black box
by Swim
Imaginary waves broke within me carving out a deep hurt like a coastal shelf. I felt strung out and exhausted and not sure how to figure out what was required of me let alone find the energy to do it. Em and Bruce took me out to where the city meets the sea, on a hunch that the real thing might cure my faker seasickness. And it’s true that bit by bit I feel better. I’ve got that pleasant tiredness that happens when you finally start sleeping again. I lie on my back on the mildewed mattress with my hands behind my head, staring up at the circular reflections of the streetlights on the ceiling and listening to the most gentle fireworks I’ve ever heard. They were loud like bombs when I arrived on the 4th, but now all that remains are simmers and whistling ripples punctuated by scattered claps. It’s as though those setting them off no longer know what, if anything we’re celebrating, but it doesn’t matter. Like me their only choice is to keep going and see things through to the very end. Until all that’s left is smoke and flickering white fairy light.
This hood’s a ripped film strip kinda world. Red-eyed cops and air-conditioned criminals dap it up and do-si-do. It’s either fresh and clean or dreds, there’s no middle way. Surfers walk barefoot over glass strewn streets. Speakers the size and shape of coffins topped with flashing lights are dragged to the beach in black wagons. Boarded up houses, some still marked with faded search and rescue codes, sink into mounds of ancient, disintegrating garbage. The girls dressed in their summer clothes saunter past weeds taller than dune grass. I enter fleeing to the trademarked sounds of the VALIS mega mix that starts in the middle and never ends. Like Rome, like PKD and Dr K. The jets are slow and low as the white sky descends and fills the frame with urgent grace. Meanwhile the waves come one after another, sometimes sideways and sometimes getting sucked up from under where I’m standing to remind me that the vibe is ancient and there’s nothing I can imagine that hasn’t already happened. I’m closer now. No lights on but everything glows. I look for signs under the elevated train tracks. A single wheatpaste eye, the same one I keep seeing on books and logos and tattoos. A shopping cart lies on its side while a hymn is hummed, over and over, tuneless echoes of a meaning I can’t grasp by someone I can’t see because they are half-hidden by the illusion of rationality and hidden deeper still.
Odious, is that you? To speak in an ordinary voice might break the trance, so I sing instead:
“Surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself awaaaaay.”
There’s a rustle followed by a movement in the corner of my eye. Up above a drone buzzes and a gull cracks up. OA was here and now they’re gone. I’m always right on time but just a second too late.
It’s the nature of intense intimate relationships such as the one I have with Odious to occasionally fantasize about murdering the other person. I used to shame myself for feeling this way back at the beginning, just after lockdown started, when they had been kind enough to let me come over after I called and begged them, convinced I couldn’t be alone. We had only had a handful of conversations up until that point, but they meant more to me than any I’d had with my so-called real friends.
“Yes, of course,” they said. “Let's hang out tomorrow.” Or something like that. One of the most pivotal moments of my life and I was so high it’s fuzzy.
But I do remember the next day at their place. I had to get used to the intricate lighting scheme, the various colored shadows that hung in the background like rainbows. Odious sat tilted forward in a gamer chair, their face directly across from my own and their legs folded beneath them. They spoke in a low voice and in a frank manner that made it seem like nothing mattered too much, which comforted me. The lights changed again, in sync with some still unknown process or unfolding event. The pink turned into purple in the front of the room, and all at once I could see myself as a silhouette reflected in Odious’s eyes. I had a flat, disquieting feeling followed by the strange certainty that if I were to shoot them the bullet would pierce my own heart.
But in order to kill them I’d still have to find them. I wait on the slanting porch. I wait at the side of the highway, beneath the mural of the little girl who died. I wait in the phone booth, filling it with plumes of tropical vape as I try and fail to will the portal open.
“There’s no such thing as a single way out”, I report back. “Each decision leads not to one inevitable outcome, but to a multitude of possible futures.”
“Duh”, Em says.
I’ve got more energy but the part I call me still feels so heavy, it fills up my head like money stuffed in a case. But really it’s just a flash. A burst of lightning–we are born and then we die, a secret message in a dream.
(Jung: When the person dreaming me wakes up, I will cease to exist.)
The key is to remember that the flash is anything I want it to be. Like reality itself I can remake it, using bits of sci-fi stories and lies.
The illusion is that it piles up, an entire lifetime cataloged in years with different titles and differently designed covers, but really the memories are just empty space because the things that happened were empty space.
(Nada y nada y nada y nada.)
“We have to make something, something with the most intense tendencies towards social flatness, something that will populate the future with positive innovation,” Em says, while doing a dab.
“But also something that will gain us a little notoriety, you know, just like you taught me. We need to start a beef or two and get something to go viral.”
I want to help but without The Babies I’m tasked with not only coming up with ideas but actually creating the content, which feels like a job. At the open mic I lie on the stage, moaning while 90’s jungle music plays and a video shows a loop of me chewing a whole pack of gum at once, working on that strong jawline I need for the author bio pic. The internet men stand around me and stare with their cocaine eyes.
I’ve got a rugged improv mindset and a smear campaign and a porn sword. I’ve got my notebook and my Japanese pens and I’m trying to describe the unpleasant feeling in the air just before a phone rings. I can feel it coming, but it still startles and upsets me with its demand to be answered, even if–especially if–it is the case that I was waiting for a call.
(Will I feel this way when Odious finally finds me? Will I answer or just let it ring?)
And there are the dark memory scenes, they are empty too but nevertheless persist. Like the one in which I’m huddled beside The Babies as we speed down the road, my Vans on my feet and my head as big as a boulder.
(Diamond necklace on my shoulder)
I wanted to be the one to help. The special one. This is what was at the root of the problem. I realized this as I climbed into the back of that pick-up and knew my time with The Babies was about to end.
I told them I was sorry and they nodded, too cold to do anything more. The shrooms and whiskey had me in my feelings. Desires churned together and became one, drumming out a singular urge for survival like the blood inside my ears.
Some of them had perfect bone structure and hair that looked better the dirtier it got. Swollen eyes like baby birds and cheap earrings like found treasure. They could have been young Greek lords or models, lounging languorously around a giant urn and getting paid for it.But there were also those who were pale misfits, with fucked-up skin and eyes that were either too far apart or close together. Cloudy, over medicated brains. Scars. Wearing ugly walking shoes for old ladies paired with black, knee-high compression socks and combat shorts.
I thought I could fix them, show them the truth just like Odious had shown me. But none of that matters now.
For two years we shared everything, food, water, books, bodies.
I nodded out and had a quick but very realistic dream that I was flying a helicopter, navigating between fake but nevertheless deadly explosions. I billowed up on a bubble of air and then dropped. The pyrotechnic heat caused delamination to me and the rotary blade. Together we fractured into layers that became fragments, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
“Fragments are the only form I trust,” I said to one of the younger Babies who was strapped in beside me. It’s a catch-phrase I’ve said so many times that in the dream I believed the words were my own.
I knew I was in a dream, though I was powerless to control it. I wondered; do movie set helicopters have black boxes? What about the ones in dreams? After all, I could die in my sleep. They should be in everything and everywhere death lurks; a black box mounted upon each step, each breath.
The dream switched from flying to being back in the truck. The Babies were slumped over and shivering. I could feel the damp air on my skin, a welcome change from the flames. It was so close to real life I thought I was awake. Lil Mountain was there. He was eating a tuna sandwich in the corner of the cargo bed as we zipped along, going somewhere, I don’t know. He was wearing shorts, his white legs curled up tight (later on I’d see the pile of rope in the truck and think, there you go). For a few seconds I watched him chew with his mouth open before he held the rest of the glistening bread out to me.
“Yo, money. Smell this—does this smell bad to you?”
I laughed and leaned towards him but we were going too fast to risk crawling closer.
“Where have you been?” I asked, relieved that he was alive.
“Oh, it’s hard to explain. Here and there… but mostly in between.”
“Man, I've been waiting for you to show up. You’d get such a kick of it out here. Cyndi and her kids are more your people than mine. Like you they can’t wait to make it home and go fuck in the bathrooms in diners and Target.”
He grinned and rubbed the space between his eyebrows with his index finger, touching just below the black quadrangle tattoo that covered most of his forehead. I settled back suddenly feeling cozy and light. Good ol’ Lil Mountain, aka Jesse James, orbited by a million satellites both real and imagined. Any moment now and he’d start talking about the government and then switch to his admirers and enemies down the street or across the world before coming back to me again.
But when he finally spoke again it was in a low voice that was nearly a whisper. There was a mechanical wheeze that frightened and repulsed me, as though phlegm coated pumps and dials were whirling inside his throat:
“The home of my people are the borderlands…we barely let ourselves be seen, and only then as a way of revealing something that’s been covered-up.”
And then he’s gone. Something happened. A cop was in front of me. I joked that they were going to bring me into the woods and beat me up. Then I’m standing in the street with another cop. We seem to be chatting normally.
The beer is in my hand then it isn’t. I had pictured it there, but now I can’t see it, so I’m straining to get out the words to ask the cop for one, a single tallboy for the ride over to the station, but I can’t ask because I’m puking up glass. I can see it, sparkling on the gravel. The Babies are telling me it’s OK, it’s fine, but I can feel the pieces stabbing my throat as the vomit surges out. There are bits of windshield, Corona bottles and that funny tasting pipe we smoked out of before.
Just one beer, one last beer, and I’ll be quiet forever. It’s already been decided.
"Hey! Motherfuckers! Why didn't you stop me?" I demand. "You guys knew what was going to happen...you read all my shit. You follow my phone around when I take it out of the cage. Why didn't you put an end to it? Why didn’t you stop me?"
I’m screaming and crying at the puke splattered ground, threatening to eat the very same glass I puked up, the glass The Babies claim was already there.
“You see that, that came out of my fucking mouth. I’ve got rock diamonds in my stomach, I’m crushing that shit up. I’m eating glass whole, and I’m puking it out in pieces. Can’t you see how I’m all cut up inside?”
Maybe the crashed pick-up truck is itself the black box. It's curled like a fist, hiding within its trembling frame certain factual errors and conceptual inconsistencies. Among these is a curse that first appeared on a wall in a cave, painted there in symbols, hidden for thousands of years before not only being seen but photographed. Passed around, released.
It followed me for a long time, appearing as symptoms and warnings. A dark shape in the corner of my eye, in the meaning of numbers I kept seeing in things I read, on billboards and license plates. It was expressed in the rough ridge of the scar on my bottom lip that I caressed with my tongue.
Here at the sea I lie on my back and stare up at the ceiling and notice how the cracks in the plaster are opening up. A glowing being wearing vaporwave blue and pink is descending, their arms outstretched in benediction. It’s Odious, coming to me in the form of an angel. They've been near me all along but I couldn’t see them because I didn’t believe.
I’ve been judged and condemned to this dark and petty little half-life but there’s still time to make something beautiful that will help people.
“I have so much to learn. But I really think I can change.” I say to Em, over and over, sometimes twice in one day. And each time I do I hope she will agree and say yes, I know it’s hard but you can do it, just a simple decision and you can activate a whole new expanse of love and peace that you sometimes feel and is just waiting there in your mind, but she never does.
Image: Francis Bacon, Two Figures at a Window, 1953
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Love Always,
--Swim