Black Hole (15 page)

We walk up the stairs and through a floor that has a
Giving Tree
theme. That sad fucking book about codependency and enabling. It's a horribly sad book, and I don't know why it's ever given to a child. Fucking greedy bastard in the book takes everything from the tree until it's a stump and then sits on what's left. What kind of message is that? The tree should've eaten that fucker.

There's a poetry reading happening, and we move our way through that as fast as we can. All poems about dead mothers and cancer and lost loves and needless suicide. There's a group called the Sylvia Plath Hallelujah Chorus that's going to perform later,
and I definitely don't want to be around for it. There's a giant oven set piece that they all walk into in the end.

We make our way to a third-floor room, through a series of soundproofed doors. Finally, we're about to meet the guy. The guy. Her guy. It's always the guy. Like a drug version of a Paul Reiser joke. He was joking about getting the TV fixed or some shit, but it works with the drug world as well. There's always A GUY.

By the last door is a hulk of a man, a cartoony figure in his bulk. I recognize him from the gym where Big Mike and I sold the horsemeat. Away from the other monstrous men, he looks somehow bigger. Standing by a normal door, he looks like a joke. His pupils are pinned. He's high as hell on something, and I'd rather not find out what.

We walk up to him. He stares at us like he can't see us. Like a blind man's dead-eyed stare.

Cecil
? Liza says.

The hulk stares. Doesn't move. I'm high, the lighting's weird, but now I'm doubting whether or not he's alive. He's dead or some kind of statue. I look around. There's a camera above him.

The door clicks open. Hulk man stands aside enough for us to enter.

The inside of the room looks like the model for a condo. It's a studio apartment, decked out with new furniture.

Cecil, aka THE GUY, sits on a couch in front of a coffee table. He's watching TVs. Not TV. There's a wall of them with the sound down and the closed-captioning on. His eyes dart from one screen to another. He waves us in and asks us to sit. He gives us the one-minute finger.

There's a basket of identical remotes in front of him. He picks
up one with a number 19 written on it and clicks one TV off. Then he looks at us, adding us into a rotation of the twenty TVs he has in the room.

I have some great stuff,
he says.
I can split my attention to multiple sources and never get distracted. The more I take, the more things I can watch. I watched all of Martin Scorsese's movies at the same time. What a rush. What can I do for you, Liza?

We need some remote. I wanted to get it from you so we can be sure of the quality.

I have dozens of dealers in here I can hook you up with.

There's something else.

What?

My boyfriend Chuck has some new shit that he needs an outlet for.

Well, is that so, Boyfriend Chuck? I see new shit in here every week. I have new shit like some clubs have new bands. I don't care about shit because it's new. I care about it because it's great. Not good, great. Is your new shit great, Boyfriend Chuck?

Yes,
I say.
It's great stuff.

I take the marbles out and put them on the table. He squints at them, then looks at me. His mouth tightens.

I've seen this shit before,
he says, anger rising in his voice
. Get it the fuck out of my sight.

No, it's new, it's good, I swear.

Do you know what it is?

Yes. Well, no, but it's great stuff.

You're not using it, are you?

Yeah.

You've done it more than a couple of times?

Yeah. It's good. I swear. The high is clean, the crash self-manages.

I don't know how to tell you this.

What?

We call it black hole. You need to stop doing this shit now. Right now. We call it black hole because it sucks you into itself and there's no way out. And it's black and round, but that's a nice coincidence. Get rid of it. I don't care how. Throw it in the ocean, bury it, drop it in acid. Whatever it takes. But stop taking this. Take anything else. Pick up a heroin habit, for fuck's sake. You god damn kids. Stick with the classics: heroin, cocaine, Oxy, sure, you'll get strung out but it won't completely fuck up your sense of reality.

I turn to get Liza's opinion.

She's gone.

Chuck?
Cecil asks, snapping his fingers.
You with me, buddy?

Liza,
I say.
I was looking for Liza.

Cecil looks at me quizzically. He rummages through his desk drawer and comes out with a wristband. He holds it up. I put out my wrist.

Suit yourself,
he says. He fastens it on.
I can't see how it will help, but it can't hurt, I guess.
He looks to the hulk.
Ismail, take him down to the Liza room.

The hulk comes over to lead me away. Liza has her own room here? I'm not sure what's happening. I just go with the flow. I follow the hulk to an elevator. We get in. There are buttons with no numbers on them. It shakes, jumps—it's an old freight elevator with blinking Christmas lights all over it. I can't tell if we're going up or down. It is as bumpy as a stagecoach ride.

When we stop, he pulls the door open. I see a hallway.

Which way?

He pushes me out of the elevator and shuts the door. There are anonymous doors, locked, with aging knobs, losing their
color. Until I come to a door that's marked: “Living Inquiry, Zygotic Android” Project. LIZA. Fuck. This isn't what I meant.

I go back to the elevator. Push the button. Nothing. I push it more. Nothing. It's not responding. This hallway is all locked doors and the LIZA room. Maybe that's the way out. Someone must be there.

The LIZA door is locked as well, but the knob is new. I jiggle the knob and hear a beeping sound followed by the door unlocking. There's a reader on the door somewhere activated by the wristband.

The door opens into a locker room. It's all white tiles and lockers with black locks on them. There's a laundry basket holding a solitary container with a screw-on cap in the middle of the floor.

Chuck?
a voice says over the system. I look around. I don't see anyone. I do spot a speaker in the ceiling.
Chuck, please disrobe and put your personal belongings in the basket. Leave a urine sample. Then continue through the showers. Bathe thoroughly. Even if you don't think you need it.

I take off everything. I can smell myself, a particularly bad BO. I had no idea. This place smells so neutral that my smell is louder than a laugh in a library. I put everything in the basket, pee in the sample jar, and walk through the showers.

There are no fixtures, only a digital display. It blinks on and flashes
STEAM
repeatedly.

Steam starts from jets along my entire height. It's right at the temperature that borders on feeling great and scalding. Right as I'm getting lightheaded, it stops. The display blinks
SOAP. CLOSE EYES
.

I close my eyes and get a steady stream of soap sprayed on me. This is a human fucking car wash.

The soap is followed by a rinse cycle. The stream is just a little less solid than a fire hose.

The shower stops.
Proceed to the next room,
the voice says.

The door at the end of the shower room has no knob. It has a small hole with a graphic of a hand with the index finger extended. I slip my index finger inside it. Sharp pain, and I withdraw.

There's a tiny hole. These fuckers took a blood sample. The door clicks open.

There's a room with a white floor, ceiling, and walls, and nine silver pods. One is open, and the hulk is there, looking impatient. He motions to me, and as I walk closer, I see he wants me to get in.

Deprivation tanks. This isn't my thing. I like the drug highs, not organic highs. This is for people using orgone accumulators, dream machines, and the like. The “you don't need drugs to get high” assholes. Fuck that.

Hey, Ismail, that's your name, right? These tanks, not my thing. There's been a misunderstanding. I was looking for a lady named Liza, not a whatever this is.

Ismail still isn't in the mood to talk. He motions for me to enter the tank.

If it's all the same to you, I'll just take my clothes back and get the fuck out of here, better for having a shower.

Ismail does nothing. I do nothing. His expression worsens. I do nothing. He contorts my wrist in a way that hurts down to my feet. I try to squirm away, but I end up in the tank.

It's filled not with water, like I expect, but a warm gel, a little
less thick than Jell-O. There's some kind of minty tingling that's really nice. I sink in until I'm suspended completely, with only my face above the gel.

Ismail bends over and pinches my nose shut, forcing my mouth open, and he sprays something into my throat. It comes on like Chloraseptic, cherry flavored, but I can taste something else in there. A psychedelic.

The lid closes over me. I would try to fight my way out, but I know better. I'm much better off riding out a psychedelic trip than trying to escape.

Time is perception more than space. Sure, things seem big when they're not; you remember your childhood home as a gargantuan building and when you see it as an adult, it's a two-bedroom shack. There's also body dysmorphia, where anorexics think they're fat and enormous bodybuilders think they're scrawny. But what I'm talking about is how you perceive time passing.

You think you know how long it's been between events, but you measure them by a number of other events happening. You don't actually feel the time pass. You feel the temperature of the day change. A movie seems short or long by how well the events are written. The ice in your glass melts. But take away the outside stimulus, all light and touch and taste and sound and smell, and your sense of time disappears. The way you think of time is only a sensory collage.

Thus the deprivation tank. Take the senses away, and you're left with a blind grasp at time.

Chuck?
The voice from the intercom has returned.
Relax. The LIZA procedure will begin soon. You likely won't notice a thing.
It will feel like a long dream. Your responses to the stimulus will be recorded for use for playback with our androids later. All of us at the LIZA project are extremely grateful for your volunteering. We would also like to let you know that you have tested positive for herpes. Upon completion of the exercise, we also recommend you have treatment for your liver and pancreas. Thank you.

I'm floating above the earth, but I don't dare turn around. If I turn around, I may fall back to the planet, burn up in the atmosphere. Space is warmer than I thought it would be; Elton John said it was cold as hell, but he's wrong. It's like a heated swimming pool at midnight. And there's not supposed to be any oxygen, but it's no problem breathing. Shouldn't my face and eyeballs swell until they pop out like in
Total Recall
? Space is kind, forgiving, and bigger than anything you've ever thought of.

The moon is the size of a nickel and getting bigger. It's chrome like the trim on a '59 Cadillac. It's brighter out in space than from the earth. Looks like a drop of mercury against the indescribable blackness of nothing.

I can see cracks and bumps in its surface, but it's not the moon at all. It's a whale, a perfect white whale reflecting silver light back to me. A sliver of darkness forms as its mouth opens. It's trying to speak to me.

Time is a motherfucker, Chuck.

Man once thought his future was predetermined by God, what was called predestination. Entire sects of Christianity adhered to this idea. Other religions have destiny and fate, the inevitable futures of each individual. The entire concept of free will was debated.

As man evolved, his concept of the future evolved as well. We have a choice. We can do what we want. We can alter our future with any
number of choices, some small, some gargantuan in consequence.

But what of his past? Can't our past be as undetermined as our future? The idea of a solitary past is archaic as Calvinistic predestination ideas.

Your past is like a kite's tail, whipping violently behind your present. You only remember it one way, but your memory is constantly changing, moving with it across different events and times.

Your past is like a dog's tail, and you're fucking with the dog. You're moving the dog, and the tail is moving with it, into pasts you've never had and away from the past you want.

Your past is like a snake's tail, and you're shoving its tail into its mouth. You're making an ouroboros out of your existence.

Your existence is a film, and you're splicing the end to the beginning, making a loop that will never end, an infinite, futile movie.