The door blew open and hovered, almost closing before flying open again, buffeted by winds, a tropical electrical storm. Rick Speer stood in his housecoat in the hall, not knowing if the lightning flashes were in the world or in his head. Who had opened the door, and why?
His mind flickered with senility, trying to find a signal among the static, and when he found a channel, it was, “I am in my apartment, and the world is gay.” He shut the door and checked his phone—an act that didn’t ground him or restore his vital signs so much as plug him back into the bright blue glow of Sponsored Content and status updates high-beaming the fetal ball of his cognition, a symbiosis close to what it meant to be alive in the current year.
“Where are you?” Telia had texted at 7:49 a.m.
“This is the last time,” she’d written at 11:02 p.m. “I hope you’re having an amazing night wherever you are! Clearly, what you are doing is so much more important than me!”
The little twister forming on the sea of Rick’s moral sense did not have a witness in the plaque of his consciousness, and so it died. He’d learned to leverage these low points in his relationship with Telia in order to accent the peaks, rather than chasing the dodo of a “happy, sunny relationship” or whatever the hell they talked about in the Russian novels he fell asleep reading. Mostly, he did what he wanted, seeing girls from the Internet behind Telia’s back and then, once the winds got too rough, showering her with sweet texts and attention and facing down her threats till one night she was lying under him, parting her rusty locks once again and telling him she loved him, at which point they’d reached the next phase of their sunny relations, framed by a knowledge of trauma and a history of collaborative overcoming.
His mind was dripping like the AC he’d fiddled with at Bela’s. He felt like his mental searchlight was unable to devour anything. There was a reason you didn’t take MDMA if you were somebody. Besides promoting extremely gay thoughts last night—lending answers to life’s impasses that were no more realpolitik than Bambi gallivanting through the meadows—it’d tattooed his grey matter, lasering his short-term memory like hairs in a Groupon session.
Rick Speer lay in bed, feeling dozens of feet below the floor, below the planks, in the cold earth. He picked up his phone again. He needed a VPN like Bela needed an IUD. It was only the morning, or the early afternoon, but already he felt like his phone was a ghost limb, like he would need to scull through the day on little boosts of notification dopamine.
He had bruises on his neck and didn’t know if Bela wanted to talk to him or if he wanted to talk to her. Last night, when the Pomeranian pulled the Glock out and stuck it in his mouth, Rick had promised he wouldn’t talk to the police about what he and Bela’d seen. It was all gauzy and maximally fucked up, fat deposits transubstantiating in water, all these coiled insides of Bela and her family, Bela and the party, Bela and the Pomeranian, Bela and Telia. He did not know where he stood with her, and a larger part—or at least his id—didn’t care. But he felt in the not caring the footprint of serotonin leeches.
His Lake Shore apartment was a convection oven tickled by Freon; he was empty. He could not achieve death by jumping out the window; maybe a broken ankle. He said to himself, I’m bleeding…, a mantra he’d whisper when he looked out at the void, which he was old enough to know not to plumb, for it led either to the emergency room or a hooker’s perfumed embrace. (He couldn’t think of a situation—funerals, his aunt’s cystic fibrosis diagnosis—that wasn’t overshadowed by a hologram of his dick, by the impulse-opening of an Incognito tab with Sugar Babies and Craigslist, or an 18-year-old Moldovan on a webcam.)
This is my struggle, he’d say to his four real-life friends, not knowing what was worse—the shockwaves through his life of having no self-control (especially as a half-German!), or the hypocrisy of editing a men’s webzine that ran three articles a day excoriating “degeneracy” and sexual licentiousness.
He went to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water, then another.
The water could not breed stability. His ruminations were a spiral staircase to a resinous dungeon with candlelight flickering over sleep-sapping repetitions. He scanned his faculties: he was a bit hungry. He felt no direct sexual urge; his testes were inert. His blepharitis was overshadowed by brain damage. His heartbeat was surprisingly light, and he did not feel as groggy as expected. He got distracted taking his pulse after five beats. The real question was the woman question, the question that kept on hatching new versions of itself. He edited a file on his phone:
Telia – Bad fashion – 115 IQ – 42-28-38 – Dutch, Scottish (Beaker) – Mid Beauty – High Economic Usefulness/Agency – Maybe Child rearing – BAD conversation – High Neediness, Blah sex – Obama, Kanye West, accounting, Python, C++
Bela – Good fashion – 107 IQ – 37-26-36 – Slavic / Siberian, Yakut (high Neanderthal, high EHG) – High Beauty – Low economic Usefulness – Child rearing yes – Neediness? – Sex? – Party, drugs, music, dancing, Japanese
Rick wanted to start a family in order to create a productive prison for himself; he wanted to send sons out into the world to fight the rising tide of high-time-preference degeneracy. (If all the last men became remedial teachers in a critical studies class headmastered by the Zuckerberg dynasty, why not commit seppuku now?) He’d given Telia a “pre-engagement” opal ring, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to commingle with her genetic matter and risk the passing on of her love of Beyoncé, notwithstanding her Mensa brain (he rated her IQ lower than what Mensa had, which rated it 133), as well as the manifold advantages of her being a Woman in Tech.
He’d never had sex with Bela, he thought, collapsing on his bed, and therefore didn’t know her, but having a SeekingArrangement profile painted a black mark on her forehead (he was aware of his double standard; he knew he deserved to be thrown out of a helicopter).
As he lay back and stretched, he started feeling more mentally hygienic, as if someone had unscrewed his brain casing, vacuumed the dust, and streamlined the wiring. But when he nodded off and his brain entered pools of false-alarm dreams (more just ephemeral flittings of the dance floor) till he really was sleeping—doing breaststroke in a stone pool overlooking an orchid-lined fjord and shooting his arms out and scissoring his legs froglike—he sensed a karmic shadow darting across the pool floor, or was it his own? As he summersaulted into the wall and kicked out, an infant hand gripped his ankle. He stopped kicking. He could not see anything in the pool but sunflecks on the surface. He tried twisting his head back, but the hand adjusted its grip and he spun in circles. He used the other foot and kicked at the hand, hitting a small torso. He kicked at it again and torpedoed forward in a frenzy, squeezing the kid until the hand pulled him underwater, and he fought to resurface, drawing air, but the hand dragged him to the bottom of the pool and he cracked his hand on the concrete, chugging water, opening his eyes underwater and seeing the child, a beautiful burgher boy in Alpine Swiss suspenders killing him.
He woke to the sound of crashing glass as his skull went through the bottom of the pool. The crinkling continued as he drew consciousness and touched his head, thankful it wasn’t busted open, thankful he’d achieved a few minutes of brain-defragging REM. He lay panting at the stucco ceiling, more optimistic he was going to recover from MDMA and from all his bruises, even if he was still a few feet in the earth. He went to the bathroom to piss a radioactive stream, and when he went to the fridge to pour a new glass of water he noticed the broken window. A rock shaped like a distended brain sat on a kitchen tile. Rick didn’t know whether he wanted it to be real or a serotonin syndrome glitch. He picked up the rock and it felt evil. He put it on the counter, broomed up the glass beneath the curtain. He turned on the light and the rock glared as though hexed by a Javanese shaman. Who had done this?
BUY BOOK
@alex_beaumais
