love was too plebian - part deux

"Forget it Kelsey, I don't even care about my stuff anymore," I tell her, from across town. As far as I know, no wires are involved, nor satellites. I'm telepathic, in a half-assed way. She'll get the gist, in her half-assed comprehension – once she tries to stop "reading me" like she does her clients, and just fucking listens.

"Props on the physical threat though, you really do know how to prey on my insecurities. And by all means, send your 'super pissed' douchebag over. I'd super love to meet him. But better tell him to come heavy, you cunt. Sorry to be super crude, but there's no other word that fits. You know accuracy is a priority for me."

It's not my fault, it's telepathy. Yeah, I chose this life, if you can call it life, but it got out of my hands. I can't help but think, and send. I suspect she can't help but hear, but she will have the option of denying it to herself. I figure. She'll distract any unwanted thoughts with a boyfriend-girlfriend carpentry project. Ahaha. How cute.

I'm vile and bitter and childish. And justified, I think. I'm a child when it comes to these ugly mind games played in the dark corners of the Casino Licentious. I think licentious is a better word than love. Love is so fucking good, man, but it's corruption. And it makes me a juvenile delinquent, what I've wanted to be since I was eight. So I suppose I should be thankful to those mean girls who pried open my rusty heart with a chisel for kicks and allowed me to enjoy anger. Especially the latest one, the last one. I'm through with this game, I'm taking my ball and I'm going home. But not before vandalizing the playground.

The worst part is that she's not even that evil. She's come a long way from when she complained to her server friend that it "fucking sucks, doing someone else's job", ie, "my" job, the cutlery, that all the other servers are happy to help me with - then later that evening, yelling to her pathetic non-associate tag-along, eager to present her some hand-crafted birthday gift, that "I'm on the fucking phone!" while having a smoke break outside.

No, Kelsey's not that evil. Just her nose-ring - that's her evil jewel, the seat of her shiny happy power. But the rest of her is fairly decent, even under the hair dye, has she gone back to black? I haven't seen, except in my head, where she's still blond, and I couldn't bare her being back to black, it's too dark, too catholic, and now her school-girl skirt is taut in my head between two legs that were straddling me that one time, or was it two? I honestly don't think about it much anymore. I couldn't if I tried.

So, the super-pissed boyfriend. I guess he's coming. I just sent out an official invite. I told him to come heavy. Fair warning I guess. Although I never get fair warnings, especially from those sweet-voiced bitches. And I'm likely to be the light-weight in this fight. I can picture him hulking over me. Hulking over her, hulking inside her, skulking up the stairs to my house. Kelsey was the first girl I've been with that I could pick up and throw on the bed. Imagine what he could do with her, the douchebag. And he's such a douchebag that he would. Do all kinds of crazy things, just to prove he can. And when's the last time I've even been in a fight?

But I've got something he hasn't got: the power of delirium. I'm the meta-me master's marionette. I don't even remember what I did to cause this delirium. I have a few theories, but there's too much noise to signal. The meta-me master will take care of me - pull some strings. It'll dispassionately appraise the situation and force me to do things I would never dare try on my own. Oh, he's a partner in crime, and though I've never heard anyone agree with me that he's a good friend, I love the bastard. Good friend? What's a good friend? There are no good friends anyway, it's silly criteria. Just friends. And he's the deepest of them all.

I trip over a pile of bedroom debris stumbling for the "stabbing knife" I think is in the closet when I hear a knock on the door. Panic strikes. Did I lock it? Oh god, I hope I locked it, because I know my roommates are gonna try and come in, I've broke the unspoken inconceivable covenant of this sacred house and now I have no right to privacy. They'll come in and find the motherload, mounds of used medical supplies! Another burst of knocking, fuck, how long before they open the airlock and blast me into space? I creep up to the door, spindly off-kilter maneuvers over debauched debris. Quietly, I squat under the door handle, reach up, and TWIST in a sudden spasm. Locked, haha! Too late for you, mate!

I expect pounding, maybe a battering ram or whatever techno-tronic equivalent exists in this house, maybe Ninova with a jasmine-scented crowbar smashing the handle. Silence there, and nothing more. Fuck. Okay. Fucking with my head, are you? Well, whatever, I have my delirium to go back to. So I will.

Did I grab my stabbing knife? No, I don't have it, unless it's sticking out of an inaccessible organ. It's in the drawer though, right? I stumble back to the desk chair, stubbing my toe and stepping on my good pair of Sennheisers. Seems like fate, more broken headphones, Void's plan. I open the drawer to find no stabbing knife, but something I hadn't expected. A little baggie. I was hunting for that baggie for hours earlier, I remember. And here it is in my top drawer, the one I checked two hundred times. But there's no kootenay crystals in it. Instead there are two lavender colored pills. I don't remember buying them, but I guess I must have. Somehow, I'm sure they're E. But I'm so delirious, is it worth taking E at this point? Yeah. I'll just take one. Then another.

Wait a second. Aren't those the diphenhydrinate pills I'm tripping on right now? Uh, yeah, that's right. And these brain zaps are getting worse. I thought it was because I forgot to take my sertraline, but then I remember that diphens cause that too. Except ten times worse. It's like an electric shock that passes from the back of my head, to the right hemisphere, then the left. Then I feel like I'm passing out, my vision dims, and for two or three seconds, I'm convinced that I'm dying and life's a big nothing - my final thoughts will be a dry haze of phase out. Then I come back to full consciousness, gritting my teeth. I'm alive, but I'm dreading the next shock. Will it come in ten seconds, or twenty? Maybe it's slowing down. But of course it's not. Fifteen seconds pass and then it all happens again. I know why they use electricity to torture people - there's something about it that's just so hard to tolerate. I'd rather be scourged till I bleed to death. I should take my sertraline but I can't find it. Shit, and I just took another two pills thinking they were E. I wish I could sleep, but if I somehow manage to, I think it'll be the last one I ever take. They call it "the big sleep", but it seems small to me. It's a doll sleep.

That reminds me, I'm in a dollhouse bedroom. I guess I took DXM too, sometime during my blackout last night. I see four bottles of Robitussion liquigels and several empty packets with their crinkled foil. And then I feel the march of pills in my stomach, one after another, slowly passing through the protesting intestine like a clogged chunnel, and me, the traffic controller, prostrate. Four bottles, fuck! Plus whatever else. Oh, I can taste the toxins in the back of my throat and in my stomach. It's methamphetamine, ammonia, and bleach. Somehow I have stomach consciousness, the most gross form of internal telepathy. And the little voice, the leader of a busy bio-hazard crew, ripples clear through my fogged head. It's not words exactly, but the message is: You must throw up. You idiot, you must throw up, right now. If you don't hurl in the next thirty seconds, you will die. The toxins will pass, barely, but there is also a parasite, a horrible monster transmission dweller. It just flew by me. If you think you feel bad now, just wait till that bug digs into your DNA. You have twenty seconds. Do it, idiot, or we're all dead.

Oh no. I'd better do it. This is body gnosis, I can't pretend it's not real. I guess I'd better purge, even though I'm so scared that it'll get stuck in my closed throat, or I'll start puking and not be able to stop and start dribbling liquefied organs out of my mouth. But I must, or I'll die. The little voice doesn't lie.

I stumble to the door again and scrabble at the handle but it won't budge. I remember it's locked and twist the other way, but it's still stuck somehow. I grab and pull and twist every which way, left and right, forward and back, inside and out, in a senseless frenzy, fretting about roommates again. Somehow it opens, and I robo-swing out like a wrecking ball, from bedroom doorway to adjacent bathroom. But I smack into the door - it rattles loudly. I open the door automatically, but my sense of left and right are inverted, so I'm twisting the knob the wrong way, and my axis of gravity is ninety degrees relative to the hallway. This fucking house, it's going perpendicular JUST to fuck with me.

I'm still trying to come to grips with the doorway, when the door opens in front of me. The light is bright in the bathroom and Ian is in there, startled and staring at me. The washing machine and dryer are humming. Fuck. Uh, nevermind, I think, or say. Ian is doing his laundry in my bathroom. So no puking. I'll just let whatever bug is in my gut kill me. Whatever.

I robo-swing back into my room and shut the door, forgetting to lock. Something pokes into my foot through my sock. Oh a needle. One of those. It's funny, somehow. It gets funnier every time.

"You idiot, you're dead now," says the little voice, and I'm so ashamed. But I think I can hold the puke in. If I'm going to die, I'm going to die dry.

But my body feels like liquid mercury. Now I remember, I'm a T-1000. Not the famous one. I'm not a bad terminator, I don't care about John Conner. And John Conner doesn't care about me. If I can keep out of human detection, maybe I can co-exist with humanity, somehow, in a dark corner. I've been sent on a mission of some kind, maybe sent myself as a sleeper agent. But I still can't remember what -

ZAP! Oh fuck, please let the zaps stop. I can't take it. I'm going to jump out the window, bash my head in, do something crazy, anything crazy. What can I do, what could distract? For some reason, I'm playing Super Mario Kart and thinking about game-melody collecting woodsprites. My thoughts are so flexible and so locked down. That's what it's like on this theme park ride.

Faking seizures... so convincingly. Why why why? Why does this exist? Why not? Silly human questions, as silly as a rock talking to me. Silly answers, but I'm serious on this radioactive test-isle.