Psychostasis Read online

  Jake grips the shaft of the penis, frowning, and finally sits down. He presses his lips to the plastic. Ash can’t breathe.

  “Hey. Jake?”

  He looks up from his bong. “Sorry,” he croaks. A tiny wisp of smoke snakes from his mouth, and then he collapses in a fit of equal parts coughing and laughter. “Sorry, Christ, where are my manners?” He extends the bong to Ash.

  “No thanks.” He scoots his butt back into the cushion. “Have you ever done this before?”

  “Every day, dude.”

  “No, I mean—”

  “Me, Scott, and this other guy would always smoke by the dumpsters before school, and I’d show up to first period like, just fucking stoned off my ass, and I had this teacher, Mrs. Sullivan, who would—”

  Ash stares at the stain above the fireplace. It’s brown and sort of…shimmery. Maybe gravy or barbecue sauce. Jake rolls on without him.

  “—Bought lunch tickets from this guy, we called him Freddo but I don’t think that’s his name. But that’s how you can get double lunch.”

  He clicks his lighter and ducks down to take another hit, and Ash says, “I meant this.” He gestures vaguely between the two of them.

  Jake pauses mid-way through dumping ashes onto the table. His puffy, red eyes dart toward the stairs.

  Suddenly, he leaps to his feet. “C’mere,” he says. “I need to show you something.” He’s halfway up the stairs before Ash can even stand. It’s one of those floating glass staircases he’s only seen in movies where nothing happens, and it gives him instant vertigo.

  “Over here.” Into the nearest of three doors, which opens onto the biggest bed he’s ever seen in person. His parents slept in twins.

  He looks to Jake for direction, but Jake is moving in twenty directions at once: fixing the bed, peeling his socks off, fiddling with something behind the gigantic hanging mirror. It swings open, just brushing the edge of the mattress.

  Ash wrenches his eyes away from one of Jake’s many junk piles. Walls of books, trinkets, garbage—like his grandma’s house before they paid that company to clean it out.

  “Ash, over here.”

  A small camera points out through the mirror. A half-dozen white shelves are littered with amorphous shapes. Jake flips on the light.

  Bones.

  Like a reliquary; hundreds and hundreds of bones are jumbled with dried flowers in glass boxes or assembled into full and partial skeletons of rodents and birds.

  His eyes skim down the shelves, past snakeskin and feathers and tanned hides, and land on a poster board leaning against the back wall. It’s a half-finished collage of newspaper clippings. The easy words jump out at him: dead, and gone, and fire. There are pictures, too, but most of them are so heavily censored that he can’t tell what they’re depicting at all.

  Jake stands on his toes to pick a fully mounted animal off the top shelf. It’s a rodent, about the size of his hand, but there’s no way to tell if it was a rat or a gerbil or a ferret. The fur is patchy in places and the glass eyes bug out at opposite angles. Ash holds it like it might bite.

  “It’s art,” he says. “I started collecting roadkill a few months ago, and those are on the top two shelves. Bottom shelf, though, that’s all me.”

  He returns the pathetic creature to its final resting place and takes a closer look at the bottom shelf. Among paper-thin shoulder blades and tiny rat heads, a miniature, grayish-pink heart floats in one of those single-serving jam jars. The skull on the end is unmistakably feline.

  “You killed a cat?” Ash asks.

  “I mean, my neighbors don’t miss it, they barely even fed the thing.”

  “Jake…”

  He rests a burning hand on Ash’s neck and looks him over with deep-set, red eyes. “I’ve got it handled, dude.”

  “I really—” Ash swallows hard. “I really need this.”

  Bathing is a luxury usually reserved for Sunday mornings, before Mass. Like bacon, silk, and movie theaters, it’s simply too rich an experience to indulge with any frequency, which is probably why Holy Trinity didn’t have bathtubs at all. Each student was allowed a ten minute shower every other day, always monitored by a member of the opposite sex. If you still had shampoo in your hair when your time was up, tough luck. He was unclean for the entirety of his four-year stay. When he couldn’t sleep—most nights—he prayed for fragrant, steaming water.

  And Jake’s tub is full of garbage.

  Ash scoops trash by the armful: dozens of silver whipped cream canisters, limp balloons, shattered bottles. A splinter of glass pierces his thumb. He frowns, wiggles it out, and blots the finger on his lips. The toilet paper roll is empty.

  He hovers over the tub and fills his lungs with hot steam. His foot prickles with pins and needles the moment it touches the water—perfect—so he climbs in, throws his head back, and groans. This should be illegal. He drags a palm from his chest to his thigh, and when he opens his eyes, a cloud of murky gray-brown hovers over him, shielding him from his own wicked flesh.

  He washes his hair. He scrubs his skin and cleans behind his ears, between his toes, under his fingernails, and after all that, he’s stuck with a dirty t-shirt and jeans. Goosebumps rise across his skin as he dresses—no matter how hard he scrubs, he’ll always be filthy.

  “You’re the best, you know that?” Jake straightens up, wipes his nose, and grips Ash’s shoulder, Hail Mary. “I showed Mocha my taxidermy and she just thought it was weird, but you get it. And the joke’s on her because I contacted the MOMA and we’re talking about setting up an exhibition next year—”

  Ash squirms in his grip.

  “—and like, I have tons of contacts in the art world and I’m relaunching my streetwear brand pretty soon, it’s called it Clothes, but this time I’m making everything out of literal garbage. That’s avant-garde as shit, right?”

  “Uh huh.” The kitchen appliances menace him with their stainless steel glint. On the fridge, someone has used children’s letter magnets to spell out the words Sir Crustimus Maxim, Grand Fuckmaster of Lower Merion.

  “You want lunch? I make a mean mac-n-cheese. Four different kinds of cheese and tons of butter, cracked pepper—”

  “I’m not hungry.” He finally shrugs Jake’s arm off. “Water?”

  Jake inspects one of the red solo cups on the counter, rinses it out, and refills it from the tap. He says, “Hey, you know I have cameras in the bathroom?”

  Ash takes an involuntary step back.

  “I mean, not to watch you. It’s because I know the government is sending people to collect evidence against me, and I keep getting these coded messages in the mail and they look like credit card offers but if you read every third word it’s pretty fucking clear that someone has defected and he’s trying to warn me.”

  He presses his body against the fridge.

  “I haven’t gotten anything yet because I guess they’ve toned it down since I put the cameras up, but I catch lots of other crazy shit, like entities and stuff. I can show you some of my best clips. Come here, look.” His eyes and smile are wide. White powder rings his nostril.

  “Is that—”

  “C’mere! Watch!” He rockets to the couch and flips on the massive flat screen, upends cushions until he finds a laptop. Ash waits until he’s settled down before sitting gingerly on the other side. Jake is still entering a password so long it runs off the screen.

  “So they’re security cameras?”

  He grabs Ash by the sleeve and tugs him close, throws an arm around his shoulders like they’ve known each other since preschool. He smells awful. Ash wants to drown in it. Hail Mary, full of Grace…

  “Watch,” he says.

  On screen, a dozen people are enacting some godless ritual in Jake’s gigantic living room, blowing up balloons and rebreathing in choppy, frenetic tandem.

  “What’re they doing?”

  “Nitrous,” Jake says. He won’t take his arm off Ash’s shoulder no matter how much he squirms. “Just wait, th
is isn’t the good part. Look at Crust in the back, with the green hair. Wait for it…”

  Crust doubles over as pinkish vomit spews from his face. The balloon slaps to the ground and everyone stops huffing. He teeters back and forth and falls headfirst into the overflowing garbage can.

  “Boom!” Jake claps his shoulder. The impact ricochets through Ash’s body and rattles his bones. “He was fine, by the way. Might be coming to camp, we’ll see. Anyway, that’s not why I’m showing you. Watch.”

  A few partygoers extend their hands, but Crust pulls himself up without help. Jake pauses the video mid-motion and says, “Look there. Top right corner. You see that?”

  Ash leans forward to squint at the screen. “What am I lookin’ for?”

  “That shadow? Looks exactly like a person, right?”

  “Uh, I don’t see no shadow.”

  “Keep looking,” Jake says. “Upper right corner. That’s its shoulder on the air vent.”

  Ash squints. What he sees looks just like a regular shadow, but he says, “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Right?” Jake repeats. “Nobody believes me, but these things follow me everywhere. Used to get bad sleep paralysis and I’d see them standing at the end of my bed, but now they’re everywhere.”

  Ash blinks. “Uh, I think—”

  “It’s so hard to catch them on camera, and I film the house all the time.” Jake releases him to wave his hands around like he’s conducting an invisible orchestra. “I only have a few clips where you can make them out, and that isn’t even their true form because they exist in multiple dimensions above our dimension. I’ll show you the other one where—”

  “I knew it!” A smile spreads across Ash’s face, even though this isn’t a smiling matter. Finally, something he understands. “I learned about this in Bible study.”

  “It’s not like that, dude. They actually give good advice.”

  “The Bible don’t say nothing about little people with red horns. They’re entities, like you said. And whatever you do, don’t listen to them because it’s their whole job to get you in trouble.”

  Jake squeezes his hands between his thighs and shuts up for a few glorious seconds. Maybe he’s not a lost cause. “You’re religious, huh?”

  “Catholic.”

  “Huh. I mean, that’s cool, maybe that’s why you can see them. I keep telling people, but it’s like they don’t even want to look.”

  Ash glances again to the blob of shadow. The leather couch squeaks as he shifts in his seat. “Hey,” he says, “could we watch somethin’ else? Do you have cable?”

  “Yeah, but the FBI intercepts the signal to my house so I don’t watch it much. I have some videos of the party I threw last Friday, though. It was fucking wild, we made a two-story bong and there were like a hundred people here and—”

  Ash swirls the last drops of water around his solo cup while Jake rambles. It wasn’t rinsed very well, and he suspects the liquid is mostly beer residue. The cut on his finger is gone.

  “—my guy Lucas, he sells for me sometimes, he got his hands on some powdered ketamine which is super hard to find in the States, and Mocha tried it for the first time and she—actually, just watch.”

  He pulls up another clip, and Ash settles in for the long haul. Not like it matters. As long as Jake doesn’t hug him again, he doesn’t care what they do to kill time. It won’t matter when he’s dead.

  “Here,” Jake says. “Watch. I’ll skip to the good part.”

  Chapter 3

  Ivan dumps him in the bathtub with none of the care he's been previously afforded. Chris lands hard on one knee and one stump.

  He’s going to drown. Ivan is going to finish what he started.

  As always, he tends to his own needs first. His movements are elegant but abrupt as he washes his hands and face, towels himself off, and slips out of his muddy pajamas and into his monogrammed robe. It's a status symbol which is not lost on Chris. He should be used to this by now—being nude while Ivan is clothed, his human rights taking a backseat to Ivan's comfort—but he's grown accustomed to being treated as an equal, and he trembles with repressed rage.

  Ivan steps away from the sink. Without a word, he yanks the retractable shower head from its post and pulls the trigger. It's so cold that he can't keep his mouth shut, and for his trouble, Ivan aims the next one at his face. He can't catch his breath. He gasps, coughs; water burns his sinuses and it's all he can do to fend off a panic attack. Remember that this cannot kill you.

  He doesn't move when Ivan shuts off the water. He doesn't even move when Ivan leaves the room. He waits. If Ivan never came back, Chris would die of exposure before getting out of this tub autonomously.

  But he comes back, holding a terrycloth bathrobe and a hardshell carrying case. “Step out of the tub,” he says.

  Ivan bears most of his weight, helps him up, and slips the bathrobe over his shoulders. He doesn't tie it in the front. Neither does Chris, though this is more humiliating than nudity. He manhandles Chris onto the long marble counter. His grip is shockingly strong; his hands are soft like kid gloves.

  “What’s in the box?”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions,” Ivan says. “Turn around.”

  He turns toward the wall and squeezes his eyes shut. He’s good at this, now; his fight-or-flight response doesn’t kick in until the pain hits. When he crawled out the window of this decadent bathroom, he wasn’t afraid. Empty, perhaps, aching like a sprained ankle, but not afraid. Not until he realized what he’d done.

  Mechanical buzzing fills the air. A circular saw flashes through his mind. It bites into his neck and spills blood and clear fluid down the furrow of his shoulder blades. It severs his spinal cord in less than three seconds. That would be a kindness.

  He breathes from his diaphragm and conjures the taste of blood. He embraces the familiar warmth of certain agony. He says, “Ivan—”

  And Ivan touches the clippers to his neck.

  He feeds Christopher’s wild hair through his palm and shaves up to some invisible marker: quick, precise little strokes that set his skin tingling and still every twitch. Blond clumps slip down his shoulder. He tries to turn his head, but Ivan guides him back to the wall.

  “You looked like a savage, blundering through my garden like that.” The clippers round his ear, eliciting a shiver which trickles downward and settles in the bowl of his pelvis. “We’ll venture out in public soon, and I want you to be well groomed. I was waiting for you to bring it up yourself.” Around the other ear. Deft. Humming, both Ivan and the clippers. “I suppose that isn’t going to happen.”

  A few questions drift through his awareness, but all of them are stupid, so he bites his lip and stares at the gelatinous smears of dark color on the backs of his eyelids.

  Ivan spins him around far too early. He still has plenty of hair on top. They only shaved the sides and back. He blinks down at Ivan and sees—

  Christophé.

  The name flashes through his head unbidden, big red letters on a canvass of white-hot shame. He doesn't immediately recognize himself in the mirror.

  With this dramatic undercut, he’s the spitting image of Christophé, before Chris fucked a hole through his visual cortex. Though this can’t be the worst he’s ever looked, it’s bad: dark circles ring his puffy eyes; stubble lines the sunken hollows of his cheeks. Without thinking, he drags a hand across the bare portion of his scalp. Ivan snatches it away.

  “Don’t touch.”

  He folds his hands in his lap.

  “Thank you. That looks much tidier, don't you think?”

  He squeezes his thighs together, suddenly aware of the bitter chill. He chews on another stupid question.

  Then Ivan grips his waist, and here it is. This must be the real event. It’s clever. It’s so Ivan, lulling him into a false sense of security with the haircut, as if that could possibly be the only indignity in store for him tonight. It was just the warm up. Obviously. He loops his arms around Ivan’s neck. His b
reathing is shallow, his heart racing.

  “Stand,” Ivan says, and Christopher’s only leg is immediately beneath him. He grips the counter and teeters on another awful precipice as Ivan stoops behind the clawfoot tub. Knives. Needles. He could have an entire field surgery kit stashed back there, for all Chris knows, and this—the precipice—occurs in the single, useless second it takes for him to reach behind the tub. A mere second of heady terror, and then the chasm snaps shut.

  Ivan sets his rubber foot upright in the bath and turns on the tap. Black mud swirls down the drain. The charge seeps out of every electric cell in his body. Ivan kneels at his foot and feeds the stump into its custom-molded cup, and Chris looks down at him, at the angular jut of his cheek, at his backswept hair slowly brightening from chestnut to copper as it dries, and he says, “Ivan, why?”

  “I could ask you the same. Why?” He buckles the suede strap over Christopher's knee and rises, straightening the neck of his robe, though it was never crooked. “Why now, of every opportunity?”

  Chris averts his gaze.

  “You’re alone here nearly every day, and yet you choose tonight to make your escape?”

  “I panicked.”

  “You panicked,” Ivan repeats, shaking his head. “We were only talking.”

  A series of right footprints linger in the beige bath mat. He watches the fibers slowly expand.

  They were lying naked in bed, only talking, as they have every night for the past three months. Ivan had stacked his pillows three-high and smeared his hands and feet with espresso-infused cocoa butter. Christopher’s mouth tasted like toothpaste. They were talking about Ivan’s research.

  They were talking about his graduate assistant, Emilia, who is preparing to visit her dying grandfather in Spain. Christopher was flexing his toes to feel the scar tissue pull his soles tight when Ivan asked, off the record: might he take her place? Just for a week?

  There is no way to adequately describe the feeling that crumpled him up like a head-on collision. There is no way to make Ivan understand. There is only this watery reflection: