CHEETAH

Cha pt e r 1

We reintroduce cheetahs so that we can kill them for sport. And keep them as trophies. Next, we breed the cheetahs and sell their organs to little kids on the black market. 

We skin the cheetahs and use them as new-age fur coats. Then, we kill every other endangered animal in the country for sport. Just for fun.

Next, we buy more lions from Africa and let them roam free in the streets, and let them eat all the little children. Then, I move to Madagascar and do a crap-ton of coke. I then take a private jet to Brazil and have some civet cat shit coffee, following which I kill the civet cat. Now in Brazil, I do more coke, and get blown by hookers from the favelas. Yes, I enjoy being in the company of fellow down-to-earth people from humble backgrounds. However, I am a benevolent man, so I pay for their pedicures afterwards. Better Call Saul reference. I then kill the hookers (I mean I really only just happen to strangle them and they just happen to stop breathing) and move into a hotel room in Rome. I attend an opera on a calm Thursday evening. I do more coke, and kill a stray cat by beating its head against the Colosseum. Its blood drips from my eyelashes.

I go back to my room and pull out the gun (that I bought illegally) from underneath my pillow. I put the barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger. Pull the trigger on a brand new Porsche 911! I now drive erratically, having consumed 4 bottles (litres? gallons?) of Rome’s finest wine, along with a small, but healthy helping of MDMA (it helps me relax). “Life is beautiful,” is the thought that arises in my mind as I ejaculate in my pants. Luckily, I am wearing a diaper. I'm into that sort of thing. I drive all the way down to Venice and scream at the locals asking them where I can find Antonio as I throw up in my mouth. This place reminds me of Venice beach, although I’ve never actually been. Bile runs down the arms of my shirt. I grab a random tourist and begin beating their face in, as I cry to God for forgiveness, wailing into the night like a cello twisting inside a pressure cooker. Suddenly, I receive a vision - a vision that beckons with a call that I simply cannot refuse - and realise I must fly down to Amsterdam to get my face sat on by a woman who has her bush trimmed down to a cute little heart. I am on the flight, and I am being handcuffed for biting the tongue off of one of the -

I wake up drenched in sweat and immediately run to my bathroom. I frantically take the lid off the flush tank and grab the dirty syringe I’ve been using to inject the ketamine the homeless man sold me (I had to use a spoon to dig into his eye socket before he would accept an offer for the vial he had hidden up his crack) into my veins. Immediately, I am slipping into that familiar, comforting K-hole and I look at the barren oil-spill of my body. I wonder why I’m not microdosing on ecstasy instead. Mental note - “microdose on clarity.” I begin to drift back and ponder beating a dog to death with a golf club. I am happy for the first time in my life. I strip my clothes off and run into the street, and end up grabbing a woman by her shoulders and motorboat her. Her breasts are small, and she screams for help, but I can tell she’s enjoying herself and a nearby (American) stranger (tourist) fires his gun at me, aiming at my knee. He misses, but the bullet flies straight through my left testicle. My left nut explodes to bits. There is blood everywhere. I feel no pain. I let her go, and lay down, naked and sweaty, on the dirty roadside of downtown Mumbai. This roadside, I notice, is particularly filthy - even disregarding my testicle that's now splattered all over the place. The pani-puri vendor standing close by is unfazed and continues washing his dirty dishes in the sewage running down the ditch along the road. I feel the warm pani-puri pani begin to pool up against my neck. A dog runs up and begins humping my foot. Yes, I am barefoot. Yes, blood is still pouring out of my nutsack, spurting out in short bursts. Man, I love Mumbai.

I wake up in a hospital and grab the nearest syringe I can find and inject myself with the last of my Special K that I’ve been storing up my ass for tight situations like these. Jumping off the hospital bed, I rip my catheter out and begin chewing on it. The nurse falls to the floor. I am apparently in Bangkok. Hell yeah, ladyboys.

I now have a rope. A rope that I am tying around the ceiling fan in my room. Bangkok is great. I seem to have lost the ability of experiencing post-nut clarity with the loss of my left testicle. I am alone, but not lonely. I have my rope with me.

It is the next morning and I wake up with my hand on fire. Literally. I rush to the bathroom in my tiny, cramped Thai shithole of a hotel room where I accidentally rip the faucet off the sink. Water sprays everywhere, and something bursts behind the shower curtain. I feel my lack-of-left-testicle begin to bleed, like it has been every morning of the last two weeks, and I rush out, stuffing a crusty sock into the gaping hole that remains. Return to sender. My clothes reek of piss and vodka. I rush out the door to avoid paying for damages and get slammed by a local bus. The bus runs over my body and my forearm snaps clear in half. The bone is sticking out, straight through my shirt. The bus driver jumps out and rips my shirt off and he slaps me across my face. His fingernail scratches my eye, and grazes something deeper. My right eye instantly fills with blood. With crimson vision, I turn around and run, straight into a tuk-tuk (autorickshaw for all you simpletons) whose glass windshield shatters into a billion tiny little shards. The police show up. They drag me away as I kick wildly and scream every slur I can think of.

I am now sitting in the Indian Embassy, lunging at anyone who offers help. They think I’ve gone mad, for some odd reason. They think I’m crazy. Well, fuck them. Fuck everyone. Fuck everyone who thinks I need help. They’re the ones who've gone crazy; they’re the ones who need help. I run out of the embassy, and reach into my left pocket, where I find my phone. I have lost almost all vision in my right eye. I catch a glimpse of my reflection on the screen. Man, I’m pretty. I dial my rich uncle, who offers to fly down to Bangkok and fuck some chicks. I don't know what he means and so I scream about how I need to get the hell out of Thailand. He shows up an hour later, and throws me into the trunk of his car.

I am now in the trunk, trying desperately to suck my own dick. If only I didn’t have those last two ribs. I think about Sting, and the trunk opens. I climb out, I notice my uncle has been shot in the head and I see his body lying on the ground next to the car. No one is around. I wonder how the trunk happened to open on its own. Suddenly, a scorpion stings my foot. Out of nowhere, a man dressed in a terrible Native American halloween costume jumps up behind me and puts me in a chokehold. A similarly-outfitted man runs up and begins sawing my foot off with a blunt hacksaw. I feel the grinding up my leg, in my teeth. I am screaming in pain, and the man whispers in my ear saying it’s all for my own good. His friend then hands me my foot. The both of them then walk away, and I realise they’ve switched my foot with someone else's; what I’m actually holding is shockingly (really?) someone else’s foot (shut the fuck up bro, there's no way!). It is rotting and has maggots crawling under the toenails. I sniff it and pass out.

I am in a fever dream ia am in a fever dream i a mu ai i am in a fever dream i am in a agever frame i am in a fever fream this is a fever team this is a forever dream this is a fever fream is is nt real 

I am conscious again and I take my diaper off. I need to jerk off. It takes me a while, but I nut and my ejaculate is weak and stained red and tastes metallic. I look around me and realise that I’m still in Mumbai. I take a step forward, and my foot lands on an open-faced used sanitary napkin with a rotting egg on it. I am hungry. I am naked. 

I run into the nearest hotel and demand a room. The staff are swooned by my immensely strong sex appeal and check me into the executive suite. I take a shower (where I jerk off real hard) and put on the brand new tuxedo I stole from the hotel laundry. I smell of shaved wood and ripped-open eyelids. I walk to the hotel bar where I get wasted on an insane and quite frankly irresponsible amount of whiskey. I decide to reveal my mommy-fetish to the hottest woman at the bar and we have dirty, passionate sex. Snorting a cocktail (get it? I could've picked "medley" instead, but oh no) of drugs from each other’s assholes, I make her cum. She fingers my left-nut-hole and it feels like pins-and-needles. I wake up the next morning having forgotten everything. I take a flight to Bangalore (after making her cum again). In the flight, I piss on a woman (it's an Air India flight) and then steal a bottle of champagne, break it against the cockpit door, and threaten to stab anyone who comes near me. The plane lands and I jump out the emergency exit. Suavely evading airport security, I stick my finger out at them. The middle one. I steal a cab and drive to Bannerghatta National Park where I strip naked and run into the forest. After hours of terrorising the animals, I get mauled by a tiger. I die. I wake up in a celestial plane above human existence. I am empty. I am a pathetic little puppy desperately trying to cum all on my own. I stare into the Eyes of God. I need to go back. I cannot let it end like this. I need this.

I am reborn as a beggar. I instantly strip naked and begin chasing pedestrians, flinging my shit at them, threatening to rape them. It is nighttime. I find a plastic knife in a garbage bin and begin sticking it into my nutsack. I miss my left-nut-hole. I make an Instagram profile and look up a girl I used to know from high school. I instantly fall in love with her and I need to suck her tits. I deserve to. I am going to kill myself. I walk into a nearby H&M and come out looking as goth as humanly possible. Walking across the road, I enter the local police station and purchase a gun. You know? Because that's where you buy them. I then look up the addresses of everyone I knew back in college. Their time has come. “The Hawks Feed You to Feed Itself” by Nervous Cop plays as I drive down Church Street with the gun tucked into my waistband. I am a perfect person. The first name on the list is the only person I kill. The others, I torture for a period of 29 days before letting them choke on their own blood. I wonder if the “God” I have seen is real. I gaslight myself into thinking I've just been staring at my reflection in the mirror in the H&M bathroom this entire time. 

I pull my phone out and begin listening to “Tarantula” by Wavves. I order a pizza. Halfway through eating it, I vomit it all up, along with half a can of Dr. Pepper I had had the previous night. But, I’m not rich, so I scoop it all up off the pavement and eat it. Dirt, and all. I suck the marrow out of my broken forearm. 

Now, I illegally immigrate to Zambia. The fish are selling like hot-cakes. I find a job as a fish factory worker and kill a night watchman on my way to work by hacking him to bits with a machete I find lying on the side of a dirt road. Life is good again. I think about the little kids working in Apple assembly lines. I am angered by the world’s lack of response to my words. I am in control. I remind myself that I am in control. I do not need to remind myself that I am in control. I stare into the Eyes of God again; I could do this for hours. Life is good. I want to stare at this person, this woman, her body, her eyes for hours on end. I want to fade into nothingness. I sit back down on the pavement. The vomit soaks my pant legs.

I am disappointed, sad, and in ruins. It is now the next day. I sprint to the nearest photobooth and take 113 images of my face. I then throw these images out the window of my taxi on the way to the railway station. Arriving at the station, I fire my gun into the driver’s headrest, killing him instantly. His brain splatters against the windshield, which has somehow stayed intact. Blood begins to pool up near the pedals, causing the bits of his head that broke out to float. On the bright side, at least I don’t have to pay the taxi fare. I buy a first class ticket to Goa. Arriving there, I get hammered. I then wander the desolate streets aimlessly, singing to myself. This is the happiest I’ll ever be. I turn into an alley. Unfortunately, I don’t actually become an alley. Instead, a gang of fat gundas corner me, armed with makeshift knives. I hand them my wallet, but I spit at them and they end up shanking me. My stomach is torn open, and mushy pizza splatters out. I am losing blood fast. Suddenly, I realise that I have gotten off at the wrong station. I’m not in Goa; I’m just in a different part of Bangalore. I wonder why I can still hear the shore. At this point, a bloated rat crawls out from under a garbage can and scampers up to my body. Quickly, the rat jumps up my t-shirt and squeezes itself into the gaping stab wound on my abdomen. The pain is sharp, and my gut feels like a deflated water balloon with a rat gnawing its way inside. I’m not hungry anymore. Suddenly, a homeless man runs up to me on all fours. It is terrifying how effortlessly he accomplishes this. He licks his hand and sticks it into my stomach. I feel him reaching around, and all I hear are his grunts and my intestines squelching. I am in agony. After struggling a little, he pulls the rat out and bites straight into its abdomen. The rat screeches in pain and explodes. The putrid scent of sweaty Cheetos and two-day-old belly-button fills the air. 

I hate you. I hate you, for you are the cause of my suffering.

The following morning, I run up the stairs to a local monastery and ask how I get to the stars. The sky is so far away and I want to be among them. I am advised to love and respect the world. I spit in the monk’s face. The world belongs to me, and so will the stars. All of a sudden, the world explodes. I whoosh up into the sky, smiling madly. This is it! Floating in space, I am observed by the Eyes of God. Rest in peace, Harwell. “I Miss the Girl” by Soul Coughing plays as I stare back. The Eyes tear up. Everything is returned to the way it was. I take a flight to Mangalore and drive down to Maravanthe. I walk up to the shore and sit down. The sun has set and all I hear is the soft crashing of the waves. It is nighttime. I look up at the sky and notice the stars. I stare at them for hours. I do not have to leave. The waves continue crashing. I think of nothing. Her eyes are beautiful.

I wake up at 4 AM. “I Claudius” by Sleaford Mods is playing on my phone. A red sky at night. Sailors delight, I am on the beach. I want to call up my friends and dip; nutter! I killed them all, ahaha! I find a boat a few meters away and push it into the sea, and climb aboard. Time to go back! My eyes are dry. I hear Gordon Ramsay’s voice scream “Wall Street is calling!” He is on the boat with me. I think my eyes are just dry. The boat stops abruptly, and I’m in Yerpedu. I think about Fiona Apple and whatever it was she had to go through. I hate tea. Voices speaking Telugu make me dizzy. I am suddenly enraged by Saint Levant’s music. He mentions “Twitter” on one of his more popular songs, but then that isn’t a thing anymore. He makes shit music. I’m not lost.

Everything is fading away. I slip back into familiarity. It feels like the end. What more is there to do? What more is there to say? What more is there to it all? I am slipping back, slowing down. This is it. I can’t do it anymore. I hear “Delta” by Mount Kimbie playing. I listen. I feel myself transported back in time; I face my 18 year old self. Four words? A chasm in my abdomen, I look him in the eye. He stares back at a dirty matted-haired homeless man with an eyeless left eye socket and blood stained clothes smelling faintly of vomit. A moment passes. I say, “It doesn’t get better.” He smiles in understanding. I chuckle softly. He nods, presses play on “All Of The Time” by Jungle, and walks away. This is it.

C h ap t er2

I can’t sleep. I am staring at my ceiling, where the plaster is peeling off. I am a man of God. A pendulum in perpetual oscillation, I am at an extreme. I have an incredibly deep sense of irritation and regret about the fact that nothing will ever be perfect. Perplexing, like a pillbox hat, I hate it. I am feverish, and my armpits are damp and have that familiar stench of starch. My head hurts and I have no idea why. This is a bad day. Every day of this past week has been a bad day. Like rice-water, nothing really feels different. I am tired. I am consumed by paralysing dread; it makes my stomach heavy and my mouth taste bitter and rancid. I am on the verge of complete collapse. I open my eyes and I see darkness. I am inside something. I am inside someone. Suffocating now, I trash wildly, trying to claw my way out. My nails aren’t sharp, but I stab outwards, ripping into the flesh surrounding me. I am suffocating. I claw with more aggression. Light. With one final shove, I am outside and the air is sharp and freezing. I scream out and feel the muscles in my throat get grainy and the sides of my neck burn. “I Love It (ft. Charli XCX)” by Icona Pop plays. Welcome to Cheetah.

I light a cigarette but it tastes a bit sour and hairy and it turns out to be a cockroach. Whatever. I stuff it inside my left eye socket to eat later. I had a packet of Cadbury Gems that I emptied into the hole but I can't find them there anymore. I take the airport bus back to Church Street and strip naked. Someone’s bound to be seduced. I run into the nearest restaurant I see, flailing my junk around but no one seems interested. Their loss. I grab a parka from the Zara store and book an autorickshaw using my iPhone SE. Getting in, I notice there’s this insanely attractive woman walking along the road who makes eye contact with me for what feels like a really prolonged duration. I jump off and pounce onto her. She says I have four minutes, and then we make out. I feel something inside my chest move and my torso flies off and lands in the arms of a retired bank manager selling momos on the side of the road. I die. Not really; I realise I’m in the basement of some nightclub in Shanghai. I’m on the cold, wet concrete floor, propped up against a pillar and my arms are zip-tied around it. A woman who looks like this Instagram creator I have a crush on walks slowly down the stairs towards me. I’m in love. She has a baseball bat wound with barbed wire, and she swings down onto my crotch. Pain shoots down both my legs, and I feel it jolting underneath my toenails as if someone’s inserting needles inside and pulling upwards. Blood from my testicles shoots up onto my face. “No one for you, pretty boy!” This is freaky, and I’m loving it. A rat crawls out of what’s left of my deflated boar bladder of a nutsack and I feel myself transported into the rat’s brain. I jog down its hippocampus, which now stretches for miles in front of me. In the dentate gyrus, I walk up to a tea stall manned by a very wrinkly old man. I tell him that I want a job. I mean I really yell at him. Because he's old. So he must be hard of hearing. The old man pulls out the gun that he’s been storing up his butt-crack. “One more word, and you’re dead meat,” he squeals. I squat down. And that's when I notice that my tie’s askew. No wonder he's in a bad mood! I also notice that I’m in an WW1 soldier’s uniform - helmet, rifle, the works, but I can't say which country because that would be crossing the line. Anyway, there’s no escaping this psychopath. I grab the rifle from my back, and stick the bayonet into my larynx. He smiles wildly and running up to my body, he pulls the blade out, and filters scalding hot ginger tea into the hole. Thanks for the free tea, you filthy troglodyte! I black out.

Next thing I know, I’m in Africa, heading north along the Nile in a speeding jeep which suddenly flips over because the front wheels lock up. Turns out, the jeep is just a single block of moulded plastic, like one of those green army-men toy sets. There’s a middle-aged couple with me in the jeep; I’m holding them hostage, but they think they’re on a safari in Gir. With no lions around. And in the wrong continent. Anyway, we jump out of the jeep and onto parched yellow mud. I pick at the crusty bits and hear a deep, vaguely human sigh come from deep inside the Earth. The jeep is sinking into quicksand. The sun sets, and it gets cold. You are stranded here with me. Hyenas laugh in the distance. There’s a dull glow in the distance, from what looks like one of those old storm lanterns. As it gets closer, I realise that it’s actually held by mummy. You think this is funny? Didn't think so. It's all wrapped in paper, like in the movies. It approaches us with arms outstretched and with its jaws snapping, but right as it lunges at me, it trips and drops the lamp, which breaks and spils oil all over the ground and into the cracks. The mummy catches on fire immediately, and it runs around screaming. It should stop-drop-and-roll, but it doesn’t. Norman Reedus shows up on his motorcycle, pulls out a sawn-off shotgun and blows its head clean off with a single shot. The rest of the mummy continues burning; that's the sitution under control. That’s food and warmth for tonight. Nodding at the group, Norman rides off into the moonlight. I decide to continue on foot, walking along the river. I’m not hungry because I’ve been having a tab of Ozempic for every meal for the past 18 months. I think I’m losing weight. A hyena approaches, and I puff my chest out at it because I'm not scared; “I’m not afraid of you, chupacabra!” I scream. The hyena opens its mouth and says “Yoo, it’s the man from Chapter 1! I’m a huge fan my G, no cap on God.” It unhinges its jaw and I climb inside. I walk past his larynx and there’s a massive million-dollar mansion inside. I decide to stay. Sure, the walls are all made of flesh and the floor is slippery with bile, but I really can’t complain. I’m home. The horse standing next to me rears up and kicks my head. I black out. I wake up like days later.

This means nothing. My doors remain reticent, carefully guarded, boarded up and unwelcoming. I am unrecognizable.

I’m in a bad mood. What’s new? It was all just a big joke up until now. Up to this very point. This full stop. An incomplete sentence marked by a solid, ruthless period. Punctuation. Punctuation is pause and pause is thought. Thought is lacking. Lacking meaning. I’m in a bad mood. This was all just a big joke. The sun has set and I can’t tell what time it is. I’m not wearing a watch, but judging by this desperate stretch of tar splayed out in front of me, I’d say it’s too late. I walk down the road in slow, predetermined and careful steps, dragging a lead pipe behind me. Its shrill, grating cry reverberates off the brick walls of the buildings that line this street, piercingly morose. That scratch of solid, heavy metal against asphalt; this is a dead end. An end that ends in death. Something hides in the shadows at the end. It is scared. Flecks of rust chip off the pipe as I drag it behind me, scratching into the tar. This is real. This is not another nostalgic drug trip. The pipe is a blunt instrument. A weapon. A tool of connection. A tool of correction. It stands still, eyes shining a dark, glossy black. It thinks it can hide, camouflaged in its lack of movement. It doesn’t know any better. My pipe is a tool. A tool of connection. A tool of answers. A period of loud pauses. This pipe is a paint brush destined to paint a patina of piercing possibilities. Predetermined possibilities. It needs to die.

You catch me today. “What are you doing?” - you ask, curtly. Obviously, I say nothing. But you know that you’ve caught me. I try to sit as still as I can, squatting - like a woman urinating on the sidewalk, and also still kind enough to warn others of the stream. But my eyes gives it all away, don't they? They well up with tears, right up to the brim. Blood seeps out the gash on my left temple, and my left hand clutches a knife bloody and wet. Inside, I’m shaking breathless. Trembling before you/ I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. You close your eyes just for a moment and then shake your head in disappointment. I’ve let you down. I’ve let you down and you know I’m a terrible terrible person. I disappoint. You are walking away from me and I fall forwards onto my knees. They’re all scratched up. Must be the rats. They aren’t going anywhere.

The camera pans down to a busy street in New York, New York and the “Seinfeld” title card fades in. The bass riff begins playing and Elaine is convulsing on the sidewalk. People walk by unfazed. The audience laughs and begins applauding. The scene fades to black, and fades back in to reveal Jerry lying on his bed. His bedside clock reads 2:47 AM. Jerry is under the covers, with his blanket pulled right up to his nose. His beady white eyes glisten in the glow of faint, curtain-filtered moonlight. He can’t sleep. His eyes are bloodshot, and his heart is racing. The audience hears skittering, followed by a startlingly aggressive gnawing at what sounds like a piece of plastic. Jerry slowly lifts his head, and peers at the door. He sees a figure, with a frame as tall and lanky as Kramer’s, and so logically he calls out in the faintest whisper - “Kramer? Is that you?” The audience laughs. The figure runs to the corner of the room on all fours - it is clearly not Kramer. It is clearly not human. Jerry is extremely disturbed. The audience roars with laughter. It is the next day, and Jerry and George are at their usual booth at Monk’s. Jerry looks like shit, having not slept in weeks. His eyes are sunken and his eyelids are dark purple. George stares at him for a while, and then asks smugly, “So, how’d you sleep?” There’s some scattered laughter in the audience. Jerry is trembling. George continues - “Is it the rat again? You really need to call an exterminator.” George looks away, distracted by an attractive waitress. “Oh by the way, Elaine’s at the hospital. Seizures, or something.” He does the “cuckoo” sign with his fingers at his temple. The audience chuckles. Kramer walks into the coffee shop, wearing a trench coat. The audience cheers happily. “Hey guys!” he says, plopping down beside George. “Hey, guess what? I’m naked under this trench coat!” Kramer laughs, and George looks at him, sighs, and says “I’ve got to go. Steinbrenner wants to see me for lunch. He wants another calzone. The guy just won’t stop!” Looking at George, Kramer replies “Well, he can suck on my calzone!” The audience goes wild. Jerry is still staring forward at nothing, shaking softly. He mutters “please please please please please please…” under his breath. Two cops enter Monk’s and walk up to Kramer. One of them says, pointing at Kramer - “You Kramer?” Kramer nods, looking confused, and says “Yeah, what’s it to you, buddy?” They promptly handcuff him - “You’re under arrest for indecent exposure. You have the right to remain silent.” “Hey just because the flash on my digicam was too bright doesn’t mean I’ve been blinding the homeless!” - Kramer screams out (he’s been engaging in street photography). Jerry is terrified. He knows he has to return to his apartment. The scene fades to black, and the audience laughs softly. Back at Jerry’s apartment, Jerry is screaming, painting his walls blood red. “I AM NOT LETTING THIS RAT CONTROL ME! NOT A CHANCE! I AM NOT GOING CRAZY! I AM IN CONTROL!” Clearly Jerry has lost it. The camera pans to the window beside Jerry’s computer and we see Newman falling, having jumped off the roof. The audience hears a crash, and sirens wail in the distance. The audience cackles. This is extremely funny. The scene fades to black. Time passes, and it’s the next day. 4 AM. Elaine enters Jerry’s apartment. She is confused - the walls are all red, and the furniture is ruined, splattered with paint. She grabs a bottle of water out of Jerry’s refrigerator. “Jerry?” she calls out. No response. The audience is silent. Elaine slowly walks over to Jerry’s bedroom. The camera traces her steps - Elaine hopes it's still paint that she's stepping on, but she knows this sticker shade dark red and there's no denying it, and it grows wetter the closer she gets to Jerry’s bed. Elaine calls out to Jerry again, but this time her voice is shaky with concern. She looks up, and sees Jerry’s body ripped open - his intestines pulled out and shredded - blood seeping into the mattress. And crouching on top of his body is something - a tall, lanky figure, black as ink, frozen in place with its long brittle arms and legs and long nails stabbed deep inside Jerry’s abdomen, reaching for something even deeper. Jerry’s legs are left hanging from his torso by a strands of thin muscle. The creature turns to face Elaine - its mouth foaming with white froth, and reeking sickly of rancid meat. Elaine screams, and the audience screeches out violently, laughing the hardest they’ve ever laughed. The creature lunges at her and the last thing Elaine sees is Jerry’s lifeless eyes, glassy and glazed over. The next day, George is reading the paper, sitting alone at the coffee shop. He reads about what happened at Jerry’s apartment. He neatly folds the paper back up, sets it down on the table beside a tipless bill, and heads back to his office at the Yankee Stadium. He ties a noose. The camera pans away, and a chair is heard falling. The audience claps and credits roll.

I don’t recognize myself anymore. I look into mirrors, I glance at windows that parade a reflection and I see a stranger. A person stares back at me; this cannot be me. That can’t be my face, can it? But it looks so gaunt and off coloured, and pale, and ashy. The hair on top looks thin, rough and out of place, like a bad wig that's worn askew. The muscles strain to contort the face into a smile that belongs to someone else. Who is this person? I don’t recognize my voice anymore. It sounds strange. Stranger. I can’t speak in complete sentences without stammering. I lose my place in sentences. My palace is crumbling. The words fall out, one at a time. I’m frustrated and I snap at everyone I know. And before those I do not, I stay silent. Are awkward silences better? I let silence fill the air, I let it suffocate me, and it breathes out humid discomfort. Surely that cannot be me. My grip is weak. Is this the end of a life unlived? How pretty it would be if I could peel this skin, this muscle, this life off, and suck the marrow out from my bones, and finally just be present. I know you can tell this isn’t me. Why won’t you just admit it?

It is Tuesday and my mind feels like liquid metal, struggling to repel poles that prevent it from wrapping around and enclosing me. It shudders, loud like an animal that is scared and confused. It warps, like an ROI gone rogue when left uncorrected, shifting with each passing frame to include areas of pitch black nothingness, while blissfully ignoring gleaming red patches of obvious and common interest. The regular makes no sense. Or is it my mind that makes no sense of it? Like W. It is Tuesday and the next day I wake up to will be a Friday.

Five hundred million years of longing and solitude. Five hundred million years of sadness and lack of empathy. Five hundred million years of new faith.

Ch a pte r. 3

My vision fades in and I find myself at the gaping, red mouth of a flesh cave. I must be dreaming. This is the mouth of a dead fish. Lately, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to tell real life from my dreams. Its eyes are glassy and faded reddish-orange. Does it make a difference? I don’t know anymore. I decide to step inside. I move forward and run my hand along the lips, which pulse and shudder, shutting behind me with a wet thump. This place is humid and smells like anchovies pissed on by drunken fishermen. I continue walking. The floor gives in a little with each step; It feels soft and supple against the soles of my bare feet, like latex viscera, coated with a thin layer of crusty pus that cracks with each step and then lets out a dark gooey tar that slightly bulges out into the crevices between my toes. This place is wet with blood. Thick veins run along every surface, pumping thick black sludge. The walls slowly widen and move further and further apart, giving way to a dusty desert of sharp and craggy rock that looks more like a seaside town's scrap metal left out at shore to rust. This desert of nightmares is a canyon. Walking forwards, I reach a cliff. At its edge, I see a homeless man lying on his side. He sees me approaching him and he stumbles trying to prop himself up on his left elbow. I am near him. He looks up at me. His eyes are sunken and his eyelids are caked with greenish-yellow mucus and almost completely sealed shut. Straining to open them, he parts his cracked bleeding lips and slurs - “Wake up man, do you know what mud feels like? Like mud? Are you listening to me? Wake up man! Are you listening?” I can hear him fine, but I choose to ignore him. He continues, unfazed and blabbering incoherently, drooling onto himself with every word he spits out. I avoid eye contact and continue walking along the cliffside. I walk away. I walk for what feels like hours. Maybe it’s just minutes. The horizon never changes. An organic, rusty hellscape that’s dying from within itself. Dry as a smoker’s lung, dusty as a bed of nails. I walk, and I notice a wall of flesh growing upwards from the ground to my right. It climbs high, eventually forming the facade of a 12-story prison. It stretches out forever, but remains only as wide as a single cell. Its face - a simple single row of cells, each with thick, blistered rods of iron worn down by centuries of white-knuckled clutches, and calcified walls scratched in by years of desperate clawing, scabby with haemorrhagic spots of mold. Each cell, dark and damp and soaked with excrement and decades of terrible memories, houses a single prisoner. All of them, staring off into the distance, are dressed in rags made of rough cloth and stand stunned, stunted and slouching in stunned silence like sacks of jute. Their skin looks thin, thin enough for my smallest tug to tear it apart, thin enough to barely veil the flame of a candle held close, close enough to singe it red, then black, then white. They stare right through me. Am I still here? I walk along the length of the jailhouse and then, I reach the very last cell. I see the very last prisoner. She’s weaving a mesh of dark red jute and has tied bits of it to replace all the broken bars of her cell. “Been working all day long?” I ask. She turns to face me and replies softly, “Oh, but there was no morn.” Mourning? This is not a dream. This is scorn. I’m not awake. You decide that I need to retreat back into the rust. This flesh cage is my prison. This flesh cage is my home. Homeless, I am outside. I’m driving a car. I see traffic, a red light in the distance. A family. We hate the homeless as a society. But they’re the only ones really living. Really human. Surviving. What am I anymore? 

Can you see the desperate longing in my eyes? I know it’s deep set and barely visible. Please tell me you can see it. I know it’s only barely there, but If you can’t see it then I know no one can. I need to know. My longing is yours. Everything I know is yours. Without you I am nothing. I am biased. I am my biases. I am this longing, for I am nothing without it. This is all I have. All I have is for you. I want to hold you. I want your weight on me. I want to feel real. I want to feel pain. I want to feel you. I know you can see it; the longing. You see it deep inside my pupil. I know you want to take it away. I know you want to plunge your blunt fingernails inside, past my cornea, slow, then sinking deep into that darkened abyss, shrouded until you finally reach it. But the prisoner knows this too. And she won’t let you take it away. She tells me to lay my head down on her lap. I can feel the bones of her thighs against the back of my head. She threads her needle with dark, red thread of jute. I close my eyes. Gently, she pierces the needle into my upper eyelid, then the lower one. She repeats - delicate, poetic, stout, resolute. I trust her. I trust her, but I won't trust you. You know this, don’t you?

Music blasts from the tiny speakers inside my earphones and crashes painfully onto my eardrums. I raise the volume loud enough to drown out everything around me. To drown out everything inside me too. This is my armour. My very own malformed dragon helm that seals airtight. It stings me like the words to your licorice song. I have nothing else left to live for anymore. The only things I own are the music I listen to, the familiar sense of discomfort that rattles like wind-up teeth deep inside my abdomen, and my name. My name is the cheapest of all my belongings because I’m the only one who ever uses it. Non-existent to others who step all over it. Non-existent to those who choose to acknowledge its harrowing yet distant presence as they would a passed-out fentanyl addict. What gives it value in my eyes? I’m not sure. I’d throw it away if I could, but no matter how hard I try, it seems to always drag itself back to me. It haunts me, bathing me in molasses, ensuring I can never escape it. It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s nice, sometimes. Companionship. But companionship holds no value. That niceness? It doesn’t add value to companionship. Companionship is a coping mechanism; to avoid inconsiderate truths that graze by soft like shrapnel from a hand-grenade. Sometimes my name argues with me. It says that my music is the cheapest of my possessions because other people use it as they please. It calls my music a whore. It says this because it knows they can’t do it with my name. But I refuse to listen. I grab it by the neck and squeeze it until it turns blue, until I feel it begin to lose strength and give in. The music I listen to is mine. No one else listens to it the way I do. My music is mine. I won’t let anyone steal it away from me. I’ll grip onto it tight, and dig my fingernails in as far as they go. Thieves steal, and thieves are bad people, and bad people are hurt by worse people. Punishment holds value. Punishment is valuable because it meshes together the past and the future with present dissonance. Punishment enlivens because it draws from the soul. It is life. Music is punishment. And my music is my penance. I like when it hurts my ears because that’s when I’m really listening. Are you listening to me? Is this your punishment? Do you like being punished too? What value does it hold for you? Is it cheaper than mine? My music swallows me and spits me out as it pleases. It tells me I taste bitter because of my name. But a name is permanent. A name is a record. A name is scratched in by a needle, and it screams out a song. My song. My music. Perjury. My punishment. My penance.

4851 September minutes. A three minute track. That’s 1/480th of a day. Every day, that’s 1/480th that’s mine again. The other 479? A struggle that ends with me locked inside a barrel of oily black quicksand, with each track adding maybe minutes for my lungs to whine and squeal and suck in grey bits of soot into leaky pipes that trap it in sticky molasses, slowly succumbing to pressure that builds like an anvil against my diaphragm. I can’t really blame anyone but myself for how thick the quicksand is. My hourglass is upturned. Added time only delays the inevitable. Quick sand. I beat it, until it runs red and spotted. But it cheats. 4851 September minutes I’ve clawed back and shoved deep inside my head. I clutch both my ears in hopes of trapping the 4851 flakes of 24 karat gold, praying they don’t slip out from the gaps between my fingers. Like pop rocks, they crackle and burst softly against my wet, swollen eardrum. Endless background noise driven by a midi controller with a faulty circuit. But I know it hides meaning. Like a wolf, stalking its prey in an industrial winter, walking between walls of brutalist grey, I find myself yearning for the release of its teeth sinking deep into my arm, the tension in its jaws effortlessly reaching bone, its saliva drawing stringy blood. A refusal to let go - and I can’t tell between the two of us anymore. This midas bite is truth. It is triumph. It is meaning. The bite is my escape into a paradise far beyond this rectory of false prophets. A departure that is truly permanent, one I can’t slip back from like all the other times I’ve been tricked into believing.

My days spill into each other uselessly like split milk. They ignore all the lines I’ve scratched into the ground and they drip, seeping into the cracks, staining, reeking, culturing rot. My lines have no respect. Like the lines that stretch across my palm without boundary or direction, they lack meaning. Every time I clutch my left palm with my right in prayer, I dig into the crevices around my knuckles with the tips of my fingernails until I feel the cartilage pushing back. Resistance. My own body protests against the lines I mutilate it with. Has this always just been about a power struggle? A deranged dictator whose subjects have long overthrown their parliament? No, it can’t be that simple, can it? This is about the lines I draw. My lines are sour and fuzzy. My lines mock me. They curl and twist like salt on leeches. They pull me deep into wet and suffocating mud, down below the roots, aggressively warping into barbed wire leashes that hook around the sides of my neck, and force their way into my mouth. Hot with friction, they thrust past my throat, bitter like iodine and rust. Cannibalistic parasites; they mock me because they know I can’t live without punishment. My punishment. They know that I’m no different from them. I have nothing else. I am a tapeworm. My lines, creased and withered, lacerate my skin, branding it like a pig sent to slaughter. I am lost to noise, drained by impedance, phasing between gluttony and hypocrisy. I am a tone-deaf pseudo-postulant succumbing to the harmonics of a higher calling. I dig into my skin and form burrows and valleys and trenches and hideouts, drawing lines that wrap around me and run ruthlessly to divide and discourage. I stretch and crawl and weep, stripping myself of all my lines, but they reappear because they’re deeper set than I imaged. I am in ecdysis.

I have power. Power inside my hands. To mutilate my body. To starve it until I see the bones stretching my skin translucent. To not care how I look. To not care how my body looks. To not care how my body looks to other people. To not care how this body looks at other people. I am not my body. I will claw my way out into the nothingness that blankets my consciousness. My body is gaunt. My body is drained. My body is dying and taking me with it. Taking me into the blackness that envelops my consciousness. There’s nothing out there. There’s no one out there. Everyone is encased in flesh. Encaged by ribs that stretch skin. I will not leak out into life decimated by choice, willing sacrifice, pseudoaltruism, so much for the greater good (or is it a greater God?) but ultimately tricking yourself into believing you can see wonders of scales unimaginable in a blackness that coats my consciousness menacingly thick. I think. My body thinks. This body reacts. I enact. My body trips. This body is false. I am nothing as long as I care about this body I possess. For as long as I care about your body, I am nothing but consciousness sealed within a tempest of nothingness. A tempest of nothingness. This is no realization. This is no discovery. What did your body expect? I am nothing without my body. My thought is a lie. Your thought is too. I am greed. I am gluttony. I am no different. I am a hypocrite. I won’t let you inside my cage. A dome of ivory white, plastered over and over and over, layered to conceal, to hide what’s always been beneath, yellowed and cracking and yet pure and continuously endless. This constrictive claustrophobic dome is an echo chamber, an echo chamber into whose floor is gashed an angled entrance that's barely wide enough and I stand hunched over with my back against the wall in eternal paranoia, armed with a sharp stick forever pointed at that unknown intruder for it must enter from below. I will not leave this dome because the dome is my home, the singular constant, and I am this dome, this singular constant, a constant that at times is a reminder of comfort so intensely longed for but never here because I stand within, trembling. My arms lacking muscle lost from years of strain, my stick remains clenched, making naught of what remains of my dwindling urge to survive, this dome will collapse onto itself, leaving me nonexistent and shattered, a million little pieces strewn with intention, careless. Lost in blitzkrieg, I wander the vast and endless plains within this dome and I sway constantly, unsteady and with unease, awaiting a singular bullet, one that never arrives, my body suspended with crimson droplets dripping down my forehead and running so gracefully into my eyes, staining them a deep ruby-red that won’t wash out.

I am a cold, dull blade. I am the pain that pierces deep inside my abdomen. I am a dark alleyway at night on a November tuesday. I am the cold night rain that drizzles down, shimmering softly in the street lights. I am the gentle breeze that stirs the tree leaves awake in a hush of white noise. I trap myself in the strangest of places that are yet familiar. Do you recognize me? Do you remember where I am? What makes you read these words? Why are you here? Does peering into my state of mind make you feel better about yourself? Do you enjoy playing a voyeur, some twisted fetish in this broken charade? Does this make me an exhibitionist? Do I entice you? We’re no better than each other. But that idea sickens me. It sickens me to my core, because I know I’m not like you. I take pride in my suffering. I’m a hypocrite. I am miserable. I am the list of all my burning bridges. I am the worst person I know. I am my numbingly intense hurt and loneliness. I am the constant dulling of my senses. I am the damp bitterness that lurks at the back of my mouth, right behind my molars, probing the length of my gums, licking the insides of my teeth with sulfurous fumes. There’ll come a time when I’ve written down enough here, on this indenture to God, for my existence and suffering to be borne weightless and translated entirely into a bunch of meaningless letters to no one. It will be, at this point, that I’d have no reason to live anymore. What would you do then? Would you end your own life too? Or would you find someone else just like me, to consume and digest and break down and shit out? I know who you are, reading this. Fuck you.

This is a transition from arbitrary to abstract concepts, a transition driven by greed and selfishness, one driven by pure restlessness and cold, agonizing envy. This is a transition that’s trapped by my horizons, framed by rolling hills of the everyday, the same, the predictable, the tasteless, the “sometimes” in my periphery. This transition is a lens that’s been sanded down to capture memories of moments smudged beyond recognition, smudged beyond perception, a perception of disdain that’s lost on everyone else but me. Because I’m so different. Ha ha. The hills roll away from me. What is this a transition to? I was hoping you’d have the answer. I’m sure you do, and I know it’s just that you’d rather not tell me. You keep things from me all the time. I know this. I’m never really present with you anyway. I’d rather be tossed aside, spending my time dreaming of foreign vistas, swept away by wonderful intoxication, to trains of the most tantalizing scenarios I make up in my head, some even involving you, but they all inevitably end with me drifting back down to this ground that I stand upon, reminding me that that’s all they are - fantasies that remain wrapped up within themselves - and that that’s all they’ll ever be - fantasies that trip and fall and shatter into a million little pieces too small to tell apart. And I bend down to pick these shards of maladaptive daydreams back up but they prick my fingertips, sending jolts of current up to my elbow and all I feel is pain. Yet, I try again, and like an idiot, I try again, and I try again, making the same mistake over and over and over. I learn nothing. I’m really mad at you this time, and it hurts. I just hope you understand that.

This next bit is for you. I am such a fucking fake. I live only to be seen by other people. I’ll never really open myself up to you. Every broken fragment of myself that I put out into the world before you is an advertisement designed to influence the way you see (through) me, the way you read (over) me. I am a block of opaqueness. I am a sellout. I am entrenched in valleys of suffering and self pity and loathing, valleys I design with nauseating intricacy, zig-zagging into disorienting oblivion, created as a byproduct of wishful thinking but in whose image? I barricade myself at the very last corner of my everchanging labyrinth, sending my infantry out to capture and contain your relentless intrusion into my walled palace of barbed wire and muck. I have been digging a hole for several years now. I make decent progress. I am consistent in the efforts that I put in. And remarkably, every few dozen months, I dig deep enough to find grass. I’ve hit the surface beneath the soil. How can that be? I find that I’m back at the crust, and I’ve lost everything I’ve worked for. I must have started digging horizontally, and upwards, I guess. I see clearly now. I can’t believe I’ve been so foolish. I’ve been in free fall, deluding myself with promises of redemption and escape so sweet it tastes bitter. I can see all I’ve done now. I need to focus. I cannot let this happen again. I will punish myself again to learn a lesson I’ve learnt a million times over. Portia says it better than I ever can - “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions. I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.” And I am unwilling to settle on mediocrity because I am not you.