[INSIDE JOHNNY:¥]
by Arden Jaeger
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
RE: IJY Assembly Cut Request
███████ █████ <███████████████> 03:21 [1 hour ago]
To █████████████
As discussed, mostly unusable. Attached NERVE_FILE so you can see what I mean.
Cheers,
██████████.
Director, Eternity_X Productions
eternityx.com
1 Attachment:
>YEN_MINDF_V0.1_ASSEMBLY_INTERNAL.nev
[Assembly Cut – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION]
M1ND_FUCK!
STARRING: JOHNNY:¥ + M4X_P4YN3
Director: Hey! So, Johnny. Welcome back to Eternity_X. Johnny? You listening mate? We’re rolling.
Johnny: What? Oh. Sorry. Just tired, man.
Director: Look, you wanna be here tonight or what?
Johnny: Yeah, I mean sure. It’s just—
Director: Then can you at least try and stay focused?
Johnny: Okay, but—
Director: Right, ready to restart?
Johnny: Huh? Sure, yeah, okay.
Director: Hey! So, Johnny… Welcome back to Eternity_X! How are you feeling tonight?
Johnny: Uh, chill, ha ha.
Director: Lots going on in this feature, throwing you right back in the wringer with M4X_P4YN3. Anything you’re looking forward to?
Johnny: Uh, yeah like… um… wait, what was my line?
Director: Come on man, are you high again?
Johnny: Sure, why?
Director: Why? Cos the whole point of a NERVE_FEATURE is to let people go inside your mind. How the fuck do I sell your brain if there’s nothing there to begin with? So, Johnny—anything you’re looking forward to?
Johnny: What? Sorry. Yeah um… uh, M4X is cool I guess? Oh! “Looking forward to a total mind fuck,” ha ha.
Director: Whatever. So, what’s your safe word then?
Johnny: What?
Director: I said, “What’s your safe word?”
Johnny: Oh, uh—red?
Director: And if you can’t speak?
Johnny: Shake… shake uh, shake my head?
Director: Right. [a wry smile that makes Johnny’s face drop] And if you can’t move?
Johnny: Yeah, so I’m gonna… gonna…
Director: If you can’t move, you’re gonna—?
Johnny:…
Director: Blink.
Johnny: Oh yeah! Ha ha. Yeah, like blink. Blink thirteen times or… yeah, cool. I’ll do that.
Director: [Deep sigh] Johnny Fucking Yen, everyone. Ready to give ETERNITY_X fans another rip-raw ride of sensations beyond the limit. You know what they say! Nothing Johnny can’t handle.
Johnny: Cool, cheers. Thanks. So—?
Director: [storming off the set and screaming to the crew] I don’t know, figure something out in fucking post. We don’t have time to reshoot.
>WARNING! NERVE users must be seated and in a clear, unobstructed environment<
>Please wait while NERVE syncs with user SENSORIUM<
> █ █ █ █ [SYNCING] █ █ █ █<
>Entering immersive calibration<
Yen’s Money.
Yen’s desire.
You are inside my mind.
> The aim of calibration is to ensure synchronisation with N_Feature and user sensorium. Please adjust definition in SETTINGS to customise affective frequency.<
You (I) reach out and press the metal lens in the right eye, feel the twitching ball of flesh as it passes an electric signal to the plates in your mind. The eye is the sterile observer, recording everything I see, while the NERVE_UNIT—threaded through my brain and skull—captures every thought and bodily sensaton, all so you can experience life inside me, Johnny fucking Yen.
You release the pressure on the eye, feel dizzy as the set dissipates into fog before returning without much more clarity. A humid white room, draped floor to ceiling in paper, with strange men at the periphery, strange lights so hot they threaten to evaporate the sweat bubbling on your kneeling thighs.
You cannot focus no matter how hard you try. Blame the chemical slurry: that cocktail of drugs thumping in the backwaters of your brain: ket, benzos, another substance that you cannot identify, even with access to memories of an extensive history of downers. The effect is a slow motion breakdown, an acute numbness and perpetual cognitive drift that makes holding onto anything near-impossible.
With a sharp buzz somewhere in your head, calibration begins. The studio’s white lights turn softly to red and then to black. The world shifts from the distant cloud of reality to the locked and forgotten vaults of the mind, the drugs making the transition from studio set to memory murk difficult to pinpoint.
By the time you’ve clocked that anything has even happened, you’re already vaguely cognizant of the dream-like architecture that’s filled with a nauseating insect buzz. Concrete walls stained by the heavy flares of fluorescence beat in the dark, and a tiled floor flashes an underwater green as, perched on a sticky counter, an insect light-trap pulses with infrequent cries for help.
In this simulation of the past, your thoughts are placed over mine in palimpsest, and mine over his—a past version of me that I do not recognise.
His: dull ache…
a wondering dread…
this bulb too bright to—
they
Mine: They?
Who cares.
Body hurts
that’s unimportant.
Yen’s money.
Yen’s desire
You:
You are inside my mind.
A single fly with a missing wing crawling towards the trap. You blink, hard, and suddenly you and me, and maybe my past self, feel everything it feels, see everything it sees: sticky traces of faecal matter clinging to its proboscis, swirling colours swallowing its eyes like cataracts. A desperate tremor of its one wing, a dull ache of recollection, remembering the pain of its removal by something so much bigger than itself. For the fly, the memory is acidic. But for you, it is no more than a bullet point floating through abstract space.
Its buzz gets louder as it zips towards the trap. Closer and closer… blue flashes exploding from the bulb as a lighthouse beacon. You become more nauseated, motions too rapid for you to process before—
You feel a hot jolt of pain when it hits the bulb. Next, a dull thwack against your skull when you return to my mind and find yourself writhing on broken tiles.
The noise of your sobbing throat sounds as distant as the the fly buzzing as it dies. Yet you experience no attachments to anything. Not the insects swarming the pipes, not the throbbing pain in your head, not the blood running from your nose to join the faecal soup dripping from the ceiling and bubbling in your squealing mouth. You lie dumbly on the floor as a red light blinks on and off, on and off, on
[-aaaaand we’re off! Rolling]
You are inside my mind.
>Calibration complete<
> entering_M!F
The dull hum of electricity, andthe feeling of powerlessness is a blanket. Sensory deprivation: set turned black, rubber gag, arms and legs pulled back behind you while your brain does everything it can to escape to somewhere else… anywhere else.
[—Stay in there, Johnny you’re going—]
[—Day dreaming—fucking—]
Mouth sour behind the gag. Breathing through the nose, hard. Two white lights appearing in the dark, the glare of his LENS summoning the bulk of his shadow as he steps towards you. M4X_P4YN3, ETERNITY_X’s premier talent, second only to the incomparable victim Johnny:¥.
You feel his fat fingers close over your throat before you see his face. A yelp bursts through the gag in your mouth, and you’re squirming, looking into his glowing eyes, bracing yourself at the sight of his—
[—Eyes open, Johnny—]
Trying to take in his bulk, even as his presence in time and space slips, even as his grip gets tight, even as he—
He’s taken your face, squeezing your cheeks together while you drool behind the gag. Shakes your whole head as a deep laugh erupts from his chest. Then he raises his palm,
[—Feel it!]
smacks it across the side of your face and you try—fucking hell do you try—to let the sensation linger, let your mind take it in completely before he strikes you again.
And again.
And again.
Each time, the smack grows harder, the restraints on your wrist getting pulled so tight that your hands are growing numb. But you are barely a body, barely a mind. You crawl comfortably into mental paralysis and feel nothing.
His groin right by your face.
The dissociative penumbra of the downer.
The gag ripped from your mouth and the gasp that fills the room quickly turns into a well-rehearsed scream that you do not feel. At least, not like you’re supposed to.
You are inside my mind.
What’s brought you here?
Seasick on salt taste, semen landing cold on the belly, face—obliterating white margins
as red light
blinking on and off, on and—
M4X’s eyes, electric and wild in the afterburn. Can’t shut my own, must keep focus. Stay in the room, the hot thud in my arsehole pounding, pounding, the taste of shit—
but I’m disappearing despite the
—Johnny, pay—
Despite the—
—trying […] us anything or what?
watching saliva pool from the corner of your lips and all the way down to a floor made of… made of… paper.
Piss becomes the midas touch as it misses your mouth, turning paper into gold. Though most of it you hold there and gargle, savouring the taste. Acrid. Poisoned by meth, desperately wanting to throw it up and what you’re not forced to swallow you spit down onto the paper as the lights in the room suddenly flash yellow and M4X_P4YN3 holds a greasy can in front of your… my… I ….
and pours more piss over your face, burning your eyeballs.
Trying to take it all in. Every sensation. All of its taste but
Me
I’m
slipping, the drugs or—
Red lights
Red lights.
I’m
I—
Sickness, sickness so unreal you are getting dizzier, thinking they must have—
must have
poisoned something, because you’re floating above my face as it stares into the void with
red light, everywhere a chaotic bruise that sinks you further into my mind and you
ARE INSIDE MY HEAD!
A total mind fuck, back lit oblivion of M4X_P4YN3 lit up on the edges by blood light sickness and -Please, somebody I—
—Johnny, don’t slip, I swear to christ—
You are inside—
Seasick on salt taste, semen landing hot in the back of your throat as a rupture that reminds you of memory tumors blistering sick and dizzy with the aftertaste of times best forgotten. Fly tortured, wings severed, killed in a trap by a sick sociopath whose name was… name was…
Who the fuck is JOHNNY:¥? Yen’s desire. Yen’s money. JOHNNY:¥ is… What?
I AM INSIDE YOUR MIND
[—He feeling anything or what?]
Seasick on salt taste, sperm dividing the margins between him and me and us and you and
what’s yet to come—
I feel electric currents in my eye and part of my mind remembers the script, what it is I’ve signed up for.
[—How’s his vitals, G?
—Stabilising, I guess. I don’t know. Man’s high as fuck, it’s hard to get a read on anything.
—And the METH BOMB?
—Yeah I reckon it’s about to hit and he’ll stop being such a… Wait, I think he’s trying to say something—
—I don’t care. M4X we’re resetting with the—
—What?
—I said we’re re-setting. Have you actually read the script or are you as fucked as this one?
[kicks]
[groans]
—Yeah, yeah. I’ve got it.
—Okay cool, he’s coming back around.
—Yo, boss man. You sure you don’t want to check if he’s?— ]
I am inside your mind.
The sudden pain of hot-white lights, a psychological hurt so palpable my spine goes cold. They’ve given me something, a stimulant designed to exceed the paralysing draught of my downer, so that now
[—Signal read is good. METH_BOMB’s done its job]
I’ve become so acutely aware of everything. Smell becomes a dagger—piss, shit, vomit, sweat, and cum—like the click of a hypnotist’s finger: back in the room, Johnny. Back in the fucking room.
—Welcome back to Eternity_X, HA HA HA HA.
Staring at M4X’s giant, tattooed back as he sets up the next scene, so aware of its weight, the way he fills the room. So aware of his smell—burning plastic, gasoline, the suffocating stench of a body unwashed for several weeks. If before he had been a translucent presence, now he is rock solid. Right here, right now.
Reflexively, I readjust myself, but my knees slip across the puddles of filth, spreading up my thigh. I tumble, face smacking into the concrete beneath the paper, and I reach up to check if I’ve broken my nose, but I’m smearing piss and shit down my cheek and across my mouth, and the smell… so present and obnoxious that for the first time, I recognise my own fear.
—HERE COMES JOHNNY YEN AGAIN!—M4X shouts with a force that does not belong to him, turning suddenly towards me.
Weight falls into the pit of my stomach as if my body has, up until now, been liquid passing through the fabric of reality, passing through pain, leaving no mark. Only a voyeur making notes of the agony and filth before letting them drift away. Always, ALWAYS—
His fists thumping against your skull, body moving as a ragdoll, insentient matter just—
Chest tight and bursting, his hands searching the inside of—
Like waking up in a fucking nightmare except…
M4X_P4YN3 presses down on the back of your neck so you’re forced to swallow the smell of your own shit, and the weight of the world is a battering ram against your mind.
CHEST TIGHT AND BURSTING AND HEAD REELING EVEN AS M4X—
Even as he—
You don’t—
[—Here we fucking go!]
Except here—it’s just so much easier to…
Can’t
see beyond the immediate danger that I’m not
real.
Reworked endlessly by everyone but me—
But
“A near-total psychological absence.”
[—Don’t lose yourself Johnny]
trying so hard to explode but
M4X’s swollen, deformed cock right in your face as he drags you by the hair so tightly you let out a yelp and you’re crawling at his command.
—FUCKING HELL THIS HURTS SO MUCH—
Ahead of you, you see a riverbed of shattered glass, spewn across the floor. The drug in your mind makes the light that bounces off it so painful you have to squint. White, laced with the emetic afterbirth of that which has come from inside
ME.
Crystal shards, swimming in the light, and when he kicks your arse with his boot you fall into the glass and you recognise, through the pain ripping through your entire body, that this is
Me.
My body.
Drawn tight in the agony, a thousand shards of glass slipping into the bruised flesh.
And I allow myself to lie here in broken glass. Pausing, panting, feeling the room grow silent as I let the reality of the pain surface. Slowly, shards slip deeper into my body – throbbing, aching, as if a bruise struck against a wall. I recognise pain, as material as the tears ripping down M4X’s cheek. The safe-word ‘red’ begins to form on my trembling lips.
It is so tempting.
All it would take is that one word and all of this would end. But I can’t. Not yet. Not until I know for certain that this new agony belongs to me, must belong to me.
You let your eyes roll to the back of your head as you fall onto your belly, screaming as the glass punctures your chest. You’re growing dizzier by the second, blood loss drawing out all your energy, but the brain tries so hard to focus only on the pain.
For a moment, the room has grown still. None of the crew expected this religious calm, to see you so thoughtful when for so long, all they have known is the living corpse. M4X hesitates, his eyes wild and regretful. Yet, the sight and sound of your sudden sobbing is enough to break all tension. M4X does what he has been paid to do. He drags you through the path of broken glass. You continue to cry, a heavy doom penetrating the soft underbelly of the brain, the psychological accompaniment to the rapid heart rate, the shredded skin. Though whether your tears mean anything you—
[—Okay aaaand CUT! Let’s get the next scene set up. M4X, you need anything?]
My first shoot with ETERNITY_X. Intimidating men, the lure of narcotics, and a brief respite from thinking about survival. The next thing I knew I was waking up in a metal coffin. No panic at first. I was ready to let the weight of the earth destroy me, auto-erotic asphyxiation by dirt. Instead, what followed was a freakshow: hallucinations triggered by the noxious smoke pumped into the box, the realisation of its thin lid giving way under all the pressure.
I was convinced I would die then, buried alive, but with a violent flash of light, the box was rent from the ground, and I entered the inhospitable glare of the studio, staring into the eyes of M4X_P4YN3. I mistook his tears for sweat at first, his sobbing for grunts. But in the end, he did what he was supposed to do, extended the torment until I could do nothing but fold into a ball and weep.
It had been a setup, sure, but the feelings were real… at least back then.
We were both so fucked up in those early days—whenever they offered another contract, we both signed it, both gave up on the relative ease of hardcore porn for whatever it was that we kept coming back to.
Now, ETERNITY_X owns the right to my body and mind. My job is to feel inhuman agony in all its horror. But they never counted on finding someone so incapable of feeling anything.
I wonder if it even crossed your mind that I exist outside of this gimmicky tech. All this time, I’ve been hung up on the fact that I don’t feel real, but you… you…
Red.
I’m not prepared for the tight knot of rage that curls in my stomach as I come to, staring into the mouth of shadow that holds the crew captive. It’s like blood thumping towards the brain, hot and steaming and—
There must be a way, I’m thinking, must be a way to make you see.
[-Ready to go?]
Maybe I could…
I could…
but
Perhaps the pain—
re-tooled
—Johnny?
The soft black underbelly of
—JOHNNY?
Set seems
So
—please
I start to beg but—
Yen’s money, Yen’s desire, and JOHNNY:¥ is just a vector, just a sign.
—I said ready to go?
—Uh, words in my mouth like rocks, accompanied by the taste of vomit —Yeah, I’m fine?
M4X follows the director’s non-verbal cue, and his body becomes an eclipse, blocking off the studio lights and the shifting shadows beyond. I look to the floor, trying to follow the rhizomatic shoots of wires that entangle M4X, them, myself, and the paper set in this drama of human fluids and glass.
And furiously, I look down.
Look down at the face in the glass table. The hurt is so far beyond you. A dull throb, sharp heat of shards penetrating your filthy body as distant as the sound of a plane rumbling beyond the concrete ceiling.
You cannot take your eyes away from my reflection. I won’t let you. You confront an archive of bruises. Mawkish yellows and the ugly force of purples blistering over a face with bones that protrude at odd angles, the twisted nose, the pointed rise of a cheek. And beneath it all, tattoos fester, impossible to decipher amidst the swollen, deformed flesh that belongs to me.
I breathe deep, and you breathe deep. I make you watch my battered face blink and dig your nails into your palms. I readjust your thighs, and you feel a sharp sting as glass drives farther into your flesh.
{—the fuck is he doing?}
{—you must}
{—ready if?—?}
{—here comes—}
Your spine recoiling, sensing M4X behind you, but still your gaze is fixed to my tattooed face.
Under my direction, you lower your forehead to the table, meeting my reflection, and I force you to stay there, force you to see my intentions festering in with enough clarity that you start to tremble. Blood bubbling and bursting in your throat as you try and speak but instead you can only succumb to my pathetic nod and—
—You ready then? You hear M4X murmur, almost fatherly. None of the psychotic aggression he’s been hired to perform. His voice bears a cadence of memory that might be welcoming if I let you explore it. But instead, you slowly nod your head and slowly, I allow the pain to come back to you.
[—set and]
The ache in your arsehole.
[—Rolling]
The hot-flashing in your face, like a punch, a feeling with enough history that your body has instinctively tried to cower.
[—good with—]
The sting in your neck as M4X pulls your hair, trying to drag your head back. But, still, I make you look down.
I fill your lungs with air and fight the urge to close your eyes, but before you can even think to breathe out, M4X forces your head forward, and my face rushes to meet you.
The sound of crashing, a brief flash of black before your vision is flooded with a red light so volatile. Unimaginable pain as glass shards penetrate your face, hot and burning as your skull throbs. I make you scream.
—WE AGREED YOU’D KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN! The director is yelling.
—FUCK OFF! blood tumbling out of your mouth, doing nothing to wash out the taste of shit—I’LL GET—psychedelic tapestry of sigils as the drugs transform body fluids into a vortex of—
—KEEP THEM OPEN—
Breath so erratic, your lungs wheezing and
—KEEP THEM—
in this sick and—
—JOHNNY—
—JUST ONE—
—OPEN!
You barely have enough time to register that you are rushing towards the table again.
I keep your eyes wide, stare at my face—the aperture of a thousand horror movies—in the screen of broken glass as it—
{CRASH}
—FUCK!
It’s not the pain that strikes you first, but the bursts of static in the right lens, now impaled by a shard of glass. Your vision breaks in half, a split-screen of the world. The left side takes in all the bloody, cannibalistic horror of the set while the right succumbs to a near-blind technological meltdown, glitching sigils as the LENS attempts to repair itself.
You feel M4X take you by the shoulders as you fall into his arms, before I allow him to throw you down onto the floor. I focus on every single piece of glass lacerating your back as you scream, the stabbing in the eyeball, the glitching in your LENS slowly vanishing, the set coming back in all its violent detail.
Dripping—
The shard in your eye, tilted towards you just enough so that you can see me staring right at you. In shaking fingers, M4X holds the shard of glass and closes his eye and
PULLS
the eyeball from its socket.
And you’re watching it wet and slick, dragging out a network of wires and nerves and—
The LENS continues to do its job, record and broadcast everything to your brain, our brains. On the right side of this split-screen, you see me through the damaged lens (still fixed to the eyeball in his hand) and the empty socket flooded with red.
The nerves and wires become new restraints as he wraps the eyeball around you. Shibari wrought from the wicked sexual liaison of man and machine. I close my eye, the one that looks out at the crew, so that you can take all this in. You came here to witness my degradation, so witness. Every inch impaled, every inch torn in that blanket of filth that is now captured in this string net.
M4X brings the eyeball behind you, and you see the damage done across years of selling myself. The ruptured anus blossoms as a rosebud, the impact of a cannonball. The red flesh glistens, catching the traces of light that spill from the eye.
—DO IT, I spit—FUCKING DO IT!
M4X’s hesitation threatens to take hold of him, but he does what he is obliged to do. One finger rests on my ass cheek, the other holding that wet mass that stares into the event horizon of blood and pulverised meat. You hear him grimace and, watching through the eyeball, we come closer and closer to my anus.
Me, my body—
He forces the eyeball into my arsehole, and you and I, we dive deep, deep inside.
Yen’s money.
Yen’s desire.
You are inside my—
But what’s brought you here?
—Seems fucking pointless doing a post-interview but—
—We’ll see what we have in post. We might be able to edit something together so having—
—Yeah yeah whatever, let’s roll.
Director: Hey, M4X, Johnny. Pretty hot show you put on for us tonight. How you both feeling?
M4X: Not bad.
Johnny: Yeah, ha ha. Same I guess.
Director: And Johnny, your face is fucked! That must’ve been hell, right?
Johnny: Uh—well, like—
Director: Though why ask you how it was when we can just plug into the NERVE. M4X, too—can’t wait to take a proper look at how you were feeling.
M4X: Yeah, wild.
Johnny: ha ha.
Director: Anything you guys want to say to ETERNITY_X fans?
Johnny: Um—
M4X: Uh—
Johnny: Like, I mean—
M4X: Thanks for plugging in, I guess. Ha ha. Cheers.
Johnny: [eye right at the camera] Yeah, hope—hope you found what you were looking for <<<<
Johnny: yeah, hope—hope you found what you were looking for <<<<
Johnny: yeah, hope—hope you found what you were looking for and—.
>NERVE:DISENGAGED
>STANDBY
The NERVE_FEATURE finishes, and I snort the first line I see. Ketamine, probably, because within moments, my bedroom starts to flutter. Lying prostrate in twisted, dirty bedsheets, I stare up at the black mould on the ceiling, washed out by the pre-dawn grey melting through closed blinds. The NERVE controller lies in my palm, but I’ve yet to switch it off. It feels too soon to disengage completely. The residue trace of emotion and phantom sensation remains in my tenuous grip on a body I am so desperate to understand.
I’m listening to the sound of a fly frantically trying to escape the dirty cup on the bedside table. In my ket (?) trance, the noise becomes too sharp, threatening to erase the ghost of yet another night I had spent allowing myself to be destroyed for… what?
The instinct to re-watch my NERVE_FEATURES is a daily routine. If not as an antidote to drug-induced amnesia, then as part of some pseudo-religious self-discovery. But my brain pisses me off. It doesn’t matter how visceral my thoughts are—played back to me through technology I don’t understand—I keep putting up this distance. Call it a plastic wall. Call it a fucking trauma response or another fucked up way to confront my loneliness… my inability to take it all in makes me so angry that even now, listening to that fucking fly I’m squeezing the NERVE_controller until my fist goes numb.
I let it drop to the floor, hear it crash into a pile of takeaway containers and god knows what else. I lie back in bed and stare at the grey light, trying desperately to ignore the insect’s death noise.
At least anger is an emotion.
All I can really remember of the making of that feature is this brief moment after the shoot. They had just removed the shards of glass from my flesh. I stood half-blind in the middle of a huge concrete room with cracked tiles on the floor. A group of grey-ish men were hosing me down while I stood completely naked and holding the wet mass of my eyeball, still hanging onto its mixture of organic and inorganic wires.
The water was like ice, but I didn’t mind. I watched as blood melted off my body, swirled in grounding eddies towards the drain. The director was somewhere screaming about the quality of the shoot and how we should at least be grateful that some art dealer was eager to buy the paper sheets now painted by every bodily fluid I could conceivably shed, that ETERNITY_X were generous enough to pay for the reconstructive surgery for my eye when most studios would’ve thrown me into the streets and let me die of fucking sepsis. But I didn’t listen to him.
Instead, I looked at a half-open metal shutter at the far end of the room. Outside it, I could make out the dream-like apparition of an airport runway, backlit by a sky that made me shudder. It was a red more potent than any of the blood washing into the drain. I swear that colour painted everything, snaking into the concrete room to embrace M4X, myself, and the anonymous men whose eyes I could not bear. It made my heart float in a way I had not felt before. Stillness, I think. Or maybe I was just glad it was all over.
—Hey, M4X said as he came up behind me, resting a warm hand on my bare shoulder. —How are you holding up, mate?
—Not bad, man. You?
—Yeah. Super drained. You know what it’s like doing these. They offered you a way home?
I turned to face him, grateful for the heat radiating from his palm as the hose was shut off. —Nah.
—Jesus christ, that’s the fucking least they could do. His smile ruptured the cloud of my dissociation. —I brought my car. It’s a piece of shit, but if you wanted a lift—
—Sure, I said, wrapping my arms around my freezing chest.
The corners of his eyes creased into a smile that I could tell felt unnatural to him. He took a quick glance around the room, and maybe after realising that nobody was watching, he squeezed my shoulder and nodded. —Come on then. Let’s get you some clothes and get you safe.
Listening to the fly in the cup, I stare at the grey light on my ceiling. The rage is still there, lingering as a confused spectre, but I ignore it. Instead, I pick up the cup and tip its contents onto the bedside table. The fly can barely move. Near death, it sputters pathetically in a patch of sticky, unidentifiable liquid. I watch it for a moment before reaching over, taking a pair of tweezers from the drawer. Through the swirling motions of the ket, I fight to hold them above the fly, moving the instrument close to its beating wings. I close one eye for better focus. A pincer-grip squeezed by steady fingers, and I pull the wing. I pull slowly.