find they cannot sleep, so they just lie there, holding each other as close as they can. And for reasons somewhat unclear, since the second they crossed the leviathan, neither of them has felt even the faintest breath of heroin fiending. But the walls are closing in tighter every day, at first a simple paranoia, and then for real, and then oppressive.
And then after three weeks, they have to walk always with their backs crouched. And after three weeks more they have no idea in hell how long they have been there and - to their stimulus sapped minds, it could have been an hour or it could have been a millennium, but it was three weeks, and after three weeks more, they can only crawl. And after three final weeks, reduced to belly crawling, one long tight squeeze through a dry cave, few spots of faintest opening ups a place to lie together and just hold one another, the the food is gone. And the conversation stops entirely. And finally even the water goes dry.
Forward. Until they finally stop completely. No point any longer.
The flashlights now, at first their batteries seemingly inexhaustible, are beginning to flicker. The two hold each other tight for warmth and light but they are both going cold and as the flashlights dim and their stomachs rumble mightily and their throats grow more parched the end seems near. They hold each other closer than ever, because that is all they can do.
They lie pressed together, backs against the walls (and sides against the floor and ceiling)limbs and faces and bodies intertwined. They hold the light such to grant them one last look at each others faces and they know they are dying, slowly, and they just hope that when the moment comes they will die at more or less the same instant, instead of being left alone in this empty, endless rot, as their souls burn down the last of their bodies embers... and then the flashlight is gone and blackness is pitch and they talk only so often as needed to ensure the other is alive and they hold each other closer.
And then, eventually, Sally Sarsaparilla stops responding and then her body grows cold and Johnny B. Good is left truly and finally and totally alone in the endless space between. And all is dark. And all is silent. And then time itself stops flowing so he is left like that for all eternity, clutching hard to his cold dead lover, in this waking tomb.
