I’ve been hallucinating for hours off and on. According to the acid, which has just hijacked my mind yet again, I’m standing—or, rather, floating around—on the set of a snuff film in progress. My eyesight’s gone quite otherworldly, so it’s very hard to say, but that could be Chris tied to a bed. His face is slightly detached from his head, a thin, silvery, masklike hologram of his agonized features, almost translucent, hovering about an inch from where they usually rest. Some guy is bent over Chris, knife out, hacking his genitals off. It only takes a few seconds to free them, but the action keeps repeating, as though it were looped, all in extremely tight close-up. Each time they loosen, the murderer moans, and Chris sucks in a breath. It creates this terse, danceable rhythm. Then it stops. There’s a cut or whatever. It’s later. The murderer’s gone. Chris seems dead. I think that coin-purse-looking lump on the floor is his balls. And there’s a lot of other stuff going on, but I couldn’t translate it if you paid me. I’m writing this account a few hours after the fact, and my brain’s still too fried to go into much detail. That’s the one annoying thing about acid. Everything’s so complicated and vivid when you’re tripping, but language is hopeless at capturing wherever you are, or, in this case, wherever you recently were. Words just dry out. So if this section seems sketchy and half-baked, that’s why. But I’m doing my very best, really.
Mason’s nose breaks the dream’s surface, which ripples out, dims, then eventually dissolves into the lines, sags, et cetera, which years of ironic detachment have imprinted on his face. He’s looking me square in the eyes. “Scott and I are leaving,” he says, for the third or fourth time, I think. All I really understand is the absence of Luke from that sentence. “Are you back among the living?”
“I’m cool.” I am, although, like I said, several seconds before I’d been in virtual reality, watching some figment of my imagination trash the spitting image of someone I … I was about to say love, but that’s not really true. “Where’s Luke?”
“Luke, Luke, Luke,” Mason says in this singsongy voice. He’s making his “I know you” face. I’m way too fucked up to describe it at the moment. “Luke’s going to ask if he can crash here,” he adds, overmeaningfully. Then his eyes become two thrift-store-painting-like takes on my emotions re Luke that are so much cheesier than the thing they depict that they’re sort of like souvenirs you’d pick up at Niagara Falls or wherever.
“Fuck off.” I hear the microwave ping in my kitchen. Because Luke must have caused it, it sounds like God, I swear.
“This was such a mind-fuck,” Scott says. I can’t quite make him out, but I’d know that whine anywhere. Oh, wait, there he is, across the living room, studying this framed pencil drawing he gave me last year—a pseudo-Japanimation frame which shows Astroboy, Ranma, Speed Racer, and Devilman rimming one another in a daisy chain—which is probably all scratched to shit by shooting-star-like light trails, if my eyesight’s anything to go by. “I can’t do acid anymore,” he continues. “It makes me think art is pathetic, and I can’t think art’s pathetic, even if it is.” Then he looks at Mason and me for approval, disclaimers. But I’m on acid, so art does seem pathetic, even though it isn’t, I’m sure.
Luke enters eating a grilled Swiss cheese sandwich. “Do you mind if I hang around?” he asks.
It’s so weird. As soon as Luke entered my peripheral vision, I became happy. And because I’m on acid, I can literally feel and even hear that emotion corrupt my interior. Every atom combusts or whatever. You know, like they’re wannabe embers, and my body’s a … I don’t know, fancy-shmancy fireplace or something. Point is, I’m glowing, et cetera.
“That’d be great,” I say. And I look into Luke’s immense, cartoony eyes with so much love that I feel like my skin offers no personal protection whatsoever.
Luke makes a happy, goofball face and gives the cheese sandwich a lionesque chomp. “I can’t believe I’m hungry,” he says between chews.
Scott and Mason are grayish, like pieces of the living room that just happen to be able to move.
“You have a cool place,” Luke says, looking around. “I’ve always thought so.” He must mean the run-down, eccentric, bread-box-shaped shell that I’ve crammed with CDs, books, and friends’ artwork. It was designed by some Frank Lloyd Wright type in the fifties. The roof leaks, the paint’s peeling, but it does look kind of fairy-taleish if you don’t have to live here. “The place I’m living is such a hellhole.”
“So why don’t you move in?” I guess that sounds insane, but frankly, I’ve been fantasizing for months about asking him to live here.
Luke stops chewing. “Seriously?” he says with his mouth full.
“Yeah.”
He swallows. “When?”
“Now. I won’t even charge you rent.”
“Why not?” He takes another bite.
“I don’t know. Because I’m okay financially. And I’d love you to live here.”
Mason and Scott are locating their coats or whatever.
“Cool,” Luke says, and swallows. “I’ll drop my stuff off tomorrow. Not that I have much, just some CDs, clothes, posters …” Then he smiles. From what I can gather, the smile means he’s happy, and that he can tell I appreciate his happiness, and that he appreciates my appreciation, and that he wants to be appreciated so unbelievably. It feels like love, whether it is or not.
Oh, Mason and Scott leave the house around now, I don’t care. Suffice it to say, Mason exudes a sleazy, conspiratorial air that I can’t relate to at all. Scott is sullen, wrecked.
I smile at Luke’s face, which is still smiling at me. There’s something in the air between us that I’ve never … what’s the right word? … experienced before, or not with this assuredness, and which I have decided to call love, because I want to be loved so unbelievably.
Luke’s face is more beautiful than it could possibly be—in the real world, I mean. It’s long and rather narrow, with deeply sculpted cheeks, a light spray of freckles, the beginnings of crow’s-feet, and a very faint five o’clock shadow. His eyes are huge, greenish-hazel, and engraved with a nervous expression. He has a small, pointy nose, full lips that seem to pout when he’s thinking, and big, mismatched ears. He keeps his long brown hair hiked up behind them, though several strands have fallen loose on one side and are jiggling around near his chin, which is square and abrupt, like a broken stalactite.
“How was your trip?” I say, because I have to say something.
“Nice,” Luke says. “I spent a lot of time looking at things. Like the parts of the walls that are all cracked and textured. And the rug. The patterns.”
“Yuck,” Luke says. “TV’s too simplistic when you’re tripping. Or it is for me. And things like kiddie porn bore me.” He looks away, thinks a bit, pouts. “Can I say that Mason is starting to give me the creeps?”
“Me too. I used to think he and I were extremely alike, but I guess I’ve changed, or he’s changed. Probably both, because …”
Luke’s losing interest in the topic. He appears to be there, listening closely, but his eyes—or, rather, their beauty—have been refracted elsewhere by his fucked up mind’s movement. They’re being absorbed by his thoughts, which are probably weighing some personal issue, meaning they’ve become more and more sublime to think about—to me, anyway. Still, he nods politely. He does this a lot, i.e., moves on mentally. Sometimes I think he’s only about a third in the world at any given time. I’m probably the same way, except when he’s around. “Do you have any candles?” he asks softly from wherever he is.
“Maybe in the kitchen, why?”
Suddenly he’s in the kitchen, digging around in a drawer. He comes back holding two skinny white candles that I can’t recall buying. He places them at opposite ends of the coffee table, unzips his backpack, pulls out several sticks of incense, searches the table for wormholes, finds some, and plants the incense. Then he lights everything with a Zippo, blows out the incense, and sits carefully on the couch. “Better,” he says. “When I live here, we have to keep a lot of incense and candles around.”
“Sure.” Whatever he says. I’m so in awe of him, it’s fucking scary.
“Cool.” His eyes jet to my CD collection. “You’re such an indie-rock kind of guy.”
“I guess. And you?” The room’s filling up with a bitter, flowery smell.
“I guess you’d say my tastes run to techno, but that term is so limiting. But, yeah, ambient, trance, tribal …” He shrugs.
“Play me some.”
“Will do. Hey, I don’t know if you remember, but I tried to find something to play while we were tripping. And your only CDs that are close to my tastes are the Pet Shop Boys and ABBA, and I really like them both, but they would have sounded so wrong on acid. So I decided to get into the silence, and things like the sound of Mason rewinding and fast-forwarding through the video. And it wasn’t bad. It gave me some ideas.” Suddenly he blinks, which seems to center me back into his consciousness or whatever. “Oh, how was your trip?”
“Heavy,” I say. “I spent most of it looking at you. But then I’d go off on these hallucinations where I was just gone.”
Luke snorts, I think about the fact that I’d been looking at him. Or, rather, about my announcement of the fact, since he obviously knew I was focused on him. I mean, acid doesn’t blind you, or not for very long. “What were the hallucinations like?”
“All over the place,” I say. “You know how it is. They’re profound in the moment, but if I tried to describe them …”
Luke is looking at me, technically, and his head nods at regular intervals, but I can see in his eyes, which have grown almost painfully mysterious, that my voice is a sound track, ambience, and he doesn’t really care if it continues or not. When I shut up mid-thought, feeling fairly embarrassed, he notices, or seems to, and smiles—one of those huge, goofy, sweet, indescribably resonant smiles that are all about his happiness and my obvious appreciation.
“Are you tired?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Luke says. “I doubt I can sleep, but I’ll give it a try in a minute. Can I use your bed? I mean, you’re welcome to sleep there too when you get tired.”
“Sure.”
“After I trip, I like to sleep next to someone I’ve tripped with.”
“Understandable,” I say quickly. “Yeah, that’d be nice.”
Okay, this is rough, because it forces me to think about whether I’m into Luke’s body. I am, of course, although the acid is making the idea of sex seem really corny and half-thought-out, thank fucking God. Like I’ve said, I’m trying to keep Luke and sex separated in my mind, not that he’d be interested in fucking me anyway. I’m too old, too easy, too emotionally available … I don’t know. These are my guesses. We’ve never broached the subject. Still, self-absorbed as he is, he must find my extreme adoration of him at least vaguely suspicious. Once, maybe twice, we’ve talked about what types of guys we find attractive. His type bore no resemblance to me whatsoever. But when it was my turn, I described Luke without even thinking. You know, tall, thin, pale, dark hair, big eyes … He seemed oblivious to the resemblance, but he must have known. Anyway, I’m in scary territory at the moment and I’d better change subjects. But, yeah, to be perfectly honest, when I’m sitting here alone, and sex comes up, and I pull out my dick and aim it into the realm of remote possibilities, Luke is the file that clicks open.
Luke and I talk for the next, oh, half hour or so, then there’s this knock on the door. I want to ignore it, but Luke’s curious, and his moods are extremely infectious—to me, anyway. So I go see who’s there, and it’s Chris. He’s visibly jonesing for dope, but there’s this … I don’t know, actual mood in his eyes, as opposed to their usual prickly haze. Poor Chris. Heroin’s pretty much eaten him out. Back when we met, he had so much surface. Even when drugs would intermittently do their sadistic little number on his looks, the change intrigued me in a Jekyll and Hyde kind of way. Luckily he has one of those pixieish faces that contextualize wear fairly well. But you have to squint.
“I have to talk to you,” he says. “Something really fucked up has happened.”
“Shit,” I say. “Is it really important? Because I’m on acid, and Luke’s here, and we’re kind of … hanging out.”
Luke’s name horrifies Chris, I’m pretty sure, but I wouldn’t know how to describe how I know. “Yeah, it’s important,” he says. “Fuck, Dennis.” His eyes are really digging around in my eyes. Usually they’re just organized into a distanced, seductive expression, and frozen there for as long as Chris thinks it will take to get a reaction from me. Really, I could be anyone. If I wasn’t so mentally sick, I’d have dumped him months back. Actually, I doubt that, come to think of it. I’m such a wuss. But it’s gotten so I fantasize about dumping him every day, and his murder is barely a passing thought, except when I’m loaded, I guess.
“All right, but just for a couple of minutes, okay?”
“Thanks.” He’s inside.
“Chris is here,” I tell Luke as we enter the living room. And I shoot him a look, like, Prepare for the worst.
“Hi,” Chris says sharply. He throws himself onto the couch and gives the smoking incense sticks an appalled little glance.
“Hey,” Luke says. When he looks at Chris, his eyes become … hard, fixed. It isn’t disapproval, exactly, more like anxiety mixed with a little … I don’t know, hunger or something. Word has it he’s sort of attracted to Chris, so maybe that’s it. In any case, it’s the most incongruous look I’ve ever seen on his face.
“Things are so fucked up,” Chris says. He’s gazing at me, and shooting Luke these occasional glares. “A kid just died. At Pam’s. For no fucking reason at all. He wasn’t even that high. I had to get out of there, so I took the bus. Pam told me I could tell you about it, but …”
I’m watching Luke, who is clearly alarmed. When he’s tense, his eyes enlarge, and his lips stabilize into the aforementioned pout. He probably hopes this expression is sturdy enough to read as cool and detached. But he’s too pure a person, so it doesn’t read as anything but self-protective and scared, at least to someone as thrilled by his every emotional minutia as I am.
“You want to crash?” I ask Luke. “I’ll talk to Chris for a minute, then join you.”
“Yeah.” He sort of bolts to his feet.
“I’m sorry,” I say very quietly.
“Don’t be,” Luke says. “See you in a while.” Then he veers toward the bedroom. Thanks to the acid, he leaves this long, crooked, translucent trail in the air that’s so weird that I space into a staticky trance.
When I wake up, Chris is watching the spot Luke vacated. “Why do you like that dork so much?”
“Luke’s the most incredible person I’ve ever known,” I say absentmindedly.
“Oh, come on. In what possible way?”
“It’s indefinable. That’s the thing about him. It’s like a kind of holiness.”
“Please.” Chris’s face crumples. “We really have to talk.”
“We are.”
“Look … ” He leans forward and scrutinizes my face. Actually, interest in anything other than dope would be very unlike him at this point. So maybe I’m off. In any case, thanks to the acid, I guess, it feels like we’re involved in a battle of the brains—or, more specifically, a battle of the drugs in which our minds are the secret headquarters and our eyes are the armies. At first I think I’m completely outmaneuvered, that acid’s complexity is no competition for heroin’s blissful self-absorption. Then Chris slaps one hand over his eyes, and I figure I’ve won. Then he throws me a curve. “I’m in love with you, okay?” he says, sounding really pissed off.
Oh shit. “I … don’t know what to say,” I say. Because I don’t. “I love you too.” But that doesn’t feel true when I say it. “And I’m very, very into you physically, you know that.” Definitely true, although, like I said, it’s a cruder interest than before. “But as much as this thing about killing you fascinates me, I’m sort of—”
“No, no, listen.” Chris’s hand loosens and flops into his lap. There’s nothing new in his eyes—on first glance, at least. “I’m sure now. When I saw that dead kid, I knew.” He points at the floor, meaning the dead kid, I guess. “I want to be like that.” He points, points, points. “I want to be this thing that fucks with people’s heads like that kid did with Pam’s. And I want to do it tonight, so I can’t change my mind.”
Chris’s agitation is flushing out my affection for him. I hate how compassion can eat through anything, even acid. “All right, look,” I say. “Get off heroin, and if you still want to do it we’ll see.”
Chris thinks about that and I study him. It’s strange what goes on in your head when you’re attracted to someone—I mean, so turned on that your thoughts are just a twisted narration to his day-to-day life, and then by some fluke or fated twist or whatever you get the chance to fuck him whenever you want, and you start to realize that his sublimity’s just your own imaginative garbage, period, and that all you’re going to get out of him is a new set of needs, body odors, opinions, emotions, et cetera, all of which you completely recognize from your other relationships, and you start thinking, So why am I prioritizing him again?
Chris opens his eyes, which crashes my stare. “If you fall in love with Luke,” he says, “you’ll be sorry.”
“That’s not an issue, but why?”
“Every time I see you guys together, it’s the same,” he says. “You radiate worshipful bullshit toward him, and he sucks it up. But there’s nothing coming back at you, man. I take advantage of you too, but … at least I put out. And unless … you guys have started fucking …”
“You’re misreading the Luke thing,” I say.
“You’re not fucking him.” Chris looks relieved, I think. In the old days I would have ventured a much wilder guess, but like I said, either addiction has demystified him, or I’m not impressed enough with his current thinking process to bother.
“No.” I probably should have lied.
Chris fights off a smile. “I should go,” he says. “I told Pam I’d help her deal with the kid.” He struggles to his feet. Maybe out of habit, I sneak a look at his ass. It fascinates me how when skinny guys stand or sit down, their asses open and close. I love how a pair of old jeans can beautify that activity, sort of the way a river beautifies its bed of rocks and sand. Thing is, at the moment I’m just eyeing Chris’s ass out of habit. Maybe I’m thinking how sexy I usually find it. Of course, Chris knows me—or, rather, he knows how my lust operates, so he watches my eyes scrub his jeans, then he gets this weird little prideful half smile that isn’t based in real-ity—on this occasion, at least. “Walk me out,” he adds. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
“Okay.” Like I said, sex isn’t sexy at the moment, but that doesn’t mean it’s a boring idea. And Chris is an interesting creature, impaired or not. Really, if my life was a movie, and the sex scenes were edited out, he’d definitely be up for an Academy Award for his strangely sensual, erratic, Gary Oldman–esque performance. It’s got all the earmarks.
We walk to the front door, outside, and around to the side of the house, where there’s a narrow, woodsy gap between the building and fence. It’s dark, and Chris stands there, hands dug deep in his pockets, looking at me with what could definitely be love. It’s a strange look—icy, fragile, electric. But that could be a trick of his dilated pupils. “You’ve got five minutes,” he says in this fake hustlery voice that I haven’t heard him use in a while. “Whatever you want to do. Then I should go.”
I want to comfort Chris, I don’t know why. So I hug him, and when he’s mine, arms encircling me too, this emotion erupts, although it’s more like I feel a chemical being flushed from my brain through my neck and down into my body. It’s not love, at least not compared to how I feel about Luke. Empathy’s a decent guess. In any case, it’s an intriguing sensation. To heighten the effect, I slide one hand down the back of his jeans, and take a gentle handful of his flat, cold, inexplicably mind-blowing ass. That does it. I’m into him—technically, anyway. “You’ll be okay.”
“Fuck,” Chris says into my neck.
It’s weird. I’m not remotely turned on. It’s more like I’m directing a scene in a porn film. You know, intuiting what would seem steamy with no thought of getting off personally. “If you knew how amazing you were …” I say. See, the trick to extracting great sex out of Chris is to grab his ass, moan politely, then introduce a compassionate comment, because he’s never gotten much clear-cut affection. Normally I do this without even thinking. But acid has altered me into an evil scientist of interpersonal contact—as regards Chris, at least.
Chris’s arms tighten around me. “Thanks,” he whispers, and kisses my neck. “But I really want to die. It scares the shit out of me, but I do.” His hard-on is sawing my pant leg. “I wish I could come,” he adds.
“Kick dope and you will.” Step two: I work a fingertip into his asshole, which has been fucked so hard so many times in his life that it gobbles me into his body.
“Don’t you want to kill me?” he says, and backs over my finger. There’s that weird, antique shit. Yuck. “Let’s rent a cabin somewhere. Come on, Dennis, you know this is fate.”
“It’s not that simple, Chris.” Maybe it’s the acid, but I’m starting to feel like he’s too good at this. Sex, I mean. Normally I’d be concentrated inside him. When I’m turned on, I can get very reverential about things like that—the perfection of somebody’s asshole’s design, temperature, whatever. Right now, Chris just seems too eroticized, as if something’s haywire in his brain, and the signals that normally flash to his heart or wherever are being misdirected to his crotch. “You should go,” I say. “I’m too high to get a hard-on, and I should check in with Luke.”
Chris leans back and studies my features. Thanks to the acid, his eyes are just eyes, period. I.e., two moist globes of colorful tissue. But nothing on acid’s that simple, of course, so I start wondering what his eyes mean in the grand scheme of things, and from what I can gather, they—or, rather, anyone’s eyes—mean … well, the answer’s beyond me. Let’s say they mean chaos. I know that’s vague. How to describe it … Okay, imagine human eyes are UFOs. I mean, in the sense that their existence proves once and for all that reality’s far too complex to be decoded by you. God, I guess I’m pretty high.
Back in the house, I pour myself a glass of cold Sparkletts, and open the bedroom door very, very carefully, in case Luke’s asleep. But the light’s on, and he’s in bed watching me enter.
“Is he gone?” Luke asks.
“Yeah.” I sit on the bed’s edge, untying my Timberlands.
“That was so weird,” he says. “I used to think Chris was cute, but fuck that.”
“Chris is a mess, but he means well.”
“Whatever.” Luke’s face … scrambles—beneath the surface, I mean. I can literally see one thought fracturing and another thought gradually forming from its remnants. The evidence is subtle, just a few newish crumbs of energy in his eyes, but I know what I’m seeing.
I slide under the covers. I’m pretty sure it’s the acid, but as soon as I settle, I have this sensation of being inside something specifically generated by Luke. It’s all about warmth, but it doesn’t have the huge, impersonal blandness of sunlight, or the detailing and slight insanity of a flickering fireplace, or the clinical heat of a heater, or the wild rush you get plunging into a hot tub. It’s a weaker heat, more poetic, and it practically itches. Does that follow?
“So are you guys going out?” Luke asks. He’s an amazing foot away.
“Going out,” I say, wondering. “Well, it’s complicated. We’ve been sleeping together, yeah, but it’s not … heavy. He’s a junkie, right? And I don’t know if you’ve been around junkies that much, but for them nothing competes with the drug. So I don’t know what to call what we do, but I’m trying to end it.”
“This is kind of personal,” Luke says. “But … what do you do?”
At first I don’t know what he means. Then I squint at his eyes for a second, decode a little swatch of their beauty, and take a wild guess. “Sexually?”
“No.” He means yes.
“Uh … Gosh, well, Chris gets incredibly high, and I … explore him.”
Luke glares at me. “Yes, and …?” That’s interesting. Oh, sorry. What I’m thinking about is that every time Luke is confronted with something he can’t grasp at once, he goes on the mini-attack. On the surface, his tone reminds me of that garish, appalled tone of voice drag queens use to explode their peculiar thoughts into the male-female world. But because in Luke’s case these retorts are so random, and so out of kilter with his general sweetness, they read as eruptions, small and contained, and placed in specific locales by his psyche. I guess I should isolate the exact whens, then figure them out individually. Maybe when I’m less high I’ll keep a little log. God, I guess I’m spacing. Let’s see, what did Luke ask me? Oh, yeah.
“Well, I’m into asses.”
“Duh.” Luke rolls his eyes. “I’ve read your books. Or I’ve started most of them. But I actually did get through one of your novels. No, wait, I didn’t finish it either.”
“Specifically? Well, this is sort of embarrassing.” I look up at the ceiling, but I’m thinking of the sky. “See, Chris has these violent fantasies. And so do I, actually. So we have to be careful when we’re having sex, because …” I check back with Luke, who’s studying my mouth, or its movement.
“Does it bother you that I don’t like your books?” he interjects.
First I’m confused by the question. “No, I guess not.” Still, to be honest, I’ve wondered what it means. As Luke has explained, he doesn’t understand why anyone would want to write about the subjects my novels recapitulate so automatically. Neither do I, so we’re even. But to him, my work’s “obvious.” It “bores” him. He’ll start a book, then, three or four pages in, begin skipping whole sections, scanning for anything he can relate to. He thinks I’m obsessed with personal interaction, and not open enough to the idea that there could be magical forces at work in the world, things that supersede and transcend people’s specialized needs for one another. See, Luke’s sort of mystical, if you haven’t already guessed. To distill several long conversations we’ve had, he believes that romantic love, sexual desire, friendship, really everything potentially problematic having to do with other people, are just petty side effects of some far more intangible meaning to being alive, and that somewhere in books, movies, music, drugs, nature, there exists a particular way to believe, a mental system that, once successfully decoded and personalized, would organize everyone else into one vast herd of malleable symbols. Not to say he wants Hitler-esque powers. In his ideal world, everyone would be wizards of some sort, and life would be wildly, invisibly crosshatched with magical spells. Still, I think his motivation is simple. He wants what he wants. And he thinks anything should be possible, no matter what. And it frustrates him when others’ needs are in conflict with his. Anyway, I’m sort of spacing again. Let’s see …
“So,” I ask. “How’s it going with … what’s his name?”
“You mean, Michael?” Luke smiles deliriously. “I saw him the other night.”
There’s this guy Michael, some club kid whom Luke’s never said more than hello to, if that, but who he’s convinced posesses something—knowledge, spiritual foresight, emotional resonance —that Luke needs to incorporate into his life. I mean, to me it just sounds like Luke’s dying to sleep with the guy, and yeah, when pushed, he’s admitted the guy’s awfully cute. Anyway, Luke has been doing these … I don’t know, magic rituals? He refuses to describe them. From what I’ve been able to gather, these rituals “bend the universe”—that’s his phrase—in such a way as to align his and Michael’s trajectories, causing their needs to coincide. If it was me, and I found myself powerfully attracted to someone, I’d just hang around, hoping against hope that this someone would find me intriguing. To Luke, that’s the obvious, boring way to look at things like love and desire. What I can’t decide is if he really is way ahead of me on these issues, or if he’s just elaborately psychologically fucked up, as some of my friends, namely Mason and Scott, keep insisting.
“So what does this Michael guy do again? Is he an artist, or does he have a job, or …?”
A laugh’s sneaking into Luke’s face. “I don’t know.”
“Things like that aren’t important?”
“Not really.” Luke smiles knowingly—or it feels knowing.
“So are you doing your … uh, magic things to help it along?”
“I’ve done a ritual or two,” Luke says uncomfortably.
“I can’t get you to describe them.”
“If I did, it would diminish their power,” he says. “The idea is to do a ritual, tell no one, then forget you did it. You could do them too, you know.”
“How?”
Luke looks exasperated. “Read Liber Null & Psychonaut. It’s in my backpack.”
“Okay.”
“But you have to be sure it’s something you really want. Like with Michael, I’m just working on getting him interested. I can take it from there. So think of something you’re sure you want.”
“You mean, right now?”
“Sure.” Luke actually looks interested.
“Okay, let me think.” Not that I need to. I spend easily half of my life in my head, spaced out, imagining impossibilities. When I’m not lost in daydreams, I’m just sort of clumsily negotiating whatever the world puts in front of me. I wish the real me and the secretive me were united. I wish I could speak in one adequate, coherent voice and make sense. Or should I say, if I were a sane person that’s what I’d wish for. But divided in two as I am, everything’s subject to compromise. The only wish that both parts of my psyche have ever agreed on is this: I wish that whenever I saw someone I wanted badly enough to befriend, fuck, romance, murder, have a great conversation with, or whatever else, that I could mutter some word and, magically, there’d be an exact replicant of that person whose purpose in life was to accommodate my fascination. Once I’d exhausted my replicant, I’d say another magic word and it would vanish. That way I’d fulfill every fantasy, evil and/or benign, and never impose my fucked-up self on anyone else in the world. The only problem is, I can’t explain this to Luke. It sounds too psychotic. So I think of something else. “Okay,” I say. “I wish you could be happy and fulfilled all your life.” The sentimentality feels out of place in my voice.
Luke clears his throat. “Cool,” he says. His face is strangely calm, fixed. The theater of his personality is regrouping backstage or whatever.
“That’s my wish,” I say, feeling totally blissed.
Luke’s eyes glaze for a couple of seconds, then unglaze. “Cool,” he repeats.
“Great,” I say. Actually, it’s more like a croak. It feels like Luke’s just said he loves me, and maybe he has. It feels much more true than, say, Chris’s “I love you,” I don’t know why. Luke is easily as complicated as Chris. Maybe that’s it. Maybe someone this complicated can’t just reduce what he’s feeling to language, and if he does, the idea must be stagnant or finished, like a work of art once it’s been given a title. But then I’m pretty complicated myself, and I could tell Luke that I love him in a second. Fuck, I don’t know.
“There’s something very powerful between us,” Luke says. Then he yawns. I don’t think it means anything, apart from the obvious.
“Amazingly,” I say. I must look insane. Really, my face is completely unaccustomed to having to represent happiness.
“I should sleep.” Luke yawns again. Then he rolls over. “Sweet dreams,” says his voice. That’s his favorite phrase. He says it whenever he leaves someone he really likes. So I guess it means “bye.”
“You too.” That was a little abrupt. Or maybe it’s just that I’m not very sleepy. Still, I reach over and flick off the lamp, then lie there watching Luke’s hair, neck, and shoulders emerge from the black. For minutes I study them, feeling the faint, totalitarian, internal whir of the acid’s decay into whatever lower-brow, speedlike substance it was cut with. At one point Luke, now asleep, rolls over again, and his unconscious face flops down, oh, half a foot from my own.
I don’t know why, but when cute guys are stoned or asleep or frozen solid in photos, my imagination feels safe and takes over my thinking. I can’t control what comes next, and I hardly even notice the change. Suddenly I’m irrational, although it’s not like a physical change. My body’s still painfully shy and respectful of whoever’s space, but inside … well, it’s hard to describe. What I’m trying to say is, I catch myself thinking how sweet it would be if Luke opened his eyes, saw the love in my eyes, and his affections were triggered. We’d gaze back and forth long enough to realize that our goals were a match. Then we’d kiss very softly. No tongues or anything. But speed’s evil, as regards me at least. So the second our mouths are enmeshed, I get hungry. Luke too. Next thing I know we’re French-kissing and wrestling and licking and biting and … If I were a sane person, it would be perfect. Being me, things go totally wrong. I have to punch, slap, and kick myself free of the image. You know, like the thought is a rapist. Not just mentally, but physically. I literally jump out of bed, and tiptoe into the living room.
When I need to jerk off, and the image of Luke feels too volatile, I turn to this small clique of fantasy figures, this mental harem of cute understudies whose membership changes from occasion to occasion like an ill-starred rock band’s. At the moment my choices are (1) Chris, the old-timer, (2) Goof, (3) Drew Baldwin, whom you’ll meet very shortly, (4) Sniffles, that HIV-positive street prostitute, (5) Chris Gentry, guitarist for the English band Menswear, (6) Daniel James, Tinselstool’s singer/guitarist, (7) Brad Renfro, actor, and (8) when I really want to spoil myself, Smear’s Alex Johns, the most technically beautiful guy in the world, or should I say the most accessible beautiful image right now, thanks to Smear’s popularity.
I raid the pile of rock magazines that I keep by the couch, grab the new issue of Vox, which has a Smear cover story, and flip through the pages until I find a decent picture of Alex, in this case drunk, shirt askew, holding a beer toward the camera. Then I sprawl on the couch and concentrate on his perfect, hazed face. Next thing I know, he’s sitting just to my right. I strip off his trendy clothes, devise a lanky white body, pose it on the rug, shut his eyes, open his mouth, fill him with primitive sounds, dive in, suck his dick, lick his balls, eat out his ass, shove my dick inside, and fuck him very, very hard, all the while licking and biting his shoulders and neck. A knife appears in my hand. I reach underneath him, place its point to his chest, and tell him he’s going to die, to which he makes some agreeable noise. I bury the blade, then drag it down to his groin. When his guts topple out, I shoot my load in his ass, which in turn makes me come on my hand—in the real world, I mean. Orgasms on speed feel so cheap. It’s like a sputter. Then I hobble into the bathroom, wipe myself off, flush, and return to the couch. That’s better.
In the weird afterglow, I absentmindedly hoist Luke’s backpack into my lap, unzip the top, and watch my hand flop around in the deep, lumpy tide pool of rave fliers, tarot cards, sage bundles, cassettes, drug paraphernalia, and so on, until I find the aforementioned book, Liber Null & Psychonaut, by one Peter S. Carroll. I page around, feeling cowed by its biblical tone, until I find a long-ish chapter on magic rituals.
From what I can glean in my speed-read, there are several ways to perform rituals, the most interesting involving this thing called a sigil, which is an emblem made up of letters drawn one on top of another, then enclosed within a circle, so that all one sees is a pattern that looks like an extremely busy logo. Apparently you’re supposed to reduce what you want to a sentence— say, “I want to be rich,” or “I want so-and-so to fall in love with me”—then build the aforementioned logo out of its letters. Once you’ve devised an acceptable logo, you stare at it, either in some sort of meditative state or during masturbation, and the meaning behind the logo lodges itself in your thoughts. Somehow, because of your intense concentration or something, a magical process is triggered, and the wish enters reality, viruslike, then fucks with the order of the universe, and you get what you want. Something like that. Supposedly one can devise one’s own sigilesque thing, then take the basic principle of the sigil and run. Thanks to the acid, I’m sure, it sounds half-plausible—or charismatic, at least. So I space out around the idea that the alphabet’s just a collection of secretive forms, i.e., Aladdin’s lampettes. That would explain some of history’s eerier twists. I mean, if you factored in magical tweaks. Then I remember what I do when I’m not stoned. You know, write novels that are essentially long, involved wishes for offbeat utopian worlds that I can’t realistically enter. And within a few seconds I have this idea, which, if it’s not obvious, involves writing a novel/sigil that has a wish neatly embedded inside it. I guess it can’t hurt.
I move to my laptop computer, which, like Scott’s and Mason’s worktables, is isolated away in a small half bedroom that I use as an office. First I pull out a blank piece of paper and think for a second. Then I write down the one thing I’d wish for if wishes could actually be granted. I can’t reveal it to you, because that would interfere with the mystical process or something. Anyway, it’s not the wish you’d expect, if that helps. I thumbtack the page to the bulletin board over my desk. Then I stare at the wish for a while. Then magically or whatever, I start writing a novel. I begin by describing exactly what’s happened to me since I snapped myself out of the heaviest part of the LSD trip. In other words, I start here—or, rather, a dozen or so pages back. That’s where everything begins.