Psychostasis Read online

“I’m not ready.”

  Ivan scoffs and draws his robe more tightly around himself. “You've been a student your entire adult life, darling. I think you can handle some light research,” he says. “This isn’t a job, you understand. I am not asking you to return to work.”

  He shrugs. After a moment, when it’s clear he has no defense prepared, Ivan sighs and begins sweeping blond hair off the counter with the edge of his palm.

  “You could have chosen better weather for it, at the very least. Last week—I beat you with the microplane grater, remember? It was twenty-two and cloudless. You would have made it much further."

  "That was a month ago.”

  Ivan stiffens, his palm full of hair, hovering above the toilet. Then he collects himself. Drops it. Flushes. “Ah,” he says simply. “I see."

  Everything is coordinated. Planned. It’s perfect, from the enforced solitude to the climate control—always a little too cold, even through his heavy straitjacket.

  He spends entire days locked to the oak frame of the guest bed, duct tape over the gauze in his healing mouth. He’d die if he vomited, but that’s unlikely since Ivan doesn’t feed him on days like this. Denial and dependence. Food, warmth, intellectual stimulation—all must come from Ivan, his perpetual savior. It’s sickening.

  And it’s working.

  After he’s counted the thirty-two ornate ceiling tiles for the hundredth time, he starts repetitively raising his legs, and then his torso, until he can almost hold a headstand. It’s entertaining for a while, and the next day Ivan locks his ankles to the footboard. He’s counted eight days since he tried to bite off his own tongue. Time is a poor anchor, considering Ivan’s penchant for drugging him stupid.

  Ivan replaces the IV bag in the morning and evening, and aside from that he offers minimal contact. Chris expected showers. Instead he gets a supervised bathroom break every two hours when Ivan is home, an external catheter when he isn’t, and eight days to wallow in his own filth. If he can smell himself, sweat and fear and boredom, he can’t imagine how bad it must be for Ivan.

  Eight days. On day nine Ivan must be unable to stand the stench, because he runs a nauseatingly hot bath, carries Chris to the study, and ignores him.

  He’s dizzy from the heat, light-headed from the hunger, starved for conversation but unable to follow any train of thought, and Ivan is just sitting there. He crouches naked by the bookshelf. He doesn’t know what to do, so he listens to his lizard brain—the part of him that regulates necessities such as pulse and breath—and rests his head on Ivan’s knee.

  Ivan’s hand settles on the nape of his neck. It’s so good to be touched. He loses himself for ten or fifteen minutes and has no desire to find himself again.

  Then Ivan reels back and slaps him across the face. Chris falls onto his heels, and a swift kick to the sternum sends him sprawling backward. Ivan is on him: pinning him, grinding against his leg, smelling him most of all, and Chris can only lie there and accept what he’s given. It’s good. It’s better than being alone, even when Ivan brings a knee down on his gut and he chokes on his own bile. Even when Ivan flips him over and doesn’t fuck him, slipping his cock instead into the pronounced gap between Christopher’s thighs, biting his shoulder and whispering:

  “You need me more than you need to breathe.”

  Chris wakes with his strings cut, in Florence, and the holy becomes mundane. He kicks away the twisted, soiled sheets with his good leg and gives himself a chance to cool down while his pounding heart returns to baseline. The image stains him like methylene blue. It brings every nerve into sharp focus. He peels the sticky briefs off his cock and gives himself a few experimental strokes, but the rapture vanished with the dream, and now it just feels sad.

  “Ivan!” He jams his ugly, misshapen stump into the prosthetic. If Ivan were home, he’d reprimand him for shouting. Silence means it’s a weekday. It’s every identical weekday since his arrival: he will study Italian and lounge around the villa in a complacent stupor, waiting for Ivan to return with his nightly package of twine and butcher’s paper. It’s been three months of eel sashimi, ostrich burgers, caviar.

  And everything tastes the same.

  Chapter 4

  Jake bounces around, sort of cleaning and sort of wrecking the place more. Halfway through, he gets engrossed in Ash’s bowl cut and starts babbling about how he, Jacob Caruso, needs to cut it all off. Ash shrugs and tells him to do whatever. He runs upstairs for scissors and returns with a dead, half-stuffed rabbit.

  “I wish I had a hobby,” Ash says, watching him sew the poor thing shut.

  “Taxidermy sells for a lot of money. I’ll be good enough to open a shop soon.”

  “I was fixing to apply for jobs, but they can’t take no applications without an address.”

  “You should start a business,” Jake says. “Drop shipping, fake Gucci bags. Doesn’t matter what, the money’s out there.”

  Ash eyes him wearily. Last month, he went to the grocery store exactly once and spent sixteen dollars—but yeah, he should start a business. He rolls over to face the couch cushions and says, “I guess you would know.”

  “What was that?”

  “I said I guess you’d know, since you’re a businessman an’ everything.”

  “I always knew I was going to do something important,” Jake says. “Something huge, I mean, massive. I think it’s you. I’ve been seeing signs everywhere.”

  His whip stitch is sloppy. The rabbit is shaping into a sort of white tube with a face.

  “When I saw your post, I knew I was meant to contact you. It’s this incredible certainty, the way you know which way is up, or how many fingers you have. Actually, it’s not like that at all, I can’t even describe it. Like the whole universe and my whole life is one big neon sign pointing in your direction.”

  Ash grunts.

  “And before I met you, I would hear your name everywhere. We even have this thing when we’re smoking and the joint is almost dead, we’ll ask, you wanna kill the ash? And it’s always me who kills it.”

  “That’s…” He doesn’t know what that is. It’s barely a coincidence. Jake just smokes a lot and doesn’t care how nasty and burnt it is.

  “Did you notice that we kept emailing each other at exactly eleven minutes past the hour? And you first posted in the forum at 11:11pm? The other day I was walking to campus and I saw this ad on a bus, and I’ve never seen it before or since. It said, prepare yourself: you’ve found a treasure. I don’t even know what it was advertising, it was just the slogan in huge text, I mean, that’s weird, right?”

  “What you’re talking about is basically witchcraft,” Ash says. “Don’t mess with that stuff. Revelations 21:8.”

  Jake drags a hand down his face. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Damnation ain’t no joke.”

  “They really did a number on you at that school, huh?”

  “You believe in shadow people.”

  “But I’ve seen shadow people. Did Jesus Christ personally descend from heaven and tell you to kill yourself?”

  Ash stands abruptly. “I’m not killing myself. Suicide is a sin, Jake. Dying ain’t.” He stomps up the stairs, and Jake is left with his jaw swinging.

  Crushing pills with a busted-up student ID, burning his nostril and plugging the nose bleed. The first hit is good, the second is better, and the third has him half-hard and craving a cigarette. No way in hell is he going outside alone. He’ll smoke in the house. He lights up and hunches over his MacBook, which was supposed to be for work, but it’s been nine months since he walked off the job with the computer under his arm, so maybe the firm is too bloated to notice. If only they could see him now.

  He pulls up crime scene photos and watches, awestruck, as the skin on the still image warps and peels. The Butcher only burned one of his, but Jake isn’t a copycat; he’s inspired. Fire calls to mind witch trials and biblical sacrifices, all spectacular enough to permanently alter the course of his witnesses’ lives, to help th
em understand the unity of light-dark, of sex-death and being-unbeing. That’s the point—to facilitate a transformation. Jake isn’t a narcissist; he knows this is far bigger than he is. Then again, a burnt corpse would be hard to preserve.

  He won’t discount fire, but he’ll keep looking. Jake knows they aren’t right about everything; he’s read trip reports and he’s not an idiot. They’re tricksters. For a while, they even told him to stop killing things, but that was just a test. They changed their tune once they sensed his perseverance.

  They have knowledge to impart but you have to wade through it, work for it, read between the lines. He’s found glimmers of truth in his scrawled journals of automatic writing, in dark-sky early morning contemplation and the space between bumps. It’s well-informed guesswork, but he knows one thing for certain: he’s on the Path. He has the power to move worlds as long as he’s paying attention.

  Laughter splits the air. Jake’s body goes rigid. The cigarette falls from his mouth and onto the carpet; he stomps out the splinter of white flame and whips his head around the room.

  “Who’s there?”

  Nobody answers, of course. Only the cameras are watching.

  He glances back to the image and cautiously invokes the stench of gasoline, searing flesh. Ash is writhing on the ground but he can’t extinguish himself. His brain is boiling. His eyeballs and fingernails are melting like campfire marshmallows, marbled blistered black flesh on flesh on broken bones. Jake bites his lip until it bleeds, and all the lights in the house switch off.

  Jesus Christ.

  “Hello?”

  The lights flip on again. Only a surge; it’s been known to happen, especially on game nights. Drunk people crash their cars into electrical boxes. Squirrels chew through power lines.

  He wipes his brow with a stray fast food wrapper and slaps it onto the wall, where it sticks. Nobody’s here.

  Nobody’s passed out on the floor, or smoking on the patio, or fucking in the guest room. The party is over. He hollers, “Show yourself, fuckass!”

  The corner flickers again. The outline of a man, blacker than ink and just as fluid, drips down the wall for an instant before it’s absorbed by the trash-strewn carpet.

  “I’m not doing this tonight. If you’ve got something to tell me, just tell me and leave.”

  He scans the room. Nothing moves save the slow drift of the ceiling fan. Where is that breeze coming from?

  “Assholes,” he mutters, pointing an accusatory finger at the corner. “This is my house and I’ve got you on tape.”

  Pot is the only thing that keeps them away—they hate the smell—so he takes a full nug and stuffs it in the bong with his thumb, screws his eyes shut, and smokes it down in one hit. Then he coughs his lungs out. They’re laughing at him, as usual.

  “Fuck you.”

  Despite the bravado, he tucks the throw blanket around his neck before going upstairs. He saw a TV documentary as a kid where aliens stuck a needle in some woman’s neck while she was sleeping. Now he sleeps with a blanket or a shirt protecting him, just in case. It doesn’t help, but he does it anyway. The only things that help are company and blunts smoked down to ash.

  Ash moves the ceiling fan, exhales the breeze. His thin chest rises and falls and rises and falls from grace, wraithlike wrists in a perfect X across his chest. Jake slips through the cracks in the comforter, takes comfort in the dull crackling life-aura seeping from Ash’s sleeping pores. Steady, now. Think straight.

  When his eyes are open, the shadows drip and dance through the room’s crevices. When they’re shut, the whispers start. They’re background noise at first, but grow louder the longer he tries to ignore them:

  He’s afraid. Poor thing.

  He asked for this. He wanted the meaning of life. He wasn’t happy when we told him to make his own meaning, was he?

  Jake shifts a little closer and wraps a careful arm around Ash’s waist.

  Our little messiah. He’ll deliver salvation. He’ll deliver justice.

  He seals his lips and screams internally: STOP TALKING.

  An instant later, the light has changed and Ash is moving.

  Did he sleep? He must have slept, or at least dissociated for several hours. He stiffens and disentangles himself from Ash’s sweaty limbs.

  Pink stripes of sunlight fall across the comforter. His own churning has stilled; the street is still quiet. This room is mostly bed, so it dampens sound—he only hears the rustle of sheets and Ash’s soft voice.

  “…Jake?”

  “Hey. Vomit in the guest room.”

  “Oh, um. Crap.” Ash scrambles out of bed like the sheets are on fire. He doesn’t need to worry about that, though. Fire doesn’t feel right.

  Ash tugs on a shirt and says, “I’ve gotta, I’m sorry. I need, um. Yeah.” And he leaves. Jake sinks into the mattress.

  Nobody wants to be close to him. His friends don’t touch him unless they’re deliriously drunk, and he’s only popular when he’s providing.

  No use wallowing in it, though. There are preparations to be made: if he wants anybody to show up to his ceremony, he needs to provide, and that’s the reality of the situation whether he likes it or not.

  He checks his burnmail inbox on the off chance there’s an update on his latest shipment. Nothing, which means he’ll have to pick up in person. He shoots Gavin a quick text asking if he can drop by and then heads to the kitchen, but before he presses the button to microwave his frozen waffles, his eyes drift to the scraps of white powder on his cutting board.

  He could have a little bump. Most people drink coffee every morning, and nobody complains about that. It’s been months since he’s seen Gavin and he doesn’t want to look like a tweaker, but he can’t fall asleep at the wheel, either.

  He sniffs a tiny bump, sticks the frozen waffle in his mouth, and leaves the kitchen with balled, trembling fists. That’s plenty. Get in the car.

  Gavin lives fifteen minutes north of campus. As Jake drives, paint peels off the neat row houses and the older, Victorian-style remnants begin to rot. If there’s a dividing line between the safe, affluent area surrounding the university and the no man’s land to the north, it’s probably the DMV: itself a kind of limbo for the damned.

  His dealer has the nicest house on shit row, meaning the doorbell works. Jake waits with his hands in his pockets, shifting from foot to foot. Twenty feet to his left, someone’s baby shrieks through an open window. He pulls out his phone and texts: I’m here.

  Everybody is supposed to text first. Gavin has mentioned more than once that he’s in the market for a “big, beefy dog” to sick on anyone who doesn’t get the memo, and that’s the reason Jake hasn’t expanded beyond selling prescription speed to med students, even though there’s an obscene amount of money to be made elsewhere. He doesn’t need a dog. Nobody wants to kill him.

  The door swings open. “Caruso.”

  “Hey, long time no see.”

  Gavin has upgraded his flat screen since he was last here. He has a new scalp tattoo—the word “Cam” with two dates, two years apart. Cam as in camera? Two years of video and photographs to re-examine?

  No. Not a message, not about Jake. Stay focused.

  “What can I do for you?” Gavin asks.

  “Uh, how much Oxy do you have on hand?”

  After five years in the game, Jake still doesn’t know how to do this. The darknet was a godsend—it’s helped him avoid being in the same room with Gavin and his type—but it’s not an option right now. This is an emergency.

  Gavin laughs and shakes his head. “Man, you’ve been off for a while. I stopped selling pills two months ago. Nobody wants ‘em. Not strong enough now that this Fent shit is going around.”

  “Fent? Since when?”

  “Some new game in town, importing this shit from China—they’re dangerous, man. You watch yourself.”

  Jake shrugs. “I’m not in it,” he says. “Personal use only.”

  “Well, you don’t have to w
orry about my shit. No Fent, no baby laxatives, nothing. One-fifty a gram.”

  A gram. That’s heroin, right? He’s pretty sure he’s not allowed to ask.

  “Can I get a half?”

  Ten. Buy ten.

  “Sure thing,” Gavin says. “That all? Coke, xans, whatever?”

  “Uh, let’s do a gram of coke, too. And an ounce if you’ve got it.”

  “Always got it.” He ducks into the next room to grab his drugs and shouts, “Hey man, you need a gun for anything? I’m doing guns now.”

  Jake grimaces. His entire operation is built to avoid buying a gun. He got nervous around his father’s hunting rifles.

  But then Gavin hands him his drugs and adds, “Shit’s fucked out there—I mean, gang banging, murder, organ trafficking—you name it. Even caught word of some huge government thing, but that’s probably crackhead bullshit.” He shrugs. “Anyway, I’ve got a Glock 26 for three hundred, if you want it. That’s cheap.”

  No thanks, he’ll say. I don’t need it. But words percolate in the pressure cooker of his chest and when he opens his mouth, they spray everywhere. “What the hell, you can’t be too careful.”

  “You got that right.” Gavin disappears into the back room again and returns with the pistol. It’s heavy and solid in Jake’s palm. He says, “Check the magazine before you buy bullets. Might still be some in there.”

  Perfect, they cackle. He won’t regret it.

  So Gavin gets his money, Jake gets his Glock, and then he’s in the car, driving the speed limit and watching the houses rot in reverse. Only poor people feel buyers’ remorse. And besides, Gavin wouldn’t lie to him.

  The gun was a good idea. Heroin is fine. Rose and Mocha will come as long as he has something. When the curtain is drawn and the lights go down, they’ll be watching. They’ll see the intricate web of strings which gives marionettes motion, and they’ll finally give a shit about what Jake has to say. He repeats that to himself, but he can’t make himself believe it.

  The crash is creeping up on him. He’d drive faster if he could, but he can’t get stopped with a fucking Glock in his glove compartment. Why the hell did he give in so easily?