Acid Fizz - 14

only two more episodes left.  you're not reading?  you got to be keeding.  well, all the earlier ones are right here:

Acid Fizz - 1
Acid Fizz - 2
Acid Fizz - 3
Acid Fizz - 4
Acid Fizz - 5
Acid Fizz - 6
Acid Fizz - 7
Acid Fizz - 8
Acid Fizz - 9
Acid Fizz - 10

Acid Fizz - 11

Acid Fizz - 12

Acid Fizz - 13

click picture & open link in a new tab for a song while you read

THE JAR MAN

i’m not too dumb to know this is a bad idea.  i guess i don’t care.  ashley’s crazy, everyone knows that.  maybe she’s obsessed with me.  what if she makes some kind of scene and chambers finds out what we’re doing?  fuck it.  oh jesus.  the damage is already done.

            Tyler Li again.  I can’t keep coming back like this.

god fuck just like that.  can’t believe five minutes ago i was blinking at my data, she asks me can i kill a spider for her? she looks up at me and i drop the smeared tissue in the trash and kiss her and it’s just downhill momentum after that.

Metal clacks.  The doorknob revolves.

oh fuck!  her head bobs off of me and my dick is a sore thumb in the middle of this room, as big and central as the sun in our solar system.  she pops me eyes that say, “shit!”  she grabs my dick hard and bends it under the flap of my unzipped shorts.

Andrew is in the doorway, not looking at us, at the afm/stm machine.  A pen hangs between his lips like a cigarette.  He holds some wrinkled papers.

he hasn’t seen us.  he turns so slow.  but not slow enough.  ashley grabs my zipper.  i can’t move, i’m too stupefied by my own assheadedness.

Andrew’s eyes turn onto us just as Ashley zips us up.  She’s still on her knees, head level with our lap.

“Uh…” we say.

“Are you kidding?”  Andrew asks.  His eyebrows lift and his mouth opens into a shape like a baggy smile, his bemused expression.  “I don’t suppose either of you noticed the afm/stm is leaking again?”

We bite our thumbnail.

“Professor Chambers, we’re both very stressed about whether or not you’ll get that grant.  We’re just trying to relieve some of the tension,” Ashley says.  shut up, you crazy motherfucker.  you’re going to get me kicked out of the program.

“Excuse me?”  Andrew says.  He huffs in an imitation of a laugh.  “Get out.  I’m going to talk to both of you tomorrow.”

Tyler wants to exit the room as fast as possible.  We push Ashley aside and stand up.

“I’m sorry, Professor Chambers,” we say as we walk past Andrew.

“Take this,” he says and slaps the wrinkled papers into our hand.  “If you could have this make sense before tomorrow because I don’t understand your conclusions at all.  Also page thirteen is missing.”

“Okay,” we whisper.

I escape in Tyler’s breath, all the colors of the room seep together into one and I can’t see it, but I feel it.  I knock something and then I’m sitting at the back of Andrew’s head, staring out his pupils.

Ashley stands up.  “It was just a couple of minutes.  We were almost done.”

“Leave,” we say.

She walks out of the room.  We’re alone.  We go to the afm/stm, careful to shy away from the steam and to clear the drops on the floor, though it’s just reflex, Andrew isn’t truly scared of it anymore.  We flick a switch and the meters flatten out.  The steam thins.

We step away from the machine, sit down at a desk, sigh.  We watch a drop of condensation fall from the ceiling and break apart on the floor tiles.  How many times is this going to happen?

when is enough enough?  how many times do i clean the same mess?

A memory opens in our head like a folded letter.  Two beer stains on my pants, linked like an infinity symbol and also a little like a piss stain.  I thought it was love at first sight.  Uki.  She was sly, Japanese, smiled supremely at my jokes and asked me for everything, Would you get me a beer?  That sandwich?  Little things and I liked doing them for her.  I was so nervous around her I chain-drank High Life all night.

We were at that hostel right off the beach in San Luis Obispo.  It was Dad’s third wedding and we flew out early to hang out before the rest of the Chambers came and surrounded us.

We met Uki the first night.  She had locked her key in her room and shut the door on her purse strap.  We found her in the middle of the hallway yanking on her purse, leaning diagonally to put her entire ninety pounds into it.  I pulled it out for her.  Eric invited her to dinner with us.  I was worried the two of them would hit it off.  He had come back from the Peace Corps with a tan and a confidence he’d never had before.  He had blond hair and a white smile like Don Johnson.

The second night we had a party at the hostel.  Eric wore a Hawaiin shirt he found in our room.  I wished that I had found it.  I thought it was awesome and he wore it as a joke, but I still thought I looked cool in my fedora.  Eric squawked notes on the saxophone with that eleven-piece brass band that gave an impromptu concert in the garage.  I’d dreamt of Uki the night before and when I saw her there alone on a couch it felt the way it did during an earthquake once when the Earth bounced me up and I didn’t know why I couldn’t feel the ground beneath my feet.

I sat down next to her, probably too close.  I spilled half my beer on myself I was so drunk.  That couldn’t have helped anything.  I tried to sop it up with somebody else’s sweatshirt.  What kind of idiot would do that?  We talked about Elvis Costello, quantum mechanics, airports, airplanes.  I got up to pee, spilled on myself again and apologized to her for no reason.  She smiled.  I told myself while I swayed at the urinal that I would make my move when I got back.  I walked into the garage and she was gone.  I wandered between drunkenly blurted brass notes.  I went to the lobby.  She wasn’t there.  Two guys from Canada asked me to play pool.  I walked outside and down to the beach where a few people were hanging out, but she wasn’t there either.  Gus the always-shirtless maintenance man asked if I wanted to check out a party with him down the beach and I said I was looking for someone.  I checked out the garage again, then the kitchen, then the lobby, then walked the halls for a few minutes and I couldn’t find her so I went to bed.

“Andrew, is that you?” she said after I stumbled into my room.  I looked over at Eric’s bed and couldn’t see anything.  “I can’t see your face in the dark,” she said.  I heard a kiss.

“Lucky you,” I said.

“Have a good night, bro?”  Eric asked.

“Mm,” I said.

I thought I was drunk enough to pass out but I lay awake for about a minute, hearing them whisper and neck.  I thought I was going to go insane.

“I’ll be right back,” I said and walked out the door.  In the halls I thought, “please don’t fuck her, please don’t fuck her, please don’t fuck her.”

I went to the beach and Gus was alone, sitting in the sand, smoking a joint.  I smoked it with him though I’d only smoked one other time in my life.

He asked me if I’d seen Uki around and I said, “No.”  He said how beautiful she was and what an amazing person she was and how he thought he could bang her.  I got the spins.  He asked me if I was okay and through gritted teeth I said, “Yes.”

He left and my head churned and I closed my eyes.  Waves, salt, wet sand, saxophone, no order in my head.  I couldn’t bear to open my eyes but I imagined myself from the outside, vomit rising in a mote around me.  I thought I would never make it back to the hostel.

Then there was this hand on my back.  It was like it massaged my whole body at once.

“What did you do to yourself?” I said.

“Fuck this,” I said.

“I’m gonna get you some water.”

He left and I puked a couple more times and dry-heaved so hard I cried and I hated the waves like it was them that was making me sick.

I came back with an empty beer can full of water.

I asked him where Uki was.

I said she was asleep in the room.

I asked if she still had her pants on.

“What?” I said.  I thought he was just drunk and not making sense.  “Yes.  She fell asleep right after you left.”

I thanked God.  I vomited again.  I thanked Eric for taking care of me.  I apologized for being a mess.

“It happens to everyone,” I told him.  I told him about the time in Guatemala I was almost stabbed by a man for vomiting in his front lawn.

I laughed.  I don’t remember anything after but I woke up under the covers in my bed.  He must have cleaned the vomit off of me.

It was gross.

Now we’re pumping solvent into the afm/stm to neutralize the Chambers compound.  i was hesitant right up until the second i started pumping it in, but i feel good about it now.  i can patch up the machine right, start with a new batch and do real work.  but i feel like i’m losing something.  it’s just the past, i guess.  one day i’ll feel the same way about the new batch.

That’s me steaming into nothing.  I don’t feel anything.  Sorrow, perhaps, for dragging down Andrew all these years since the accident.  I told that girl in the woods that her family would find her when they died.  I hope I didn’t lie to her.

I want to say something to him or do something for him before I leave.  I can think of nothing fitting.  We had our times together and now I suppose we’ll have our times alone.  I love you, Andrew.

one day these will be the good old days.

Goodbye.  I drift out of him and I know this time I won’t come back.

Acid Fizz - 11

nodding off, i post another.
when it's up i'll twist the covers.

if you've been reading, you know it's the tits.
if not, you'll need preceding bits:

Acid Fizz - 1
Acid Fizz - 2
Acid Fizz - 3
Acid Fizz - 4
Acid Fizz - 5
Acid Fizz - 6
Acid Fizz - 7
Acid Fizz - 8
Acid Fizz - 9
Acid Fizz - 10

click picture & open link in a new tab for a song while you read

CLAIRE HOLZKORN

This is what she looks like: her eyes are little domes shut to the world and mascara crystals bind her lashes.   Her nose is like the entrance to a forest cavern.  Her lips are too glossy and too red even after I asked them to dull them and even after I dabbed them myself with my handkerchief.  They’ve never looked like that before.  Her mouth is closed to hide her mangled tongue.  Her cuts are caulked and plastered now.  She looks perfect.  Not perfectly her, just perfect.  Her face is a wax model.  I squeeze her hand.

I’d always thought she was happy.  She looked happy.  Did she come into the house singing like that so that I’d think she was happy?  Because she knew it would make me happy?  How many times has someone looked at me and said to themself, “she looks happy?”  Did I give it to her?  My mask?  Did I pass it down so that she could walk around like I do, looking alright so no one would ever ask if she really was?  Did I doom her?  Did I even know her?

What was so rotten in there?  What poison broached those gleaming sealed lips and sickened her?  She didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs, didn’t even smoke.  I’ve been looking at her and looking at her, just looking for one thing.  I want to know who she was and what was inside of her.  What did she want a week ago?

            The light changes as the rising sun breaks in, lighting her more evenly, less dramatically, and she looks even weirder.  I resent the sunlight coming into the room.  It’s been just me and her for hours now, alone and painted in this room by the night and now the light shines in and the birds are chirping and there’s some creaks from the foyer.  The world is trying to break in.  I’m supposed to burry her today.

            They’re whispering just outside the door.  I don’t care what they’re saying, probably who should check on me.  Am I alright, barely leaving her side for the last day, singing “Plaisir D’amour,” her favorite song as a girl, to her all night until my voice went hoarse and probably keeping up Clyde and the rest of the Matheson Funeral Home family awake?

            Someone’s coming down the steps, Helen probably.  I need more time.

            The door opens.  “Good morning, Ms. Holzkorn,” a man says.

            Who the hell is this now?  I peel my cheek off the edge of the casket where it’s been laying for hours now.  My tears glued it down.  I snort up some phlegm and turn to see this guy who I don’t know at all.  He’s about forty, nerdy with glasses and a short-sleeved button up.

            “I don’t know if you’ve ate, but I went by Alterra on my way here and got a breakfast sandwich and a coffee.”  He walks up to me and offers the white bag and paper cup to me.  I won’t let go of her so he sets them down next to me and rubs his jeans with his palms.  “There’s cream already in it, but the sugar’s on the side.  If you’re not hungry and the sandwich goes cold, there’s a cinnamon bun in the bag too you could have later.  I understand if you’re not hungry.”

            Why is this guy is here?  Why the Mathesons let him down here?  My brain is too exhausted to go farther with a question than just the asking.  I turn back to Ginny and study her neck, the good side.

            He sits down in one of the first row folding chairs.  She never lived to see her breasts sag.  I wish she had grown old enough to get ugly, old enough to know there were worse things than being young and sad.

            “My name is Andrew Chambers,” he says.  He’s probably lived long enough to have ruined his life once or twice, learned its value.  She should have been disillusioned with one life and stepped into another and been disillusioned again and cycled through it until she became unphasable, until she wore rhinoceros skin.  She deserved a decline, she deserved the wisdom that comes with it.  Why couldn’t she just have lived that long?

            “I’m the one who found Virginia,” he says.  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

            I open my mouth and squeak instead of talking.  I clear my throat and rasp,  “Thank you.”  I need this stranger’s consolation less than I need a hole in the head.

            “The real reason I’m here is about a dream I had.  Last night I fell asleep in the lab I work in  and in my dream I saw your daughter.  It was all black so I couldn’t see her but I knew she was there and I could tell that she didn’t know she was there.  Her soul was supposed to go somewhere but her mind kept thinking about where she’d already been so she was just wandering and getting more and more lost.”

            Her stomach is flat because she’s still a girl.  She never had a kid.  Kids rip your world apart and your body too.  I would have liked to see her world ripped into something bigger.  She lived the movie version of her life but I wish it had been a novel, messy and long and with subplots that go nowhere.

            “I woke up back in my lab and it was all dark and for a second I thought I was in that neverending blackness that Virginia was in and I was so terrified I couldn’t breath but after a few seconds I could smell the disinfectant and I felt the seat under me and I took a breath.”  I wish he would leave.  “I knew that something was keeping her here so I looked up the name of her funeral home and I came here and sure enough I find you, holding onto her tight like you’re going to pull her out of deep waters.  Have you been here all night?”

            She died pretty, never lived long enough to see men lose interest, never had to settle for old guys, fat bald old guys.  That Bobby is a hunk.  He came over to console us and ended up balling his eyes out so hard that Nick had to drive him home, poor kid.  Sweet as hell.  Even in the middle of sobbing he thought to congratulate Helen on her baby.  Ginny should have lived long enough for one of them to fuck up the relationship.  Everything ended so perfect with her.  How could she have killed herself?  Just to spare herself the sloppiness of a real life she had to die young and pretty?  Were the cuts some instant approximation of age?

            “I don’t want to come in here and tell you how to handle your pain, but I saw her in the blackness.  It was so cold and so frightening and I’m scared she’ll never find her way out if you don’t let her go.  Will you do that?  Just for a little while?”

            “You are crazy,” I tell him.

            “I just needed to do something.  Whether you let go or not is your business.  I probably wouldn’t listen to what a stranger told me to do right now.  I believe what I’m saying, but, whether you listen to me or not, I am sorry for your loss.  I know how excruciating this is.”

            My hand slides to her fingertips.  I feel along the stitches they sewed over the cuts.  Her head, her nose, her tongue, her fingertips.  Did she scar herself over every point the world could get in to block its entrance?  Or did it open herself to the world before she died?  I can’t think about this anymore.  But I will.

            I unclasp my purse and pull out my cigarette case, pluck one out and fasten it between my lips.

            “Do you have a light?” I ask the nerd.

            “You can smoke in here?”

            “Nevermind.  I found one.”  I pull a Bic out of my purse and start the cigarette.

            “Well, I’m glad to have met you.  I’ll come by the proper service later.”

            I turn and he’s already on his feet.  It’s lonelier in here with the daylight.  “You have someplace to be?” I ask.

            He stops on his way out.  “When I found Virginia there was the stale smoke from a snubbed cigarette in the room and I breathed it the whole time I waited for the cops.  Since then cigarette smoke makes me nauseas.”

            “She smoked?”

            “Um…”

            “She smoked?  Ginny smoked?”

            “Well, there was smoke in the studio when I got there.”

            Then that’s one thing I know, one thing I can see inside that pink petite body of hers, a pair of blackened lungs just like mine.

            “It was the same brand, actually,” he says and backs away from the smoke I’m exhaling.

            “Huh.”

            The stairs creak and suddenly Clyde’s peaking in, wearing his robe, his eyes blinking from early morning re-orientation to the world.

            “Claire,” he says, “I’m sorry but could you please smoke that outside?  It’s a public space.  We can get fined for that.”

            I look back at Ginny, Ginny the pretty, Ginny the young, Ginny the sad, Ginny the happy, Ginny the faker, Ginny the smoker, Ginny the so-many-things.

            “Why don’t you come outside with me?”  Andrew says.

            I let Ginny’s hand go for the first time in six hours.  My knees pop when I stand up.

            Andrew goes out the door around Clyde.  As I pass Clyde I grumble, “Sorry,” and take another drag.

            We walk up the stairs and toward the up-angled golden sunlight coming in through the front door.

Acid Fizz - 10

Ten, X, TEn, tEN, teN, x, vv, IIIIIIIIII, 10, tEn, vV, ixi, TEN, ten

This is the tenth episode of the WWD online serial, Acid Fizz.  Below are the previous chapters if you have not been keeping abreast:
Acid Fizz - 1
Acid Fizz - 2
Acid Fizz - 3
Acid Fizz - 4
Acid Fizz - 5
Acid Fizz - 6
Acid Fizz - 7
Acid Fizz - 8
Acid Fizz - 9

click picture & open link in a new tab for a song while you read

VIRGINIA HOLZKORN

If today was not an endless highway, if tonight was not an endless train, if tomorrow wasn’t such a long time, then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all, yes and only if my one true love was waiting, if I could hear her heart softly pounding, only if she was lying by me, then I’d lie in my bed once again.

            Elvis doing Dylan and didn’t Dylan say that was one of the most flattering moments of his life?  And didn’t Dylan do Elvis too?  He did.  Can’t Help Falling in Love, off Dylan.  It’s funny because as soon as I think of that song I realize that I’ve had it in my head without realizing it and Tomorrow is a Long Time was just my brain’s roundabout way of getting to it.  Dylan is a funny album, all stuff Dylan would have tossed out if he’d owned it but Columbia released it anyway and it’s actually good, but of course it is.  Like the Beatles thought Let It Be was all crap, but that was a bunch of crap because that album rocked.

            The rest of the show is shaping up.  As soon as Smiley’s done, I’ll go into this little symmetrical medley, Elvis doing Dylan, then Dylan doing Elvis.  I just have to get back to the studio.  When did I leave?  Can’t Help Falling in Love is really the same melody as Plaisir D’amour, which was written around 1780 something, I think.  So Dylan is in a daisy chain from a two hundred something year old French composer to all the people, French and otherwise, who sang Plaisir to Elvis doing his knockoff to Dylan and then to UB40 and whoever else covering the knockoff.  So Dylan and Elvis are hubs in this kind of daisy-chaining musical evolutionary anthropology, with all the covers of their songs that have been recorded and covers of other peoples’ songs, and they have more chain links spoking from them than they lived days on Earth.  So in the show I’ll focus on the two shortest chains between them, Tomorrow is a Long Time and Can’t Help Falling in Love, then play Plaisir D’amour, which was composed around the time of the French Revolution, creating some context for Elvis and Dylan, a context big enough to fit the galaxy and the two musical gods will shrink relatively from killer whales to killer bees.

            My mother had a Joan Baez album with Plaisir d’Amour on it – I wonder if she still does.  I could go by and see before Smiley’s done.  Actually Dylan is hers as well (actually they both might have been Dad’s to begin with), but I think the Joan Baez is still in the basement at her house.  I used to listen to that song over and over when I was little.  I don’t know why I did that because now I think about listening to the record and I remember the rain weighing down our lawn and the road outside and rolling down the window in Texas, a place I never want to see again.  Maybe that was around the time after Dad, it’s hard to say.  I guess it must have been if I can remember it, the whole of childhood was the time after Dad because seven, eight, nine years isn’t really that long to get over someone dying even if I don’t remember him now and maybe never really did.

            Now that I think of it, Plaisir D’amour might be the song I’ve been thinking of all along and the other two songs were just my brain’s really roundabout way of getting there.  I got the damn radio show wired into my subconscious.  When did I leave the studio?  Plaisir D’amour is about the pain of love, even though the title means pleasure of love and Joan sang it as joys of love.  Can’t Help Falling in Love is about the inevitability of love, not the pain or pleasure of it although it has a pleasant sense to it.  The two of them were in love at some time, Dylan and Joan.  They were in love and then they split ways (ain’t no use to sit and wonder why if’n you don’t know by now) and one sang Plaisir and the other sang Can’t Help Falling in Love, two different songs that were in fact the same song but about two different things even though they were about one thing really, which is love.  The pain of it and the inevitability of it and the pleasure of it are all part of the same thing contained within four letters like a prisoner between four walls, L-O-V-E.  What do I know about love?  I don’t know what I know, don’t know if I’ve been in love, I mean real love.  (Bobby).  (carl, harry, john).

So the whole two hundred and something year life of one song collapses in on two musicians who were once for a few months or maybe just a night in love and each later found themselves caught in the same river of that song that stretches all the way back to that French composer and all the way up until the last man sings Can’t Help Falling in Love or the last woman sings Plaisir D’amour or maybe there’s another progeny song waiting to hatch.  Who knows?  Probably.  Who says Plaisir D’amour was a totally original song anyway?  How many totally original songs could there really be?  I bet there were two songs in the beginning and they met like Adam and Eve and made babies and their babies made babies and Milk Cow Blues and Too Much on My Mind and Sufragette City and Ragged Wood and Who Loves the Sun? and Hold On, I’m Coming and Yakety Yak and I Got Friends in Low Places and every other song ever are the inbred offspring of two songs that fucked good back in the garden.

            I could think forever.  That one time I tried meditating with Helen when I visited home after my first semester away and she had learned it in jail and she told me it was about my breath.  Breathe in, breathe out.  Stay on that.  It’s not about emptying your mind, she said, because that is nearly impossible.  It’s about learning to label your thoughts.  A thought comes and you punch it with a “thought” tag and you throw it out and then another one comes and you punch it.  You never run out, or at least she never had.   Monks do, I guess, maybe some others.  It’s just labeling your thoughts for what they are, which isn’t you, they float around you like clouds or satellites and they have a lot to do with your atmosphere but there’s a whole planet in the middle of it pulling all that gravity and that’s something else.

            I remember that it was noisy and laborious to label them all instead of just letting them swim over me like usual.  Helen said it was like sitting under a waterfall and I agreed and I never tried it again.

            I’ll just get Joan from my mom’s basement and then take the car back to the studio and I’ll have the rest of the show figured out I think.  Cousin songs, sister songs, lover songs, father songs, daughter songs, which is all the same thing because the geneology is so criss-crossed now you couldn’t read it on a map and everyone has fucked everyone and given birth to everyone and combed the other ones’ hair and every other fucking thing.  I could go for a fuck now but I wouldn’t even know where to put it.  Which way is the studio?  Or am I headed toward my mom’s house?  Where am I?  “Thought.”

Acid Fizz - 6

It's time for a brand new installment of the WWD insano-fiction serial Acid Fizz.  Please let us know what you think so far.  If you'd like to catch up on earlier chapters you can find them here:

Acid Fizz - 1

Acid Fizz - 2

Acid Fizz - 3

Acid Fizz - 4

Acid Fizz - 5

click picture & open link in a new tab for a song while you read

PAULO QUIRINO

This is all a bit like when that guy Rufus played me a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony slowed down one thousand times into one angelic chord that unspun eternally.  It was during the ethnography conference in Hamburg, we’d gone back to his apartment after the dinner.  I’d had a few glasses of red wine and we smoked Rufus’ hash that he’d rolled into a little worm on his coffee table and lit at one end and I listened to that chord and it was as dreamy as the world had ever been for me.  There was a humid gust of air through the window and I got it on with him just because I felt too good not to.

            I feel now like I am that chord and also I guess a little like the hash smoke my breath plucked out of the air, that stung my lungs and vitrified my brain.  I never understood then where drugs put me, that they staged me just high enough so I could step up to the gate, but left me there without the key.  I know now there is no amount of wine or narcotic that can give me that key.  The key is something else.

It was luck that I found it but it was like the terreiro was just waiting there for me and also like I’d found a secret compartment hidden in me, some unknown clump between two organs where all that I was meant to be had squirreled itself away.  So lucky that I found what I didn’t even know I was looking for.  If I had never gotten that Fulbright to study in Brazil, never joined the House of Tulio, where in the world would I be now?

            Not here, not riding this angelic chord, not some scattered molecules in the sky.  Ever since Ed’s teddy bear incinerated in the landfill and the last of the stuffing fizzled away and I drifted away in the smoke I’ve felt so free.  It is the feeling that every drug only hints at like photographs of the Sistine Chapel only whisper of the real thing.  But then by that same token I suppose there is the Sistine Chapel and then there was the actual Genesis it depicted.  It is wonderful to be a gas.  I hope all other gas knows that.

            I kick around a little, something must be flying through here.  A bird’s wings toss the air over and then it pushes under me and I swirl and then graze some membrane.  It’s an eye and I impregnate it, slip into it and the diffuse feeling like that infinitely stretched chord ends.  It’s like I grow veins out of me, grow them into a brain, into a spine, and the spine grows into bones, and each bone grows into other bones into more bones into muscle and into the follicles holding my feathers in place.  I flap and lift and the wind is solid as I cut through it.  It is like kneading the air into the right shape to slide on.  I hope this bird knows how magnificent this is.  Its thoughts are just indecipherable twangs, like some ragged twirling cylinder in a player piano.

            There is a purple glow in a corner of the dark sky and I know its name:  Milwaukee.  I shove the bird’s body to force it in the city’s direction.  I angle the beak, I paddle the wings.  It is difficult to coordinate and I can’t quite repeat the motion I’ve felt it do.  Maybe it is the rhythm I can’t get quite right.  Everything falls out of joint.  I drop, flip in the air, first one way, then another, knocked hard this way and that as the air shoots up all around us.  I’ve lost control.  In my head I hear a car wreck, aluminum crumpling and glass crunching, but that’s only my imagination.  I withdraw completely from the controls and the bird extends its wings and beats them against the rocketing air.  A few muscled flaps and then he rights us.

            I poke myself forward just a tad into the bird’s brain and look at the glow of the city, but I don’t touch anything else.  The bird is willing to concede its direction to me and we fly toward the glow.  Maybe it was headed that way to begin with…

I skim over the swerving taillights and fuming noise on Locust Street, over the cool air rising from the river, over the wooded strip of Riverside Park, and then over Oakland Avenue.  Drunk folks line out of Oakland Gyros and around the corner.  Is it Saturday?  Some of them touch each other and the others just reach to their friends with course barking and cackling.  I’ve been among them, smoked a hole into my good shirt waiting in that line once and then scarfed a gyro down without noticing and demanded a new one.  They threw me out.

            It must be Saturday.  No other night of the week would be so busy, not in the summer.  And it must be late on a Saturday night, around bar close.  Did I get that lucky?  Exactly one week since I was lying on my bunk in the MSDF.  Odd to put a name on that length of time, like naming the number of minutes between the big bang and now.  I don’t even have to wait.  She’s at her microphone right now, ready for me.

            I steer the rudder and point the beak at the campus, at the red fuzzball the radio station’s antenna blinks into the hazy night.  The trees and houses file in a line under me.  Soon all this matter will be like a foreign country to me or like a luxury.  I won’t have to guess at things, how do I do this? why do I feel like that and how do I get to feel different?  Beethoven’s Ninth won’t play at a one thousandth, it will play at every speed possible.

            There’s Stadler Hall with the antenna climbing out of its roof.  The website said the studio was on the sixth floor, so one-two-three-four-five-six, there it is.  I nose us down and accelerate.  I’m getting the hang of it and only falter a little.  The twangs from the bird’s mind spin faster, possibly protesting, I don’t know.  I lock the bones into place and glide on my bearing.  It’s not like I want the bird to die, but I happen to know the place it’s headed to and it isn’t much worse than where it is now.  It’s not as if it can go where I’m going.  No one can.  Thank you, Oxalá.  My head is yours.

            The red bricks come into focus, so close I can see the texture of each one.  This is extraordinary, the air wedging between my feathers, supporting my belly but also caressing my back, the softness of the bones against each other, barely exerting like stirring a spoon through sweet yogurt.  I hope it knows how wonderful it is to be a bird.  I can hear the music through the wall.  The bricks are too close to focus on.  The bird chirps sharply.  I smell its blood as I osmose through the wall, dispersing again, slowing into something primeval.  It is wonderful to be me.

Acid Fizz - 5

Wow.  It's an all new chapter of the groundbreaking WWD serial Acid Fizz.  It's not TV, it's World Wide Dirt.  If you haven't been keeping up with it, you can check out the first few chapters:
Acid Fizz - 1
Acid Fizz - 2
Acid Fizz - 3
Acid Fizz - 4

click picture & open link in a new tab for a song while you read

THE JAR MAN

I’m sucked up from the village while I inhale a pungent vapor and I realize they are somehow the same thing.  I coil in on myself, wind tight, and then there are two hands before me, my hands, wearing thick rubber gloves and wrapping a sheet of tinfoil onto a machine made of metal tubes, covering a jet of leaking air.  I gag from the taste of it and I’m thinking: god, that smells like a burnt barf and oh no, chambers is going to fucking kill me.  i didn’t touch anything, didn’t do anything, i’m on the other side of the lab watching youtube, i don’t know why the afm/stm machine started leaking, fuck.  i’m off the project, no two ways about it, off.  all i did was forget to double check the mass spec reading last month and he threatened to kick me off then, screaming, hitting the tabletop so hard the beaker fell off and that blue acid eating into the floor and him looking at me like he wished it was my face that was melting away.  i shouldn’t have called him just now, but what else could i do?  it’s condensing and dripping from the ceiling.  he’ll be here any second.  maybe i could just leave.

            I feel thoughts all around me.  Under the storm of them is a structure like a mountain and I climb it, each foothold a detail of a self that I am now a part of – tyler li/five-foot-eight/24/chinese-american/the reasonable one/chemistry grad student/less than average attractive/wish i had gone for a motocross career/4 months without sex/3 months since i talked to my mother/thirty-one thousand dollars in debt/four-hundred, eleven dollars, sixty-something cents in my checking account/microwaved spaghetti, garlic bread, coffee in my stomach/never been that sad, never been that happy/blame my mother for my being unassertive, my father for chemistry/don’t like eye contact/often dream of China I saw as a boy/can’t get this lil wayne song out of my head for three days/don’t want to get kicked out of chambers’ graduate assistant team.

            We rip another piece of tinfoil off on the box’s teeth and layer it over the steaming leak.  I can’t focus in this noise of consciousness.  Chambers.

Two metal doors rumble down the hall.  that’s him, shit, shit, i should have ran, is there someplace i can hide?  shit.  under the table? behind the door where i can run out as he soon as he walks past it?  The jet of gas bursts through the new layer of tinfoil.  Two feet drag toward us down the hall.  here he is, he’s going to kill me. maybe i could hide in the closet.

A man walks in and regards us with dull, angry eyes that I remember.  fuck.  this isn’t my fault, isn’t my fault.  He’s scrawny but with a gut, flat silver hair, wearing a misbuttoned short-sleeved shirt.  who leaves some vague experiment in a bunch of rusty pipes for a decade?   Andrew.  Andrew?  It is him but some other version of him.  no one even knows what’s in there.  it’s probably burnt out any chemical agent and turned to water by now.  you are heating fucking water and i’m gonna get my credits robbed from me for leaking your worthless steam.  His breath is loud, deep lines are worn into his face.  everyone knows you’ll  be booted from the department sooner or later because you don’t do anything.  but you expect your students to be perfect.  fuck you.  don’t look at me like that.

“Get away from that right now!” he says.

We bound backward from the machine as if his command has robbed us of our volition.  I have never seen anyone nervous around Andrew like Tyler is right now.  Andrew stares into the puddle as if it were deeper than it is, like he’s looking at the bottom of the ocean.  It is as if his eyes dull even more.  I’ve never seen him look so hopeless.  Why do I keep getting sucked back into this world?  I do not want to be here.

“Did it touch you?” he asks.

“Just my shoes.”

“Get in the shower now!”  He bites on each word.

“I didn’t touch anything,” we say.  “I’ve been trying to patch it up with tinfoil.  I can put some more on and that might help.”

“Tyler.”  He brings his front teeth down on his lip to form the “f” of “fuck,” but stops himself.  That I have seen before.  “Get in the shower right now or you could die within the next few minutes.  Throw away those shoes and don’t touch them with your hands.”

i know the fucking procedure, cocksucker.  “I know,” we say and run out the door.

I hate the dullness in his eyes.  Give me the sludge, I don’t care if I see the village even, give me eternal blackness, not this.  I remember my brother and he’s funny and he loves things and his shirts aren’t misbuttoned and his hair is combed and it makes me sick to see him old and angry and diminished.

I try to push out of Tyler like I did from the millipede.  Our body heats as we run down the hallway toward the showerhead.  I focus on the warmth, pull at it and then it becomes part of me and I heat and I push toward the surface and sweat out of Tyler’s pores and evaporate and drift out of him as he reaches the showerhead and yanks the pullchain and I slip into the darkness and am so relieved to hear the sound of pouring water fade from me…

I’m tossed side to side and whirl around in the darkness and suddenly I’m gagging on that sharp salty stench and I’m looking through eyes at that puddle on the floor.  What am I doing back here?

no.  it’s really not a mistake. i had myself fooled there, idiot that i am, telling myself tyler was that dumb that he must have had the wrong afm/stm machine in mind, that it couldn’t really be mine.  but he’s only just so stupid and there it is, the scientific american-featured chambers solution, in a god damn puddle on the cracked tiles. of all the experiments in this whole building it had to be that one.  it had to be that one.  god damn idiot students, they don’t give a fuck about consequences, they does not have a fucking clue what they mean.

is tyler alright?  well, i’d know if he wasn’t.  i remember how eric screamed.  i fucking hear it when i go to sleep at night.  i had suspected that the solution had diluted in these years since eric.

Eric.

i could hear him all the way down the hall.  for god’s sake.  fuck.  i don’t even give a god damn about anything in this lousy fucking lab except one thing, why does it have to be that, god damn it, god damn.  the only fucking thing i ever created that was worthwhile, the fucking solution my brother lost his life to and for what?  for a fucking puddle on the ground eric is dead, for a fucking puddle on the ground.  i am a fucking idiotic waste.

Eric is dead.

            We pick up a glass flask and raise it to throw against the wall.  We take a hard breath and set it down on the table.  The hardness presses on our eyes and squeezes one tear out of each.  A couple of drops drip from the ceiling and add to the puddle’s mass.  How could this be you, Andrew?

i was never this way when there was a reason not to be, when someone gave a fuck how i acted.  i had a wife, i had friends, i had colleagues who respected me, i had a brother.  they’re all gone now so what the fuck does it matter how i act?  i could walk around with my dick hanging out of my zipper and vomit instead of saying hello and no one would care.

I will us down onto a stool.  I unbutton his top button and adjust it to the right buttonhole.  I try to slow our breath, slow our thoughts, try to let him hear my thoughts.  He seems to sense them, like how a noise from the real world creeps into a dream without being recognized for what it is.  Andrew, it’s okay.  You’re brilliant.  I know that you are brilliant and so do you.  That solution of yours, you can make another one or if not you can make something just as brilliant.  I remember you, you could do anything.

how could i do anything after i killed eric? no, not just killed, got him eaten alive by acid.  Eric is dead, eaten by acid.  Am I a part of that puddle, a part of that acid fizzing out of this machine?  how the fuck do i do anything after that?  what if i killed someone else?  i would have dissolved the solution by now if i had the nerve.  it’s just it’s the only thing i ever discovered that’s worthwhile.  if it goes then what was i even here for?  but then why didn’t i ever do anything with it?  i’m such a fucking loser.  what the fuck was i blaming tyler for?  i’ll dissolve it tonight like i should have done nine years ago.

No.  Andrew, don’t throw it away.  You can keep it safely, you’ve done it for nine years now.  There’s no reason to throw your life’s work away.  Eric wouldn’t want you to.  Not much has leaked out and we can patch up the afm/stm machine tonight to save the rest.  In the morning you can start to figure out what you’re going to do with the compound.  Everything’s going to be fine.

This is all very familiar, from some past life that seems too old to have happened in recorded history, like a hieroglyph carved into crumbling cave walls.  Andrew gets upset and I have to talk him down.  I remember doing it a hundred times when he was falling apart over a girl or breaking his head to figure out a formula.  It feels like I’m reanimating some muscle that’s gone stagnant and decrepit from eons of neglect.