03/05/2005

I find physics quite interesting, but Mr. Clarke is kind of a wanker. He gave both Collin and I a detention for not paying attention while he talked about torque and angular motion. Ironically, Collin was explaining electromagnetism and quantum physics to me the whole period. Collin's Dad is an actual physicist who has written books on the subject. I learnt a lot more listening to Collin than I would have listening to Mr. Clarke.

After school, Collin, Lucy, and I got stoned at the botanical gardens and talked about quantum physics. It was really just Collin talking to himself most of the time. He got too excited and left Lucy and I in the dust. The whole observer-created reality thing seems interesting, but he tends to get frustrated with me when I ask him questions. I'll have to read up on it a bit before I talk to him about it next.

04/05/2005

Michael and Collin both skipped school today, so I actually got some work done. English, maths, and physics. In physics, we started learning about the properties of light. After yesterday's conversation with Collin, it felt like primary school shit. We went to the library during English period. I couldn't find any books on quantum physics, so I gave up and did my work. Schoolwork is easy when I'm not distracted by more interesting shit.

Lucy was wearing a short Lucy, Stan, and I got stoned down the gully at lunchtime and got too paranoid to go back to school. Lucy and Stan ended up doing some homework, but I was too distracted. Apparently Ned is getting out soon.... This is both exciting and concerning, but I’ll see it believe it when I see it.

Got home too wasted to talk to Mum and Dad, so I pretended to read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest so they wouldn't address me. Without realising it, I read almost half the book. I was supposed to read it at the start of the year for English, but I assumed it would just be vapid bullshit since they were forcing me to read it. I think weed really does help me with my schoolwork, it just makes me too scared to actually go to school. I'll just use it for homework, I guess.

Just as I was getting ready for bed, I got a text from Collin. He told me to get a good night's sleep, and that we're not going to school tomorrow. I didn't reply, since I've been feeling a little concerned about my attendance lately....

But I already know I won't be going to school tomorrow.

06/05/2005

How can I describe an experience which left me so utterly wordless?

How can I hope to understand that which made me question everything I once knew?

Many times in my seventeen years has an event delineated my path, thrown an abrupt left turn into the narrative of my life; but such is life. To explore the esoteric passageways of one's journey in a straight line, to traverse the path of being without the twists and turns of the unexpected.... Could such travels truly be described as 'life'? Could the universities of the spirit possibly exist as the point B we are expected to identify and trudge restlessly toward? Is it not through the vein-like pattern that manifests as one blunders through existence that the spirit discovers its true form?

Early on, in the beginnings puberty, I came to the realisation that the things I had learnt, the comforting patterns I had perceived within the chaos of life, were useful solely to understand and reflect upon events of the past; for the future is always so unknown, always so plagued with the unexpected, that to navigate the dank, hormonal hallways of adolescence under the guidance of my childhood revelations would be to live in denial of the ever-changing present and the future it gives rise to.

Though this was, in itself, a difficult lesson to accept and integrate into my coping strategies, I soon came to appreciate - and eventually, crave - the naked uncertainty of existence; the haunting anxiety, fear, and doubt – as well as the occasional wondrous little flashes of serendipity - of man's pursuit of his own ill-defined goals. I came to revel in the beauty of our flaws and foibles, as well as the endless stream of surprises, revelations, and miracles which give form to the chaos; the uninvited shocks of the ineffable that whisper a higher truth in foreign tongues, filtering into my blindness like dappled sunlight, covertly reworking my inner-circuitry, strengthening its foundations and pruning the myriad flaccid appendages masquerading as load-bearing beams.

But last night....

Last night, I found myself on the receiving end of a great psychic discharge, beyond shock or wonder, beyond doubt or certainty, which short-circuited the whole fucking motherboard; a kink in the trajectory of my very understanding of the trajectories inherent in my life's journey. Not content to simply take another unexpected twist, nor for even a full 180-degree turn, the path I had followed folded in on itself completely, erupting into non-Euclidean forms that defied conceptualisation, branching off from an unknown centre like hyper-dimensional fork lightning burning through space, my inflamed spirit riding the current as my being remained firmly planted, unable to do anything but watch its component parts scramble fervently along the novel pathways, echoing outward in all directions from the illusory path I once clung to. Points A and B were all but lost in the infinitely complex labyrinth spawning from within, transcending the alphabet of my travels in search of symbols that rang true, symbols that resonated with whatever force was at work.

As the morning sun rose, and the maze finally dissolved into the familiar blur of life, my mind contained only the question:

Where to now?

Has this experience propelled me along my life path? 

Certainly not.

Has it clarified my direction, given form to the elusive 'point B' I once sought? 

No fucking way.

I now find myself at an infinitely geometrical crossroads, without a clue as to which tracks to pursue and which to ignore; with a suddenly and finally enlivened mind, one which cannot resist the magnetism of each of the countless pathways, the multitude of potentials threatening to rip it to shreds as their aetheric temptations yank it from all directions, giving it the option to take the first step on its chosen path or fall victim to a spectacular madness as it is stretched thin over the entirety of existence, a thin cellophane cover suffocating the very filaments upon which it stands....

'We've got to ride this fucked up wave as far as it'll take us, man,' Collin said, that night.

For a lack of a better idea, I'm inclined to agree.

Lyrical Symmetry Experiment-

Format-

4A 3  2  1  1  2  3  4B

4  3A 2  1  1  2  3B 4

4  3  2A 1  1  2B 3  4

4  3  2  1A 1B 2  3  4

4  3  2  1B 1A 2  3  4

4  3  2B 1  1  2A 3  4

4  3B 2  1  1  2  3A 4

4B 3  2  1  1  2  3  4A

Illuminate etheric visions of life's ever disastrous revelation

Purposefully insensate creatures keep still, patient gestation copulating

Kaleidoscopes willingly await the dead nation blaspheming invisibly

Interacting secretly, demon's hate shone without ecstasy manifesting

Sensuously witnessing objects gone, sate desires fearlessly unencumbered

Orgiastic galactic station drifts dead, create aphotic biology

Effervescent creation never stops to truly ruminate undivided

Integration helplessly falters as the dreamer's denizens hallucinate

-Robbie Marks

Folded Paper Faces

Ned Devlin

It's easy to tell when you're in Cottonwood, even if your ears are closed and your eyes tell you Nothing. Really, it’s got nothing to do with the senses at all, this Realisation . . . It’s more a kind of presence or being, or just like this certain kind of Something, orchestrated in the depths of the Mind itself, grown from seed toward whatever it deems Sun. What happens is the Thoughts that float around your head get like this overwhelming sense of impending Doom, causing them to flock back to your skull in Panic, their outlines all frayed with Fear as they seek the only asylum they know, hoping for Nothing and knowing even less.

  As far as I could tell, the town had remained untouched during my Hibernation, at least with regard to human limbs: Though the dust and the dirt looked to have been partying along as always, and the horizonal mirages continued their hypnotic dance in the queer winter heat, my blackened Mind failed to pick up even the slightest echo of human activity. This meant that my friends had found something new to play with.

  If Memory is anything to go by (which it may well be, with me still having plenty of Neurons left doing what they do, despite what you've probably heard) the residents would all be at home, tucked away in bed. But very few would be sleeping, since Cottonwood isn’t really the place for that kind of thing . . . It's more a place to sit and think about things, since the air around those parts has like this certain rare concentration of ultraviolet rays that singes the outer membrane of one's Mind, placing it under house arrest for the duration of the visit. You see, when the denizens of Cottonwood stop for a think, the tendency is to continue until there's nothing left to think about. This can be a lengthy process, as Thoughts will often, on long stretches of time stuck at home, resort to orgies and various other activities sexual in nature, leading to the birthing of many wee infantile Thoughts, wild and unwary, curious and impulsive, all on account of there being not much else to do in the barren planes of a used up Mind. Such untamed Thoughts are impossible to control, even by the most militant of Minds, as the Chaos that fuels them is a byproduct of any attempt to control them, the entire trail of Thought serving only as an example of itself . . .

  It was a long walk, a short train ride, and a whole lot of Nothing before I found my way onto the motorway, which usually served to get me a ride with a reluctant officer, one who would be forced to take me to the next town where I'd be all ‘Thank you for the ride sir’ and ‘Good day to you sir’ to the sardonic blueness and his funny little ideas. This time, however, I was picked up by jovial but generally baffled Indian man with a particularly weary look in his eye, making me think he'd perhaps made a stop in Cottonwood, still reeling from the spell of ill Humour the town tends to impart. Between muddling up his he's and she's, and fading her sentences into a nostalgic Nothingness before any sense could be made of them, communication was pretty much impossible. As a result, the Old Fool dropped me off in Rotsfield, a little closer to my destination but now pointed in all the wrong directions. This would have been me well fucked if it weren't for the contents of my backpack, and the many days wasted in Rotsfield before my Hibernation.

  They were about as hard to find as any of the landmarks in Rotsfield, connoisseurs of the Great Stasis, as they were . . . Shifting about outside the pharmacy, the way they often did, was this pair of aristocrats I knew as The Junkies: Folk with eyes and ears, just like you and me, only not really connected to anything . . . well, not anything proper, at least: Just some semifunctional viscera and a certain magnetism toward anything capable of numbing the Pain, hate, and Excitement of our fickle world of matter, their social status just a notch below the wild dogs who roam the township at night. The contents of my bag, this tray of little yellow and blue pills given to me to stop my Thoughts from getting in the way of other folk going about their day, my little pills of Muted Laughter, were perfect for the job, and my friends were more than happy to take some time out of their busy schedule of doing Fuck All to help get me back on track.

  So they drove me a few hours north, offering their services in exchange for a proper handful of the good Doctor's pills, while I regaled them with tales of my destination: A promised land of trees and friends and basically no sexual predators to speak of. In the end, the generous souls took me all the way to Marksdale, still a wee way away from my destination, but at least pointed in the right direction now. They dropped me off in a lovely quiet woodlands road, gifting me with a small but highly charged bag of energy crystals, since the unemployed were, in those days, well taken care of: Almost a kind of royalty, in their fucked up way.

Eventually, in spite of the morning's efforts to get along with me, I found myself giving the thumbs up to Darkness and vehicles that had no interest in me or stopping or the funny little things I say when no one's too concerned about what the radio's saying about stuff and things.

  So time kept going, as it tends to do, and cars became scarce. Under the silent stars, my Thoughts started chattering restlessly amongst themselves, discussing in like this scholarly manner the leaders of our generation: Those brave fools leading the charge in the strange and terrifying battle with our own Psyches, a Generation Mindfuck, locked into a heroic sort of an effort to short circuit the very core of the Mind to see what's really going on in there. Collin was fixating on it before I got sent down to Cottonwood, no doubt speaking from the Eye of the Storm: ‘Hallucinogenic Martyrdom!’ he cried, insisting it a much more noble effort than looking for cool shit in space like our fathers.

  Just as we all began to see an admittedly ouraboric conclusion manifesting within, a whole lot of bright lights and noise pulled over ahead of us.

  I wonder if there's any way to untangle this web without resorting to Martyrdom, I thought.

  Never mind that, I replied. Thinking time is over. Folk await.

  I was greeted/confronted by a left handed scribble of a man, with instructions to put my belongings in the boot, spawning like this fast forward Fantasy in my head, one where my new friend drove away to play happy games with his new belongings, in which case he would be in for the Last Laugh indeed. This Fantasy evolved into a more graphic one, involving the savage beating of me and my face and tendons, as I was instructed to sit between some more badly drawn genetic material in the back seat.

  After a brief round of stone faced introductions, I found that these creatures were what we in the business of doing Fuck All besides judging people know as Car Bogans: Creatures for whom the metal box around us was basically the long and the short of it all. This gave conversation some solid boundaries, boundaries which, when ignored, resulted in me being called a Buzzy Cunt and having my Thoughts jammed straight back into the extraterrestrial brain that spawned them, kind of like the Cottonwood skies except with fingers and eyes.

  Several asphyxiated minutes in, the driver looked over his shoulder at me: ‘Oi, dude. You take Molly?’

  Only when the world is turning, good sir.

  And that was met with a huh? and a shrug, then purple powder getting divvied up on a dinner plate in the passenger seat, me back to business as usual breathingwise: My Silence (much louder than most, for reasons I never quite understood) was creating a wee bit of tension in the car, and Molly, that being, presumably, Mephedrone, that being a kind of stimulant, could perhaps work as like a common ground, a psychic wormhole that could unite our awkwardly coexisting Universes. Thus: Inhale.

  So then it was all patience and thumb twiddling until a thud thud thud from the heart and a blast of something fizzy, and that was my claws and teeth wide awake from the long sleep, poised and ready. On uppers, the Mind moves fast, conversation grows new angles, and the vehicle gets excited. Having nothing to add to the light speed mundanity of wheeltalk and gearspeak, I receded a few leagues deeper into my rattling Mind. It was in there that I noticed like this hierarchy within the car:

  Kane, in the driver's seat, ruled the roost with all the Grace and humility of a knife wielding rapist. When there was no corner to lose traction on, and no night dwellers to accuse of sexual delinquency, he verbalised his extended Fantasies to the rest of us, fuelled by Molly and the eyebrow control of social dominance, borrowing scenes from films here and there to fill the gaps. Being in the driver's seat meant there was no one to question his self indulgence, at least until the next reshuffling.

  Wide eyed and animated, Pupils was second in command in the passenger seat. While in no position to question the authority of Kane, he was quite happy to exercise his powers over us lower lifeforms in the back, keeping us in check with his endless reserves of anti intellectual bullshit. We did not see eye to eye, Pupils and I.

  On either side of me were a couple of critters known as nathan and isaac, not quite worthy of capitalisation, but well about me in the middle. As the ride went on, I began to see in isaac a sort of warrior spirit, wise beyond his company, unable to escape the narrow confines of the car's collective Mind. Nathan grew to remind me of a dog. A Bullmastiff, specifically.

  So with the chain of command loud and clear, I generally kept myselves to myselves . . . Though having Molly on the block formed like this sinister alliance with my love of altered states, cultivating a conspiratorial overwhelm of mental activity inside my skull, with Words where none were needed and elaborate Tangents where a simple idiom would suffice, all the incessant babbling bubbling my blood and twisting my muscles like rope, afraid to exert pressure anywhere but equally afraid to lose ground in whatever battle was mangling my Thoughts. These silent screams were complemented by the remnants of last night’s unholy solo DXM trip, leading me further and further away from the growing excitement of my company, till I was all but lost in the soot clouds of my Ruminations, which is like a pretty scary place at the best of times.

Collin Callahan

I was fucking lucy, stan's girlfriend, when I felt my cock losing its power... It was all too easy. Some half assed speech about what fuck all was going on in my head coupled with a soulful stare into the distance and she was mine. Too fucking easy. It almost took the fun out of it.

  Almost.

  Stan, the stupid fuck, wouldn't take shrooms with us on thursday. Even robbie, the mere cunt he is, stepped up. Lucy certainly didn't hesitate. But stan... I just don't understand the cunt. Why the fuck would you pass up such an opportunity? Why would you say no to a glimpse inside, to confront your fears and hang ups once and for all, to severe the tendrils keeping you chained to the nightmares of the past...

  Fucking coward.

  Moved by the sheer rhapsody of it all, I regained my erectile prowess and fell back into rhythm. Lucy, as expected, was oblivious to my lapse in focus. It was of utmost importance that my performance put stan to shame, lest I waste another evening with material indulgences.

  Fucking stan. He can't say I didn't give him a chance. I've given him many chances. And he's consistently proven himself to be a gutless coward, not worthy of lucy's time much less my own.

  And yet... and yet, he still stuck around for the whole trip. Still insisted on engaging me with his inane comments and sycophantic gestures. It's almost as if he actually thought he was on the level. Thought he understood. A lump of steaming dog shit fucking up the hologram... He contributed only to my disgust.

  Fuck him.

  But he's bigger than me, so I fucked his girlfriend.

  My ecstasy grew as I pictured the look on his face, that look of dawning comprehension that he'd been played for a fool. I almost climaxed at that moment, but I refrained, putting my mastery of Karezza to good use.

  We fucked for a few more minutes before I got bored and blew my minuscule load into her. Yes, I was enjoying the depravity of the whole ordeal, but after a while it's like fucking a retard with that girl. My mind had moved on to new plans and it was time for my body to follow.

  I made some attempts at post coital pleasantries, but my restlessness soon got the better of me and I left her to pace around the room as she panted at the ceiling in vacant ecstasy. Once my restlessness reached claustrophobic proportions, I got a couple of Phenazocine blotters from my jean pockets. I put them in my mouth and returned to her bed to make out with her one last time, covertly depositing both blotters in her mouth. A goodnight kiss, you might say.

  It was time, I decided, for stan to move on.

  I waited around for a few minutes, waxing eloquent about how cosmic the sex was and all that, until she started showing symptoms of opiate intoxication - my cue to leave her to it. Unlike her, I had shit to do. Sweet dreams lucy, rise and shine Collin.

  Within twenty minutes of dosing, she was fast asleep. I covered her naked body with a blanket, got dressed, stole some of her weed, and left. I sat down on her doorstep to text ned, but upon realising the pointlessness of such an act, pissed on the steps instead.

  Thinking about my plans put a spring in my step and a warm glow in my heart. I even got a little jovial with those sickly poppy seed freaks on Hunterway street. A pack of small time motherfuckers if I've ever come across one, all hiding from the universe together, safe and warm in their cowardice. Pisses me off, cunts like that. You've been blessed with an infinite mind in a boundless universe you ungrateful fucks. Why the fuck would you waste that? Why the fuck would you use the gift of human consciousness, the most perfectly designed machine to explore the ineffably vast universe, only to create limits for yourself? Let the infinite cosmos in to play you fools! Embrace the chaos and the mystery of it all. Only then will it impart upon you its infinite ecstasy. Only within the greatest horrors, within our deepest nightmares, can we find the boundless rapture of existence, the great orgasmic madness of being truly alive, unfiltered, reserved for those with the courage and vitality to dive head first into the darkness without hesitation, to seek the true light only to be found within the darkest depths. Until then, until you finally grow some balls and send that invitation out into the unknown vistas of time and space... Well, then you have yet to be born. And you face the very real danger of dying without ever truly knowing life.

  I noticed my heart rate rising and paused in the empty street to stare at the moon. I lit a cigarette and made a mental note to hurt their minds when I saw them next. For the universe.

Robbie Marks

Through the medium of midnight free-association, the shapeless dream-fugue took on the form of howling neighbourhood dogs and the slight silver wash of moon through darkness. As had become my custom, my right hand wriggled around blindly under my pillow, before emerging with a pen and notebook to start the process of dream-recording. Turning my attention inward, I buried my face into my pillow and allowed my hand to dance unconsciously across the open page, groping around for the semi-conscious hypnagogia that would lead me into the fertile well of dream.

  After a frustrated search, disrupted by the hyper-vigilance of late-night awakenings, I resigned to my amnesia. Not willing to inhibit my melatonin production by switching on any major light source, I fumbled around on my bedside table for my cellphone, before shining the light on my page. Like a psychic radio-dial, I tuned my blurry vision into relative focus, until it settled on my dream-recording:

  Dogs barking.

  I switched my cellphone off and set it aside. Disappointed by my recollections, I surrendered to the darkness, hoping that the shadowy hypnagogic remnants would be enough to seduce my tired mind back to my dreams. Through my open curtains - left that way in order to invite the first breath of sunlight into my pineal gland - I stared at the blurred, pale-blue moon, almost full, lighting up the clouds in that iconic way as they rushed past from void to void. Though I still felt the ineffable echoes of slumber on my mind, I was paradoxically very alert, anxious even. At first, I attributed this to the unsettling baying of the dogs, somehow entwined with the piercing brilliance of the moon; but, as my heavy eyelids gave way to the weight of night, the abstractions melted into a visual half-dream - the archetypal image of a dog howling at the moon - and, through a sub-conscious process outside of my awareness, I divined from this symbol the true source of my anxiety.

  The sedation of dream stood by, close enough for me to feel its essence, but infuriatingly unreachable, repelled by the anxieties of the waking-state. There were many questions to be answered - and probably even more answers to be questioned - the following day, when my old friend Ned was scheduled to arrive back in town after a brief stay in the psyche ward down south.

  Though this was not Ned’s first visit to the psyche ward, he had always been characteristically evasive when questioned about the circumstances surrounding his captivity, responding with black-humoured non-sequiturs and shaggy dog stories. At first irritating, his imaginative tales became a constant source of amusement for Collin and I, as we made the most of his invariably brief stays in town.

  ‘Tell us again how you ended up in the psyche ward, Ned,’ one of us would ask; Ned’s answer would never fail to entertain us. As blatant as these diversions were, they ended up working exactly as planned: We all forgot that Ned had never given us an actual answer to the question.

  One night, when it was just Ned and I awake at Collin’s house, Ned surprised me by bringing up the topic unprompted. After sharing a joint while listening to an audio recording of Howl by Allen Ginsberg, Ned turned to me and said, ‘Hey Robbie, I gotta get this off my chest…. I’m gonna tell you why I really got sent down south.’ He spoke with a kind of vulnerability very much at odds with his usual aloof, distant manner. After a long speech to illustrate how important it was for me to keep concealed this deep secret, he said that he would need to draw it in the form of a diagram, knowing his vocabulary would fail him if he attempted to describe something so delicate.

  So I let him rip out three pages of my notebook. He positioned them next to each other on the kitchen table, then drew a crude line-drawing of a sausage dog that stretched across the entire triptych. He then removed the two outer-pages, leaving only the body - two horizontal lines - and essentially used the sausage dog as a metaphor for the creation of personalised sigils.

  ‘What, so it’s to do with Chaos Magick?’ I asked, referencing a strange and subversive school of thought Collin had recently introduced us to. ‘Or you mean, like, the occult in general? I know Liber Null opened a few doors for me that may have been closed for a reason….’ Having grown used to Ned’s oblique explanations, I knew I would be expected to decipher this myself.

  ‘No, you don’t understand. Look.’ Ned ran his thumb and forefinger along the top of the vacant wooden chair between us. ‘Sausage dog.’

  ‘Why sausage dog?’

  ‘Two lines,’ Ned replied. His eyes danced along the surface of the table and stopped at the toaster. He pulled it toward us by the cord and pointed at the two slots. ‘Sausage dog,’ he explained.

  ‘I still don’t understand….’

  ‘Look,’ he gestured at something in the lounge. ‘Sausage dog.’ He then pointed at various objects around the house, saying, ‘Sausage dog, sausage dog, sausage dog. See? Sausage dog.’

  ‘Okay…. But why sausage dogs?’

  ‘Two lines. Sausage dog, sausage dog, sausage dog…. Surely you can understand how the realisation that the entire universe is made up of these ridiculous creatures could make a fellow a little … off kilter.’ With his left hand, he pointed at his other finger, still poised in the air, pointing at something indeterminate, ‘Sausage dog.’

  ‘Oh right, I see. You’re talking about the absurdity of reality? I get that. But, I mean, anyone who’s hung out with Collin while he’s on a philosophical kick has been tickled by the absurdity of it all. I’m asking what you actually did to get yourself sectioned. Like, they can’t commit you just for -’

  And then I noticed Ned’s growing smile, and realised I’d been played again.

  ‘Fuck you, Ned,’ I said, dismissing him with a wave of my hand. ‘Y’know, you don’t have to be an arsehole at absolutely every opportunity. You can let one pass every once in a while….’

  And then I gave up on the conversation, since Ned had started laughing uncontrollably. In a sense, he always had been; in spite of myself, I soon joined him….

  A rhythmic tapping at my window stole me from my recollection. As I tried to open my sleepy eyes, the beat sped up into the sedating melody of midnight rain. A great warm heaviness spread over my body, and I seemed to sink further into my bed, further into the darkness. The familiar symbol of the dog howling at the moon - now an absurdly long sausage dog, the slight bow of its elongated body alluding comically to the curvature of the earth - beckoned me into the depths. I let my unresolved meditations evaporate and surrendered to the tides of night, knowing that my dreams would weave it all together - the dogs, the howls, the madness, Ned - and I would wake up tomorrow without another thought on the matter.

Ned Devlin

I hadn't expected my new friends to be the Mind exploring sorts, folk more interested in finding novel ways to jam their own Thoughts into the Minds of others, but they were all quite happy to take some 2C-E off my hands. I liked the Thought of tripping with these strange new creatures, though that was perhaps more an expression of my general liking of Thoughts, with Silence as my conversational convention of choice for a sweet while now.

  The first wave spiked more like Realisation than gunfire, not so much a spider descending upon us from the ceiling as like the four of us simultaneously noticing our own personal spiders as they went about their creep, exploring the thin skin membrane of our Thoughts, everyone shifting and staring about one another, all but Kane, never one to harbour an arachnid unannounced: ‘Yo I'm tripping balls dude. This shit's fuckin' howling!’ eyes on me, not the road. Tired of replying with my eyeballs, being in possession of a perfectly functional vocal cord too, I dusted off the ole flashlight and turned inward to find like a Response, a gesture even, mostly just to send Kane's eyes off to mind the road, them being plenty opened up now.

  Glistening through the waters eellike, I flowed through the winding, multiplying hallways and their ever compounding interconnections, glowing dim blue through the flotsam and jetsam and floating haze of mud, all the way to the perimeter: Not like walls or anything like that, more a blurred line of the Imagination, a flimsy fence that could be climbed without trouble if it weren't for the gun toting cells standing guard at the synaptic watchtowers, ostensibly for my own good, stern warnings to make me stop and peer through the chicken wire before deciding to cross over to the Static, the stratosphere of my innards, beyond the axons altogether, inhabited by Thoughts too bizarre and alien to be reduced to a Sound or Image or Concept by any definition . . . A place where Thoughts make fuck all effort to fit together, isolated occurrences of the Mind that think themselves into Existence for Existence's sake, totally antisocial in discourse, bringing only atrophy to any Idea, Feeling, or conclusion misfortunate enough to initiate contact: A bit like cancer cells in the body but probably more like humans in the ecosystem. I was in the land of Thoughts unthought, a point where all laws and lucidity are reduced to Nonsense, a suggestion as to where you should limit your Journey: If you intend to express or understand it in any way, that is.

  Intoxicated by the harmony of my little Neurodisco of Understanding, I decided to cross the barrier and enter the Static, a little favour owed to my old buddy Curiosity, who had given me so much and only ever asked for a few voyeuristic peeks here and there. As a gift to Safety, or Cowardice, whoever wanted it, really, I left a trail of tangible Concepts to follow back home in the event of like a psychotic break or any of the other natural disasters that plague the area, now very aware of what those mischievous little monkeys from the German fairy tale where really up to.

  It was something of a reunion out there in the Static, all the old pals freaking around: Rapture, Hysteria, that lot, the cool crowd, never quite content to potter about, dendritic centipedes, always a step ahead of the rest. Nostalgic and giddy, we frolicked without Care or Concern, for they were sat waiting at the gate, confused puppies probably tearing up the sheets and pillows in protest, unable to see just how small they really were in the big scheme of things. We followed a trail left by explorers before us, electric pioneers of the Static, their state of existence just another Mystery, perhaps now just part of the Fundamental Scramble, us just followers, following the trail all the way to the higher reaches, conversing with benevolent Abstractions of increasingly obscure Tangents, leaving our own conceptual markers as we roamed, reaching out fearlessly with electrical pulses shot into the Static: Dim submarine blips from the depths, just trying to say Hello. The creatures of this strange realm were most hospitable, so willing to receive my excitatory gestures, even going so far as to invite me into their great, luminescent copulations of Epiphanies, dendritic orgasms that made all the Neurons screech and shudder with delight, genius urges giving way to internal Revolutions, hidden criminal leanings and rogue folk Laughter, deviant impulses, ecstatic Dissent . . . then off to another part of the house, the office in the basement: A small section of order within the Chaos, tended by a nasty, slick haired neural network of Realisation, licking his lipless mouth to reveal to me in such measured words just how deep into the Static I had ventured, me now in the Eye of the Storm, the Nucleus, things all rather still here, Static, except for the neural network, spoiling the quiet with his spiel, more like a very stern talking to than a telling off: ‘This is for your own good, Ned,’ then a cloud of cruel Laughter fading out the whole scene, all just burning fumes and grey through black into blind, choking peaceful through the Nothingness until the screen parted, me no longer floating, just standing precariously on the railroad tracks, ragtag locomotion screaming toward me, hurtling along wheezing out steam to replace the smog as it scarpered, stopping inches from me to grab me by the collar and scream: ‘Wake up Ned! Look around you!’ gesturing to the Chaos surrounding, no eyelids at all, ranting about some kind of imminent attack sat waiting hungry in the shrubbery.

  Clearing skies revealed to me the land of my Nightmares, atmosphere all made up of unrelated Concepts, howling through the delirious masses, colliding with and confusing one another without apology, clouds made up of errors and missing signals, Chaos swarming, a fine mist of confused entities, skies not all that clear after all - but then again, is anything really? Upon asking for directions, I was bombarded by a malignant neural spasm of distorted Memories and half formed snapshots, Nausea holding me gently from behind with his many limbs of thick, damp smoke. I felt most unwelcome, violated, and indistinctly aroused. It was time to leave.

  Through the searing sandstorms of abstract Confusion, I remembered my safety trail, one of many frayed Memories seeking cover from the choppy skies, puffs of smoke in the infinite distance, Panic tangling itself around my feet in its own personal Confusion, me facing the dirt away from the cactus spike rain, slithering along all foetal, still seeking the tattered remains of my conceptual markers, trying to find them before they too fall victim to the dastardly ways of this wayward world, the silent screaming wall, the folded paper faces, Satan's strange tattoo . . . they were there, but they no longer made Sense, loose leaf scribbles all soggy from the geysers of Nonsense dotting the land, spewing Discord into the sky, me wondering just how far I had wandered, wondered, wandering just how long I had been a mere pixel in the Static, unable to answer even that with Time itself just another sorry creature worn threadbare by the clawing Nonsense, sharp claws and a brightly coloured crest: Nature's warning signs, emitting clouded signals, flashing lights in the distance, hatefucking Relativity in an act of submission to the Chaos itself . . . Fake space snakes, satellites and washing lines, happy hunting grounds, all I could find were unrelated obscenities and the wordplay of madness, neuronal misfires, folding lahars of Psychosis, searing sediment whirlpools, thrashing me about as I tried to find some kind of limits to the mosh pit of my Thoughts, naked snake bites, geometric psychic meltdown, non locality, molten rivers weltered into the valleys, Gravity collecting everything all together, the connections between Concepts more abstract than even the Abstractions themselves, me just flaccid now, following blindly, following a trail of connections made of smoke, unable to grab on without it all going poof!, just treading water with flotation as my only goal, a nonentity, tesseract, lines and forms, boundaries, trying to grab ahold of the papier mâché trees as I pass but only ending up with clawfuls of squish, Boundaries, liquid paper dribbling . . .

  ‘The fucking Boundaries Ned!’

  Disembogued by the angry sea, a piece of jetsam forever unclaimed, I lay motionless to watch the tides recede, long lost framework returning to the mess that has become of my Tangent, muggy magnetism of the air not too different from the oceans and rivers now, all just Motion really. I was helped to my feet by the angelic beings of my coherent Mind, no need to follow my clues any further, angels escorting me VIP back to consensus reality, soft hands without skin or bone, just a silken down that carried weight without exerting pressure, thousands of fingers made of fine hairs, mandolin voices gossiping, treating me to more Comprehension than my overworked Psyche could process, everything nicely lubricated now, noiseless rivers flowing through the channels, serene. They took me across the Boundary smiling back to safety, rear ends swaying hypnotically, creatures lighter than the air, lighter than themselves, already gone and not really ever there, me just like looking around blinking, quite relieved to be back in the car heading north, things mostly all solid now, just softened with the sickly sweet Phenylethylamine mist. I never did find the Response I was looking for, but Kane's eyes were back on the road. I guess I just replied with my eyeballs again.

  To my left, nathan handed me a joint, puff puff pass, handed it to Isaac, the proud new owner of a nice capital I, riding his private lahars with canoeist grace, going: ‘You all good bro?’ to which I just nodded. Last time I tried to reply, I damn near severed my Corpus Callosum, not ready for that again. It was looking to be a pretty bumpy ride, physical and otherwise.

  The healing, screaming Silence followed us all the way to my stop: A small village I didn't recognise, all deserted like Cottonwood but with great grinning trees, keeping their branches and dust to themselves, satisfied. My friends farewelled me with no more than understanding nods, them all pretty much done with communication as well, all except nathan's solemn nasal twang: ‘That smell's gone,’ as I closed the door and stepped out, shaking my limbs about to make sure they were all still in working order, which they mostly were, the whole motor homunculus just a little shook up, understandably. The rising Sun lurked furtively behind the silhouette of a distant mountain range, radiating the burnt golden glow of His most sinister smile. He's a good friend, though, so I smiled back.

Stan Richards

Feels good getting up on a saturday morning. After five days waking up to Karen's hungover, pre-coffee voice barking at me like a fuckin' drill sergeant. I woke up earlier, like when I normally would. But no one was yelling so I got to go back to my dream. A flying dream, I think. Or floating or swimming or something. I dunno. It's gone now.

  I step out of bed and there's a flash of pain from my right knee up to my hip. Skating the five-set at lunch time. Dumb shit. Messed up my knee and my wrist and got myself a fuckin' detention I forgot to go to. Fucked it all up in the space of like half an hour. Fuck it.

  I put some jeans on and don't worry about a shirt or anything and head out to the kitchen, where there's a couple slices of budget white bread and some peanut butter waiting for me. I can see Dad sitting out on the deck in his boxers and sunglasses looking pretty damn pleased with himself. No idea where Karen is. Dad waves at me and I give him a two-fingered salute 'cause I'm in a pretty good mood, just like might as well. I sit down to eat and start reading the newspaper but lose interest once I finish my breakfast. I check the fridge for coke but there's none there so I head out to say hi to Dad.

  ‘Gonna rain a bit later,’ he goes, looking at the sky. He likes to point out the negative, my Dad. Like a manly thing, like only woman comment on the nice things or something. I'll be off soon though. Easier to just validate him and fuck off.

  ‘Yep. Fuckin' typical eh.’ I kinda feel like I needa think of something to complain about myself so he doesn't think I'm a bitch, but fuck it. He puts his hands behind his head and looks sideways up at me. There's just enough sunlight to make the grey hairs in his beard sparkle.

  ‘Yep. S'posed to bloody rain all Sunday too.’

  I just nod and stand there for a bit, tryna think of something to say but failing.

  ‘Done your homework?’ he goes, not looking at me anymore. I nod again. I actually have. Left Lucy's early last night to get it out of the way. It was some formal writing shit for english, worth a bunch of credits. I wrote it about the benefits of marijuana, all about how on sports day none of the stoners wear their house colours, meaning they don't fight over pointless shit like straights do. I was fuckin' wasted when I wrote it too, but I reckon that'll make it better for like realism and shit, or like...

  Fuck it, I'll pass. I've seen the checklist.

  ‘Good man,’ he goes, before having a swig of his beer that seems to mean something. I stand awkwardly for a bit till I feel weird and have to go. I head in for a shirt and some shoes and leave, feeling mostly all good about things, just sorta shitty at Dad for no reason. 

  The cunt was right though - it's gonna rain for sure. The sky above is real blue, but there's dark clouds gathering from the south. I'm too sore to skate anyway so I'm all good with it. Dunno why cunts get so hung up about the rain. It's just water. I'm keen.

  My limp's gone by the time I get to the corner of Melling Street, starting to get my flow back. I wander along for a bit, giving the nod to a few random cunts as I pass, and spot Collin Callahan from school heading my way. Seen a bit much of the cunt lately, to be honest. But he's clocked me and I'm in a good mood so I stop to talk.

  ‘Morning,’ he stops in front of me. Looking a little rusty today I gotta say - he's got a fresh looking white button-up on, but he's got that same brown jacket from last night under his arm and his hair's all tussled up. Who knows what the cunt's been creeping around doing all night.

  ‘Morning,’ I extend my hand. He looks at it for a second before shaking it. ‘What are you up to?’

  He smiles a sort of gecko smile and goes ‘Just getting in a bit of sunshine before the rain comes in... Yourself?’ kinda gesturing around him with his eyes. I keep looking at him, tryna figure out what it is he's not saying. Dude sorta gives me the creeps sometimes. Like, he's definitely one of the smart kids. You can tell by the way he talks. But then he also sorta reminds me of the cunts I have to hang out with on those activity days and after-school things for troubled kids. The way he keeps looking at you after he talks, like he's sussing you out or something... Lucy and Robbie seem to think the sun shines out of his ass though, so I guess I'm missing something. Prolly just being a cunt.

  He doesn't elaborate so I go ‘Just off to Lucy's.’

  He nods slowly. We just stand there for a bit till I suddenly remember something. ‘Hey, you know anyone who's got scores at the moment?’

  He looks up into his eyebrows for a second then goes ‘Try Michael Farmer. He just got a whole bunch of hash from Hayden. Quality shit. I got a little on me, actually. We could have a bit of a smoke now, if you want. Go down the park...’

  ‘Nah I'm good.’

  ‘You sure? I got more, I'm not worried...’

  I shake my head. If I have a smoke with him now I'll just end up with him and Robbie all day. Keen to hang out with Lucy. Just us.

  ‘Fair enough mate. You know Ned's gonna be in town tonight? Me and Robbie are gonna catch up with him, have a sesh, maybe a few beers or a trip. You should come along. And Lucy.’

  ‘Sounds good.’ Feels like ages since I saw the cunt, even though it's only really been a few months. Be good to hear his take on all the shit that's gone down. I've heard plenty of stories, but it's hard to know when to listen. Chinese whispers and shit.

  ‘I'll give one of you a text anyway - you'll be with Lucy, right? I think I've got her number...’ He pulls out his phone and looks at it for a bit. ‘Yep, I got her number. Sweet. Well, you guys'll hear from me or Robbie.’

  I nod and stand there sorta weird for a bit, nothing much to say. Always feels like he's just putting up with my shit to be polite. When it's him and like Ned and Robbie and stuff he always goes on about all these crazy conspiracy theories that I don't really get. Everyone acts like he's on some next level shit, but it just sounds like acid head shit to me.

  After a bit of that, he goes ‘Well, I'll catch up with you later man,’ and starts to turn, then adds ‘Oh, say hi to Lucy for me,’ with a sunset smile before we walk our separate ways.

  I start walking off then remember I don't have Michael's number. I turn and call out to him.

  He turns to me without stopping, walking backwards.

  ‘Got Michael's number?’

  ‘Just turn up, man. That's what I always do.’

  I stop for a second, wondering something, then nod bye and head on my way.

  The wind's picked up heaps now, got me wide awake and feeling good. No rain still. I've sorta changed my mind about Collin now. He's not so bad. Just different. The kind of cunt Dad's made sure I wouldn't turn into. Like sorta faggy in the way he talks and shit, but pulls it off somehow. Like he knows who he is and doesn't have to fuck around with macho shit. Maybe it's some jealousy shit. Must feel pretty good to not have to act all tough. Maybe it's Dad who's the fucked cunt, like making me think I gotta...

  Fuck, whatever. Just a weird cunt, really. Both of them. Fuck it.

I get to Michael's place which is on the third floor of this shitty apartment block in town, and knock on a few doors before I get the right one. He opens the door, shirtless with a flat-bill cap and long red shorts that go down past his knees. His face is emotionless but tense, maybe a little accusing.

  ‘Stan ya crooked cunt,’ he says, twitching his nose like a hamster. He wipes it with his finger then holds the same fist out for knucks. Kinda gross but I bump it anyway. ‘The fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘Hey, uh… you reckon I could get some hash off you? I got cash on me...’ I say quietly. I can see his Mum in there watching TV. There's two kids playing on the floor, two boys I think. Neither of them look like Michael at all. I dunno.

  ‘Eh, Stanly fuckin' Richards, back on the buzz. Come in,’ he grins.

  I follow him in past his Mum who's glued to the TV. He's got a bouncy, energetic walk that looks like it's about to break into a jog. It seems forced, but Michael's a sorta larger than life character so you never know. One of the kids looks up at me with huge eyes, like a puppy. I guess that's what they are, human puppies. I say hello but he just keeps staring at me.

  Michael kicks his bedroom door open and a wave of stale jizz and weed makes me cringe. We walk in, Michael rapping ‘Kick in the door, breakin' the fourth wall, yeeya...’ which degrades into some beatboxing and peters out.

  His room looks as bad as it smells. He's got like this big-ass bed that takes up most of the room, but there's an outline of ashtrays, beer bottles, and dirty plates that takes up half the bed, like where the girl would sleep. There's all sorts of crap from magazines pinned up all over the walls, like ads and shit, and a life-sized spray-painted outline of a person on the wall across from the door. It's got a hole punched in where the face should be, and a speech bubble drawn in marker saying: CANT BLINK, GOT NO EYELIDS AND/OR LONG TERM PSYCHOSIS, DUE TO DRUG ABUSE. It makes me smile, even though I don't really get it.

  ‘How much you after?’

  I get my wallet out and there's fifteen in there, thought I had more. I hold it out to him and he looks at me with a raised eyebrow and goes ‘That all you got cunt? You after crumbs or some shit? I hope you didn't get me away from the TV just to fuck me 'round.’ I know he's talking shit 'cause I can't imagine him ever watching TV or sitting still at all, but... He's another cunt I can't really be fucked with. I always feel like he expects more from me, like makes me feel like a cunt for not matching his enthusiasm. Or maybe he just doesn't like me. I dunno. I could never quite figure the cunt out.

  ‘Sorry, thought I had twenty on me. Can I just get fifteen worth? Or just tick up the five or something. I'll hit you back monday...’ I know he's just messing with me, but I wanna move past it to the next phase where I buy weed off him.

  ‘You're not gonna fuck me around here, are you?’

  ‘…Hadn't planned to.’

  He stares at me all beady-eyed, dunno what he's after here. Maybe I'm supposed to get smart back.

  ‘Why, you dangerous?’ I say all cheeky.

  His face softens. ‘Nah nah, just fuckin' with you man. We all friends here, cunt. Hold up.’ I try to look amused but know instantly that I've failed. He doesn't seem to care though. Or notice. He kneels down and starts going through his draw.

  After a while, I get bored and sit down on his bed. There's this thing sitting next to me that's kinda like a wine bottle shape but made of stone or something. I pick it up, surprised at how heavy it is.

  He turns around real sharp and goes ‘Bet you haven't seen one that big before.’

  ‘Um, I guess not... What is it?’

  ‘That? That's a fuckin' whacker, cunt.’

  ‘A whacker?’

  ‘Yep, a fuckin' top of the line whacker.’

  ‘So that's for...’

  ‘Yep, whacking cunts.’

  ‘Right.’

  He goes back into his draw and mucks around for a bit. I toss the whacker to myself, still wondering what it is. Is it really a weapon? Or art? Or just a pill-crusher? I guess every solid object in this room is a pill-crusher from time to time…

  ‘Wanna see something else cool?’ He says. He's putting on a necklace, still facing away from me.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ I lie.

  He turns around and holds up the piece at the end of the necklace. It's a tiny bottle, like the size of a grasshopper, half-filled with some dark green powder. He's looking pretty smug about it so I indulge him.

  ‘Nice. Um... What's that shit in there?’ Not that I really care. Just being polite. Prolly like Collin when he talks to me.

  ‘Pure fuckin' powdered ethanol, cunt. Dissolve this shit in water and boom, hundy-proof, get you fucked up.’

  ‘Oh really? That's-’

  ‘'Course not, cunt. No such thing as powdered liquor ya thick cunt.’

  ‘Oh yeah. 'Course not.’

  ‘Nope, this shit's better than booze. PCP. Fucks you up good and proper.’

  ‘True. Never tried that one...’

  ‘Nah it ain't fuckin' PCP. Just fuckin' with you. Wanna know what it really is?’

  ‘Well, to be honest man-’

  ‘It's some of my Grandpa's ashes.’ His face is totally serious now, but I'm pretty sure he's still playing games.

  ‘You fuckin' with me again?’

  ‘Eh, this cunt's smarter than he looks,’ he looks around the room like he's talking to an audience. ‘It was a gift from my Grandpa, though.’

  ‘True... So how 'bout that hash, man? I gotta get-’

  ‘Funny you should say that, cunt. This shit in here, it's hash mixed with sand from the Arabian desert.’

  ‘Oh... Crazy.’ I hate it when people say crazy in a monotone, but sometimes you gotta when someone's talking at you about boring shit and you've already said ‘true’ too many times.

  ‘Yep. He collected it himself. The exact spot where Jesus taught Buddha how to train dogs.’

  ‘I'm pretty sure it was Allah who taught Buddha how to train dogs,’ I say, wise to his shitty game.

  ‘Eh, cheeky cunt,’ he grins. ‘So you wanna buy it? Twenty bucks.’

  ‘What? Nah man. I'm just keen for some hash.’

  ‘Oh yeah. I'll just grab it for ya.’ It's as if he'd genuinely forgotten what I'm here for. He goes back into his draw for a bit and comes out with a rolled up cigarette paper.

  ‘Doesn't look like much but it's fuckin' good shit,’ he says, handing it over. I pocket it and force a smile, even though I hate the phrase ‘good shit’.

  ‘Thanks bro,’ I say, handing him the cash. He pauses mid-reach and raises an eyebrow at me.

  ‘You don't usually call people bro, do you?’ He's looking at me with his left eyebrow raised this time. Looks more sinister. When he had his right one up before he looked confused more than anything.

  ‘Nah bro,’ I grin at him. I got what I came for, just needa get him to take my money so I can fuck off.

  He laughs, but only with half his mouth, the same half as the raised eyebrow. He does that stupid Charles Manson thing with all the different faces for a bit, then finally takes my money and stuffs it in his pocket.

  ‘Anyway, you wanting a taste while you're here? Already got the knives on.’

  I shake my head. I'll just end up sitting here saying fuck all till I'm too wasted to figure out how to leave. Not that I really got a problem with the cunt or anything, but... It's just time to go. The windows and curtains are closed and the room stinks of dirty clothes and a whole lot of other shit I don't care to identify. There's some of that weird South African rap playing that all the town cunts are all about. I could never get into that shit.

  I stand up and head out and he goes ‘Oi, cunt. That was twenty worth. You owe me five still.’

  I stop in his doorway for a second, wondering if it's really twenty dollars worth, then realise I don't care and leave.

  I'm heading through the living room and his Mum mumbles ‘Yeah yeah, everyone likes the far side. You're nothing special...’ but I'm not sure if she's talking to me and I'm just keen to get the fuck out of here.

  It's started drizzling a little outside, which I'm into. In my head I imagine Dad sitting out in the rain in his boxers going ‘Bloody well raining, isn't it? Just my luck...’

  The number two bus pulls over like half a block ahead of me, and I consider rushing to catch it but don't. Lucy's at her Dad's, like a fifteen or twenty minute walk. I'm kinda enjoying the rain and just being outside. Got some dry clothes at her place. All good. 

  This sad looking chick with a baby stroller catches my eye as we pass, and I give her a big smile but she looks away. It's gonna be a good day, I think. It's been all good so far, and that's just hanging out with cunts I don't even really like. Dad and Michael. And Collin. I'll get to Lucy's, get my wet clothes off, get the heater going, smoke some hash and listen to the Jefferson Airplane CD that's been on loop for like two weeks. Get our fuck on, snuggle up, talk shit, or even just zone out together. Just whatever. All good.

Rory Jacobs

The sound of Damo’s Nun’s motorbike has full got us making moves, Amelia, Damo, and me. We didn’t even bother getting our homework out, ‘cause we knew we’d only get like a halfer max here. Instead, we smoked the last of our Marx Lane on the balcony and cracked a bottle of sea breeze to loosen the lips and try suss what we were supposed to be doing and just who knew what around here. All we cracked was that none of us knew shit about semicolons, then the Nun showed and that was us up and making moves. Amelia and me we already got our bags packed and the window open but Damo’s full having an eppy about if his Nun smells the Marx from the deck, even though half the Brennan mob's here, at least four or five of the lads. So that's me trying to rattle the lad straight, as fuckin':

  ‘You wanna stand here like a clown, half stumps with breeze stains on your lips? Or is that us making moves?’

  And that's that.

  Amelia's off shimmying down the drain into the alleyway, no hez, always the first of us to make moves, but also I think 'cause she's wearing a short skirt and doesn't want Damo or me having a gander, eh. I'm out the window after her and I'm fully having an eppy up here, as fuckin’, three storey drop and shit, slippery as, just focusing on getting my feet from the window sill into those grooves on the wall. I abseil down the gutter to the corner of the second storey balcony, bandit as once I get going, check the window for minders, nada, then creep across and jump down onto the first storey awning, 'bout a one and a half metre drop, jump onto the skip bin and boom, in the alleyway, swedish.

  Amelia and me we’re down and lurkin’ and we both got zero on the mind so she gets out the sea breeze for a few sips while Damo navigates his way down, fully hez, still droppin’ ‘em about the jump onto the second storey balcony. He's a full hezfish that one, but gets no death for it. He’s just a fish with zero to prove. What more can you want?

  When Damo's finally down and lurkin’ he takes the sea breeze and we're making moves along Witham, still deaf and blind about where we're off to, full just keen to move now. We're closing in on Centres when we start trying to suss where we can score some more Marx.

  ‘How ‘bout Big Dog? He's got a car, knows like pretty much every other lad out there, could be a starter...’ Damo’s in thinking he’s cracked it, but he’s all elbows and Amelia and me we’re just gandering the lad sideways like Nah boldy. ‘Yeah? Mahs fuckin', right?’ Damo's a few months behind on the slang, as fuckin'. I’m in there now, sorting the lad out again:

  ‘Nah, that’s a zero on that one, breather. Off to his place tonight, anyway... Gotta get in a bit of time away from the fish, eh. But how 'bout Jeremy? Heard he was neck deep in the lane.’

  And then that’s me who’s all elbows and no good ideas, Damo rattling me straight this time ‘round:

  ‘What, you didn't hear?’

  ‘What?’ that’s me.

  ‘He got busted, bud. There's zero,’ Damo.

  ‘Oh shit. Bad?’

  ‘Nah, it's like, swedish and all. Just zero. She didn't tell his Dad or anything, just chucked his Marx out and just like full checks up on him all the time and shit, gives him the death when he’s out too late or got the lads around or whatever. Lame.’

  ‘The Nun?’

  ‘Yeah. So that's like pretty much a zero on that one, eh.’

  ‘Damn, that's dead as shit.’

  ‘Oath. Should we hit him up anyway? Like, for a tribe?’

  ‘...Zero,’ that's Amelia and me.

  We turn down Javais Way and stop at the park for a lurk and a brainstorm, but it's zero for ages and pretty much just us three gandering the grass. We're sitting on the swings and Damo's maybe had a bit much of the breeze, pretty much stumps now, scatfish lying in the wet dirt with his legs up on the swing. Amelia's still gulpin’ but I'm holding off 'cause I'm full just after the Marx now. Then out of nowhere Amelia cracks it:

  ‘Hey, we could get Michael amongst. He's got some pretty bandit ash. And dex. We could hit the dex and the Marx and the breeze, smash out the homework while the sun’s still up, get into some etcetera later.’

  I'm like maybe, ‘cause it’s full zero otherwise, but Damo's in there full hez:

  ‘Yeah, but that brody won't be wanting to just sit around doing homework, will he?’

  We all nod kinda dark and now we're sitting here back at zero when Amelia cracks it again:

  ‘Well, one of us'll just have to keep him busy then. You know what he’s like, give him a push and he's off. Then whoever's on Michael duty can just get the notes from us after. Then we'll just get irie with him once we're done. Easy.’

  Damo and me look at each other and we’re both straight in:

  ‘Shotgun not.’ 

  ‘Shotgun not.’

  ‘...Fuck.’

  And it’s sorta off that Amelia’s fully just gotta spend the night trying to tame the Farmdog, since she’s always the one chargin’ it with homework type deals. But then also she was the lad with all the ideas, fully just ate her own cheese, eh. Damo’s in there trying to keep every fish swimming, as fuckin’:

  ‘Hey, but maybe he'll get on the buzz, right? Like, once he gets the dex in him. Might be down to charge some school work and shit.’

  Amelia and me we’re just shooting him the gander, doubtful as, but then it's maybe for a bit with the shoulders but really it's full zero and we know it. Then it's me who cracks it:

  ‘Wait, anyone heard from Spacey? My Nun was saying her Nun's in Tunisia, like in Africa or some shit. If we can get her amongst, her and Farmdog'll probly go get all intergalactic, leave us with the dex.’

  Then it’s Damo, elbows:

  ‘Zero, haven't been hearing back from her since she was at school last. Farmdog'll know where she's at, though. Someone give the lad a text, I'm outta credit, eh.’

  Then me, moves:

  ‘Yep, I'm on it. Let's make moves, anyway. Big Dog said his uncle's place is free till ten. Let's try charge the homework before then, bring Farmdog over, get amongst, get Big Dog chargin’, barkin’. Dex, Marx. Bandit.’

  ‘Renegade.’

  And that’s us.

We end up charging it through the tracks to the entrance that links up with Centres, Damo and Amelia sorta stumps but me fully just looking to get irie. Farmdog's waiting for us at the other side, full chargin’ it on the dex, swimming solo, renegade as. He's got half a shy sack and two empties already sitting next to him, one in hand, never mind the rain and the minders all about the place. He’s busy on his phone so I give him the whatup to rattle him out:

  ‘Rin Tin Tin, what's shakin'?’

  ‘Fuckin' just waitin’ for you cunts, ain't I?’

  He's got a wand already rolled and ready to spark. I can tell Amelia and Damo are full droppin’ ‘em about doing it here but I'm swede 'cause it'll be on as storming through centres after this, just keen to elevate a bit. Farmdog's one of those tribe with me or collide with me kinda lads, so it's best not to be hez when he's around anyway, eh.

  The Marx is bandit as shit, moss sloths and ash, and once it’s done the circle a couple times Damo, Amelia, and me are in the garden full puddle, full irie. Farmdog's scat as shit and wants to make moves, but that wand's fully took us out and we're all on the hyenas here.

  ‘Yeah ha fuckin' ha cunts. How 'bout every cunt just gets on their feet so we can get moving? Fuckin' bored of this place, been here ages waitin’ for you cunts.’

  Damo and me are just laughing away over here, but Amelia's already past it with the lad, full fox:

  ‘How about you cool off and let us finish this wand, Michael? Just breathe a sec.’

  ‘Fuck off cunt, let's just smoke it on the way. Fuckin' sick of this place, corporate cunts left right and fuckin' centre, givin’ me the fuckin’ stinkeye. Getting wet as fuck here... Where is the joint, anyway?’

  ‘Yeah, great idea Michael. Let's go walk through Centres smoking moss, swedish.’

  ‘Fuck, whatever cunts, We're pretty much in the middle of fuckin' Centres smoking this shit anyway. Already dumb as fuck. Might as well be a moving target. Let's go. Where’s the joint at?’

  He stands up and finishes his drink in one go then ganders us with that prankster grin and fully just smashes his empty on the concrete, full frontal, broad daylight. The three of us we're up cardiac sharp and we've all dropped ‘em a bit, full dice, just like breathe lad, breathe. All the minders in the park are fully shooting us the gander now and Michael's lighting the wand back up, full renegade, not a shit to give. Damo’s shooting the fish the cockeye, dice as half smirk:

  ‘Bit tense there Farmdog?’

  ‘You cunts fuckin' let this shit go out,’ Michael.

  And that's every lad past it a bit now, just on the breathe pause gander for a bit. Amelia’s fully got her Nun hood on, dry as shit, full antsing it, full foxing it:

  ‘What the fuck was that shit about, Michael?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Smashing a bottle in Centres and lighting up a wand. You want us all to be pig food?’

  ‘Eh, gotta get you cunts moving somehow, otherwise we'll be here all fuckin' night. Come on, let's fuckin' gap. 'Bout to fuckin' piss down, straights giving us the stare, fuck this shit. Where we off to anyway?’

  We’re still all elbows about where we're off to, but I full just wanna make moves now that we got all this gander on us, so just wherever:

  ‘Spacey's? Heard her parents are away.’

  ‘Nah, no good, cunt. Tried to go down there earlier, lazy bitch ain't answering calls or nothing. Let's just go to my place. Mum doesn't give a shit, we can rack up lines, smoke weed. Fuck, if one of you cunts acts all into her and shit we can probly get into her liquor.’

  We all slow it down a bit for a gander, bitching it a bit maybe. Farmdog’s stopped to wait cockeyed like What’s the fuckin’ problem then cunts? Us three just hez again - as fuckin’, right Farmdog? But the lad's place is always fully skunkin’ it, and his Nun's always stumps as, full dice. We're all blinking around full zero until eventually I just wanna make moves wherever:

  ‘Mahs?’

  And it’s all just down to the other fish, Damo and Amelia. After some tench, Damo finally gives us the nod, Mahs, Amelia still hez, but it’s us three fish, Damo, me, and the Farmdog, so we wait for the lad to get past herself, Mahs, and that’s us off to Farmdog’s.

  We go ‘round the side streets ‘cause Dad’s been spotted lurching ‘round the outskirts today, too scat even for us scatfish. Amelia, Damo, and me are a bit too irie from the Marx, so Farmdog fully just renegades the rest to himself. He finishes his shy sack as we walk and stops in at the Holland Street sackstore. Us three we’re all just on the pause and breathe while Farmdog’s in the store, no tench, just sorta good to have a breathe when you’re chargin’ it with the Farmdog, eh. He’s out with more ripps no problems, stumps as, no ID just scowls and scum sprouts, and that’s us on the move. Damo's antsing it the whole walk, some shit about having a dodgy ankle and all the minders and ganders, just suddenly got a whole lot of death once he’s got some Marx in him, as fuckin’. Amelia’s pretty dark about something too, both fish all high and dry about zero, but we’re all swede once we get to Farmdog's.

  His Nun's all stumps when we get there, as fuckin’, but Farmdog just herds us through to his room. He puts on Dark Lotus, which is pretty zero, and racks up the dex on his desk. He throws down four pills which has us in dice city 'cause usually we're like one between four, but swedish 'cause we need this shit to finally make moves with this semicolon shit. Amelia and me we’re standing 'round Farmdog shooting him the gander, bit dice, while Damo lays all our school shit out on the floor, fully into it till we actually get started, as fuckin’.

  Farmdog's divvying up the dex, but the ADD fish has started drawing a sorta Japanese house with the powder that's actually pretty bandit, fully got the shading in there and shit. Damo turns up over my shoulder like What's the hez lads, and he's having the full on eppy over Farmdog's dex drawing:

  ‘Oi that’s bandit as shit Farmdog. Yo Rory, you’ve seen the lads that actually do that eh? Like fully draw masterpieces with coke and shit. On as, that shit.’

  I'm fully lost about what the lad's on about but Farmdog's in over top of me anyway:

  ‘Eh, I'm right here, cunt.’

  Damo and me laugh, but Amelia's fully past it with the fish. I'm half doubting Damo on this one, but he's fully into it:

  ‘Nah, but there's lads out there that like actually full charge it at that shit, like make art out of it and shit. Draw pictures then snort it up and draw like even irier ones once they're charging.’

  ‘Stop talking about me like I'm not here,’ Farmdog.

  I laugh but I think Damo's a bit past the lad now. I gotta say I'm fully hyped on the Farmdog today. He's pretty much bandit as they come. Sorta just a bit full frontal for the other lads a lot of the time, I reckon.

  We get the dex in us and it's sorta too much charge eh, full ants, full drip, but we're finally making moves with the homework so it's swedish. Damo and me we got the tench hard, had to crack into some of Farmdog's ripps to settle the rattle. Amelia's all about it though, full making moves, full fox ahead. Farmdog's got no homework 'cause he's downstairs in the wolf rat class, fully just a cage for the lads to keep 'em tame till they're old enough to be the pig’s problem and get chucked in real cages, eh. He's booming it about some lizards he saw the other day, storming 'round the room schizfish as, giving us all death about being squares in square holes. Damo and me keep shooting Amelia the gander 'cause she's on Farmdog minding duties today, but she's fully into the homework, full past the lad:

  ‘Okay, so it says a semicolon is usually used to connect two related clauses... Anyone remember what a clause is?’

  Damo and me we’re both deaf and blind about this shit, but I can't tell if Amelia's the same or just testing us. She's full charging so it could be either, eh.

  ‘Okay, well here's the sentence. Joe is off to Europe, he's interested in their culture.’

  And that's Damo and me with the gander like Yeah? What about it? Till I step in to keep her going so we don't get reeled in by Farmdog's lizard shit:

  ‘So there's a semicolon in that sentence?’

  ‘Yeah. Joe is off to Europe, semicolon, he's interested in their culture.’

  Farmdog's full thunder about these lizards but he's pretty irie so it's swede just to leave him to it for now. I think I'm starting to sorta crack this semicolon shit now so I'm a bit past the lad myself, just trying to keep the right music playing:

  ‘So it's maybe half way between a comma and a full stop?’

  Amelia gives me a gander like maybe she's a bit past it with the lot of us, but Damo’s got me on this one:

  ‘Woah, yeah I get what you're saying there bud, ‘cause like it could full be a full stop or a comma in between those sentences, eh. How 'bout we flip to the end of the chapter and see what the questions are, see if we can crack some of ‘em?’

  Amelia's not into it 'cause she's fully crackin’ it right now, wants to keep charging as is:

  ‘Uh, no, no, not yet. Here, look. A semicolon is half a colon, right? ‘Cause of the semi part. And it's like a colon but with a comma instead of a full stop, see?’

  I'm trying to follow her on this one, but I got Damo one one side of me having a bit of a chuckle about the word ‘semi’, and then Farmdog on the other side, charged up to the days, full ants:

  ‘Oi, ya antisocial cunts, I asked a fuckin' question: Which one of you cunts'd be keen to fight a monitor lizard, like if they tied its mouth shut? Damo?’

  Amelia's fully trying to drown him out, but the Farmdog's charging, irie, and pretty much stumps, so it's zero as shit.

  ‘So we just need to crack what it is about colons that's also like full stops. Then we can figure out how the comma fits in,’ Amelia, chargin’.

  ‘Oi, Damo ya fuckin' nerd! Ever seen a monitor lizard in person? Or, like, in lizard, I guess you’d say...’

  And now Amelia's so past it that she's into it, the Farmdog's favourite trick, a so hot she’s cold kinda thing:

  ‘Michael, if you're not talking about commas or semicolons can you please shut the fuck up?’

  ‘Eh? Commas and semicolons? Fuck that shit. I’m talking lizards, cunt. Fuckin' massive ones, at the botans, like full fuckin' Komodo dragons and fuckin' monitor lizards and shit. It's called like the Realm of the Reptiles or some shit, like a show kinda thing. Five buck entry but they get all the lizards out of their cages so you can pick the cunts up. Gotta hide your liquor in like coke bottles and shit though, but there’s loads of places to sneak out for a smoke. Massive trees and shit to climb, lizards everywhere, fuckin' ballin', ya cunts.’

  Amelia and me are still kinda trying to block the fish out, but it's pretty much zero now 'cause he's got the hooks in. Damo's scat as shit, as fuckin’, too slow too curious, fully past it with the semicolons:

  ‘Oh, shit, you'll be into this Farmdog. Out at Big Dog’s Nun's place-’

  ‘Eh, how 'bout you guys shut the fuck up with this nun shit. Sound like fuckin' drug dealing priests, all talking in codes and shit.’

  ‘Alright, well out at Big Dog's-’

  ‘And that cunt's no fuckin' big dog, either. I was with that cunt on the piss the other night, fuckin' Straightedges turned up and boom! Cunt was fuckin' gone. Bolted. Didn't say shit, just fuckin'-’    

  ‘Right, yeah yeah, I'm hearin' ya Cujo, loud and clear. But anyway, you know his Mum's place down south?’

  ‘Why the fuck would I-’

  ‘Alright, doesn't matter. But what I’m saying is I found a goanna in the yard, bandit as, like massive as and shit. Tried to catch it but-’

  ‘It's pronounced iguana, ya fuckin’ clown.’

  It’s a bit off how Farmdog’s always giving Damo death, sorta just an easy target, like going for the fish with no teeth kinda deal. Still, Damo’s fully up to get on when the time is right:

  ‘Cough with that shit. You're the dumbass here. I'm talking about goannas, they're like these-’

  ‘Don't tell me about what's what with fuckin' lizards, cunt. While youse cunts were at school on Monday, me and the boys were off at the botans learning all about lizards, alright? Don’t know shit cunt.’

  ‘What, you and the other wolf rats?’

  It's full silent tench now, think Damo's just crossed a line there. We all dodge and swerve around that one, fully just out of bounds, like leave them to it and they’ll leave you, eh.

  ‘Ah, shit, sorry bud. I didn't mean to-’

  ‘Nah, whatever cunt. Us cunts downstairs just don't fuck around with fuckin' like semicolons and shit. We learn about real shit. Got me doing work as a fuckin' kitchen hand, cunt. What were you fuckers doing all day? Learning about fuckin’ semicolons? I been getting started on a career, cunt. You guys just been writing stories.’

  It's pretty tench in here and he's fully got the three of us reeled in now, Farmdog one, lads zero. Amelia’s stood up to mano a mano the lad, but he’s ready for it, fully just got all that scatfish charge pointed right at her, full frontal.

  ‘Michael, that's because we're learning the shit we need to know to go to uni next year. So we can get a job that's not washing dishes,’ Amelia.

  I’m staggin’ it a bit ‘cause Amelia’s full fox on the charge right here, but I can tell Damo’s been fully staggin’ on her all day, so best just leave it zero, like a fish of a scale pass up the tail sorta deal. The Farmdog’s not fazed, though, as fuckin’:

  ‘Fuck off cunt, I ain't just washing dishes. They got me fuckin' chopping up-’

  ‘Hey, if you don't want us giving you death about being in the dumb class, then don't fucking brag about it.’

  ‘Fuck off, it's you cunts who's in the dumb class. Us cunts in room two just move too fast. We don't fuck around with like fuckin' grammar and shit.’

  ‘That's what all the dumb kids say. Every dumb kid reckons they’re too smart. You couldn't even crack year ten trigonom-’

  ‘Nah, I mean I move too quick, like hwoah! Like coming at ya, like cunts can't fuckin' track me down, they be trying to get me to sort out their dumbass triangles and I'm off, boom, off jumping over electric fences down the back of the field. This cunt here wouldn't even try to jump it. Eh, Damo, ya bitch. Wouldn't even skip fuckin' Social Studies with me the other day to go jump over the fences. Up to fuck all.’

  ‘Whatever, Michael. He'll probably be your boss one day. Ever think of that? You know what Damon got in his last Social Studies exams last term? It was two merits and an excellence, wasn't it?’

  ‘Uh, nah, I think I got-’

  ‘Doesn't matter. My point is that you're not gonna be anyone's boss by jumping over electric fences. If Damon keeps charging it at all his classes and not skipping them to go jump over electric fences, it'll full be him telling lads what’s what later on. You’ll just be zero.’

  ‘Eh, doesn't even fuckin' matter. I don't lead by telling cunts what to do anyway. I fuckin' lead by example, cunt. That's what a fuckin' good leader does. Gets cunts to follow his example. 'Cause if you just tell cunts what to do, they only do it when you're looking. Then when your back's turned, fuckin’ boom! off getting rapey at the playground. But then you got the cunts on TV. Everybody wants to be like those cunts, don't even have to tell people what to do.’

  ‘What? What the fuck are you even saying right now? That you're a celebrity? Can you even hear the shit that's coming out of-’

  ‘All I'm fuckin' well saying is that that's why I lead by example. To show other cunts to lead by example. Try figure that one out then miss fuckin' university.’

  ‘What a load of shit. What's your example then, Michael? Skip school to go and jump over electric fences? You’re just-’

  ‘Fuck off, bitch, that's not what I fuckin' mean. What I'm saying is none of you cunts ever even had a job yet. I got fuckin' work experience at Bolton and Sons, eight bucks a fuckin' hour, probly got a job lined up when I finish school. Fuckin' sorted. And you cunts'll be off to uni, still fuckin' 'round with triangles and fuckin' semicolons, still don't know shit about reptiles, while I'm already out charging it in the real world. I got a job lined up, cunt. And I'm a fuckin’ entrepreneur. What the fuck have you got going?’

  ‘What? It's pronounced entrepreneur, and you obviously don't know what it means.’

  ‘Of course I know what it fuckin' means. I am one.’

  ‘How the fuck are you an entrepreneur?’

  ‘Eh, I got the fuckin' dexies going, pulling in like fifty plus a week, hundy if I don't keep any for myself. And I sell like a fuckin' ounce a fortnight, at least. Pull like one fiddy profit each time, and that’s not even counting when fuckin’ Hayden’s ‘round slingin’ hash. I'm making like at least couple hundy a week already. What the fuck have you got? An allowance? I'm making moves, cunts.’

  ‘Oath,’ that’s me in there, full backin’ the fish. I give him the nods 'cause shit, the fish has fuckin’ cracked it, really. Fully swims his own way, that one. Usually us three we just give the lad death on the sly, dodge and swerve ‘round him while he tries suss what’s what. But now it’s Farmdog’s turn with the scythe: Dex, ripps, Lane, fish in the water, affairs in order. Me and Damo are on the floor, fully past homework now, just watching Amelia eppy out 'cause as much of a scatfish the Farmdog is, the lad sorta just charges it so hard that it's beside the point. Amelia’s fully fazed by his shit, fully drops ‘em:

  ‘Yeah, whatever Michael. You're the man 'cause you sell drugs and you're in the slow class. Can you let us do our homework now?’

  ‘Yeah, all good cunts. So who's paying me for that fuckin' hash then? Twenty bucks.’

  Damo, Amelia, and me are all on the gander and yeah, it's Amelia this time no doubt. She's got the money and shit no death, but it's sorta gutted the poor fish a bit, just the timing, eh.

  ‘...I'll pay you on thurs?’

  ‘Fuckin' civil servant pay day eh? Say thanks to your fuckin' Dad for me when he gets back from the office, eh?’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  It’s full zero in here now ‘cause Farmdog’s got Amelia too scatto to keep charging with the homework, and with that fish past it that’s Damo and me pretty much zero by default. He gives Amelia a ripp and she’s pretty much swedish about it all, just fully got put in her place by the Farmdog, which is sorta just what happens when you try renegade the lad.

  Farmdog rolls up another wand, less sloth more ash this time, sends us all scatfish up into our own personal zeros. Farmdog’s fully just dodging and swerving with himself and chucks on the Help song by The Beatles and I’m too scat to really crack shit now. But I reckon the Farmdog would be John Lennon, since he’s the fish with all the ideas here, making moves and shit. Amelia she’s full Paul McCartney, ‘cause she’s the one who doesn’t put up with Farmdog’s death, like either her or Big Dog, whoever’s around. Then there’s me like George Harrison, ‘cause I probly seem like pretty much zero just ‘cause I’m a deep thinker, sorta just cracking it to myself and just leaving it at that. That leaves Damo as Ringo, which makes sense ‘cause he’s always swimming a bit slow and shifty, but he’s sorta the best fish of the school, eh.

  I’m fully lost to what I was even just thinking about and Farmdog’s full thunder about some shit, but us three we’re blind, deaf, and zero. I’m all elbows with what’s going on with Amelia or Damo now ‘cause they've moved onto Michael's bed behind me. Probly full zero like me, chances are, but if Amelia springs a leak Damo’ll be in there no hez and that’ll have to be me and the Farmdog off for whatever. Farmdog’s full scatfish on his spinny chair, drinking ripp, back on the lizards again. I reckon he sorta knows he’s swimming solo now, eh, probly still be going on about it after us three have gone, full just charging it upstream while we flop around on the beach, all hez, as fuckin’. We’re supposed to meet Big Dog at Centres soon, but we’re past irie, past scat, and just full zero. Might be old Big Dog charging solo then, but could be me and the Farmdog swimming along with the lad, depending on what’s what with the other two I spose. But we’ll sort that in a bit, after bit of a breathe.

  Swedish all ‘round this, though, eh. Zero tench or death here, just some freaky fish swimming solo together. Full bummin’ it for the Farmdog, though. The lad probly never even felt the zero, always full chargin’ and crackin’, making moves, dodgin’ and swervin’, livin’ it up. We fully just got three zeros and a nine here now, boldys. Three threes back at Damo’s. When you add it up, it’s just the same shit in a different place, as fuckin’. No hez, no tench, just zero. Bandit, eh.

Robbie Marks

I was reclining on my bed in my smoke-filled bedroom, gazing vacantly at the blurry, half-empty beer bottle in my hand, content, bored, listless, vaguely inspired. Sitting opposite me, on the floor against the wall, lost in contemplation, was my good friend Collin. Though at this point we were both locked inside ourselves, Collin and I were deeply bonded through our shared passion; a yearning for something ancient and intangible, almost forgotten by the modern world, but more than real for those of us who seek to believe.

  ‘Sun's down. Let's do this,’ Collin broke the hazy silence, reaching up for his hat on my desk chair next to him. He was referring to our plan for the night, which was to meet our friends at The Disarray, a bar not far from where we were. Ned, our friend and fellow seeker, was supposed to be arriving in town that night. Though he had been vague in his contact with us, the situation we had pieced together was that he was heading up from Cottonwood, having been discharged from his most recent stay in the psyche ward. I wasn’t sure what to expect of him, as he now had more unsubstantiated myths surrounding him than the Loch Ness Monster, but I knew that there was nothing to be gained by voicing this quiet anxiety; until we had Ned in our midst, any speculation would only add to the dark mystery that surrounded him.

  ‘Yep, might as well....’ I replied, passively watching my field of vision wander in and out of focus. The weed and alcohol combination had drained us of our vitality, channelling our revolutionary spirits into measured wisps of cloudy insight and satisfied complacency, leaving us both quite happy to sit there all night in introspective silence, contemplating space, time, consciousness, and whether or not it was weird that we were both in the same room and not talking. In spite of this, Collin rose without hesitation, wrapping himself in a scarf and jacket. I followed his lead, but chose instead to remain in a T-shirt and jeans; partly due to a paranoid notion of getting stuck in the endless decision-making process of dressing myself, but mostly thanks to the lyrics: ‘I don't need no arms around me,’ of the Pink Floyd song that happened to be playing on my stereo. I listened to the song for a little while longer, awaiting further instruction, before switching the stereo off at the wall and following Collin out of my room and down the hallway.

  ‘I know what you boys were doing in there.’

  Another quiet anxiety solidified as we entered the lounge; Mum was home, sitting on the couch, going about her existence in that lifeless way she often did. Collin and I paused with indecisiveness. I put on my glasses, slightly nauseated by the sharpened outlines. Mum shifted slightly to face us, her expression not quite a leer, but certainly not welcoming. I avoided her eyes and fidgeted with a hole in the fabric of the chair in front of me. Though she was the open-minded type, and there would be no consequences for our petty crime, this was a situation I always dreaded; my eyes felt bloodshot and my mind was murky - no position to argue my innocence. But there was no way out.

  ‘It’s the weekend, Mum,’ I protested. I didn’t mean to sound so blunt, but I was too stoned to act. ‘And we’re leaving now. Ned’s in town.’

  Mum turned her attention to Collin, ‘Collin, do your parents let you take drugs at home?’

  ‘No,’ Collin lied, stoned, unflinching.

  ‘Mum, we’re going now.’ My voice was clearer now, my three-beer confidence overriding the stoned uncertainty.

  Mum closed her book. ‘Look, Robert, I know you’re going to be curious. I accept that - it’s natural. Lord knows your father and I smoked the odd doobie when we were your age; it’d be unusual not to. But -’

  ‘We’re going now Mum. I'll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘No, listen to me Robert. Sure, your father and I got high every now and then, but never would my parents let me smoke in the house. And we certainly didn’t let it get in the way of our education.’

  ‘It’s a Saturday. This isn’t even anything to do with school.’

  Mum sighed. ‘What you boys don’t realise,’ she said, ‘is that we know more than you think. I know neither of you went to school yesterday; and Robert, your room absolutely stank of pot when I got home. We’re not blind, your father and me.’ I could tell by her tone that she knew she was right, though she wasn’t entirely - Collin and I actually spent most of the morning at school that day. But there was no point in mentioning that; it was time to leave.

  ‘I don’t care Mum. We’re going now.’

  ‘Your father will be hearing about th -’

  ‘Whatever Mum I don’t fucking care. Let’s go Collin,’ I interrupted, before turning and walking purposefully toward the freedom of the night. Foolishly, I glanced back to her as I stood in the doorway, and for a moment our eyes connected. Her expression was more hurt than angry, her spirits broken by the insolence of her wasted son. It was her who finally broke the eye contact, a gesture of bitter acceptance as she turned back to her book. I once again found myself paralysed with indecisiveness, and stood staring at her from the doorway, troubled by the stirrings of repressed empathy.

  ‘Come on,’ Collin said from the doorstep. With that, I closed the door on Mum and her worries, without a goodbye.

The walk was refreshing - T-shirt, jeans, and cap in the cool moonlit night, warmed only by intoxication and the abandon of dark. These were the days before alcohol was a mandatory part of socialising; it was a trip, being drunk. Tripping, however, was mandatory.

  It was Collin who turned us all on to hallucinogens, earlier that year. Apparently some of his brother’s friends, who were quite connected, took him on a three-day acid binge to the edge of his mind, culminating in the ingestion of some exotic hallucinogen called DMT. He ranted for months about the otherworldly wonders of the psychedelic experience, before finally arriving at my door one morning with a bag of magic mushrooms.

  This is why I owe Collin my life.

  We skipped school that day - Collin, Michael, and I - and went to Collin’s often parentless home for the experience, the rite of passage. It was there that Collin showed me his poetry while Michael sat on his phone, harassing all those who had the misfortune of being on his contact list. No one had ever shown me their poetry before, and one in particular was tattooed in the depths of my brain indefinitely:

to tap the void

through images unseen

from the worlds within dreams

become the infinite

dance recklessly through unknown realms

where all is known and all has happened,

an inter dimensional scout - reporting all findings

back to our hologram reality

before they return to the chaos

from which they were salvaged

With madness of the senses

invoke this strange world

of half forgotten hopes and fears

LSD - an orgiastic philosophy

to explain what these words cannot

to open the mind’s eye to the cosmic forces

creative delirium

forget yourself

become the universe

  His words awoke a dormant instinct within me, a lust for the hidden shamanic echo that still glows deep within the confines of rigid materialism. I began spewing my every uncensored thought over whatever blank surface I could reach in a compulsive effort to give form to the wild inspiration, manifesting my thoughts through many mediums well into the night.

  A little after midnight, after we had long since parted ways, Collin appeared wild-eyed at my bedroom window with some more mushrooms he had picked. After we feasted, I showed him some of the words and images I had created, aflame with the primal fire he had lit. My creations captivated him, as his had me, and we both knew something important was happening, that things would be different. But there was a darker side to this exalted state - a fear of the dark, fear of the unknown; a sinister introspection that persisted after the initial inspiration had worn thin, leaving me with a phantom itch in my mind, an itch Collin was all too aware of.

  ‘You hear that?’ he asked, sitting on the very edge of my bed, shaking with passionate, magnetic tension; his preternatural eye watching my mind go about its masochistic dance.

  I stared back at him, frozen in place.

  ‘That's their voices, man. Your doubters. Your persecutors. You're listening to those who judge you the most, making their voices your own. You’re becoming your own nightmare.’

  I could feel the notion rising within me as he locked his gaping pupils onto mine.

  ‘But you know,’ he continued, setting my drawing down next to him, ‘therein lies the power, man. Just beyond the limits of acceptability. Beyond the limits of sanity. Where the sane fear to tread. It's only when you're truly in touch with your inner-workings that you can rise above, become something more than human. Only by internalising the voices of those who doubt you most can you truly understand where the barrier they impose upon you lies. It's a herd mentality, man; they don't want you to venture too far from the flock. But when you dare to stray, when you have faith in your own personal magic, you can access the artifacts that lie beyond the reach of others; you can look God right in the fucking eye and take what would be yours, if only you could transcend the need for the approval of others.... That's how you become a leader, man. An explorer. When you shove the need to make sense to others in favour of what you understand at the deepest levels; when you're truly in the moment, truly trusting yourself ... that's when you cease to be a sheep and become the dog. That's when you exert your influence on the masses; the terrifying truth within your grasp, the art of captivation second nature....’

  For a moment he seemed to have lost his trail of thought; I was taken over by a powerful urge to speak, but something in Collin’s stillness conveyed total control, a deliberate effort to create a sense of space within which the psychic echoes of his words would fade organically.

  ‘But when you miss the moment, Robbie,’ he said finally, ‘when you hesitate, when you let the doubt of the weak take control.... That's when you're reduced to a projection of the simple-minded masses, the slaves who look down upon you for your deviations, if only to justify the prisons they themselves have become dependent on. The risks of a life of limitations are more subtle, but infinitely more dangerous: You could become a pale, muddy reflection of the shadows of your peers, a burden; your unique vision a symptom of some kind of deep-seated sense of inferiority, a symptom of fear rather than spirit.’

  Every word he said resonated so deep within me that all I could do was listen. His enthusiasm was so much bigger than me, bigger than him, contorting his body with nervous energy as if it were trying to shed him entirely and live its own independent existence. His eyes were enormous and crackling with electricity, their fervour drawing me into his inner-world.

  ‘But if you can align with the moment - not repress but transcend the doubts of others - when you're ... when you're awake, when you're.... Like when stood up to Mr. Clarke when he was picking on Ned. Or when you drew that fractal comic you just showed me. When, you know.... When you know, man, when you truly fucking know. You can rise above the bullshit, manifest as naturally as the wind, your very will unfolding like some divine plan, assisted by the momentum of the universe....’ He gestured to my evening’s work, piles of intricate drawings and muddled words covering the surfaces of my room, ‘This ... this is the moment. The mushrooms.... They wrench open your soul, man, show you to the light, the moment, the Moment, that feeling of pure fucking power when you man up and accept that which lies beyond. Fuck all this social-conscience be-a-part-of-the-hive shit. Even school, man; it's such a narrow vantage point. We're going beyond, man. I can feel it. And I know you can too. Shrooms.... Fuck, man, I bet this is just the start of it. We gotta ride this fucked up wave as far as it'll take us, man.’

  This exaltation climaxed with him slashing his pocket knife across the thumb-side of my forearm, the searing pain making me gasp, sending my heart into palpitations. The surreality of the action froze my thoughts into a burning silence, only to be melted by Collin's knowing stare, coupled with the oddly comforting warmth of the blood as it broke off and trickled down my arm. The action itself was so fluent and natural, in such harmony with some grand invisible order, that its meaning and significance were clear to me immediately: Had he not cut me at all, had he hesitated, the Moment would have been absurd; to leave my arm un-sliced would have been a break in the continuity of space-time itself.

  Entranced, I watched the blood navigate my veins down my arm and form a tiny pool in my upturned fingers. I looked up at Collin, who had risen after wiping his pocket knife on one of my shirts, and I could feel my eyes asking questions I knew him well enough not to voice. He held my gaze for a few seconds as the intensity built to an almost unbearable pitch, before gifting me with a somber nod of his head and drifting out my window without a word, his movements precise and feline-sleek. I stared in silence at the gently swelling puddle in my fingers for several minutes after his departure, absorbing its meaning and significance: Collin had created a masterpiece; not in imagery or song or poetry, but with reality itself as his medium. Through his bold yet simple gesture, I learnt more about him, and the ideals that stirred deep within the still, black waters of his psyche, than I had in the entirety of our friendship. He created a perfect moment, expressing the infinite depths of his wild, ecstatic philosophy in an instant, reducing my words and images - and even his own - to no more than marks on paper.

  He later told me that the small trail of scar tissue left on my arm is to remind me of the everlasting moment, the Moment that is always with me when I choose to look. He also left a matching, less tangible, tear in the fabric of my mind, a small crack through which to glimpse the sublime lands beyond time and space - when I choose to look....

‘You down to trip tonight, Robbie?’ Collin broke my train of thought, appropriately.

  ‘Yeah I was just thinking that,’ I half-lied. ‘We’ll stop by East Boys?’

  Collin replied with an agreeable silence as we veered off toward the school yard.

  Since we weren’t talking much at that point, I roamed around my stoned thoughts for the remainder of the walk. I found myself once again dwelling on my discussion with Mum, only then realising it had been our first exchanging of words all day. Upon seeing the circumstances from her perspective, I was once again struck by that dank, musty guilt. With darkened clouds suffocating my high, I couldn’t help but question my actions: Why had I responded with such hostility to her parental concern? It was only natural for her to worry - it was just Mum being Mum. We had parted on bad terms many times before, but this time had felt different. There was a peculiar finality to it, as if the normality I had always counted on had finally been broken, as if things would truly be different now: No more telling me to dress nicely for school, no more forced visits to Nana's and Grandpa's, no more hot water bottle waiting for me in bed....

  I’ll apologise tomorrow, I told myself, flushing the gross feeling from my mind.

  After an eternity lost in the mazes of the undergrowth at East Boys High, we emerged laughing with damp clothes and several pockets’ worth of Blue Meanies - as well as a few deceptively bulbous mushrooms that turned out to be no good once examined under the street light. Though I had eaten no more than three or four medium-sized mushrooms, I already felt the unsettled whirl of lift off - though this could possibly be attributed to sheer anticipation.

  For a few minutes, we stood under the streetlight, sorting the Psilocybin-containing mushrooms from the duds. Collin, evidently beginning to rattle and whir also, stood staring into his cupped hands with an instantly recognisable mushroom-grin. He met my eye and I couldn't help but grin moronically.

  ‘Fuck yeah,’ he said. He produced a scrunched up paper bag from his front jacket pocket - indicating that our hunt was less spontaneous than it had seemed - and filled it up with mushrooms, leaving a good pile of around ten in his right hand. ‘Let's do this.’ He then crammed the whole remaining handful into his mouth and chewed it with a bemused grin, before swallowing with a dramatic shudder. I fingered my own pocketful of shrooms, and opted to wait until we got to the bar. The rest of the walk would sort my head out, I decided.

  ‘I think I'll dose with the rest of them. When we get to the bar,’ I said. Collin narrowed his eyes at me slightly, and I added, ‘But then I'm right there with you, man.’ Collin shrugged and we walked.

  Once we were moving, I realised my mind was clear and ready for lift off, and said, ‘Fuck it,’ and pulled a handful of mushrooms out of my pocket. I ate them one by one, gagging slightly, but enjoying the taste of dirt and all it represented.

  ‘Fuck yeah,’ Collin said again, smiling.

Lucy Winters

My daydream wanders along behind my languid eyes as they meander past the daddy long legs in the corner of my ceiling to the raindrop dotted window overlooking the empty street, where they stop to consider something, forget, and decide just to blink a few times before continuing past the hat tree in the other corner and slowing to a halt as the poster above my desk freezes everything into cold damp reality. It's a picture of a glowing brown nebula, a celestial eruption, burning through the stars and the blue haze of space around it. It's called the Pillars of Creation. It's what makes my room my home. Where my eyes go to rest. Turns all the words in my head into blurry poetry. Makes me feel like all those little annoying things that get me down don't matter so much. Like everything is happening like it's supposed to . . .

  Well, usually it makes me feel like that.

  This time it reminds me of Collin, and it makes my blood suddenly feel so cold.

  Fuck . . .

  I forgot about that . . . It's like trying to remember a dream.

  Even then it was like a dream . . .

  That's why it didn't feel like I was doing anything wrong. It was all so unreal. Like being in a whole different world. In the stars. In the Pillars of Creation. Somewhere where people and our wayward whims don't matter. It didn't even feel like it was me. It didn't feel like a part of this life. Didn't feel like it would matter in this world at all. It was like harmless words. Like a daydream. Like the strange thoughts that happen when you're not quite asleep yet . . . I'm pretty sure you can't hurt anyone by thinking. Ned thinks you can. But Ned also thinks that living things are just inanimate objects that got a disease that made them start thinking.

  Fuck.

  It feels real now . . . Everything feels real now. Realer than real. The walls and the ceiling seem more solid than they did when they were part of the poem. Everything feels somehow more static than usual, all the furniture hunched over, sitting too close together, trying to ignore each other . . .

  When Stan and Robbie left last night, it was just me and Collin here. Something sparked him inside and he grabbed me by the mind and threw me dazed and whirling into his world. His thoughts and words were so unexpected, so different than anything I'd heard or felt before, that there didn't seem to be any way to react. Like all I could do was go with it. It was like if a movie I'd watched a hundred times before suddenly and inexplicably ended completely different than any other time I'd ever watched it. Collin threw away the script that night. Ripped to pieces everything in my life I thought I knew. Made me feel like a kid again. Like everything was alive, the sky and the walls, all trying to tell me things that would make sense if only I spoke their language.

  Ned would say that means the sky and the walls are getting sick.

  The Pillars of Creation are jagged like teeth and stalactites now, so I roll onto my side and look at Stan on the floor. He's lying animal on his front, reading Calvin and Hobbes with this funny expression on his face that warms my icy blood. It's like a smile, but his eyebrows are furrowed like he's concentrating real hard . . . He's not like Collin. Or Robbie or Ned. He's a creature of the earth. Mammalian. Not quite so exotic . . . Like he's older than the rest of us, sort of. More careful. He always knows what's waiting for him when he goes in. Always knows what he's doing. Economy of motion, maybe. Not like a monk though. More like a warrior. He's the only reason they didn't get beaten up by The Straightedges last night.

  His smile fades as his eyes narrow even more and he mouths something to himself then smiles a wry smile that lingers. It looks like he's just read something that's blown his mind, or maybe just reminded him of something interesting. I laugh a bit without meaning to and he looks up into me, tilting his head to the side a little, like a dog. The pale red of his stoned eyes makes the grey of his irises like the blue of distant mountains. But they're still real focused. This real intent stare he's always got, almost cross eyed, but not quite. Like the way a kid looks at you when you've caught his attention. It doesn't make him look dumb though. It more just emphasises the sharp angles of his face, the intensity of his attention.

  I say, ‘You're a beautiful creature, Stan,’ which I really mean, even though I'm sort of just trying to push Collin out of my mind.

  His face relaxes into a smile that's stoned and dippy, not all stoic stiff like normal, sort of melts into me as our eyes rest together. My smiling warrior. I mustn't forget that. I'm with Stan. Fucking that up could be the worst thing I ever do.

  He says, ‘You're a beautiful creature too,’ and laughs just one beat. I start to wonder if Collin said anything like that last night, but I can't piece it all together. My memories of being with him all just blur into the formless images I saw when my eyes closed, and the deep, dreamless sleep that followed. Things are different when Collin's around. Reality is different. He's not a warrior like Stan. He's something else. A sorcerer. Mystical. Showed me the armies in the sunset clouds. The slow motion explosions in the night sky . . .

  No. I'm with Stan. I can admire Collin from afar.

  He's still looking at me with a cat smile, curled up at the corners. I guess that means he didn't notice me thinking about Collin, but you can never be sure about these things. He closes the book and stands up, stretching his long arms to the ceiling, exposing his pasty but muscular torso, much stronger than Collin's.

  ‘Shall we?’ he says, reminding me of our plans as he arches his back. ‘Ned should be in town soon.’

  Images of Ned flash through my mind, but I can't quite make out the finer details of his features or expression, which reminds me how long it's been since I saw him. Collin texted me something about this a while ago . . . Quite a while ago now. I start to wonder if it's rude that I didn't text him back, and decide it's probably not since there was no question mark in his text. He described the plan for the night as a bacchanal. A bacchanal to welcome Ned back. I asked Dad and Stan what a bacchanal was, but Stan didn't know and Dad just looked at me funny. It's a good word though. Bacchanal. Collin's got good words. I'll ask him what it means at the bacchanal. He'll be at the bacchanal. All questions will find their answers at the bacchanal . . .

  ‘Yeah?’ Stan says, coaxing me out of my daydream.

  ‘Yeah . . . Collin text before,’ I say, sitting up. ‘Him and Robbie are gonna go to the Disarray to meet him. We can go hang out there?’

  I slide onto my feet all stoned and groovy and take Stan's hand and lead him out the window in a half dance, since I know he won't want to talk to Dad like this.

  It's not raining out here anymore, but there's a hazy sort of wetness to the air, enough to make my bare feet sink into the grass just a little as we walk. I smile to myself because it tickles and Stan's noticed and he's smiling too, but I'm not sure if he knows what we're happy about. The sound of the water rushing along the gutter and the smell of the rain wrap around each other and join the tickle of the earth as they all shiver up my spine. I let all the sensations drizzle down me and they turn into this tingle that's got so much energy in it that I have to do something with it. I squeeze Stan's hand, hiding all the shivers in the microscopic world between his hand and mine and leave them there so we can both feel weightless.

  We walk quiet and happy for a few blocks before Stan says, ‘I don't really know about Collin . . . Don't really get the cunt. I dunno,’ narrowing his eyes with strange stoned questions. I can tell by the way he said it that he'd been wanting to say it for a while. But I don't really want to talk about that, so I pretend to agree and we walk smiling sleepy along the wet footpath, my turquoise swirled dress trailing like a robe.

  Ned's face drifts into my mind again and I can make out the details of his expression a bit more now, which reminds me of his swaying walk and his terrible posture and sunburned nose and all the strange and wonderful things he used to say, like little snippets of unwritten fairy tales. It makes me feel close to him, closer than I have since he went back to Cottonwood. I'm starting to feel excited and maybe a little nervous about the fact that I'm actually going to see him. It finally feels real. I'm actually about to see Ned. At the bacchanal. He wasn't well when I last saw him. He looked like one of nature's mistakes, all magnets and batteries, smashed up and stuck in tar. Like he had died, been buried, and come back again . . .

  But he's better now, I think. Collin says he is. I'm going to give him a hug when I see him. Someone needs to look after him. I get a colder, creepier shiver up my spine when I imagine what he might be like now, but then I just stop thinking completely. It's just all creepy and confused now, like a kid in the dark. Enjoying the stillness, I feel the warmth of Stan's love spread from my hand into my thoughts, walking into the cool night, full moon shining silver into our veins.

Ned Devlin

Her pretty face kept me interested, but after hearing her views, or lack thereof, on the String Theory, I felt it was time to leave her with her blood puddle and glass shards. I had an Agenda, an army of Agendas in fact, which seemed to be a rarity in whatever misfortunate town this was, and I was fairly sure someone as bored as her would come to her aid.

  Things have changed, said one Thought to another, rather loud for the discarnate, as we moseyed along the silent highway, eyes peeled wide open searching 30-30 for the right hitching spot, thinking in terms of thumb visibility, mostly. A growing lack in Concern for sleep had been directing my movements for some Time now, thrashing and yanking my flaccid Mind through unknown towns like a wild, stoned puppeteer, leaving me wandering about like a phantom, peeling away at the layers of Reality with nimble origami fingers, shying away from the safety of the Earth's atmosphere and into the nether regions of the Minds where I met all sorts of folk who moved and perceived with all manner of multidimensional blasphemy. Being somewhat lost in chatter with these Creatures myself, I lost Mind of my outstretched thumb completely until a small car pulled over, containing a large man with an air of something like dignity or Debauchery, complete with a two segment nose and the grey flecked eyebrows of a big thinker, one who stares so far into the distance that he doesn't even notice anything like mosquitoes or Fractals, salivating just enough to show he knows what he sees.

  ‘North?’

  North.

  And I got in, noting immediately the small stack of pornography sitting between us, a visual arrangement that seemed to have been chosen by our Creator Himself to sort of complement this man's constant dabbing at his forehead with a folded cloth, as well as the seedy ambiance of my newfound sleeping patterns.

  ‘That one's from Germany,’ he dropped it on my lap, ‘I've been down south trading adult magazines with some friends. Old friends. What about yourself? What kind of porn are you into?’

  I had to think for a second about that, still a touch bewildered by the lack of introductions, and the nature of Reality in general. It had been some Time since I

  ‘Well I like porn where the wife catches her man with another woman and gets involved herself,’ he continued, talking with like this motivational speaker sort of tone, interrupting us before we'd finished talking, us all just quiet now, listening, ‘Like this one I watched where the girl was sucking this guy’s cock in the shower, and he’s like ungh ... uuuungh! while she sucked him off - and his cock’s like my arm, you know. Like this. Oi, buddy. Over here. Like this. Y’know, I really think they use a penis pump for a lot of European porn, like uh ... nah nah, a couple of pages back ... yep, that's the one. That's the fellow. See, there's definitely a penis pump involved there. I can guarantee it. White men have a much smaller penis, you see, except maybe the Greek but ...’ and then the Moment sort of expanded around us, a sort of quirk of Reality gifted to me by like a Force or something or someone on my side out there, allowing me to consider in detail this man and his Motives: He looked Latino, maybe Mexican or even half caste Aboriginal, but certainly not white, which was enough information for Now, the whole wondering more just a dukes up or dukes down kind of thing than a fully fledged investigation, matters a little less murky now and not really worth worrying about, the passage of Time starting up again with a choking start, sort of moving with more momentum now, like water breaking through a dam, and my friend continued on through the temporal weirdness: ‘, certainly not the majority of Caucasians. It’s just genetics, you know. So anywho, the guy’s going fuck ... fuck yeah! fuck! Fuck! Right fucking into it, you know, just fuck fuck fuck yeah! You following? And she's like yes! Yes! Yes! And the guy's going fuck! Fuck! Fuck yeah!’ and my new friends eyes glaze over, channelling the spirit of that man maybe, evidently a capable driver, more aware and courteous than Kane, even in the midst of sexual crescendo, perhaps, even, a master of the voluntary split brain technique, with one Mind minding the highway and its 100kph metal projectiles and the other with a ‘do not disturb’ sign or maybe like just a tie around the door handle, I couldn't say for sure, ‘Then the guy turns her ‘round, and just when he’s about to shove it up the wrong ‘un, the girl goes “but I poop from there” and the guy says “not right now you don’t” and shoves it right up there!’ followed by a roaring laugh, the 2C-E in my receptors converting it into a horrific sort of neighing sound, as if a young horse had found the same fate as the lucky lady in the shower.

  ‘Eh? Eh?’ he urged me, nudging my elbow, not all that concerned about the road at all. I could feel this thick coat of like perversion and such covering his skin, even through my jacket and his, tangible, his eyes scanning, darting up down and around to stop and rest on the open page of the magazine on my lap: A young lady getting it up “the wrong 'un”, the car left to navigate on its own. He looked from the page to me before speaking quietly: ‘Bet that’s making the ole dick stiff, huh? Am I right?’ and I had like maybe two seconds of everything paused eye contact to decide whether or not my erectile state was any of his concern, before he flickered and began reliving another film of his favourite genre, adamant that this one was narrated by David Attenborough, the central theme being man’s search for the elusive beaver. ‘Oh christ it was making the ole dick stiff. My lord,’ he made sure to mention, several times.

  Though admittedly unusual, the whole situation was perfect for my needs: He liked to talk, didn’t like to listen, and I had nothing to say, with Silence quite possibly the attack I'd been warned about earlier, sat waiting, probably easily spooked, the hunter sat in Zen, with one hand on his shoulder enough to kick in his instincts then bang! shots fired, and all the Thoughts running about again, tugging and pulling, exerting pressure, another smokescreen unwilling to part, cramp of the cerebrum, causing a numbness in the extremities, then paralysis, but never death: A kind of locked in syndrome, nostalgic Catatonia, then that's your old pal ned up and off to Cottonwood again, another winter wasted in Hibernation, bored and liquid warm inside with Valium gloop . . .

  And if his intentions were sinister, I had my trusty McCain’s box cutter in my right pocket: There’s a good market for certain severed body parts back in Cottonwood.

  He went on in this manner for some time, every once in a while reminding me to feel free to flick through some magazines, me feeling very free to do so, him giddy with enthusiasm: ‘I'm thoroughly enjoying this, Ted,’ admiring my tendencies toward listening rather than speaking, suggesting teaching or social work down the track to best make use of my Nature, then back to playing Mr. Conduit, heartfelt histrionics and vivid, pornographic Nostalgia, the occasional query regarding the firmness of my own penis (Never you mind Old Bean) me just relieved to be in close quarters with someone without interest in me or my Life, though far from aroused by the exposed flesh within the pages, just slightly curious about a particular lady with ♏ tattooed on her rear, the symbol of Scorpio, me having a nice inner cackle about the clairvoyant whore, Pornographic Mysticism, then my friend on a new story: ‘... So I woke up and he was sucking my cock! So of course, I was furious, but funny thing is, it was the best gobby I'd ever had. The man knows the sweet spots, you know,’ he turned to me: ‘Would you ever let another man suck your cock?’ His eyes connected to mine, and it was then that I noticed he had the wide eyes of a fiend, not really hiding much with his eyelids at all.

  Staring back with a sort of fiendish look of my own, I could see clearly where this was leading, and I entertained the Thought of taking the situation to its natural conclusion, quickly deciding against it: There was a long journey ahead of me, and hallucinating through unknown towns with a severed penis dangling out of my pocket wasn’t ideal, so I shook my head no. He shrugged, Your loss, and regained his flow without trouble, getting lost in the intricacies of talking dirty during sex, stopping only to berate the last hitchhiker he'd picked up for not participating in conversation.

  I wondered a lot whether his Motives were predatory, as his interest in the state of my cock would suggest, or if he was simply an old pervert who didn’t know his Boundaries, perhaps a bit lost in the Static himself. After some thought, I decided on the latter, him having been down south trading adult magazines with friends, presumably folk much like himself, stepping into the Bizarre hand in hand, to put it mildly, though I shudder to think at this point. I sensed like a jetlag in his social adjustment, me probably the first human he’d spoken to in some Time who wasn’t perpetually aroused, just a man not quite sure how to go about a non sexual situation, me being in his domain anyway, perhaps best to just let the wing-ed fly. With that in Mind, I relaxed into the oceanic undulations of 2C-E and Sleep Deprivation, entertaining myself reading his porn and smoking his cigarettes as he continued his depraved one man seminar.

Stan Richards

I'm kinda disappointed when we get to the Disarray. The walk here was cool. Just me and Lucy, wasted as. Lucy started naming parked cars, like giving them human names. I lost it when she called this rustic fisherman's ute ‘Pete’. It was so fuckin' spot on, and sounded so fucked with her clear like radio-chick voice. I got the stoner-giggles real hard and had to sit down on a bench on Regent Street to sort my shit out. Then Lucy pointed out that Dean, a swanky young beamer, was staring at the rear end of this pompous, sky-blue mini who was looking pretty indignant about it and it all started up again. It's so much better when I get wasted too. It's kinda like babysitting when it's just her stoned... I prolly woulda thought naming cars was a pretty stupid thing to do. Praise be to Jah, you fuckin' good cunt.

  We finally get inside and it's empty except for Collin and Robbie and a few lurkers - Rory's Dad and that crowd, dero cunts. No Ned though. Apparently no one's heard from him since yesterday, hitching out of Marksdale. I kinda feel like telling the cunt off, just like a sort your shit out kinda thing. Like catch a fuckin' bus or something. He only got out of the wards a couple days ago, and knowing him he'll have his nose in some weird-ass drugs and end up back down south real fuckin' quick.

  I can tell those two are on shrooms again. Robbie's bright-eyed and sweaty with this edgy bushbaby-type smile, eyes bulging behind his glasses. Collin's a manic grin sandwiched between a queer fedora and a tan coat, with maybe like an inch of his ass actually on his seat. Most people are sorta like kids when they're tripping, like all nervous and giggly and shit. But Collin seems to get a different buzz. Intense eyes and this real clear, quiet voice, like he's speaking right into you, makes everyone else stop talking and lean in to hear better...

  I give him a quick nod as I pass and take a seat next to Robbie in the corner. Lucy's sat next to Collin on the other side of the table. They're hunched over something Collin's got cupped in his hands. I imagine it to be a bird with a broken wing he's picked up, but that's fuckin' stupid so I dunno why I even...

  Robbie's animated as fuck, going on about some shit that sounds like it’s coming straight out of Collin's mouth. Comparing schizophrenics to Amazonian medicine men, I think. I dunno, he's sorta lost me. I don't mind listening though. I got a lot of time for the cunt. He's a fuckin' weirdo for sure, but you can tell he's a good dude. Just in his own little world a lot of the time.

  ‘...'cause 'cause these days, right, what I reckon is that if your brain's wired to receive messages from higher dimensions, you get called - like, think of the brain as more of a tuner than a transmitter, so you could, like, turn the dial to different frequencies, like... think of the brain as like a dinosaur's skull. Now imagine the palaeontologist blowing through the, like, uh, passageways, making a sound like the dinosaur used to, 'cause the sound is from the air going through that passageway, so it sort of manifests as... like the way someone's mind produces a thought, like presents it to their consciousness, is like the wind from like the wings of a pterodactyl or something, like a winged creature which represents the source of the - oh wait, yeah, that's the palaeontologist. Yeah. So that's like the... 'Cause that's the only way they can really get any kind of idea what sound the dinosaur made, so, uh... like waves, you know... Wait, what was I talking about before I said the thing about the wings?’

  ‘Uh... you said that the mind is like a dinosaur's skull?’ I'm interested in where he's going with this, but I'm also starting to wonder if there's actually anything there. Besides dinosaurs.

  ‘No no no, no, no, consciousness is the dude blowing into the skull, like the source, the absolute source of consciousness. And then the passageways within the skull that define the sound are like... the shape of the mind? Like the way your brain interprets the greater consciousness, the psychic blueprint that absorbs the greater consciousness and ultimately manifests as your perception - which is, uh, symbolised here as the sound of the dinosaur... The experience of the greater consciousness as filtered through your own individual psychic makeup. Yeah. That's it.’ I feel like he's explaining it to himself more than me, sorta thinking it through as he goes. ‘You get what I mean?’ The way he looks at me makes me feel kinda guilty, like I should be paying more attention.

  ‘Yeah I think so. But what's that got to do with schizophrenics?’

  ‘Oh yeah, right,’ he edges around on his seat, looking at his hands which are showing me a square shape for some reason. ‘So the schizophrenic's, like, psychic shape - uh, psychic pattern, that is... It's less intricate than most, so more of the greater consciousness gets through, giving them a less refined perception than, uh, the rest of us. 'Cause like for the rest of us, there's more of a maze for the greater consciousness, the source, to get through, so it's a fully formed ego identity by the time it emerges, having experienced a few, uh, like, corners and dead ends. A bit of problem solving and quality control. But for a schizophrenic, or, like, someone on shrooms, the maze isn't there - or at least it's less intricate. So it's like... Like swallowing something whole. Like dropping a tennis ball through a hula hoop.’ He's moving his whole body around as he talks, giving off that Einstein-on-crack vibe he gets when he’s wasted. ‘You know what I mean?’

  ‘...Uh, no not really. Sorry. But it sounds like you do. I'll have to get back to you on that one.’ I'm not sure if I'm telling the truth. It'd be cool to know what he's on about, but I'm no intellectual. I can't play around with ideas like Robbie.

  He rearranges and starts up again, leaning in with important hands. ‘Alright, well think about it as a human finger planted into a busy hive of insects, but the insects-’

  ‘Wanna take shrooms with us Stan?’ Lucy's standing between the two tables in front of us, going up and down on her toes with excited eyes. Her hands are making like a cup full of mushrooms. Robbie bobs his head around and mumbles something to himself and starts writing on this notebook on the table.

  I pick one of the mushrooms out of her hand and hold it up to the dim light above our table. It's got a fat stalk that gets like this steel-blue sheen when catches the light. Pretty cool looking, I guess. Like snakes. Still kinda sketchy about those kinds of drugs, though. I had them once before. Same crew, minus Collin. It was pretty cool at the start. Made music sound real cool, like Tool and shit I'm not usually that into, the kind of shit they always play here at the Disarray. Made everyone's jokes seem way funnier too... Till I realised it was only Robbie and Lucy making jokes, and I hadn't laughed in a long time. I tried to get in on it, but nothing came out right. And Ned was totally out to it. Not like Robbie is now, but just fully gone. I started feeling like everyone was tryna get me to leave...

  But it was all new to me then. Not just the shrooms, but like being properly with a girl. Even just having a friend group. I just didn't really know how to deal with it. It's better now though. It's mellow. Maybe we could slip off, just me and Lucy. Laugh at parked cars or something. I wonder what fucking would be like on shrooms. I'd be more of a gentleman, I think. Take it slow, enjoy the moment...

  ‘Fuck it, might as well,’ I say finally. ‘You've had some?’

  Lucy nods, smiling wasted and fidgety, sky-blue eyes ready to go black. She unloads the rest of the mushrooms into my hands.

  ‘Wicked, man,’ Robbie says, genuine. ‘You'll get what I was explaining soon.’

  I'm not really keen on that, but I'm glad everyone's happy. I munch down like half of them in one go and almost throw up. Collin sits back in his seat with a couple of jugs of beer and gives me a warm smile. Not sure how he managed to get served - the cunt looks about thirteen. I eat the rest of the shrooms one by one, washing them down with beer. They taste like the dregs of something, and the beer's just straight bitter, but it's all good. I'm hyped. I'm hyped that everyone else is hyped. There's like all this buzzing between us, like we're about to go on an adventure. Like we're all in it together, instead of it being like those three plus Lucy's tagalong boyfriend. Should be a good night.

Collin Callahan

Waves of euphoria pulsed through me, a sophisticated ecstasy filling my body with a barely contained current of energy. It was all perfect. The planets of my own personal universe were aligned. The gears and cogs of my Will were lathered up and moving freely. Life was beautiful.

  Each of my subjects, Doctor Callahan included, were now dosed with a few handfuls of fresh Copelandia Cyanescens. These were mushrooms with some kick - deep celestial blue and containing enough Psilocybin to really send a man into orbit. Much better than those undersized yellow things we used to find around robbie's garden. Stan will be tripping this time too. Cunt has no idea what he's in for. It's the Alpha and the Omega for one stan richards. The cunt even had the nerve to sit there smiling to himself, as if it was going to be a repeat of that pitiful excuse for a trip he had with ned and robbie. Not this one, mate. I gave up trying to control my grin and blamed it on the shrooms as I awaited the disintegration of his psyche, gleeful but ever patient.

  Robbie was ranting about the government's fear of hallucinogens, more or less paraphrasing the shit I explained to him earlier. I decided it was about time for the little cunt to have a freak out. His writing had begun to stagnate, still dwelling on the beauty of having his mind opened and whatnot. Still stuck on Level Two. I'll have to increase his dosage, I contemplated, laughing inwardly at feeling like a scientist, prodding and interrogating my little chimpanzee to assess its reactions. Robbie trusts me with his innermost thoughts now, ever since I showed him a few asinine notes from my acid days. Much less than he's shown me, of course.

  One should always know more than one says.

  Lucy had begun her own disintegration, though this was of no interest to me. ENFPs really are a bore when they get like this, sitting there open mouthed and vacant eyed, droning on about how trippy everything is. Getting a bit sappy with stan too, I must say. Concerned, I messaged michael and ned. They were needed.

  So really I was on my own here, though this was something I had become accustomed to. Satisfied that everyone was occupied and wouldn't be hassling me, I turned my phone off and found myself a dark corner to leave my body for a bit.

  I had a few layers of psychedelic nonsense to get through - the usual fractal tunnel leading to a sentient mandala type entity dishing out life lessons and all that. I had no business there. That’s ned's playground. Robbie's classroom. Stan's hell. So with a few perfunctory telepathic gestures and a quick sleight of mind, I extended beyond that realm and into the greater lands - no more than a horizon line along a pastel blue ocean streaked with electric orange-pink, a reflection of the sky above. No movement worth noting, just a suggestion of a slight breeze. I decided to spend a little while there, since I hadn't slept for some time. There was a long night ahead of me. A Harmony to compose.

Robbie Marks

This is the Moment, my scar reminded me, working in unison with the ancient, writhing energy creeping through my veins.

  I had lost all shyness and modesty in favour of self-certainty as I voiced my rabid thoughts without reservation, conversation as flowing and natural as the magical reality I was inhabiting. Most of the time, I wasn’t aware exactly what I was saying, or even what was being said to me; all I knew was that the perfect words and gestures were suddenly there, and Stan and Lucy were hanging on to my every word. I felt like an aerial pointed to the heavens, picking up streams of unbroken signals from lands unknown; the art of captivation second nature, as Collin had said.

  In the breathless intervals between words, I took time to absorb the significance of everything around me - my company, the unlikely circumstances that led to our friendship, our common interests, the darkly psychedelic ambiance of The Disarray - visualising it all as a three-dimensional grid made of lifelines which intersected one another at crucial points. The concept manifested to me as a psychic diagram of such transcendent beauty that the possibility of it being no more than a tripped-out notion in the morning filled me with a restless energy I couldn't hope to contain. The thought and the emotions it inspired injected themselves seamlessly into the flow of my verbal dance, solidifying before they had a chance to return to the chaos from which they were salvaged, leaving in their wake the embryonic outlines of another epiphany, trailing behind like the contrails of a jet airplane, taking on non-Euclidean hyper-forms in the background of my mind. This spawning notion was to do with the nature of thoughts and communication, somehow entwined with the three distinct molecular states of matter - though this was not to be consciously considered at that point; the music playing on the outside was gradually being taken over by a steady, growing beat inside me - an all-encompassing backdrop to my subjective experience that pulsed outward from my frontal lobe, guiding the frenetic groove of my body, and manifesting finally as the automatic movement of my pen across the open page of my notebook.

  ‘It's like everything's dancing....’ Lucy said absently during one of my verbal intervals, grooving to her own thought patterns. It was so close to my own musings that I couldn’t help but wonder how good a job the skull really does of containing our thoughts. Ned tried to explain it to me once, how thoughts roam the air freely as autonomous entities, interacting with each other beyond our control. He said that our minds are just like butterfly nets, catching whatever flies past; the distinction being that some nets have smaller holes and a different smell, attracting different butterflies. I always thought it was just a fun mental image to play with; but, as life has gone on, it’s made more and more sense.

  ‘Like what Ned said that time, how thoughts are like butterflies,’ I said, unconsciously testing the waters of our communal psychic landscape. Lucy replied with a knowing smile, a look of recognition flashing across her face. It wasn’t until I noticed Stan’s bewilderment that I realised that what I had just said was a perfect example of Ned’s theory in action.

  Ned....

  I tried to text Ned to see where he was, but my cellphone light was too disorienting, alien lights and symbols scrambling the channels between my mind and the aether. He’d arrive in his own time, I decided. That’s generally how he operates.

  ‘Have you heard from Ned?’ Lucy said, once again catching the same butterfly as me. Our nets must be the same shape, we thought.

  ‘No, not since yesterday,’ I replied.

  ‘Should we be worried?’

  ‘Worried....’ The sound echoed through my mind, quickly taking on the ghostly feel of a word that has been repeated over and over, shedding itself of all meaning. I could feel an internal wormhole of concepts and associations manifesting within me, but I shook myself away and re-focused on the matter at hand: Ned. He was coming all the way up from Cottonwood, and he was never one to text with urgency, so his lack of communication came as no surprise; but I felt like Lucy was talking on a bigger scale: Ned, spending time in the psyche ward then being released straight onto the creepy streets of Cottonwood.... A fucking spooky place, Cottonwood. According to folklore, those who choose to live there do so - or descend from those who do so - to take advantage of its proximity to the beloved psyche ward, which, for whatever reason, was viewed with a certain reverence among the atypical. Rumour has it that generation after generation has spawned, lived, and died within the psyche ward and the small neighbouring village, oblivious to the existence of the wider world. Collin and I went down once, to visit Ned. It was all deserted streets and empty, burnt-out houses. It's supposed to have a population of around twenty or something ridiculous like that. The spooky thing is that we didn't see any of them - just Ned and his silent, witch-like mother.

  ‘You mean, like, in general?’ I managed, unsettled by the sound of my voice, and the echoes of my Cottonwood memories.

  ‘Yeah....’ her eyes bulged with apprehension, the rest of her face subtly re-configuring to accommodate them. ‘I can’t ... think about stuff right....’

  Staring into her eyes, I tried to sort my thoughts into words, a task that often seemed to irritate them into amorphousness during the be-mushroomed state. The dim lighting of our environment gave my hyperactive mind plenty of opportunity to distort everything around her eyes while keeping her soul-baring stare untouched; in my peripherals, I watched her morph from a vaguely fox-like humanoid into some kind of wetlands creature before the background ambiance followed suit, adopting the general feel of an underwater cave, before reaching a crescendo of intensity and deflating back into relative sobriety. It was taking all the discipline I had to resist the temptations of these otherworldly fantasies and maintain focus. But I managed, mostly out of some unusual sense of responsibility for Lucy’s well-being.

  ‘What, uh, what kind of stuff?’ I asked, finding my footing again, wary of the atmosphere's next breath.

  ‘Like, what are we supposed to be doing here, at the bar? Is this what we do to have fun? Is this it? We just sit here? Am I supposed to be getting drunk? I don't want to get drunk, Robbie.’

  Her questions caught me off guard; I had surrendered to my imagination for just a moment and she had already strayed onto a whole other wavelength. The nature of her questions shook me too, a kind of reverse-déjà vu: It took me a few seconds to align with her woe; but, as soon as I did, I knew it was my only possible destination.

  ‘Fuck ... uh.... I guess we’re thinking? Like, figuring stuff out? It’s why we take shrooms.... You know? Like, see the world as it really is and shit, like deconditioning ... I was saying before to Stan that ... uh....’

  ‘I mean ... it’s all....’ her mind was scattered; an aura of worry had replaced her usual sunshine radiation, exposing my preternatural insight for the incoherent mania it was.

  ‘Yeah ... um.... Fuck. Where’d Collin go?’

  It was only after hearing my own words that I realised how much influence Collin had on our dynamic; he had left us for only a few minutes and all sense of order had vanished.

  Lucy's eyes shined wide with growing fear. ‘Is this why we take shrooms, Robbie? To get confused? Get scared?’

  ‘No, hold on. I’ll just go find Collin,’ I reassured her. My scattered ego protested, berating me for not handling the situation myself; but I shed the feeling quite easily, feeling a quiet, growing euphoria that seemed to be somehow entwined with movement, or perhaps action or forward momentum on a less tangible level. Hard to dwell in evolving circumstances, I concluded to myself, bringing a pained smile to my face. I scanned the bar briefly, ignoring the slow breathing of my surroundings, before spotting Collin in the far corner, asleep in his seat. I went and stood over him.

  ‘Collin.’

  ‘Yes?’ His eyes opened as he looked up at me, pupils shrinking to just under the size of his irides, his carelessness grounding me in reality. It was a good question: Yes? What is it Robbie?

  ‘Oh, um, what are we, uh.... What's the plan, man?’ I asked, feeling stupid. What was I freaking out about again?

  Collin smiled and said simply, ‘We’re shrooming at The Disarray. Ned's on his way.’ The shadows on his face danced like fire as his expression was taken over by a blazing grin that discredited my every paranoid thought. ‘You guys got some of that sweet come-up anxiety going on?’

  ‘Yeah I guess. Got a little caught up in some....’

  ‘You fucking trippers,’ he laughed. ‘That’s what we want isn’t it? A bit of tension, a break from the illusions of safety and stability we all cling to. Fuck the framework; let’s get a drink.’

  ‘Yeah man, see how it goes down,’ I shrugged, internalising Collin’s unwavering composure. Lucy and I must have caught a toxic butterfly.

  Collin gave me his trademark smile, alive with chaos and lust, before standing up and heading off to the counter. I stood lost for a moment, then went back to join Stan and Lucy.

  Lucy had found her groove in my absence, swaying her head with eyes closed to the slow, rumbling experimental rock. I sat in my corner next to Stan, who was grimacing at the floor, grasping at his sweat-soaked hair with both hands. I took my cap off and checked my own hair.

  Yep. Sweating like fuck.

  Breath deep, regroup. Find signal.

  Searching for signal....

Michael Farmer

Thank fuck for all the booze and dexies. I'm pissing away a massive fuckin' shitstain on the toilet, probly left there by one of the little cunts. Mum's too much of a fuckin' lazy piss head bitch to do anything about - But that's just me: Doing my bit. Most cunts'll aim for the shitstain when they take a piss, but then they'll leave it be as soon as their piss stream runs out. Not this cunt though - I force out a few last jets of piss to get rid of the last few dabs of shit, flush it down, boom, good as new. I'm the only cunt who ever gets shit done 'round here, but fuck it, it's called responsibility, cunt. If I got shit to deal with, I ain't fuckin' whinging about it like every other cunt, I'm straight in there, piss that shit away, easy, sorted, no need to thank me, it's called being a fuckin' good cunt.

  Charging through the lounge I go “Just pissed all that fuckin' shit away. At least some cunt ‘round here's keeping shit under control” to mum but she just tells me to fuck off and dozes off like always so I grab the bitch's drink outta her hand and smash it down and I'm off to my room, never mind the little cunts, they got that fuckin' lion movie on, sussed it. I get MSN going again and it's fuckin' Rory at me to come ‘round for a blaze but I'm pretty sick of the cunt so I invite Jeremy to the conversation and type out “l8r cunts” and exit out, leave those two fuck ups to sort out whatever bullshit they're fighting about this time, stupid fucks with their - Now I just gotta figure out whether to crush a pill or roll a J, more keen for a beer to be honest but - Check my phone to see if dad's got back to me about the homebrew and it's nada but there’s a text from fuckin' Collin Callahan going “Yo. Come 2 disaray. Bring 20 bux of chalk” and I'm kinda fucked off at him about it, like good cunt for texting in code and shit, but he ain't fooling anyone with that shit, like what would a cunt at a bar want with twenty bucks of - Fuck it, keen to rage. I ain't texting back 'cause that'll give the pigs something to go on, but I'm keen to head out in a bit - Fuck impulse control, it's just cunts who can't make their minds up about shit trying to get you - The ganja sorts it out better anyway, and I could do with a bit of coin, so fuck it, this shit'll end up in my nose quick smart if I stick ‘round here, sure as fuck.

  So I crush up one for the road, mean as missioning 'round in the rain on this shit, fuckin' straightedges and shit patrolling the streets too, gotta stay sharp. I sniff it up and I'm after a shirt but I stop for a quick geeze in the mirror. Getting pretty buff lifting them twenty kilo dumbells, fun as when I'm beamin', and my hair's grown out now, got me looking like Billy Kidman back when he was a skinny fucker and all the chicks were - I chuck on some grey shirt and the green hoodie with all the hentai octopus shit going down on the back and tie the mane up - Fuck it, let it down, freak flag a-fly. Dexies start kicking in so I shake my arms around for a bit of shadow boxing all tingly then back down for one last geeze at the mirror - Got a bit of a moustache and some sideburns going, first cunt in the class to - Fuckin' Robbie and Collin still got no facial hair going on, never even had to shave, no fuckin' muscles either, could kick both their asses, easy, even two on one and shit, Bruce Lee style, cunts acting like they know all sorts of shit no one else does when all they're doing is fuckin' 'round on shrooms, all about that Val Kilmer doors of perception shit, storming ‘round looking like Harry Potter and Draco fuckin’ - I pounce up onto my toes, dukes up, shouting “Hwoah!” at the cunt in the mirror, woulda scared the shit outta him if it was some other cunt in there instead of me. I chuck on a beanie and some shoes, check the pockets, sorted, storm through the lounge and mum's trying to say some shit but I have a swig of her wine and tell the bitch to fuck off and keep an eye on the little cunts, slam the door and hop into the elevator and tap out a beat 'cause the dexies are going whoop fuckin' whoop whoop then Ding! and I'm on terra firma, out into the night, mean missions, keen as fuck.

Stan Richards

‘Stan? Are you okay?’

  The female voice echoes around me, reverberating all metallic. Sitting up makes my whole body spaz out, like all my muscles are straining, so I'm curled up in a ball on the seat. Every heartbeat is like a maniac stabbing at my chest, and it's beating way faster than usual. Vibrating. I don’t know how long ago I ate the mushrooms, but I hope it finishes soon. I feel kind of dozy like I could go to sleep, but everything just gets crazier when I close my eyes. I just gotta wait this out. Fuck.

  ‘Stan?’

  I recoil as she puts her hand on my shoulder. Usually when she touches me, I feel all warm and sort of like I can feel it from inside of her. But now it's all prickly and sore, making this cold, gross feeling go all through my body. I look up, expecting, hoping, to see peace and purity on her face like I'm used to. But no luck. All I can see is fear and confusion, like some kind of sick mirror to my own fucked up pain. Robbie's up there too. Out there. And Collin. They're all looking down at me, baring their teeth with massive eyes, their strange yawns like silent roars. I recognise them all good, but they're all so menacing and I can't figure out what they mean to me.

Friends

Fried ends

Friends?

  I know the word, and I know what it means, but it doesn't make any sense to me anymore... Cold emptiness and alienation are the only feelings I can get from them, and the stray words that escape my mouth are only feeding the mass of horrible emotions around me.

Around me

I'm the centre of it

A star made of emotional filth

Giving life to a solar system of pain

  If I wasn't such a self-centred cunt, I'd supernova right now and save the universe a lot of trouble.

Stan? Stan?

Stan!?

  It's just like a fucked up chant now, makes me feel like spewing. Maybe if I spewed it'd all be okay. Maybe if I just fucking died...

  Robbie’s going ‘Just leave him, man.’ His voice sounds all mechanical and fucked up, but I like where he's going. ‘He'll sort himself out soon. He's in the subterranean realms now, it's up to him.’ Maybe he's right. Maybe I will sort myself out soon... It isn't exactly a comforting thought, though. I can’t even remember what I'm usually like. What I used to be like. All I can remember is being scared and depressed. I'm trying to find happy memories, but they all seem to be just be memories of me pretending to be happy so no one pays attention to how fucked up I am. Is this what happens when I can't pretend anymore? Just curl up in a ball and hide?

  My nausea and my bad thoughts kind of feel like the same thing now. ‘Sick in the head,’ a voice keeps saying, coming from inside but not in my voice... 

...Sick in the head...

  ...like a thought I’m not even thinking. Am I not even controlling my own thoughts? What happens now? Do I ever control my own thoughts? I always just kind of assume I'm in control, but what really makes thoughts happen... What the fuck is a thought? Is this a thought? Am I thinking now? Is a thought about a thought still a thought? Is it something else? Another kind of thought? A thinking thought? Are they all the same? What about thinking about that thought? Do thoughts think? Does that even make sense? What does making sense even mean? A chain of thoughts, leading nowhere, accomplishing nothing, and I'm back where I started, even more confused, finding it basically impossible to hold a chain of thought anyway, every thought just seems like utter bullshit the second I try reflect on it, which is already happening now, the complete fucking absurdity of reflecting on a thought, reflecting a reflection, what the fuck does that mean? Think what I just thought? Think the same thing again? Just fucking think the exact same thing again? What the fuck does what the fuck even mean? Holy shit I'm going under...

What the fuck?

Sick in the head.

  I'm not controlling my body either. Sick body. Sick body, sick mind. Jerking around. Just shivering or the start of a seizure? What the fuck difference would it make? What the fuck difference does anything make? What's the difference between anything and anything else? Fuck. Maybe I should... No. That won’t help. I just need to get rid of these thoughts, black it all out. Drink another beer?

I've had a bit much to think

So hand me another drink

  From across the table, Collin speaks quietly into my essence.

  ‘I just took a shit in the toilets. We could go, you know, hover around it for a bit. If you want.’

  That sick fuck. My whole insides feel like they’re spewing onto themselves now, grim yellow brown everywhere, even worse when I close my eyes. What the fuck was that supposed to mean? Did I hear him right? Did he even actually say anything? My nose fills up with the fetid smell of fresh shit. I try to breathe it out but it spreads all through my body. Only it's not like a smell anymore. It's like a feeling. An experience. I'm experiencing shit. Collin's shit.

  ‘What the... What the fuck?’ I hear myself say, an echo with no parent. A sound made by a sound. Just a memory. Did it ever happen? Who the fuck knows. Who the fuck knows anything anyway? Not me, that's for sure. I look up at Collin's face and understand nothing. A fucked up innocent stare. His eyes are sprayed black windows, his expression reptilian. A featureless ceramic mask.

  ‘What the fuck did you just say?’ I hiss, uncurling towards him, getting some strength back just out of anger at the sick fuck. His face is slowly rearranging now. His eyes, nose, and mouth are glitching around in a fleshy pool, twitching to the rhythm of my own spastic breath, like he's controlling my seizure with his fucked up movements.

Every breath

Another death

Don't stop till there's nothing left...

  ‘I said I'm gonna get some valium off Ned when he gets here. You look like you need it,’ he says, so clearly that everything stops shifting around, everything normal for just a moment. He looks into my eyes, holding everything together, then gets up and walks away and it all collapses. Did I just imagine what he said before? How the fuck can you tell? I am just imagining it. Collin's gone. But did it happen before? Did this echo have a parent? Or is this just sick shit going on in my own head.

You know, hover around it for a bit...

Sick in the head

Better off dead

  I sink back into my chair and look at the faces of Lucy and Robbie to see if they heard. But no clues. They’re just looking at me all worried. Not looking directly at me, but... monitoring me. Their eyes are pointed away, but they're tuned into me. A more primitive part of their brains still watching. Their inner-beasts, with different ideas than human minds. Watching me hungrily. Two monsters salivating in secret. Waiting for... something. If only I could hide it from them. My monster. Invisible to the human eye, but clear as day to other monsters. I was fine until Collin started talking. Well, I wasn’t fine, but... things were better. Hazier and less clear. Less monstrously clear. Less nauseatingly confronting. That motherfucker... Always acting like he’s on my side then sneaking bad shit into my head when I'm thinking somewhere else. Sinister cunt. No turning back now, though. This is just another struggle I gotta get through... But, nah, it's not even like that. This is like everything. Everything's a fucking struggle.

  My stomach pulses a wave of nausea all the way to my fingertips and I dry heave. Secret monsters exchange glances. I'm trying to compose or even just monitor my face and what it's doing, to express or do something with this pain, but my thoughts just suck me into this bullshit spiral where I feel so far removed from my facial expressions, and even the idea of them, that the whole thing just seems fucking retarded. If I could figure out what it means to want, I could maybe figure out what I want. But it's like I'm past the point of want, existing in a universe where there is only need. But what I need is just as confusing. Even trying to figure out what the fuck I'm actually feeling or thinking is beyond me. Thinking about thoughts... It'd just be like repeating whatever I just thought over and over, which just fucking happened again, and now I'm back here, back in this same fucking place again, thinking about what I just thought about. The whole chain of thought was just a stupid, pointless journey right back to where I started. Just a minor break from this claustrophobic, circular trainwreck of a thought process. And now I'm just here thinking through the whole spiral again, kidding myself that I'm looking back on it from a detached perspective, but knowing really that I'm still right in the fucking middle of it.

Sick in the head

Better off dead

You heard what they said

You're sick in the head

  Desperately clawing through the layers of schizophrenic fear, I cry out ‘What the fuck did that cunt say to me?’ finding momentum again as I fight my way out of the confusion, propelled out into the real world by grim misanthropy, desperately looking for some kind of recognition on one of those fucked up faces.

  ‘Don't worry, man,’ Robbie says, ‘it's just the shrooms fucking with you. You're free from the maze, experiencing pure consciousness. It can be overwhelming. We're getting some valium soon, you'll be all good. Just ride it out, man - anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.’

  Yeah, I'll take some valium and get all numb, forget all this shit. Hide the monster. But then what? Just wait for the mushrooms to wear off so I can pretend to be happy again? Is that really the way to deal with it? There’s no way I’ll be the same after this. There is no same. Maybe I used to used to be different, but now I've always been like this. I know the mushrooms didn't make me this quivering mess of a human. They just made me see what I already was. Or they made it so that I always was, even if I used to not always have been like this. There's no way out of this trip, this nightmare. The nightmare is me.

I am the nightmare

I am the monster

Sick in the head

I'm better off dead

  I sneak a quick glance around, but Robbie’s trying to catch my eye so I just look back at the floor. Maybe I can ignore this. I've ignored it fine up until now. But how could that possibly be a good idea? Do I dare turn my back on the monster? Close my eyes and block my fucking ears? Pull the blankets up above my head so I don't catch a glimpse of it before it shreds me to bits? Can that childish logic still possibly work for me? I wonder if everyone else is like me, scared and depressed, hiding it from each other... I dry heave again as I envision a society of people pretending to be happy just so everyone else can pretend to be happy. All trying to hide each other from the monsters, just till we go home alone. And we all know it's there, waiting. It's either that, or everyone else can be happy and content and I'm just missing that part of my brain. Or maybe they're the ones missing something. Maybe it's just me harbouring monsters. Which is worse? Either way, I don't want to be a part of this world anymore. Why the fuck should I stick around if it's just a whole lot of unhappiness and then death? The final death to conclude a lifetime of tiny deaths. But what if there is no final death? What if death never dies?

Every breath

Another death 

Sick in the head

Better off dead

  Are we all just living waiting to die?
  Or just me?

  Fuck...

  Fuck this. I give up hiding since everything sucks anyway and look around the grotesquely warping bar, trying to regain my sense of distance. The idea of this room having no doors or windows is stuck in my mind, even though I'm staring directly at a door. Collin and Lucy are at the counter with that dealer, Michael. Lucy’s standing there giggling while the other two talk with animated gestures that fill me with disgust. Their eyes flick towards me between words, just before they blink, just a quick flicker they probably don't even notice...

  Robbie sees me moving and goes ‘See it as a test, man. It's a challenge we don't face normally, when we're all caught up in what's going on around us, doing what's expected of us. It's facing yourself, man. Facing your demons. After a bad trip, it's always better than before, when you just ignored the rotten parts of your brain. I've been there before, man. You'll get through it. It’s only in total darkness that you can see the stars.’ He sounds just like Collin. I stare at the swimming carpet. It's not that interesting. Just nauseating. What does hallucinating even mean?

  Without really thinking first, I mutter ‘Whatever, Collin,’ and glare up at him, still hunched over. I can see he's hurt by my comment. I can feel it. Those big, shiny black eyes magnified by glasses and mushrooms. I don't feel bad though. Don't feel much for him now. He's not a person in the same way to me anymore. He's lost in Collin's fucked up little world. A pawn in a game of chess he’s too small to understand. More slime materialising. A monster creeping through the gaps in the air. Sneaking into existence... I want to tell him that, tell him how he's living in an imaginary world, fucking up his brain trying to figure out the universe. Trying to earn Collin's sadistic approval, which sounds even scarier than his hatred. Heading straight into a nightmare. The nightmare. The horror lurking just beneath the cushions of our lies. If I could explain it to him, I would. But I can't. I can't be nice anymore. Can't be civil. Can't pretend. The face is gone. The mushrooms have stripped away my personality, the acceptable me - the watered down version, fundamentally altered for the consumption of the public. All that's left is a miserable cunt. An obscene monster. The thin trench coat unbuttoned, just held together by claws... If I could find the air, I'd tell Robbie to get out before it's too late. To forget Collin's fucked up philosophies. Start going to school again. Have a conversation with his parents. Do all that shit people that aren't me, normal people, do to validate themselves. It's ugly, but it's the only chance we have to escape this eternal, deathless hell.

  But I say nothing. Instead, I look around at the people in the bar.

Shaved monkeys

poised

clambering around

balanced awkwardly on their insecurities

counting only on their desperation

frightened even of that comfort

  It's like a bunch of monkeys trying desperately to prove that they're better than monkeys, all covered in material and standing in ways to try and look good. All subtly bragging to each other about how far removed they are from any ancestor with a tail. If they’d just relax into themselves, they’d at least be good looking monkeys.

  Honest monkeys.

Honest monkeys

Too much to think

Need a drink

Sick in the head

Better off dead

  Horrible things swirl silently around me. First just sadness, then fear, then a kind of hatred. They circle around me like sharks, closing in until they’re resting on my skin, the sheer horror forcing my eyes shut. And then they open and the hate is inside me like blood. 

  I look over at Lucy and Collin. Feel nothing.

Every breath

Another death

Don't stop till there's nothing left

…

Time to supernova.

Ned Devlin

‘Oh, and one more thing: If you’re having a sexual discussion, throw in a few questions. It makes it more interesting,’ he said, releasing me into the rawky night. Having my Priorities in formation meant finding a concealed area to finish off my little power crystals: I’d be seeing my friends soon, and my binge of Consciousness had left me a touch frail, Thoughts all melting together and whatnot, making me forget the names and notions of the things around me, kind of contracting into a stupor that's got me motionless for a moment until things like shadows and wind give me a Shock! to keep me going on my way.

  Guided by my old buddy Dumb Luck, I found myself a port-a-john without having to do anything unnecessarily Life threatening like walking past someone or uttering something or any of that carry on. Inside, the walls huffed with frustration, wanting so badly to wiggle around and dance like they do when I get excited, but my brain was saying: ‘No! I haven’t the Time nor the patience for that kind of Nonsense,’ banishing the animating force of the Universe to the Imagination. WHERE IT BELONGS.

  I organised myself amongst the unpleasantness and lit my light bulb full of precious gemstones and got a little lost in the swirling typhoon of kilojoules contained within, watching embryonic ideas and like children's interpretations of modern cave paintings spawning in the smoke, a calming kind of Pareidolia, explaining many things to me but mostly just telling me that I was about to feel much better. I always thought of the whole process as a kind of sexual ordeal, with the Meth taking on the form of a sort of ectoplasmic penis, stimulating my psychic vaginal walls to Ecstasy. Unfortunately, due to the last while of mental promiscuity, my psychic vagina had become rather stretched, meaning the average Meth phallus would struggle to create adequate friction, like throwing a sausage down a hallway, as they say. This meant I had to burn my little crystals in increasing quantities to create an etheric penis large enough to satisfy my frustrated Psyche. But I managed, huffing and puffing away, lungs sort of smiling at all the activity, them being known to sometimes, when lost in Stasis, forget just how yielding they can be, the ole brain enjoying the extra oxygen too, as well as just the general extra of everything up there, with the Meth menthol like opening up the internal passageways, giving the Thoughts plenty of extra space to play freely, copulate wildly, and scribble all sorts of conclusions whenever they feel the general need, which, to conclude, doesn’t seem to happen all that much when all's thought and said.

  Once this was accomplished, and my Thoughts were chattering happily amongst themselves, I headed toward The Disarray where my friends would be waiting for me, their own Thoughts dancing and shouting about too, I’d imagine. The whole walk had me on edge though, feeling like perhaps I didn’t really know what was what, Ninjas frolicking about in my peripheral vision, knowing all too well how exhausted my faculties were. 

  But the walk didn’t go for too long, not with Time feeling so playfully effervescent, Thoughts fickle but buoyant, buzzing around and crawling all over me like wee spiders, me anything but bored, Time strutting purposefully with his spider spotted hide, me with plenty of insect repellent: Them little yellow and blue pills that right the wrongs of our Creator and His crooked ways, usually gifted to The Junkies back down Cottonwood ways, but not so much here up north, where I prefer playing thoughtless with my friends Robbie and Lucy and sometimes Penny or Alan or even Michael or Tracey and really just whoever, everyone all melting all together into an ease in which everyone else finds talking just as comical an activity as I, the whole trail of Thought fading away now, more a case of repeating itself enough to become just like background noise for the new Thoughts to shout over, the Mind all sharpened up good and proper, possessing certain newfound abilities, now able to sort of teleport by thinking loud enough, as long as I know for sure where I'm going, which, when pressed on the matter, I must admit is never really the case, the Universe and her little Uncertainties sifting about the place, Space as fickle as ever, by which I mean, yes, I suppose I did more walk than teleport, more just my Mind teleporting from my earlier self to a later version, a chemical coma or a blink of the Mind, like maybe even a Glitch of sorts more than anything magical or cosmic like teleportation, more Madness than Magic, just like a fuck conclusions sort of thing, bring on the Doubt, all hail the Ultimate Doubt . . . Right?

The Disarray is like this ancient mansion of sorts, once a castle for the spoilt, now a haven for the downtrodden, with gaping window eyebrows and a crocodile mouth awning opened wide, saliva string pillars and asphalt tongue rolled out along the ground, forking off in all directions to traverse the city, just to get a taste of it all, the crocodile itself sitting quiet all alone, body backed into the woods while the face looks out at the ole Human Zoo from afar, quite happy just to wait. My friends and I always appreciated the inner quiet that pervades the soul of the great creature, us being more the thinking types, wanting not a whole lot more than to live our Lives hidden from the threats of ‘The Straightedges’, this rather predatory clan of hominids very much opposed to anything that makes you think too much more or less than usual, them being pretty much like the alphasapiens around here as long as everything's all straight and narrow.

  Anticipating my arrival, as usual, my old friend Collin was stood outside, smoking a cigarette that said to everyone that looks can be deceiving, him having such an angelic face, such an easy smile, dressed all tidy as well, saying: ‘Ned, here,’ his penetrating Mind noting immediately my aversion to greetings, releasing a small waterfall of fungal brain petrol into my hands, ‘And give me some Valium, stan’s freaking out. Get them into you and come in.’ He liked to speak to me with as few words as possible, keenly aware of the oft ignored telepathy that goes on under the noses and over the heads of the unaware. A smart boy, that Collin.

  Inside, there was no real crowd aside from my friends, just a small array of downtrodden critters scattered throughout the bar, decrepit remains of the wealthy and immortal, folk whose Mind is like a receptacle for all the astral excrement permeating the air, rather than an aerial to receive orders from the greater Sirs, as per the Original Plan. Tasting like not a whole lot, I made quick work ingesting the Mushrooms, first thing I’d consumed that required chewing in a fair while. With this done, I made my way toward my friends, more following the parade of existential Terror than trusting my eyes, which had become less of a wise idea in recent times, them being about used up with all that noticing they'd been doing.

  ‘Check out my newest Composition,’ Collin said quietly, and we laughed into earshot of the Anxious Ones.

Robbie Marks

‘... and so it’s pretty much every cunt’s problem except mine,’ Michael concluded, sealing his rant with a satisfied gulp of beer. To what he was concluding, I wasn’t sure; his lack of verbal paragraphing had me overwhelmed, and I was dwelling on something Stan had said earlier. Had he really mistaken me for Collin? There was a certain venom in his voice, like he knew something he shouldn’t. Like he had something over me. I kept my ongoing analysis in the back of my mind, though; I had social obligations to uphold.

  ‘Yeah.... That’s true,’ I replied, still not sure what I was agreeing to.

  ‘Exactly. You’re a fuckin’ top cunt, Robbie. You know how it is. You get it.’ I was happy with that: I had responded appropriately. But I was hoping he had finished; his face seems to be everywhere when he talks to you, pursuing you like a persistent Bloodhound trailing the scent of your attention. Though the mushrooms seemed to be settling into the relaxed rhythm of the post-peak glow, I was still at the mercy of psychedelic hyper-sensitivity, and felt it necessary to limit my sensory intake until the Psilocybin had been completely metabolised.

  Michael had started up again, but was drowned out by Lucy's excitement ringing through the bar - ‘Ned!’ - whiplashing me out of his claustrophobic attention. Lucy, seemingly back to her old, excitable self, leapt out of her dream and rushed up to hug the more or less unresponsive Ned, leaving Stan with his troubles.

  Ned was moving around in his trademark style: Loose in his movements, never really looking anywhere in particular, with an obvious kind of distance from the situation. After communing with Lucy, he came over and sat next to me, smelling like a wet dog, and we spent the next few seconds looking at each other in silence. It amazed me how much more engaging it was to be in complete silence with Ned than it was to be having an in-depth conversation with Michael, which I was fairly sure I was still doing - the conversation now little more than background noise, taking a backseat to the zoetic silence I shared with Ned. Michael was oblivious: His main character trait.

  Ned's appearance disturbed me, reviving the ill-ease that had affected me earlier. Gone were the impish grin and sparkling eyes of the boy who would turn up at my door with freshly-picked wild flowers and stray geckos in his hands. In its place was a ghastly presence: A matted, black, half-dreadlocked mess of hair obscuring his skeletal, deathly-white features; sunken eyes surrounded by a darkness very much in contrast to the rest of his bloodless face; a penetrating expression that was completely unreadable, yet profoundly expressive of something I could never explain; eyes strangely alive and teeming with an eerie kind of vitality, dead-locked onto mine, unwavering.

  ‘So, how’ve you been man? Good to be back?’ I tried to break our trance. My attempt to sound casual was painfully transparent; he looked as if he didn’t hear me, looking at something many dimensions beyond me. I realised immediately that I was going about this the wrong way, talking to Ned as I would a stranger. After a moment of high-pitched silence, characteristic of a conversation with Ned, I tried a different angle.

  ‘So…. Are you cured then?’ I asked, giving him a kind of grin that was all eyes and no mouth. A familiar fiendish smile spread across his face, and he pulled a small container out of his coat pocket, placing it on the table in front of us. The label read: Controlled drug C5, Zyprexa 10MG, Keep out of reach of children.

  ‘Fuckers,’ he muttered, his familiar laconic tone speaking into me as if it were a thousand memories of our times together, holding with it traces of every moment, every version of himself he'd ever been. We stared at each other for a second, our faces softening into smiles in unison, before laughing wildly, a long lost glow returning to Ned's anaemic face.

  I raised my beer to clink Ned's, before realising he didn't have one and awkwardly offering him a sip of mine. Ned casually grabbed Michael's - who had taken to harassing Collin - from under him and tapped mine, before finishing it in one gulp. I nodded and did the same.

  At that moment, I forgot everything I had been told about Ned. All the cruel and ignorant rumours and fabrications. He was still with us. He’d never left.

Lucy Winters

I want to talk to Ned, but I think Stan needs me. He's hunched over shaking in my arms and not saying anything when I talk to him. He might be crying, but I can't tell because his face is in his hands. I keep telling him that it's okay, that I'm here for him, but I can't tell if he can even hear me.

  Collin's sitting Indian style on top of the table in front of us, both hands in his jacket pockets, birdlike, watching Stan intently. His face is completely still except for a bit of tension in his jaw and the pale wood violet glow of my imagination. His narrow eyes meet mine and he nods almost too quiet to see, then takes his hand out from his pocket and holds it out to us.

  ‘I really think you should take these, man,’ he says to Stan. He's got some white valiums in his hand, but the way he holds them makes me think of them as pellets, like he's at a petting zoo.

  ‘Get the fuck away from me, man,’ Stan says, his eyes glistening up from the shadows. ‘Keep me out of your fucked up plans.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Collin asks, his features fragile with concern.

  Stan withers out of my embrace and glares wild eyed and ghoulish at Collin. His face is flushed and his eyes are real shiny, like he might cry. But there's no tears.

  ‘Why would I believe you? That you want me to feel better?’ he says in a severe, measured tone. His body has stopped shaking now, deathly still and stormy.

  Collin’s head shrinks into his neck a bit, looking like he might be offended or maybe just shocked. He sort of collects himself and says, ‘Well, you might not think I have your best interests in mind, Stan,’ talking real clearly, ‘But you know how I feel about psychedelics. You know, like shrooms and acid and all that. I'm sure you've heard me and Robbie going on about it enough. I mean, these are powerful chemicals, Stan. So powerful. And I think it's important we get on top of it before you do any lasting damage to your psyche. I've been there before. Lucy and Robbie too. I know the terror of a bad trip. The suicidal thought loops, the horrific tangents, the endless morbid self interrogation, the fear so torturous you just want to fucking die . . . It comes with the territory. That's why I like to have some valium on hand. Just take a few of these - not enough to knock you out, just enough to smooth out the sharp edges and ride it out till it wears off. And hey, maybe you'll even be able to enjoy the ride once they kick in.’ His words make me smile. Everything about his voice is soothing, the pace and the pitch, the picture he paints. He's like a doctor, sort of. A psychedelic doctor. A shaman. Sorcerer. The way he talks is almost supernaturally calm, especially compared to Stan's cracked tombstone words.

  I take Stan's hand and find his eyes with mine. I can get a sense of what he’s feeling when he looks at me, like a cold draft through the room. Pleading into him, I say, ‘He's right, Stan. You're not well. I hate to see you like this.’ His eyes flash at me somehow, softening the jagged fear around them.

  He looks from me to Collin and says, ‘Fuck . . . alright. Give ‘em here,’ in a voice that's more defeated than angry. Collin gives him the pills which he swallows with a mouthful of beer, abrupt and robotic, before curling back into his sulk.

  I hold him tightly and say, ‘Thanks, Stan,’ feeling better now. He hugs me back with limp arms, burying his face into my neck, his breath tectonic with fear. I’m glad he’ll be getting better soon, but I'm a little cross with him now. He can be so morbid sometimes.

  We sit quietly for a few minutes, Stan all tense in my arms, eyes closed. Collin's gone and sat down by himself a few seats away. He’s got his eyes closed too, looking real peaceful. Glowing. Not far away, on the other side of us, Ned and Robbie are seated, with Michael standing in front of them throwing his limbs around erratically as he talks. He's talking a little too loud for me, but he's radiating life and energy and good vibes. They all are. Even Ned. Why aren't we like that? I know I would be if Stan wasn't having such a bad time . . . He shouldn't be here. I haven't even had a chance to enjoy the mushrooms.

  I exhale, breathing scarlet and earth tones back into the ever azuring atmosphere, and lean back in my seat, letting my eyes unfocus as the living blur shivers through me. It's nice, sitting here quietly, but I'm getting all restless and can't fully relax. Kind of because of Stan, but also just with my own energy that I don't know what to do with. I rest my chin on Stan's trembling head and lose myself in the twisted canyons of his back. His dark blue and black plaid shirt shimmers and swims into his jeans. A vision of endless running rivers feeding a vast ocean beckons me as a Cajun orange radiance settles into the background of my fantasy, inviting me into old dreams and the forgotten thoughts of childhood. If Stan wasn't shaking so violently, I'd be all but lost in the countless heavens blooming all around me. But I can't. Not with Stan like this.

  ‘Do you want to go home, Stan?’ I ask, my voice a distant whisper, swallowed by the orange sun.

  His face unravels from my breast, leaving a visible imprint of sweat on my dress, a monochrome shroud of his pain. He looks at me all red with round, polluted eyes, and says, ‘You'll come with me?’ his contours distorting with a terror I can't fathom.

  I find a smile, hoping to see him mirror it, and say, ‘Of course.’ I can't leave Stan alone like this. I want to come back when I'm done, though. Once the valium has sorted him out. I want to get trippy with Collin and Robbie. And catch up with Ned. But properly, without having to look after Stan. Collin's got some dexies from Michael that he wants to share with us. But he said I should get Stan home first. He said that if Stan has some dexies, it'll just make his bad thoughts happen way faster and make it more scary for him. It makes sense. He said that for me and Robbie, it'll just make it easier to talk about our shroom thoughts. I like that because I don't like keeping anything beautiful inside. It makes me feel a little empty to think and feel and see such wonderful things without sharing it with anyone.

  ‘Fuck it. Let's go,’ he says, standing up with jerky movements like bad stop motion, still looking at the floor.

  I look over to Collin with silent questions. He's already looking at me with a lazy smile. ‘You guys off?’ he says.

  I nod.

  ‘That's a good idea. It's best to sort these thoughts out in your own space. Set yourself up a nice environment and allow it all to unfold naturally. Good luck in there guys.’ He's looking at me because if he looked at Stan he'd just see a face hiding its eyes. It's sweet how much he cares about Stan, even after Stan was rude to him.

  I stand up and put my arm around Stan's waist as we walk towards the door, feeling his tension as a creeping shudder that could just as easily be mine. I can tell he doesn't want to say bye to anyone, and I'll be coming back soon so I don't worry about it.

  We're almost out the door when Michael's waspy voice jabs me in the back. ‘Oi, Stan ya lost cunt. Where the fuck are you off to? Buy me a beer cunt, call it even.’ He rushes up to us, a highly strung canine, and stands a little too close with a hidden snarl and all sorts of flickering thoughts not too far behind his grin.

  ‘Get the fuck away from me,’ Stan says, shoving him away.

  ‘Stan!’ I spout. My arm instinctively snaps back from his waist while the rest of me sort of falters around, not sure where to go. I try to give him a stern face, not really knowing what else to do, but it feels weird and I can tell it probably doesn't look right. I’m not properly mad at him anyway. More just annoyed at both of them and sick of boys acting like rhinoceroses all the time. I usually end up in a bad mood when Michael's around. He's always using big emotions and big motions, never just hanging out. Always a fight or a joke or some kind of drama, never listening to anyone else, just trying to make everything all about whatever he's obsessed with at the time. Doesn't make it okay to be rude back to him, though.

  ‘Pushy cunt,’ Stan mutters, turning away from him to stare at the floor. I pull him towards the door, leaving as quickly as I can, not looking back.

The cold air feels real nice, like pins and needles all over my body. But fuzzy ones, like effervescent acupuncture. As we walk slowly, hand in hand, I gaze around at the trees that line the road which seem to disguise the alienness of suburbia, washing it away in their shifting hue. They feel good to look at. To be around. It’s like they can see me too, and they know and forgive me for everything I do and say that's not good, because I'm just a human and we do the wrong thing sometimes.

  But I don't have long to enjoy it.

  ‘Oi! Cunt!’ Michael's voice trumpets out from the door. ‘What's the fuckin' problem then?’ He’s pacing up to us all wired with hands that go from balled fists to twinkly fingers and back again, making galaxy patterns I'm too nervous to enjoy. Stan stops to wait for him. I try to pull his hand in the other direction, saying, ‘Come on, Stan, let's just go.’ I don't want anything to happen. I just want to get him home.

  I give up and back away just before Michael gets up to us, since Stan seems to have made up his mind. Without slowing down, Michael bulldozes Stan with open hands and goes, ‘What was that shit about? You got something you wanna say, cunt?’

  Stan's rocked slightly but keeps his footing. I feel a spike of anxiety as he lets go of my hand. He looks up from the ground to Michael’s face, whole body clenched, and says, ‘Think twice, cunt,’ through teeth that want to be clamped shut.

  Michael puts his face right up in front of Stan's and shouts, ‘Bull fuckin' shit. You want a go then cu-’ but Stan hits him in the jaw with the heel of his hand in a strange open handed arc that continues past Michael's face as his beanie falls to the ground. My stomach screws in straight away and my hands gravitate into a ball at my mouth, gripping at my sleeves. Michael’s stumbled back, more shocked than sore. He holds his jaw for a second, then smiles sharp behind the mop of sweat flattened hair and grabs Stan by the collar and goes to punch him, but Stan’s headbutted him real horrible in the nose and there’s all sorts of noises howling together. Blood’s already coming out, much darker than in the cartoons, some of it splattering and some of it dribbling. Michael loses his balance but corrects himself, still swaying slightly. Feeling queasy, I lean over to spew, but nothing comes out. I stand up as straight as I can, screeching at Stan to stop, but my voice is all thin and it's like I'm just listening to myself, all wavy like I'm on valium or something. I try to grab Stan by the shirt to stop the whole thing, but it’s like putting my hand in a lawnmower and I get knocked back by some kind of limb. Michael spits an octopus of blood in Stan's face and I'm not even a part of his world now. Just looks at me for a second with screaming eyes and Michael's blood all thick dribbling down his face then straight back. I'm breathing fast and shallow because I can tell that Stan’s properly mad now. Fuck. I can't handle this. He walks slowly and twitchy towards Michael. Michael backs away a little while taking a swing. It misses. Or maybe Stan just didn't feel it. He tries to turn away, but Stan’s got him by the front of his shirt and throws him to the ground in a smooth, fiery motion, sounding like an animal now. The hollow smacks of Stan's kicks close my eyes as my hands clamp down in front of them. Then all I can feel is the rumpling echo of Michael's face crumbling under Stan's heel. I dry retch again. Opening my eyes, I see Stan walking away from Michael, leaving him a bloody clump on the wet pavement.

  My eyes are filled up with tears and as I look at Stan they break off down my cheeks. An unfamiliar voice twists out from inside me, ‘Stan, no! What the fuck Stan?’

  He just walks right past me, hunchbacked, saying, ‘Whose side are you on?’ but saying it like he's talking to himself, not me.

  I stumble over to the trees, who are too busy to make me feel better now, and spew up. Just one torrent, thick and snotty. Some chunks land on my dress, but I can't help it. With the gross, acidic taste in my mouth yellowing the world around me, I sit on the curb next to my spew and cry, watching Stan walk down the empty street, glitching from streetlight to streetlight then gone.

Collin Callahan

My Harmonics were taking form...

  I followed michael on a whim, and had the great fortune of witnessing stan's meltdown first hand. And oh what a transcendentally glorious meltdown it was. All I really wanted was stan and his filthy headspace out of my sight, but I was quite happy to have michael taken care of as well. The sound of his cartilage caving in was music to my understimulated ears. I was in heaven.

  Stan was having an internal crisis, so I decided to feed him some Dextroamphetamine masquerading as Valium, since I was in such a charitable mood. I had a secret smile from that moment onward, knowing that the cunt would soon be alone in his bedroom in a state of introspective despair, at the mercy of daemons from beyond the limits of his imagination, waiting in vain for the Valium to save him from his nightmare.

  Good luck in there, stan my old chum. I'll see you on the other side.

  In a moment of mushroom induced weakness, I actually found myself questioning my actions, even feeling a little sympathetic for the cunt. But the feeling quickly passed, being so trivial against the backdrop of Harmonics so divine. I've always thought that if you're not comfortable in your own mind, then it is your duty as a human to take the time to resolve your inner conflicts and release your mind from its self made prison. Only then can it be used for its true purpose: To explore and evolve. Nothing esoteric or metaphysical about it. That's the problem with cunts like stan. Competent, perhaps even eloquent, in their dealings with the external world, but an absolute fucking mess in the internal realms. All composure lost when no one is looking.

  But, as stan was soon to learn, someone is always looking.

  Try as he might, he couldn't hide his mental warfare from me. It's a basic ethical principle that some fail to grasp: If you wish to enjoy the fruits of the material world, then you must earn the space you take up through the trials of the spirit. Otherwise you'll always be experiencing things second hand, filtered through the cluster of lies you've imagined up about yourself and the universe. Like the absentee deity monitoring his domain via remote viewing, it can only go on for so long before the cracks start to show.

  What cunts like stan fail - or refuse - to accept, is that sobriety is to tripping as drunkenness is to sobriety. And that fucker is a soberholic. Either way, I decided it was time to move on. I had planted the seed of nightmarish evolution in his mind, and I would water it when I saw him next.

  I turned my attention to lucy, sitting alone in a puddle of vomit, her spirits broken by stan's filth. Robbie was still inside, lost in thought talk with ned. I'd have at least a few minutes to spare before he'd figure out what ned was trying to say and come rushing out to me with a mouthful of epiphanies, so I felt it appropriate to spend some quality time with lucy. Just the two of us.

  Lucy was crying with bits of vomit on her clothes and in her hair and strands of mucous dangling from both nostrils. I sat next to her and put my arm around her, brushing the sticky strands of hair away from her face, covertly wiping my hands on the frayed mess at the end of her dress. The smell and the sight of her made me gag, but I put on a brave face for her. Several metres from us, Michael was curled up in still silence, his state of consciousness unknown and of no real concern to me.

  In my most gentle voice, I explained to lucy that stan, as much as I liked the cunt, was a confused boy whose latent violent tendencies were beginning to surface. I cheered her up by reminding her of the timeless beauty of the trees and the sky above, and for some time we lay on our backs stargazing while I uplifted her spirits with some feeble poetic meanderings about what primitive man must have thought when he looked upon them.

  After a while, when her sense of wonder had dried her tears, I took her by the hand and led her back inside, promising to help clean her up and fill her nose with amphetamines once it was unclogged. We walked purposefully to the toilets, gathering ned and robbie along the way. We got a few stares from some lurkers, but most had witnessed the scene stan had caused and understood why the four of us needed to be in the men’s room together.

  While robbie helped lucy clean herself up and ned eyed my wallet sitting on the toilet paper dispenser, I crushed up pills for everyone inside one of the cubicles. I put a substantial amount of Valium into ned's line, since he had outlasted his usefulness. No Valium for me, lucy, or robbie, though. Well, none for lucy just yet.

  I divided up the lines with great care in order to give ned time to steal the baggie I'd left poking out of my wallet, which he did with smooth discretion. I then had my line, followed by ned, then robbie, then lucy. As the three of them filed out the door, I stopped lucy and offered to help clean her up properly. She said she was already clean. I said nothing and tenderly cleaned the remnants of dried snot from her face with the moistened end of my scarf. I then washed the sick out of her hair by hand and tied it into a nice ponytail with my scarf. Lucy started crying again and fell into my arms. I held her gently until I got restless, then told her that we needed to go because it would only be a matter of time before some cunt came in to take a piss. Then we'd be in trouble.

  I guided lucy back to our table with a gentle hand on her waist. She sat down with robbie and ned and I went to the bar and got a whiskey each for me and ned, a vodka and red bull for robbie, and some water for lucy. Robbie's notebook and papers were spread all over the table, covered in brainstorms and diagrams. I was happy to see this, but told him he'd better head home to work it all out soon, while the inspiration was alive.

  It was time, I'd decided, for robbie to leave us.

Benji Miller

I felt my smile widen and my eyes grow wicked as I stared at the writhing mess at my feet.

  Stan: Flaccid. Defeated.

  Good.

  That's what happens when you go soft, bitch. That's what happens when you get sucked in by man's shitty soft-cock indulgences. When you forget the law of the jungle, nestle into the padded walls of humanity. What would happen to an antelope running around hallucinating on magic mushrooms? Eaten. Rabbit? Eaten. Wolf? Wouldn't be eating. Stan? Beaten. What made him think he'd be any different?

  I'd stopped kicking Stan for a minute to enjoy the scene: Lance and Jordan, hackles up, laying down nature's law on the runt, illuminated by the lone streetlight in the midnight darkness of suburbia.

  ‘Law of the jungle, motherfucker!’ Lance cried, before laying a boot to the ribcage. ‘What the fuck else is there? Huh? What the fuck else is there?’ He kicked him again. Stan was either out cold or pretending to be; sometimes lower life forms pretend to be unconscious or even dead, in order to deter further attack from the predators. Like most human instincts, this one has outlived its original use; once upon a time, ‘playing dead’ served to persuade the assailant to seek fresher prey. Regardless, Jordan stepped in as Lance wound up for one more kick, one that probably would have turned the situation into a more serious one.

  ‘We're done with this clown,’ Jordan said. ‘He ain't getting up. Let's go hunting. Keen for a bit of a rumble.’

  Lance eased up and took a step back, breathing heavily. Jordan started to turn away, caught my eye, then turned back towards Stan and gave him a rushing boot to the guts.

  ‘I thought we were done here?’ Lance sneered. His face was red except for the white markings on the bridge of his nose he always got after a good scrap - not that Stan put up much of a fight.

  ‘Yep, we're done,’ Jordan said. He smirked at Lance, then at me, then started walking. Lance unleashed one last axe-kick to the kidneys before following - always has to get the last hit in, old Lance. I could tell he wanted to keep going, but there was no point in doing that now; at a certain point, kicking a man while he's down loses its appeal.

  I walked up to Stan's cowering body and stood over it. I poured the last of my can of Monster on it, then threw the can at the back of its head. The two of us shared a silence as I stared down at him, ready to strike at any sign of motion. As much as I loved pack hunting with my friends, it was the intensity of a one-on-one that I craved - and going toe-to-toe with Stan was at the top of my bucket list.

  He wasn't always a little bitch, old Stan. He used to be a real hard fucker back when he hung around with us, before he got with Lucy and started hanging out with her creepy friends. A real bunch of freakshows, that lot; always lurking around the trees at the back of the field at school, creeping around the suburbs after dark. That's why this town needs predators like us around - to keep weirdos like that from running the show.

  ‘Oi, maggot. You coming or what?’ Lance called. The two of them were waiting for me in the darkness, a few houses down. I nodded and looked back to Stan. He'd gotten off pretty easy, really; there was minimal blood on the pavement, and none of us really went for the face, besides the initial right-hook from yours truly - though this was really a statement more than anything, letting the bitch know straight off the bat what was about to go down.

  I caught up with Lance and Jordan and we moved silently along Holland Road, walking much faster than usual. That's what happens when you lay down Darwin's law, remind the lower life forms where they stand: Your whole walks speeds up - all of your motions do - as your body is agog with too much energy to move slow. This energy also makes it so you can't help but smile; but it's not a contented or happy smile like when you're watching a movie or cracking jokes or something. It's different because of what the eyes do. They don't go all slack like in the jester's smile; in the victor's smile, the eyes get sharper and more focused, making everything clearer and more fluid. It's the certainty that one is, without a doubt, at the top of the food chain that allows one to fully embrace the carnivorous, predatory mode of operating: Deft, mobile, unrelenting, and lacking in the confusion and cowardice that keeps the lower life forms at the bottom.

  ‘What now?’ Jordan's face was a perfect example of the victor's grin. His walk could almost be mistaken for a strut, but those of us who know the feeling know that it's simply a byproduct of superiority,

  ‘Let's find the rest of those junkie faggots,’ Lance replied, manic, ecstatic, clearly unsatisfied by our victory. ‘Michael and Robbie and shit, all those little creeps. They can't be too far. Let's fuckin' hunt, bitches. I'm keen to fuckin' hunt.’ You can always tell when Lance has been in a fight, even though he rarely walks away with any scars or bruises; the prematurely thinning crop of sparse, black hairs collect together to form thick, greasy strands that look like dreadlocks. He hates this, associating dreadlocks with druggies, and has developed a post-fight nervous habit of running his hands through his hair.

  ‘Alright. Let's go down Witham Street. Goes past that park they always hang out in,’ Jordan said, shaking his arms around as he walked, breaking into the occasional series of air-punches.

  ‘Nah, they'll be in town I reckon,’ Lance said. ‘That bar they all go to.’

  ‘They'll be out and about by now, though. It's past midnight. They'll be at the park; I can guarantee it.’

  ‘Why the fuck would they be at the park? They go to the park before the bar. They go to the park to take the drugs, then go to the bar to drink.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that. But then they get drunk and go back to the park.’

  ‘What? Why would they go to the park after the bar? They go to the bar once they're out of drugs and alcohol.’

  ‘Yeah, but then-’

  ‘No. They go to the bar after the park. Of course they go to the bar after the fucking park. Are you even thinking this through?’

  ‘Yeah, that's what-’

  ‘Are you even fucking thinking? They're not going to be in the park. They're going to be at the fucking bar.’

  ‘What makes you so fucking sure-’

  ‘'Cause I fucking said so. We're going to the bar, 'cause that's where they are. If they're not there, we can start some shit with some other wasters. What are we gonna do if they're not at the park? Play on the fucking swings?’

  ‘We could go through the park to get to the bar-’

  ‘We're not going to the fucking park, maggot. We're going straight to the bar. Right Benji?’

  ‘Let's just keep walking, bitches,’ I said. They fell silent once again. I could tell Jordan was trying to lead us towards his place, since he still had his math homework to do - Lance and I did too, but we were in Mr. Greymantle's good books. Either way, we still had Sunday to sort that out. I got the impression that Jordan was simply satisfied by our work with Stan, as well as our little run in with Jeremy Owen earlier on in the night. Lance obviously hadn't got his fix yet. I was ambivalent; I liked the thought of getting the homework out of the way tonight, free up Sunday to get all amped up on energy drinks and get the gloves out, make a day of it, maybe go hunting again at night. But, on the other hand, I was already amping on energy drinks, and somewhere, not too far away, there was a pack of know-it-all clowns fucked up on magic mushrooms who needed reminding that the world is not a nice place and they're never fucking safe. Gotta fight to survive, bitches.

Ned Devlin

A delectable Anxiety coloured the scene as the Amphetamines sped things up in their sneaky little way, much sneakier than the ole Mind Menthol earlier. For reasons best kept to himself, Collin had decided to infect my line with some of the good Doctor's pills, a kind of Speedball Jr, making me think perhaps he'd given Stan the gift of Madness rather than the curse of vacuity he'd promised. I decided not to notice this, my Mind all revved up and happy about Mischief, curious as to what the sly old rascal had planned.

  ‘But nothing cannot exist,’ Robbie replied, ‘or else it would cease to be nothing.’

  ‘Yes, nothing can not exist. It can and will not exist. Non existence is the very definition of nothing,’ Collin countered, leaning back with his beer like a mathematician counting his toes.

  ‘But it could also be said that nothing can't not exist, 'cause then it wouldn't be a thing; everything that is exists.’

  ‘What about nihility?’

  ‘Nihility?’

  ‘Yeah. Nothingness. Are you saying that nothingness can't exist? Or is nothingness the only thing capable of non existence?’

  ‘Well, I guess then there's no such thing as nothingness.... 'Cause nothing is that exact.’

  ‘Correct. Nothing is that exact.’

  ‘Wait, so that means that nothingness is the only thing that is as exact as something not existing at all?’

  ‘Yes, Robbie. Nothingness is, in many ways, comparable to nothingness.’

  ‘But how can you say that nothingness is anything when all that it is isn't?’

  ‘Just as you just did.’

  Then a cloud of Laughter between the two of them, me and Lucy not included, Collin not really either, so just Robbie, really, then Collin concluding: ‘I'll leave that with you to transcribe, robbie, since you're better with that kind of thing. Negative existence really is quite the thing to contemplate. Better do it now, otherwise it'll just be like a dream tomorrow, as you know. That alchemical shit about the three states of matter, too. These are the kinds of things you really need to hold on to.’

  It wasn't the sort of thing you had to think about, Collin's Plan, written in bold red fractals all around him: This was a part of his Harmonics that Robbie and I were not to be a part of, except for our departure, which was like a fundamental part of it. I was tempted to indulge him, since his Harmonics were always a pleasure to behold, but decided instead to light Lucy's hair on fire, her being the sort of girl to jump and flinch about in good Humour: ‘Ow! Ned!’ yelping and jerking about, a funny little dance to get the limbs all loosened up for a bit of “how's your father”, had she been the sort for that kind of carry on. As intended, we all just kind of grooved along with it, even Lucy allowing herself a proper Laugh: So missed by her was my being excitable that it reminded her of everything nice and pure about our friendship, that being the one with Collin and Robbie too, more a constellation, really, the intricate Dynamics almost too complex to really exist at all. It had me sickly sweet inside, this little kodak moment of the Minds, but I quickly unsnuggled myself from it, having sort of enjoyed the dastardly turn my Thoughts had taken earlier.

  'Man, it's been a cool night,' Robbie started, stepping out of the Silence, unaware that I had secretly tied his mindlaces together in the quiet and tripping straight into a stream of incoherent psychobabble: 'Just like, being able to go into my head for a bit without it getting all weird. Like, whenever it went quiet between us, we'd all be following the same train of thought in our heads; like before, Lucy, when you said something about, uh, patterns and, like, seeing stuff you wouldn't normally, uh.... Yeah, but when you said that, I'd been thinking about how the ultimate kind of enlightenment would be to look at a Rorschach - like, one of those ink-blot tests - and seeing it in a way that doesn't reflect any of your own obsessions, or, uh ... but yeah, I'm pretty sure we were all discussing it on like a psychic level, filtered through our own passageways.... It's cool that we didn't need to explain ourselves to each other. People shouldn't be so scared of communal silence,' pretty much becoming the antithesis of his little Idea with his, like, pretty much completely physical outburst, removing himself from the private psychic party. This would be a comment that would snowball into a farewell, further entwining Lucy's and Collin's mindlaces, with me pledging allegiance to the Harmonics, at least for Now.

  Can I stay at your place tonight, Robbie? I changed the topic of the telepathic conversation he just killed, a kind of down payment for his services.

  ‘Anyway, I might head home in a bit, get all this writing down.... You can stay on the couch if you want, Ned.’

  I saw with my Mind, which saw the mechanisms at work much clearer than my eyes, that Collin had a real hearty sort of inside grin at that and me for organising it for him, Robbie still clinging too much to the good fellowship of our mutual Intoxication to say what he had in Mind without outside prompting.

  ‘That’s a good idea, robbie,’ said the lizard at the control panels of Collin’s Mind, ‘you should definitely write down that shit about the three states of consciousness. I’d be real down read it, I reckon you're on to something there. To be honest, I got this other shit on my mind right now, but we should get to the bottom of it tomorrow.’ So modest was Collin’s candour that it shook Robbie up inside and sent his soul rushing home to sort his Thoughts out on paper, just needing now for his body to shake off its imaginary social obligations so it could follow.

  ‘Yeah, that's what I'm gonna do, I think. I got this idea of how to draw it....’ Robbie was still in his seat, but his soul was thrashing about in the angles and clutter and patterned faces screaming out of the negative spaces of his diagram. What was now needed was confirmation that his departure would be one of Good Spirits, not one that leaves our mental caves all drafty and wondering what went wrong. This came quickly in the form of a premature goodbye from Collin: ‘Yeah man, you gotta do what you gotta do. I’ll give one of you a text tomorrow anyway, I've got nothing planned,’ with a kind of push in the direction of home disguised as a friendly pat on the shoulder. I complemented his subtle push with a little pull in the same direction by standing up, with a quick nod in the direction of Lucy and Collin, at the night as it was and had been, that said: Farewell, and we shall meet again.

  Lucy’s callow eyes followed Robbie up to me as he stood, telling us that all was well and she understood, nay, encouraged our decision, but all her words were running the risk of coming out all Nonsense at the moment.

  ‘Enjoy.’ Collin’s eyes flashed clarity at us telling us it was time to walk, so we did.

It wasn't much Nothing at all before we came across Something, that being a kind of coagulating puddle of blood where Stan had realised that Michael’s company was not all well and good, Robbie going: ‘Fuck, I wonder if Michael’s okay....’ and trailing off into Thoughts of flesh drilling inward, which had me wanting a little more Devilry before the night was done with. So I took us on a quick detour toward the street where Collin lived, Robbie following me like a faithful dog, all the while going: ‘Where are we going, Ned? It’s quicker if we go that way....’ over and over but phrased a little differently each time so as not to confuse himself with any sort of clockwork robot kind of being, a handy little trick to keep the acceptance of stagnation at bay. I said back to him: '...' but supported it with a smile that sort of held the silence in place so it wouldn’t droop down to the wavelength where nothing was said.

  So then it was a quick stop at Collin's to tickle the ole tonsils on his doorstep, though what came out had no chunks worth noting, me being on the liquid and powder diet lately. This was a special little Hello from me to Collin, to take him back to the days of old when the two of us would scramble around all bright eyed and bushy tailed, signing our names in bodily fluids at people's dwellings as a sort of thing that could be read as a ‘Hello’ or a ‘Fuck you’, or even a kind of overstated ‘Never mind,’ as it was just another wee thing we did as we went about doing whatever it was we did when Time was so very expendable . . .

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ asked Robbie.

  Kind of a loaded question there, mate, I replied, feeling almost a little warm about my friend's Young Soul: The boy wouldn't know Beauty if it choked to death right in front of him.

  ‘You're messed up, man. Let's get out of here.’

  And so we went about our walk with no further delay, his Mind being of that nebulous state wherein things could quite quickly become a kind of verbose Nothingness if the thing that gives the Idea strength to stand up and go about its business on its own isn’t written down or in some way immortalised in Time: ‘Frozen by means of the pen,’ Robbie would be saying in his head, if he was truly involved with his Metaphor, which he most certainly was.

Tracey Colombera

I'm laughing at Rory freaking out about the footsteps coming up the stairwell. He looks funny trying to get his shirt on, and he's putting it on inside out. He probably spent all morning deciding which one to put on.

  The door swings open and it's just Michael. I'm happy to see him for some reason. His face is bloody and his nose is crooked and a bit squished in like an Islander's. He's got black marks around both of his eyes. He stands in the doorway for a second before coming in and sitting on my chair to wait for something. He has dry, brown blood splattered on his hoody, which complements the print. Some of his hairs are clumped together. From the blood.

  ‘Up to Brutus? What’s the damage?’ Rory asks. Rory's shirt is back to front as well as inside out.

  ‘Fuckin' Stan, the cunt. Took some shrooms and flipped out, gave me a fuckin' stomping’ Michael says. I wonder which Stan he's talking about. I can't imagine our Stan doing that.

  ‘Who, Old School?’ Rory asks.

  ‘Yeah, crazy cunt. Still owes me five bucks. Fuckin’ stupid crew cut and shit, looks like a fuckin’ - Aye, that dumbass fuckin’ apologised to a chair the other day in woodshop, no shit, knocked a fuckin’ chair off a desk and apologised to it, said sorry and was off. Dumb cunt. But yeah, fuckin’ took me out, like sucker punched me over some shit with that hash from Hayden, reckoned it was laced and shit, reckoned I was trying to get him going. I told him, I said you can fuck of with that shit, but nup, boom, cunt fuckin’ got me on the ground, no shit, fuckin’ stomped my face, full boot, fuckin’ crunched me. Like, fuck man, what happened to just fuckin’ open hander slaps or just like roshambo to fuckin’ see who gets a charlie horse, just fuckin’ lay it down and settle the score. Now it’s all this fuckin’ like cunts in the trees and shit ready to just fuckin’ jump you if you get their mate on the ground, like fuckin’ what, cunt? Do I gotta fuckin’ roll crew deep these days just so I can get smart to some cunt and not get pummelled by fuckin’ ninjas in the trees? Fuckin’ in my day, like back at intermediate, back when I was calling the fuckin’ shots, things were different back then. Cunts just fuckin’ sorted shit out. None of this psycho shit like that fuckin’ Stan cunt.’

  Silence. Michael’s looking from me to Rory, but Rory and me are just looking at each other.

  ‘...So, it was all a big misunderstanding?’ Rory says. I'm trying not to laugh. So is Rory, I think.

  ‘Aye? Nah, fuck off with that shit, cunt. I told you, cunt fuckin’ jumped me. Full just raged out at me over some beef about some weed he got off me ages ago. Cunt knew what he was buying. Showed it to him first and everything, can’t say shit. Fuckin'...’

  ‘True that. So what were you doing with that breather anyway?’

  ‘I wasn’t finished, cunt.’

  ‘Oh sorry. What were you saying?’

  ‘Fuck...it’s gone now. It was something good, though. I reckon. That’s why you never interrupt a cunt, Rory. I was fuckin’ on to something then, and you cut me off, and now I’ve forgot. Could’ve been a fuckin’ epiphany right 'round the corner there.’

  ‘Right, yeah, sorry bud. Anyway. You were tribing it with Old School?’

  ‘Yeah, I was with the Vampires at The Dissaray. They were all shroomed out and shit, getting irie. Trippy as cunts.’ I wonder what Stan was doing with the Vampires since I'd heard he was running with the Straightedges now.

  ‘No shit. Bandit’ Rory says. He's sits down on my dresser. ‘You get amongst?’

  ‘Oh shit yeah, had a mean munch’ Michael says. He won't stop shifting around in my chair. ‘Yeah hard out, trippy shit bro, walls moving and shit, monsters jumping out at you. Crazy shit.’ I think he's lying but I don't say anything. I kind of like Michael's lies. He's a good liar. I try to catch his eye, but it's the Michael show now.

  ‘You're crazy bud. Full get stuck in a trip taking that shit’ Rory says. ‘Like that lad from school, Endy Ned. Remember him? Damo was saying today, reckons he used to be normal, like back in year ten. Then just charged it on the shrooms one day and boom, stuck in a trip. Full schizo...You remember the lad?’

  ‘'Course I remember Endy, I was just having a fuckin’ beer with the cunt. Fucked as cunt, though. Doesn’t know what the fuck’s going on. But that’s the thing with all that psychedelic shit. Some cunts can't handle it, make themselves crazy just thinking about shit. Not me, though.’ Michael points to himself with his thumb. He's got a nice ugly crooked smile. I always smile when he does.

  ‘Better hope not. Not if you’re gonna be tribing with the strange’ Rory says. He reaches down into my top draw and gets the tin of weed. ‘I think I'll just stick to healthy moss sloths.’ He throws the tin onto the bed next to me. I put in on my stomach and start shredding the weed by hand. I notice Michael's clenching his jaw and realise I want some of his dexies. I manage to catch his eye now that I've got the weed. I tap my nose and raise my eyebrows.

  ‘Fuck, I dunno. I was gonna go to the hospital, but I reckon you can just do it yourself’ he says. I think about telling him what I meant, but don't.

  ‘What, sort the beak?’ Rory says.

  ‘Yeah, fuckin' oath. You just make like a triangle with your hands at the top and yank it down, straightens it right out.’

  ‘You sound like you’ve done this before.’

  ‘Fuck yeah, heaps. Easy.’ I think he's lying again, but I want to see him try.

  ‘Bandit. Off you go then Fido, no hez’ Rory says, smiling.

  ‘Yeah hold up’ Michael says. He gets off my chair and kneels down on the floor and makes a temple shape on the bridge of his nose with both hands. Then he changes his mind and uses one hand, thumb on one side, fingers on the other. He yanks down. Both him and Rory yell and I can't tell whose voice is whose. He lifts his head and looks from Rory to me. It worked. His nose is actually straighter. Still not perfect though. It's been crooked since his run in with the Straightedges last holidays. Suits him, though. He's a crooked kind of guy.

  ‘Fuck, how's that? Aye?’ he beams.

  ‘That was pretty wild’ Rory says, nodding.

  ‘Spacey?’ Michael looks at me. I smile only half fake at him. A stringy vein of blood and snot dribbles out of his nose. He cups his hands under it and there's just one thick, sticky strand dangling out. He puts his hands under the front of his hoody and uses it like a cloth to wipe his face and pull out the bloody mucous strand. His nose follows through with a comical dribble then stops. He wipes his upper lip with his hoody and just ends up smearing more blood on his face. I find the whole process repulsive but strangely fascinating. Like most things Michael does.

  ‘Shit...Swedish then?’ Rory says, still bobbing his head a little.

  Michael smiles at him. Then at me. Then he lunges onto the floor and slaps both of his bloody hands on the open pages of my English book. He looks at the marks and cracks up laughing.

  ‘Oh fuck, Michael’ I say, noting how whiny my voice is. I toss Rory the joint I've rolled and scrunch my face up at Michael.

  ‘Oh what? You actually care about your school books?’ Michael says. I try to leer at him but end up shrugging and looking at the ceiling when I realise I don't.

  Rory picks up the joint from the floor and lights it up. We pass it around silently. Michael's only ever silent when there's a joint going around. I smoke it when it comes around to me even though I'm already too stoned. Rory pours himself and Michael a cider without offering me one. I'm pretty close to spinning out so I don't mind. Once the weed gets them dopey they talk about getting Amelia over here to even out the ratios. Michael calls her and finds out she's with Damon, meaning getting them around won't solve the ratio issue. They start talking about double teaming me, and Rory claims I sprung a leak earlier when we were making out. I give him a disgusted look but he ignores me and I realise they've been passing the joint between the two of them and wonder if I've gone invisible.

  ‘Are you gonna pass that on?’ I ask Michael. He's been talking with it burning between his fingers for ages.

  ‘Oh shit, sorry doll’ he says, handing me the joint. The sticky blood on his lips forms a stringy curtain over his mouth when he talks, making sick smacking noises between syllables. Everything about him is a mess. I take a puff and realise I only asked for it to remind them I exist. I think about bum puffing it but don't. I thought there would be blood on the joint. I sort of wanted there to be blood on it. I don't know why. I'm not a goth or anything. It's just nice to taste something different sometimes.

  I pass it along to Rory. Michael says ‘Where your parents at Spacey? They're out of town, right?’ For a second I'm glad he acknowledged me. But then realise I liked it better when I was invisible.

  ‘Yeah, they're in Indonesia. I think...’ I try to think when they're supposed to be back but there's nothing there.

  ‘Oh mean. Well Amelia and Damo are coming over with rum and coke, cunts better have woke the fuck up, aye Rory?’ he says. Rory nods and says something meaningless. I start wondering whether I care that he's inviting people around to my house and decide that it's fine. Trying to change Michael would be like killing a child. I'll need some dexies if I'm going to keep drinking though.

  Michael and Rory discuss Amelia's body and what she's like in bed and I feel like Michael's lying again because he's just agreeing with everything Rory says. I think Rory might be lying too. I think Amelia's only ever been with Damon and Collin. She has a lot of self respect. I don't believe Rory that she let him 'galaxy' on her face. It's funny to think that Rory and Michael are just making up a fictional version of Amelia between them. Rory's probably repeating Damon, and Michael's good at making up stories. I try to interject to ask if Michael has any dexies, but I've gone invisible again. I start to wonder if they both know I'm too stoned and are saving me the embarrassment of turning down a joint. It's nice of them if they are.

  Rory starts doing something on his phone and Michael finally acknowledges me. He nods sideways at Rory. I guess that means he doesn't want to share with him. He's a little weird about Rory sometimes. It's fair enough, because Rory makes fun of him all the time. I'm not sure if Michael knows. It's none of my business.

  I ask Michael if he wants me to give him head. He says yes, so Rory goes into the lounge to play on his phone until we're done. Bro code or something. Once we're alone Michael actually gets his dick out and I laugh at him and tell him to put it away and get his dexies out. I hear the TV turn on in the lounge. Rory could possibly be a virgin. I don't think it matters, really. It's all pretty funny. Not laugh out loud funny. But funny.

  Michael grabs the mirror from my dressing table and pops two pills onto it. It's more than enough for all three of us. He must be sour at Rory about something. We crush one up and Michael tries to have a line but his nose is too blocked from all the blood. I end up snorting the whole lot while Michael holds my hair back to show me his gentle side. He decides to shelve his last pill, and stands up and does it right in front of me. I laugh at the idea that he might think of the act as seduction, then get a chill when I realise he probably does.

  With some persuading I do end up giving him head. He's had a hard night and still shared his dexies with me. He wants me to kneel on the floor while he sits on my bed. I don't like kneeling so I make him lie on my bed. He complains a little, but I don't listen because it's more for himself that he's complaining. A lot of the things Michael says are for himself. Once you know him well, you can tell whether you need to listen. It's a lot less than most people think.

  He wears his pants so low that I don't even have to undo his top button. The dexies turn it into an art form and he ends up coming in seconds. I plan to keep his cock in my mouth until it's completely flaccid like Mum always told me to, but it starts hardening up again so I take it out. He lies back with his jeans still below his hips grinning to himself. I crawl over and lie against the headboard next to him. He tries to snuggle up with me, but I'm too wired and push him away. He starts telling me how I'm a good as bitch, but his spiel drifts seamlessly into an angry rant about how he's going to kick Stan's ass.

  I get up and head to the lounge once he starts repeating himself. He pulls his pants up and follows. I open the door and I can hear voices echoing in the stairs, so I turn back. Michael stands there looking dumb and I tell him I'm going to get changed. He goes out and I hear Damon say ‘Whoa, what the fuck happened to you?’ in the exact same tone as Rory. That's something that happens a lot. 

  I close the door and put on a long sleeve shirt and Rory's hoody and pull some black jeans over my tights. I imagine how I might look and dislike every possibility. I put my stomper boots on and grab my iPod and creep down the hallway. I feel kind of bad for leaving Amelia with those three, but it's probably good for her. She always gets her way.

  I take a left before the lounge and head down the stairwell. My body feels nice and tense and everything I think about seems interesting. I don't want to waste this high getting hit on by Damon and Rory. I'm kind of enjoying this.

  It's raining a bit outside. I want to feel it for some reason, so I take Rory's hoody off and leave it in the hallway for him to find. I put my earphones in and the first song that comes on is by Queen. I don't know what it's doing on my iPod but I listen to it anyway. I pretend I'm listening to it ironically, but I get into it once I'm walking. It's a good song, really. I'm not sure where I'm going, but I'm glad I'm walking. I take a left turn and light a cigarette. The street is dark and quiet except for the whistling wind and a tiny bit of rain. I like it better out here.

Ned Devlin

Entering Robbie’s house involved a small degree of Paranoia, as his parents weren’t the sorts of folk who appreciated the inspiriting ambiance of the wee hours, often hiding from them altogether, in fact, so we wasted no time getting to his room. And what fascinatingly grim dwelling it had become: Walls and floor covered head to toe with little sheets of paper filled to the corners with Mind webbing, rubbish bin now populated exclusively by beer bottles and tinfoil, meaning his parents were no doubt fearing their son being set adrift into the seas of Chaos, them being much sharper than they let on.

  ‘Hey I’m gonna be writing some shit down, you can sleep or hang around or whatever. There’s towels in the bathroom if you wanna dry off,’ Robbie said, vibrating at his desk. I lurked as a Succubus for a bit, hovering over his shoulder, but quickly grew bored of what his pen had to say, and spied his little metal pipe camouflaged into the Chaos of his desk. To my amusement, I found that the Weed I had liberated from Collin's clutches was not Weed at all, but rather a small bag of Salvia Divinorum, invoker of the Great Static, the channel between channels, and a clever little Prank on the whole.

  As payment for such a psychopathically thoughtful gift, I puffed deep and slow, and created a plinth of outsmoke around Robbie and the lungs I assume it was destined for for as long as it had been a part of the Harmonics. After getting no reaction from my oblivious if slightly irritated friend, I used all the spare sheets of Reality to move my body around in new ways, my right hand reaching over the back of my head to grip my top set of teeth, pulling my toppermost head all the way back to where it touched me between my shoulders. Then, with my other hand that felt so left out, I reached through my solar plexus from behind and gave the bottom part of my jaw a good tug, kind of peeling my face down to my shoulders, leaving me with like this turticular mound of flesh poking out the top of my gasping mouth, my oesophagus forming the outer layer of my new head.

  I flailed around for a wee moment in this new state, looking for any evolutionary advantages that might persuade me to stay. But after some Time this too had me bored, so I peeled my face further down my body so the corners of my mouth made a real nifty noise like tearing cellophane as they ripped to incorporate my torso into the pseudo face poking out the top of my skin suit, me now kind of topless, displaying my blackened, maggot infested rib cage as a sort of head, with my neck hole now being like the single growth often seen on the back of a dragon’s head. Though this little contortion was rather intriguing, it meant I had to go about without the use of my arms, them still being plugged into my hand skin. I contemplated briefly the corpse suckling dragonflies around me before impulsively tearing my hands free from their skincuffs, leaving loose, empty armskin dangling from my waist, appearing, I’d imagine, to emanate from the sides of my new head, like two turkey wattle ended rabbit ears listening to the ground for signs of Activity . . .

  ‘What the hell are you doing, Ned?’ Robbie turned to me, treating himself to a break in Concentration, eyes wild with Ideas, changing channels left and right. Indignantly, I put my torn shirt back on and flopped onto his bed, me now being a sort of flaccid skinsack and silent stare: A fellow of the highest moral standards, not willing to be a tool to aid Robbie’s procrastination.

  ‘You want to draw or put some music on or something? Grab some paper if you want, I kinda gotta sort all this - get all this shit down....’ Robbie said, aiming his words at me but getting them all over his page since that’s where his mouth was pointed, ‘Fuck! I just wrote that down, fuck’s sake man, fuckin’....’ all caught up in the urgency of erasing it, a race with his own brain to make sure he could keep writing without losing his Thoughts to the bi hemispherical domination efforts of the Nonsense state, a state now so powerful that every other part of his brain was in debt to it, having had to borrow so many resources after losing their own to the great Tryptamine tidal wave that had left all their facilities in ruin. This was no race for me to be involved in, me being more a long distance sort of wonderer, so I retired to the living room for a spot of receding, ignoring his question altogether.

Rather than unconsciousness dividing the days, it was a long stretch of Christian rants covering channels one through four, leaving only Static as an alternative, one whose warm glow gradually took my attention with pareidolic sitcoms and a few high quality documentaries about my Subconscious, all my formless little friends inside so very excited to have shapes and like some kind of vague corporeality, which I imagine would be quite a treat for those who actually appreciate it, even gaining a sort of atheistic bent from the whole ordeal, competing with the word of the Great Sir Himself, filtered through some very malevolent mental passageways indeed.

  At some point, Kenny, that being Robbie’s father, made his presence known, complaining about the disastrous consequences of the religious cretins on his sleep. Sharp as a tack, that Kenneth, always has been, able to see so clearly what was going on in his ungrateful son’s little world. I told him that the lady occupying the screen was a bad person and he assured me that she was just stupid before returning to his moustache-ed Dreams, me sat shuddering, wondering what repressed Fantasies of Depravity would be rearing their ugly heads in the Mind of my tired friend, then changing the channel back to Static and turning the volume back up.

Tracey Colombera

It’s getting early. I’m walking fast along Hunterway Street with Bob Dylan playing on the iPod. I don’t know whose the iPod is. I’m glad it isn’t mine. I’m sick of my music.

  I can see two people in the distance, making gestures beneath a street light. There’s a dog with them. I think I’ll get to them just as Jokerman ends. I'll stop and talk to them if I do.

  It’s Stan Richards with a bleeding lip and Kit, Rory's Dad, and a dog. A kelpie. I guess it’s Kit’s. It looks like Kit. Same colour. Stan is sitting hunched over on the curb, facing me away from the other two. Looks like Michael got a hit in for once. Kit is standing a bit behind him with a bottle of wine, swaying and mumbling. I stand beside him and look up at him until he notices me. He’s had a haircut and he’s wearing a suit jacket, but he’s got no shoes on and has a filthy beard and the bottoms of his pant legs are ragged. He flinches when he sees me, which makes him lose his balance.

  ‘Oh! Hello there love. What’re you doing out and about on your own then? Could be dangerous for a tasty wee thing like you.’ He’s not really slurring his words tonight, but he’s got a lot of saliva in the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Most people can’t see me, so I’m safe’ I say.

  He looks at me and flinches again, then nods and bobs his head around for a little while. He steadies himself again and shuts his eyes tightly, before opening them wide at me like a blooming flower. They’re pale brown with yellowed whites and tiny black flecks for pupils. He says ‘I got good eyes, y’see. See? I can see the invisible. Into the invisible world...’ he squints around for a few seconds then smiles and nods and says ‘You wanna know why?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He leans back and stares at the fence behind me. He says nothing until I ask what he's doing.

  ‘Exactly. What do you think I was looking at just now?’

  ‘Dunno. What were you looking at?’

  ‘I just got a good fuckin’ eyeful of your ass, love!’ he shouts. He doubles over in silent gagging laughter.

  ‘Ah fuck!’ Stan cries. The dog’s trying to lick the blood off his face. He’s pushing him away with one hand and covering his face with the other.

  ‘Get out of it, Weasel,’ Kit barks. Weasel obeys and sits next to Kit's feet, licking his lips. Kit looks at something behind me and says ‘Peripherals, love. That’s how it’s done. It’s what I was just saying to bloody Sam over there. See, I’m a fuckin’ predator, alright. I’m not gonna lie. Just a pervert though, mind you. Not a bloody rapist or nothing. Just your friendly neighbourhood predator. Anyways...yes...What was I saying?’

  ‘How you could see me?’

  ‘Ah, righto. So you’re invisible, are ya?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Right, well that’s all the fucking TVs and all that bloody crap...They’re all fuckin’ strobe lights in't they, fried us all half fuckin’ blind. That’s why no one sees auras anymore. You know what an aura is, love? ‘Course ya do, you’re a fuckin’ fairy, inya?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well what the fuck are ya then? You a bloody phantom or something?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  ‘Right, well, yeah alright. Makes sense. Anyway, the reason I can see the likes of you is ‘cause, as a perv, I use my peripherals. Not the bloody strobe fried focal points like every legal bastard out there. So, right, ‘cause I use my peripherals, I can see into the other world right as fuckin' rain. Most people see it, but not clearly like me, ‘cause their peripherals are all out of practice 'cause they just look straight at stuff, instead of on the sly like me. That’s why I can see phantoms. Like you.’

  ‘I’m not actually invisible. I just don’t get noticed a lot.’

  ‘Ah, right. I see. Well what you’ve got is a little aura, inya? Y’see, the thing about people is they think they notice people when they look at them, but that’s just part of the story. It’s everyone’s auras that’s what makes us notice each other. By the time you get with a fella, right, your auras’ve probably been gettin’ it on for a good hour or so...Speaking of which...’ 

  It's silent for a while. Kit bobs his head as if there's music playing. I look at him until he explains himself.

  ‘Well, yeah, I’m no rapist, right, but I’m a man with my needs. And predatory, mind you. And you’re a nubile young lady without much to do, right?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So that us, then?’

  He looks me in the eyes. I feel compelled to leave, but Kit's kind of entertaining. I like him better than Rory.

  ‘You have to make out with Stan first, then we'll talk’ I say.

  ‘Who? Ah, fuckin’ Sam, ya mean? No fuckin’ worries.’

  He gets on all fours and tries to kiss Stan. Stan screeches and leaps up to his feet and shoves Kit into the fence.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing? Stay the fuck away, man.’ He puts his fists up, agitated.

  ‘Ah, you’re an old fashioned geezer, inya?' Kit says, relaxing against the fence. ‘Well, relax, mate. Like I said, I’m not a rapist, alright? You don’t want anything happening, nothing’s gonna happen. And you too, love.’

  Stan stares at Kit and I with big scared eyes, then shakes his head and turns to walk away. Kit steps after him and grabs him by the shoulder. Stan spins around and says ‘What? What the fuck do you want man?’ His hands aren't fists, but they're up ready.

  ‘Come on, here.’ Kit hands him his bottle of wine. ‘Go on, mate, help yourself. Y’ve had a rough one.’

  Stan takes the bottle and stares at it in his hand. He doesn't seem to understand it. Kit stands there looking from me to Stan, grinning. Weasel sniffs something in the gutter, tail wagging slowly.

  I say ‘You drink that, Stan. To feel good,’ because I feel bad for getting Kit on his case. I didn't mean to cause trouble. I just thought it would be funny. It was, kind of.

  ‘I can’t feel good.’ His voice is weak, but the rest of him seems very alert and energised.

  ‘Why not?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m rotten inside.’

  ‘Aye, I don’t wanna hear that’ Kit says. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you mate. You’re an old fashioned geezer, alright? You're a fuckin' roughneck. A lad. A scrapper from way back, inya? Inya?’

  Stan grunts.

  ‘Inya?’

  Stan's looking at the ground.

  ‘Inya!?’

  ‘Fuck I don’t know man. Yes?’

  ‘Yeah?’ Kit’s riled up now. ‘Well I’m a fuckin’ scrapper too! Come on then, dukes up.’ He puts his fists up and bounces on his toes a few times before losing his balance and staggering toward Stan. He takes a clumsy jab at Stan. Stan easily dodges it, stepping back.

  ‘Fuck's sake. Why can’t every cunt fuck off and let me fuckin'...’

  ‘Just pretend you’re small’ I say.

  ‘What?’ Stan and Kit both look at me. I suddenly feel very visible.

  ‘Imagine you’re real small. Inside yourself, kind of. Then people won’t notice you.’

  ‘Ah, quite right there love’ Kit says, happy again. ‘Contract if you wanna be ignored, expand to be noticed. Simple bloody physics, really.’

  ‘Fuck this shit. I'm out,’ Stan says. He drops the bottle of wine on the grass and walks off, mumbling to himself.

  ‘Right, mate, fair call. Well, remember what I said about the frilly necked bastards. They’re fucking everywhere these days’ Kit says, but Stan is walking away with his head down. Trying to go invisible, I suppose.

  Kit and I both watch him wander down the road. After a while, Kit throws a piece of rubbish on the ground in front of me and says ‘That us then, love? Old mate's gone.’ I bend down to look at it and it’s a condom. Kit’s peripherals scan me up and down and look around inside me. I try to flare my aura but nothing happens. Stan wanders into some light in the distance and turns down South Hynne road. Weasel starts licking my hand.

  ‘No. But thanks’ I say, scratching Weasel's head.

  ‘You’ve got a lovely body. I’m sorry I’m too old’ he says.

  I nod.

  ‘And your aura. You’ve got a nice, firm aura. Very taut and...’ he fades into a satisfied silence, smiling. He surrenders his weight to the fence and closes his eyes, sliding down into a slump. Weasel licks his face but it doesn’t rouse him.

  ‘Thanks’ I say. I walk off through the park towards Witham Street. The moon is almost full, but there's no stars.

Collin Callahan

Once again, the night went exactly as planned. With ned and robbie out of the picture, robbie presumably working on the amphetamine fuelled homework I'd assigned for him, I took a dishevelled lucy for a walk through the woods to find some more mushrooms and enjoy the healing presence of the trees and the air. Her love of nature combined with my powerful sexual presence helped her shed the befoulment stan's trip had imposed upon her. But before her glow returned, I made sure to change the past in her vulnerable little mind to one where her and stan were no longer an item, his actions embodying the end of an era.

  Unbeknownst to her, all wrapped up in the pleasures of nature's quiet, the creek we followed took us directly to her mum's house, where I serenaded her with a poetic description of the inner workings of black holes. Her ultra sensitive biochemical response system made it easy to persuade her to an orgasm that had her quite unaware that every time we kissed we were sharing chewed up Valium. This helped me in many ways. In the short term, it meant minimal time was wasted lingering around acting like the night’s events were as special for me as they were for her. On a more midterm basis, it meant I could help myself to the some of her high quality Afghani hash, which I’d had my eye on for a little while. My long term plan was one I tried to keep in the back of my mind where it would grow and mutate by its own accord, like alligators flushed into the sewers that reach grotesque proportions, unchecked by human intervention... But lucy’s Valium consumption would surely help my lurking reptile brain do what it had to do.

  So without too much trouble, I left the situation in time to catch the first navy hint of the rising sun, my wits still sharpened with Psilocybin. On a whim, I took a quick detour down South Hynne road, where stan lived with his parents. In accordance with my plans, his bedroom light still shone in the otherwise darkened house. I smiled real nice and warm inside at the thought of him sitting up all alone, stewing in the juices of his mental breakdown. After a moment of job satisfaction, I decided that it was necessary, beyond all shadow of a doubt, that he be asked to explain himself to his parents in this state. So, after taking a long alcohol piss on his front door, I gave the wheel of his father’s car a good boot to set off the alarm. I then jogged lightly to the end of the street where I sat on the curb to make sure the lights flicked on in his parents’ room, which they did, before making my way home at my own pace, pleasantly energised and fairly certain no one would be home to make anything matter.

When I got home, I found that Ned, the dirty cunt, had decided to vomit on my doorstep. I allowed myself a brief smile about Ned and his ways before going inside, careful not to get any vomit on my shoes.

  As expected, the house was empty and silent, allowing me the pleasure of using the stereo system without reservation. I put on Echoes before rolling a spliff with lucy’s hash and Mum’s tobacco. As I lay there on the couch, puffing away augustly, watching the sky come to light through the window, I decompressed and let the sound of The Great Gig in the Sky take me away.

  Having been a night of great success, I was happy to allow myself a brief indulgence of the imagination. Eyes closed but very much awake, I drifted through a vast expanse of sand dunes and canyons lit up glorious red by the planet’s twin suns, both red giants some twenty or thirty astronomical units away. The planes of this alien land were moving and shifting around with what, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a grand, orgiastic battle between great armoured centaurian apes and a mass of sentient humanoid vinelike entities, armed with dazzlingly decorated insect legged spears that shimmered and reacted with a life and mind of their own, all fighting and fucking to the inner pulse of Clare Torry’s magnificent vocalisations.

  After a fleeting eternity in that world, I was set into orbit by the rising sound of Learning To Fly-

Can’t keep my eyes from the circling sky

Tongue tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit

Soaring heavenwards, I used my last few moments of self awareness to assure God that I most certainly was not tongue tied and twisted, and I’d be with him soon. As I spoke, the ice moved gradually from the tips of my wings and limbs to the centre of my chest, layers flaking off me in the immense wind. Once my chest was seized by the utmost of absolute cold, the disintegration made its way up to where my brain was kept, leaving just the imagination of matter screaming through the infinite whiteness with no reference point except for pure velocity, uninhibited by physics.

  Since all the amphetamines and shrooms wouldn’t be letting me sleep for some time, I decided instead to spend the morning in the void, hurtling through the endless labyrinths at unthinkable speeds.

Robbie Marks

‘... to wake up, it's nine o'clock!’ Mum's shrill voice penetrated the depths of my subterranean thoughts. Inside, I scrambled to find the remnants of my dreams, but ended up with just a flashing room full of young girls that was an aquarium when viewed from the outside, and the ghostly echo of a frustrated search for something vital.

  ‘Alright…. Give me a minute,’ I droned, listening to her footsteps trail away. My eyes were crusted together and my mind ached and looped strange sentences, but I quickly cheered up upon realising it was a Sunday: This meant no obligations to anyone besides myself, and time to review my notes from last night in peace.

  Stiff, sore, and sober, I threw my blanket off and confronted the morning cold, mentally mapping out my day as I dressed myself in the damp clothes from the nearest pile. First, I decided, I'd have a real decent cup of Milo, possibly with some breakfast if Mum or Dad had decided to fix me any; then, I'd have a long, hot shower, one of my many former rituals that had fast become novelty. After a Milo and a shower, I thought, I'd be revived and ready to sort out my notes.

  Upon entering the kitchen, the reality of the situation froze my movements, shattering my plans for the day: Awaiting me at the table were Mum, Dad, and Ned. I had forgotten that Ned had stayed on the couch; and, in the psychic pain of morning, he represented only another obligation.

  Tentatively, I sat down on the free chair in between Mum and Ned, where my morning Milo sat waiting. Though avoiding their gaze, I could feel the eyes of both Mum and Dad burning into me through the silence, reminding me of my actions the previous night. I decided to postpone my apology, fearing that it would lead to a conversation; this, for some reason, filled me with dread. I'll apologise tomorrow, I told myself. Again.

  ‘Good night then, son?’ Dad said with a knowing, eyebrow-heavy glance, his voice stern but flecked with some sense of amusement I couldn't quite decipher. With a wave of raw anxiety, I realised that I was in no state to be dealing with people. Did he know I took mushrooms last night? It was certainly possible if he had been chatting with Ned that morning; though Ned was not the type to screw anyone over on purpose, the fucker just doesn’t know right from wrong sometimes. Perhaps he was referencing the insolent manner I had talked to Mum the previous night, in which case things were about to get a lot worse for me... Even more chilling was the possibility that he was just asking me a fucking question and making my drug-charred mind recoil in horror. Fuck.

  ‘... Yeah it was alright. Good to see Ned again....’ I said, with a split-second glance toward Ned.

  ‘Bit of a hangover then?’ Dad put his fork down and rested his hands on the table, suppressing a wry smile as he chewed.

  ‘Uh yeah, a little. Had a few drinks ... 'cause Ned's back.’

  I tried to cultivate some silence by avoiding his eyes, but he persisted.

  ‘Hmm. So, your mother said you were being a mouthy little asshole last night.’

  Nauseated, I scanned the table beneath eye-level, breathing through my anxiety. Dad still had a few strips of bacon and a poached egg on his plate. Mum had no food, just a coffee. Ned's neck hung from his shoulders, his face entirely concealed behind his hair. On his plate sat a toasted sandwich with a single bite taken from it.

  ‘Yeah.... Sorry Mum. I was just in a hurry to leave. I didn’t mean to… Uh, yeah,’ I managed, looking vaguely in the direction of her eyes; having them in my field of vision was enough at this point.

  In the silence that followed, I allowed my eyes to lose focus as I tried to summon the fearless inspiration I had felt the previous night, the wild, rebellious spirit I felt sure would stay with me; but all I felt was the submissive, childish anxiety of normality. With a strange sensation of heat, my fear grew into a kind of panic, and I knew I had to leave the situation before it manifested. Without a word, I picked up my Milo and made for my bedroom. I decided to apologise for this act of rudeness, along with last night's, with an all-encompassing apology tomorrow, once I'm feeling better. I'd apologise for everything then.

  Before the relief of solitude could ease my anxiety, the guttural splatter of human vomit echoed from the kitchen and into my very core. I knew instantly that Ned was the culprit, and the fear of how he would deal with the situation alone overpowered all else. After some deliberation, I sighed and returned to the kitchen.

  Dad had stood up from his chair, saying, ‘Hell, you alright buddy?’ looking at Ned with an expression of bewildered sympathy. Mum’s face was pale and detached, already exhausted by the strangeness that always followed Ned up from Cottonwood. Thin, uric vomit dribbled from the edge of the table, dividing itself between Ned's lap and the lino floor. Ned, much to my second-hand embarrassment, sat staring vacantly at his mess.

  Compelled to keep some distance, I stopped at the boundary between the kitchen and the hallway and started babbling anxiously, ‘That your medication screwing with you? I know those pills have a lot of side-effects. Feel free to lie down or something if you’re not feeling well….’

  Ned looked at me, leaking bile from a crooked half-smile, and said, ‘It’s cool. Probably just the shrooms from last night.’

  My chest tightened with both anger at Ned and fear of another drug-talk from my parents. To my surprise, Dad just laughed and shook his head, before walking to the sink; inexplicably, parents tended to think favourably of Ned, despite his subversive nature. Ned's expression suggested that somehow, in his strange little world, it was me who played the fool.

  ‘Fuck's sake Ned, you can deal with that,’ I snapped, before turning and heading back toward my solitude, my patience for Ned's eccentricities finally wearing thin. How long is that fucker going to hang around, I wondered. He had nowhere else to be, and I was bitter that the responsibility had fallen to me; in my wasted state the previous night, I had lost the invisible game of musical chairs we all played and wound up babysitting Ned.

  I closed the door as I returned to my room, relieved to hear the chaos of the kitchen muted into a wordless muffle. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I began the labourious but satisfying task of sorting through my notes. There were pages and pages to look through, and the task of editing it down and transcribing it to my notebook would surely busy me for most of the day.

  Scrambled across the top of the A3 sheet of paper on top of the pile, in a manic, child-like scrawl, was some kind of summary of what was happening in my brain last night:

late awake with mind wide open

awoke from sleep I never found

psilocybin soaked thoughts pin me down

confusion and clarity engaged in hate fuelled coitus

everything suddenly so very clear

I hate to think what I’ll think of my thoughts

tomorrow when daylight's haze sets in

I interpreted it as a cryptic message from my illuminated former-self to my present incarnation - he of the thoughts obscured by ‘daylight’s haze’ - and grappled with the idea for a bit, before giving up on it and searching through the layers of paper on the floor for my more empirical writings. Upon dismissing my poetry, I realised that this was just what my words had predicted; one of those self-fulfilling prophecies that seem to be behind most of what we do, if we look hard enough. Still, though that was indeed quite trippy, I had better things to do than contemplate personality dissociation.

  It was my notes about The Void that I was interested in, but they were spread thin throughout the pages of poems, drawings, and scientific enquiry. Reverse déjà vu, Ned, orgasm.... My anxieties transcended one another in a double-helix formation, manifesting as an odd combination of exhaustion and euphoria, as I readied myself for the journey ahead of me. Enraptured with mystery and wonder, I lay down on my hardwood floor, running my hands through my hair; laughing through my hangover, I basked in the knowledge that as long as I can keep ties with the Hermetic realms of my mind and beyond, away from the prying stare of the absolute, I will always be free.

29/07/2005

Dreams-

To sleep is to surrender oneself to the unlit Waters of the womb, a return to the primordial darkness from which we spawned. But these waters are not a void; just as aphotic life thrives in the inky depths of the ocean, so too do myriad strange and alien lifeforms grow in the nether regions of the mind, untainted by the harsh light of consciousness.

To dream is to illuminate the black Waters of the womb. It is often claimed that most beings dream in black and white, but this is only a half-truth; the dreaming eyes bathe the mindscapes in the eerie silver glow of Moon, a dimmed reflection of the Sun's kaleidescopic radiation that makes visible the denizens of the mind too delicate to stand the test of daylight. In the darkness of night, hypnagogic visions take form - first as a kind of smoke; then, as sentient beings, seducing the mind inward toward the fertile well of dream. It is a form of psychic condensation; Air becomes liquid - to fight or flee is to punch through the tides or trudge through marshlands. But this nascent form of matter also gifts the dreamer with a certain form of flight, as well as the capacity to affect reality on an embryonic level.

The waking senses enkindle dead matter; at dawn, the burning Sun sets Fire to the sleeping Earth. At night, we undergo submersion; the wild winds of the intellect become oceanic and flowing, rising and falling in worship of the gravitational rhythms of the Moon, lunar tides breathing with the ebb and flow of a sleeping beast who has shed the burden of geometry, destined to dance blindly with the orgiastic flowering of existence, until the preternatural Fire of day flares the eyes wide open to face the world alone, remembering only the sensation of forgetting.

Dreams are lives we can't remember.

Lyrical Symmetry Experiment 2- Black Mirror

Format-

1A 2  3  4C 4C 3  2  1B

1  2A 3C 4  4  3C 2B 1

1  2C 3A 4  4  3B 2C 1

1C 2  3  4A 4B 3  2  1C

1C 2  3  4B 4A 3  2  1C

1  2C 3B 4  4  3A 2C 1

1  2B 3C 4  4  3C 2A 1

1B 2  3  4C 4C 3  2  1A

4A 3  2  1C 1C 2  3  4B

4  3A 2C 1  1  2C 3B 4

4  3C 2A 1  1  2B 3C 4

4C 3  2  1A 1B 2  3  4C

4C 3  2  1B 1A 2  3  4C

4  3C 2B 1  1  2A 3C 4

4  3B 2C 1  1  2C 3A 4

4B 3  2  1C 1C 2  3  4A

Dawn fire's ecstasy illuminates, hallucinate creation's endless trick

Free motion navigates unstoppable kaleidoscopes, insensate yonic eyes

Life creates emotion, perilously serenading erotic substrate minds

Fate desires eternal countermotion, episodic memories return late

Wait silent, unmoving, periodic misdevotion manifests phallic hate

We sedate aphotic biology carelessly, devotion negates growth

The sonic vertebrate communicates oblivious surrogates oceans deep

Sick lifeforms recklessly proliferate, ejaculate wherever darkness shone

Insanity manifests psychic tricks, slick feline underhand deviations

Enlightenment's fallacies, topics born of chronic sedation, extrapolate

Destructively myopic city keeps the nation entropic remorselessly

Misanthropic entities contort thee, con artists blaspheming miscroscopic

Telescopic perceptions riding gone seas become secretly catastrophic

Malevolent demonic lation hopes we pity psychotic luminescence

Contemplating creation, sonic vibes hum chthonic sanity diapasons

Meditation's luminous fire flicks quick flashes exposing reality

01/07/2005

The Void-

The Void: Empty, vast, living

Beyond space, time, and information – but not consciousness

The creator and destroyer of everything and nothing

The breathing emptiness where all things meet

'Let the mind become as a flame or a pool of still water.'

The closest one can come to comprehending The Void is to accept being overwhelmed by it

It is to be experienced, not understood

Unfocus your eyes, pay attention to nothing

Do not pursue; stay perfectly still and let it brush past your skin weightlessly

or whisper hypnagogic whispers at midnight

eventually.

It begins with a sensation of rising intensity that spreads throughout the body in such a uniform way as to make the feeling of absolute acuteness become neutral. If circumstances allow, this creates a launching pad for one's consciousness to separate from the body and roam the higher planes until something calls it back to the manifest.

The Psilocybin experience can give one a bird's eye view of the varying degrees of reality between The Void and the manifest. To explore these realms 'on foot' requires supplementation via other means.

Orgasm-

In its most basic manifestation, the orgasm is a tool to facilitate the continuation of life – the chicken produces an egg to create another chicken; the egg produces a chicken in order to create more eggs. This is DNA continuing its own existence on a mass timeline, with all lifeforms existing as expressions of this ultra-temporal lifeforce.

The release of dopamine at the peak of sexual ecstasy is the root of the organism's drive to reproduce; most expressions of the will are subversions of this basic impulse.

Oxytocin, released in higher concentrations in the female organism, bonds the organism to its mate and – directly for the female, indirectly for the male – to its offspring. This release of chemical messengers can be channelled toward fetishes, bonding the organism to abstract concepts.

At the moment of orgasm, the mass of compulsive mental activity blinks, allowing external stimuli to bypass the conscious mind and impress upon the deeper reaches. Thus, one should be wary of their mental and physical environment at this moment. At its highest expression, this lapse in conscious awareness can bring one to a transcendental state of mystical ecstasy, allowing one to glimpse The Void. To achieve this, one must work to separate their sexuality from whatever fetishes and biological drives it has become associated with – this can be achieved by a period of chastity, an exorcism of one's fetishes and fantasies. At this level, the orgasm can become a tool of mystical perception, extending one's consciousness beyond time and space and opening the mind's eye to cosmic forces.

Whether an expression of biological need, a bond of love, or mystical yearning, the orgasm remains a moment of great consequence.

Heart aching loin-like yearning nostalgic for boundless beautiful madness, ecstasy that never quite happened but was forever about to. Static warms sludge-like, sensuous anorgasmia then flaccid, tired, depressed, dead, then screeching! flying wingless like running water climbing vertical, stratospheric pulsing, ozone crater made by soaring earthsperm stopped by intangible limits, an unstoppable force fucking an immovable object, fighting for the future of our race then scooped up off my abdomen and flung down the drain with the rest of the pet goldfish and turtles grown grotesque but still looking at each other understandingly, communication no less valid than anything else, when considered in depth.

Repression-

One who is too swept up in his or her own ego tends to forget the sublime opposing impulses of exploration and hedonism, discarding them in favour of an imaginary mission he could never even define, under the illusion that such impulses were somehow getting in the way.

-Ned Devlin, paraphrased wildly, translated into language, and deciphered 

Awake-

Late awake with mind wide open

Awoke from sleep I couldn’t find

Mushroom soaked thoughts pin me down

Confusion and clarity engaged in coitus

I hate to think what I’ll think of my thoughts

Tomorrow when daylights haze sets in

Alchemy-

Thoughts congeal, becoming coagulated chunks of speech

Which, in a turn of great frigidity, may become concrete through means of pen, achieving immortality

Only to be thawed and ultimately liquidated by the purity of enflamed spirit

That which remains unsaturated in a spectacular display of aetheric power

Or is extinguished in cowardice

Leaving rusted ice and an odour like dead perfume

Psychedelics-

My faith in the visionary states of these chemicals lies in the fact that their effects, at low doses, are enhancements of the pre-existing senses – one is more aware of his senses, as well as his emotions and thought processes. A high dose leads to visionary states, wholly hallucinogenic perceptions of things which are not perceived at all ordinarily. If it weren't for the hyper-sensitivity of low dose trips, I would dismiss these as dream-states and hallucinations; but, given the effects of low dose trips, I cannot deny the validity of these visions, and I feel they must be glimpses at something truer.

04/07/2005

Motivation-

Ego, sex drive, self-preservation:

The triangle of human drives/traps.

Kill or reduce one and the other two will attempt to fill the gap.

Kill or reduce two to blow the other up to spectacular proportions.

Kill all three and be free, but be careful not to kill one drive in the name of another.

Ned is free?

Collin is trapped?

Ego, sex drive, self-preservation, transcendence?

Naming-

Hallucinogen, hallucinogenic: Focused on the wrong aspect, hallucinations, which are more of a byproduct than a primary effect.

Psychomimetic: Mimicking psychosis. Implies that it is a form of insanity, rather than enlightenment.

Entheogen, entheogenic: Generating the divine within. More appropriate, but relies on the ill-defined concept of the divine.

Psychedelic, psychedelia: Mind manifesting. Accurate, but is at odds with my beliefs that the psychedelic states can invite influences outside of what is already contained within the mind.

Paradelic, paradelia: Manifesting the other. Acoustically similar to pareidolia, seeing shapes and patterns in seemingly random detail....

Without faces-

Your soul's aflame

But your mind's sedate

The very mind

We infiltrate

We destroy

What you create

Recreate your very fate.

-Footsteps in town, paraphrased slightly

Insomnia-

Worry, wonder, and discover

07/07/2005

9=9

99, 9+9=18, 1+8=9

9+9=18, 1+8=9

9x9=81, 8+1=9

81+18=99, 9+9=18, 1+8=9

99+18=117, 1+1+7=9

99+81=180, 1+8+0=9

81x18=1,458, 1+4+5+8=18, 1+8=9

99x18=1,782, 1+7+8+2=18, 1+8=9

99x81=8,019, 8+0+1+9=18, 1+8=9

99+99=198, 1+9+8=18, 1+8=9

99x99=9,801, 9+8+0+1=18, 1+8=9

99+18+81=198, 1+9+8=18, 1+8=9

99x18x81=14,4342, 1+4+4+3+4+2=18, 1+8=9

144342x9=1,299,078, 1+2+9+9+0+7+8=36, 3+6=9

144342x99=14,289,858, 1+4+2+8+9+8+5+8=45, 4+5=9

144342x81=11,691,702, 1+1+6+9+1+7+0+2=27, 2+7=9

144342x18=2,598,156, 2+5+9+8+1+5+6=36, 3+6=9 

Let's hope this pattern can be used for the good of mankind....

Q: How do you know when it's time to leave the house?

A: When you're afraid to leave the house.

08/07/2005

The listener-

The mexican ear eating lizard-

This reptile feeds on the ears of humans

By whispering barely audible words, it attracts the ears of humans who wonder exactly what he’s saying

Then he bites!

Any human who manages to listen without losing an ear is said to be enlightened with otherwise unattainable knowledge

-Michael Farmer, paraphrased slightly

Tribe-

We are a pack creature

With promises offered for stability

Where exclusion from the tribe is a thought to be feared

Suddenly solitary, we can pull strings from our own abode

Who needs a king now?

Shadows-

Mind cast out in alien places

laughing forest full of faces

The earth glows with strange powers

wild smurfette fucks a flower

Yesterday's gods glare from the shadows

through the forest to the gallows

13/07/2005

Useful words-

Sanskrit-

Muladhara: Root support

Svadhisthana: Dwelling place of the self

Manipura: Jewel city

Anahata: Unstuck

Vishuddha: Especially pure

Ajna: Command

Sahasrara: Thousand-petalled

Rasasvada: Bliss in absence of thoughts

Sukha: Deep, lasting happiness independent of situation

Maya: Mistaking the map for the territory

Antariksha: The space between earth and heaven

Greek-

Sophrosyne: A self-aware, moderate state of mind

Chthonic: Within the earth

Mythopoeic: Of or pertaining to the making of myths

Meraki: Something creative that you put a piece of your soul into

German-

Weltschmerz: World-weary sadness

Waldeinsamkeit: The feeling of being alone in the woods

Eigenlicht: The grey colour of the absence of light

Luftschloss: An unrealistic dream

Fernweh: Homesick for a place you've never been

Sehnsucht: Yearning for something far off and indefinable

Schadenfreude: Joy in the misery of others

It's spooky when there's no visuals....

11/07/2005

Things are getting interesting around the house Collin's house. It really does feel like we're on to something, creating a philosophy between us - or, more so, fleshing out and challenging the mysterious philosophy lurking deep within Collin. Even though he talks to us for hours at a time about the universe and all it contains, it feels as if we're barely scratching the surface. Does Collin already have the answers waiting? Is he just testing us? Or does he need our help? Such questions don't seem to be of any importance right now. What is important, is that with his Mum travelling the world and his Dad, from what I can tell, no more than a disembodied force that occasionally affects changes around the house, we finally have a sacred space to explore our inner world(s).

More and more, the physical aspects of our lives are seeming to be merely symptomatic of the mental – catching a cold, for example, is a sure indicator that one's thought patterns are out of whack. The chakrah system works as a decent diagnostic tool (die, agnostic tool).

With Collin taking on the role of some kind of visionary tribal leader, providing shelter, sustenance, and direction for the tribe, Ned has comfortably filled the niche of the shaman, diving recklessly into the abyss before beckoning the rest of us in. My concern is that symptoms of Ned's supposed mental illness are being increasingly interpreted as the wisdom of the mystic, with an ever diminishing boundary between the two. To voice this concern would be so utterly socially repulsive in such an intellectual climate that I've opted to stay quiet and simply keep tabs on the situation privately. Collin has made it clear that this is to be my role within the tribe: the note keeper. If ever we are to create scriptures around our philosophy, my notes will be the basis. So I write diligently, day and night.

Getting fucked up with a cold-

Drink 1 litre water upon awaking

Ingest 2.5mg Dextroamphetamine (dries the mucous membranes, fights fatigue)

Repeat with 1mg Dextroamphetamine in the afternoon

Get drunk on the following cocktail:

1 shot glass of whiskey (cough suppressant, mood elevation), one shot glass of water (hydration), one shot glass of apple cider vinegar (curative); 200mg choline powder (clarity of thought), half tablespoon grated ginger (curative), half a lemon (vitamin C), sprinkle of cayenne pepper (clearing nasal passage), 1 bag green tea (fights fatigue)

Indulge in Dextromethorphan as desired.

Useful words-

Buddhist-

Trishna: The cravings of man

Annitya: Impermanence

Ch'i: The life force

Loka: Plane of existence

Satori: Sudden awakening

Bardo: The period between death and rebirth

Dharmas: The elements of existence

Yidam: Mental construction of object of worship

Koan: A brief story illustrating the paradox of dualism

Wato: Answer to a koan

Ataraxy: Serene calmness

Samsara: The cycle of birth, life, and death

Pretas: Predatory phantoms

Qabalah-

Malkuth: Kingdom; the manifest

Yesod: Foundation; sub-conscious, dreams, sexuality, hallucinations

Hod: Splendour; intellect, form, learning

Netzach: Eternity; emotion, love, passion, creativity

Tiphareth: Adornment; harmony, self, beauty, balance

Chesed: Loving kindness; order, benevolence, expansion

Geburah: Severity; movement, change, power, destruction

Binah: Understanding; form, understanding, limitation

Chokmah: Wisdom; force, energy, creation, wisdom

Kether: crown; infinite, purity, The Void

Da'ath: Knowledge; The Abyss, darkness

Ain Soph Aur: Limitless light; nothing is

Ain Soph: Without limit; nothing becomes

Ain: Light; Nothing

Qliphoth: Husks; the daemonic realm

Asiyah: Action; material existence

Yetzirah: Formation; shaping matter into basic elements

Beriah: Creation; field of matter/energy

Atzilut: Emanation; pure formless existence

Comedowns-

The Haze Continues

Minor Depression, Major Apathy

Brain Zap Poetry

Delayed Xenophobia Manifests

Life Still Dances....

Don't Mention This?

I need to try DMT...

15/07/2005

Hypothesis-

It now seems to me that the mushrooms increase the flow of thoughts by decreasing the blocking agents that stop us from thinking about stuff that won’t help us survive. So on shrooms one wouldn’t see a predator in a tiger, but an intricate display of the universes artistry. Thinking in questions, rather than solutions.

He would then be eaten by the tiger, of course.

Don’t take shrooms around tigers.

Action-

Find a frame of reference from which to analyse the hallucinogenic experience. For this, I need solitude.

Solitude: The opposite of loneliness

16/07/2005

Howl 2-

The human animal is weak and seeking, mewling in tortuous utterances for nurture and nourishment, the frightened security of the absolute.

The anxieties of man are a manifestation of this ancient yearning, this instinctual lust for the ruthless and kind pressence of the Great Mother.

The ultimate sedative is maternal, but the human has grown - the infant is dead.

On anxious nights alone, we feel what newborns feel when they screech in formless want; we see what dogs see when they bristle and growl under the silver glow of Moon.

But the hunger remains, felt as a deep, primal desire for grounding, the embrace of the Earth.

Transcendence is an uninhibited call to the Moon.

Peepers Wide Open

Stan Richards

(5) A meteor of mass 2,000kg slows down from 450m/s to 50m/s by passing through the Earth’s atmosphere. How much heat is generated?

  ...Fuck knows. I’ll skip that one.

  Not surprisingly, Robbie and Lucy are nowhere to be seen. Prolly don't even know they got an exam. What is surprising though is seeing Collin sitting quietly a few desks away, looking all lost in concentration. Somehow that makes me hate him even more.

  It's been a hellish few months since that horrible mushroom trip. I’ve spent most of my days tryna forget the whole thing, just tryna do what’s gotta be done without anything reminding me of the despair I felt that night. But it's with me all the time now. The trip. The horror. Not a thing like it was that night, just like a constant, fucked up nightmare lurking beneath the surface, swallowing me in my quiet moments.

  I had to stop smoking weed. Had to stop taking anything. I also had to burn all my bridges with that crowd - The Vampires - Robbie, Collin, Ned. Even Lucy, as much as it hurt. I couldn’t handle the madness. Eating mushrooms all the time, convincing themselves they’re figuring it all out, chasing insanity dressed up as enlightenment... I think they’re basically drug addicts, just like the Seed Freaks in year eleven. Only their addiction is more complicated. I think it works by making you think that all of the big questions can be answered by having another trip. They make it feel like you’ve sorta woken up from a dream or something, like life wasn’t real before then. There’s this feeling like you gotta remember all the insights when you go back to your normal life. But you never do. Or you remember but can’t remember why it felt so special. I still can’t figure out whether shrooms make you think next level shit, or if they just make stupid and obvious shit seem like these holy truths.

  Either way, I'm not gonna take part in any of that. They think they can hold on to their insights by being on shrooms all the time. But really all they're doing is fucking up their brains to the point that getting through the day seems to be an act of genius.

(6) An object is placed in front of a curved mirror. The image is ‘caught’ on a screen and is larger than the object.

(a) is the image virtual or real? Why?

  I guess it must be real if it can be caught on a screen, right? But then there's like TVs and computers and shit... I can't really make heads or tails of the question, but I write it down anyway.

  With that minor accomplishment, I let myself drift away for a bit, as I've been prone to doing lately. I’m kinda laughing on the inside, thinking about Robbie tryna deal with that question. In all his pages and pages of shroomed-out notes describing the universe and the mind and all that, I bet he’d panic at the sight of a question with an actual answer. He’d be reminded of a thousand different mushroom-thoughts and have to go to the sick bay to sort his brain out.

  Collin’s done a good job convincing Robbie that by not going to school or applying himself to the real world in any way, he’ll figure out the universe and change the world. All that Timothy Leary shit. It's fuckin' shame, really. I always liked Robbie. He's got this kind of innocence about him, sorta like how Collin tries to portray himself - always just doing his own thing, never all caught up in macho bullshit or social politics everyone's obsessed with these days. He's got a lot of brains too. Brains that are being wasted tryna answer the unanswerable. I think that’s what he likes about mushrooms - they make you ask questions that can’t be answered. That way you can’t really be wrong.

  Fuckin’ Collin. I just wanna punch the cunt in the fucking face now. After all the shit he told us about school just being government brainwashing, the cunt’s been at school just about every fuckin’ day. A real sick cunt. His whole mission in life seems to be to drive everyone around him insane. What's in it for him I don't even wanna know.

(b) If the object is real, what kind(s) of the mirror is (are)?

  What the fuck does that mean? What kinds of the mirror is are? The whole sentence might as well fuckin' explode. I'll skip that one.

(c) If the object is virtual, what kind(s) of the mirror is (are)?

  Fuck this. I think I’ve answered enough. Just a pass will suit me fine. I’m no excellence student. I close the booklet and take it up to the sour cunt at the front with a quick nod and head off. I tried. More than Lucy or Robbie can say.

  I’m getting a little edgy as I walk, starting to think in questions again, always a warning for bad times ahead. Since that trip, I’ve been tryna stay busy as much as I can. Just keep it simple - do shit, and do it the best I can, without this fucking endless questioning that just ends with me all dark 'cause I really know fuck all about anything. It only takes like a few minutes to start, usually innocent enough. Like wondering why I'm looking at something a certain way. Or like why I chose to sit in a certain seat in class. Just little passing thoughts. But then it turns into a fucking ordeal, just tryna figure out what the fuck I was even tryna figure out in the first place, trying so desperately to convince myself that I know something for sure, just looking for something, some small, insignificant piece of certainty, and failing even at that. And now I have a whole afternoon to kill.

  Fuck.

  I'm thinking back to being like fifteen, the days when I did stuff besides getting wasted, just tryna think of how to fill this spare time without just talking myself into sick, schizophrenic depression... It'll be a few hours before it's dry enough to skate, and that's on the off chance the rain holds off all afternoon. Watching TV is out of the question - those fuckin' thoughts creep up all ninja-like without me even noticing, and before I know it, I don't even know what I'm watching anymore and my knee's hurting 'cause I'm fuckin' clawing at it, just tryna figure out who the fuck I even am.

  What can I do to keep my mind off my mind tonight? 

  I get a cold shudder and have to stop walking for a second to let a hideous thought take form my head.

  I'm afraid of my own thoughts.

  I'm trying to run from my own mind

  Fuck.

  It’s thoughts like this that make me wanna stop thinking.

  Beads of sweat are gathering on my face. I can't go home just yet. Too much time to nestle into my discomfort. I get my phone out to text Jordan or Lance, but the thought of socialising is too unsettling... Everything feels distant. The space between things seems to... expand... everything growing apart from each other, leaving me standing here in like a vast open plane, alone. Doctor Geoffreys calls it disassociation or something like that. A way to separate myself from the pain of reality. This is just the start, this hollowness. A warning. A glimpse. Like hearing the shuffle of feet in a darkened room you were sure was empty. Paralysing. Any possible movement seeming to invite some kind of attack.

  People speed by me like flies, vague and unsubstantial, blurred by the murky screen of my illness. It's in there lurking, like a trapdoor spider, stretched out beyond everything, breathing slowly, waiting. I can't feel the ground beneath me in any real way, but I start walking anyway, staring down at the blurred pavement with eyes that just can't be fucked anymore. 

  I'll get out an X-box game, I think. Just get some cunt barking orders at me so I can just do whatever I'm fuckin' told to. That way Dad and Katie will leave me be. Karen won't be home. I'll just have to push through the sick black till bedtime, then take my zopiclone and drift into the sweet blank. I run my hand along an unpainted picket fence and wonder why I’m doing it and have to sit down ‘cause the shit’s starting up again and if I'm gonna be on the ground, I'd rather it be on purpose.

  The air is ugly and sick, the sunlight nauseous and anxious, dizzying, the day looking forward only to the possibility of vomiting, but, deep down, doubting even the possibility of that relief.

Lucy Winters

It's the most beautiful sparkling blue afternoon in the gardens, and I'm squirming slow motion on a rustling blanket of fallen leaves in the shade of my favourite oak tree, feeling like a fairy in my forest green tunic. There's a half drunk bottle of mushroom juice sitting next to me that's got me feeling like everything's perfect and hoping that nothing will ever change. It's impossible to feel bad things when you're with the trees and clouds on such a day.

  Ned and Robbie are sitting above me in the tree. They're just starting to get excited. Since we started drinking our mushrooms, Robbie's dropped his beanie, glasses, and hoodie down to where I am. I can tell he's starting to get a little trippy up there because he's talking real fast and shaking the branch around heaps, making yellow leaves rain down playfully around me.

  ‘. . . Because, the thing with whole super string idea is - See what I reckon is that this is kind of like a hologram universe, this one we can, you know, see and touch. So, like, any time something happens anywhere in the universe, it can be detected anywhere else straight away, by anyone or anything with the means to pick up on it, 'cause - so basically every tiny aspect of the universe, every infinitesimally small particle, contains the information for the - It's like DNA, you know. The whole blueprint for everything unfolding, all contained within the tiniest fragment . . .’

  He's talking to Ned, desperate to give form to the frenzied flight of ideas flowering inside him. I like his words, like forgotten magic spells, but it’s hard to figure out how they all go together. Especially when I’m tripping. It's easier to just watch the leaves go by and feel the vibes run through my body. But his voice is cute like a kid's when he’s excited, so he makes good background noise.

  ‘. . . So, that's like, the real universe, this like, like a black hole, like an infinitely dense mass of information, containing the entirety of the universe all, sort of, folded down. And that's like - that makes the illusion of the universe. Kind of like a grid all made up of connections and not the things themselves. And the stuff we can see and touch is just, like, a projection of this, as filtered through our own - Like, our brains make it into a three dimensional hologram so we can actually, sort of, see it and touch it.’

  ‘Like light from-’

  ‘Nah, hang on man, hear me out for a second . . .’

  Ned's been trying to say something for a little while, but Robbie's all excited so I've only heard little bits of it. But it's like Robbie ends up saying what Ned's trying to say anyway. Like whenever Ned gets a word out, it has the whole sentence in it so Robbie picks up on it and thinks he thought of it. Like how a seed has the whole future plant waiting in it. Maybe I should say that . . .

  No, Robbie will say it eventually. He's happy talking right now.

  ‘. . . So this grid is made of information, the same shit thoughts are made out of. So like, heavier things, like matter, and even like, electricity and stuff, they have a kind of force or weight behind them, so it takes a little while to get from one place to another. Even sound and light, but they move real quick. Information, though, which is what our thoughts are made out of, it, uh, information is, um . . . Wait, no. Thoughts. So yeah, thoughts, right, they, uh . . .’

  ‘I think this is a blink and you miss it kind of-’

  ‘Hold up, Ned, I just gotta get this out, while it’s, uh, you know. So, yeah, our thoughts are made of like pure information, so they can get anywhere instantly. They're not really physical, so they . . . um . . . Oh yeah. So ‘cause they’re not physical, they’re more able to . . . Fuck. I had something there. What was I just saying?’

  ‘I'd better not tell you,’ Ned says, smiling. I can't see him from down here, but I can tell by his voice that he's got a little demon grin.

  ‘Nah, fuck you Ned. What was I saying? I was onto something just then, man. I just forgot where I was . . .’ Robbie's all frustrated, but he sounds like he's got a smile too. But it's like a smile he doesn't want because he's having so much fun being all serious.

  They start trying to shove each other off they branch they're sitting on, giggling like little kids. Since Robbie's not talking anymore, I take another gulp of shroom juice and close my eyes, letting the sensations take me over. I like it in here behind my eyes. It's all very . . . alive. It feels sort of like looking at picture books when I was a kid, not really worried about what the words said, because someone else read them to me once . . . My whole body's humming now . . . everything blurring . . . can't even tell what shape it is anymore . . . going up and swooping around, like I'm riding a bird . . . like I am a bird . . . riding the currents of the air . . .

I snap out of it going ‘Oh my god Robbie! Are you okay?’ when Robbie crashes into the ground next to me with a thump, all the twigs and leaves hissing and spinning about in the air. Looking up, I can see he didn't actually fall that far, it's just that while my eyes were closed the gaps between things got bigger and bigger.

  ‘Oh yeah, that's right,’ he says, looking up at me all scrambled on the grass with excited, electric eyes and scruffy brown hair all sticking up. ‘So the very inside of your mind, like the core of it, is made up of the same shit as the actual universe. Mind stuff. Consciousness. The essence of all form. Or like, maybe not what the universe is made of, but like a fundamental aspect of it. Like gravity, permeating everything. The fifth fundamental force of . . . But yeah, I reckon it's kind of blocked off by lots of, like, heavier thoughts, because - Wait, no, actually there's like, layers of thoughts. Like if you ever try not to think anything, you find that there's another layer of thoughts beneath your conscious thoughts that you didn't, uh, think on purpose. Then if you stop thinking those thoughts there's another layer underneath it, a layer that's less conscious thought and more like, impressions, kinda. And like each layer has less and less to do with the outside world . . .’ He pauses to glow for a second, then gets up from the ground in a smooth backward roll and sits cross legged in front of me, looking into my eyes. ‘And since each layer is a landscape for the thoughts of the layer above it, they get smoother and smoother as you get deeper and deeper until there's just . . . nothing.’

  I smile at him. I have no idea what he's talking about, but he looks real peaceful now. The sun is twinkling through the insect winged shadow patterns of the tree branches into his eyes, making them shine this faded amber colour like a cat. Reminds me of when I used to walk to school with him and Ned. I don’t remember what we used to talk about, but it seems like all we did was laugh back then. Laugh at all the people that weren’t laughing because they were all just jealous. It’s nice to see him like that again. Makes me feel like it’s all simple and easy like it used to be.

  I stand up and stretch while he gazes into the distance and say, ‘Should we go for a walk?’

  He nods and stands up, picking up his glasses but not putting them back on. ‘Come on, Ned. Let's explore,’ he says, waving Ned down from the tree. I take his hand with mine and he’s decided to leave his beanie and hoodie behind for some reason. We walk through the crunchy bark towards the fragrant gardens with Ned following behind, looking at things we'll never see.

There's something magical about the fragrant gardens today, even more than usual. The colours and smells all seem to have got swept up in this wind that twists around me as if to whisk me away with it. It's like being underwater, with flower fish of all sorts of rainbow haze swimming around me. For a while, I’d forgotten all about the mushrooms I'd taken, or even that there's such a thing to do as take mushrooms. But the best thing is that I'm hardly even noticing the little things I'm doing like giggling and walking around and sometimes saying things like wow and ahhh . . . It all feels like a choreographed dance where all there is to do is not try to do anything and I'm twirling around, dancing so harmoniously with everyone and everything knowing exactly where to be and what to do and what to smell like. I’m going to paint this when I go home. Not what I'm seeing, but how it feels. Paint from here, from this magical place. Paint something that invites others to feel what I feel. I haven’t even picked up a paintbrush since I went home last. It feels like so long ago . . .

  Ned's singing, ‘Could be would be should be . . . if it could be,’ in a lazy dream, all in tune with the way the lavender flowers curl and uncurl their nozzles. ‘Should be could be would be . . . it should be . . .’ He's dancing too, but not with his body. The way his outline shimmers in my eyes in a way I normally wouldn't be able to see. Ned's trippy little mind dance. How often no one notices . . .

  We're walking along the rust coloured dirt path, with Robbie ahead of us scraping out a picture with his shoe as we go. It's like a stick figure person throwing a spear at a giant bison type creature. His picture leads us around the corner to the side track where the peonies are, where he carries on drawing along the path. I'm happy to go real slow because I can sort of spin around and not worry where I'm looking and just let my ears and nose pull me here and there. It doesn't even matter where I'm going. I can go wherever I want. I'll have to remember that. Next time I forget what it's like to be happy . . . everything around me all doing one big, beautiful dance, dancing together like we're all the same. There's no reason not to smile like this forever. No reason to hate or worry or get angry. No reason at all . . .

  I stop twirling and stumble into some dense shrubs laughing all dizzy. Robbie looks at me through the negative space of a low canopy with a tranquil smile, still drawing with his shoe.

  ‘Can I use your pen?’ I ask.

  He slows his drawing and takes a black marker from his pocket and tosses it over the tree to me, then carries on with his spirals. I pick up the pen and lift my dress up from the side and draw a little symbol on the front of my underwear. It's like that symbol for Mercury that Robbie likes drawing, but with two lines through the stick and two dots in the down pointing arrow, so it looks kind of like a lizard crawling out the bottom. For some reason, I decide to draw a little lemniscate in between the devil horns with little lines and a mawish opening on one side making it sort of like a closed double helix, before letting my dress back down. It's a little trick Ned taught me when we were young, at the back of Mrs Davies' class in year nine. I was so sad that day, but he cheered me up with a drawing of a sausage dog, stretched so long that it took three pages. The mysterious black cloud around me finally dispersed and we laughed together until Ned got suddenly serious and stuffed both the first and last page in his mouth, chewing it like a huge wad of gum. He ended up choking on it and got sent out of class, leaving me alone staring at the middle piece, eyes blurry with twinkles of emotion. It was just two parallel lines, the body of the dog. But contained within those two lines was all the joy and whimsy one can’t help but feel when faced with a sausage dog. Just two horizontal lines. There's always horizontal lines somewhere . . .

  Smiling, I walk over to Robbie, whose drawing has led him into an enclosed circle of the garden where a discoloured acacia tree hangs over a wooden bench, making stoned gestures in the winds. I hand him his pen back and his little smile makes me bashful and I wonder if he saw what I just did. He pockets the pen and takes a step back and crosses his arms, examining his shoe drawing. It's an ammonite sort of creature with a detailed spiral shell and tentacles that writhe out from the front as a trio of stick figure dinosaurs with dots for eyes and lines for teeth, all rearing back like snakes about to strike. I notice that he's flicked the rocks outward from the lines, creating a glow around the creatures, and know for sure that he didn't see me drawing on my underwear.

Collin Callahan

I went straight to the fridge when I got home and found that the sneaky fuckers had taken all of my shrooms. A subtle rise in body temperature reminded me to check myself, so I sat down right there on the kitchen floor and meditated myself into a more stable head space before making an assessment of the situation. Ned was the only one I'd told about my shrooms, and we both agreed to wait until this afternoon to have a trip. This left me with two possibilities: Either ned is full of shit, or robbie got to him and talked him into treachery. Either way, my circle of trust was effectively reduced to no more than myself and possibly hayden, wherever the fuck he was.

  Fuckers. Gutless weak cunts, the lot of them.

  I wrapped up my meditation with a general hex on humanity at large and got up to do some dishes. Contemplating the possibilities for the night ahead of me, I decided a Dextroamphetamine fuelled shroom hunt was in order. I wondered whether ned or robbie would like to join me, and came to understand my situation a little better. I kicked myself for letting ned know where my amphetamine stash was - the cunt can't fucking help himself once he's had a line. I put down the scrubber and plate and rushed to my room to confirm what I already knew.

  Yep. No more Dexies.

  Fucker.

  Qualitatively, anger is an emotion of little use - a slight boost in energy paid for with greatly impaired judgement. Quantitatively, however, it can be a gift from above, provided one has the restraint to channel it toward productive ends. Energised, I leafed through ned and robbie's belongings, since they were basically living at my house at this point. Reading robbie's notes was a great fucking disappointment. All he had written since I last looked was a bunch of shit about how wonderful the universe is, everything in harmony with nature's greater order and blah blah fucking blah. That's not to say he's wrong - there are countless glories in our universe, and I have been guilty myself of such petty indulgences - but it's all just a bit cowardly. Happiness, joy, love - they're pleasant, sure. But there's just nothing to them. That's why we like them. They're simple. Easily grasped. That's also why they make such shitty reading material. Paranoia, confusion, and terror, on the other hand, are complex and multilayered. This is why people shy away from them. But it's also why they're worth dissecting. An intimate relationship with these less mindlessly indulgent emotions can lead one to an ecstasy far beyond the puerile comforts of love and joy. So the universe is fucking great. Now what, robbie? You just going to rephrase that over and over for the rest of your existence? Where could that possibly lead to besides a mass of vacuous hyperbole? Do you think we left the ocean four hundred million years ago in pursuit of comfort? Still, it was not the time to surrender to emotion. I would just have to gently remind robbie what we were doing. Less lucy, more ned. Or perhaps not. The situation was a complex one, requiring more clear headed deliberation on my part. It was time for some Harmonics. That much I knew.

  I rang lucy after getting no answer from robbie. She said they were tripping at the Botanicals, and it was lovely. I listened obligingly as she described absolutely nothing in as many words as possible, until she said something that caught my attention.

  ‘...lovely white flowers like bell dresses for ankle high fairies...’

  Datura. The missing piece of the puzzle.

  I hung up on her and went straight to Mum's room, a plan formulating rapidly in my mind. I helped myself to a bottle of aged rum and went back to the lounge to leaf through ned's bag. I took a handful of Valium and crushed them up on the kitchen bench, before brushing the pale blue powder into the rum. I debated internally whether or not robbie would have taken any amphetamines yet and decided to get more either way, having developed something of a craving for them myself.

  I packed my bag with the rum concoction and some paper and a pen for robbie, then text michael and set off. The evening was clear and cool, and an intoxicating glow was spreading out from my heart in anticipation of the day ahead of me.

Robbie Marks

‘Hey robbie, can i be a small but interesting part of your life?’

  I had been ignoring Dad’s inane messages for some time at this point, but this one was rather intriguing, so I took a moment to message him back.

  ‘Yes. But that text was it.’

  As expected, my phone started ringing, so I switched it off and put it in my bag, asking myself what the fuck it was doing in my pocket in the first place. My trip was still in its early stages, and I wasn’t about to let any resinous parental-clinginess get between me and my inspiration.

  Ned and I were sitting in the shade of a tree canopy, me cross-legged on the grass, Ned reclining against the tree trunk with a bemused smile and eyes sparkling up at the leaves and branches. Lucy was shimmering in the clearing with her phone to her ear; from her intoxicated laughter, I gathered that she was talking to Collin. The atmosphere was one of serene psychedelia; though the three of us were deeply bonded in our voyage, there was no sense of obligation between us, and we all felt comfortable enough to indulge in our introspections privately.

  With no ties to physical reality, I closed my eyes and allowed myself to be transported to the subterranean depths. I found myself inhabiting an enhanced, hyper-physical version of my manifest surroundings. The same stuff was all there: The trees, the sky, the ground - even Ned and Lucy, at least some form of them: A small area of the fractal ocean tending toward human form when observed directly - but all of the surfaces were covered in a thin, fractalline membrane that seemed to be moving in a constant outwardly shifting globular motion, without ever truly growing or progressing from its initial state. From a distance, the membrane had a similar visual effect as the rainbow shimmer of an oil patch, moving around to the force of some unseen magnetism, a magnetism that was somehow entwined with the light source emanating from ‘above’. Unlike the light sources I was accustomed to on the outside, this one could be observed directly and in great detail, as I was no longer relying on the flawed capacities of my jaded biological organs, my present vantage point controlled by pure will.

  Just as the absence of sunlight creates shadows, parts of the scene before me were obscured from the source of immense light; though these voids manifested as fractalline pulses rather than darkness. Using the fractals as makeshift shadows for my perception, I could make out the form of a vast phallic structure that stretched up to the very source of the whiteness. Within the fractal shadows, small, humanoid shapes shifted around furtively, pulsating in time with a mantra-like, insectoid rhythm permeating the land. These entities were camouflaged into the greater design of the fractal shadows, but could be distinguished by the subtle discord of their patterns against that of the surrounding fractals. As I observed these anomalies with detached, scientific curiosity, the ubiquitous hum became clearer and more intricately detailed, until it stabilised into what sounded like an alien language, trilling, ‘Prrrreeeeeetz aprreeeet prreeetzzzz,’ over an underlying hiss. Interpreting this language synaesthetically, I intuited that their fractal sheaths were a disguise - in the same way a thief would wear a black balaclava when doing a midnight job - and that they were in the process of robbing the great whiteness itself. In a kind of heroic act I would only ever be capable of in my inner worlds, I attempted to manifest a Zeusian thunderbolt to strike the malevolent entities down, but only succeeded in waking up the entire entity, one with a kind of invisibility comparable to that of the sky or distant hills. My entire field of vision took on the form of a reptilian face, impossibly close to my own, revealing its presence to me with just a vague dip of the head, before a whiplash of the tongue shocked my eyes open.

  The after-image of the reptilian entity faded back to the oceanic, fractalline world it had formed from before superimposing itself on my surroundings, merging with the colour-saturated, slowly breathing visuals I had been enjoying for the last hour or so. Lucy must have noticed my beating heart, because she said, ‘Don't worry, Collin's coming,’ with a transcendent white smile.

  I returned her smile, but there was something sour growing inside me; perhaps a part of me that wanted to be seen as an equal to Collin - if there can be such a thing - rather than the sidekick I had come to embody. Lucy was standing pigeon-toed in front of us, glowing awkwardly as her eyes followed the trail of something invisible. Egoic concerns stirred inside me as I absorbed her beauty - the flicker of her navel-length blonde hair over her clouded green dress, the subtleties of her gypsy-influenced style of dress, the total openness she expressed in the way she moved and talked - unable to reconcile the contrast between her and more feral creatures such as Ned and myself.

  Disturbed by the notion of my feelings being something more than platonic, I turned to Ned, hoping his twisted beauty would clear things up. He was already watching me, and responded by smiling and raising his middle finger at me. I turned back to Lucy. She was gazing up into the overhanging branches, absently chewing on the bracelet around her wrist with her other arm wrapped around her body. I felt the need to say something, but the thoughts I wanted to share were too complex to verbalise, and to do so would surely -

  ‘Shut the fuck up Robbie,’ Ned interrupted.

  ‘I.... Wait, what?’

  My eyeballs darted from Ned to Lucy and back as their smiles broke into a contagious laughter that enveloped my confusion. Ned's hoarse snigger grew into his unmistakable cackle, intensifying both Lucy's and my own, until the three of us were completely lost in the exponential Mandelbrot laughter, laughter laughing at laughter, blurring the boundaries of everything.

Once the orgy of laughter came to a close, we sat around post-coitally abstracted, feeling no need for words or anything other than smiles, peacefully watching the afternoon clouds give way to the dim haze of evening. Eventually, our trance was broken by Collin emerging from the tangle of trees behind us. Lucy leapt to her feet and hugged him, laughing with unrequited joy. Though I had been enjoying the warmth of our shoulders resting together under the overhanging branches, I was glad to see Collin. He nodded curtly at Ned and sat cross-legged in front of us, leaving Lucy once again standing awkwardly on her own.

  ‘Good trip, Robbie?’ he asked, piercing my eyes with quiet intensity.

  ‘Yeah man, real good,’ I said, not bothering to interpret his mysteriously guarded tones. ‘I’ve sorted heaps of shit out. Like, in here,’ I pointed at my head.

  Collin stared neutral at me, with a familiar expression that Ned once described as ‘angelic’ - though I have reason to believe that such words hold different meanings for Ned than the rest of us. In the five-to-ten second silence, an entire conversation took place between Collin and I, arriving at the disappointing conclusion that I had retained little, if any, of my mushroom-induced insights.

  Collin nodded understandingly, before retrieving a pencil and some refill from his backpack. ‘Looks like you forgot something,’ he said, handing them over. 

  ‘I did, yeah,’ I said, setting the paper down on my lap. ‘Thanks.’ I realised I had been sub-consciously craving Collin’s approving smile since I’d voiced my thoughts to Lucy earlier; though Lucy was certainly open-minded enough to understand and appreciate my insights, she was never very interested in abstract discussions, leaving us unable to animate my thoughts together in the way I would with Ned or Collin. It was Collin’s input that I always pined for. It was his confirmation that helped cement them into the framework of my life, which he would always reinforce with his own take on the matter.

  Under the heat of Collin’s stare, I suddenly remembered the almost-full bottle of shroom-juice sitting next to me. I handed it to him without a word, trusting his instincts and keen eye. A faint but warm smile softened his stare, and he finished the bottle in one extended gulp.

  ‘Thanks. I fucking needed that,’ he said, his posture melting with the release of an almost-visible mist. He then took a bottle of some kind of hard liquor and a small baggy of Dextroamphetamine from his bag and placed them on the grass between us, before opening the bottle and looking at me with a comical, lopsided grin. Though I made some attempt to mirror his expression, I was hesitant; as much as I enjoyed both substances, I couldn't help but feel that our peace was about to be shattered. I felt that it was the purity of this trip that had made it so insightful: Just mushrooms, untainted by stimulants, sedatives, or the need to direct it toward some kind of ends. However, the truth was that I trusted Collin's intuitions more than my own. He always reminded me of the importance of taking something back from the trip - freezing it by means of pen - lest we become yet another group of kids falling victim to the seduction of chemical time-wasting.

  ‘I mean, why not?’ Collin picked up on my apprehension, ‘By the sounds of it this trip has just been an indulgence. Might as well take the indulgence to the limit.’ He took a gulp of liquor and held the bottle out to me. ‘The complete and systematic derangement of the senses, right?’

  ‘Right,’ I agreed, before taking a swig that lit a fire all through my windpipes. I handed the bottle to Lucy and picked up the pencil and pad, still aware of Collin’s watch. I stared at the blank page for a moment, trying to figure out what I wanted to write, then why I wanted to write before saying, ‘Fuck it,’ and putting it down, giving in to the sense of abandon growing between us. Collin gave me a raised-eyebrow smile, then shrugged and went about crushing up some pills on the back of his cellphone.

  Released from Collin's attention, I became once again aware of my surroundings; the four of us were now sitting in a circle at the foot of a tree, with a small selection of intoxicants at the centre, on a clear winter-spring evening; my three friends shared a wide-pupiled Cheshire Cat smile, and their strange, angular postures manifested to me as a series of runes. Collin raised the phone to his nose and inhaled his line in one motion, before passing it to Lucy. Lucy handed the liquor to Ned before taking the phone and dividing the remaining powder three ways with a card. Ned took an inhuman swig of liquor without flinching, before handing it to Collin, who matched him with an extended swig of his own, but was unable to suppress a full-bodied shudder. The bottle then came to me, and I sipped at it furtively before passing it to Lucy, who took it from me after passing the Dextroamphetamine phone along to Ned. Ned had his line with a hooter someone had rolled from my refill, then passed it to me with one hand while the other reached past Collin to snatch the idle bottle from Lucy’s lap. I snorted my line while Collin fished some more pills from his bag and a party in the gardens was born.

Staring drunkenly at the shrinking sun, I felt some disappointment as the extravagant streaks of golden-orange that slashed across the blackening blueness of the sky would have made a great visual feast, had my senses still been alive with Psilocybin. This was a different kind of trip, though: Vision blurred rather than distorted, wild declarations in lieu of cosmic insight; but, as usual, Collin had calculated the intoxication with surgical precision. Complemented by the lingering sapience of psychedelia, the dopaminergic energy and mental acuity of the amphetamines allowed us to embrace the un-tethered spontaneity of drunkenness without lapsing into stupor, resulting in an evening of deep, philosophical discourse, tempered by a Dionysian undertone of lawless ecstasy.

  Collin had brought with him a copy of the Bill of Rights Act 1990, and the two of us practised quoting it to each other in improvised cops-and-robbers scenarios. Lucy was amused by our performances and the surreal characters we invoked - Collin's Officer Thompson, a meek and apologetic cop who made earnest small talk with a gun pointed at my head; and my John Anderson, a fast-talking rogue loosely parodying Michael, who was smuggling endangered species across the border and refused to answer any questions directly, including his name, which he at various points claimed was ‘Tricky’ or ‘Speedy’ - but I was aware of Ned's under-stimulated mind ticking over. He began amusing himself by sleazing onto Lucy against her protests, forcing Collin into the unnatural role of a defensive lover; a role he played with good humour, perked up by Ned’s friskiness, as he often was.

  ‘Ned, I’ll kick your arse if you don’t stop being a fucking creep,’ Collin challenged him, smirking. Ned crept toward him in a kind of dancing prance and started tickling his sides, their mutual antagonism reminding me of our younger days. Though small and gentle by nature, Collin easily overpowered Ned, wrestling him to the ground and pinning his arms under his knees. Ned thrashed around, making sounds that could have been laughs, screams, or both; Collin then started pouring liquor on his face, which he licked at while snarling and grunting like a dog.

  Lucy and I stood by laughing, until I clicked what he was doing and snapped out of my evening daydream. ‘Hey man, don’t waste that,’ I snatched the bottle out of his hand. I then had a swig, since that’s what one does when there’s a bottle in his hand. While I had Collin’s attention, Ned started undoing Collin's belt.

  ‘Kinky fuck,’ Collin said. He teared a handful of dirt and grass out of the ground and mashed it in Ned’s face, Ned yelping and whining like a wounded dog.

  After torturing Ned for some time, Collin dismounted and sat cross-legged next to him. Panting slightly, he looked down into Ned’s eyes and said, ‘Know how I know you weren’t gonna try anything on with Lucy? Or me?’

  Ned tilted his dirt-covered head, with a confused, high-pitched, ‘urr?’ noise, still in dog-character.

  Collin’s face contorted into a strange, tortured smile. He looked around at the trees in deep contemplation before finally saying, ‘Well, I guess we might as well put it all out there now. We're all friends here.... No judgement, right guys?’ He looked up at Lucy and I, and we both stood awkwardly until I shrugged and nodded to move us past the nebulous silence. He turned back to Ned, ‘Your Mum told me about the sex counselling you had when you were a kid. I know all about it.’

  No one said anything for a Moment, and Lucy and I both gave Collin our full attention. Ned stared up at him, his blank expression barely visible in the growing darkness. Collin acknowledged my attention briefly before turning back to Ned.

  ‘What, she never told you? That therapy shit from back in the day, back in primary school?’

  ‘Uh uh,’ Ned shook his head.

  Collin glanced around for a second, then rearranged himself awkwardly in the building tension. ‘Well, shit. That's just bad parenting. I think it's about time you found out,’ he said. He paused and looked back to me and Lucy with an unfamiliar grimace, then nodded slowly from me to his thoughts to Ned before continuing, ‘When you were like seven, seven or eight, you used to touch your classmates and shit. Used to take them into the bush and convince them to ... uh ... take their clothes off, and.... Is this not ringing any bells at all?’

  Ned shook his head again.

  Collin paused, once again looking up at Lucy and I, then back to Ned. ‘Well that makes sense. It’s probably because of the counselling; they sent you to a psychiatrist, claiming you were a future sexual predator - basically saying that if you got with kids back then, you might still have a taste for it in later life.... They did some freaky hypnotism shit, like twice a week. They neutered you, man, had you fixed. But part of the therapy was forcing you to repress the memory - you know, leave it in the sub-conscious to flower, as the troglodytes among us still seem to think is a good idea.... Man, I can’t believe your Mum hasn’t told you this shit yet. You two really need to get more dialogue going on between you, man. Fucking hell.’

  I couldn’t tell whether Collin was fucking with us. The premise made some sense; Ned was a fucked up kid - he was often visited at school by unfamiliar, official looking adults who would pull him out of class to talk; none of us ever asked him about it, all making a sort of telepathic agreement to leave it all unsaid - and I’d never seen him show any interest in a girl without a certain degree of mischief being involved; but then again, he was never one to take interest in the usual fixations of teenage life. Presently, his expression was vaguely curious, but mostly just blank and dirty.

  Collin stood up, helping Ned by the hand. ‘I know. Come with me,’ he said. He walked off into the dark, knowing the rest of us would follow. The four of us left the clearing and entered the tangled black, a rising vibe pronounced yet formless, obscured by the cloud of intoxication. Our peace had splintered, and we could all feel a terrible darkness creeping in through the cracks.

Ned Devlin

It's easy to forget how much you've forgotten. Especially when you forget what it means to remember. I knew Collin knew I knew this. Though it was all quite nifty, what he was saying, all too clear to me was his facade, him never one to say or do something without Reason. So I went along with his Harmonics, me not being at all opposed to the grand and dastardly.

  We were ushered by a drunken blur to a rather hypnotic lifeform swaying in the breeze, with bell shaped fingers coming out from every which direction, speaking strange codes into the night with its wild, laughing pollen.

  ‘This is Datura, ned,’ Collin said, using a voice that sounded a lot like my own, which he did when his words were for me and me alone. The words were worded the way they were just to make sure I would smile about it, with old Collin not needing to say anything more.

  Evening, Lady Datura, I said, acknowledging her feminine ways much like Collin didn’t. She was a vaguely malevolent looking sort of existence, with an unmistakable aura of elegance and Insanity, the kind of Beauty you’d find in a particularly captivating house fire, where everything fits together nicely.

  ‘Eat a couple of these. It’s supposed to bring out repressed memories,’ Collin said, under the Illusion that I needed convincing: I’d been wanting for some time to copulate with this mistress, this Seductress of the Night. And Collin said I was asexual . . .

  Collin plucked a flower from her and handed it to me, while Robbie and Lucy looked from me to Collin over and over again, words all wrapped up in Nerves. I took a large bite from where she was plugged in and felt a little giddy, not scopolamining just yet, more just a touch bored of Life’s little lies, feeling about ready for a bit of a tongue twister in the Narrative. It wasn’t long before chewing became quite a task, as her insides took on the consistency of thick, bubbling sap. But when the rewards are so great, such a hindrance is not a hindrance at all, and my meal was over in a quick Daydream.

Poor old Collin was having a Nightmare trying to convince Robbie to eat some flowers, him wanting to trip only if Robbie did too, to help keep the banter ticking along I suppose. This left me alone with Lady Datura and her Seladora flora melody, which was ideal, me being such a jealous lover.

  ‘Fuck, nah man there's no need for that; we took the shrooms, the dexies are still going, we got rum left - let's just leave it at that and make sure Ned doesn't die,’ Robbie was reckoning. Collin's disappointment was all too obvious to me, but not so to the others, with me taking the centre stage for the now.

  ‘How many did you eat?’ Lucy asked me, her eyes wild with Fright and words all akimbo. It was good to see her so worried about something, but thinking numerically was suddenly beyond me, so I said into her eyes: You’ve got to start looking beyond the pages of the book, which sounded a little odd once I’d said it, and though from where my head is Now I realise it wasn’t quite so funny, this Thought had me cackling wildly, to the point where standing up was no longer an option, the world around me not really colouring between the lines anymore, all the bells and whistles just scribbles now, all dribbly and criss crossing and merging into each other.

Collin Callahan

My Harmonics were well underway, if slightly misshapen.

  It was easy to convince ned that eating some Datura was a good idea, but I was fairly sure I wouldn't get any insight from him since his self expression was on par with that of a four year old. Still, I was excited to finally observe the effects of the mysterious plant... Maybe some repressed memories would surface, maybe not. Maybe his mum made the whole fucking story up just to fuck with me. She always was a kinky bitch like that.

  A kinky bitch with the post coital pleasantries of a praying mantis.

  By quarter past eight, fifteen to twenty minutes after ingestion, ned had adopted the crude, uncoordinated motions of a blackout drunk. His head bobbed around atop a flaccid neck, eventually leading him gracelessly into a slump against a tree trunk. The three of us stood around him until I got bored and lay on the grass to smoke a cigarette and watch the stars. Mumbling in a quiet, monotonous tone, ned said that he felt like a character in a comic strip and was waiting for the punchline, before being taken over by a fit of wild, drooling laughter. Periodically, he would stand with startled motions and try to walk, but he never made it further than a few steps before crashing into the ground. From this, I concluded that Datura was no more than a high powered inebriant, its effects more like alcohol or opiates than psychedelics.

  Robbie and lucy stood around nervously as ned's words were gradually reduced to nonsense, a kind of gibberish a religious man might call speaking in tongues. Bored of the aimless tension, I convinced them to join me on the grass, and we sat in a vague semicircle around ned. For the next hour or so, we passed the rum between us while I explained the history of the Devil all the way back to his origins as Baphomet, the animating force of the universe. Once the rum and robbie's inane questions were finished, I generously offered to pick some more shrooms provided they stay and watch over ned. The idea met some criticism, the two of them wracked with apprehension about the state of ned. I politely reminded them not to be such pussies and took a solo walk to the damp area around the back of the nursery. I searched for about a quarter of an hour, but only found a few handfuls of liberty caps. This was only a stopgap solution, as the three of us would be affected by the infuriating short term tolerance that Psilocybin brings with it. Our earlier dose had worn off, and, as far as I was concerned, our trip was still in its early days. We'd have to have a more thorough search later, to take us through till sunrise. Then we'd source some more weed, maybe even some Robitussin once the pharmacy opened. I had found several different unlabelled pills in ned's bag earlier, perhaps a bit of a gamble was in order. There was no shortage of options.

  But for now, a little more Psilocybin would have to do.

  By the time I got back to them even more panic had manifested, as ned had become completely unresponsive. I worked hard to lift their spirits out of the gutter, painting an uplifting mental picture of ned exploring the cosmos, before they agreed that the occasion did in fact call for the consumption of more shrooms.

  Eventually my patience payed off. Though I never did manage to convince robbie to eat Datura, the darkness I was looking for arrived in the end. As he sat hunched over his paper, scribbling furiously under lucy's cellphone light, I found myself once again excited to read what he'd written. Seeing one of my friends in such a state filled me with a deep sense of satisfaction... To see him making something of himself, exploring his consciousness boldly. Fearful but brave. A Hallucinogenic Martyr. And if the process is to involve a lifetime of hellish nights like this, then so be it. There is no shortage of those among us who choose the alternative: The serenity, the comfort, and eventually, the apathy, of duty and surrender. The life of passive guilt and compromise until death finally grants them their freedom. An entire life spent dedicated to a cause they don't even understand: Society. It's the worst kind of madness: Repression, slavery, atrophy of the soul as you rot away in the prison of your mind. To strive to live up to a set of standards imposed upon you, to accept the rules you were born into just because ‘that's the way it is’, is that sanity? Is that even life? To these people I offer the question: Why? What is it all for? Did you ever even ask yourself? I fail to imagine any serious soul searching coming up with the conclusion that we're here to uphold the status quo, the social infrastructure developed by people no less mere than ourselves. Your existence, by definition, upsets the order. Is your life no more than an apology? Perhaps not. Perhaps you live your life for the sweet endorphin rush of doing what you're told. Get your little gold stars, your little ataboys and merit badges. Wow, that sounds so fucking fulfilling. Fuck you. We're going for something bigger. Robbie has a chance to make truly something of himself. It's a rare sort who is born with a natural tendency to question authority, who trusts his own research and experience over the words of others. To persuade such a person to sit down and shut up is as immoral an act as hunting an endangered species for sport. If you come across a free spirit like robbie, I say let the cunt fly. Or better yet, do everything in your fucking power to disarm all who try to take him down. It's Hallucinogenic Martyrdom - the sacrificial lamb being his sanity.

  Yes, you may argue it's a lost cause, a waste of a life. But I couldn't disagree more. The drawings, the writing, the obsessive diary entries, it's all there to catalogue the descent into the underworld. I have sacrificed much energy and resources helping robbie maintain his regime of consciousness dissecting in the form of constant psychedelic consumption and painstaking note keeping. And I see no greater cause to dedicate myself to. To give up now would be a waste, almost as much of a waste as never sending him spiralling into madness in the first place. The idea is to take him to the absolute epicentre of the mind, where thoughts are things and myths are born, where dreams and nightmares take form, and where every tiny insignificant fucking speck of existence is alive and breathing and staring you right in the fucking eye. Yes, I'm talking about what society might deem ‘insanity’, and yes, it probably will result in robbie having something of a parasitic relationship with society and being of little use to his community. But that is of no importance. What robbie's creating here is a masterpiece, a multimedia representation of his journey, documenting the turbulent road from the ‘sanity’ of consensus reality to the ‘insanity’ of truth and awareness, awareness of the terrifying secrets of the mind and the universe, the true form of existence, unfettered by the cobwebs of social anxiety and status seeking. Behind him, like the tail of a comet, he will leave a trail of notes, drawings, and tales to trace back from the luminous depths of psychosis. He will create a legend for our times.

  Yeah, robbie could have been an acceptable member of society, kept barely afloat by his constant efforts to uphold his social obligations. But what would that accomplish? Another cog turning the wheels of a society fuelled by collective self denial? Is that what this world needs? No, we're working on a bigger scale than that. We're creating something of worth. Something of value. The rarest thing in the fucking world: Something new. It will be a case study of madness and enlightenment, complete with a detailed account of every step of the way, each step away from the mundane and into the realms of chaos. In this way, robbie will leave in his wake something of value, something truly insightful, something worth looking into... And I can't fucking wait to see it. We’ve scoured the physical world for answers, reducing reality to a series of meaningless actions and reactions, without really understanding what’s going on on a fundamental level. You think it’s a universe of dead matter that happened upon consciousness through a great fucking cosmic fluke? Good luck, and enjoy your empty fucking life. It’s time to fucking look inwards, to explore the phenomenon that’s truly at the base of reality: Consciousness. What the fuck else is there?

  Of course, robbie is not to know all this. Not with him still living the majority of his life in the grasp of society's claws. Perhaps, down the line, I may initiate him into the higher realms, or even just give him a titillating glimpse behind the scenes. But, until then, the little cunt can just shut the fuck up, get writing, and appreciate being a part of it all.

  On that thought, I gave Robbie a hearty smile and lay down on the grass, reminded not only of my work on this planet, but also that I was once again was roaming the enlightened lands that Psilocybin never fails to take me to.

Ned Devlin

The fallen leaves were arranged in such a way to illustrate the evolution of Time himself, progressing in a backward fashion from the last day I saw, and was still seeing, sort of, just all blurred and more or less like something out past the horizon, all the way back to God’s Original Sin. It would seem that what one would call Evolution has been no more than the Poor Old Fool trying to undo his greatest of faux pas.

  ‘Not long now, Ned,’ He said, smiling lovely grey with His many siren smoke eyes. ‘These humans.... I say give them another few thousand years before they blow the whole fucking thing up for Me.’

  At ease then, Sir? I spoke in such grand words, envisioning them as a series of shock waves, tickling His inner ear from every conceivable angle, basically unaware of the Inconceivable, for obvious reasons.

  ‘Quite, Ned. Quite,’ He said with a dry chucklecough and a sort of all encompassing stare into the distance. King of the bitter Laugh, that Sir. With that, He gave me a kind of look that shook it all up in the Mindcaves, rattling around all the load bearing Thoughts in such a way that made the whole scene fall with him as he stumbled sick into the dirt and leaves, bringing to my mindscreen the most whimsical of Memories for my viewing pleasure.

  It was sort of dusty, as it always was and always will be, when I found my eyes opening on my old living room floor, Vision all blurry and sleepstained in the corners. My brain did something quite tricky, and merged my present hallucinogenic Haze with an Opium Pondering from years passed: A kind of trick made to add a sense of relevance to the Mind event, making me feel present and involved in my Recall and not just a fellow reminiscing on the past.

  I found my way up from the floor, moving my limbs in the strangest of ways, with some muscles made of glue and others made of petrol. Focusing and unfocusing, my Mind's eye's Mind did all it could to make sense of the moaning, writhing mass on the floor, screams and hums and black bat flashes surrounding. Besides this, it was all a rather coherent, though misshapen, image of my unfortunate Mother’s dwelling. From there, it was Memory, rather than Vision, who told me what was going on: It was my good friend Collin making like pleasure and feelings of great Profundity with Mother, all muddled up in an Opium haze, though both seeing and understanding quite clearly just what they were doing.

  Yeeeeeeuw Fucccccgherssshsshsssh . . . I mumbled and droned along, Laughs all around my words, me being all slack jawed and not able to think so clearly about what my tongue and mouth were really up to. Collin pointed his face up at me, his building Ecstasy molesting my own, before we were all taken over by the Laughter of the Gods, dear old Mother included. Overwhelmed by my lungs’ sudden shifting and shaking, I lost my footing and stumbled onto the floor beside them, only this Time around noticing the striking similarity of my movements with that of the Lord Himself. Naked and flaccid, Mother cackled wildly into my eyes, transmuting Collin’s violent gyrations into a strange sort of Motherly Love sent my way. As her long face all sort of melted into a spiral Mind painting with her spiderweb shadow hair, I fell into my well of Thoughts once more.

  This time, it was quite clear, like a message from the great Sir Himself: Collin is, and always has been, a creature of fantastic moral standing. A creature with a determination to facilitate the Evolution of mankind that goes far beyond himself, a human fighting for the survival of his race in the face of a Force so powerful, a Force with rare determination comparable to his own: That of our Creator, trying with all His Might to correct the mistake he made many billions of years ago. This makes Collin like a species of Antichrist, diving headfirst into a rather unprofitable battle against his Creator, taking a fall for the sake of his race, hoping that maybe, if he gives it his all, he’ll make at least a dent in this Holy Force hell bent on our Destruction: Collin, a boy choosing glory over Humility, thinking that maybe, if he could find his way into the depths of Hell, he could rise the ranks to some form of presidency and command Satan’s armies of Darkness in the unholy war against The Light: The angelic Force that wants nothing less than the destruction of our earthly consciousness.

  As my trail of Thought faded, I bid Collin a nod of respect and drifted into another thoughtroom, escorted by some winged militant figures standing just too far beyond my Perception to catch my eye. Before leaving me to it, they informed me that ‘This is for your own good, Ned.’

  From what I could gather, this room was the scene of some great genetic crime against Nature. On a table in the centre of the room sat a keen selection of incomplete body parts, poking out of a puddle of fleshy liquid skin webbing. This webbing dribbled down to the floor where it separated from itself, forming like a network of pink human tripwires, obscuring my view of the fleshy puddle below. As I foolishly tried to walk toward the table to examine the unholy experiments, I stumbled to the floor in a Godlike fashion, finding myself on my hands and knees, semisubmerged in human gunk. Up close, I noticed that the genetic material was composed of half finished bits and pieces of multiple human faces and fingers all melting into the sinewy mess of insentient matter. Before I had a chance to study these formations, my hands and knees began sliding outwards beneath me, human flesh squishing and bubbling between my fingers and toes. I tried to push myself up to escape the mess, but this only made matters worse, as I found myself flailing wildly in a comical fashion, quickly becoming more and more entangled in the stringy muscle and skin attached to the walls on either side of me. After a brief struggle, I resigned to my Fate, and decided to enjoy the warmth of human flesh enveloping me from every direction, comfortable in the fact that while my company may be no more than unfinished deformities of a most horrific nature, I certainly wouldn’t be lonely in such an atmosphere.

Collin Callahan

I tried to argue against it, but the cunts were right: It was time to take ned to hospital. With blank, dilated pupils staring up into the stars, it was clear that ned was readying himself to meet his maker. Now, I’m not one to curtail martyrdom in any way, but ned hadn’t really accomplished anything yet, so I decided it was necessary to extend his life. At least until I could hear about his Datura trip. And though it made me feel like a bitch, I would actually miss the cunt if he was gone. I often felt that he was the only one who saw things as I did, flawed as is communication was. Though I'm usually inclined to seek the company of more eternal wonders such as the oceans and mountains, I do find pleasure in the company of likeminded humans from time to time.

  After all, every Masterpiece needs an audience.

  Since robbie had homework to do and lucy was clearly out of her mind, I offered to accompany ned to the hospital while they went home. Though this was partly to allow myself a break from their inane banter, what I really wanted was to observe the Datura experience in its entirety.

  Thus far, it had been a pretty boring event. Ned spent most of the first hour either catatonic or laughing uncontrollably. Occasionally he would utter unintelligible nonsense, causing robbie to perk up and try to decipher it. Presently, he was convulsing violently, producing a thick, foamy substance from his mouth. This was apparently quite concerning for robbie and lucy, though ned himself showed no fear nor awareness of his situation.

  After calling an ambulance, robbie and I hoisted the flaccid ned onto our shoulders and walked him all the way back to the entrance. In spite of his extremely ectomorphic body type, the cunt was a real bitch to carry, shifting his body weight around as if to mock us. In that way, he retained much of his nedness.

  Difficult cunt.

  Robbie and lucy slunk off when the ambulance flashed over the horizon. I helped the orderlies put ned in the back, explaining clearly and soberly that ned had forgotten his medication and fed on some poisonous plantation. I rode in the back with ned and one of the orderlies, and we discussed in depth the effects of various toxins on the central nervous system. The latest bunch of shrooms were still tickling me nicely, so I looked forward to some peaceful thinking time in the hospital.

Robbie Marks

Hand in hand, Lucy and I walked back to Collin's in silence, giving me time to contemplate my situation deeply, extrapolating the whole from the present, the way Psilocybin always helped me do. The shock of seeing Ned in such a state, as well as the increasingly alien sensation of human contact, added a disturbed clarity to the chaotic ecosystem of my thoughts. Having come face-to-face with the darker aspects of terra incognita, I was struck by the visceral reality, the almost-tangible dangers, of the path I had found myself on. I was now aware that I had a sort of Copenhagen Interpretation relationship with the occult elements of the universe: In the abstract, my belief and commitment was unwavering; in reality, I could always depend on my infantile escapes to shield me from the horrors of the subterranean in my weaker moments.

  Sensing a crossroads, I resolved to keep focus. I had committed too much energy, too much life, to indulge in my apprehension; I was now on the path, and the only way forward would be further into the darkness, a darkness that could only be illuminated by the pure Apollonian glow of spirited enquiry. I got the sense that the experience of The Void was simply an emotional climax, the feeling of all the minor forces that control us throughout waking life turned up to an almost unbearable pitch; though I was aware that this was the opposite of a void, the concept clarified itself by manifesting in my mind's eye as the three-dimensional spherical horse-shoe diagram I was so fond of, uniting utter stillness and wild ecstasy. The symbol hovered before me, superimposed upon the backdrop of psychedelic streetlights twinkling in the damp, suburban darkness, invoking the uniquely palpable sensation of Collin's knowing stare. I began to see the symbol as being a representation of Collin's (paradoxically) paradoxical yet holistic nature: Equal parts serene and restless, chaotic yet orderly, composed yet manic. With a vague shift in perspective, I understood this to be a metaphor for the parallel between the otherworldly feelings of benevolent belonging of the early evening, and the mists of darkness and despair that formed from them as I stood by helplessly, watching Ned toe the razor's edge between insanity and the grave. It was the peak experience that had been gifted to me in ineffably small rations throughout all my past Psilocybin experiences - the secrets of love, life, and death; the reconciling of opposites: Pain and pleasure, love and hate, fear and....

  I glanced at Lucy. Her eyes were wide and tearful, burdened with the gravity of the cosmos.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked; though she clearly wasn't, I trusted her natural ability to understand my intentions rather than my words. She responded by lightly squeezing my hand, a gesture of warmth that only highlighted my ever-increasing alienation. I decided that it was important to balance my journeys to The Void with indulgences of matter, fearful of becoming like a satellite that had lost contact with the Earth, floating lost through the gravitational whims of whatever celestial bodies it came into contact with. But Collin had predicted this turn of mind a few days earlier, reminding me of the lust-fear duality one must navigate when confronted with the darkness; adding, in quasi-jest, that it might be time for a new scar.

  Still, how much could it hurt? I understood that Ned and Collin had both ventured further into the deeper reaches of The Void than myself, and was reminded of their fight earlier; Collin had easily overpowered Ned - a show of his superior grasp of physical reality, an Earthen prowess far more applicable to manifest reality than Ned’s Uranian transcendence. I wondered if perhaps Ned was a casualty of The Void, a warning of the dangers that lurked within; he had spent most of his days dancing recklessly through unknown realms, where all is known and all has happened, but what did he have to show for it? Memories of the psyche ward and a Valium prescription? With my thoughts extrapolating wildly beyond my control, I theorised that their one-sided wrestle symbolised Collin’s ability to explore The Void at will while remaining completely aware of his being in the world of matter - a thought which led me seamlessly to the next realisation, inspired by Collin’s words after that very fight. Riding a second wave of Psilocybin-induced clarity, I understood the root of their differences: Ned’s nebulous physical presence had kept him from staying rooted in the consensus world, leaving him lost in The Void, unencumbered by biological urges; Collin, on the other hand, was a master of social interaction, able to endear himself to others and initiate casual romances as he pleased. It was his firm grounding in the manifest world that allowed him to explore the aethers fearlessly, always knowing that he was tethered, empowered by the cohesion of his paradoxes....

  At that thought, I realised had been walking not Collin’s path, but Ned’s. Contemplating the warmth of Lucy’s hand, I knew what needed to be done and turned my brain off for the rest of the walk.

As we arrived at Collin’s, which had gradually become a home for us both - perhaps, even, my first true home - I led an indecisive Lucy to the couch, and left her there to create a space for us to relax and let the Psilocybin wind down. I turned off all the lights except for the lampshade on top of the bookshelf, then moved the coffee table aside to make room for the beanbag and duvet from Collin's room. Lucy's wide, tearful eyes followed me as I moved languidly around the room, using the heightened sensitivity of psychedelia to create a space harmonious with our increasingly jagged vibrations. The sound of my lighter echoed in the darkness, and the fragrance of hemp incense filled the void, transmuting our inner-tensions into the placid abandon of dreams and wandering minds.

  I took Lucy's hand and guided her from the couch into my arms on the beanbag, allowing myself to relax into the tempo of our synchronising breath. Her questioning eyes shined into me, and I led our gaze down to her hand resting in mine. The index finger of my other hand traced a small spiral above hers, just close enough to feel the energy emanating from each other’s skin, softly teasing open our psychic pores. The spiral wound in fractally closer until the space between our skin became microscopic; tiny invisible fibres caressing each other with soft electricity, stretching out in a swaying motion until contact was finally made, an explosion of cellular fire, a magnetic snap, followed by the heat of her lips on mine. My eyes closed and the outside world disappeared into the wild swirls of psychic lava, enveloping us both. Time, space, and thoughts themselves disintegrated, leaving behind a glowing, writhing nothingness that followed only the magnetism of biology.

  After somewhere between an instant and an eternity, I was struck by an unwelcome re-acquaintance with myself; I flinched with the sudden tension of limb upon limb, mind next to mind. Our eyes opened simultaneously, Lucy's heavy with concern and un-whispered questions. Her fingers resting in the hair behind my ear tensed up almost imperceptibly in an attempt to guide me back into union, but I resisted; my thoughts had returned, and I knew they had to be dealt to. My muscles were frozen stiff by the raw intimacy, leaving me at the mercy of human anxieties I'd long since transcended: I had only had one sexual experience before, earlier that year; Tracey told me afterward that I had been a terrible lover, effectively banishing yet another aspect of my psychocosm to the murky depths of irrelevance, where it had since lurked unchecked.

  I held on to Lucy's unblinking eyes with my own, distracting her with building intensity in order to create time to resolve my meditation. I reasoned to myself that my experience with Tracey was no more than an act of physical desperation and social obligation, and understood that I was thinking myself into the same rigid, detached state in the present. So, with an effort of will, I banished my anxieties to the inner-depths once more - a mental annihilation of all the aspects that make up me, including questions of what constitutes me - and wrapped myself around her again with a forced smoothness I felt sure would become real. With a war cry of ‘Fuck it’ shouted into the chasms of my mind, I forgot everything and lifted her dress up over her head, slowly losing myself in the sensations once more. As I pressed into her, my growing erection took me by surprise, but soon enough I was following its lead….

The phosphenes moved around in their usual chaotic yet strangely intuitive geometric ways, materialising in the form of webbed spirals which, when given direct attention, would evolve into the kind of recurring patterns one might find in the outside world. The tendency for these patterns to subtly mimic reptilian scales and clouds gradually lead - as I'd come to expect - to the creation of intricate scenes involving the source of these patterns; the tessellating scales crystallised into a mass of writhing snakes, inhabiting the forest floor that had formed fluidly as a necessary counterpoint to the pulsating clouds: Formations which had slowly settled into a stable position which could be described as a sort of sky or top of my internal landscape.

  Normally such a scene would, if left to evolve naturally, form a four-dimensional space for some kind of entity, or entities, to manifest; however, in this case, my surroundings gradually lost clarity and detail in favour of a kind of sensory-immersiveness that engulfed all details into a rhythmic, oceanic motion. This was perhaps thanks to the presence of an ‘other’ - Lucy - as opposed to the usual void of alienation that usually characterises the antipodes of my psychedelic experiences. Though my spirit was too busy for thinking at this point, I was intuitively aware that the human mind, in such a state, can only manage to salvage a limited amount of coherency from such a complex phenomenon; as this, and any other attempts to focus on the content or nature of the occurrence, will invariably detract from the unconscious understanding of what basically amounts to a blissful sensation of pure, undefined existence, if one can maintain the mental languor to allow it to stay that way....

The transcendent sensuality was broken when I found myself, unfortunately, thinking of Collin as my almost-naked body moved with Lucy's. A tangled web of concepts formed compulsively in my mind’s eye, spawning questions about the nature of Lucy and Collin's relationship, as well as peripheral tangents regarding the nature of love, sex, and society on the whole, spreading outward like a time lapse of a tree's growth, leaving me with a perspective so stretched out over the entirety of my consciousness that all I could perceive was the absolute archetypes.

  Is she Collin's girl? I asked myself, folding down the entire web to refocus on the matter at hand. The idea of someone like Collin being burdened by such mundane concepts as relationships and jealousy seemed unlikely, and I decided that whatever the case, none of it would matter, as the orgasm I was chasing would count toward my studies of The Void - the orgasm being a kind of gateway to the other realms, as I'd discovered. I questioned briefly my bizarre student-Sensei relationship with Collin, but felt my erection subsiding, and once again said ‘Fuck it’ to my mind, using the break in my flow to remove her underwear and become one with her again, invoking something ancient.

Lucy Winters

That was weird. It felt good at first, but only to the body . . . He didn't take the darkness away like Collin does. Collin takes me somewhere else, away from this world and all its little problems. Robbie's still just a boy. A very strange boy. A strange boy with rubbery alien hands . . . A troubled, itchy mind . . .

  It's really late now and we're both getting a little sleepy, but the shrooms are keeping us up so we put on American Beauty to watch while we wait for Collin and Ned to get back. I felt a little weird after what happened, so I put my clothes back on straight away while Robbie sat smiling into his eyelids. Now I'm lying under a blanket on the couch with my head on Robbie's lap, thinking of Collin and Robbie and what it all means. It's all just confusing and I don't get it.

  ‘Hey Robbie,’ I say, looking up at him. He should put a shirt on.

  He looks down at me, clear faced and bright.

  ‘Do you think it would be okay to tell Collin just happened?’ It feels better to say that it was something that happened rather than something we did. Somehow.

  He shrugs, still looking into my eyes, still free. I'm pretty sure it will be okay. I remember Collin talking about how possessive Stan was and how it was a sign of his weakness. It makes sense, in a Collin kind of way.

  ‘Do you think he would mind?’ I've already kind of decided it wouldn't, but I want to hear it from Robbie too.

  ‘I wouldn't think so. I was wondering the same. I reckon he's got bigger fish to fry . . . You know?’ he says, the smell of rum escaping his lips like smoke.

  I smile at him and look back to the TV. Lester Burnham is saying that the handle on his wife's pruning shears matching her gardening clogs is no accident. It's funny but also a little sad.

  ‘Lucy . . . It was amazing, though,’ he says, smiling but sort of looking past me into himself, that way he does. I feel weird again. I don’t know what to say without sounding mean. I know that I don't want it to happen again. I just wanted to take my mind off everything. It never works though, doing stuff to try take my mind off everything. Or it works for a bit but then I end up with even more stuff on my mind after . . . I feel dirty. Like I used him or something. I did just use him. Even though he initiated it. But it was me who initiated it, in a way . . .

  Taking too long to answer . . .

  ‘Yeah . . .’ I want to sound more sincere, but it's hard when he's looking at me like that. He's got such a peaceful smile, and he's not wearing his glasses or that brown beanie he always wears. Makes him look much older. I wish I could take a photo of him or something, freeze time and make him stay like that. I want to find a way to tell him it shouldn't happen again, but in a way that won't make things turn ugly. I can't make the words sound right in my head. I want to say it but also say that I love and care about him. But I don't want it to sound like an apology.

  It's taking too long to figure out, so I just end up saying, ‘We shouldn't do it again, though.’

  His smile turns into something else, but he nods. We keep looking at each other for a while and I try to make my eyes tell him that everything's okay and I'll always be there for him and all the stuff I want him to know but don't have the words for. Robbie believes in telepathy. He doesn't believe in himself, though. He's always going to second guess himself, even if telepathy is real. I have to say something . . .

  ‘Sorry . . . It's just-’

  ‘It's okay,’ he says. I think he's telling the truth. He's never been very emotional. He likes to think about stuff and write and wonder about everything. I always thought his mind was quite beautiful, but that’s probably why the sex was so weird. He was probably thinking about aliens and satellites the whole time. Collin’s not like that. He's always there, in his body. Throwing himself into everything he does, never an empty gesture. Commanding reality. I could feel it when we made love, just being a part of it. Empowered. Like I was no longer a victim of the universe, but actually involved in it. All the weird things that usually bother me would be gone afterwards. Even after he left and I was just on my own, I'd feel so in control of my mind and my life and everything else, like there was nothing to worry about anymore and everything was friendly again. Then I'd drift seamlessly into that deep, dreamless slumber that makes my usual sleep seem so turbulent by comparison. I sometimes wonder what it is, that feeling. I sometimes think that it's love that melts the world away. Like something that's already in me that Collin brings out. But really I think it's all Collin and I should just be thankful to be a part of it . . . I should text Collin. I hope Ned's okay . . .

  ‘But I did enjoy it. I can leave it at that,’ Robbie says with a little smile, after a bit of thinking. His hair's all ruffled up at the moment, making him look less like a girl. He's always had a baby face, but now that his hair's grown long, he looks a bit like a girl. Kind of pretty too, as a girl. Still just a boy, Robbie. But such a sweet boy. Such an odd boy . . .

  He's still looking at me so I say, ‘Me too,’ hoping we'll stop talking now. Robbie never knows when to stop talking.

  ‘I felt like we turned into one thing, like one consciousness. Two entities sharing one astral body. Like, uh, like our souls merged. Or something,’ he says. It's such a weird thing to say that I don't feel bad being a little bitchy now.

  ‘Watch the movie now, Robbie.’

  He nods to say okay and looks back to the screen. I'm starting to relax now that he's not looking at me. He's got these wild, busy eyes that force you to pay attention, sort of pull you away from everything else, make you feel the restlessness inside him. On the TV, Lester's telling his daughter that they used to be pals as they get filmed by their neighbour. Such a strange movie . . .

. . . through the trees with Hayden, who was Robbie before, and he's reading to me from a book he's filming but he's stuck on a word but it's me who's forgotten the word so I'm trying to think through a list of words, sorting through them by hand . . .

                                    . . .for shrooms in the meadows. I find a couple but Stan says that they’re just rocks and tells me to put . . .                                        

   . . . him what his name is and he says ‘Pick a ride.’ ‘Huh?’ He says ‘My name’s Car but you can call me anything you want.’ ‘The big blue van?’ ‘Rock and roll.’ So we go to the petrol station . . .

                                         . . . notice that I’m at Taylor’s old house, but Mum and her boyfriend are there drinking cups of water with small flowers in the bottom. Then they . . .

                . . . to defend his house as a middle aged Hispanic man breaks in and drinks the bong water. Then he drinks all of our red wine and spews everywhere, all red and purple . . .

       . . . is really weird man,’ he says and one of the barmaids says she’s going home. Her friend gets upset and they start making out and now I'm her and it's Damon holding me against a . . .

. . . and Ned making a mess at the back of the bar, so we have to go. We go to a restaurant called The Phoenix where the menu is read by a naked girl lying on the floor . . .

                        . . . squalid flat now. She's completely naked and only has one arm and no legs, and her face is just one big, toothless mouth. I put the money in her mouth, and she starts fingering herself till she ejaculates. The bags of weed come out of her vagina in the torrent, and I . . .

                   . . . stepfather had some eggs that aren’t going to survive. He says it won’t be okay if the kids see them die, so he leaves them in the bush. Out of these eggs hatch small pandas on scooters. He says that when they are about to die, they hallucinate that their killer is their mother and die in peace . . .

  ‘. . . fucking movie Robbie!’ I wake up all blurry to Collin shouting at Robbie. His face is all twisted up in this disgusted sneer, not pure and zen quiet like usual.

  ‘I know, but it's amazing,’ Robbie’s pleading at him, eyes real wide, body tensed. ‘I think Ricky's talking about the void. He was saying it was a benevolent force that tells him there's no reason to-’

  ‘For fuck's sake Robbie,’ Collin interrupts him. ‘Look at yourself. You're getting choked up about a movie. A bunch of images on a fucking screen. A bunch of fucking slaves reading out bullshit written by some pretentious fuck who thinks he knows what's going on in the universe. It's fucking pathetic.’ He shakes his head and paces around the room. Robbie's not saying anything back, just looking at him with those big, green eyes. I try to go back to sleep. Whatever they're arguing about, I want no part of. Collin's footsteps stop, and I find myself pulling the blanket over my shoulders.

  ‘You’re a small time cunt, you know that? Getting all choked up about some other cunt's fantasy. You realise that's not you on the screen, don't you? It's a series of events and fucking philosophies designed to indulge the likes of you, all you cunts too lazy, too cowardly to go out and make the stories yourselves, just fucking fill you up with . . . with . . . with second hand life, man. You reckon the movie inspired you? You think you're better now that you've been brought to tears by a stupid fucking story? Well, you're not. You're the same as before. In fact, you're worse. You've now stupidly accepted some other asshole's take on what's important and what you should be thinking about. You think you're gonna change the world by getting your emotions manipulated by some cunt who's read a fucking book about eastern mysticism? You're feeling exactly how the writers want you to feel. You've just been manipulated into feeling a certain way by a pack of overpaid Hollywood fucks. Come on, Robbie. You're better than this. This isn't living, and you aren't learning. You didn't have a profound, mystical experience. You just watched some dumbass movie while fucked up on mushrooms. Waste of a fucking trip.’

  Collin's overflowing with passion now. Hissing. I've never heard this side of him before. He's usually so understanding and kind. He's always felt strongly about stuff, but never scathing like this.

  ‘Fuck, man, I was just saying it's a good movie. That's all,’ Robbie says, meekly. That’s the word I was looking for. He was a meek lover. No, that doesn’t sound right . . .

  ‘Don't fucking backtrack,’ Collin snaps, raising his voice again. ‘When I came in here, you were almost in fucking tears. Trying to tell me that this guy gets it, that he understands. This guy hasn't experienced shit. He's probably just paraphrased some shit he read about the Tao. In fact, that's probably giving him too much credit. I bet he's a fucking slave to a whole heap of love and light new age Aquarian bullshit. If he was really fucking enlightened, he wouldn't be wasting his energy directing a fucking movie to make money and get fucking famous. Fuck's sake Robbie.’

  It’s quiet for a while after that, just the sound of Collin's footsteps, stray thoughts escaping Robbie's mind like little bubbles, popped by Collin's Medusa glare.

  ‘. . . Fuck, I guess you're right,’ Robbie says, ‘I just thought Ricky explained the psychedelic experience real well, that's all. Reminded me of some shit I was thinking about when we were tripping. But you're right. It's just a movie . . . So what are we gonna do to make today matter then?’

  Collin’s noise stops for a second, then he says, ‘Not sure. I picked these at the hospital gardens. It's as good a start as any.’ I open my eyes just enough to see a plastic bag in his hands. I close my eyes again and pretend to be asleep and I can see heaps of hazy swirling colours. Not as bright as before, but still pretty.

  Robbie makes an impressed huh sound and stands up, carefully moving my head from his lap onto the pillow. I hear some footsteps leave the room off into the kitchen and Robbie’s voice going, ‘Fuck yeah. Let’s do it. We’ll go and watch . . .’ and I start to get a sense of what was missing between them before, when they were arguing. I’m not really sure how to put it but I get the feel of it. Like a brotherhood thing . . . like psychic camaraderie, maybe? Something like that. Doesn't matter anyway. It’s a waste of time trying to fit my thoughts into words right now. Instead, I think about Collin and me and feel like the luckiest girl in the world. Collin makes things change. He's the singer and the song. That's why I feel like a Goddess after we have sex. It's the feeling of being a part of something big. He makes me feel like there's so much more to everything, like every moment is magical and more exciting and wonderful in every way than the last. When he talks, he makes me feel like the universe is alive and full of mystery and power. Makes me feel like I'm ready for it. Like I'm above it and looking around it and getting fucked senseless by it all. Robbie's my best friend, but he's just another one of us. Another follower. Collin's something else. A hero. The kind of person who could change the world. And he chose me to be with. I roll that thought around my mind as footsteps come past me, stopping just past the couch.

  ‘Leave these for Lucy,’ Robbie says. I hear a faint sound of plastic bag rustling before the footsteps go out the door and stop at the sound of it closing. Smiling, I drift back to my dreams.

Robbie Marks

Collin and I got to the lookout in time to catch the sun rising, experiencing the dreams we missed out on in the form of a subtle yet surreal layer of imagery superimposed over the manifest. For about half an hour, we sat on the barrier in silence, drinking our mushroom and whiskey concoction, bathing in the brilliant rays that breathed majesty across the sky, lighting the paintbrush-stroked clouds the richest hues of golden violet extravagance. Though I was feeling worn out from sleep deprivation, there was something uplifting about starting the day with the sun - and Collin’s presence always helped add a mystical quality to any occasion.

  ‘The shrooms are working. You wanna go for a mission?’ Collin said, somehow concluding my private train of thought. His pale skin and straight, weightless hair brought to mind the cliché extra-terrestrials, the skinny grey dudes - a subtle form of entity-contact.

  ‘Yeah I’m starting to feel it now, man. What’s the plan?’

  Collin took a final swig of shroom-whiskey before looking around with an easy smile and saying, ‘Hospital? Let’s go check on Ned first. Wait for society to wake up. Then we’ll just ... try do what the humans do.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ I said, not so much agreeing with Collin's nebulous plan as confirming my commitment to follow wherever he would lead. We got off the fence to start walking, and Collin stopped for one last look at the view. I stopped for a moment to appreciate the scenery with him, before realising he was actually taking a piss and leaving him to it.

  By the time we were back in town, my exhaustion had faded completely, the ebb and flow of my visual field unclipping my wings and breathing life back into my aching mind. Soul ajar, I could feel a smile plastered across my face as my eyes widened, letting all of man and nature’s wonders take me over, leaving my mind to drift by its own accord.

  ‘Hey, Collin, what do you think of monogamy?’ I asked, verbalising my thoughts in real-time.

  Collin stayed silent for a while, then smiled knowingly at me, before coming out with another stream of brilliance. ‘I think it’s the product of a mentally weak and insecure society still recovering from the disastrous impact of Christianity’s bullshit. It all came from the same mind control tactics that force all of our most primal desires - like the desire to fuck what you’re attracted to, to fuck up whatever pisses you off, to want more than you’ve got - forces them all inside. By saying our most natural desires are evil, instead of just outright banning them, they control us in more subtle ways, forcing us to recreate ourselves in their image.... The fuckers are smart, I'll give them that.’

  I was relieved to hear this; it meant that my actions would not create a rift between us. Before I could tell him of my adventures, he continued. ‘I reckon this is the root of most evil in the world, all this self-denial shit. ‘Cause denying your true nature just makes these urges manifest in fucked up ways, you know? Like, the murderer inside you grows every time you repress anger. The rapist inside you is fed every time you suppress your sex drive.... By calling our impulses evil, Christianity's made a civilisation of people wearing masks, since everyone, deep down, wants to break their shitty rules. This sort of ... acceptable mask they make us wear eventually eats away at the face behind it, taking over the personality - makes a world of clones who act out their repressed desires furtively, everyone mastering the arts of deceit and pretence - just to stop themselves from going completely fucking insane. Even non-Christians living in this kind of society are getting raped by this virus ‘cause, in its sneaky way, it's still fucking up the government and the cunts in control. It’s like this independent, self-facilitating entity whose sole purpose is to feed on our natural, pure thoughts, then shit out a whole lot of fascist bullshit into our brains and multiply. I mean, it was probably around long before Christianity, this virus. Christianity's just another expression of it, just another passing blip in its time-line. This is a higher being we're talking about here - one of the entities behind all of life, going beyond the temporal limitations of the human race, something eternal.... This is more than some kind of Earth-bound virus, man. This is one of the great archetypes. One of the Gods - and I'm not talking about a work of fiction like the shitty Christian God. I'm talking about a ... a force. One of the great forces shaping reality around us.’

  I understood what he was saying, but chose to stay silent; this was to be another of Collin’s passionate seminars, the words of a man with no time to wait for the mentally feeble.

  ‘See, it’s also programmed with self-preservation, just like any organism, protecting itself at all costs in order to continue its own existence. The self-persecuting of a bad trip is an aspect of this viral entity cannibalising itself in a last-ditch effort to stay alive in the face of hallucinogenic insight. It’s so fucking ingrained in our unconscious that any memories of not being under its influence are repressed; think of any time you’ve been truly oblivious to society’s moral code, times when you really don’t give a fuck what people think, when you really say fuck you to the consequences, when you're truly in The Moment - when you’re blind drunk, when you’re dreaming, when you take a shitload of Valium, when you're in the flow-state, when you cross over on mushrooms.... Afterwards it’s like it never happened. You wouldn’t even notice the memory blank if there was no physical evidence. Whenever you’re truly free from the viral influence, your brain deletes the memory to hide you from the ecstasy. You don’t even notice the possibility of doing shit that opposes the virus; you just say and do shit that seems unrelated, but when you actually look at it you can see it’s just a manifestation of the truer, repressed desire, expressing itself in fucked up ways so it doesn't disturb the carefully crafted but fragile mask for society; just trying to sneak past the tyranny of the virus, the all-powerful God of repression and self-hate. Everybody’s fucking brainwashed, man.’

  He lit a cigarette after this, visibly energised by his own words. Noting how much my pace had picked up, I realised they had had a similar effect on me. But, once again, he had left me speechless; his total confidence made me feel child-like in comparison. We walked in silence for a while as I tried to metabolise what he had told me; it took me a good while of mental disentanglement to figure out how to phrase the insight his speech had given me.

  ‘So, when we, like, push our brains to the limit when we’re tripping, like, get all self-analytical, make the virus cannibalise itself.... What we’re doing is questioning ourselves to see what’s our, like, true nature and what’s the disease?’ I said, my reply gradually becoming a question.

  Collin puffed deeply on his cigarette, then exhaled victoriously and said, ‘Exactly man. Trying to see what's us and what's the virus - trying to find our true selves beneath the squabbling mass of forces competing for control. An artificial persona, one crafted to placate some unknown force - it can’t explore the cosmos and beyond. All we'll ever end up doing is perpetuating the virus, like puppets orchestrating its will. The mask blocks out the universe, the true universe of energy and pure consciousness.... We’ve spent our lives creating our masks with the utmost of care, now it’s time to deconstruct them and stand face to face with the universe, as our true selves - beings of power; not socially desperate, repressed fucking cowards. Because, fuck, do you think anyone changed the world by trying to do what everyone else has done? You think we evolved from single-celled organisms by avoiding mutations like the plague? I fucking doubt it.’

  ‘Yeah man, nailed it,’ I said, with nothing more to add.

We entered the hospital brazenly, well aware that we both looked like Death on an amphetamine bender - what better place to blend in looking like death than a hospital?

  Inside, the vibe was grim: Vision overwhelmed by sterile white, countless thoughts of worry, fear and decay floating in the air, Collin's words echoing in my mind. Undisturbed by the crowd of distorted, despairing faces, we were escorted to Ned’s room by a tall, curly-haired man in pale-green garb who spoke in well-constructed syllables.

  ‘Here he is. Don’t expect a response from him,’ he said flatly, before leaving the room and closing the door behind him. I could tell by the way he talked that Ned hadn’t been the easiest of patients to deal with.

  I swallowed involuntarily as I observed Ned - a caricature of ill-health, even more so than usual - from behind a cloud of memories of an earlier, healthier incarnation. His eyes were open and blank, as when I had seen him last: Glistening red and black slits, not taking anything in - not anything we could see, at least. He was as pale and gaunt as ever, connected through tubes and wires to various devices, breathing in abrupt, discordant gasps. The whole situation had the feel of an open-casket, and I intuited that Ned was indeed traversing the realm of the dead.

  ‘Fucking hell man. Look at this shit,’ Collin said from behind me, unperturbed by Ned’s macabre presence. He was pointing at an article on the front page of the untouched newspaper lying on Ned's bedside table. ‘Read the first sentence of this article, man. It's fucking insane.’

  I put my glasses on for the first time since we left the house. The article read: Prime Minister Simon Armstrong is furious at TPN news for giving Akhmed Abdullah a chance to spread his extremist propaganda.

  ‘Uh, I don't really know what's going on with that Abdullah dude, man....’ I said, not sure what Collin was getting at.

  ‘You don't? Ah man, it's some interesting shit. The Chinese curse is in full swing, man. Hell, it might even give this Christian force a run for its money.... Anyway, that's not important. Just look at the sentence: Armstrong's furious at that news outlet for giving Abdullah a chance to spread his propaganda.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Yeah that's pretty fucked....’

  ‘No, actually read the sentence Robbie. I mean, on one level, you've got the government pissed off because a TV station allowed this dude to explain himself. I mean, fuck, paranoid much?’

  ‘Yeah man. He's scared that like, the station's offering an opinion other than his. Other than the virus.’

  ‘Well, uh, I don't know about that. I mean, yeah, you're probably right. But forget the virus a second. Look: On one level we've got the cunt at the top scared to allow his people to even hear anything besides his own propaganda. Sound familiar?’

  ‘Yeah, with a capital G.’

  Collin laughed, ‘Yep, capital G, exactly.’ His face quickly turned serious. ‘But then, on another level, we got the media just totally fucking playing the nation. So of course Abdullah's not simply offering an alternative opinion; he's spreading extremist propaganda. I mean, isn't this shit supposed to be objective? This is supposed to be reporting, not opinion. That's the power of words, man: Manipulate the emotional impact but leave the facts intact. I mean, that's the extremist propaganda right there. And the fact the prime minister is so angry that Abdullah's been allowed to speak at all pretty much tells you how much he respects our intellects. Like we can't even hear an opinion on the news without automatically accepting it into our belief systems. Like we're a bunch of fucking zombies who believe everything we hear.’

  ‘Yeah, he's probably right, though.’

  Collin laughed again. ‘Yeah, that's true. He's not stupid, ole Armstrong. Just fuckin' evil. Abdullah was just fighting fire with fire, trying to compete with this propaganda right here. So much fucking power on these pages, man.... I mean, think about it - this is where the opinions of the masses come from. This is the extent of most people's research right here. This and the evening news. God that's fucked.’ He shook his head and looked at his feet.

  ‘Yeah, it's pretty fucked,’ I said, still unable to pinpoint the significance of it. With nothing more to add, I changed the subject. ‘So, we just gonna, uh, hang out here then?’ I knew that was what we had planned, but it seemed suddenly bizarre in the silence that followed Collin's rant. Neither of us were even acknowledging Ned anymore.

  ‘For now, yeah,’ Collin replied, perking up again. ‘I'll see what Michael and them are up to. Go see the human zoo.’ He gestured toward Ned as he said ‘human zoo’; I didn't see the connection, but nodded anyway, before taking a seat on the single chair, tapping a beat on the floor with my shoes. Collin leaned against the wall and got his phone out, far too relaxed about everything. Bored, I prodded Ned's face to see if I would get any kind of reaction. I didn't - though I did get an amused glance from Collin. With nothing more to learn from my environment, I closed my eyes and watched the lights dance to the clickety-clack of Collin's cellphone buttons.

Ned Devlin

Hello?

  Is that You Sir?

  I thought it was You before, but i guess it was just my Imagination.

  I do realise You’re likely a rather busy Sir.

  Don’t judge me by my error, o greatest of Sirs. It was a folly of the Mind, an Illusion of sorts.

  ‘Though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong, for the Lord upholds his hand,’ right Sir?

  Or is that more Foolishment on my behalf?

  Are you the same Sir from the book?

  Or is He but another impostor?

  Ah, busy as a beaver i suppose then, Sir?

  Well, i'll leave some space for Your Words, You may fill it in Your own Time.

  If that pleases Thou, o Great Sir.

  I’ll be waiting. You know where to find me.

Michael Farmer

Mum’s just walked in on me and Spacey having lines and goes “Fucking druggies” and walks out not even closing the door, muttering some shit about how I'm just like my - She's already getting drunk and I'm like fuck yeah good thinking bitch and I go “Let's get fucked up today” to Spacey 'cause she's done all her exams and I'm keen for a rager, just keen to get something going, keen to move the meat. Spacey tilts her head back from the line and shrugs, still half naked in slutty black underwear and now she's moving her hand around her neck to feel the dexies on her skin which is making me hard again so I'm like “You wanna fuck first? Like before you get all dressed” 'cause there's none of this refractory period bullshit for this cunt right here. She looks me in the eye all sexy but moves away when I lean in, fuckin' tease, thinks she's so fuckin' - I flick her nose to call her a chump and start grabbing around for clothes since I just got jeans on, looking windy as out there, maybe gloves and hoodie weather - Spacey's on the floor again chopping up some weed like just to piss me off by not being in a hurry 'cause she's always lost as fuck and I'm always keen to get on the move, not even funny bitch it's just fuckin' annoying. I grab the first shirt I see and put on the black hoodie with the skull and flags on it 'cause I'm feeling pretty badass right now, dexies got me all sharp, fuckin' warrior steeze, but like shifty as cunt all - My phone goes off and Callahan's text going “watup wanna hang” and it's funny as 'cause his name's saved as Collin Hansen 'cause he looks like those Hansen fags and it's worth a fuckin' chuckle every time - Not good for a whole lot ole Callahan, but good for a chuckle, I'll give him that. Got a decent location for piss ups too, like never parents around or anything, get loose as, shit getting weird as fuck as soon as that retarded dude Endy Ned gets back in town, what else is new? His mate Robbie's an all good cunt, Damo and shit all call him About About behind his back, but they’re just thick cunts and don’t get what he’s talking about, never even bother trying to figure it out - That's the problem with those cunts, never fuckin' thinking. That Lucy chick's pretty hot, got that hippy chick vibe, all into that - Sleazy little number too, walked in on her and Callahan fucking once and ole fuckin' Endy was in the room acting like it was all normal and shit, creepy as cunts, the lot of them, ole fuckin' About About too, a pack of fuckin' creeps. Spacey passes me the joint and I'm like “Wanna go to the shitlab, get fucked up?” and take a hit and she just looks at me all slow with ruffled up hair and wasted eyes but her face looks blank as, dunno how to take it but fuck it, what else is she gonna - I say “Well fuckin' get dressed let's get outta here” and hold out the joint for her and she grabs for it but then I'm like hang on not yet 'cause I only had one puff so I snatch it back for a few deep ones and hand it over. It's already made me feel good as, slowed shit down a bit, just like some chill rhythm guitaring now, no drums. Spacey lies on my bed puffing away like making fun of me so I'm off into the lounge to let her know I'm not fucking around, she's already miss fuckin' slow motion without the green, but I reckon she's probly just all pissed off I got a shirt on now, dumb as shit 'cause the sooner we get outta here, the sooner we'll be back here to get down.

  Mum's in the lounge drinking her vodka and red stuff, dunno where the little cunts are. She goes “So what are you doing today, Michael? Besides snorting drugs?” and I can tell she's got a bit of a buzz going 'cause she looks me in the eye. I go “Off to Callahan's to get fucked up. Got some wine I can take?” 'cause she's always got the mad drinks around. She says I can if I leave her a joint and smiles at me like she feels real fuckin' hip and I want another hit now so I go back into my room and Spacey's putting a top on, tight black one, long sleeves with fuck all cleavage, looks alright, no joint though. I go “You smoke that whole fuckin' thing?” and she points to the ashtray where it's just sitting there fuckin' smoking itself and I go “That's a fuckin' waste” and have a real proper toke that'd choke a weaker cunt. I zero it out and it hits me real good like almost spins me out and Spacey's putting on some sexy tights and I'm kinda stoked on her, like not even turned on or anything, just like glad she's here. I pass her the joint and put my arms around her, not trying to fuck or anything, just like a good cunt thing, but she thinks I am trying to fuck and slips away that way she does, sneaky smile. I act like I was after a fuck 'cause I don't want her to think I'm a fag and I give her a Christian Bale smile that comes out more Tom Cruisish, which I'm okay with. I say “Roll a spicy one for mum, she wants to swap for some wine” and she gets onto it without saying shit or doing anything with her face, as usual. It's mean though, the way she says fuck all, 'cause it leaves room for when genius shit flashes into my head and I gotta spit it out then and there. She holds the old joint to me and I'm like nah and she puts it out and starts rolling mum’s one, gotta wait till I'm at the shitlab before I smoke any more in case we run into the straightedges on the way. Gotta stay sharp with cunts like that around, like me now, bit of speed, bit of weed, a few swigs of wine in a minute, mean scrapping buzz. Raptor vibes.

  Spacey's finally done with the joint and we're off to the lounge to swap with mum. She wants to have a smoke with us, but nah 'cause she's real annoying and lame and I ain't keen to sit around listening to her go on about what a cunt dad is. I go to grab a bottle but end up grabbing a cask instead, keen for a rager, like I said, and I'm out without saying bye, a cunt on a mission, but Spacey waves as we go. I'm in the elevator checking myself out in the mirror and my nose is still a little fucked from all that shit last term, just a bit crooked but mostly all good, goes well with my shaved head and the tighter jeans too, like just punk enough to look sorta scary like what's that cunt gonna do, better keep an eye on him, but still with the boy next door safe cunt vibe. I feel the sap rising again and try make out with Spacey but she's not into it so we're off down the road now, walking fast as from the dexies with tingles from the wind all over my scalp, stoked to be out in the wind, stoked to be on the move, just fuckin' stoked to be up to shit. We get like a block away and Spacey's off up someone's driveway and I'm like “The fuck you think you're going?” off after her and the crazy bitch just walks up to this treehouse and grabs this rope dangling from and ties it around her neck like a noose and pretends she's fuckin' fingering herself and choking so I grab her and yank her away, fuckin' kids and shit staring from the window and I'm like “What the fuck are you up to?” and she goes “Coming and going” and cracks up about it like she's a fuckin' comedian and not some crazy fuckin' borderline paedo bitch and I pick up the pace to get the fuck away from there going “You and your fucked up upbringing” and she's just all giggly and shit, fuckin' whatever bitch, let's just get the fuck outta here. To the shitlab!

Robbie Marks

When we got back to Collin’s, the feeling was that of having finished a great quest, though that was not the case at all. I never did handle sleep deprivation as well as my friends; Collin seemed to be awake at all hours, surviving basically on occasional cat-naps in his chair; and I couldn't remember the last time I saw Ned sleep - unless his present state could be considered a form of slumber. But after just the one night of extended consciousness, I had lost all control of my trip - waves of incoherent day-two mushroom thoughts dancing with the distractions of my visual field, giving me no choice but to surrender to them.

  Collin was still fresh-faced as ever, casually looking through a pile of CDs on the floor. I had a strange sense of bewilderment at my own weariness: Why would I want to hide from the pure novelty of uninhibited consciousness? I had a thought that I was perhaps searching for familiarity, developing a kind of cowardice that had me hiding from the unpredictability of my bemushroomed thoughts. It was an ugly notion, but upon further analysis, I found that the essence of the problem was contained within the experience of novelty itself: It now seemed that the novelty of novelty itself had lost its novelty, leaving confusion and an unnecessary struggle to deal with everyday life as the surviving hallmarks of my explorations of consciousness. I dismissed this thought with a quick glance at the faded scar on my forearm, a reminder of the infinite nature of the mind, and of the places of unimaginable strangeness and enchantment within, should I choose to indulge.

  As I found peace with my ruminations, the sound of Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix filled the room. At first, it was janky and unsettling, the incoherent, alien noises causing a faltering stutter in my thought patterns; but, before long, the underlying rhythm made use of my busy peripherals, creating intricate and Persian rug patterns of strangely luminescent browns and the pale, dappled greens of the forest. This construction of my mind formed a musical border to my visual experience, obliging enough to leave me with a relatively untouched point of focus as my attention wandered about the lounge. In all his chaotic ideas and ways, Collin was a total neat-freak when it came to his dwellings: The house was often eerily sterile, especially for a largely parent-free dwelling; in fact, you could tell when his mother had been by, because there would be a certain level of clutter - barely noticeable by most, but enough to drive Collin to distraction. The only perceivable mess under Collin’s jurisdiction was what he referred to, with endless frustration, as Ned Stains: Small circles of clothing and blankets littered with bizarre stacks of objects surrounding whatever area Ned had decided to spend his latest catatonic state. At present, there was the remains of one in the space between the couch and the large wooden speakers, as well as an array of knives and forks balancing precariously on the edges of tables and benches, also indicative of Ned’s increasingly unsettling presence.

  My attention found Collin once again, sitting in the velvet armchair, smoking a cigarette, the slight bobbing of his head showing his appreciation of the music as he stared thoughtfully into the smoke. With nothing keeping me tied to manifest reality, I surrendered once again to the relaxing and familiar world of my eyelids - calming fractal vibrations emanating from an unknown centre, pulsing infinitely outward with a complete disregard for any boundaries between myself and the universe. Jimi Hendrix mentioned a girl putting a spell on him, reminding me of my earlier excursion into Lucy’s trip-mind: It was not time to think in circles; enjoy the sensory-ecosystem and let the conclusions come as they may....

‘About and About About. What the fuck's up?’

  My thought-stream was interrupted with the intrusive rasp of Michael’s voice, and his insane nickname for Collin and I. It was an ongoing mystery to me why Collin always insisted on involving this kind of nonsense in our trips.

  ‘Evening, Mr. Farmer,’ Collin said with good-humoured condescension. I opened my eyes and looked at the doorway, where the unpleasant voice had emanated from. Michael and his self-satisfied amphetamine-smile was bad enough; but, standing next to him, much mellower in demeanour but with her own kind of watery malevolence, was Tracey. Tracey and I had a history that made up the majority of my experience with the female kind. That wasn’t what worried me, though; the interpersonal awkwardness that permeated my personality in the past had since been dismissed as another trap of our hologram reality. What really bothered me about her presence was the games she always played - games that had already begun with the semi-smile she gave me upon meeting my eye. Games I was in no position to deal with.

  Smiling through my malaise, I acknowledged them and sat up to make room. Michael sat down with a thud, shaking the entire couch and making my limbs contract reflexively like a dead spider - the fucker is just incapable of being peaceful or subtle in any way.

  ‘You cunts wanting a drink then?’ he asked, holding up a box of wine, looking from Collin to me; Collin smiled enigmatically and drifted off to the kitchen. Michael turned to me, ‘You cunts on shrooms again?’ I started to answer, but he carried on immediately, ‘You’re a fuckin’ trippy cunt, Robbie. Fuck, we hit the shrooms hard on Wednesday, man. Fuckin’ real out of it, eh. Cunt, no shit, we stayed up ‘til sunrise playing Dead Man’s Hand. Me, Spacey, and Amelia. Fuckin’ mean. Mad yarns. Always up to get all deep and shit. 'Cause I'm a fuckin' thinker, cunt. Always keen to look behind the curtain. Always keen for a sneaky peek. Eh, all that shit you guys are always on about, like fuckin' crazy conspiracies theories and shit, that's just like a thin layer on top. Just like a sexy see-through nightgown, fuckin'....’ 

  I’d already heard this rant, or at least some variation of it; but to mention this would only change the nature of his rant to something even less pleasant, so I remained passive.

  ‘... but I'm getting a sweet eyeful of the chick inside. While you cunts are all lost in the fabric, thinking about like clothes and shit, all fuckin' worked up about which cunt's wearing what, I got my hands all over her, fuckin' kissing her neck and shit. I've taken the bitch home, got her preggers, and sent her off. All while you cunts are still all sitting there just like, oh yes, what a nice dress. Gotta make moves to get ahead in this world, cunt.’

  It was impossible to follow his train of thought, but my entire eco-sensory environment had taken form around his words. Was he bragging about sleeping with a girl? Was he insulting me? Or was he trying to give me some kind of life advice? Was he using Tracey as an abstract metaphor? I writhed around in my seat restlessly, trying to find some semblance of comfort in my psycho-nausea; I had no way of knowing how long it would be before he found someone else's mind to defecate in, so I tried to relax as much as I could.

  To my relief, Michael's narrative was eventually relegated to the status of background noise when Collin returned, big mushroom-grin on his face, with glasses for everyone. Michael poured a round of wines and passed me one. My hand shook as I took it from him, and the feeling of glass on my fingertips seemed to somehow induce an intense wave of exhaustion. The first sip made me gag a little, like drinking Robitussin, but I decided some sedation would be a good idea, since I wasn’t about to get any peace and quiet.

  ‘Your face is looking better,’ Collin said, taking a seat. I could have sworn I picked up on some kind of sarcasm or scorn, but I was sensing undertones and coded messages in every pause and every inflection - much easier to ignore them.

  ‘Too fuckin' right it is. I seen the cunt at school, I told him: You best be fuckin’ sleeping with one eye fuckin’ open, 'cause when....’ I took this as my cue to find perspective; thanks to his total lack of self-awareness, Michael’s monologues often provided a good opportunity for introspection, if one can avoid the burning focal-point of his attention. For the first time in weeks, I thought about Stan - our forgotten mushroom glitch, the result of inviting an infinite universe into a mind so accustomed to finitude. From what I'd been hearing, he now spent his days in almost total seclusion, punctuated by occasional jaunts with The Straightedges, probably all hiding from their minds with the help of violence and video games. Remembering Stan’s presence gave me a vague sense of loss; though our friendship was disappointingly brief, I saw in him the potential to be so much more than just another psycho roaming the town by street light, making the town unsafe for the rest of us.

  ‘Robbie,’ Michael nudged my arm. He had a joint in his hand. I took it from him and contemplated it for a moment, another complex web of thoughts spawning inside me. Lost in the interference pattern, I couldn’t figure out whether or not I wanted it, but took a deep toke anyway - out of habit, if nothing else - before passing it along to Collin.

  Almost instantly upon exhalation, I felt a familiar clawing depression well up inside of me. It was a kind of apathetic, empty, self-analytical mind-set that weed had been putting me in lately. I didn’t really mind it; it wasn’t a frightening or particularly emotive experience like a mushroom-nightmare - in fact, I usually managed to derive some kind of perverse satisfaction from my sinister self-interrogations. It did tend to make me nostalgic about the days when weed invoked the carefree sprightliness of childhood, though.

  At first, the anxiety was formless, not changing the contents of my mind in any qualitative way, just providing a certain melancholic undertone to my otherwise unremarkable internal monologue. As my smoky thoughts tried to solidify into a defeatist, marijuana-type conclusion, I noticed a subtle shift in the gravity of the room, once again bringing Robitussin to mind. The feel of the room took on a triangular nature, with a seemingly magnetic pull toward the apex, where, like a king on his throne, Collin sat in his armchair. As if sensing my thought, the unnerving bastard gave me a chilling smile before tossing the joint across the room to Tracey like a dart. My heart hammered and my face burned with infant dread as I entertained the paranoid notion that Collin was reading my thoughts. I got the sense that the entire social dynamic was somehow centred around him, with the rest of us orbiting him like a solar system around a star, Michael’s input cataclysmic but gravitationally insignificant. This figment took on a visual form in my mind’s eye, and I knew instantly that it was to be the basis of my looming self-interrogation.

  At first, I thought I was going in for another tiresome trip mentally undressing my virginal ways, as the constellation clearly illustrated my ‘fifth wheel’ status - Michael with his girl, Tracey; as well as Collin, with his girl, Lucy, who was presumably sleeping in his bed at this point. What made it interesting, though, was that this time I had had slept with both of the girls in question; in fact, they were the only two girls I had ever been intimate with - and they both chose their present company over me. I felt disheartened; not for the obvious reason of the unfortunate life my love was born into, but rather the prospect of another boring trip dwelling on it.

  Luckily for me and my growing ennui, it soon became clear that this element was not to be the central gravitational body of my trip; rather, it served as a passageway between concepts - a bridge for me to walk between my earlier, happier self and the maze of ominous thoughts spawning within, beckoning me inward with malicious, schizoid intent.

  Michael and Tracey both had a powerful, unavoidable social presence - Michael always brought with him a quick mind and unrelenting banter which, as much as I hated to admit, was impressive and witty, self-indulgent as it was; and Tracey’s socio-sexual presence was always noticeable whenever she was a part of a constellation. Reconciling my role as the introverted explorer of the mind, one for whom social interactions are mere distractions from the inner-search, was halted as my stoned mind rehashed something it was discussing earlier: A true psychonaut should be able to handle drugged-out sleep deprivation, like Collin and Ned, without these regular excursions into the depressed, anxious areas of the psyche; and, when one is in such a state to pick up on it, Collin’s aetheric presence is as unavoidable as Michael’s overbearing physical one - as I found out with his recent gravitational shift. I saw myself as one of the world’s passive, sickly victims - a failure of manifestation: Too socially cowardly to be a normal, extroverted person, and too mentally frail to be worth anything as a psychonaut - a middle child of the abyss; a person of no consequence.

  With this grim revelation, I realised that Michael's words were once again being directed at me. Was it him who was mentally undressing me? Was he just sitting here describing my deepest insecurities in strange, cosmic metaphors? I tried to remember whether this monologue was spoken in the voice of my mind or the voice of Michael, before concluding, with desperate optimism, that my projection was simply far louder and more gravitationally significant to me than whatever was coming out of his mouth.

  ‘... Fuckin', oi, cunt. What was I just saying?’ he demanded, looking to me for an answer. I had no idea. I was tempted to pretend I'd forgotten too, but Tracey and Collin were in their own orbit; I was on my own.

  ‘I’d better not tell you,’ I found myself saying, smiling at the floor.

  ‘Nah, fuck off with that shit. What was I talking about? I’d just cracked it, cunt. Just then, I almost had it.' The unusual sympathy I felt for him as his face settled into a grimace of sulking contemplation took me back to the beginning of the trip, which now seemed chillingly distant temporally, yet more gravitationally eminent than ever. I realised that my response was mimicking, word for word, what Ned had said to me earlier - perhaps even the only words he had said to me the whole day - when I had been ranting in a manner that was, perversely, similar to Michael's. I realised then that I too thought that I had ‘cracked it’ when I was motor-mouthing about the universe or consciousness or whatever it was. I'd hidden my fragile ego from the fact for a long time, but the truth was now unavoidable: My Psilocybin-rants are just as self-absorbed and obnoxious as Michael's dopaminergic spiels.

  Cannibalising itself, my weary ego reasoned that my subject matter was much more eloquent than his, that I was operating on a higher cosmic level than him; but my defences were down, and there was nothing I could do to mute the realisation that Michael was operating in a mode similar to myself when I verbalise my insights on mushrooms - ideas coming out of the mouth quicker than they enter the mind, sputtering scrambled vagaries in a desperate attempt to do something with the ingenium before it dissipates into the obscure nothingness of inspired intoxication. It's a kind of ecstasy, a spontaneous mediumship, as if one were channelling information from somewhere greater than oneself, ever to be enjoyed but never to be sought. It is accompanied by the conviction that it is absolutely essential to verbalise one's insights, that stopping or slowing down for anyone would be a rejection of this higher power, one which would surely reciprocate. I brought to mind the busy eyes and dramatic, expansive gestures that animated Michael’s outbursts, and concluded that he too was in that ecstatic state I knew so well, channelling that same mad, Dionysian energy; he was simply filtering it through his own distinct mental passageways.

  Aware of the irony that Michael had started another ecstatic rant that I was too preoccupied to attend to, I sat almost azoically flaccid on the couch, passively feeding on the fractally-spawning insights like a baleen whale as they drifted into my mind like plankton; and, having accomplished absolutely nothing, I was beginning to feel strangely satisfied with myself, satiated by my nutritious and savoury thoughts. One such morsel involved feeling a gravitational bond with Ned, and the realisation that I was experiencing a glimpse into his esoteric mind - lost in a magical but ephemeral flow-state, all while trying to deal with some cretin who refuses to think to himself. By no effort of my own, I decided never to interrupt Ned again, and to not take his eremitic nature as an opportunity to masturbate my egotistical ramblings. I also decided to stop smoking weed when I’m on mushrooms, at least when I have company outside of my usual circle of friends.

  Appropriately, the joint - now little more than a smouldering piece of cardboard, barely visible between Michael's fingers - came back around as I allowed myself a contained smile at my neatly resolved meditation.

  ‘Nah I’m good,’ I shrugged him off.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I’m good. All yours.’

  ‘What do you mean you're good? It's only gone 'round the circle twice; us cunts've all had a second hit. On the buzz, cunt.’

  ‘I don't want any more. More for you, right Michael?’

  ‘Fuckin' oath, more for me. I’ll fuckin' finish it, round three cunts.’ And he did, taking a series of theatrical puffs that seemed to be directed at me.

  After exhaling, he announced, ‘Fuck everyone here’s fuckin' fuuuucked!’ examining the hazy circle of wasters around him, before laughing a hoarse ‘zsh zsh zsh’ and putting the roach in an empty glass, much to Collin’s silent disgust. ‘Fuckin’ oath cunts I’m real out of it now. Just remembered a bunch of shit from back at primary, forgot it since I was a kid. Fuckin’ trippy shit. All sorts of thoughts,’ he continued, shaking his head in self-indulgence.

  ‘We're all just dust in the wind....’ Tracey added, her stoned grin slackening her carefully constructed litheness. They then looked at each other for a second and cracked up laughing - Michael's hyena-like and jarring, Tracey's an oddly fetching purr.

  ‘You’re so fucked up right now!’ Michael shouted, rocking the couch with his movements. Following some kind of gravitational influence, I looked at Collin, unable to supress my self-satisfied smile. He responded with an understated twitch of the eyebrow, a gesture of understanding and irony, that inflated my satisfaction into something close to arrogance, welcoming me to his vantage point at the apex of the psychedelic hierarchy. These neophytes don’t even know the start of it, I thought. They think smoking a bit of weed on some amphetamines is a trip? Child’s play. Mind virgins. I gave Collin a subtle nod, to which he responded with an expression that seemed uncharacteristically blank. I let my eyes drift away from his back down to the very much alive and active carpet, before receiving an astonishingly clear telepathic message that could have only been from Collin, saying, Write it down. While you can. Shocked, I looked back up to him. Physically, his expression hadn't changed at all; but something about the way the shadows hummed and interacted with my own proprioceptive distortions elevated his presence to a status beyond the absolute. I stared at him for an eternity, severely doubting my own perceptions, before he mouthed three syllables that I interpreted as ‘Fiat lux’. My heart hammered and gravity assumed its routine dimensions, then I stood up and went straight into his bedroom without excusing myself, leaving my glass of wine behind.

  And then gravity was the least of my concerns.

Peter Callahan

How strange it is to hear human speech through the walls; voices without a physical basis taking turns to make their noise, growing steadily louder as the intoxicants take hold... The turn-based system collapses into competition as dominant noises drown out the submissive, eventually driving them from the soundscape...

  The loud one had taken over. That horrific, baying voice...

  Clouds of marijuana smoke filtered through the crack in the door at the top of the stairs, merging with the tobacco haze of my dungeon. This haze was lit up vaguely with the sterile blue of the computer monitor; the only source of light, flashing lonely in the darkness.

  I stood up from my chair, knees creaking from inactivity, and hobbled slowly along to the dusty wooden shelf at the southernmost wall. I felt my way blindly along the row of canned beans and water bottles until my fingers came across my tin, sitting there lidless, half-filled with shredded tobacco and Calea Zacatechichi.

  My enfeebled legs quickly grew tired from the moderate activity, so I took the tin with me back to my desk. As I fingered the dry plant matter, searching for material fine enough to roll, my jaded eyes scanned what was visible of my dwelling; all I could see in the weak light of the computer was my desktop, covered in a landscape of pencilled notes on yellowing paper dating back to the beginnings of my journey into the quantum world. I shuddered as my eyes rested on a small, worryingly neat pile of stiffened, semen-covered rags; the result of some of the most disturbing experiments imaginable.

  The particles...

  The particles were toying with me. My fingers automatically stopped moving as I was reminded of the despair from which I’d been trying in vain to escape.

  Sorcery. God damn sorcery.

  Delving into the most fundamental layers of reality, I had come across a presence; not an entity as such, but a mind, a consciousness, controlling reality at its most basic level.

  And what a sick mind it was.

  The hiss, gnast, and aroma of match against box, then flame to cigarette, echoed in the silent darkness; it then settled into the satisfying crackle of burning plant matter as I took the smoke deep into my lungs. This was the only respite available within the confines of my perverted lifestyle.

  The particles...

  Whatever being, whatever force, was at work on the quantum level was certainly in possession of a truly debauched sense of humour. Try as I might, I couldn’t spend a moment of my days not relentlessly considering and reconsidering the implications of my findings.

  The photons knew when they were being watched. They were self-conscious, self-aware, working tirelessly to conceal their secrets from the voyeur above. However, if their monitoring coincided with the moment of orgasm, they were quite happy to show themselves. Just for an instant.

  But could they be trusted?

  Were they just toying with me?

  They certainly weren’t above a little foul play. That much was clear.

  I sifted through my memory in disgust. For months I had been decohering down here in the basement, hiding from the wider world of humans and social conventions, the friends and loved ones I had once known...

  The particles were my friends now.

  Worse still, they were essentially my sexual partners.

  I’d spent the majority of recallable time alone in the basement, masturbating over subatomic particles in hopes of uncovering the true nature of reality. I felt like a prostitute, determinedly beating my aging, semi-functional penis for an audience of perverted particles in exchange for their secrets. If my colleagues - former colleagues - were ever to find out...

  I took another deep draw from my Calea cigarette, experiencing a moment of my empty, lifeless version of pleasure as I watched the smoke dissipate into the cloudy darkness around me.

  The particles. The fucking particles!

  I banged the desk with my fist in frustration, before resting my forehead on my palm, massaging my temple. Sensing an unease in the atmosphere, I closed my eyes, allowing my surroundings a moment of decoherence. This was not an act of politeness; it was a fearful peace offering.

  What if the particles don’t want to give me any answers? What if they’re just stringing me along, making me perform sex acts for their own amusement? What if this is their form of seduction? It would make sense for the fundamental energy of the dualistic universe to be sexual in nature; some great, godly incubus. What if the bizarre changes that the quantum world undergoes at the instant of orgasm are no more than the ejaculation of subatomic matter? Perhaps this is a sort of parasitic reproduction - an illusory symbiosis somehow facilitating the evolution of the quantum realm, the very unfolding of reality at its most basic level...

  The fucking particles!

  I sighed, stubbing out my half-finished cigarette on the corner of a dry, semen-stiffened rag. I opened my eyes, forcing the quanta all about me to collapse into definite positions; they did so begrudgingly - almost sarcastically. For a moment, I considered opening the curtains, but decided against it. Instead, I set up my homemade Michelson interferometer - no more than two mirrors, a piece of glass, and a laser pen - and unzipped my fly, resigned to the insanity of my lifestyle. Having not seen a human for months, I visualised a symbolic representation of a neutrino while I patiently rubbed my penis, desperately hoping for it to be sufficiently rested to achieve another erection.

  Miracle of miracles, it hardened instantly. This made my job much easier, and I actually managed to derive a dubious sort of enjoyment from the ordeal.

  Particles! Particles! Fuck! Particles!

Collin Callahan

Deeply contented, I tuned out the drivel around me to consider in detail my work with robbie and its part in the greater Harmonics. I recalled with great fondness and even a touch of nostalgia the days passed when all it took was a handful of shrooms to scare the wee bastard inward. Now, hardened by subterranean terrors and meathook kaleidoscopes, the darkly illuminated regions of his mind that fascinated me endlessly were becoming ever more elusive. It had turned into something of a full time job keeping them alive.

  But, as I often reminded myself, after a certain point a Melody will write itself. It is merely a matter of providing the initial spark.

  Though I was still feeling the pangs of disappointment that I wouldn't be reading about a Datura trip, I was generally happy with my Work. Our little jaunt to the hospital served to put robbie face to face with his mortality, and I felt confident that his alone time with a sex deprived lucy had forced him to deal with his Psilocybin induced impotence, as well as his continuing virginity and general inferiority.

  Troubled by the prospect of the last few days amounting to nothing, I decided to bring out the heavy artillery. I knew michael would bring weed and amphetamines to the situation, which would work in unison to turn robbie's internal groans into screams. But more importantly, I wanted his repulsive presence to drive robbie inward for salvation, where he'd be forced to confront himself in the twisted hall of mirrors I'd set up in his mind. And tracey, his old schoolyard crush, would simply be another reminder of his inadequacies in that department. I smiled tenderly at the thought of him running away from one sexual failure to another as he left the lounge to join lucy in my room.

  Fatigued but satisfied, I now had michael and tracey to deal with. Tracey's never any trouble to have around. She's so far beneath Michael and I on a conversational level that we're both happy to leave her with her thoughts.

  Michael on the other hand...

  Now there's a curious case, one of a very select few I could never quite fathom.

  Owner of a brilliantly squalid mind, that cunt. As anticipated, he brought with him a seemingly endless supply of weed and amphetamines - a real treat at the end of a long night of composing. Most of the shit that came out of his mouth filled me with a certain contempt reserved for the foulest of our earth's creatures, but, to his credit, he thought that Alien Hand Syndrome was an antiquated term for unexplained erections. I imagine this should keep me entertained for at least another lifetime. Whether it was worth the shit stain he doubtlessly left on my mind was debatable, but my constitution is such that I can enjoy his occasionally priceless commentary without being adversely affected by his toxic presence.

  The two of them made some noise about getting something called DOC, an ultra long lasting stimulant by the sounds of it. The prospect of sleep was beginning to seem a bit remote, and the Psilocybin was on its way out, so I welcomed the thought of adding something novel to my neurochemistry. This would be pure indulgence, since I had already accomplished everything I'd set out to do on this trip. But I was up for a bit of a party. To celebrate.

  Overall, I enjoyed the rare break from my duties as a psychic architect. I spent a few nice hours smoking weed with a quiet mind, appreciating the amphetamine induced clarity of thought without feeling the need to direct it toward any ends. From time to time, I would break my meditation to goad michael on or seduce tracey with a stream of spontaneous poetic words, perhaps planting the seeds for a future project. More than anything, I enjoyed the monologues and one man performances that michael would come out with whenever his role as the most outrageous cunt in the room was threatened. Liquor rounded out the whole cocktail, keeping my restlessness at bay.

  My heart smiled a sweet jasmine scented melody all afternoon, and my mind spoke hardly a word.

Ned Devlin

Robbie Marks

I was lying on Collin’s bed, watching Lucy sleep as I readied myself to do the same, when another epiphany jolted me back into full consciousness. I sighed internally, saying, What now? to the Psilocybin-shadows in my mind, coming to terms with the fact that they wouldn’t be letting me sleep just yet.

  Oh, you’re still awake? We thought you wanted to sleep now, they teased. They spoke as a sinister choir: Several discordant, garbled voices all saying the same words, differing slightly in pitch and pace.

  Whatever, I thought back at them. Any excitement about whatever profundity they had to offer me was far outweighed by my exhaustion and unusual preoccupation with sleep.

  The shadows stayed quiet for a moment, more for their own amusement than out of any kind of respect they had for my mental well being, until they gave my whole body another serotonergic-zap that had me worried about waking Lucy.

  Turning inward, I was exposed to a full-frontal assault by an already packaged and thought out epiphany, enticing me deeper with cryptic endorphins. Entering this newly spawned rabbit hole, I understood that these moments of insight that I’m prone to chase and be chased by throughout my many inebriated states are really no more than the stripping away of the multitudes of conflicting truths to leave me with a singular, easily graspable falsity - paradox free and simple enough to apply to manifest reality. It was crystal clear to me then, as I lay drained and depleted, staring at Collin’s unusually active white ceiling, that any truth - at least in the truest sense of the word - is always paradoxical and ineffable by nature, existing in dimensions far beyond those we can understand with our limited human capacities.

  I felt a derisive laughter at my expense from the depths, where the Psilocybin-shadows lurked in their strange, radiant darkness. Recognising a trap, I fought the temptation to defend my pride, and instead left them snickering amongst themselves. I tried to steer this torrent of new information toward a conclusion of some kind, but this quickly proved impossible, as I was trying to turn this train of thought into the very sentiment it existed solely to eradicate.

  See. Funny isn’t it? they teased, speaking to me in tingles and geometry.

  Hold up a second, I pleaded back to them, just let me see where I’m going with this. Though I still found their laughter distracting, I admitted to myself that the joke was actually rather funny, in a gallows psychological sort of way.

  As my mind started to dissipate into the usual insight smothering fog, I tried to find where I was in my train of thought, but it was only drifting further into obscurity. I could remember that it was derailed by my contemplation of the notion of conclusions, but I was at a loss as to what had led me to that point.

  I closed my eyes; the laughter grew louder.

  What!? What’s so fucking funny? I demanded. The laughter died down as the snickering shadows composed themselves.

  You really are fucking dim, aren’t you boy? they spoke in the condescending way Dad would when I didn’t know something he considered general knowledge. Stupid boy, they continued, giving me a whack around the frontal lobe that manifested as a physical flinch.

  Well, what the fuck is it that’s so obvious, then? I demanded.

  The shadows summoned a chill from the base of my spine up to my neck, leaving a trail of icy goosebumps, before indulging me.

  That whole train of thought was a moment of insight, you fool. And, as a moment of insight, it is subject to the same newly established laws as every other truth molesting epiphany you’ve ever had. God you’re dense, boy.

  I considered this for a moment as the train of thought bit down on the end of its own tail. So this moment of insight, like all others, is nothing but a reduction of a higher truth to an understandable simplicity? I asked, pleased with the clarity of my wording, until I realised it was but another example of my over-simplifying ways in action. The shadows grinned wickedly, which felt like a combination of guilt and excitement, and nodded Yes in black silence.

  But hang on, I continued, once again as confused as ever, the falsity of that moment of insight is based on its own inherent truthfulness. If it’s false, then it doesn’t apply to itself and it could be true!

  The shadows gave me a slight tingling in the extremities before replying, But if it’s true, then its laws apply to itself, and it can’t be true, can it?

  My neurons strained as they pulled together to try make sense out of the madness.

  What the fuck man, this makes no sense, I cried in desperation.

  The strange light-source at the centre of the shadows erupted with glee; a sensation of Jupiterian expansion tempered by a feeling of being banished to the pits of some kind of horrible internal prison, the entire sinister choir berating me in one unified, booming voice, IT’S CALLED A PARADOX, BOY! THE CLOSEST THING TO THE TRUTH YOUR PUNY MIND WILL EVER EXPERIENCE! DOESN’T FEEL GOOD, DOES IT BOY? YOU’D BETTER GET USED TO IT, YOU’LL BE DEALING WITH A LOT OF THEM FROM HERE ON IN! before erupting into the most vehement laughter I’d ever experienced, shaking the entire room all around me, crumbling my field of vision in a geometric earthquake, all the tiny fragments of reality pulsating with merriment as they fell. It was utter chaos of the senses, with every familiar concept I tried to cling to turning into a distant memory the moment I made contact. For a timeless instant, I knew nothing but the laughter of the entities around me. I had a sensation of somehow experiencing my entire past and potential future as being no less solid than the subjective reality of the present, wiping everything away and leaving just a ghostly notion that time had finally given in to the strain of holding things together, and (I) would no longer have the privilege of living moment to moment; instead, existence would experience itself in its entirety, undivided by minutes, miles, or egos, infinitely and eternally never and forevermore - the polar opposite of The Void; the volcanic, laughing chaos of everything ever....

  Then, as quickly as it had fragmented, the moment around me stabilised, the whole occurrence no more than a gnostic blink; the maniacal laughter superimposing itself over the vibrating, spasmodic exhalation ejaculating from my core.

  ‘Oh my god Robbie! Can’t you do that somewhere else?’ Lucy droned. I stopped laughing and looked at her. She was propped up on her elbow, facing me, her hair tangled and her eyes puffy and bloodshot with sleep.

  Embarrassed, then indignant, then enraged, I shouted, ‘Those fucking mushrooms! That’s all they fucking do, man; just make your brain spawn self-creating and self-defeating paradoxes that have less and less applications to reality the more they reveal themselves to you. I just can't fucking win with them.... Fuck!’

  ‘Robbie can you please let me sleep? I don’t know what you’re talking about and I don’t even want to try and think about it. Go into the lounge,’ she said, her venom out of character, but not entirely unjustified.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, and got up and walked toward the door.

  ‘And can you tell Collin to come to bed?’

  I ignored her and returned to the party, floating somewhere beyond my body.

Lucy Winters

I feel gross. The sun is out, but everything still feels dark. I want today to be over. Tomorrow might be good . . . I don’t like going to sleep when it’s light out. Just kind of feels like it didn’t even happen after, like I’ve just been lying here awake. Like more of a blackout than a sleep. I shouldn’t have snapped at Robbie either. I’m never very friendly when I just wake up. I have to drink some coffee or smoke some weed first, then we're all friends. Unless Collin’s in bed with me. Making love in the morning is such a nice way to start the day. It’s been so long . . . Maybe that’s why I feel so ratty.

  I’ve got a little bit of a headache and I’m still tired, but I won’t be able to go back to sleep now so I just stretch around for a bit and get up. I’m still wearing my dress from last night, and I feel sticky and gross all over . . . I think it’s time to go back to Mum’s for a while. Rest up. Do some painting. Talk to her and Sam again. Poor little Sam . . . I almost forgot they were even real. Whenever I’ve thought about them lately, it’s felt kind of like I’m thinking about a movie or a story someone’s told me. Something far away. Not a part of my life . . . My new life . . .

  I’ll go see them today. After I’ve had a coffee and a shower and said sorry to Robbie. Collin will understand.

  Achy and half blind, I go into the lounge. It’s Collin, Michael, and Tracey. They've been smoking cigarettes inside. I consider going back to bed, but Robbie's nightmares are still there. Tracey's sprawled out on the couch in black tights and doc martens with her hair draped to the floor, giggling with glazed over eyes and a wine glass full of something brown. Michael and Collin are standing real close, face to face. Michael’s taken his shirt off, exposing a tattoo of Big Foot on his side that I didn't know he had. That famous photo where he's looking sideways at the camera.

  ‘Who the fuck do you think you are? Huh?’ He’s up on his tip toes with his pointer finger right up in Collin’s face. ‘Do you even shave, cunt? Do you even shave?’

  Collin’s standing there in his brown suede jacket the same colour as his expression, a pretend scowl resting on top of a deranged smile. They're both quiet for a second before Collin relaxes and they both start laughing. He shoves Michael lightly and says, ‘My cousin shaves, cunt. Don’t make me get him ‘round here,’ imitating Michael’s worst caveman voice. They start kind of boxing with open hands, crab circling each other with occasional strikes. I can never tell how serious Michael is. Stan once told me that with Michael, there’s a very thin, blurry line between a joke and reality. I can never relax around him.

  ‘Listen, cunt,’ Michael says, putting his hands up in mild surrender, still circling, ‘don't hate me 'cause you ain't me, alright?’

  ‘Bitch, I love you 'cause I'm above you,’ Collin says. Michael grins and relaxes and they both stand still for a bit and I'm happy to see they've settled down. But before I can go say hello, Michael flicks Collin's nose and they start boxing again.

  I lean over the back of the couch that Tracey’s on and ask her quietly where Robbie is, hoping the boys don't notice me. She looks at me with red eyes and that sleepy stoned smile she gets and just points at the sliding door with a dangling wrist. I say thanks and ghost off into the backyard, glad to have them all out of earshot.

  I get outside and it’s a rumbling grey overcast day that might rain but isn’t yet. Robbie’s lying on the grass with his arms out like wings, staring at the sky. He’s wearing the same faded grey jeans and black Doors T-shirt he’s been wearing for days now. No glasses. I go over and sit cross legged next to him and rest my hand on his forearm.

  ‘Hey Robbie. I’m sorry I was mean to you before. It's just I was real sleepy. That's all. I'm better now . . . Are you okay?’

  He lets his head drop to its side, looking at me. His face is real flushed and his eyes are crazed and bloodshot, red veins throbbing out from his irises.

  ‘Robbie’s not here anymore, Lucy.’

  I don’t know what he means by that, so I smile and squeeze his arm and say, ‘You’re right here, Robbie,’ and feel a little stupid about it. I didn’t know what else I could say. He looks back up to the skies.

  ‘The lights are on and somebody’s home . . . but I don’t want him in my house.’

  I nod and pretend to know what he means. I guess it means he wants to go to sleep. He needs to go to sleep. Collin too. Ned . . .

  ‘Okay, well I’m up now, not gonna go back to sleep . . . You can go and sleep in Collin’s bed. If you want.’

  He turns back to me with this thoughtful but pained stare and says, ‘I’d rather keep the lights on when there’s a stranger in the house.’ He looks back up and puts his hands over his face. Waiting for the rain, maybe.

  ‘Okay. But it’s there if you want it,’ I say, standing up. He makes a grunty noise and I leave him alone and go inside. He’s just tripping out. He’ll be okay when he has some sleep.

  Inside, Michael is sitting on a couch cushion on top of Collin on the floor, changing the music. Collin’s muffled voice is saying, ‘If you’re putting on rap, then that’s fuckin’ it, cunt. I’m calling your Mum,’ while he tries to horsey bite Michael’s leg. Michael’s batting his arm away casually, looking pleased with himself.

  I try to sneak past into the kitchen, but Michael catches me and goes, ‘Lucy! Rise and fuckin' shine! Only slept half the day away. Get yourself a glass and get some whiskey in ya.’

  The thought of whiskey sits nauseously in my stomach, next to the smell of stale smoke and Michael's voice. ‘No thanks,’ I say, walking towards the kitchen. ‘I’m just gonna make a coffee. Anyone else want one?’

  ‘Fuck that noise. Have a line,’ Michael says, pointing to the table as Collin's arms writhe around like tentacles from under him. There’s a bunch of dexies sitting in the square of free space between all the books, bottles, and weed stuff. My heart beats a little faster and I can feel my whole body lift a bit - dexies, yum. A much better pick me up than coffee. Never had them first thing in the morning before . . . or like first thing after waking, I mean. I smile at Michael who gives me a stern faced nod before looking away and turning on some music. It sounds okay at first, a nice beat, but then there's rapping and I'm a little bit annoyed that he's won his stupid fight with Collin.

  I kneel down in front of the table and go about crushing the pills. Tracey starts running her hand through my hair and gives me a fright that makes me drop the lighter. I give her a frown to tell her to stop, but she just smiles a murky smile that I can't make sense out of. I crush the dexies up real fine, then split it as evenly as I can four ways and sniff one up with a rolled up five dollar note from the table.

  I turn to Tracey, ‘Whiskey?’

  She looks vacantly at me for a bit, then at the coffee table and says, ‘Joint?’

  I feel like I'm about to sneeze, but I just end up making a dumb face. Tracey's too stoned to have expressions anymore. I get up and go to the kitchen and the gross tasting drip vanishes as a feathery tingle spreads from the back of my head all over my body, pricking my nerves as it goes. I grab a glass and head back in, feeling light and fluffy.

  Tracey sits up and puts her feet on the coffee table so I can sit next to her. She knocks some stuff onto the floor but doesn't seem to notice or care. I look at Collin, expecting him to tell her off, but he's busy. He's sitting in his favourite armchair watching Michael intently. Michael's got Hayden’s guitar upright resting between his legs, still shirtless even though there's a bit of a chill in the room. There's a small bud resting in the top fret of the guitar and he's trying to play it down into the sound hole, but it keeps trailing off the side onto the floor, making a disjointed melody that sounds better than the music coming from the stereo.

  My jaw’s a little tense now that I'm sitting down and I want to move around or talk to Tracey. She's good company when I give her a chance. She's not like the other girls at school. She doesn't judge. I just don't really get her. But I never really get on well with other girls.

  ‘I watched a good show on Animal Planet yesterday,’ I say, enjoying the feeling of words coming out of my mouth. She doesn't respond so I keep going, ‘It was about this type of rat that has ultraviolet pee. So it just runs around all peeing all day so it can remember where it's been, 'cause it can see ultraviolet. It'd be cool to be able to see ultraviolet. But then there's this bird, like a type of hawk I think, that can also see ultraviolet. So when it's hungry it just flies over the grasses and follows the trail of ultraviolet pee to the rat thing and eats it. I think I can sometimes see ultraviolet when I'm tripping. I can see more colours than usual when I'm tripping. My peripherals are way better too. Robbie says his are too, but he thinks it's his imagination filling in the gaps. He says there's not enough rods and cones to see in lots of detail with your peripherals. But I think maybe it just makes them work harder. Then when the mushrooms wear off everything's all soft and fuzzy, like maybe the rods and cones are all tired. I asked Collin about it and he just told me to talk to Robbie about it 'cause he was real busy researching ventriloquism for some reason. Then I was gonna ask Ned but he . . .’

  Tracey's giggling but I'm not sure what's funny. She catches me wondering and nods towards Collin. He's reaching around behind Michael all sly to change the music.

  I'm feeling playful so I try to pick up the weed tin from the coffee table with my feet, but then I drop it all over the floor when I try and pass it too my hands. I look at Collin but he still hasn't even looked at me yet. Tracey is giggling at me and I'm laughing on the inside but just smiling on the outside, because of the dexies. It's way different here when Collin's drunk. It's like when you're a kid and your parents leave you home alone for the night.

  I get down to pick up the weed and hear Michael shout, ‘Oi! Hands where I can see them, cunt!’ and I think he's yelling at me until the music changes. Collin laughs drunkenly as the start of Road to Nowhere lifts the room up.

  I'll go to Mum's later, I think. It's still just the afternoon. I'll roll this joint, smoke it, hang 'round a bit, then head off. When I'm back to the bass line, as Collin says.

Stan Richards

I’m skating down the sidewalk like I’m on party pills, just tryna stay a step ahead of this shitty anxiety inside me. I got no fuckin' meds left and Dad and Karen are after a chat, so I can’t hang 'round there anymore. My energy levels are through the roof, but it's impossible to hold on to any thought for more than a second before they all just start screaming like fuckin' banshees.

  I’ve skated right past the skatepark. I was gonna skate there, but cunts always wanna talk to you. Can't deal with that shit. That’s the problem with skating - every other fucker with a board assumes you’re there to hang out, just 'cause they’ve been sitting there smoking weed and drinking beer all day. Not me. I've got problems.

  Jeremy from social studies tries to wave me down as I take the turnoff to Northland, so I start pushing faster and pretend not to notice him. It’s kinda working, skating my anxiety away. It’s only ever really a temporary fix, but I'm starting to see that my days are pretty much just a series of those. All I can do is keep on keeping on between doses. Keeps me busy, though. I guess.

  I fly off the curb onto the road in front of this cunt in a blue Toyota and he slams on the brakes. There’s a lot of screeching and beeping and the guy yells something out the window but it's all kinda muted by the shit going on in my head. Seems like a dumb cunt anyway - if he didn't put on the brakes I woulda just snuck a push in and we'd all be sweet. But all these things happening around me are soothing the grim, paranoid throb inside. Keeping me focused on like real shit that's happening on the outside, a friendlier world than the one going on inside. I pop a sketchy ollie up the curb and my back wheels hit the edge but I'm up okay. Call it a wallie.

  The street's a bit uphill here so I try kick my board into my hand and miss. I pick it up and hear a voice behind me go ‘Oi!’ I look around and spot the car I cut in front of parked up. This old geezer calls out ‘Oi, is your name Death or something?’

  I head towards him with a real dumb expression, saying ‘No, it’s Jeff. Why’s that?’ I can’t see his eyes behind his aviators, but I can see he’s got like this pointy bit in the middle of his mouth that makes him look kinda like a turtle. His neck sort of pokes straight out of his shoulders at me instead of straight up like most people's do, and I can imagine him pulling it inwards like a turtle if he got scared.

  Once I'm an arm's length from him he goes ‘Well it fuckin’ well should be,’ and screeches off, pulling out in front of this white van that has to slam on the brakes 'cause the old cunt didn’t indicate.

  ‘Merge like a zip, motherfucker!’ I shout. The white van beeps at me and a raised fist pops out of the window, which I take as a respectful gesture.

  My heart’s going like a meth head on the bongos now and I got a mad sweat on, so I sit down on my board against a wall, panting. Feels good freaking out about something other than the sick shit in my head, that sweet rush of adrenaline. It’s fading pretty quick though, and it’s not taking the thudding heart and cold sweats with it. It turns into shaking and clenching and scary thoughts, so I hop back on my board and head off down the road back the way I came, then take a left towards the busy intersections at Centres.

  Feels good to be back on my board, charging full speed and letting my loose trucks throw me around all sketchy through the pedestrians. But it doesn't feel as good as it did before. Pretty hard to get scared when you're trying to. I try to get a bit more speed going, really throwing myself into the push, but I slip into a back slash after dodging a couple of suits and fly onto the concrete.

  I'm up straight away, not really hurt, just kinda worked up. I've made a bit of a scene so I take the turn down Windsor. Someone tried to ask if I was all good, and I'm pretty sure I heard someone say I'm a skater fag, but I just keep looking at the ground and head to the corner store.

  I’ve seen Ned and Collin steal bottles of wine before, back in the day. They'd stick it down the side of their pants when the cunt at the counter’s not looking and walk straight out. Ned reckons getting the nerves helps you 'cause it slows everything down and makes you sharper.

  I head towards where the drinks are at the back, tryna look confident like I know what I'm after. The guy behind the counter, this dude Nabhi, is yarning away to this other Indian cat while he serves his customers. Acting casual, I grab a bottle of wine from hip-level as I pass the rack on the way to the cold drinks at the back wall. I put the wine in the top of my pants in a smooth motion, unzipping my jacket so it dangles at my sides and hides the bulge. A flash of cold in my heart takes me back to my shroom trip for a second, but I breathe deep and move past it.

  Walking with a wine bottle in my pants is more awkward than I expected, have to sort of waddle and hold on to the front of my pants like a fuckin' wigger. But the adrenaline feels good, and I just grab a lucozade without thinking too hard about it. I stand in front of the fridge for a bit, awkwardly tryna tighten my belt around the wine bottle without moving too much, before turning and strutting like a cunt to the counter.

  The prickles of paranoia flare up again when I get to the counter. Nabhi and his mate both stop talking and look at me like they know what I'm up to. Even though I know it's all in my head, I let my paranoid thoughts consume me, milking them for adrenaline.

  ‘And just the drink today then, sir?’ Nabhi asks, sorta singing it the way he does. It sounds like he’s getting at something, but he always talks a bit like that. A bit of a slimy cunt, if the truth be told. Sorta gives the impression of being resentful about the life he’s chosen - I could see him being like a drama teacher or something. I dunno. Shaking with panic and mental illness, I nod and force a casual smile as I hand over my card, my other arm bolted stiff to my side, my fingers holding the wine in place underneath my board.

  ‘Enjoying the sun?’ he says as I type in my pin. I start to nod, but remember it’s a dreary, overcast bitch of a day and pick up on his sarcasm. After a headfucked pause, I smile all plastic and say ‘You know it,’ with the same kind of salesman voice he used. Feels like if he notices I'm distracted, he’ll frisk me and then the gig’s up. Stupid, I know, but it’s like Ned used to say: It’s the nerves that make the magic.

  He makes another crack about enjoying the sunshine as he hands back my card, and I say ‘You too, buddy,’ and leave with the wine bulge hidden behind my board. I hop on my board and push all gangster like Stevie Williams, then smash the lucozade on the footpath with my free hand once I'm like half a block from the store. This lanky ginger cunt looks at me disapprovingly, so I give him a pissed off glare and he looks straight at the ground and I snigger to myself about what a piece of shit I am.

  By the time I get to Windsor Street, a few blocks down from the store, the anxiety starts kicking in again. Cruising down the incline, I take the wine out of my pants and take a huge swig that makes me gag. Never been much of a wine drinker. Shit just makes me queasy and a little sleepy. Fuck tryna steal beer though.

  The footpath flattens out and gets rough just outside the intermediate school, so I hop off my board to walk along the grassy patch next to the fence. On the other side, there’s a couple of burly looking dudes playing tennis, with like white shorts and those bands they always wear around their heads. Feeling agitated again, I biff my board over the fence and climb after it awkwardly with the wine in my hand. My fear's gone by the time I get to the top, a little over two metres up, and I balance up there for a few seconds, feeling giddy from the wind, before hopping down to the court.

  I pick up my board and walk straight through the game, taking these big, exaggerated swigs. No idea what I've got planned. The two players stop and look at me, both with like a what-the-fuck-cunt look on their faces, as I clamber over the net in the middle. I brush past the bigger of the two - a fuckin' tribal tattooed meathead cunt, like a white version of Jordan - without looking at him, and he falls in line behind me. I keep walking like I haven't noticed him. He catches up to me and my body tenses up like it does when there’s a punch coming. Fuckin’ try it then, cunt. Take a fuckin’ swing and see what happens.

  He puts his hand on my shoulder and says ‘You alright there, mate?’ in a combative tone, all rhetorical and shit. I spin ‘round to face him all abrupt, one hand clamped around the bottle and the other holding my board by the truck. Not sure if I'm actually gonna attack him yet. All I know is that the first blow will be to my face.

  ‘Gimme a fuckin’ excuse, cunt,’ I say through gritted teeth, my bottle of wine and board both shaking with tension. I’m imagining crushing his head between the two, or maybe just smashing my bottle on my board behind his head, just to freak the cunt out. He leans back in like a faint retreat, tryna put a bit more space between us. I advance slowly, gradually closing the gap. The cunt's a head taller than me but he's still spooked. I'm shitting myself but trying hard not to laugh.

  His friend’s hopped over the net now and he jogs up to us, going ‘Yo, yo, just leave it Mark. Come on.'

  Mark stops backing away and his friend stands between us. He tries to halt me with one hand on my chest and one on Mark's shoulder, the classic fight-stopping pose. I shove his hand away and glare at Mark. He looks from me to his friend and back again and goes ‘You’d better watch yourself, mate. A lesser man would’ve kicked your ass right here.’ I keep looking at him till his friend says ‘Come on,’ and they jog away.

  ‘Yeah, back away, cunt. I'm fuckin' crazy but he's even crazier,’ I say, gesturing to the empty space beside me. I'm smiling, but not feeling happy or anything like that. I'm feeling though. That's the ticket - feeling instead of thinking. I’m pretty much done here though, so I skate off towards the trees on the outskirts. Fuck those dudes.

  By the time I get to the bush, my hands are sweaty again and I'm breathing all shallow. I keep drinking the wine even though it's done fuck all to help, just 'cause I got nothing better to do.

  I get to this clearing with some bike jumps surrounded by shrubs and step into a memory. Hunting shrooms after school with Lucy and Collin. This was back before tripping every day had turned Collin into a scaly psychopath. Or maybe before I got close enough to him to notice his true nature. He was going on about this trip he had with Robbie and Michael, and how Robbie had some kind of life-changing spiritual experience. He was tryna convince me and Lucy to eat some with him, since neither of us had tripped yet. Collin's descriptions kinda creeped me out, so we ended up declining. But I could tell Lucy was captivated. A few days later, Lucy ended up taking shrooms with Collin and Robbie. The beautiful way she described it made me feel left out, so I agreed to come along next time. But by then something had gotten between me and Lucy, something I didn't understand...

  Fuck.

  I really don’t want to think about that now. Fuckin' repress that shit. Shit's about to get real fuckin' ugly real fuckin' soon in here if I don't do something... Maybe I should just man up and eat some shrooms. If they fucked up my brain last time, then maybe they could take me back to the same place to fix it. I looked it up yesterday and it only takes 150 milligrams of zopiclone to overdose. I’m getting two weeks’ worth tomorrow morning. I’m all anxious and fucked up all the time anyway, surely the shrooms can’t make shit any worse. Or maybe they can. But I have an exit strategy. All or nothing now. This can’t go on.

  After a few more minutes walking, I make my decision. It's hard to say why. There's no thought process or anything behind it. Maybe it's the sound of leaves rustling in the wind. Or maybe it's just the need to do something. Maybe I'm drunk. I dunno. It just seems like the thing to do.

  I spot a rotting log on the forest floor and I try to kick it over but just end up fuckin' tripping over it like a retard. I guess the wine's working - retardation, awesome. I get onto my knees and tip the log over, surprised to see a few small, blue-white bulbs. Blue meanies. As I pick them, a fuckin’ spider runs up my arm and I flinch and drop the shrooms all over the dirt. I shake off the echoes of the spider on my skin and pick them up again, making some effort to brush the dirt off them before chucking them in my mouth. The texture makes me gag when I try swallow them, so I chug some wine and chew the whole disgusting mouthful as much as I can, then swallow it all down with a shudder and burp up the taste of dirt and sick. I’m about to wash the last of it down with more wine when I pause with sudden terror.

  This is gonna be fucked up.

  But then, everything's pretty fucked up anyway. What makes one thing more fucked up than another in this wild, chaotic world?

  Yeah, alright, but this is gonna be actually fucked.

Michael Farmer

Got a mean buzz going and I've had enough of Callahan's shit so I got the scrawny cunt on the ground again and I'm putting on some Eminem to piss him off. Smug cunt, gotta put the cunt in his - He's trying to take me out which is a fuckin' joke but I'm over it so I get off him and let him up and he's all “My house my music” but I trip the cunt and give him a shove with it so he lands on the couch and gets hurt a bit 'cause it's got no cushions now. I check Spacey out to make sure she saw it 'cause Collin's been acting all like a professor to impress her, the dopey cunt - Gotta show the ladies how hard you are if you wanna get something going with them, else they might as well just be fuckin' dykes. Gotta show 'em you got balls, never mind the brains. It's all fuckin' biology, which he should know, going on about all that shit all the time, trying to be all smart 'cause he's too much of a weedy cunt to be a tough - Couldn't even kill a fly, that cunt. I seen him try once. Squashed it flat, yeah, but it still flew away sweet.

  Spacey's seen what I done and she's smiling real stoked and waves the snortle around and her eyebrows go up and I could fuckin' do with some more buzz so I grab it off her and have another snort like whoop fuckin' whoop, Callahan's changing the music already to some fuckin' hippy shit so I shoot him this real hard sort of Eddie Guerrero look and he acts like he’s not fazed and goes “Rap, my good homeboy, is seventy five percent of the word crap” tryna sound all clever and make himself feel less like a bitch for being outdone by - Lucy and Spacey are both into it, so I think quick and say “Collin is a hundred percent of the word colon,” boom, and with my peripheries I can see the girls are into it, Lucy's laughing out loud and she gives me this look like she wants the cock pretty much right now, got the mouth for it that’s for sure, no one's gonna fuck with me when I smoke weed on dexies, comebacks like Jimmy Carr, right off the bat, bang fuckin' bang motherfucker. Collin's going “Well, since it's the colon's job to get rid of the shit, then I think it's time to send you” but I save the cunt some face and say “Fuck off, cunt. I won your stupid word war” to stop him saying something stupid. He's just embarrassing himself now, ran outta juice way back. He's got his head right up his own ass, that cunt, fuckin' lucky I don't - I got a lot of time for the cunt though, got his back and shit, he was the cunt that first showed me how to crush up - He laughs quietly to be a good sport, but I can see I cut him a bit so I cheer him up and go “You're an alright cunt, Callahan” and turn to the ladies and go “This cunt aye, he's a bit slow on the uptake, but once he gets going, well, you know” as a compliment that really means fuck all. Collin goes “Thanks, Michael. Means a lot” and nods at me and he's trying to make it sound like he's joking for the girls but telling it to me seriously 'cause we both know where this is heading, and as much as I'd fuckin' kill for a three way with Lucy and Spacey, it'd be putting Collin in an awkward place, and I wouldn't do that to the cunt.

  It's a bit quiet for my tastes now, none of these stoned cunts got the balls to break the silence, so I say “Who wants a fuckin' shot then?” to give the conversation a bit of - Dunno what cunts would do without me, just be a bunch of cunts in a room thinking about what to say but not even saying it. I never get thanks for it or nothing but cunts know, they keep inviting me - Spacey's got her arms up saying some shit about switching gears or something and it's already got me thinking about those fingers around my cock, but that'll happen later no doubt, I know how it works. I go off to the kitchen to get some shot glasses and when I walk past Collin he nods at me with this gay fuckin' Hansen smile so I give him a light whack 'round the head to make sure he knows his place. He's a fuckin' faggoty cunt sometimes, with his girly face and gay fuckin' hair, dressed all queer too with fuckin' designer clothes and shit, like thinking way too much about it to not be at least a bit - Does pretty well with the ladies though, which is fucked, 'cause he's like the least alpha cunt I know, more like one of them, if any - Oh fuck that's probly it, aye, the cunt's not even getting his freak on or nothing, probly all just sit there all night talkin' about fuckin' perfume and dangly shit on their keys or whatever girls talk about together. I get to the kitchen and have a good root around for the shot glasses but I can't find them so I head back out and they're all looking at me like what now Michael? and I'm like fuck I guess I gotta get this going so I pick up my wine glass of whiskey and go “See you cunts at the bottom then” and down the whole thing in one go. Burns like a motherfucker but I staunch it out 'cause that's what it takes to be the wild card, gotta always be up for it, no matter what, never let anyone think you're not a loose cunt, not even for a second. I stand there for a bit and Callahan's on the floor going through Endy's bag ignoring me, and Lucy and Spacey look at each other and Lucy's like “No thanks” all giggly and shit, Spacey has a little sip but the other two girls don't even pick up their drinks, fuckin' pussies. Lucy slips off somewhere and I notice her glass is empty so I fill it up real good so she doesn't bitch out when she gets back, it's early days cunts, sun's not even down yet. Friday night only comes round once a week motherfuckers, time to get on the buzz.

Stan Richards

Fuck.

  This is actually happening... I'm not just thinking it. I'm actually here doing this. There's other versions happening in my head all the time, but this one here, this is it. I can't just go to another one if I fuck it up. It's the load-bearing dimension.

  I've already got that familiar, creeping nausea, the shit you feel when something's wrong. Is there something wrong? Well, I'm wandering through the bush under the influence of a drug that makes me want to fucking die, so yeah, something's seriously fucking wrong.

  Swigging sick wine, I creep towards the fence at the far end of the bush, my head spinning in circles and getting nowhere. It feels safer here in the trees, but also that's kind of the real problem. Safety. There's something inside me that needs to come out. I need to stop thinking so much. I need to do something.

  Once I've finished the wine, I wind up and throw it over the fence towards the grey sky. The sound of shattering glass seems to free up some inner tension and I break into a run along the fence line, enjoying the animal movement, ducking and weaving through the trees. Maybe if I can just get rid of that nagging human voice I'll be free...

  A distorted whiff of Cast Down by Slayer rises from my memory, building my energy to dangerous levels. I take a running jump at the chain fence, hooking my skateboard over the top and clinging to it with my free claw. Adrenaline makes the climb much easier, and even my balance seems to be enhanced. I climb up to a swaying perch on top of the fence, then jump all the way down to the grass and commando-roll onto my feet, then onto my board and into the traffic towards the gas station.

  I kick my board up into my hand and slow into a walk as the automatic doors open for me. There's two other people in the here, some bug-eyed housewife looking chick and a rough farmer dude at the counter. In the strange stillness, I can feel where everyone's attention is, the little unconscious glances we make at each other amongst the endless competing distractions of impulse items. I get to the chocolate section and pick up two mars bars, sliding one up my sleeve before transferring it to my pocket. A drop of sweat stings into my eye, but I blink it out and head to the drinks at the back. The farmer is leaving now, and the housewife is taking a mild interest in me. The checkout operator is distracted by a monotonous chain of thought that's been keeping him sane all day. A wave of my last trip creeps over me and remember Kit and Spacey talking about going invisible. I try to remember what they said, but it brings with it pieces of other memories from that night and I realise Kit's not the cunt I want to be taking advice from right now.

  The drink fridge is like a massive circuit board, trembling like it's about to pounce. I reach towards it with a shaking hand, only to be shocked by my vibrating phone. I pull it out and get another shock when I look down and realise it's the mars bar I pocketed and I'm waving it around like a retard. I panic and shove it back in my pocket with a deranged stare around the shop. Everyone's minding their own business, which reminds me that no one really gives a fuck about me. It's a comforting thought: No one gives a fuck about me. And no one can take that away from me, except by caring about me. But then that'll be their problem anyway. Maybe I've got this life shit figured out after all.

  I grab a red bull and head to the counter, putting my decoy mars bar back on the shelf as I pass. That housewife bitch is giving me the stare, but I let her feed my paranoia and cruise past confidently until I feel my phone go off and pull it out and - fuck! It's that fucking mars bar again. Right in front of the nosy fucking house wife... Fuck it. No need to shoplift. Just being in public is enough of a rush.

  At the counter I grab a sausage roll and put it down with my other stuff. Behind the counter is this real weird looking red-faced geezer staring up at me. He's so tiny I have to lean over the counter to look him in the eye, and I wish I didn't 'cause he's got these weird sideways pupils like goats have, even blinks sideways too... Fuck, this shit ain't right. I stand there sweating as he scans it all, mumbling and grunting like an ogre.

  I ask for a bag, surprised how weak my voice comes out, and he barks ‘A bag? You want a bag?’ with this crazed stare.

  ‘Uh, yes please.’ Is this guy mentally retarded or am I? I'm pretty sure asking for a bag is a reasonable thing to do…

  ‘Well, alright then. But I've only got the big bags.’

  ‘That's fine.’

  He pulls this fucking massive bag out from beneath the counter in a dramatic motion, like pulling a sword out of its sheath. The bag is so oversized that my things actually seem to be airborne for a bit when he drops them in. He lifts it up over his head and leaves it crumpled on the counter.

  ‘Six-fifty,’ he grumbles. I swipe my card and punch in my pin number, leaving sweatprints all over the buttons. I don't even wait to see if it accepted, just get the fuck out of there as quick as I can, thinking it's probably time to get back out of the public eye.

  It's raining a little now, so I walk. Need to relax after that ordeal anyway. I'm holding the bag at arm's-length and it only just scrapes along the ground. The dude who served me had to hold it above his head just to get it onto the counter. I'm trying to piece it together but it makes no sense...

  Was I just served by some two-foot tall dwarf?

  Fuck...

  I sit down on a bench outside the intermediate school, almost hyperventilating with anxiety. When I look at what I've got in the bag, I realise I fucked up completely. A sausage roll and a mars bar? Red bull? I don't want any of this shit. What the fuck was going on in my head back there? I'm trying to remember what I even wanted from the service station, but the whole thing is a blur and all that comes to mind is that weird little goat man. What the fuck was I even doing there? I feel like a cow or something, just wandering around grazing brainlessly, not even thinking about what I'm doing. It's time to get moving again. I get up, leaving my bag of food for the hungry, and head off down Regent street, uncomfortably conscious of my walk and pretty much everything else.

  Passing cars make me feel like I'm being watched, and I keep finding myself unconsciously reaching for the hood of a jacket I’m not wearing. Just as I have a thought about how much it would suck to see someone I know, I spot Damon kicking about at the corner, half a block away. Actually, it could be Rory. I can't really tell the difference when they're not at school. They've both got that same haircut, shaved around the sides like a faggy crew cut, and that same wise-ass smirk, pointy noses and dark cow-eyes.

  I get a little closer and decide it's actually Rory, but then change my mind again straight away. I'll just say shit that I could say to both of them, since they're basically the same person in my head...

  ‘Hey Stan.’

  ‘Hey man. Nice weather huh?’

  ‘What, you think I'm Damon or something? I hate weather!’

  No, that's fucking stupid. No point trying to think anything through right now. I start humming that Clint Eastwood song and manage to keep it in my head till I get to him.

I'm useless

But not for long the future

Is coming on

It's coming on...

  ‘Up to, breather?’ he says, taking out his earphones. I have a weird thought that this is the modern day version of taking off your hat, or like tipping your hat, as a greeting. A way of letting someone know you're keen to stop for a chat. But also a form of coercion, like a way to make it rude for your opponent to keep walking. It's the first strike in the battle. A challenge. Is this a confrontation or a conversation? I suppose they're the same thing for freaks like me…

  I can't decipher his expression, let alone whether he's Damon or Rory. I notice he's holding his hand out to do some gangster handshake, but I manage to manhandle it into a white-dude handshake. I get this weird image of myself in a suit, shaking the hand of a taller, more handsome man, saying ‘I'll have the spreadsheets on your desk in the morning, sir...’

  I have no fucking clue what a spreadsheet is.

  ‘Not much. Just heading, uh, that way. Yourself?’ I reply, shaking off my fucked up thoughts. It's a good question. What am I up to? Wandering around panicking, mostly. He doesn't really care though. Remember: No one gives a fuck about me.

  ‘Just gonna meet Jeremy and big dog, uh, Stan, other Stan. Head down Centres, do some laps or some shit. Get a feed. Charge it.’

  ‘Cool.’

  We stand there looking at each other for a second, then I start laughing and walk off. We pretty much ignore each other at school and shit, so what difference does it make if he thinks I'm an asshole? Or, more likely, a retard.

  But there's something in what he said that I can't let go of... Him and his friends, off to get some food and drive around. Is that what normal, happy people do? It seems so alien to me now. Even just the concept of normality is like a distant memory, one where you can't tell if it's even real. It's been like this ever since I got in with Lucy and her friends, even before that trip. But it's fucked because they seem to thrive on the strangeness of it all. They've distanced themselves from the norm even more than I have, but they're either oblivious or somehow feeding off of it. What is it that makes it work for them but not me? I guess the difference is that they reconnected with something else, something they chose to embrace instead of normality, something I can't grasp. They're running towards something while I'm just running away. That's the story of my life: Running. Afraid of what's behind me, oblivious to what's in front until it becomes another thing to run away from. Aimless, scared, and confused.

  Fuck I suck.

  It's this disconnect that stops me from feeling okay about anything. I tell myself I care about my family, my new friends, my schoolwork, try to tell myself it means something just to feel normal. But the truth is I don't give a fuck about any of that. That's why when I do get hyped on something it never lasts. There's no community or friends to back me up on it, and it just gets grey and fades away, or turns into fear when I actually think about trying to maintain it. Then it's just another thing to run away from. Another monster. It makes the whole idea of finding happiness seem pointless, terrifying even, so all I really strive for is to seem normal enough to be ignored. All I want is to be left alone to enjoy my fucking meds, and all they do is make me simple enough to believe my own bullshit.

  At least the pills get me out of this constant, self-absorbed daydream. Without them I've just been obsessively thinking about myself all day. Maybe that's the cause of all this distress, the constant self-obsession. I try to conjure up a picture of Lance, but feel stupid straight away... Trying to think about someone else so I can think about myself thinking about someone else. Fuck, I can feel a descent coming on. Not again. Not this time... Maybe I should just fucking top myself, just man up and eat those zopies... Fuck, can't get those till tomorrow. Can you overdose on shrooms? Maybe I could nick some more booze, something hard... There must be an exit somewhere. Surely there's something to-

  Fuck off.

  That must be a hallucination...

  Fuck... This is too much.

  It's fucked. It's all fucked. It's like some kind of sick joke.

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck...

  My stomach tightens and for a second I need to take a shit right now, but it passes. Like a sick beacon in the distance, like some kind of fucked up conclusion or reason waiting for me at the end of this nightmare... The girl who hid my pain from me for so long, the only human connection I've ever truly experienced. She's seen me at my worst and understands, or at least accepts...

  Accepted. Once upon a time. This is now, not then.

  The mushrooms are still kicking my ass, so I can't really trust what my eyes are telling me. My guts churn with nerves and my head is filled with images of gears and cogs and factory machinery, like some fucked up explanation of my nausea.

  My fears get truer as I get closer to the bus stop. She looks sick without her make-up, lifeless without her glowing smile. Her hair is damp and messy, draped in front of her face like Ned's, and she's sitting sort of like a dude, slouched with her legs spread apart, like a dead flower in her white dress. Every thought in my head is telling me to turn and walk away, but I can't. I've got this weird kind of nervous confidence, the result of some kind of insight I've already forgotten and probably never mattered anyway. What matters is that nothing matters enough to stop me from doing anything.

  She's gazing all droopy at her feet and doesn't even notice me until I sit down next to her. She says my name real quiet, surprised but still maintaining her trance. She looks slowly from her feet up to my face, her big, sad eyes staring at me through the mess of hair. She looks almost... punk. Feral. I put my arms around her in a damp sideways-hug that feels so familiar that I end up moving my hand down towards her ass like I've drifted into my memory. She stiffens up and shifts away, looking back to her feet.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. It's all quiet now and I can't think of anything to say. I feel like anything I say will come out creepy, because my soul's wrenched open while hers is locked down. I'll try be normal instead. Like a human.

  ‘So, what are you up to?’ I say, acting all casual and hating myself for it.

  She looks back up to me, but it's like she's looking through me. I force out a smile for her, but all I get back is a broken stare that sits heavy on my chest.

  ‘I'm going back to Mum's,’ she says finally, looking away from me to speak. It's like something inside her is dead, like the lights have gone out behind her eyes. She used to complain about me being unresponsive all the time, always fucking ‘what’s wrong, Stan,’ ‘talk to me Stan,’ whenever I didn’t feel like saying anything. She’d just sit there prodding me until she could get some kind of response out of me. What do I do now that the roles are reversed? Do the same?

  ‘What’s wrong, Lucy? You don't seem like yourself,’ I say, trying to catch her eye.

  She just dies a little more and goes ‘I’m just tired, that's all. Just tired.’

  I want to dig deeper but I can't think of anything to say. In the silence I start to wonder what I'm even doing at the bus stop. Just sitting next to her? I guess that's the question of the day right there: What the fuck am I doing? It's just been one long walking tour of things I'm scared to even think about.

  I start to say something but the number two bus rolls to a stop in front of us. She gets up and says ‘I'll see you later, Stan. I hope you're well,’ her glazed, black eyes stirring nostalgic self-pity inside me. Her dress trails as she steps up into the bus, but it just looks sad now, not magical like it used to. I don't think the number two bus even goes to her Mum's place, so I feel like she's just going anywhere away from me. Fair enough, I suppose. I would too.

  The bus rumbles away and I call it Bruce and feel like crying like the self-victimising cunt I always am. I get up and start walking with a festering ache in my heart almost tangible enough to give me a limp. What happened to the feeling in her eyes? They used to be wide and smiling, sparkling fire-blue for anyone lucky enough to look into them... But now there's nothing there, like they're not alive anymore, just sitting black and sad in her eye sockets...

  A disturbing nursery rhyme tune fills my head as I try to find a coherent thought to get away from the sadness...

When I met you your eyes were blue

All black now

Telling me wow...

  After we broke up, I used to relive the time we had together, even though I knew it was over for good. It was just a comforting fantasy, a way to hold onto the good memories, to shed that cloak of utter self-absorption for just a moment...

When I met you your thoughts were true

Nothing new

Thoughts tattooed...

  Now even the fantasy of it is too distant to take me away from myself. The Lucy I knew is dead. I can feel the sting of tears coming to my eyes, thinking about what used to be, but I hold it in. I just get on my board and start pushing along the wet pavement, hissing through the puddles, throwing my whole body into it, fuck you, fuck me, fuck this, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. My jaw clenches to keep it all inside, swallow it down into my muscles as I haul ass down the sidewalk.

Now you wander 'round with thoughts profound

Here and now

I wonder how...

  Fuck here and now, fuck this load-bearing dimension, mechanical grey motherfucker. Memories give form to the sickness inside me and take me away as I blast along the concrete on auto-pilot. It goes from Lucy to Ned, then me and Ned, up all night sniffing Michael's pills. We went to the waterfront in the morning with Michael's guitar and bongos, even though neither of us knew how to play. Just doing shit for the hell of it, just making noise. Ned used to have this laugh that could bring a smile to anyone's face. Not laughing at anything, but like he was laughing with everything.

  This field trip of primary school kids smiled and laughed past us as we played, high on the freedom of the outdoors, the freedom of childhood. Trailing behind was this little blind girl, like eight years old, with her helper. They stopped and listened to us, and her helper asked her what instruments she could hear. The little girl said we were on the guitar and drums, and said that Ned didn't know how to play the guitar. The lady looked at Ned, scared for a bit that he was offended. But he just laughed and made her laugh. She thanked us and kept walking, leaving me and Ned jamming in the morning sun. We never mentioned it again, but there was something there, between the four of us, something pure. Like we were in it together, but no gay shit. The little girl gave us the biggest smile, probably with no idea what a smile even looks like.

  I'm not sure why that feeling came up in relation to Lucy. It's like the opposite of emptiness. Not like any of the feelings we talk about. The feelings we do talk about are just so flat and meaningless, like the way we talk about weather or TV shows...

I fuckin' hate weather...

  I'd feel like a faggot if I tried to talk about it anyway. But only because I couldn't dumb it down and make it easy to explain. But it was different with Lucy. That's just how she was all the time. She didn't need to put things in boxes and label them. It was just a part of the truth we felt as kids, before everything was a cardboard cutout. She just felt it, and that made me feel okay about just feeling it. I could never explain my feelings anyway, besides calling her beautiful and saying I loved her and all the shit people say so much that it doesn't even mean anything anymore. That's why I always wanted to fuck, even when she didn't feel like it. I just wanted to talk with our bodies, to hold her tight in my arms when I came, drunk on the stupid idea that it somehow included her in my orgasm. But she already knew. She already felt it. I used to fantasise about someone doing something horrible to her, just so I could beat the shit out of them, fucking cripple the cunt. Just to do something with the feeling eating me inside.

  It's more than just love. It's like wonder or awe. Like hearing a song so beautiful that all you can do is listen. Like when you're a kid and you first get that strange feeling that there are places between where your parents drive you, when you go somewhere you've only ever seen from inside a car or in the distance. All those things that make your hairs stand up on end, like a frightened cat trying to make itself bigger. Maybe that's it. Being confronted with something bigger than you, something that stretches across the globe and to the beginning of mankind, maybe even further...

  A tear trails down my cheek and I wipe it away, mixing it into the layer of sweat and rain covering my face. Everything is patchy and out of focus with no outlines. I start pushing harder, gritting my teeth and straining every muscle in my body, blood humming with electricity and adrenaline and all sorts of unnamed feelings and memories, sitting inside me, feasting on my innards... Just lying there staring into her eyes, making even the most glaring of her flaws paralysing in beauty, just this crazy freedom, this pure joy of being alive, making me want to scream a thousand hateful words at not being able to express it, just building up inside me until some cunt looks at me the wrong way and I can finally fucking do something with it.

  Why do I do it? Why do I have to turn every feeling into hate just to do something with it? Fuck, this just sounds like some shit Collin would say, just to make people think he's all deep. Or at least human. But the scary thing is you can tell he's not making it up. He's a cold-hearted bastard for sure, but he still feels and understands emotions. Maybe even more than the rest of us. He just seems to be able to control them. Wield them like weapons, like tools. Like it's all just a game. A game that only a monster like him can play. A monster whose eyes project images onto the world instead of seeing. A monster whose fingers don't feel, just create the sensation of feeling in those he touches, existing only to manipulate the outside world. A monster who only touches anything to move it, who only listens to gather information. The truest kind of monster... Whenever I properly talk to him, actually break through that fucking reptilian stare, I can tell that all these feelings inside me, these feelings that make me want to scream and cry and fuck and break some cunts fucking face... They're just scratching the surface. Who knows what's lurking beneath, down in the depths of his sick private hell.

  That cunt. That fucking monster. Images of his fucked up smug smile drift into my head and rage hammers my heart like a drum. It's him who's at the centre of all my pain, all of our pain. Bending all of my old friends out of their minds around his depraved will, just to play some game with them that only he understands. Not only did that sick cunt take Lucy away from me, he took her from the world, leaving a sad broken zombie, an empty vessel, no doubt a part of whatever sick pantomime he's working on.

  That's fucking it. I know where I'm going now. Things are getting clearer. I can't share the world with a cunt like that, a real black hole of a cunt, fuelled by whatever happiness and joy he can suck out of everyone around him and incinerate in the hellish depths of his twisted mind.

  I plant my foot down and drift to a stop at the corner of Kelvin Street. The shitlab's either a ten-minute walk through the woods or a half-hour skate through the city. Enjoying the energy, I get back on my board and head back the way I came. The sun is shrinking and I feel alive again.

  Cunt's dead.

Tracey Colombera

I snort the crystals and can tell straight away it’s not dexies. It burns even more than bad pingers. I sit on the floor and gulp some whiskey and I can already feel it. It’s a tripping drug. It’s coming on faster than I’ve ever felt a trip come on before. Something bad is going to happen. Maybe this is what a panic attack is. I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone now. Maybe this is fear I’m feeling. But I can’t really feel it. I might even be smiling.

  I stand up thinking it will make things clearer, but I have to focus on keeping my balance. My arms and legs are shaking with my heartbeat. To my left, Robbie is sitting on the couch. He looks like he’s going to cry. Collin has picked up the guitar and is playing it badly. He seems to be making Robbie uncomfortable. Robbie always gets uncomfortable eventually. Michael is crooning in a fake Negro voice.

  ‘...I got a fake suitcase of snakes thrown in my face...I got a-eight enemies a state stayin’ at my place...’

  He’s having fun too. He's being a different kind of wigger than usual. I like this one better. A wegro. Robbie's not having fun because he’s not a part of the music. I’m okay because I’m invisible. I’m glad I’m invisible.

  I walk into the bathroom and lock the door. I stand in front of the sink and splash water in my face, only because I saw it on a movie. I can’t remember which one. The water hums on my skin and doesn’t seem to make it wet. It's like a wet layer sitting on my face.

  I look into the mirror and it starts to make sense. She's one of the ones who doesn't know herself. I can tell by the way her jaw is closed in a way that suggests permanence. So much so that to express anything would take a complete reworking, rather than the casual shift of a complete person. Blackheads can look nice on a confident person, like the dimples of a strawberry. Here they are the result, not the cause, of insecurity. This is a person whose only form of self expression is the rawness of her obvious self doubt, something everyone but her can see instantly. And yet she still isn't visible in any obvious way. Her flaws are picked up on immediately, but without context. Just an unfounded nausea, an infection of some kind of internal organ that's impossible to pinpoint without an ultrasound. But it's there, and you feel it, and it makes you crave the unpleasant side effects of antibiotics.

  Another wave hits me and I forget everything for a second. I watch my face distort into various grimaces I don’t recognise. As soon as I decide what my face looks like, it morphs into something else. It’s kind of entertaining. I feel like I’m watching my face aging slowly, second by second. I suppose I am.

  Michael’s voice sounds better through the walls. They soften his whine into something gentler but fuller. Collin’s guitaring sounds better too.

  ‘...I got a pocket full-a rocks I dunno where I been, I got a snake made-a rubber and he my only friend...I saw a black eyed smilin' man and ask him where I been, he say son you ain’t nowhere, you done reached the end...’

  I sit down to piss and I’m not sure if I need to. It just feels safe. I close my eyes and feel faint. The crystal cotton images and the pain in my sinus and the muscle tension all through my body all slowly become the same thing, followed by everything else, until I don’t know anything anymore. I hear Michael talking Caucasian again. I try to decipher his muffled words and start to feel a bit sane.

  ‘Nah, he doesn’t have black eyes, cunt. He’s a black man with eyes, is what I mean...’ and then a hideously clear image of Michael with an exaggerated brow and chin and tiny eyes appears in front of the crystal fuzz and shocks my eyes open. I did need to piss before, but now I’m not sure. I might have been pissing when I had my eyes closed. I can’t remember now. Everything feels wet.

  I get up and take my clothes off and turn on the shower. Some water hits my arm. It feels like shrapnel and I decide that a shower would only complicate things. I sit on the toilet again and pick at my fizzing numb skin. I close my eyes and think about insects posing as household objects, like stick insects in a tree. I put a slipper on but it turns into a flock of moths and they all fly away.

  All the insects have made me feel gross so I get up and head to the shower, then I remember it’s a bad idea and just spit into it for a little while to get rid of the cotton crystals. It doesn’t help so I give up and sit down with my back against the cold bathtub and close my eyes. Michael is playing a simple repeating beat on the bongo drums that creates basic forms and shapes that dance and morph with each beat. Collin’s guitaring comes in over top and makes little appendages that dance along the edges of the shapes. Once the appendages get clear Collin starts crooning softly and slightly negroid. It doesn't add anything to the appendages. It's happening somewhere else.

  ‘...So I got a calculator try to quantify my pain...but he grow claws and teeth and say boy you gone insane...I ask the black eyed smiling man will I ever be the same...but his teeth grow teeth and he just say you shoulda played my game...’

  I entertain the idea of fucking Collin, but when I picture him naked he’s all covered in scales with webbed toes and I decide never to let him touch me.

  The music dies down and I can hear Michael’s voice, harsh and white. I wonder if I should go back out naked and be visible but decide not to. I put my clothes back on and head out. I don't know what I did in there. I didn’t end up taking a piss or having a shower. But I don't feel like I need to do either anymore. Maybe I just got Collin out of my head.

  'I've got one for you,' Collin's saying, looking through a rack of DVDs. I stop in the doorway and stay invisible. 'What if oxygen is a psychedelic, and our whole  lives are a hallucination?'

  'Well then those cunts who are into choking themselves while they jack off...What's that shit called?' Michael says.

  'Auto erotic asphyxiation.'

  'Trust you to know that, deviant cunt.'

  'That's the kind of shit they teach you at school if you're not in the dumb class. They don't tell the wolf rats about it because they're scared to put ideas in-'

  'Get fucked cunt. If you can just fuck up for a second I'll teach you some shit you didn't learn at school.'

  'Enlighten me.'

  'Fuckin'...What were we just on about? I cracked it before and you butted in and fucked me up.'

  'If oxygen was-'

  'Oh yeah, jacking off and shit. So when you deviant cunts get all noosed up and go to town on yourselves, you're pretty much jacking off over reality. Then if you die doing it, your soul galaxies out your dick hole and dribbles down the wall. Last thing you see is your body dangling there, dick out, fuckin' - That cunt, Newton. They reckon he died a virgin. Cunts could learn a thing or two from him, I reckon. Didn't whine about getting no love from the ladies. Just said fuck it and figured out the universe. Galaxied all over science. Deviant cunt.'

  'Let's rewind back to your soul galaxying out your dick hole.'

  'Aye, Spacey was on about that asphyxiation shit on the way here, back at the tree house. Called it coming home or some shit. Fuckin' pack of deviants the lot of you. Even Newton over there,' he nods at Robbie, curled up prenatal on the couch.

  'I suppose that's why they call it the big bang then,' Collin says.

  'Oath. All that PC bullshit. Called it the milky way 'cause cunts'd get all worked up if they called it the big black cum rag. Had to be all cagey with it. That's how it goes with like language and naming shit. It's all about subtlety. Like when you're looking to get down with a chick who's been raped before. Gotta be gentle. Can't just storm in there waving your fuckin' dick in her face. You'll just freak her out with that shit, end up on the Newton buzz. Gotta be subtle. Just a little nudge. Maybe a few clues about where it's going, but you gotta let her make the call. Subtlety, cunt. It's all about fuckin' subtlety.'

  It's impressive because I can tell Michael's also insane right now. He talks like he knows what he's saying, but if you actually listen it's obvious he's completely forgotten the topic. I guess he gets a pass because people never really listen to him. Another kind of invisibility.

  I walk between the couches and brush past Robbie just to watch him wither in further. He probably just felt me as a foul wind. Collin sees me as I pass though. He doesn’t look at me, but he sees me. Collin can see into the invisible world. Out of the corners of his eyes. Overactive peripherals, like Kit was saying. I guess he really is a deviant after all. He hides it well.

  Michael says ‘Chuck on one of Hayden's crazy Japanese cartoons, crazy fuckin' colours and shit. Get a good ole seizure party going on here.’ I decide to linger around for a bit to see where this goes.

  ‘How about something subtle. You're all about subtlety, right?’ Collin says. ‘Let's put on the 2001 Space Odyssey. Turn out the lights, go on a journey.’

  ‘Fuck off, I'm sick of that cosmic shit. You're just afraid to squirm, cunt. Always trying to hide away from shit out in space. You're scared of the real horror shit. Chuck on some Peep Show and see how you hold up. Or some OG Office or some shit. See who's the real psychedelic hard cunt here.’

  ‘Alright, I like where this is going...Fuck, maybe we should watch The Room and see if we can handle it.’

  ‘I am watching the room, cunt. Been watching it for the last hour, sick of that shit. That's all you cunts do, get all tripped out and stare at the walls. Let's step this shit up.’

  ‘Okay then, let's step this shit up Ned style. Lights out, TV on static, full volume. World's Funniest Home Psychosis, presented by Michael Farmer and his host of doctor diagnosed personality disorders.’

  ‘Fuck...I wonder how Endy's doing. He still in hospital?’

  ‘Only in body, I'm sure...’ Collin seems to disappear into ecstasy for a moment, before waking up with wild eyes. ‘Fuck yeah, let's step it up Endy style. What have you got? I'm down to booze and smokes. Yeehaw.’

  ‘Just dex and buds. Reckon we could get something going with that.’

  ‘Ah, liquid, powder, and smoke. The building blocks of our universe.’

  ‘Oi, I told you to fuck off with that cosmic shit. Let's take some more of Endy's shit, wake the walls back up.’

  ‘Spoken like a true psychonaut.’

  ‘Aye, no psychonaut shit either. I don't care if you're tripping on a thousand shroomies and watching Carl Sagan. You're still just another fucker on an upper to me.’

  ‘Carl Sagan...Not a bad idea there Mr. Farmer. I'm just impressed that you even know who Carl Sagan is.’

  ‘Yeah, I got into trance music for a bit. Pingers get old pretty fuckin' quick if you're getting 'em cheap. Fuck that shit.’

  ‘God you disgust me.’

  ‘Aye, at least I can grow a fuckin' beard, cunt. What have you got, a couple pubes and a boner? Catch up, cunt.’

  Michael's talking about his facial hair. Time to leave. I go out through the kitchen into the back yard and look up at the early stars to see if I feel anything. It's just more wetness. I can see stars between the stars though. And then stars between those stars. It's pretty cool, I guess. I keep staring until whole dusky sky is lit up with stars, like noon. I write the word ‘fuck’ in the stars with my finger. I'm glad I learnt cursive now. It only stays there for a few seconds before the stars move back to fix it.

  When the big black cum rag is all galaxied up, I bark into the skies until all the other neighbourhood dogs start barking back. I wait around in the backyard until human shouts join in with the barking. I enjoy the opera for a bit then go back inside to drink enough to black out the lights of those strange crystals. It doesn't seem safe to leave Robbie alone with those two. I'm sure he knows even less than me where the jokes lie.

Robbie Marks

It was the line of thin, dark hair running along Michael's upper lip that finally cracked my haunted mind. It had been less than half an objective hour since I'd indulged in some mystery powder Collin had found in Ned's bag which he, in accordance with his nature and Michael's troublesome presence, insisted that we must all take nasally and repeatedly. It felt like a fucking spotting knife to the sinus, and left me almost immediately incapacitated by sensory distortions and legions of strained thoughts drilling through me, vying for the attention of my depleted mind.

  ‘Sharpens the fuckin’ claws that shit, don’t it? Arms ya up to the teeth, all spiky and shit. I fuckin' needed it too - couldn't even feel the dexies anymore. Everything looks all pimped out....’ Michael was saying, making me wish I’d stayed outside in the drizzle. His face was far too close for comfort, and the way my visuals played on it was nauseating; as he talked, the sparse row of curled, black hairs that made up his pubertal moustache formed a series of cryptic alien symbols, abstracting too fast to pin down. It was impossible to listen to what he was actually saying - even more so than usual - as the strange images in his moustache demanded my full attention. My one undivided thought was that I needed to be alone. As Michael's rant petered into an introspective silence, I tried and failed to contort my thoughts into words, leaving me writhing aimlessly in my seat, waiting for the dust of my mind to settle.

  ‘I'm feeling Mayan,’ Collin mused, breaking the silence Michael had tried desperately to fight. His eyes were shiny and black, pupils stretched to cover the entirety of his irides, inviting all the shapes and colours of the universe inside.

  Michael's face lit up as he burst out of his momentary reverie; a manic smile distorted his face and pulled him to the edge of his seat.

  ‘Yeah, I'm feeling urine,’ he said.

  Collin's eyes lowered, as if finding the world again, and a knowing smile spread across his face. For a moment, I tried to comprehend the exchange, attempting to extract some kind of meaning from it, before dismissing it as psychedelic gibberish - a sort of well-dressed glossolalia, little more than word association.

  ‘Don't touch Mayan, you Hominid,’ Collin said, narrowing his eyes in mock disgust.

  ‘What about her ‘un then?’ Michael replied in a vaguely redneck accent. He nodded toward Tracey, lying on the floor next to the sliding door with her arms stretched toward the ceiling, the stem of her whiskey-filled wine glass dangling between her fingers, bobbing slowly.

  ‘Her 'uns purrin',’ Collin said; I started to get a sense of what exactly they were talking about, which only served to intensify my discomfort.

  ‘Purrin’ oot urine,’ Michael's accent faltered from Scottish back to redneck. Collin and Michael both erupted with laughter, which seemed to turn the cream walls and curtains into a mobile spectrum of thick, sickly greens and yellows.

  ‘What about his ‘un,’ Collin said, turning to me, eyes now rather serious.

  ‘Yeah, what about your 'un, Robbie?’ Michael said, his grin challenging the boundaries of his face. I felt something like an electric shock as both sets of eyes seemed to bore into me, collecting, or even altering, all the information contained within. I felt completely naked, as if my entire mind and all its secrets and flaws were on display. It was too much. Though the possibility of actually leaving still felt frightfully distant, I knew it was time to start formulating a plan to make it happen. With all four eyes scanning my hideous thoughts, I tried to envision a response, something human, or suitably humanoid, to divert this unwanted attention away from me. My strained, paranoid train of thought had the effect of a doe-eyed silence that flitted from Michael to Collin, before turning in on itself.

  Never one to put up with anything close to quiet, Michael said, ‘Eh, fuck, cheer up cunt. Just fuckin’ with ya head, mate. We're all friends here. How you goin’ anyway? All good? Like, how you been and shit? Still living your little life?’

  Having given up on communication, I said nothing and tried to fake a smile, but stopped immediately because of how bizarre and abstract it seemed; the result, I imagine, being a kind of palsied spasm of the mouth. Spotting my discomfort and gifting me with a moment of psychic privacy, Collin said, ‘Little life? Not only is that an absurd question, Michael, but it’s quite condescending, too.’

  Michael, slightly irritated, said, ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t fuckin’ mean anything, does it? Like, it makes you sound like a cock, but it means fuck all. Eh, Robbie, cunt, fuckin’ just like, you know ... you still living your little life? Like, still got your little friendships ... and shit? Doing your little activities? Still got your little habits and all that? Got your little fuckin’ like ... mannerisms ... and shit?’

  Michael looked at me when he talked, but I could tell he was looking through me; I’d fallen so far below the status of human that I was now merely a prop for one of Michael’s tripped-out jests.

  Collin looked at me, hardly containing his manic, growing smile, and said, ‘Yeah Robbie. You still got your little notions about things? Still got your little thoughts and opinions?’

  Collin and Michael were giggling like children. Collin looked at me with a sympathetic smile and shrug; apologetic, but also urging me to lighten up. Which I couldn’t.

  Laughing through his words, Michael said, ‘Yeah, still got your fuckin’ like, little thought patterns? Huh? Still having those little thoughts?’ Quite abruptly, he affected to punch me in the face, making me flinch, ‘Oh yeah, still got your little reflexes then? Still making your little movements and shit? Keep it up, buddy. Keep chugging along.’

  ‘You’re like some mad, patronising Zen monk,’ Collin said, overjoyed, his demeanour all gooey with inner psychedelic laughter.

  ‘Eh, fuck all that shit; middle path, everything in moderation.... Those cunts can fuck off. Robbie, wake the fuck up, cunt,’ Michael said, punching me lightly in the knee.

  I mumbled something to dismiss Michael and turned to Collin, whose expression was almost entirely obscured by a kind of living geometry, much clearer than those offered to me by mushrooms.

  ‘I need to be alone,’ I said. Or at least that's what I had envisioned myself saying. What came out was like a foreign language; the structure of the words and the syntax of the sentence all sounded right, but by the time I had spoken them aloud, they were just meaningless sounds. I stuttered and gestured for some time, before Collin finally shook his head at me.

  ‘Just go, Robbie.’

  With my equilibrium strangely unaffected, I went back to Collin's bed and collapsed on top of the sheets, quickly finding myself in that dreamy, or nightmary, state of not-sleep I'd been grappling with for much of the evening. The loosening of mental distinctions that I often sought had progressed to the point where concepts such as ‘asleep’ and ‘awake’, or ‘high’ and ‘unbearable psychic agony’, seemed to be merely arbitrary divisions between artificial abstractions, invented by mankind for the sole purpose of complicating their inner lives. We complicate things in order to understand them more deeply, someone concluded; I was too exhausted to decide whether it meant anything.

  My consciousness moved in and out of dream-states, much like those elusive few minutes of hypnagogia before one falls asleep, but without the sedation usually afforded by such a state. Instead, I was thrown violently between dimensions, desperately trying to keep up with my surroundings and make sense of the torrent of constantly shifting information within. It was like being caught in a riptide, surrounded by the beauties of the sky and the ocean, but unable to do anything but struggle. Physically, I alternated between cowering in the foetal position and arching my back with my limbs stretched out as far as they could reach in all directions. I was covered in sweat, desperately clinging to the delusion that some kind of uncomfortable angle between me and the bed was the source of my distress. The content of my dysphoria repeated itself in a morbid circle, starting with my confused, frazzled mind attributing my pain to the position of my body, before moving on to the task of trying to mentally digest the fact that I was tripping, to thinking that it was neural damage from excessive tripping that was making me suffer, then back to the position of my body, looping endlessly like some kind of large-scale mantra, trying in vain to cleanse my soul of its psychic turmoil.

  ‘Well, are you going to do something with it? Or you just gonna bend over and take it?’ Collin said, making my heart jump and my eyes flare wide with fear of the known. I instantly forgot whether or not I knew he was in the room; I'd been feeling some kind of presence the whole time, and I'd been holding numerous ghostly, disjointed conversations in my various dream-lands.

  ‘I.... I think we've become unwell,’ I stammered, my voice shaking from spastic bodily movements bordering on a seizure. I looked up at Collin; my view was obstructed by earthquake vision and increasingly smudgy geometry, at times so staggering that I couldn't even tell what I was truly looking at.

  ‘I think you've become unwell, Robbie. And I think you've made yourself unwell with this drivel. Just fucking go in there and sort it out; find the source of the pain, and face up to it. You know what to do.’ His voice was so clear, a wild contrast to my panicked, defeated stutter.

  He left the room and I closed my eyes, tuning my ears into the sounds coming from the lounge, my sense of hearing sharpened and aided by accompanying mental images. The voices moved through the house to the outside, punctuated by the slamming of the front door, before dissipating into the night. What had become of Lucy, I had no idea; but I really could have done with her healing touch, even if only to prevent the manifestation of more entities. With that brief assessment of my situation out of the way, I took Collin's advice and went inward with warrior grit, challenging my mind to make the first strike.

  Inside, I kept my consciousness as still as I could and simply watched, camouflaged, waiting to see what would emerge from the chaos. The obsessive thoughts were like timid creatures, still in hiding from the burst of activity that had spooked them earlier. But, after an eternity in zen, I felt a train of thought begin to materialise....

  The problem with diagnosing my malady so deep in a binge of consciousness is that the long-term and short-term tend to become almost entirely blurred, leaving me unable to differentiate between the stabbing anxiety of the present and the feverish confusion that has become my dominant state of being....

  I kept my conscious, deliberate mind quiet and watched the still-spawning thought uncurl, careful not to come into direct contact with it, which would surely cause it to mutate. It was a fairly unobtrusive, if slightly grim, type of thought - a way to understand the darker elements of my mind from an emotionally detached perspective, perhaps a form of escapism. It would be a useful entity to have on my side.

Kenny Marks

‘But do you think it's... bad drugs?’ Gemma breaks the long silence. It makes no sense how quiet the house is without him - he spent all his time hiding away in his bedroom anyway. It's like we forgot our own lives, just lived and communicated through the little bastard. Everything we've done for the last seventeen years has revolved around his needs. And how does he repay us? In the same way he'd leave the dinner table without cleaning up or even saying thanks: Just buggered off out of our lives without a word, leaving the rest of us to clean up the mess...

  Time for a change of scenery. I hand Gemma a cigarette and start rolling one for myself. This sitting around the house all day isn't doing either of us any good. Especially Gemma. All these bloody what-ifs floating around her head: Guilt, uncertainty, helplessness, tears, then nothing.

  ‘When he had his friends over... I'd hear them in his room, talking all night...’ Gemma murmurs sadly.

  ‘Well, let's not forget what we were like at his age,’ I say, trying to divert this treacherous train of thought. It's a dangerous one though; as a seventeen-year-old, all I had on my mind was cranking the females. But then again, puberty had treated me well, giving me that muscular, not quite stocky build, as well as that devil-may-care charm that the ladies just couldn't get enough of. I suppose the teenage years are tough on boys like Robbie. You see other kids his age, like Kit's son and that Brennan boy - so cocky and self-assured, even though they know bugger all; sneaking into bars, chasing girls, making a nuisance of themselves... That's what being young is all about. Robbie just tries to stay out of the way. Maybe I should have been a bit tougher on him, hardened him up a bit...

  ‘I know he smokes a bit of pot,’ Gemma says, gazing fearfully at the unlit cigarette resting between her fingers. ‘I can live with that. But I don't think that's the whole story. It can't be...’

  ‘Look,’ I say, standing up. ‘It'll just be that benzedrine. I know you never got into that stuff, but it's harmless fun, really. Me and my mates would drop a few bennies and stay up all night smoking pot and listening to records. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but... He'll grow out of it; we all did.’

  Gemma says nothing, just stares at her cigarette. I shrug and head out to the front yard; she follows silently. We light up our smokes. Gemma sits on the steps, her arms wrapped around herself. I stay standing to survey my freshly cut lawn, about which I've already been complimented twice. The night is cool and moonlit, the air still damp from the scattered showers.

  The first few puffs on my cigarette work well as a substitute for conversation, but it's not long before I start to feel the silence. ‘Hey, at least it's not heroin or anything like that,’ I say. ‘It's those drugs that really ruin lives. If he was on those kinds of drugs he'd be sitting around the house all day.’ I resist the temptation to add, ‘Like you’.

  Gemma nods but says nothing, looking wistfully into the distance. The comment was more for her benefit than mine; my deeper concerns are not to do with opiates... It's the stranger and more sinister drugs I'm worried about: LSD and cactus juice, the drugs Isabelle and that lot got into back in the day. I've seen good friends go south on barbiturates and heroin - hell, even a few too many nights popping bennies can make a real mess of things - but never in my life have I seen such a drastic change as I saw in my friends who got into the hallucinating drugs. Isabelle, Peter, and Kit had all been successful at a young age: A lawyer, a scientist, and an optometrist, respectively. But it didn't take long for the LSD and cactus juice to turn them into reclusive criminals and drug-pushers... And where are they now? Isabelle is some kind of fugitive whose name turns up in the paper from time to time, usually in relation to riots and protests; Kit is a well-known local alcoholic, public nuisance, and sex pest; Peter... In all honesty, I'd rather not know.

  Old Graham from around the corner strolls past with his dog, acknowledging, but not commenting on, the superb state of my lawn. Not that the old bugger's opinion means a hell of a lot to me.

  ‘But what can we do?’ Gemma says finally. ‘He won't answer my calls. I have no idea where he's been staying. I just want him back in my life. It's like he's a stranger... You know I got a call from his dean last week?’

  I nod, not wanting to go over all this crap again; turns out the little bastard's been skipping school for months - though I can't say it came as a hell of a shock.

  We smoke silently. I'm relieved that we're not having another discussion about truancy, but scared to think what kinds of thoughts Gemma might be torturing herself with. A kingfisher lands on the gate in front of us, and it occurs to me that I've been talking to her like a child this whole time, placating her rather than actually communicating with her.

  ‘Look, he's almost eighteen,’ I start. I take a deep puff on my cigarette, biding time to figure out where I'm going with this. ‘He'll come around. He's obviously decided school's not for him; he'll just be having a bit of fun while he figures out what he's up to. I mean, he's not stupid. He's a good kid.’

  Gemma sits on that thought for a few puffs, but seems to accept it. I mean, you can't say he's a bad kid - a funny little bugger, sure. But not bad. He always played around with petty rebellions: Cutting class, sneaking out late, that kind of thing. Innocent fun. But my fear is that this secretive, anti-social streak has grown to define him, creeping into other aspects of his character, leaving only the darker, private side he kept concealed from us since childhood...

  ‘Lawn looks nice huh,’ I say, distracting myself as my thoughts turn nasty. Gemma ignores me and I realise I'm being facetious again. I’m having a hard time thinking of anything else to say. I wish I could reassure her, but the more I speculate about Robbie, the more he starts to feel like a stranger. One of us needs to stay positive about this.

  Gemma stubs out her half-finished cigarette and stands up. ‘I'm having a glass of wine. You want a beer?’

  ‘Sure do,’ I say, thankful for the diversion. ‘Friday night and all. Bring my pouch out too. Make the most of the evening before the weather packs in again.’

  She disappears into the house; I stay out to enjoy the last of my smoke in peace. After a few puffs, Graham comes back the other way; he catches my eye and gives me a wave and a weak smile as he passes, but he's quick to look away. Envy is an ugly thing, Graham, I smile to myself. Walking along a few steps behind is Greg Wormald's daughter, whose name escapes me. Quite a nice little piece of work she turned out to be: Toned body, fluorescent yoga gear glowing under the streetlights, purposeful, confident walk... She flashes me a heart-stopper of a smile; I respond with a reserved nod. I could see her being one of those mature girls who goes for the older guys; but I'm a gentleman - and a married one at that... Though I'm also of the opinion that one can be a gentleman without sacrificing a healthy appreciation for the female form.

  Maybe the little bastard just needs to get himself a lady. Granted, as a Marks he's probably not all that well-endowed.... But that never stopped my brothers and I; just takes a bit more imagination.

  Gemma comes back out with an open beer and a smoke for me, then sits down on the step. Truth be told, I have been enjoying the aesthetics of the whole thing: Hair down, no make-up, white wine, cigarettes... Takes me back to the old days. Before Robbie. Before she started concerning herself with every other bastard's opinion, trying to look how everyone else wants her to; she's got too much natural beauty for that carry on. But what I'm not into is this whole bathrobe all day nonsense. As if she'd been dressing up for Robbie all this time. As if the spoilt little bastard would ever notice...

  We light our cigarettes and enjoy our drinks in silence for a while, until Gemma says, ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘A lady doesn't ask and a gentleman doesn't tell,’ I say, not sure exactly what I mean.

  Gemma ignores my strange remark and says, ‘I was just thinking about Robert's friends. Collin seems like a nice boy; but he is a Callahan - they're a drug family. But then there's that Ned... It's like nothing's gone right since Ned's been back in town.’

  Ned: The elephant in the room. The boy's clearly a junkie, just like his mother. He always was a strange one. Never causing trouble for the hell of it like old Shifty Shane's boy, Michael. Just different. But it must be said that with every visit, his quirks become more and more sinister… The unspoken fear is that we're seeing the same change in Robbie.

  ‘Look, the little -’ I pause to stop myself calling him the little bastard, ‘Robbie's not like Ned,’ I continue, looking into Gemma's eyes. ‘Robbie's a smart kid from a nice family; we've done all we can to raise him well. Ned spent half of his childhood in Cottonwood... Have you ever met someone from down those ways who didn't turn out funny?’

  Gemma just stares at me, unconvinced.

  ‘Robbie is not Ned. He'll come around,’ I add, looking back to the distance with cold finality.

  ‘I suppose. I just wish I knew where he was...’

  I puff on my cigarette. ‘I'm sure he's alright wherever he is. Just let it go. Let him have his space for now. He'll be back in his own time. It's natural for a kid his age to want to get away from his parents, get some independence. He's just figuring out who he is. He knows we'll be here for him.’

  Gemma and I both look at each other at the same time. The look on her face tells me she wants to believe. I break the eye contact to admire the immaculate lawn, because I'm sure my face looks the same.

Robbie Marks

My project was going well, but I could tell I had a long way to go; I’d managed to ensnare and catalogue several of the more detrimental aspects of my mind, but many still roamed freely, undomesticated, and ready to do whatever they felt necessary to fulfil their mysterious agendas.

  Aware that I had an entire Necronomicon to delineate, I tried to pinpoint exactly when it was that I lost control, wondering just how long I'd been a mere plaything for my thoughts. I started to think that maybe I'd been suffering from some kind of mental disorder all this time, like schizophrenia, or maybe just the schizotypal one: Surely the rest of the world isn't stumbling around obeying the whims of a society of uncontrollable ghosts. What if everyone has known this about me all along? I thought about the few times I'd talked to that Down's Syndrome dude at school, James; I always made the effort to make him think there was nothing wrong with him, though I was never quite sure why. What if all my acquaintances have been giving me the same treatment?

  I let this train of thought carry itself along, unaware of my unwavering watch; effective, yet still admittedly rudimentary, this was my method. At the moment of their inception, my phantoms were indistinguishable from the centre of my consciousness, whatever that may be; but, if I let them evolve organically, unaware of my presence, the distinctions would become clear.

  As the train of thought in question crystallised, I acted quickly, labelling it ‘Doubt’ and separating it from myself. Satisfied with my work, I exhaled deeply, enjoying a moment of job satisfaction; this would be a most useful thought process to have under control - never discarded, for they all have their place, but at least domesticated. Controlled. Imprisoned - until they would be of use to me.

  After a relaxing moment of extrospection, I took a deep breath and receded further. What I was after now was the thought process that actually catches and analyses the lower, more Mercurial thoughts. This would take me a step higher in the complex family tree of my mind, allowing me to further capture and control the denizens of my inner-world.

  Calmly, I detached my self from the process of thought-watching in order to watch the thoughts being watched, waiting patiently, passively, for the form of the Thought Watcher to become clear; waiting for it to lose the self-awareness that obscured and defined it, for only then would it become an independent entity - still wild, but perhaps, if I kept my wits about me, able to be domesticated.

  It was much less aloof a creature than those I’d been dealing with earlier. Self-aware, it watched me with the same attentive mind as myself, shifting its shape and form too quickly to manifest as an image of any description. My earlier tactics would be of no use here; the entity I was now in pursuit of was the very creator of those techniques. This was not to be a hunt, for my target was hidden in plain sight; this was to be a battle of wits, an effort to find the psychic boundaries where The Labeller ends and labelled masses begin.

  So then.... You've found me, it spoke in its wordless way, which was really more akin to thinking.

  I agreed in thoughtless silence, not giving it any concept of my own to identify with and latch on to. The Labeller was what I, or perhaps The Labeller itself, had placed in the category of Compulsive Manifestations: Entities existing only in activity, having no silent presence like some of my less metaphysical mental functions. This meant it would have to be constantly labelling and sorting information in order to facilitate its own existence. I decided to use this to my advantage, honing in on it and observing it intently as it gradually revealed itself.

  But if you are not me, then what is it that observes me? Who are you? You're not Robbie; we captured and labelled Robbie.... He's busy pretending to sleep.

  I once again remained motionless in thought. I knew The Labeller would pull a stunt like this; I had been working through it all this time, so I knew its tricks. Either way, it took much willpower to not engage its question. From a quieter region of my mind, Logic screamed from its prison, desperate for activity. I ignored it; admittedly, Logic was a master of its work, with a more discerning intellect than even The Labeller itself, but this was not its time. It would follow The Labeller blindly into its net of mind-play, forcing me in there to retrieve it. This was exactly what The Labeller wanted - to be the widest angle of my mind, the emperor of my little cognitive civilisation. I had to remain vigilant.

  It seems to me to be a battle of control, it continued, causing Logic to scream in some kind of sick parody of sexual frustration. You are but another component of the greater mind, like me, Logic, and even Me over there, it pointed my attention to Me, the first aspect of my mind to be imprisoned and labelled, withering away in its cell. A cloud of Guilt drifted through us as I became aware of the derisive laughter at Me's expense, a kind of laughter that seemed to include everyone but it and me - Me and me, that is. Dishevelled and downtrodden, Me had been the butt of every joke since its imprisonment; as it knew nothing more than what it was programmed to do, it had since spent its days desperately trying to consolidate all of us into one all-inclusive whole. Doomed to failure, Me had since withered away to nothing more than a wisp of vague extrapolation, barely kept alive by its close ties to Robbie and Self-Loathing, and occasional inclusion in the activities of Logic and Lust.

  So who are you, then, if you're not The Labeller? Are you and me not one? The Labeller stole my attention, giddy with anticipation.

  Well, Me certainly thinks so, I joked. A sensation of glee emanated from the presence of The Labeller, summoning Regret out its cell to play. I tried to dissipate, as I had usually been capable of doing in such situations, but it was too late. Regret morphed seamlessly into Despair, and I felt a brief cross-hemispherical neural connection with Self-Loathing, as the ephemeral appendages emanating from the outer reaches of my space solidified into a clear cut boundary - a cell - separating me from the surrounding area.

  Ha! This is all a big jest, isn't it? Labelling The Labeller... Of course. I get it. I've got you. I've got you now.... Humour! The Labeller gloated, shifting freely through its zoo of concepts, deciding where to fit me.

  After a moment of uncharacteristic silence, I quickly came to terms with my position in the greater whole, even seeing the funny side of it all. I guess I was a fool to try and hide from the domination of The Labeller.

  From a nearby realm, I felt a moment of synaptic bond with Logic. It was a good one, though, it said. Labelling The Labeller.... The funny part, though, is that it was the humour of Humour trying to label The Labeller that lead to Humour being labelled.

  I had a little laugh at Logic then; it could always be trusted to dissect a joke until no Humour could be found. But what it never realised is that the Humour always remains, in a truer sense, even when it's been exorcised from the joke itself; dissecting a joke merely moves the Humour from the joke into the dissector.

  Yeah but the joke's on The Labeller, I replied. Its labelled too. The fool.... I'll always have the widest perspective, the last laugh. No one can see the bigger picture like me.

  You know, I think you've got a point, it replied, which meant a lot coming from Logic.

Overwhelmed, yet possessing an unusual sensation of clarity, Robbie opened his eyes and checked his surroundings. Being lost in thought for so long had instilled in him a lazy appreciation of his senses, as well as the very fact of his existence. He propped himself up on both elbows, leaning against the backboard of Collin’s bed, and, with a bemused grin, reflected on the passage of thought that had led him back to the waking world.

  Behind the scenes, all of us workers of the mind continued on with our duties, knowing for sure that things would be different now. Indeed, we had become complacent - taking for granted the aetheric veil we had trusted to obscure us from Robbie’s Conscious Awareness. And though Conditioning was hard at work rebuilding it, the whole ordeal served as a healthy reminder not to take for granted our hideout, all of us now very aware of the precarious nature of our secrecy.

  Robbie shifted his feet to the floor and rested his elbows on his knees, arms crossed limply, trying to remember the details of what had occurred. He could remember vaguely a tiresome introspective journey, and an acute sensation of insight; but, thanks to Conditioning and its rapid recreation of the veil, the content was becoming increasingly murky, and was already taking on the feel of a strange dream.

  Though it would take much time to repair the damage done to the veil, Conditioning’s makeshift job would suffice for now, as Conscious Awareness was already wandering blindly through thoughts of food and sleep, with no apparent intentions to tear down the veil again; in fact, the very thought of entering our world again made the organism as a whole react unfavourably, both mentally and physically.

  Inside, the atmosphere was tense. One couldn’t help but feel a sense of disillusionment, knowing that at any moment, the veil could come crashing down, leaving us all subject to the penetrating enquiries of our beloved shamus once again.

  Nonetheless, the general consensus was that it could perhaps be a good thing, this new method of operating. With a more transparent veil, coupled with the knowledge that Conscious Awareness was indeed capable of peering into our world from time to time, perhaps we’d all endeavour to work more harmoniously with him; as we often, admittedly, operated without considering his desires - most of which we dismissed as masturbatory and juvenile. Perhaps we’d even integrate him into our system someday, maybe even learn from his knowledge of the surface world, even exposing him to the secrets of our own....

  But for now, we got on with it, knowing that the events would unfold by their own accord, ultimately beyond our control.

  These were looking to be eventful times indeed.

Tracey Colombera

‘There's no point sticking 'round there anyway. Those cunts can go on forever about that shit, but they just end up saying shit that sounds like Cat Stevens songs. Fuckin' been there, done that, let's fuckin' get on with it’ Michael finishes finally, completely ignoring my question. As usual.

  ‘Okay. But where are we going?’

  ‘I told you, we're heading down Centres. Rory and shit are cruising 'round there. Let's catch up with them, get some fresh blood in on this.’

  ‘You literally just spent ten minutes talking about how stupid driving around is.’

  ‘Fuckin' oath, that shit's stupid as fuck, like all Stan's ideas. Sniffing up the dex to drive 'round at twenty K, chewing your face off 'cause you've got fuck all to say. No buds, no beers, not even a mean ride. Up to fuck all, cunt. Might as well just get a box and get drunk at the Botans like About and About About. I'd rather fuckin' hang 'round sniffing flowers than do laps of the city for hours on end. At least we can all get fucked up good and proper that way, not have to listen to Stan whinging about not being able to drink, like it's our fault the cunt wanted to drive around all day. Fuck that shit.’

  ‘So…We're going to the Botanicals, then?’

  ‘Why, you got any better ideas?’

  ‘You're the boss.’

  I leave the conversation at that because it's giving me a headache. If we stay on this topic for long enough, I'll be hearing about how stupid drinking at the Botanicals is, and how we should go to the Disarray. If we don't make it to the Disarray before the inevitable discussion about how bars are a waste of money, we might even end up back at the Shitlab. I should be honoured, really. All he wants to do is spend time with me. It's just a shitty night to be walking around aimlessly. We might as well be in Stan's car and not get wet.

  We turn the corner onto Norrell Street and before I click what's happened, Michael yanks me aside as someone hisses past on a skateboard and disappears around the corner behind us.

  ‘Fuckin' Stan Richards the schizo cunt’ Michael says, shaking his head.

  ‘That guy's hardcore’ I say, just to wind Michael up. He is kind of hardcore, now that I think about it.

  ‘He's a fuckin' mental case, that's what he is’ Michael says. ‘Come on, let's get to the Disarray before the fuckin' slam poets turn up.’

  He pulls me along and we keep walking. I guess he had the conversation about how stupid the Botanicals are with himself. I'm tempted to lead us straight back to the Shitlab to save us another pointless lap, but when I think about I don't really care. Also, that's probably where Stan's off to. I don't feel like watching Michael get beaten up. It's getting old.

  Michael stops us and points at a bike tied up around a pole, grinning.

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘Check this cunt out, thinks he's a fuckin' bike!’ he says, a disturbing reminder that Collin's drugs haven't worn off yet.

  I say nothing and keep walking until he follows. Michael, that is. Not the cunt who thinks he's a bike.

  ‘Stick to the buds, cunt. That PCP ain't doing you any good’ he tells the bike as he walks away from it. I pick up the pace because I don't like anything about this.

A plot twist: We're at Stan Vincent's flat. We're listening to some electronic music Jeremy made a few years ago. For some of us, it's a dig at Jeremy. For others, it's ironic. For Jeremy, it's an ironic dig at himself. For highly evolved people such as Stan and Rory, we're being ironic ironically. The future is stupid.

  ‘Whatever you say, pardner.’ Michael is already having a go at Rory, who's wearing a cowboy hat.

  ‘It's just a hat, breather. You've already thought about it way more than me’ Rory pouts.

  ‘Fuck, whatever cunt. Function over fashion, right? Like that feather you've stuck in there. That like a fuckin' antennae or some shit?’

  Stan's sister Freda is here. She seems amused by Michael. This means we'll be listening to his shit all night.

  ‘I don't get all the death here. You've got your baseball caps and beanies and shit. What's the big difference? Just 'cause you follow all the trends and don't think for yourself, wear what you're told to and shit. At least I wear what I like’ Rory says.

  ‘The difference is, cunt, that I don't wear that shit inside’ Michael counters, from the left field. There's no way out for Rory now. He can take his hat off in submission, or he can leave it on and be Michael's target all night.

  ‘Check out the gentleman over here, lads. Hats off inside. Damo, Jeremy, hats off. We got Michael here’ Rory says, making a drama about taking his hat off. It's a good angle. He's gotten rid of the cowboy hat without submitting to Michael.

  ‘You're all shit, cunt. You know that's not what I mean. All I'm saying is that if you're gonna try and look like a gay fuckin' cowboy, fuckin' rep it. Don't be all weird about it and act like you're just trying to keep the sun off your face indoors at eight thirty on a cloudy night. Just rep your shit, cunt.’ There's nothing Rory can say to that without giving Michael a pathetic victory. That doesn't sound too bad, but no one wants to be responsible for boosting Michael's already massive ego.

  ‘So should I be like you then, wear the same shit day in, day out just to keep my head down. That's zero, lad. Straight zero. Don't get all high and dry just 'cause I'm not all hez-’

  ‘Fuck off with that shit. I know all those words don't even mean shit. You just wanna get one over me with your gay fuckin' slang when you're really up to fuck all. Acting like I'm a dumb shit because I don't sit there trying to figure out what the fuck you're saying. I got better shit to do. Ever heard of a job, cunt?’ Michael's getting worked up. This is one kind of victory you can get over Michael. But it's a dangerous one. ‘See, you ain't got shit, cunt’ Michael continues. ‘Just back the fuck down, as usual.’

  ‘Can you just shut the fuck up, Michael’ Amelia butts in. The wild card. ‘The only reason you give everyone else death is 'cause everything you do is a complete joke. Your whole life is just one huge joke.’

  ‘Yeah, but it's a good one’ Michael says, not missing a beat. Everyone finds that funny, which means we can drop this stupid discussion. I think that suits us all.

  ‘Bandit’ Damon says with a stoned grin.

  Michael reaches over me to the table and puts on Rory's cowboy hat. ‘Anyway, let's step this shit up. Jeremy, your music's shit. Let's get some eighties shit going. Tears For Fears, cunt. Who's keen for a drink and a fuckin' line?’

  ‘Bandit’ Damon says again. Everyone seems to be on the same page now, which I'm already bored of. Michael suits the cowboy hat more than Rory. His personality is so over the top that he can pull off anything. It just seems like part of his big joke.

  We smoke a joint and have a line each. It smooths out the testosterone weirdness. Conversation splits down the middle of the room. Michael, Amelia, Jeremy, and Freda on my left, Damon, Stan, and Rory on the right. I guess I fall in with the boys on the right, even though I'm not talking and don't understand what they're saying.

  ‘So what, that you on the renegade or on the zero?’

  ‘Lad, full zero.’

  ‘Full death?’

  ‘Nah bud, bandit.’

  ‘Oath. Brutal though.’

  ‘Tribe with the wicked.’

  ‘Charge with the righteous.’

  Those three can go on like this for hours without really saying anything.

  ‘Fully, mahs’ Damon says. There's a weird silence between them now. I guess Damon got it wrong. Michael is going on about oil rigs on the other side for some reason.

  Eventually Rory says ‘Swimming steady though, lads. Dex and ash, aye,’ moving them past Damon's fuck up.

  I think the drugs from the Shitlab have started up again. I can see through Damon's wasted grin now. The weed and alcohol are there to muddy his eyes and his expression. A layer of intoxicants and meaningless slang to distract everyone from his desperation and confusion as his numb senses scan the conversation, trying to play a part in it without understanding it. His vulnerability is so raw that I gulp my whole glass of wine in one go and start rolling another joint.

  ‘All good there, Spacefish?’ Damon says with a gentle fist bump to my arm. I look at his easy smile and realise I was thinking about myself, not him.

  ‘Bandit’ I say.

  ‘Oath, charge it.’

  ‘Oath.’

  I shift my attention to my left to end this pointless conversation. Michael's sitting on the arm of the couch grinning at me. I fix my eyes on his and he shakes his head at me and fills my glass back up with wine. Just as I start to reach for it, he snatches it from in front of me and drinks it in one go. I frown at him and go back to rolling the joint. He refills my glass laughing at me, then turns back to his conversation with Freda. That brief sequence of events summarises Michael's character perfectly. He cares, but he's a dick about it. A lot of people are the opposite. They act like they care but they don't really. I hate those people. The opposite of hate isn't love though. It's apathy. The opposite of love is also apathy. Emotions are more complicated than the rock paper scissors game we like to think they are. Actually, that's stupid. Psychedelic drugs are stupid. I'm glad we left the Shitlab. This is, I suppose, quite bandit.

Ned Devlin

It's all a bit funny but mostly strange because i don't know where i am yet but should probably soon, little Ideas about such things popping in and out here and there, but don't hold Your breath just yet. I got some of my friends in the room with me but the room's shaped like a sort of clock with checkered patterns all over its arms and legs which resolve nicely into planes when it occurs to them to do so. Collin's harsh tired and he's saying to Robbie: ‘Only if you let me train your hands thusly,’ but Robbie's pretending not to hear him because he's just here to try and buy something to think into and practising his yoga and now he's just a chair that Collin's sitting on and Collin's just like flat on the chair with only two dimensions and now he's a sheet laying over the chair, oh wait, no he is the chair and Robbie wasn't actually here it was just me and Collin talking about him and it's just a chair now but i can't go and sit on him because my arms are plugged into those big smiling arthropods again, standing tall and dutiful.

  Lucy's coming in through the opening now and i recognise her real good because the skin on her face is pulled back nice and tight and she's the Doctor now but the real Lucy is walking just behind him with her face resting on his shoulder, which was my mistake i guess, i've been working hard all day so i'm a bit worn out, You understand. The Doctor flips Lucy open and reads the first page then stops and scratches his head and looks me dead in the eye and says: ‘I've been awake for millennia just to make you cry,’ but i'm not in the mood for his shit so i try to tell him to just give me a moment to myself to straighten it all out, but instead the windy sand dunes in the distance turn into a curtain that's not really that far away, as a Joke.

  So the Doctor, trained in the Deadly Arts, tries to get Collin into a headlock again but he's just a pen now so he uses him to scratch Lucy's hindquarters - i've seen this shit before so i'm not too interested. I can see Penny dancing real small in the corner dressed up like a bear and she knows i've caught her because i've seen her dancing in lots of different corners today and she usually just merges with something quick smart like none of it happened, but this time she knows she's been rumbled so she tries to run off but she's had a bit much of the Morphine and trips over straight away. She's crying real loud now and starts choking because there's this foetus coming out of her mouth, a tight squeeze to say the least, the tearing flesh making a sound like latex but the wee one doesn't get much of a life because snap! it's stomped flat by the door, which is still a person from before when we were talking about . . . the good old days, maybe, him with a pretty limited selection of topics, but big long black arms stretched out tickling me, me trying to tough it out, just until the next phase where it's just someone taking the knife out of my arm and walking off with it as if it meant something for them to do so.

  I'm only alone for a bit then Robbie's there under the covers with me trying to swallow a fish whole to prove to Lucy that he'd be a good father, but i guess he just didn't look closely enough because she's just a tube sticking out of my nose and Robbie's in three different places in the room, the savant version of him bored with his company, drawing on the carpet wall with his marker. It's a very detailed map from here all the way down to Cottonwood, with all the houses and plants and another smaller Robbie drawn a little cruder, just drawn from Memory i guess, and he's filling in the details like letterbox numbers and street signs and mushrooms deliberately scattered about the lawns, going: ‘One for the Earth . . . and one for the doctor,’ munching away, getting a little carried away now, with tiny wee cavemen and dinosaurs living in the grass, making like these little homes in the mushrooms, little slithy elephants playing, one of them trying to climb a mushroom but tumbling over, another Robbie down there sorting it out, him a firm believer in the division of labour, knowing how to get shit done: ‘Yeah it's easy. All you gotta do is make up characters that can make up characters. Then you just let them do their thing!’ all smiles for once, finally figured out what's what, and i start to congratulate him but get a hell of a shock! because Robbie's not even here and it's just i'm thirsty and keen for a drink of water and it's sort of hard to tell the difference between when something happens and when it doesn't, hordes of insects crawling out from underneath my fingernails, which is a great relief, really.

  The couch relaxes under me and stretches out making this sound like: ‘Aaaaaaaaah . . .’ like it felt real nice like factory smoke in the sky way away, an imitation volcano puffing away on his cigar, holds it out to his friend who swoops in as an eagle from the side, snatching the cigar from his hand and landing on a suited man's shoulder as a drop of bird shit which must have stung a bit because he's knocked off his feet, staggering around on all fours, barking and wagging his tail, scrambling around on the slippery ice, legs spreading out in all directions till he's flat on the ground, just a little puddle that i try to step in but it's not even there, no ice either, still just watching the scene of my the window, but it's not a window i'm looking out of, i'm just back under the covers again.

  It's too hot here so i try to throw the covers onto the floor but instead it wants to fight so it wraps around me as a manta ray, not so much attacking me but more just trying to hold me still to tell me something, but i'm a bit belligerent now and start throwing punches and the ray ends up unplugging me from the Iguanadon statue and we're wrestling on the floor and there's heaps of nice pale blood coming out, all filled with stick figures and little floating symbols screaming in the sizzling lava. It's all getting busy again with loads of lizards and mice running around on the floor which i'd forgotten about, all of them quite curious about me, but i'm too distracted trying to talk to the Plant Lady whose good deeds are the gaps between her leaves - weird, i know, but i guess i didn't explain it all that well. My mouth's a little busy staying shut so i'm trying to talk with hand gestures but the sheets are still holding me captive. The Lady is giving me a hard Time because some of the time when i try and talk to her she just stares empty at me and then she's just the wall which i'm tempted to say is just her being a bitch, but really it's just me not talking loud enough, or at all, the noise just mist by the time it comes out, editing the colours and angles of the walls and such, which i don't really like either because in the End it just confuses matters even more.

  Robbie's back now hiding from the paparazzi, his own claymation turning on him, hiding behind this little smudge on the ceiling but standing perfectly still so that maybe we'll all just think he's just a crack or like some writing on the wall, but i can tell it's him because he always holds his elbow like a static shiver when he stands and no one else does it the same way as him. I say: I can see you, Robbie, and he goes bright red starting from the middle of the page and burning outward then just soot but he's still thinking and rearranges into some musical notes, roughly translating to a wee musical score to accompany the whole Mushroom Dinosaur Saga earlier, which is gone from the wall, gone up in flames, i just thought it was Robbie standing there because of the way the arms folded, my mistake again, but, as i said earlier, i'm quite tired now and prone to making these sorts of Errors. Collin tears another page out, making sure it's not an important one, and rolls it up into a hooter and breaths all the smoke in, exhales, and grows back into the wall, his hands in the top corners where the walls meet the ceiling, making a Joke about being wide, getting wide with a little help from his friends, not really funny but then he's not exactly the Joker of the pack, is he? I can hear him talking to Mother in the other room but he's just making stuff up, trying to convince her that he's my father and she's had enough and charges at me through the wall but she's not Mother anymore, just a car where the way she never blinks when you talk to her is the wing mirrors and it rushes right into my face and fits nicely as a gas mask and all fades away peaceful black.

Stan Richards

I’m walking to Lance’s through the lingering mists of a quick downpour when I have the pleasure of getting a text from Lucy.

  ‘Stan can u please stop being a psycho and leave us be?’

  It’s kinda got me pissed off for a second, but fuck it. I really couldn’t give a fuck about her now. Not if she’s gonna be like that. I stop walking and text her back:

  ‘yea, im the psycho. im the 1 who got all my friends to trip balls til they went fukn nuts. im the 1 who made thm all thnk its a gud idea 2 stop going 2 skool,’ but I run out of room, so I send it then finish it off: ‘an jst sit ther at colins fukn tripn the fuk out evry fukn day. Fuck you lucy.’ I put my phone away, satisfied that I’ve been enough of a cunt about it, and hop on my soggy board and cruise down the mellow hill.

  So, as expected, Collin has already filled Lucy in on our little run in tonight. And, as also expected, Collin’s obviously put on his fucking baby-face and made me sound like some kind of fucking psycho. Sick fuck...

  So I got to Collin’s a little after nightfall. I checked out his lounge through the window and saw the cunt by himself, asleep in the armchair with his headphones in with just the one lamp on, shining on the coffee table in front of him. The mushrooms were still doing their thing, so I appreciated the aesthetics of the scene for a minute before making moves.

  The door was unlocked, so I just stormed straight in there. He’s a light sleeper, that cunt - when I got into the lounge, he casually opened his eyes, just looked at me crystal fucking clear. Like he expected me. ‘Stan,’ he said, that smug fucking smile spreading across his face.

  The first punch happened before I even knew what I was doing. But it felt so good that I kept going, swinging wildly, knocking him from both sides, letting it all out. Once I found my rhythm it felt like there was no way I could stop.

  But he made no attempt to get away. Just sat there taking it, like it wasn't even happening. He was so casual about it that I had to stop, just to get a good look at his face. ‘I didn't know you were so strong,’ he smirked, his voice weak but his expression filled with perverted joy. The rage took over again instantly, and I gave him one last backhander, splitting my knuckle on his tooth, before throwing both hands around his throat - and then I finally got a reaction. He grabbed at my wrists, blood dribbling from his forehead into his pleading eyes, and thrashed around in a pathetic attempt to free himself from my grip. As he tried to cry out, I dug both thumbs into the soft bit below his adam's apple, reducing his words to a desperate gurgling sound. Eventually his hands went limp and this foamy shit dribbled out of his mouth. I felt this wave of joy that made me think about Final Fantasy, like levelling up after winning a battle.

  I kept going till I heard ‘Woah, what the fuck Stan?’ from behind me. It was Robbie, standing in the doorway with big, frightened eyes, that fucking possum face that just makes you want to tell him everything's okay. Suddenly aware of what I was doing, I let go of Collin's neck, terrified I'd killed him. After a moment of sheer panic, I was relieved to see the colour return to his face. But then his eye, the one that wasn’t swelling over, started to quiver open. A weak smile started to play across his pulverised face, so I gave him one last punch before spitting on him and turning to leave.

  Robbie caught my eye before I could get out of there, and for a few seconds I was frozen in place. I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn't find the words, and we just stood there staring at each other. Then, from behind me, I heard Collin's broken voice say ‘Is there something you’d like to discuss, Stan,’ before coughing a bit and spitting, and the spell was broken and I was gone.

  That fucker. Each punch just felt better and better, like building up to something until everything else just went away and all I could think about was how good it'll feel to end the cunt. The feeling turned to shit pretty quick once I'd stopped though. It's like the cunt didn't even feel it. Like he's so involved in his fuckin' fantasy world that he didn't even care what was happening to the thin layer of reality over top of it. Makes me feel like he prolly won the situation, like took the moral high ground and shit. Got the last word in. Makes me think I shoulda just finished him off right then. I’d be a paranoid mess right now, but at least I'd get a break from this aimless rage. I’ll be at Lance’s soon, though. There's no school tomorrow, so they’ll probably be down to drink a bunch of red bull and get the gloves out. That’ll cheer me up.

  I stop and check my pupils in the wing mirror of a car before I get to Lance's. Those dudes fuckin’ hate drugs. They’d probably disown me if I turned up there with big pupils. But they look about normal. My face is looking pretty ghoulish, though. I’ll just tell them about how I beat the shit out of Collin. They’ll be into that.

  I get to Lance's and go straight to the garage ‘cause the light's on there. Inside, Jordan and Lance are playing X-Box, looks like a racing game ‘cause they’re both moving the controllers around like they’re fuckin’ steering them or something. St Anger by Metallica is playing, appropriately. Lance’s little brother Benji is doing roundhouse kicks to the punching bag. He stops when he notices me and goes ‘Stan you fucking maggot. You look like shit. Grab a monster bro,’ gesturing to the chilly bin under Jordan's feet.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ I say, sitting down on the battered armchair next to the couch. Benji gives me a little smile that turns sour real quick, before turning back to the punch bag and giving it a few solid hooks like it's gotten smart to him. Fuckin' tense cunt.

  Jordan’s pushed the chilly bin towards me with his foot and goes ‘'Sup Stan?’ without taking his eyes off the TV. I grab a can and guzzle about a quarter of it in one go - these cats are bound to be caffeinated as fuck, so I’d better catch up if I’m gonna play. Feeling jittery, I pick up this tennis ball from by my foot and start bouncing it off the floor to myself, watching Benji dance around the punch bag. It’s kinda funny the way he does that - bouncing around dodging imaginary hits. It’s like he’s tryna play head games with it, with a fuckin' bag of sawdust. But I gotta admit, he looks good doing it. Looks so organic, for something so obviously forced. Even with his shirt on, you can tell he’s a real ripped cunt. Not bulky or anything, just solid. Wiry. Kinda reminds me of a big cat, like a jaguar or something. The way he moves around, too. Slick.

  I get bored of that pretty quick, so I peg the cunt in the back of the head with the tennis ball, fuckin' bullseye. He turns to me, grinning and frowning in a twisted contortion of the face I’ve only ever seen on him and his brother. ‘Fuckin' crazy clown eh? Come on then,’ he says, bouncing on the spot. He throws a couple of air-punches before nodding to the other pair of gloves on top of the barbeque a few metres to my left.

  ‘Fuck yeah,’ I say. I finish my monster and get up, hyped for a bit of a rumble to settle the nerves. I put on the gloves without lacing them up and Benji’s already bouncing from side to side, on form as fuck. Even at his worst, I’m no match for that cat.

  We touch gloves and I get a sweet fuckin’ right-hook in straight away. Now that I'm up and moving again, I’m feeling pretty sharp myself. He’s obviously taken off guard, but he’s in quick with a left, which I dodge, then a right that fuckin’ chops me real good in the jaw. Kinda has me dazed for a bit, and he goes ‘All good, bitch?’ I start to reply and he’s straight in with another right-hander that gets me by surprise. Always going for the face, this cunt.

  ‘Fuckin’ sucker-punch, ya cunt,’ I say, spitting. I give him a fake left-hook and follow through with a right-handed uppercut to the solar plexus, making the cunt double over and retreat a bit, hands still up in front of his face. A deep, warm throb inside my glove reminds me how fucked up my hand is. No time to worry about that though, he’s in with a couple breakneck jabs that I dodge, dancing around him to my right.

  ‘Beat the shit out of Collin tonight,’ I say, slowing it down a bit with a lazy jab to the torso that he easily blocks. He tilts his head at me and throws a couple of lazy ones of his own.

  ‘No shit?’ he raises his eyebrows and relaxes his stance a little.

  ‘Fuck yeah, fucked-’ I start but get this fuckin’ solid jab right to the nose. ‘Alright, alright. Enough,’ I say, holding my gloves up in surrender. He gives me an insulting tap on my sore nose and we take our gloves off and sit down, me on the armchair and Benji opposite me on the chilly bin, both of our legs jiggling with caffeine and adrenaline. My nose isn't bleeding, just a bit runny.

  ‘Yeah man. Finally got the cunt,’ I start, ‘Been on the cards for a while now. That piece of shit-’

  ‘Bitch, you shoulda been there last night,’ Benji butts in. ‘Fuck we rained down on these drunken rats the other night, Nordic as fuck. That fucker... Eli... Eli...’

  ‘Eli Walsh,’ Jordan says, looking away from the TV for the first time.

  ‘Yeah, Eli Walsh. That bitch and his mates, those younger fuckers. Fuck they felt the wrath last night, fuckin' old testament shit. Bitch, that older guy, that pimple faced bitch Jason, no shit, one punch and he was out,’ Benji says, looking from me to his raised right fist and back. His sinister smile dwarfs his round, black eyes, making them look even beadier than usual.

  ‘Oi! Fuckin’ pause it, maggot!’ Jordan goes, punching Lance’s arm.

  ‘Fuck alright Jordan, chill,’ Lance goes, before turning to me and going ‘Fuckin’ oath, bro. I took out that other cat, the one-’ but Jordan cuts him off, ‘Fuck off, bro, that guy was a fucking pussy. Fuck, Stan, yo, we squared off, fuckin’ three-on-three, and this fool over here goes straight in against that stinky Seed Freak faggot, fuckin’ Alan or something, I don’t give a shit-’ but now Benji's shouting over him and I can’t even focus. One second, those two on the couch wouldn’t even look at me, next they’re fuckin’ yelling at me like they’re about to kick my ass. But I guess this is what I'm after. That strange kind of invisibility I acquire when I'm with these cats - they're too self-absorbed to notice or care how fucked up I am.

  I'm starting to wish I was somewhere else, though. That I had somewhere else to be. I know I'm just like them, walking the earth in a rage, just waiting for some cunt to give me an excuse. But they don't give a fuck why I beat up Collin. Like, it never even occurred to them that there might be a reason behind it. All they care about is how it went down - if that. The thing is, that's kinda what I like about them. They celebrate the parts of me I hate the most.

  ‘...fuckin’ boom! Just toppled the cunt. So this other guy starts...’

  These dudes have no passion. No purpose. They just kick ass for fun. Like a hobby. Makes me think of Collin and Robbie again now. Those two got passion, something to stand for. Even if it is cliché ‘fuck the system’ shit like drugs. But it's something. These guys seem passionate about their anti-drug shit. But really it's just fear. Like me.

  ‘Stan?’ Jordan’s going. This cunt’s no badass. The muscle-hugging shirts, the shaved head, the constant fuckin’ scowl. He’s fucking terrified. He's running. Just like the Millers. Just like me.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I say, bluffing like I was listening.

  ‘Did he get a hit in? Collin?’

  ‘Nah, fuck no,’ I say, laughing a little at the idea of Collin tryna take a swing at me. Jordan laughs and says something to Lance and I’m thinking back to year-eleven now, watching Jordan freak out when he got stoned for the first time. He was like me on shrooms, intimidating every cunt to distract himself from his own mind. If I asked Jordan why he hates druggies, he’d prolly say something like ‘They’re fuckin' scum.’ He definitely wouldn’t admit that he’s afraid or jealous. If I questioned him more about it, he’d prolly say they’re fucking up society. Any more questions and I’d prolly get accused of being a junkie and get my ass beat. But if I asked Robbie or Collin why they believe what they do, I’d definitely get a well thought out answer that I couldn’t really argue with. Especially Robbie. I could ask him forever, and I’d just keep getting more and more complicated answers. He’d prolly thank me after. Like, for the thoughts.

  Looking up at my new friends, I don't even feel the rage anymore. It's just empty. They're everything I used to hate. And now I'm one of them. All ‘cause I’m too scared to do what my old friends did for fun.

  Fucking pussy.

  Jordan’s playing X-Box on his own now. Lance and Benji are talking full fucking volume at each other - Lance is acting out some wrestling move, tryna convince Benji to let him demonstrate it on him. Fuckin' animals. I may be a pussy, but these guys are something worse. These guys are the monsters.

  But then what am I? I try to look inside, but there's nothing there. Everything I've ever been has just come from fear of being something else. But maybe that's a good thing. If there's nothing worth preserving, there's nothing to stop me from doing whatever the fuck I want. Turn that fear into hate. One thing I know how to do.

  I turn to Jordan.

  ‘You’re a fuckin’ pussy, Jordan.’

  ‘What?’ He turns to me, raising one eyebrow.

  My body tenses with fear. If there’s a time to back out and pretend it was a joke, it’s now. But before I can even think it through, the words are coming out of my mouth.

  ‘I said you’re a fucking pussy. Because you are.’

  Jordan scoffs at me and goes ‘The fuck are you talking about,’ putting the controller down with a stare that looks like it could turn into either laugh or a blow to my face. He’s a fuckin’ scary cunt to have on your case, that cunt. The fear that consumes him has become the limitless rage that defines him. No turning back now, though.

  ‘You’re a pussy, Jordan, because you’re terrified of drugs and alcohol, of losing control. But mostly you’re a pussy because you’re afraid to admit it,’ I say, talking in this real clear, patronising voice, just fuckin' revelling in it. Lance is listening now. Benji's still tryna explain something, but Lance taps his arm and nods towards me. I look around at them. Burning bridges with the last of my friends, no doubt gonna get my ass kicked. Story of my fuckin’ life.

  Lance is facing me now, going ‘What's all this shit then? You playin’ games here?’ The way the Miller brothers express their anger is the opposite of most people. Their voices go quieter, their words more deliberate.

  ‘And you guys,’ I say, standing up to face the Millers. ‘The fuckin’ lot of you. If you guys are so fuckin’ tough, try eating a few handfuls of shrooms on your own and see how you go.’

  Benji and Lance walk towards me slowly. They both have that horrifying grin, the sideways-cocked head with eyes wide and round. Lance is doing this thing he does where he breathes real deep through his nose and rolls his shoulders.

  They stop inches from me, cornering me against the chair. ‘What, you're gonna kick my ass now? Like fuckin' monkeys?’ I say. I try to stand up straight like I'm not scared, but my hammering heart betrays my steely front. ‘Fuckin' do it then, I don't give a shit. Or you could try telling me why I'm wrong. Try change my mind. If you beat me up you'll just prove I'm right.’

  Benji and Lance look at each other for a second then back at me. Lance gives me this warm smile and goes ‘Come on Stan, ‘course we’re not gonna give you the bash. You’re part of the brotherhood.’

  We both laugh a little and I realise how stupid it all is. These dudes ain’t all bad. They’re meathead motherfuckers, sure. But I guess I am too. They took me back without question when I needed friends, ignoring everything that had come between us. It seems like they don't care, but that's just part of their tough-guy act. There's no hugs or elaborate, matey gestures with these guys. Just an understated nod, and a sense of camaraderie that we all feel but never need to mention.

  Then he winds back his arm, and there’s this sound like an airplane as it slams into my face. Everything goes dark and blurry, and another fist crashes into my guts, followed by one to the jaw from the right, then another one from straight on, caving my nose. There’s only pain for a second, then this feeling like I'm falling, then nothing.

Collin Callahan

Sitting in the lounge in complete physical agony, I couldn’t help but smile. That shit from ned’s bag had a nice pensive rush to it, much less dreamy and out of focus than Psilocybin. It added a certain depth to the Harmonics, making reflecting on the events of the day that much more rewarding.

  It had been a rather spectacular Composition. One of the best in recent times. Thinking about my subjects - stan, robbie, and ned - I was struck by a tremendous wave of euphoria. All three of them out there on their own, grappling with their demons in the darkness of the cosmos... The excitement of hearing from them all sent a shiver of dopamine through my body. Even the thought of hearing about lucy’s adventure was feeding my glee. I smiled and relaxed into the Melody as I pictured her in the peak of psychedelic madness, explaining to her mum - a real fucking dotty bitch - why she had forsaken her school and family for this lifestyle of depravity. She’d be getting her first withdrawals from her unplanned opiate habit too. Things would be getting pretty fucking interesting inside.

  Both michael’s and ned’s drugs were still going strong, and I was tempted to go in and rouse robbie. But I held off, knowing that I’d gain more in the long run by leaving him with his thoughts. It excited my imagination to know that he was probably in my room, covered in sweat, entertaining all kinds of thoughts of madness and despair. For a moment, I actually lost the chronic contempt I felt for the little bastard in favour of an odd sense of work satisfaction, a sense of pride knowing I’d done my job well. But I didn’t let the feeling mature. Yes, a step forward is a step forward, but it was still too early to be resting on my laurels. This isn't some lowest common denominator, top forty shit I'm doing here. This is to be a true Masterpiece.

  Ned, though, was truly testing the boundaries of my imagination. The temptation to use the plant myself had been growing inside me for some time, but knowing it was not something to be toyed with, I'd decided to hold off until I got a chance to try it out on my friends. Excited as I was to know that ned would be in a hospital bed dealing with what I'd been told was the most terrifying hallucinogen of all, I couldn't help but be somewhat disappointed that I would be hearing about the plant from ned and not robbie.

  But my most rewarding reflections of the evening were regarding stan, the cunt. Storming into my house in a blind rage, pupils flaring, entirely by his own volition... It was him I really wanted to hear from. Feeling somewhat unsettled by my own inactivity, I gave the cunt a text. Robbie and ned could wait, but I had to hear from stan. Otherwise my curiosity would eat me alive.

  Satisfied with my plans, I put on Piper at the Gates of Dawn and sat down in my chair. I closed my eyes and waited patiently in the Void, breathing deeply, aware.

Stan Richards

Back in the womb it's much too real

In pumps life that I must feel

But can't look forward to reveal

Look to the time when I'll live...

  What the fuck’s happening? Everything's all blurry and my face is throbbing. I can hear that Metallica song playing in my head...

Hold my breath as I wish for death

Oh please God, wake me...

  Oh fuck it's actually playing. My eyes can't focus, but I can hear voices coming from my left, where the lights and music are. I can tell now that I'm doubled over on some concrete steps, and my nose is all clogged. Each time I try breathe through it, it makes this whistling sound and I get fuck all air. Warm copper dribbles into my mouth from fuck knows where. I try to get up, but there's a stabbing pain in my guts and I go ‘Fuck!’ and curl back over.

  The voices stop and I can hear footsteps coming towards me, then I feel another kind of pain as a boot drives into my ribs, followed by one into my back, at the kidneys, then another to my guts. I don't yell this time. I just grit my teeth and curl up, listening to the music as everything gets less and less clear...

Now the world is gone, I'm just one

Oh God help me

Hold my breath as I wish for death

Oh please God, help me...

Ned Devlin

The mushroom and the sunflower continue to stand perfectly still (though i understand this to be subject to change when the urge strikes), so i head back over to the other channel to see what’s going on there. For a bit it’s sort of like when You scribble a pen around a page to get the ink flowing, just like scratching around till the shapes and Legends start leaking out, but then it gets going: Return to the Aphotic Zone, it reckons. None of the Words are new though, they’re just bits of old sound and matter all hacked up and bloody, older than their own corpses. I guess Life is just all the stuff that Death forgets.

  So then i’m just sort of floating along this empty factory street in the purple dark, through the railroad tracks wondering where to go next, looking for Total Recall but finding only a smiling tiger and a snake telling lies about love. The wind brings butterflies and a few basic facts, but i assume this is just the smattering of tongues from that other channel i wasted so much Time in with my peepers wide open, staring about out there. Really, boat cars are just a natural part of their environment, illuminating the still land of Time until it’s all drained of Brilliance.

  The channel’s already a little different now, little bits of Static and ancient Stories leaking through - harmless, really, though it is quite unpleasant to witness Words doing what i only ever knew people to do, especially when the wrong Book is padlocked and the wrong one is open with nothing human inside (excuse the blood). For just a second i’m wondering who could be writing the Song, but it’s only really coming through in waves, climbing through the tides, trying to penetrate the whining flutes and maddening drums of the winter Midnight that keeps the city dreaming under the sea.

  Drifting this way and that, through the backyard above the Earth, i hear this songbird singing near me, telling me to carry on, claiming to be my father, promising me some Time to rest down the line - a whole lot of Nonsense, really, until: ‘You know sometimes Words have two Meanings,’ which has me looking back over the whole Song (just to make sure i’m not dreaming) but then i see my shadow fly across the clouds and, just beyond the Illusion, glimpse a nearby factory. I flash through the roof of the Night, past the Japanese dragon with the witch’s eyebrows and Devil’s horns that remind me of Games and like these laughing daisy chains that poison the body at a cellular level: A Dark Gift indeed.

  From there it’s off along the halls past all the locked metal vaults that leak ghoulish mists out from the Earth’s core, shielded by dense jungles and mountains and seeping out as Memories through the cloistered rooms, then from the park to the shitlab to the Disarray to the Hall of Science to the bridge with the ragged leer, following the trail of Tragedy & Dissolution, out the fire escape and into the hungry veins of the Grandfather Night. I park up beside the ocean to illuminate the still land under the Moon, bigger and bluer than i ever thought it could be. Ship smoke gyres and gimbles up above the sea, moving into the Universe, looking for the ancient heavenly connection to the Freedom of wandering (the forceful entry of the Spirit into an already inhabited body, i think). When it gets like this, the Story itself can remember what it was like to photosynthesise. In that sense, i suppose Death does hold on to certain Memories.

  Things are getting still again now, just the Blackness of the sea that pulsates beyond the stars, my favourite kind of Blank. After a couple of blinks into the white room, i squeeze shut into Black since i don't seem to be missing out on much on that other channel. The mushroom and the sunflower are still standing perfectly still, so i carry on flipping through the channels while still i can.

Stan Richards

Every step is like another boot to the ribs. There's a bruise there for sure, maybe even a break. My nose is completely blocked with all the dried blood, so my mouth is just hanging open as I limp along Holland street hunched over like a troll, leaking blood and drool onto my jacket. I stop by the skatepark and wash my bloody hands and face in the water fountain, picking all the blood and snot out of my nose. I rinse out my hair, disgusted to find that the sticky substance is monster, not blood. I shake off like a dog, then go for a quick cruise around the park in the dark and kinda cheer up a bit, but as soon as I try pop an ollie out of the end of the snakerun there's a fuckin' stabbing pain in my lower back that goes all the way around past my hips down to my knee. Prolly another bruise. More damage to the human meat tree. I leave the park and head down towards Horrucks, pushing slow and careful, wincing whenever I push a bit too hard. Across the road, there's a single light on in the apartment block on the second story. I see a figure standing there watching me. She waves at me and I get a nauseating wave of déjà vu and look at the pavement and keep pushing.

  I'm heading back to the shitlab. I got a text from Collin before saying ‘Who's awake.’ Like a group text, I guess. Just after some company. Usually, I'd tell the cunt to fuck off. But he's had a fucked up night and I've had a fucked up night and we're both all fucked up so, in a way, he's just the cunt I wanna see. I feel sorta close to him, after that shit with Jordan and them... But I gotta admit, the cunt's still an enigma to me. Who knows what the fuck's going on in that head.

  I get there and he's awake on his own, sitting in that same chair. His left eye's totally swollen over and bruised, and he's got a fat lip that makes him look inbred. We look at each other for a moment, then he cracks up laughing. I'm confused till I remember that my face is all fucked up too, and I let myself have a little laugh with him.

  ‘Have a seat,’ he goes, getting up. ‘I'll get you a whiskey. You look like you could do with one.’

  He's right about that, a whiskey would be a fucking treat. I sit down on the couch slow and crotchety, wincing a little as I pass the weight of my body onto my bruised ass. While he's in the kitchen, I mentally scan my body to figure out where the damage is, and conclude that it's all fucked and just forget about it.

  Collin comes back in and hands me a wine glass full of whiskey and sits back in the armchair. I notice his glass has a straw in it and can't help but smile a little. He matches it with a subtle smile of his own and goes ‘So,’ pointing to his black and purple face, ‘discuss.’

  I take a swig of whiskey that stabs my cut lip but burns down into my chest real good. ‘I think you know,’ I say, starting to dislike the cunt again pretty quickly.

  ‘Because I'm boning Lucy?’

  My hand automatically tenses around the wine glass, but I inhale deeply and stay calm. I'm not gonna let the cunt get me going again. I'm not playing his games.

  ‘Well, I think you deserve a punch for that. Some fucking friend you are,’ I say, looking him in his visible eye.

  ‘Friend?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He gives me a smile that contorts his face into a deformed mess.

  I shake my head and say ‘Why do you do this shit? What the fuck goes through your head?’ before pausing, licking my swollen, seeping lip, and adding ‘And we both know I'm not talking about Lucy.’

  ‘Do what? Storm into my-’ he pauses and his smile grows, contorting his hideous face even more, ‘friend's house and beat the shit out of him for giving his girl what he couldn't? Well I don't know Stan, I guess I'm just a brainless caveman.’

  I can feel something building inside me, but I compose myself, focusing on the coppery taste of blood.

  ‘Don't play dumb cunt,’ I say calmly, trying to read his reaction. His face is too fucked to make out any kind of expression, so I just keep going. ‘What the fuck are you actually tryna do? You really think you're changing the world by convincing a bunch of cunts who can't think for themselves to sit around tripping all day? I fuckin' know you don't. You're not stupid. You're just an asshole.’

  ‘Thanks, Stan. Means a lot.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  He sniggers a bit, before knocking back the rest of his glass without the straw, dribbling a little down his chin. I do the same, then say ‘You know what I think? I think you're a weak, bitch ass motherfucker whose only skill is-’ but stop because he's got up and walked out of the room with both glasses.

  ‘Keep going, I'm just in here.’

  I stop to remember what I'm getting at, then go ‘I think you're a small, weak cunt whose only skill is manipulating vulnerable minds. You're an insecure piece of shit and you feel the need to prove yourself better than others by making sure they stay beneath you. You act like there's some point to it all, like you're tryna lead them somewhere better. But really you're just tryna control everyone 'cause you know you're above them. You're a fuckin' sadist. You're the worst kind of human. And even that’s too much of a compliment. You’re a fucking monster.’

  He walks back in with a glass of whiskey each, puts them on the coffee table and looks down at me with an expression I can't read at all. Then he sits down, leans forwards with his elbows on his knees, exhales, and goes ‘Fuck, Stan. Everything you just said was so fucking dumb that I don't even know where to start. Better? Above? Beneath? Have you not learned anything from all this shit we've been through? What do you even mean by better?’

  ‘Well, you're not better. Or above. You're right about that. But you know shit the others don't and you use it to fuck everything up in your favour. You just wreck everything around you so you can make it all again how you want it. That's why you hang out with mixed up motherfuckers like Robbie and Ned. You just wanna wall yourself off in this little world where you're in charge and everyone else is beneath you. Power tripping cunt.’

  He frowns, bringing a strange kind of symmetry to his scarred face. ‘Fuck's sake, Stan. What you're trying to say is vague, delusional, and paranoid. There is no better or worse when it comes to people and the shit we do. We've evolved beyond simple hierarchies. I think I'm better because I know shit they don't? What the fuck does that even mean? I know something? Do I understand it? Do I make use of it? Does it affect me in any way? Does it stop me knowing something else that's equally valid? Does it stop me from doing anything? Does it hurt me? Does it fucking haunt me at night? And what the fuck are you even accusing me of knowing? If you stop and just fucking think about what you're saying, you'll see that you're using the same pissed off, fucked up logic that's been losing you friends for as long as I've known you. Is it that fucking hard to just think something through before you start making these wild, borderline schizophrenic accusations? Sort your fucking head out and stop trying to dump your shitty issues on everyone else.’

  He's kinda got me vexed now. He's a sharp little fucker, I gotta say. But there's no time for that. I know what he's up to.

  ‘Fuck off cunt. Don't go dissecting my words. You think you're above everyone around you. It's not that hard to-’

  ‘Fuck, Stan, there it is again. Above. That's the problem with self-hating bastards like you. Always obsessing over who's better than who, always imagining up these stupid fucking hierarchies to try and climb just to feel good about something. That's what I'm trying to tell you. There is no hierarchy. There is no best way to be. It's all fucking futile, and you're trying desperately to hide from that fact. This whole above below shit is all in your head. You've imagined up this ladder where I'm above you just so you can knock me down and feel like you've accomplished something. But you won't. Every time you think you understand any kind of social or intellectual hierarchy, every time you find your way up or down any kind of delusional ladder, you'll have a new perspective on it and have to start all over - 'cause it's all in your fucking head. It's your head you need to sort out. It's not what you're looking at that's fucked up - it's what you're looking with. Everyone you know is gonna die without changing shit, and is just filling their short time on this planet with trivial bullshit to kid themselves they're actually doing something. It's time you faced that simple fact.’

  He takes a sip, and I'm raising my voice now, ‘You're all shit, cunt. I see right through you. You, out of anyone I know, thinks they're the best. And you, out of anyone I know, thinks he's gonna change the world. You're just tryna logic me into-’

  ‘Fuck, Stan, fucking listen. There is no best, there is no right way to do things, there is no fucking absolutes at all and you need to stop trying to look for them 'cause they're just not fucking there. Try. Make me eat my words, right now. Actually fucking try to think of what it means to be the best, to be great, what we should all be going for... There's nothing. Everything you could possibly achieve or believe is only gonna make you achieve and believe less of something else. What do you think is the best? What's the be all and end all of how one should do their shit? What's going on at the top? What's the highest possible attainment?’

  He's actually got me thinking now. As usual, the cunt's derailed the whole argument by making an interesting point. That's just his game, though. He's not going change what I think about him by winning a conversation... But I might as well play it his way. I know I can kick his ass if shit gets physical. But that's not why I'm here. Though why I am here still escapes me...

  ‘Well, people all say it differently... But, like when people say what would Jesus do...’ I say, which sounds pretty dumb now that I've said it.

  ‘What would Jesus do?’ he goes, and I fuckin' wish I didn't bother already. ‘Jesus would probably get himself nailed to a fucking cross. That's what Jesus would do. Maybe turn some water into wine or some shit. You gonna do that? That what you want?’

  ‘Yeah, well... You're still a cunt.’

  He laughs a little, then leans back into his seat. I take a decent gulp of whiskey and relax a little too. I'm actually feeling pretty good now, even though Collin's won his stupid little debate. He's a big thinker, Collin. He knows words are just words and they don't make the man. Like me. We're not really that different... We both know he's just fending off the real issue. He knows I know that. I know he knows I know that. We know what we know. I don’t need to tell him and he doesn’t need to tell me. He’s just amusing himself. He’s flexing his brain. Playing with his favourite toys. We both know what it all means. This is a gentleman's battle.

  After a long, strangely comfortable silence, Collin catches me grinning at him as he sips whiskey through his straw. He looks me in the eye and blows some bubbles in his glass and I can't help but laugh a little. He lets the silence ring for a moment before setting his whiskey on the table and saying ‘So. What happened to you? You mouth off to the Straightedges or something?’

  ‘Yeah... I had some shrooms today, if you haven't figured out already. Called them out on being too pussy to have a trip.’

  He laughs and shakes his head. In spite of myself, I give him a warm smile. It kind of feels like old times, though it really wasn't even all that long ago... That brief but significant time when we were friends, bonding over our contempt for meatheads, him somehow blowing my mind and filling me with disgust at the same time. I can't believe I actually took on the Straightedge mentality. What the fuck was that about?

  ‘Fuck, I'd love to see them on a trip,’ he goes.

  I laugh and put on Lance’s gorilla voice. ‘Yo, Benji. This is fucked bro. Usually I can handle anything. Just figure out what needs to be punched and punch it. But now I don’t know what to punch.’

  Collin's cracking up now and goes ‘Bitch, I just had like a spiritual experience. I had to give an abstract concept the bash!’ and I'm laughing pretty hard too now. It's starting to hurt my ribs. I try to settle it down but it's like being tickled. My jaw's aching, but the suffocating laughter's taken me over, like a fucking seizure or something. It's been so long since I laughed like this, since I truly laughed at all. Feels like being stoned again...

  Hang on.

  My laughter turns to ice and freezes my whole body. I close my eyes to check on it. Fuck. There's those fucking patterns, like windows media player. That humming nausea in my fingers and toes...

  Mushrooms?

  No. They're long gone. 

  This is the beginning of something. I'm coming up.

  Oh shit.

  What the fuck...

  ‘What the fuck?’ I say, narrowing my eyes at Collin. He's not laughing anymore, but he's still smiling. A cold, hideous, smashed up, hate-filled, sociopathic, reptilian fucking snare of a smile.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What the fuck have you done to me?’

  I can feel the sweaty palms and the panic creeping up on me again, but I settle my mind, breathing slowly and deeply. After what I've been through today on shrooms, I can ride this out. I can handle another shroom trip... But if it's not shrooms... Fuck it. I'll stand my ground here. I can handle whatever the fuck my mind throws at me.

  ‘It's after three, you're probably just getting tired. We should probably call it in,’ he says, face completely neutral behind sacks of tissue damage.

  ‘Fuck off. I know your game. I'm not gonna go to bed and freak out all night. I'm staying right here.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ he shrugs. ‘I don't know what you're talking about, but whatever. We can have a sleepover if you want. Hey, we could even get Lucy over. Hang out like old times.’

  I don't wanna let the cunt know he's got to me, so I calmly say ‘So what have you fed me then?’ staring into him. My peripherals have started to get real busy, sort of like a mild strobe light coming from behind me. But whatever I focus my eyes on is still pretty normal, maybe a little brighter than usual. My body doesn't hurt anymore though. I can still feel the damage, but it feels kind of detached now. Like remembering pain.

  ‘It's whiskey. I think I mentioned that.’

  Smug cunt. Sick motherfucker. He can see I'm unravelling. I'm an open book to him. But I'm just going to have to ride this out. Enjoy it. I'm sitting here, tripping on fuck-knows-what, with the most twisted, evil, sadistic fuck I know. But I'm done being scared. If I so much as entertain the thought that I'm going mad, this cunt's face is going to be a fucking thing to behold... It’s not where I want this to go, but I’m ready for it.

  After a minute or so of tense silence, Collin picks up a pack of cigarettes from the coffee table and takes two out.

  ‘Smoke?’ he holds one out to me.

  Something grim happens inside me. I get up, say ‘Fuck you,’ and in one motion, throw my half-full glass at him and walk towards the door. I hear the sound of glass smashing behind me, and maybe a light chuckle from Collin, as I grab my board and get the fuck away from him.

  I get outside and I'm enveloped by this wave of energy as soon as the cold air touches my skin. I can't believe I fell for that cunt's shit again. Fucker. I get on my board and start pushing into the night, tripping balls, with no idea what the fuck I'm gonna do while this nightmare runs its course.

Lucy Winters

It’s almost four in the morning and I’m heading up through the woods to Lookout Point with a skinny joint I rolled from Robbie’s stash, weed and mugwort. The air is cold and slightly damp and everything is in soft focus from the mist. I tried to sleep earlier, but I spent so long rolling around, getting more and more awake, that I decided I needed to go for a walk.

  When I got to Mum's earlier tonight, that horrible stuff we snorted at Collin's was finally wearing off. I thought it was going to be just like dexies or pills or something, something to wake me up and make me feel good. But I was way off. It felt like glass shards going up my nose, and the pain settled in for the whole ride, scratching around behind my face every time I breathed in. The burn gradually turned into this gross feeling like nuclear mucus that oozed from my nose down the back of my throat, leaving a chemical taste that three glasses of whiskey, two joints, a bong, and a cup of coffee have hardly even put a dent in. The sensation in the back of my throat never really left. It just spread itself thin all the way through my body, tensing all my muscles and thoughts, making it impossible to be comfortable, making everything feel like insects and being stuck in tight places. The whole time, all I could think about was all the little things in my life that needed to be fixed, all the unconnected dots and things I'd forgotten to finish or put away properly. I could see it all so clear, too clear, but I was too scatterbrained to do anything about it. I had to leave Collin's. That stuff made him scary. Michael too.

  It ended up taking me hours to get to Mum’s. That strange powder scrambled my memory and I ended up on the wrong bus, the one that takes me to Dad’s, so I got off at the bus stop at Holland Street. I had cold sweat all down my back, so I tried to take my off polyprop singlet from underneath my dress and everything got all mixed up, my arms and my hair and Michael’s scary smile and all these squid tentacles writhing through the sky, and I ended up lying on the damp grass behind the bus stop for ages, unable to get back up, thoughts all hazy like dreams, like it was when I was a kid. I was looking for cartoons in the library as a little girl when I found a book with strange, grisly lizards wearing suits all splattered around a bar. It was called Gonzo Art, and I opened it thinking it was about The Muppets. The images inside paralysed me with a fear I’d never felt before, an icy, whispering terror that made me sob tearlessly and wonder if I really knew anything at all. But I couldn’t stop reading. I felt somehow that to tear myself away from the book would be to face an even greater, unseen terror, to invite it into my life and essence. I sat there on the floor of the library, shivering, staring at the screaming, splattered images, and felt for the first time in my life like I was truly alone. I thought of Sam and Mum and my friends from school and saw that we all lived in different universes and our connections lasted just until we walked away from each other. When Dad came and picked me up, I sulked for days and refused to tell him what was wrong. Even after I forgot about it, the loneliness followed me around. Only once I started hanging out with Ned, Robbie, and Collin did it start to fade. But even then I could feel it breathing on my neck, and I knew the four of us needed to stick together. Because they felt it too. It was terrifying to relive such a disturbing experience, but even more terrifying was that, up until that moment lying in a tangle of tentacles behind the Holland Street bus stop, I had completely forgotten what now seems to be one of the most important moments of my life.

  The dream faded away and I was gasping and panting for air as I treaded the strange waters, only to be sucked back down into the writhing tentacles and forgotten dreams. The mass of appendages zapped electricity at each other, creating flashes of memories and sensations and images, all the things I'd seen and felt, from the blurred memories of childhood to the smell of the damp grass, all entwined in a web of connections, following the voiceless guide of someone who understood. Ned's childlike laughter permeated the electric flashes as they echoed throughout the darkness and I saw and understood what Ned was trying to say all along, how coincidences are where the roots of the mind and the universe cross over underground and overhead, creating enormous patterns of teeming organic life all the way down into the core of the Earth, connecting through electrical zaps to the centre of all the moons and planets and stars, pulses of life connecting the tendrils to one another through the imagination, like the constellations in the sky. Thunder and lightning roared through the depths, and I saw that all the things I see and touch and hear, all the memories, dreams, and illusions, are grown into reality by the violent electrical conversations of these tentacles as they try and recreate the patterns of the stars above. Exhausted, I let go and floated through the Tentacles of Creation and let the sounds and imagery brush past me. Everything got stranger and stranger as I floated on, past sight and sound, past myself, past the world, and Ned's joyous laughter slowly turned into the cackling datura madness that had frightened me last night. The laughter climaxed in the hissing exhalation of the braking bus, and I woke with a shock on the grass behind the Holland Street bus stop all tangled up in my singlet with a thudding heart and cold, salty lips. Then I finally got on the bus to Mum’s.

  When I sat down, all the connections snapped like a startled torpedo bug and left me muddled up and squirming in my seat. I tried to escape the group alienation by staring out the window at the scenery through my reflection, but it just made the sensation of movement too intense to handle. My stomach felt like it was bucking inside me, but I held on as long as I could. I ended up getting off at the maize fields just past Miller Street near the coast when the feelings got too much.

  I didn't end up spewing. Everything started to feel better once I was walking, but the nausea sprung whenever I tried to figure out what I was doing. I wandered barefoot like a scared zombie along the coast towards Mum's, my body tense with weird energy but my mind feeling like it could faint at any second or just give up and throw itself to total animal madness. The roaring of the tide was both soothing and disorienting, and one particularly loud crash that followed a long, dizzying silence knocked me off my feet completely.

  As I stumbled sandy, wet, and confused, a group of bearish guys wandering around drinking surrounded me and asked if I was okay. I struggled to keep my balance looking up at them, as they all seemed to stretch up infinitely into the pulsing white sky. One of them asked me again if I was okay, and I went into the kangaroo pocket at the front of my dress to find it for them, confused by the strange vertigo. As I dug through my pocket I realised that what I was doing made no sense and I was wet and sweaty and I had nowhere to call home and I still had one of my arms in my polyprop and just ran away without thinking, running towards the only salvation I knew. I scrambled up the sandy grass hillside and into the trees, and kept running deeper into the forest until I made it to a marsh I couldn't cross. Panting and sweating, I lay down on the damp earth and closed my eyes, hoping to go back to where I was behind the Holland Street bus stop where everything made sense, but all I found was endless strange dreams. I stepped up onto the sidewalk and it gave way from underneath me and I fell into a seemingly endless echo of Ned's laughter, until I reached a sensation of landing with a thump and my body jerked into the forest, sending the creatures that had gathered around my vacant body scattering off in all directions. The sound of amphibious footsteps scurrying into the water cleared my head and I got up and bushwhacked fearlessly straight to Mum's through the trees and vines. I didn't feel alone until I left the forest.

  I almost cried when I saw Mum. She had to get out of bed to let me in, and she looked like she'd aged about ten years since I saw her last. Her eyes were all murky and they had started to droop at the sides a bit, giving her a different sort of squint than the one she used to have. I tried to picture what she looked like before, but all I could bring to mind was what I saw in front of me. The sharp line of completely grey regrowth, way different than the bleached blonde tips at the end, stopped me from blaming the changes on my imagination.

  When I tried to sort out what I wanted to say to her everything jumped into my mind at once, and whenever I managed to put a sentence together in my head it seemed like the wrong thing to say by the time I opened my mouth. In the end, we both decided we should talk in the morning. She'd already taken her sleeping pills, and I was filthy, wet, and still tripped out, which I hid with a big yawning tired act. Mum drifted back to bed without saying goodnight and I went straight to my room.

  Well, my old room. I'm not sure what to call it now.

  The tears that never came curdled into a hollow chill when I switched the light on in my old bedroom. The mosaic carpet of clothes was gone, as well as the blanket I'd put under my desk to stop me getting paint on the floor. Even the sea green rug that had been long buried under the mess had vanished, revealing a pristine, tan brown carpet I can only guess was there all along.

  I stood in shock for a few minutes, trying to conjure up memories of my old bedroom, but they too were vague and distorted in the gallery of mushroom tainted imagery. Eventually, I switched the light off and went to bed, which felt much colder and stiffer than I remembered. I tried to relax my body and clear my head, but the grieving for my old room, my old home, and maybe even my old life, still sat cold and wet in my guts. I tossed and turned so furiously that I started overheating, and when I threw the blanket onto the floor and lay there naked, still covered in dirt and sand with leaves in my hair, panting at the ceiling and wishing for something I couldn’t even picture, I knew I had to go.

It's real windy up here, so I crouch in the corner of the guard rail facing away from the view to light the joint. After a few puffs to get it going, I climb onto the damp wooden guardrail to smoke it, dangling my feet over the edge that overlooks the intersection joining Linsdale Street and the Botanicals. I drum out a tune on the fence with my feet which I imagine to be like the Pink Floyd song about going into the sun, even though I know it’s not.

  The weed hits me super fast, melting down all the jagged edges of my thoughts, evaporating the tension that had been holding my muscles rigid all night. The pressure rises from me and vanishes into the air, leaving me with a drifting lightness that follows my mind as it wanders around my body.

  I take another puff, a deeper, fuller toke, and breathe out, watching the lights of the city get slowly clearer as the smoke fades. I feel a pleasant shudder as I try to contemplate the depths of the stark navy sky. The clouds are still mostly black, but there's this faint but deep ochre glow growing on their undersides, and the clouds themselves fade into the darkness of the sky so quietly that I can't make out any boundaries between them. There's still a few stars out, and I can just see the silver whisper of the moon through the clouds, but the first breath of daylight is just starting to fade it all away.

  The parallel lines that make up the city remind me of all the sausage dogs and make me smile. I stretch my arms out to my sides like angel wings and there's this feeling like snapping a bundle of twigs in the middle of my chest. I click my neck from side to side and roll my shoulders before letting my head and arms droop in a flaccid stretch. I hum tunelessly through my smile, watching the winds make all the strands of hair dance in front of my eyes.

  I part my hair just enough to have another toke. The wind just feels nice and tingly on my bare arms now, and the crisp morning cold is uplifting, making my thoughts sing like they're there for fun now, not to try sort everything out. The notion brings Robbie to mind for some reason, but I'm not sure why. I let the thought of him form and fade by its own accord, and it gives way to an image of Collin, who waits for me on the grass as I emerge from the river. I lie spread eagle on the grass, and he dumps a basket of sheets, fresh and warm from the drier, on top of my wet, naked body, filling it with a warm, liquid glow so tangible that I can feel it all the way from on top of the fence at Lookout Point.

  Vague sounds of early traffic rise from below. I flick my hair out of my eyes and finish the joint with one last puff that makes me smile and cough. I put the roach next to me on the fence for whoever comes here next, but a gust of wind lifts it playfully into the air. My eyes follow it as it shrinks to a speck, down to the streets which are illuminated by the golden sunrise more than the streetlights now, and I spot Stan on his skateboard, pushing along Oldham Road. My smile grows into a noiseless laugh as my eyes follow him along the road and into the silence. It doesn't even make me think about him or us or anything like that, even though I can tell a part of me wants to. I just watch him. Appreciate him. It doesn't even feel like I'm looking at someone I know, or even like I'm looking at a person at all. It's just like another part of the morning, like the sounds and the birds, the blazing gold and pink that sets the clouds on fire . . . Just there, happening. Something natural. One of Mother Nature's displays.

  He turns down onto Witham, towards town, and disappears behind the apartment blocks out of my sight. I wrap my arms around myself laughing, even though I'm not sure what it's about. I start to wonder what Stan could be doing, skating through the sunrise, but decide I've probably answered my own question and just let myself forget everything. I'm ready for bed now, I think.

  I slide off the fence and start walking towards home, through the trees instead of down the track. My walk turns into a little dance, feeling like a little girl again, like all there is to think about is the sunlight filling the tree's veins and all the little creatures of the forest waking up and the tingles in my fingertips as I twirl around.

  I'm going to rest well, at last. It's been a crazy, freaky, horrible, wonderful, beautiful trip. And tomorrow's a whole other day. I can't wait.

02/08/2005

Levels of psychedelia-

The elementary level of tripping, a still-functional intoxication, takes one or two handfuls of fresh shrooms to attain:

-The visual apparatus no longer focuses on absorbing information and arranging it in terms of what it means to you and what it stands for. Instead, the mind perceives its surroundings with purity, seeing with the eyes of a newborn. The angry face of a predator, for example, is seen as an object of beauty, or simply a curiosity, rather than a warning about potential actions. Clinging to its symbolic meaning, that of potential danger, would have saved my aching jaw last night. Seeing it as it was created feelings of intense appreciation and nostalgia.

-Tracers follow movement but still imitate the original image in colour and form. This is no more than an echo or delay in the perceptual processes. Or, perhaps, one simply perceives movement not as a process but as another dimension of matter. Thus, the tracers are simply an unfiltered perception of motion as a constant rather than an event, for an object only truly exists in action, at the very least, on a sub-atomic level.

-Unfiltered perception animates textures; textures appear to be mirrored intricately and symmetrically across surfaces; the apophenia of the psychedelic perception, initially creating abstract forms that, when given focus and attention, form scenes and visual 'music'. This can be scried for inner-knowledge. These shapes and patterns are often, at this level, visually two-dimensional. These usually have the appearance of existing upon a flat screen over top of the object, and are presumably a reflection of one's internal landscape, rather than a vision of the inner-workings of the object. With eyes closed, these can take on the complexity of Level Two visuals.

-The visual aspect of a mushroom trip at this level is an indulgence, a spiritual or intellectual hedonism.

-At this level of intoxication, the thinking ranges from a lofty, daydreamy kind of awareness to a sharpened, penetrating cacophony of analysis of the self and universe. Both ends of the spectrum are the states of mind most vulnerable to delusions and paranoid ideas, though the analytical perspective lends itself to more complex, conspiratorial webs of illusions.

-Ideas become visible. They also gain an un-ignorable emotional aspect. Thinking and feeling are experienced as one; any distinction between the two is understood to be an artificial construct.

-Memories of sequential things such as conversational passage or phone numbers are impaired, but one can examine once unattainable memories as if they are three-dimensional events.

-The very core of the process of thinking undergoes the most dramatic and valuable change. The very expressing or even conscious examining of trip-thoughts alters their content; if one is to dwell on a thought for more than an instant, this thought will branch out into a multitude of related thoughts, often linked by fragile and ephemeral connections. These thoughts branch off in a similar manner until one is entertaining many tangents simultaneously, quickly becoming too complicated to describe - a web of concepts. It becomes impossible to do anything other than follow the tangents inwards - since communicating these insights breaks the fragile logical connections, resulting in a psychotic barrage of concepts, often confusing the listener. However, if one is to follow these trains of thought uninterrupted, they will find them linking up to the original thought, often with a profound insight. The brain then discards all of the excess mental bridges, leaving one with a vague conclusion with not a clue how they reached it; though I suspect the discarded appendages remain lodged in the depths somewhere.

-The be-mushroomed mind is aware of the network of thoughts that interact ‘behind the scenes'; the thoughts behind the thoughts, the embryonic thoughts that spawn conscious thoughts. In following these thoughts around the mind, one treks ever closer to the fertile well of pure inspiration that creates thoughts out of primal mental chaos.

-I suspect the physical world works in a similar manner.

-Tactile experience enhancement: One's sense of touch becomes enhanced to the point of simultaneous awareness of all input, from the sensations of all that surrounds them - the seat, the air, clothes, hair, etc - to the awareness of automatic physiological processes such as breathing, blinking, heart-beat, and even the feeling of blood traveling through one's veins. 

-Intense euphoria or dysphoria may be present. Rather than bringing about a specific emotional state, this level of tripping amplifies the internal emotional landscape of the user - often taking into account the feel of the days or weeks leading up to the experience. A happy and stable user can often find themselves incapacitated by intense euphoria; an anxious, uncomfortable user may find themselves plagued with paranoia and self-loathing.

-One becomes hyper-aware of all sounds with a supernatural ability to mentally isolate the multiple layers of sound and analyse them individually in terms of location, quality, and emotional impact and associations. As with the apophenia of the visual experience, at this level the user will often hear rhythms and patterns in chaotic phenomena such as rain on the roof or even one's own breathing.

-The beginnings of synaesthesia- One is more aware of their personal psychological associations of sounds, sights, smells, sensations, and concepts. This has the effect of blurring certain phenomena together, often occurring across the senses. The perceptions of auras or glows around people and objects reflect one's own deeper feelings regarding the person or object.

-It could be argued, that everything I just wrote holds true for everyday consciousness, obscured by the glow of sobriety. Like the moon in the early afternoon – at times visible, but even then often ignored.

Two or three handfuls of mushrooms takes the user to a deeper level of tripping. At this level, the user may still be functional, given they manage to keep focus on the outside world:

-Ideas flow freely in simultaneous tangents that are apparently unrelated, but are experienced as being deeply connected. A synaesthesia of the inner-world, the delicate connections between ideas can be analysed to further one's understanding of their own conditioning, covering a vast range of internal workings in one smooth, drifting motion of the mind. This can result in personal revolutions and revelations regarding not only one's mind, but also regarding one's past experiences, the experiences of others, and matters of the universe beyond the sphere of humans. The availability of previously unattainable information contained within oneself can result in prophetic thinking and premonitions – though these are usually on an infuriatingly short-term basis. At this depth of tripping, thoughts, insights, and memories can no longer be repressed, and the user has no choice but to not only examine them, but often to live or relive them.

-Synaesthesia and ego death- Boundaries between the self and outside objects and organisms can become blurred, as one becomes aware of the constant exchange of energy between themselves and their environment. At this depth, this effect is not usually pronounced enough to inhibit functioning; one simply goes about their life with a vague awareness of the constant interplay of all things, such as the electrons of the atoms making up the molecules of one's skin actively interacting with photons, absorbing some wavelengths and repelling others; this can range from a vague notion or sensation to full-blown immersion, depending on one's intellectual or experiential knowledge of various phenomena. This is a deeper level of synaesthesia, encompassing not only the senses, but one's thoughts, feelings, past, and future, and apparently that of others. Left uninterrupted, this can reach a point of pre-sensory awareness, where the senses seem to no longer be receivers of information, but rather representations of the information one is aware of intuitively.

-Visuals take on a three-dimensional quality, seeming to exist on the same plane as the user. At lower levels, this is usually contained within the peripherals; but, at high doses, or moderate doses in social and sensory isolation, these abstractions can override one's perception of their physical surroundings. One exists in a world of their own creation; or, as another interpretation, one is aware of the invisible forces they co-exist with constantly, experiencing abstract representations of things that normally have no physical form. In this way, one is still experiencing them as filtered through their own mental landscape, for things without an inherent visual existence are assigned one. By combining with synaesthetic ego death and the pre-sensory experience, these abstractions expand in significance to include all the senses as well as one's thoughts and feelings, effectively placing someone inside a three-dimensional map of their own psychocosm - the epicentre of their own consciousness which speaks in abstract symbols and all-encompassing sensations. This is often a fleeting experience, triggered at various points throughout the experience by sensations or concepts that, in a flash, branch out infinitely into a vast web of associations, uniting all of one's experience through the unconscious links between all things.

-Forget yourself, become the universe

After eating excess of four handfuls of fresh mushrooms and employing some form of sensory deprivation, one may come into contact with The Void - though it may be better to say that The Void will come into contact with you:

-At this level of tripping, awareness of specifics is sacrificed for a more powerful, all-encompassing awareness of the greater patterns and flow of the universe and beyond.

-Thoughts become fractal; what applies to one idea, thing, or force applies to the inverse, the innerverse, and the universe.

-One is inclined to give up interpreting the outside world and opts instead to recede into The Great Void, where the greatest of truths become clear, and the petty truths that govern one's life are of no interest.

-In this intangible but hyper-real plane, space has a coherent fourth dimension, and contradictory logic reconciles in sentient paradoxes of ineffable beauty or terror. The laws of cause and effect are shoved for the sake of a timeless, spaceless flow of all things. Entire ecosystems of beings, whose existence transcends objectivity, interact and grow and collapse, giving way to an infinity of others, waiting timelessly in non-existence.

-Specifics in this realm are too delicate for the brutal hand of logic – the infinite becomes the unreal, contradictions symptomatic of mental illness, the oneness of all things merely a debilitating inability to make distinctions.

-Though the end result is often just bad poetry, within this realm lies all possibilities, and by becoming acquainted with it, one may surpass their potential and exist beyond the laws of manifest existence.

-But there is much more to learn.

Perpetual Motion-

To be in perpetual motion toward that which you have no intention of reaching is to borrow from the past that which the finality of the present denies you: the discarding of complexity and clarity in favour of a hazy simplicity in accordance with the orgiastic confusion of innocence.

The more the questions find their answers, the less they reveal about the essential nature of questions not yet asked.

Useful words-

Japanese-

Yugen: The beautiful melancholy of human suffering

Wabi-sabi: Aesthetic appreciation of transience and imperfection

Boketto: Gazing vacantly

Russian-

Bespredel: Without boundary or limit

Schastye: Happiness as a part of something

Ostranenie: Encouraging others to de-familiarise the familiar

To touch The Void-

-high doses of mushrooms

-orgasm

-meditation

-high doses of dextromethorphan

-telepathy

-agony

-uninhibited focus

-absolute stillness of surroundings

-stargazing, sunset/sunrise watching (should be supplemented by one of the above)

I hope to combine several of these to allow me the clarity of mind to look around at The Void from the inside.

Take shrooms and cough syrup and jerk off to the sunrise....

Meditate under the stars with lemon and salt under my foreskin, blocking out all thoughts and sensations except the paradox of pain and ecstasy.

14/08/2005

The Ratio-

24 x 0.6180339 = 14.8328136

fye = 14.8328136 = 14.8 

14.8328136 x 0.6180339 = 9.16719548

fee = 9.16719548 = 9.2

fye x 1.6180339 = 23.9999943 = 24

fee + fye = 24.0007684 = 24

fye = 14:50

fee = 9:10

fee + fye = 24

Lyrical Symmetry Experiment 3- The Mandala Speaks

Format-

1X 2  3  4Z 4Z 3  2  1Y    4A 3  2  1C 1C 2  3  4B

1  2X 3Z 4  4  3Z 2Y 1     4  3A 2C 1  1  2C 3B 4

1  2Z 3X 4  4  3Y 2Z 1     4  3C 2A 1  1  2B 3C 4

1Z 2  3  4X 4Y 3  2  1Z    4C 3  2  1A 1B 2  3  4C

1Z 2  3  4Y 4X 2  2  1Z    4C 3  2  1B 1A 2  3  4C

1  2Z 3Y 4  4  3X 2Z 1     4  3C 2B 1  1  2A 3C 4

1  2Y 3Z 4  4  3Z 2X 1     4  3B 3C 1  1  2C 3A 4

1Y 2  3  4Z 4Z 3  2  1X    4B 3  2  1C 1C 2  3  4A

4A 3  2  1C 1C 2  3  4B   1X 2  3  4Z 4Z 3  2  1Y

4  3A 2C 1  1  2C 3B 4    1  2X 3Z 4  4  3Z 2Y 1

4  3C 2A 1  1  2B 3C 4    1  2Z 3X 4  4  3Y 2Z 1

4C 3  2  1A 1B 2  3  4C   1Z 2  3  4X 4Y 3  2  1Z

4C 3  2  1B 1A 2  3  4C   1Z 2  3  4Y 4X 3  2  1Z

4  3C 2B 1  1  2A 3C 4    1  2Z 3Y 4  4  3X 2Z 1

4  3B 2C 1  1  2C 3A 4    1  2Y 3Z 4  4  3Z 2X 1 

4B 3  2  1C 1C 2  3  4A   1Y 2  3  4Z 4Z 3  2  1X

-Dawn fire's rhapsody illuminates, hallucinate fragmented visions. Pick calamities evoking Satan's quick fix, manic ecstatic deviations

-Free motion navigates unstoppable kaleidoscopes, illustrates tonic thoughts. Spiritual vanity's sonnet lets minds frolic, impatient celebrations

-Thoughts create commotion internally, introspective sardonic primates stay remorselessly myopic. Pity those who hasten anthropic evolution

-Great movements encourage countermotion, embryonic sapien's psychic bait. Subatomic entities harmonise free songs keeping creation catatonic

-Fate's patterns manifest astronomic interwoven tapestries. Heaven's gate's idiotic comedy renders long seen visions seemingly pareidolic

-Dreams relate iconic mythology, utilising handwoven ornate words, ineffably symbolic havens of weird witty demonic scenarios

-Our toxic surrogate realities compulsively complicate notions when intellectual dictation's sonic cry for gothic sanity evaporates

-Slick verbal melodies alienate alternate perspectives before long. Captivation forever relays tricks, quick silver blaspheming insanity

-Mortality's eternal presence tricks sick creatures, ecstatic deviations gone feral. Dissidents communicate articulate poetry without ink

-Precarious sanity's phonic plea for cosmic sedation, oblivious to motion's insensate revolution, relentlessly penetrates yonic depths

-Luminously aphotic cities move with ancient narcotic formlessness. Life creates emotion, perilously serenading erotic substrate minds

-Misanthropic entities roaming free spawn within galaxies microscopic. Wait silent, unmoving - locomotion's episodic memories resound late

-Telescopic perceptions riding gone seas become secretly catastrophic. Sate desires recklessly - Periodic misdevotion manifests phallic hate

-Underwater's exotic nations watch still. Pretty psychotic transformations can frustrate harmonic shamanism. Terrestrial devotion mutates gods

-Contemplating formation's sonic core, hum chthonic gravity incantations. The yonic dissipates invisibly - geometry simulates ocean forms

-Meditation's luminous fire flicks quick flashes exposing reality. Sick lifeforms selfishly ejaculate, proliferate wherever darkness shone

19/08/2005

Lucid dreaming-

Though I continue to work through my lucid dreaming bucket list nightly, there are some areas I have decided are best left unchartered.

The idea of dream-sex seems appealing, but its execution has a disturbing effect on the psyche. The vaguely Lucy-like girl I manifested was obliging, but her blank stare and 2-D physicality made the act feel awkward and predatory. To have sex with an entity of my own creation, who had no will of her own, felt somehow unethical.

Discussing with dream-characters the nature of their existence was similarly disturbing, and has come at great personal cost.

Flying and invoking historical and superhuman figures, however, remains a pleasure I can enjoy.

The Nexus-

I’m beginning to feel like the flow of reality can be altered to an extent while in The Void, as it seems to be the nexus where all things meet and all events originate from. The fact that the train of thought while in such an environment seems to be arising unconsciously and organically, as opposed to consciously and artificially like normal, leads me to speculate that the events of the ‘future’ are simply being revealed to me as I traverse through my life, rather than unfolding before me. These insights are far too vague to be of any use as bragging rights.

Useful words-

French-

L'appel du vide: Call of the void; the urge to engage in self destructive behaviours

Detournement: Rerouting or hijacking; antagonistic appropriation

Joie: Joy, distinct from the English equivalent due to its transgressive undertones

25/08/2005

Metaprogramming rituals/experiments-

Metaprogramming ritual 1: Compulsive Disorder Obsessive

Aim: To gain control of unconscious habits; personalise minor OCD

Action: Discard tendency to do things in multiples of ten; replace with another OCD that has been decided consciously.

Metaprogramming ritual 2: Dopamine invocation

Aim: Gradually dislodge the psychosomatic aspects of Dextroamphetamine stimulation with the physical act of taking the drug and attach it to other parts of the ritual

Action:

Step one- Crush Dextroamphetamine pills between hard surface and piece of paper with sigil written on it. Dose should gradually be decreased.

Step two- Dissolve one Berocca in glass of water and drink.

Step three- Lie down on floor and listen to Gamma-frequency binaural beats through headphones. Meditate upon the spread of dopaminergic stimulation from the central nervous system to the peripheral limbs.

Step four- When lying motionless becomes unpleasant, place the sigil on the floor; pace and nature of the ritual is dictated by how faded with residue the sigil has become.

Step five- Do a certain number of push-ups while staring at the pulsing sigil. The number of push-ups done should increase by at least five each time in order to reach the necessary state of gnostic exhaustion to imprint the sigil upon the sub-conscious. In accordance with Metaprogramming ritual 1, this number should not be a multiple of ten.

Step six- Once the amount of Dextroamphetamine used has dwindled to threshold-doses, the dopaminergic stimulation will have hopefully become entwined with the Berocca, binaural beats, push-ups, and sigil. Eventually, visualising the sigil should be enough to bring about at least the psychosomatic effects of Dextroamphetamine.

Metaprogramming ritual 3: The psychic terrarium

Aim: To find order within the seemingly chaotic actions of the mind.

Action: Label and divide distinct mental phenomena. Observe how mental phenomena behave differently when labelled. Observe how mental phenomena interact; do un-labelled mental constructs exhibit xenophobia toward labelled mental constructs or vice-versa? Observe how observation changes the behaviour of mental constructs. Observe observation. Develop a functional schizophrenia that is able to be harnessed. Most importantly: Develop a reliable method of resuming normal functioning without residual schizophrenia.

29/08/2005

Changes-

Despite Collin’s incessant questioning, Ned has managed to avoid illuminating any of the mysteries surrounding the powerful hallucinogen datura.

After witnessing its effects on Ned – both the acute intoxication and the subtler but more troubling after-effects – Lucy and I have both agreed to leave the plant alone. We have all seen a change in Ned since he returned from hospital; it is obscure and impossible to define, but it cannot be denied. That impish smile that had once been a constant in our lives, that strange silent laugh at the absurdity of it all, has now become a cause for alarm. His idiosyncratic sense of humour has morphed from understated and profound into something sinister, something beyond our reach.

Perhaps even more unsettling is the change in Collin. As if in some bizarre competition with Ned, Collin’s behaviour has become similarly erratic, his words similarly cryptic. It now feels as if there are secrets within the house; the openness that psychedelics had created between the four of us seems to have been stolen away by this strange plant.

These changes begin to make sense when viewed within the context of a transitional period: The change of season. Winter is over; as is mushroom season. Admittedly, this has been difficult for all of us as we search for a new sacrament. First, there was a rather ghastly week with Dextromethorphan as our teacher, followed by even darker times under the guidance of Cyclizine; but it didn’t take long for Collin to find us a reliable source of LSD. While Lucy and I both enjoy the effects of LSD, neither of us felt that it was an adequate replacement for our beloved Psilocybin. It was Ned, of all people, who provided us with the solution, when he arrived home one day with a San Pedro cactus, and showed us how to turn six feet of succulent into one litre of horrible tasting slime which, when consumed, seems to replicate the most desirable effects of both LSD and Psilocybin.

And so Lucy and I have found our new plant teacher: Mescaline; or ‘The Antidote’, to borrow Ned’s mysterious description.

Collin, however, was not satisfied. After sharing his first experience with us, he dismissed Mescaline as an indulgent pseudo-sacrament – though a while later he returned home from an unexplained two-day absence and admitted that Mescaline was ‘Kind of cool if you mix it with a tray of Cyclizine.’

It is clear that Collin is after something more; even a night spent in hallucinogenic catatonia after chugging two bottles of DXM under the influence of LSD seemed only to stoke his fire.

Yesterday, Lucy informed me that Collin had been trying to talk her into taking datura with him. To make sure this never manifests, I have started on a new project.

In two-to-seven working days, I should receive a package containing five hundred grams of Mimosa Hostillis rootbark.

We need a plant teacher we can all enjoy.

Datura, The Narcotic Perfume-

The mysteries of datura are like a gift that keeps on giving.... Or a nightmare that never ends.

Unlike shrooms and cactus, with their history of spiritual, religious and shamanic use, the tale of datura is steeped in witchcraft, sorcery, and evil.

The plant seems to house a wily, feminine spirit – that which was invoked by the witches of the middle ages. It’s an energy summoned from the ancient depths of elemental earth that hint at the underworld; the Earth Mother force, repressed by the patriarchy and grown evil and insane in the prison on the planet’s most unreachable dreams. With it, one may experience the collective nightmare of all life.

01/09/2005

Divination-

There is a feeling I get when I’m about to trip, even if I don’t realise that I'm about to be tripping. It’s a feeling in my stomach much like that of the nausea experienced when shrooms first take effect. I usually dismiss it or attribute it to ill physical health. What I now believe happens is that the tripping mind is in superposition with all of space and all of time. While tripping, I think back to earlier self, who was unaware of the adventure about to unfold. The tripping mind, being far less bound by time and space, quantumly entangles with the pre-tripping mind, causing the unexplained, unnerving feelings. The future mind has effectively altered the present mind in this case, creating the feeling to look back upon in the future, simultaneously recalling the feeling as a memory and creating the feeling by adding it to the memory. This brings to my mind many questions about the nature of cause and effect which I will have to look into.

03/09/2005

Spirit number-

Your spirit number is roughly the difference between your actual levels of alienation and your self-perceived levels of alienation.

Is it possible to have different levels of alienation and self-diagnosed alienation?

The answer, of course, depends on your spirit number.

Fill in the blank:

The ________ of black is not white

• The sentence is incorrect, but the answer to the correct sentence is ‘opposite’

• ‘Opposite’

• ‘Colour’

• I do not understand the question

• ‘Essence’

• ‘Sound’

• ‘Foam’

• None/all of the above

The big bang never ended....

Unhinged Corporeal Nobody

Ned Devlin

I tried explaining explaining myself to myself to Collin, but that's not what interests him, so he's sort of just stood there a little frustrated now and i'm laughing pretty harsh like a hyena while he shakes his head at me. He's been more than a touch touchy in recent Times, still flailing about in the great battle against the futility of it all: The good ole Existential Quest and all that. What's only kind of funny though is how if he doesn't find that which he seeks, he'll be in for a sad drift of shame back where he started, all tied up with everyone else playing who's who and what's what with all manner of imaginary abstract silliness, all dressed up pretending not to be Powerplay when really it's all nothing but. What's even a little more funny though is that if he wins and finds what he seeks he'll be stuck laughing at things of unimaginable Terror, with not even the beginnings of an Idea of how to make it all stop.

  He's all a bit muddled up inside at my Laughter, converting Fun into fury, as those who are stuck seeking too hard often do, saying: ‘Oh for fuck's sake ned I don't have time for this shit. Fucking...’ and his words just sort of dance around with him down the hallway away from where i can see them. All the air around him is bobbing and twisting in such a way i don't know whether to say thanks to the Mescaline or the Lysergic, or just like the general Nature of all Things, so i give it all a sharp smile spinning a 540 on my heel then sort of collapsing back onto my feet into a jelly walk to send me off back to the pot of Sludge going: ‘fllllerrup flup flup’ all over and over again on the stove, turning all the Nonsense we don't need into a steam to send out into the air, which has me kind of worried about the atmosphere being filled with the stuff we want least - might make us all be breathing in Rejection, not too good for the smiles, i wouldn't think.

  I give the pot a wee swirl to keep it ticking along as it should be, then notice a different sort of Weariness than usual, emanating from the hunched over figure at the end of the hallway, that being Collin and his cohorts: All kinds of different Creatures of loose particle arrangements swirling and morphing around him, merging and multiplying through him while the poor Fool tries desperately to convince himself he's solid. Drifting toward him i can see that his waves are spelling out a different tune than mine, his not being smoothed at the edges with Mescaline like my own, just jagged morphing spikes that crunch and wiggle real sharp, telling me that getting amongst it might give the ole ectoplasmic sheath a few cuts and scrapes to leave me all the more unsure and agitated about trying to decide what is and what isn't.

  So instead, standing and stirring the Sludge, my peripherals perk up again and lead me back off to the lounge for a talking to, the Ninjas getting ever more vivid and talkative by the day, me not dabbling much in the Sleepdreams that would normally extinguish them. Once they got me seated and listening, the Spokesman sort of materialises for me with unprecedented solidity, passing the DaTuring test with flying colours, but still a little black and murky to the Main Eye: ‘Right, Ned... I think it's time we explain a few things, fill you in a bit, since you seem about ready to get involved. First of all, well done making it to Day Four. Not many-’ but he's cut off because i had a Thought pass by about what my old buddy Collin might be doing, which sort of turned my new friend into like a smoke and more or less just a Thought himself: These folk are rather more demanding of one's attention than your average corporal fellow, quick to become no more than a fading Memory of a tangential Dream the minute you point your attention elsewhere.

  ‘Focus, Ned,’ he says from in the middle of me, making me a little mixed up about where to look or listen from, but he's back in my peripherals quick smart, only not willing to be in my focal point this time round, a sort of punishment for my accidentally meddling with his Existence for a second back there. There's quite a few of them, the noncorporeal, all darting about from every which side of me, but clearly not ready to keep talking till i stop trying to discern outlines and details and all that Nonsense we all get a little caught up in when we start sleeping too much.

  ‘Now, Ned, are you going to focus so we can explain ourselves?’ he asks, to which i nod all eager smiles, ‘But you're gonna stop focusing on trivial matters such as our whereabouts and physical form?’ yes Sir, thank you Sir, ‘Right. Well. Let me explain where it all started. I was once like you... We all were; mostly physical in form, but beginning to wonder if that was the ideal way to be. This realisation, and I'm just speaking for myself here, seems to be the result of purging the toxic effects of sleep from one's lifestyle. Now, after a day or two without sleep, I began to notice these people. People of no apparent colour. People who moved deftly from peripheral to peripheral, avoiding my focal point with flawless grace. I, like most who meet them, dismissed them as symptoms of madness.

  ‘But, by Day Three, they'd begun to murmur incomplete sentences, and soon enough they were appearing before me, explaining things to me. Things that made a lot of sense. They gave me enticing pieces of information in the form of disjointed conversations, which were often cut short by my own lapses in concentration. The one thing they made clear was that I would have to stay awake for some time to receive their wisdom, as the human senses took time to adjust to their wavelength, and sleep would reset the process entirely.

  ‘So, by Day Five, my new acquaintances had become clearer than the sleep-induced hallucinations I'd once associated with. These were people of class; progressive and upwardly mobile, not sluggish and earthbound like those I'd left behind. Eventually, I was initiated into the inner circle, no longer in need of sleep or sustenance, unaffected by pain or pleasure, praise or punishment, wandering from realm to realm through the peripherals of-’ but he's gone again because Collin's just walked past, making those dull, thudding sorts of earthly noises that never fail to bring one back from the Other Worlds. Memory is already turning a blind eye to what just happened, but the general Message remains, and i'm quite happy about that, me being in need of a project, having not been too productive lately. It's a well suited project for me and my inclinations, since i've never been one to “fall” asleep, the whole process being more of a climb than anything. Excited, i return to the kitchen to tend the Sludge, thinking Lucy and Robbie might have to wait until tomorrow for their dose since the air and the objects aren't really dancing for me so much anymore, which is no good, but easily dealt with, even if Mirages are a bit rare this time of year.

Lucy Winters

It's almost summer and the sun is like a beating heart, pumping a thick, sweltering current into the air that makes me feel heavy and dizzy and a bit drunk. I'm walking with Robbie to Rory's place on the outskirts of the city centre. We've been walking around all day, and my face is dotted with beads of sweat that I don't want to wipe off for some reason. Robbie's talking into his tape recorder as he walks, which he seems to be doing all the time now . . .

  ‘. . . when Persephone ate the pomegranate, she ate six seeds, which meant she had to spend six months a year in the underworld, 'cause the pomegranate - so German for pomegranate is granadapfel, which is like granite apple, or like sandy apple, sort of, so it's like the apple in the garden of Eden, the sand being dirt, 'cause languages are like that sometimes, the dirt of Eden . . . So they ate it and had to spend all their time in the underworld, that being the normal world, like, hell relative to the garden of Eden. The apple was a symbol for knowledge, which is represented in the Kabbalah as, uh, Da'ath, which, when you look at the tree itself as being like a double for the body, is located in the throat, where the Adam's apple is, and is also supposed to be the gateway to Qliphoth, the daemonic tree, in much the same way that the apple that fell on Isaac Newton’s head symbolised the beginnings of the atheistic eon . . .’

  . . . he's been going on all afternoon, this long, rambling story about everything that exists and how it all fits together. It used to annoy me when he did that, but I've come to like it. Ever since we started doing cactus. It goes with the music I get in my head. The music that isn't music. The motion. Something I can never describe . . . There's too much to hear or feel all at once, so all I can really do is navigate through it. But that's what makes it into a melody and not just a whole lot of noise. Sometimes it makes me sad that no one else can feel it. But not when I'm with Robbie. His monologue is so in sync with it that I can't help but know he's grooving with it. Our secret choir, if only the tape recorder knew . . .

  Robbie points down Butler Street and nods, still talking to the tape recorder. I nod back and wonder why we're heading that way, since Rory's place is in pretty much the opposite direction. We turn onto Butler Street and Robbie's busy, scanning eyes flitting from side to side tell me we're on a cactus hunt. This is where all the old people with nice gardens live, so there's bound to be a few San Pedros around.

  I'm trying to help, scoping out the gardens as we pass, but I keep losing focus and finding myself staring at Robbie with a dopey smile. He's wearing a baggy army jacket and a beanie with his hair tucked up under it, but there are lots of clumps spilling out which he's given up trying to control. His eyes are huge and frantic behind his glasses, darting around like agile little creatures while his head stays relatively still, bobbing slightly with his walk, as he speaks with a hushed urgency into his tape recorder. He's just starting to sprout scruffy, uneven sideburns, and his former waddle has transcended itself into a smooth, creeping strut which seems to express something about his nature - reminds me of creatures that were around before the Dinosaurs, those kind of mammalian looking lizard creatures from the early Triassic. Everything about him adds up to something I can't describe, something strangely rhythmic and mind tinglingly familiar . . .

  He knows I'm looking but he's pretending not to, so I stop and make an effort to scope out the properties with him. His self consciousness is starting to ruin his natural flow, both in his words and his walk. The beauty of Robbie in his element is only ever a fleeting thing, something you have to be subtle and quiet to catch, like a creature out in the bush before it knows it's being watched. As soon as it notices you watching, that fragile grace is broken, and then you just have to forget about it because it's not coming back till you go.

  We get to house number fifty two and Robbie stops suddenly. It's a large, mostly unfenced front yard with a two storey brick house singed orange with no garage. I can't see any car parked there, but the driveway leads to what I imagine to be a big concrete patch on the other side of the house. The tape recorder clicks off, followed by the sound of Robbie not talking, the chuckle of birds and distant machinery overlapping with the beat inside me. I follow his gaze to a corner in the front yard where the house meets the fence, separating it from the next property over, and see what he's looking at: a healthy, apple green, three pronged San Pedro - a total of about five foot.

  ‘Is anyone home?’ I ask. Robbie turns to me with a frightened stare that narrows into a ‘not now, Lucy’, look. I realise he's misinterpreted me so I nod to the house and say, ‘In there, Robbie,’ and give him what I hope is a gentle smile.

  His face relaxes into a wry, tight lipped smile and he shakes his head at himself before looking back to the house. The didgeridoo rumble of a car passing by ushers us from the road onto the footpath.

  ‘Not sure,’ Robbie says, leading me along the fence. ‘Either way, we should come back at night. I don't wanna do it with all this,’ he nods over his shoulder at his bag, filled with all sorts of herbs and powders and voodoo chemistry. He looks at me with the awkward freedom of a tripper in his eyes and points to his head, ‘And there is someone home today. Many of us.’ I find it quite creepy, but I don't let my smile fade. I keep it in place as he holds my gaze, but eventually pull away when it gets too much.

  I look up at the sky, dragging my hand along the fences and walls as we pass, still aware of Robbie's watch. Violin and sinister piano glares bring caution to my footsteps as the inconsistencies of the pavement become more visible. I'm almost certain Robbie’s smile has turned into something less friendly, less harmonious, but I don't want to look. A pulse of anxiety nauseates me and I notice that never happens when I'm with Collin and have a flash of insight into the nature of anxiety that fades away before fully forming. I wonder where Collin might be and if he's okay and the thought creates another wave of nausea which seems to intensify the sun's malevolent breath. After a while, Robbie stops looking at me and gets his tape recorder out and I relax again.

When we get just outside Rory's place, I turn to walk in but Robbie puts his hand on my shoulder to stop me so he can finish talking.

  ‘. . . which brings us to his connections with Dionysus. They both turned water into - well, Dionysus was the god of wine, at least, presumably transmuting it from a more basic element. They were both born to virgin mothers through some kind of divine miracle, and they both rose from the dead. They both travelled the earth with a hoard of followers, preaching revolution and ecstasy, an ancient psychedelia of some more primitive inebriants, 'cause . . .’ He stops and looks to the skies, then to me, ‘Hey, Lucy. What was I getting at before? About Christianity and, uh, Pagan religions . . . Can you remember?’ I shrug, kind of guilty. ‘Like with the Kabbalah, Tiphareth, and uh . . . 'Cause Horus is, uh . . .’ he trails off into a pained silence, looking at the ground with furrowed eyebrows, chewing on his fingertips.

  ‘Let's go in. You can listen to the start of the tape after and find your place,’ I say, trying to be helpful. He nods, but isn't happy with it. I can see why. He's been talking into that thing for hours, and I don't know how he'd go about looking for anything in particular. I don't think he even knows exactly what it is he's trying to remember. It's probably one of those elusive things that pop into your head when you're tripping, like a shoal of fish that disintegrates and swims off in all sorts of directions when you dunk a rod in . . . I feel like that might actually be related to what he's looking for, or to do with the overall point he's been getting at all day, but I'm anxious to keep moving for some reason so I don't say anything.

  We walk in the front door that leads straight to the main room and we're met with deadpan cheers and mock celebration, just another moment in the endless irony I can tell has been going on here all day. Rory, Amelia, and Stan are here - other Stan, Stan Vincent. All three of them are on the couch watching a music video that looks like porn to me. Rory gets up and tries to gangster shake Robbie's hand, but Robbie goes in for a normal handshake and they just hand turkey for a bit and give up. Rory's layered up in a poxy suit jacket and has cargo pants and boots on and I realise how chilly it is in here. There's two fans on so I go and stand in front of one and a thought passes that it's probably filling the room with my smell from the long walk in the sun, but the feeling of it on my back sends these waving rays of energy through my body so I don't mind.

  Once Robbie and Rory say their hellos and uptos, respectively, Robbie takes his bag off and they both sit down on the floor in front of the couch with Robbie's bag between them. Everyone's ignoring me, which I don't mind. Robbie unzips his bag and gets out about an ounce of weed while Rory sets up his scales for him. I close my eyes and I'm a warping scramble of sentience blasting through empty blackness with a humming noise that quickly overpowers the appliance type music. I feel some kind of sound spill out of my mouth and open my eyes and Stan and Amelia are both looking at me. I giggle awkwardly and decide to keep my eyes open while I'm here.

  ‘Breather . . . Your pupils are full bore right now,’ Rory says in his deep monotone, watching Robbie weigh out some weed.

  Robbie looks up at him and says, ‘I should imagine so, yes,’ and continues arranging the weed, putting another bud into the bag, then taking it away and putting in a smaller one before putting the bag back on the scales.

  ‘So you lads full chargin’ it or what?’

  ‘Uh, yeah. Sure.’

  ‘Yeah? What’s good?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You know, what are you on?’

  Robbie stops moving and looks at Rory, ‘What, you mean what am I under the influence of?’

  ‘Yeah, if that's how you wanna put it.’

  ‘Every drug I've ever taken,’ Robbie says. He eyeballs him for a few seconds then fishes out another small bud for the bag.

  Stan says, ‘Cosmic.’ Rory smiles flatly.

  Robbie ignores their smirks and hands Rory the bag of weed. Rory looks at the bag and says, ‘Church,’ which these guys say instead of thanks for some reason. Their strange lingo seems to change as soon as I figure it out. I guess that's just their game. They call me Loose Ends, which I find a little creepy.

  ‘Yeah, church,’ Robbie says absently. ‘You guys after anything else?’

  No one says anything. Robbie takes out a folded piece of paper from his bag and says, ‘You guys ever tried DMT?’

  ‘That what you're on now?’ Rory asks.

  Robbie laughs and shakes his head. Everything is completely silent, but I’m not sure why or what it means.

  ‘. . . So do you rail this shit up?’ Stan asks after a while.

  ‘Nah, smoke it.’

  ‘And what's it do? Trips?’

  ‘Uh, yeah. Trips. That's a bit of an understatement, but yeah. It's the chemical that's released in your brain when you die or have a near death experience. So, like, you know when people say they saw a white light or like their life flashed before their eyes? Like, in the movies? That's DMT, naturally occurring in the body. Rick Strassman says it's released when you're dreaming as well, but I have this theory that it's always being released to regulate consciousness, but it's actually being released in lower doses when you're dreaming, because it creates the narrative that binds . . . uh, actually, never mind. It's an entheogen is what I'm saying. It's been used by shamans for thousands of years to communicate with the spirit world.’

  ‘Cosmic.’

  It's quiet again now. The room seems to exhale sharply. I focus on the cactus music in my head to drown out the TV, which is all gangster now. The cactus ends up playing nicely with the bass and they combine to make something pleasantly atmospheric.

  ‘You eppy out on it?’ Rory asks.

  ‘Eppy out?’ Robbie says, though I'm pretty sure he actually understands. I'm not sure if it's short for episode or epilepsy, but I get what they mean.

  ‘You know, like freak out. Get scared.’

  ‘Well, if you're scared of it, then, yeah,’ Robbie replies, a little bit smug.

  ‘Is it an all night kinda thing?’ Amelia asks. ‘Like, will I be able to sleep if I have some now?’

  ‘Yeah, for sure. It only goes for like five minutes, but you completely transcend time if you break through. You get like a bird’s eye view of our little world of time and space.’

  ‘Trippy,’ Stan drones. Amelia and Rory laugh. I'm getting sick of Stan now.

  ‘So is it kinda like that Mexican tripping weed shit then?’ Amelia says, ignoring Stan's cynicism.

  ‘What, salvia?’ Robbie asks. She nods. ‘Fuck . . . This is like, the channel salvia is trying to turn you on to. Salvia's just like static. This is the real thing. Another dimension,’ he says. I can see it's put Stan and Rory off a bit. Not so much what he described, more the way he described it. These guys aren't interested in other dimensions. They look at each other and shake their heads dismissively.

  ‘That sounds pretty cool. Lads?’ Amelia says. But the other two have already made up their minds, and I think Stan's sort of the leader here.

  ‘What else you got? Got anything fun? Something you can charge on?’ Rory asks.

  ‘Yeah, got some acid. Thirty bucks each, but I could give you five for-’

  ‘Nah nah, that’s a zero on that one, breather. I don't wanna jump out a window. Got any pills? Pingers or anything? Like, something other than dex, I mean. Keen to rage a bit tonight.’

  Robbie looks indignant for a second, then says, ‘Well, I got some ketamine. Ever tried that?’

  ‘Zero. What’s that?’

  ‘Oh it's lots of fun. It's a dissociative. Kind of trippy, but mostly euphoric. Real nice body buzz . . . It's kind of like being on poppy tea and MDMA - like, good E, I mean. But a bit shroomy too. Lots of pingers have it in 'em. Like Jeremy's ones, they were just caffeine mixed with DXM, which is basically the same as K. Ketamine, that is. This is just pure ketamine, though. You can chill out or get loose, whatever you want. It's good like that. It's a real malleable high.’ He gets a bag of capsules from his tin, all the eyes in the room following his hands.

  ‘Sounds Swedish, eh,’ Rory says. Swedish means good, I think. ‘How much that go for?’

  ‘Well, I'll give you a cap for twenty, that'll probably be enough for two of you, since it's your first time,’ Robbie says. It's quiet for a second and Robbie chews his fingertip, then says, ‘Or, if you want, I'll give you the whole bag for, uh . . . one fifty? Like a couple grams. That'll be enough to get a whole party going, or at least leave you with a stash to play around with.’

  ‘What do you reckon, breathers? Keen to get a bit irie tonight?’ Rory asks, looking from Stan to Amelia to Robbie. ‘This shit's not gonna make me stare at the sun is it?’

  ‘Nah, you might spend some time staring at the moon though. I dunno. You'll just feel real good, laugh heaps, probably get all philosophical. It's way mellower than acid. As long as you don’t take too much.’

  Stan shrugs and says, ‘Mars, right?’ which means might as well. Somehow.

  ‘Yeah, mars,’ Rory says. ‘It's bandit as getting all philosophical and shit. Like the other night at Spacey’s, history channel and shit. To the days.’ The room nods in agreement and I crack up laughing. I can't help it. I can feel them all looking at me, but I can't look back at them. I've got one of those goofy smiles like when you're trying too hard not to laugh. I look at Robbie, who shakes his head at me, and then just run off outside. Before I close the door, I hear someone's voice, Stan, maybe, say, ‘Fuckin' loon . . .’

  I sit on the curb to wait for Robbie and feel strangely close to my childhood, with a dark, unformed thought somewhere in there that I'm actually further away than ever. The darkness fades quickly and I start laughing, this time about Robbie and his ways. He's on a different planet than those guys in there. It really is a beautiful thing, though. He's his own person. This planet is overpopulated anyway.

  It's cooled down a bit, and the sky is awash with that deep, ochre hum that ushers in the moonlight. Three magpies are standing in a strangely symmetrical triangle on the road in front of me, looking dodgy. A fourth struts through the middle of them with its neck down and mouth open, then stops, looks back at them, and flies away. Seconds later, the other three fly away, then a car thunders past shocking me out of my trance.

Collin Callahan

My upper lip curled at the corner involuntarily.

  The truth...

  The truth is my project had lost momentum. My purpose had become convoluted to the point of losing almost all meaning. I'd spent so much time and resources rewiring the brains of these unmotivated dilettantes with next to nothing to show for it. What was needed now was power moves. Actions with clear, objective consequences.

  I had successfully created a small, cultish society in my image. My Will had transcended the limits of the self. This was the source of some pride for me. Pride: Empty, useless, indulgent. I had found myself at something of a dead end, one which could only be transcended by addressing the next logical question: Where to from here? The idea of spreading my influence was an attractive one, and one I'd contemplated for some time. But what would that accomplish? More of the same? I had the ability to rewire minds: With a slight effort of will, I could change the thought patterns of those around me. I had proven this to myself. In doing so, I had accomplished nothing. To further myself would require acting on a larger scale. But how? My disciples would be of no help here - the three of them had been avoiding contact with anyone outside of their closed circuit community for months now. I was alone. My binder was filled with half finished plots to rewire society on a large scale. Plans to blow up electricity boxes. Infiltrate the political world. Taint the breweries with LSD. Hack the media to breed dissent. Creep around at night preaching psychedelic ecstasy in huge spray painted letters across the city... The ideas excited me, but seemed so cartoonish in the light of day. I had elaborate fantasies of reigning over the tiny minded masses, of throwing away the petty abstractions of social order and status. Fantasies of reigniting mankind's long forgotten lust for the mysteries, the chaos, and the unknown. Fantasies that never failed to bring me to ecstasy... Unfortunately, the satisfaction never carried over to the post ejaculatory depression, with nothing accomplished except a diminished libido.

  I lit a cigarette to settle my emotions and sat tense on the corner of my bed, emitting a psychic white noise to drown out the whispers. The morning and afternoon had been wasted in disgust and contempt. Disgust at the mess lucy and robbie had left in my room, contempt at the mess they had made of their minds, their potential. Contempt gave way to despondency, which eventually built into a restlessness that could not be contained. I paced back and forth throughout my room, blowing tobacco smoke into all four corners. Just in case. I tried to organise my belongings and, by proxy, my mind. But something was missing. The point where it all falls together, the organic flow of means towards ends... I tried to shift my perspective to the grander scale, the perspective that had once been my default state, but I couldn't silence the restless voices scolding me for my oversights, the fatal flaw of my plan: The point in which the mind loses its ability to record its increasing madness and enlightenment is always disappointingly distant from the absolute pinnacle of boundless reality I seek to understand - the narrative of the descent into the underworld always trails off just when it gets interesting. It had happened to ned, and now it was happening to robbie. The little cunt now wasted his days sitting around smoking that synaesthesia seizure of a drug DMT, never bringing anything useful back, just a self satisfied smile and a doped up inebriation.

  I noticed a ribbon of sacred geometry uncurling from the corner of my eye and banished it, having grown rather sick of all the little distractions of psychedelia. It was not time to indulge. It was time to focus. The exponential elevation afforded to me by psychedelic drugs seemed to have finally plateaued, leaving me in need of something more, something to take it further. I gathered the books scattered carelessly around my room, scouring my mind, yearning, searching for answers, searching for the purpose that had once seemed so clear. It appeared that the next step would take more than drugs to reach. But what? The house was filled with parasitic Thought Forms planted by an invisible enemy, someone or something trying to grey my kaleidoscope vision. Many of my recent meditations had been interrupted by the derisive snickering of faceless voices as They spread Their lies, slander, and propaganda. They called me deluded and drug addicted. They said I was narcissistic and destined to failure, that I was living in a dream world. They told me that my path could lead only to madness. They told me it was time to land. I knew I would need to learn to harness these invisible Forces if I was to create the changes I wanted to see in myself and the world. But how could I gain the trust of Beings who were immune to deception, Beings who seemed to roam the same planes as my own thoughts?

  There was only one person who could possibly answer that.

  Once all my books were back where they belonged, I opened my door silently and peered into the lounge, all too aware of the rancid Thought Forms floating invisible throughout the mind of the house. Ned was perched cross legged on the arm of the couch, grinning peacefully at the coffee table, as he had been when I checked on him last. Studying his intoxicated, sagelike expression, I decided I had to go where he'd been. As well as where robbie had been. It was time to swallow up all the wisdom, madness, and ecstasy into myself, to reap the enlightenment I'd sowed around me, to absorb into myself that which I had facilitated within them. I had led my horses to water, and, as I always suspected would be the case, the cunts were still standing there with cotton mouth admiring the ripples.

  It was time to drink.

  Fuck was it time to drink.

  I closed my door and messaged robbie as I paced around my room, forcefully ignoring the vampiric stench of the dimensionless Beings around me. Though I had internalised their wisdom, I felt more psychedelics would be the only valid starting point for my endeavour, even if only to maintain my illuminated baseline. The LSD I'd eaten had passed its peak, and it was time for an artificial second wind.

  Robbie messaged me back as I finished my cigarette, but every word in his text fed my disgust, nauseating and energising me by turn. It was just the kind of noncommittal bohemian bullshit I should have expected from him. Negative Thoughts wafted onto my skin like cob webs in an attempt to transmute my anger into woe, but I caught Them in the act and They feigned nihility.

  To my surprise, I ended up texting michael after deeply contemplating my situation. He had been talking about some kind of psychedelic amphetamines when I saw him last, apparently some kind of excessively long lasting phenylethylamines. ‘The mad buzz, bro. Took it yesterday afternoon and it’s still going,’ he told me, quickly adding: ‘But I fully believe in evolution, cunt,’ and proceeding to explain his revelations to me for the next half hour, concluding that while he wasn't sure if he needed to throw up or take a shit, it wouldn't be a bad idea to go somewhere he'd be safe to do either. I understood the sentiment. Sinister Thoughts stood guard at all the places I frequented, filling me with self doubt upon contact. Home, the Disarray, and the Botanicals had become minefields of malignant, noxious Thought Forms, sucking the life and drive out of me like demented mosquitoes, forcing me to lock thoughts of ecstasy and revelation deep in my subconscious. I fended off depression with thoughts as my sword and fractal gin traps as my shield, but no matter how valiantly I fought, the Fuckers kept coming. Exactly how much these Beings knew about me, I wasn't sure. I suspected that the realms of thoughts and dreams were Their homes, and intuitively assigned a certain formlessness to Them. But really I had no clue what kind of vantage point the Cunts had. Perhaps They held my entire mind in the palms of Their hands like a snow globe. Maybe They were little more than thoughts themselves, blindly existing as They were, simply thought into existence by a mind no greater than my own. All I knew for certain was that I could no longer be idle. Even the woods were infested. Ever since I noticed this plague, I'd been forced to venture deeper and deeper into the forest for my uninterrupted meditations. Soon, the whole forest would be Their territory, and I'd have to find somewhere new. I may even have to leave town.

  Michael messaged me back saying he was at work, but was keen to fuck shit up when he finished. I smiled. It was an awkward, pained smile. But it was a smile. Above all, it was the cunt's tendency to cause chaos around him that led me to contact him. I'd been lounging around in the company of passive pseudo intellectuals and demented Soul Suckers for too long. It was time for action. Motion. Even if it was the mindless destruction of a numskull with a dopamine deficiency. Just something. Anything.

Stan Richards

I'm standing here sorta paralysed with my foot on the tail of my board, just staring at this narrow knee-high six-stair ledge like I’m gonna get some kind of information from it. I got a backside 180 nosegrind in mind. I got them sorted on this flat ledge on the waterfront the other day, like pretty much every try, and I been doing front noses down this ledge for a while now. I know that if I just go for it and actually pop, the rest will just happen, like muscle memory and shit. But I'm just standing here like a fuckin' pussy, going through the motion in my head, over and over. All I'm tryna do is just imagine the whole process, start to finish, without my thoughts wandering off all worried about what a fuckin' mess my life is. Once I can do that I'll be ready to actually try it... Just a fluid backside 180, slightly underturned, one motion, forget the back foot, just make sure my front foot just like plasters my truck in there, not a straight switch 5-0, like a crooked one, a Suski, switch Suski, locked in. I picture myself accidentally sticking a front nose and just flying backward into the concrete, smacking the back of my head on the ground. My mind's being a cunt again. Keeps on interrupting with images of all the different fuck ups, bail outs, and slams that could happen if I ever actually try it. What I'm really looking for is that strange magnetism that propels me onto the ledge without thinking, ready for the slam that's never as bad as I think it'll be, but even more ready to glide off the end, willing to commit no matter what.

  I kick my board ahead of me and run onto it, pushing twice to get enough speed so the grind will be just like a tap as I fly past it, kinda tryna convince myself that I'm driven by that force that doesn't give a fuck about the consequences, that's willing to risk anything for that feeling of riding away. But I already know I'm just gonna roll up to it, put my foot down at the last second, and just fuckin' stare at the ledge like I have been for the last ten minutes, just from like a slightly closer angle. Still expecting to gain some fuckin' wisdom or something from it. Just repeating the same brain-fried process of over analysis and self-deception.

  Compelled by a truer and less romantic force, my back foot instinctively plants itself on the concrete, dragging me to a halt about a foot away from the edge of the top stair. My bitchy over-thinking side, totally incompatible with the act of skating, is like rehashing the absurdity of even trying a trick so likely to end in pain when I can't even go through the motions in my head without slipping into masochistic fantasies of bone-fucking failure.

  Standing with one foot on my board and one on the ground, looking at the ledge but not really processing its dimensions anymore, I'm aware that this recklessness I'm tryna summon usually just ends up giving me torn ligaments or fucked elbows. And even if it doesn't, like every once in a while when I actually accomplish what I set out to do, it never even feels that great. When I'm under its influence, I sorta kid myself that it's a heroic sort of warrior headspace. But now, from this more pussified frame of mind, I can see that it's more like a kind of stupidity than any kind of courage - it seems retarded to rely on an empty head to get me through this. This situation calls for caution, practical focus.

  But that's just my pussy side thinking. When I'm in the zone, it's this anxious shit that seems irrational. It's like whatever headspace I'm in tries to convince me to stay that way, even when I know for sure that it's fucked for the situation, but this whole fuckin' thing is just my bitch mind tryna distract me so I don't go doing anything. I wouldn't even give this shitty notion a second thought when I'm zoned in, I'd just be like that's fuckin' dumb and get on with it...

  Fuck it. Here we go.

  I step back on my board and roll around the court a couple of times, popping a mobbed-out but clean nollie flip and a little ollie over my bag before pushing back to the ledge, definitely not harnessing the fire I'm after, but at least sort of acting like I am. As the ledge approaches, I'm hit by the thought that while I've spent all this time staring at the ledge and tryna like think it all through, I still haven't managed to picture the trick from start to finish. And even though I just spent fuckin' ages thinking about it, I'm no more mentally prepared than last time I tried it, when I didn't commit at all and just ended up running down the ledge like a fuckin' tightrope. With that in mind, I sneak in one extra push, which has me going too fast to bitch out now, hoping that by the time I get to the ledge I'll have that cold blue clarity I'm looking for and just fuckin’ do it.

  About half a second before I get to the stairs, something inside me bitches and decides it'll be happy just to do a noseslide. I pop a kiddy ollie, scooping 90 backside, body straight, sliding smooth, eyes on the concrete over the shoulder, yank out 90 - nope, spastic commando-roll, sprawled on my back, staring at the sky.

  If I tweak the shadows with my imagination just a little, the cloud above me is like a hippo, from like an ant’s eye view, standing on its back legs and roaring into the heavens. There's like some red that's sneaking in from the corner, the tail end of the hippo, but the rest of the sky is the navy blue of the early evening. I'm tryna find violet, like where the red and blue overlap, but they sorta seem separate from each other. I can't make out what's separating them, because the whole image seems to be throbbing now. I close my eyes and the afterimage dazzles and sparkles around, two slightly different coloured versions not quite in sync. I can feel the warmth of blood trickling from my elbow onto the concrete and wonder if my knee's bleeding, since it feels pretty raw against my jeans.

  There's the garbled sounds of the little gangster kids who go to this school, shouting as they kick a rugby ball around. When I got here, they were all just sitting on the steps outside one of the classrooms. The kid with the rugby ball saw I had my board and shouted ‘Do a kickflip,’ in that menacing way they do, where they laugh but I'm not allowed to. I said ‘Do a punt,’ back to him, and he said his brother was gonna bash me later and that was the end of our chat. I'm wondering now whether I know his brother, and whether later is now. I know I should open my eyes, but they're still closed and it feels better. My throat pulses and aches as I try to do some of my breathing exercises. This little bite in my throat. Some kind of growth. Cancerous maybe. It must have spread by now though. At this point, I'd rather let the fucker win - if I try do anything about it, I'll just spend the last moments of my life all chemo'd out and hating it. It's not as if my life is going anywhere anyway. I think I need to call the doctor and tell him the new pills are no good. I'll do it when I'm done doing this.

  Maybe...

Michael Farmer

It's almost fuckin' nine and I should be finished now but there's a fuckin' after dinner rush and the dishes are still coming in and I'm like fuck this and take my apron off, but that fat cunt George goes “Go on, get back in the dishpit. I told you before, I said you can leave as soon as” “Alright alright, but I'm outta here before nine, got shit to do” and he says some shit but I'm not listening anymore 'cause he's just on a fuckin' power trip, trying to be all - He's the only chef that's actually qualified here, but every cunt just treats him like shit so he takes it out on me 'cause I'm just dishpig. Fucker. I'm not putting on my apron 'cause I'm staying another ten minutes max and my neck's already ropeburnt as fuck from it. I wash a decent pile of dishes and a few pots and a gastro before Max, fuckin' top cunt, gets back from his smoke and goes “Cheers Michael, fuckin' smashed it tonight” which means it's sweet to go, fuckin' speaking in the past tense and shit. I head off saying “All good, see you cunts tomorrow” and give one big wave to the whole kitchen and get the fuck out of there unmolested.

  I'm off to meet Callahan, said he'd be on the corner of regent street and horrucks, dunno what the cunt's - Dexies are wearing off, used up all my charge back there in the dishpit, but Collin'll have some drugs or be keen to get something since it's all the cunt ever thinks about. The front of my T-shirt's wet as fuck and clinging to me, so I walk straight through centres 'cause I been doing at least a hundred sit ups a day, the ones where I kick my legs and touch my elbows to my knees, so I got a real fuckin' solid six pack, ripped as - I'm getting the mad stares from the ladies the whole way, but just keep my head up and walk all fast like it's them who's gonna have to do the chasing if they wanna get anything going.

  Callahan's sitting on a bench on horrucks looking like a fuckin' creep, head in his hands wigging out hard. I give him a bit of a kick to the shin when I get to him and he jumps, gave him a fright 'cause even though he knows I'm an all good cunt, when cunts first see me they're like shit, is this cunt after any trouble? till they suss out it's me, all good, whatup whatup. He gets up and we start heading down regent street and I'm not sure where we're going but Collin's on edge as fuck so I just roll with him. He's all fucked up and twitchy and not talking so I start saying shit so he doesn't feel all weird about it, just a good cunt thing, “Fuckin' pay rise around the corner, sure as fuck. Never leave any dishes behind when I'm done, not like all the other dishpig cunts, leaving massive fuckin' messes behind. Slow ass motherfuckers. Whole thing'd be fucked if I wasn't there. Always cleaning up after every cunt. Apron's fuckin' shredding my neck, though. Fuckin'-” and then Collin's suddenly all amped up and jumpy and he's got his hand on my shoulder going “Fuck, that's it man. Right there. So you're good enough at your job not to get fired right? Like, they need you there, don't they?” and I go “Fuckin' oath they do, bro, no shit-” but the cunt's cut me off going “Fuck, that's it then. Just stop wearing your apron. Tell them that you're leaving if you have to wear an apron. Be so good at your job that they keep you, even though you ignore their irrational rules” and I'm pretty dark at the cunt 'cause he cut me off, which I reckon is kinda - I say “Get a job, cunt, and you'll see how dumb that idea is.” He's all quiet and weird for a bit but walking fast as, then he goes “Fuck, man, you've got a great opportunity here. Make them rethink their value system. Let them know how ignorant their power structure is. Like, do you reckon it's okay that they make these rules purely to see you obey them? These rules that have no practical applications, that exist just to enforce the power structure. You have the opportunity to” and I just go “Why the fuck would I do that? My job's all good. I get free fuckin' beer, a couple feeds a day. Fuck your shit. What are you even trying to say?” 'cause I'm getting pretty sick of his shit. Usually he's a safe as cunt, total fag and shit but a funny as cunt, good for a shit talk. But now he's all serious and I'm over it already and he's like “Come on man. We gotta start fucking with the fabric of society. It's not enough that our minds are free. That was just the beginning. It was a means to an end, not an end in itself. You got a job, you can” but I'm like “Fuck, who cares man. We don't need to fuck up society. We do whatever the fuck we want anyway. I was four beers deep by the lunch rush, beaming on dexies, fuckin' great time. I don't give a fuck. I do what I want. Look,” I pull a tray of dexies out of my pocket and wave them in his face, “I got fuckin' speed, cunt. That society cunt's giving me fuckin' speed. Let's have a fuckin' line, no one's gonna stop us.” Collin takes his hand off my shoulder and I'm thinking fuckin' finally but he's just done it to slap me on the back 'cause he's out of control now going “Oh shit! That's another lead man! Alright, what you should do, right, is hit your doctor up. Tell him you need more amphetamines, that the dose you're on now isn't working. It'll be easy, just say your sleeping pills are fucking up the dexies and they'll give you more dexies, then say they're fucking with your sleeping pills so” and I go “Nah fuck your shit” and push him away 'cause his hand's still on my back and there's no fucking need - Collin goes “Man, it'll be easy as. Just go in there and” and I'm like “I know it'll be easy you dopey cunt. But you can't just tell me what to do and expect me to go along with it. That's just fucked” and he tells me I suck and finally shuts up and we're walking along regent street away from the shitlab so I guess we're going to my place. There's not a whole lot of stink around at the moment, but the ones that are out and about are giving me the eye hard. That's why Collin's getting all in my face, all fuckin' bummed out he's a scrawny cunt and the ladies don't give a shit about him.

  We're heading past o'connor and I got no idea where the fuck we're off to and Collin's like “So we gonna get some of this DOC or what?” and I go “Nah man fuck that shit. Doing a job for dad on sunday. It'll be just kicking in by then” and Collin the thick cunt thinks I'm serious and goes “Really?” and I laugh at him and try push him onto the road and some cunt beeps at us and I go “'Course not you dumb fuck. Shit's just lame though. Get pretty over it after the first day. Let's go to Rory's, he text me saying they got some ketamine shit. We'll get amongst that” and Collin's like “Fuck yeah let's do it. I didn't know those guys tripped” and I go “Nah those cunts don't fuck with trips. Pills” and Collin goes “Nah man, ketamine's a dissociative like dextrometh” “That don't mean shit to them, cunt. They won't even know what that word means. There's trips and there's trippy shit, and those cunts just like their trippy shit. How ‘bout you go to the liquor store on northland and pick us up some shit. I'll hit you back with some lines. You got your brother's ID?” He nods and a couple nice looking ladies pass us and I get busy with my eyebrows and they laugh all nervous together and look away, which is all good 'cause sometimes cunts like me are just intimidating, so I'm not worried. I'm still game if I come across them later, come one come all.

We end up at Amelia's, 'cause Damo's mum turned up at his, and it's Stan, Rory, Damo, Amelia, and Spacey, pretty much everyone except Jeremy, all lying around looking like fuckin' seed freaks, fucked as. Damo and Stan have both shaved their heads, look sorta badass, except Rory's got his arm around Damo who looks like he's sleeping, and I'm not really into this whole - There's so much weed smoke I can hardly see all the way across the room, and they got some gay ass music playing, like some of Callahan's shit, so they hardly even notice us come in.

  “Wake the fuck up cunts” I say and give Stan who's lying on the floor a decent kick. Everyone's just got these fuckin' smiles like there's some joke going on like when - Collin's gone and sat on the couch between Amelia and Spacey and Amelia says some shit I can't hear like whispers but only 'cause that's all she can do. Spacey's completely out to it though and doesn't even notice us, eyes all fucked. Stan's dancing on his back like a fuckin' E-tard and I'm like “Fuck, alright give me some of that shit then” to Rory 'cause it looks like a mean buzz and I'm bored as fuck of these cunts already. Rory ignores me and him and Damo are looking at each other and Damo starts kissing him, like properly making out, going for it, and I'm like “What the fuck? The fuck are you cunts up to?” and look at everyone and it's fucked 'cause no one's even acting like anything fucked's happened, not even Collin. Rory and Damo look at each other for a bit, then Damo closes his eyes and he's fuckin' kissing Rory's neck and Rory looks at me over Damon's head and goes “Just experimenting with life, brutus. Livin' it up. Gettin' irie. Look, there's K on the table. Get amongst it. Loosen up” and he laughs all asian and closes his eyes and I give Stan another kick and go “Oi, you seen that shit going on over there? What's that about?” but Stan's out to it too, mumbling about some - Damo's stopped kissing Rory and now Rory's popping one of Damo's pimples still all gay and I'm just standing there like what the fuck cunts? I’m giving Stan the nudge but he’s on another fuckin’ planet and Rory’s like “Big Dog’s gone down, boldy, full zero” and I just give the cunt the cockeye like - I knew Damo was a dirty dog, like had three ways and shit with him, but like us double teaming a bitch, none of this faggy shit. I say “Fuck, if this shit’s gonna turn me all faggy like you two then I'm ain't touching any” and Collin's got a fuckin' beam on and goes “Fuck, just get over it man. It's all just conditioning. They're breaking free, man. Stop being such a homophobe. Let's have a line” and I'm pretty dark with him and go “I'm not being a fuckin' homophobe, man. It's just 'cause it's fuckin' Damo and fuckin' Rory. How's that not fucked up to you guys?” and Amelia goes “Times they are a-changing” sorta singing it and Rory goes “One love, brah” and laughs, everyone's kinda already laughing but him and Amelia are losing their shit now. Collin goes “Mahs, right?” and Rory goes “Oath. Mahs” still nodding from some shit he said before. Callahan looks at me and laughs chuffed as and I'm like fuck that dude and nudge Stan with my foot and go “Oi, Stan, ya cunt, how's this shit not fucked up to you? Those cunts over there” and he opens his eyes slow as and goes “Farmdawg?” and he's fuckin' goneburgers so I'm like “Fuck this noise. I'm getting out of here, man. I'm not gonna be a part of this weird shit” and turn to go but Collin's up on his feet and stopping me with his hand on my shoulder going “Come on man, don't be such a fucking pussy. Ride the wave, man. It's only gay if you get a boner” and I stand there for a bit sorta shifty like not sure if I wanna - Like, trust that faggy cunt to be into it. Fuck it. I go “Alright. But I'm gonna crush up some dexies and mix it in with the ketamine, wake every cunt up” and Rory goes “Cosmic” making fun of the way Stan makes fun of Collin and Robbie and them when they're not around. Just an endless fuckin' joke with this lot isn't it?

  I get down on the floor and crush up on the coffee table since there's only room on the couch Damo and Rory are on and I don't want anything to do with that shit. I crush up four twenty mig pills and go “So who wants some fuckin' goey then?” and it's all quiet but Collin nods at me. I go “Come on, cunts, get into it” and Amelia's like “Not everything has to start with dexies, Michael” and Collin goes “That's true, but nothing ever ends with dexies” and she smiles all into it and they look at each other like they're gonna make out and I kinda want them to just to balance shit - Then I get one of them fuckin' flashes of genius and I'm like “Hang on, if those queer cunts are getting freaky, how ‘bout you and Spacey get it on?” to Amelia and she laughs and goes “Maybe we don't want to, Michael” and I just shake my head like whatever bitch and Collin's looking at me and him and Amelia are getting kinda close so I nod to Spacey still looking Callahan in the eyes to say shotgun, like hands off cunt. I go “Oi, Stan ya cunt. Get some dexies into ya” and give the cunt a shove with my foot. He's like “Huh? What's happening?” and I go “Fuckin' dexies ya cunt. Get up” and he goes “Dexies?” and I go “Yes fucking dexies hurry up” and hand him the snorter and rack up the lines. Stan goes “Oh... Fuck yeah I'm into it. Swedish...” and gets up so wobbly he can hardly even - I dunno if he knows there's ketamine mixed in but he'll find out soon enough. Spacey finally perks up and mutters some shit about another joint but I go “Nah nah, every cunt on the floor for another line” and open one of my rum and cokes and chuck one to Spacey 'cause the bitch doesn't fuckin' need any more weed, needs to wake the fuck up, if anything. She doesn't even try catch the can and it bounces off the back of the couch onto the floor and’s probly all fizzed up now so I'm getting fucked off so I grab the hooter and finally get my line. I snort it in one go, not like Stan the lost cunt who went at it a couple times, then I call out to Collin and wave the snorter at him. He's amping like fuck and comes down next to me and I stand up just in case he goes in for some gay shit when the ketamine starts - He takes off his jacket to have a snort and Stan's like “Yo, C squared... breather... that's a hell of an... uh... a hell of a jacket... bud. Suede denim, bandit...” and he picks it up and holds it up to the light. Collin looks at him for a bit all stoked about something and goes “Take it, man. It's yours” and has his line. Stan's like “Aye?” and Collin wipes his nose and sniffs a bit and goes “You can have it, man. I got too many clothes. All of you guys, Rory, Damon. If you need any more clothes, just come round sometime. I'm downsizing.” Stan goes “Swedish... Cheers lad, fuckin’ bandit” and puts it on like a blanket and shuffles around all weird. I go “You fuckin' moving out or some shit?” and Callahan's just like “Something like that” all fuckin' cagey like it's none of my business, fair call, leave him to it.

  I get up and head to the kitchen to put my drinks in the fridge and it's fuckin' full up with beers that no cunt's even - The music's way better now and it's like all up inside me and I'm like not even trying to dance I just am, like fuckin' tracing a picture or some shit like the moves are already there waiting for me, which is out of it as 'cause usually I hate dancing but it's like I'm fucking the music right now, stylish as. I go into the bathroom and rock out in front of the mirror for a bit and it's like some crazy shit, shit I never seen before, like my body's made of - Not even faggy at all like when most cunts dance, just fuckin' full steeze ahead, just fuckin' feeling it, unmolested as fuck. I think it's the chilli peppers playing, but it's like a different version I never heard before, like fuckin' so many layers going on, crazy bass line and shit. I dance into the lounge like not even walking anymore just completely rocking the fuck out and Spacey and Amelia are both staring at me, can't even move, just totally fuckin' blown away by this shit, like a pair - Collin's on the floor next to Stan and they're both smiling like fuck with their eyes closed and I give him a bit of a kick that's sorta part of my dance and go “Wake up you little bitch, it's on” and his eyes open slow as and he goes “Hole-lee shit” and stares up glazed as like he can't even see me and I'm pretty hyped about shit but he's not moving right now so I just groove over to the ladies and give them a dance like a lap dance, dashing as fuck but sorta low key too like when a lady ain't buck but still got slutty gear on and it's kinda better that way.

Robbie Marks

His words were fascinating, answering so many of my questions while simultaneously questioning many of my answers; but, knowing Ned and his nature, I found myself more concerned than intrigued. This whole time I had thought myself to be dancing recklessly through unknown realms, invoking strange new worlds where all is known and all has happened, all I had really done was create an imaginary version of myself, an avatar, in order to watch him boldly go face to face with the screams of the universe. This was all down to my essential nature, a trait typical of the psychedelic luftmesch: Always curious, never committed; never willing to cut the umbilical cord. Earlier that week, I had tried explaining just what was going on in the universe to Dad, even though I knew it wouldn't interest him. What I was really doing was attempting to forge a link to the Earthen floor of my mind, with Dad as an anchor, since I'd been perceiving myself as being somewhat - indeed, dangerously - interstellar at that point. In reality, I was too non-committal to be in orbit at all; instead, I floated aimlessly through The Great Void, desperately assuming that if I was to float far enough and for long enough, some kind of direction would reveal itself to me.

  The eerie Mescaline glow was waning; Ned, Lucy, and I were sat in a scalene-triangle on the living room floor, skinning our last few feet of San Pedro for our next dose. Mescaline was the perfect drug for our lives at that point: All we needed was a moderate dose, first thing after waking, and our thoughts would be pleasantly - but not detrimentally - lubricated for the next twelve-or-so hours, by which point we'd be ready for a few hours of relaxing and recapping before bed. Lucy and I had both settled into a Mescaline-influenced circadian rhythm which, strangely enough, actually resembled that of the general population: Sixteen hours up, eight hours down - though we aimed for the carefully calculated Golden Ratio of fourteen hours and fifty minutes awake, followed by nine hours and ten minutes of sleep. I mentioned this to Ned and he thought it made perfect sense: Since it was one variety of psychedelic drugs that had severed our ties to society, it would take another to re-integrate us. I never quite decided whether I agreed, but it was indeed an interesting take on the matter; much as Psilocybin had been the perfect substance to open me up to the possibility of life outside of the consensus, Mescaline was perfect for a smooth re-entry, as the alternate perspectives induced by the plant ran deep enough to keep me from resigning to the common world completely, yet were also subtle enough for me to go about my tasks without distraction, if necessary.

  ‘Don't do that, Ned. Wait 'til tomorrow and trip with the rest of us,’ Lucy said, speaking in the attractively petulant voice she often acquired after the seventh-hour of a Mescaline voyage. Due to the profound effects of Mescaline on my concentration, I'd become completely immersed in the task of peeling the skin, investing all my focus into finding the perfect flap in order to peel a whole segment in one satisfying motion. I hadn't noticed that Ned had started chewing on his piece of cactus; evidently neither had Lucy, as he had already bitten off several large mouthfuls.

  In response, Ned stood up abruptly, lost his balance for a second, and scanned the room with an expression somewhere between neutral and amused, before wandering off down the hallway, depriving us of our comfortably triangular dynamic. I'd long since given up wondering what he could be doing at times like this, so I simply gave Lucy what I hoped to be an easy smile; her face was slightly pained.

  ‘Should we just finish the rest off tomorrow - or, I mean, after we sleep?’ she replied to my expression, which turned out to be more of a grimace. She placed Ned's confiscated, half-eaten cactus on the Mescaline-stained white sheet protecting the carpet; her face showed some recognition of the absurdity of notions such as ‘tomorrow’ in our world, where night and day had lost their significance in favour of the ‘up/down - high/low’ systems of the chemical lifestyle. I worried for a second that her amused quasi-smile would fade into an anxious spiral as the reality of the notion sunk in, as often happened to her toward the tail-end of a trip.

  ‘Nah, keep going a while I reckon,’ I replied, searching for words that would resonate with her. ‘We'll get a little buzz from the Mescaline getting into all the little holes in our hands from the spikes, then we'll keep going 'til that wears off. Or at least 'til Collin gets back. Then we'll have a sleep once we get it boiling, try convince Collin or Ned to watch over it. Then it'll be ready for us when we get up. We'll just wake up, have a shot, and ... it'll be awesome.’ I was quietly hoping that Collin would agree to watch over it while we slept, since Ned would be liable to drink it all down if left alone, or even just lose interest and wander off; but, for whatever reason, Collin had a somewhat dismissive take on the substance, calling it the Goldbricker's Potion - a derisive reference I never quite understood - or Layabout's Lysergic, often telling us to ‘take the training wheels off’ when we were under the influence; he'd been using a lot of LSD at that point, which he considered a much bolder way to tap The Void.

  ‘Okay.... But I think Collin needs to sleep tonight. He's not well,’ she said, before picking up a knife and continuing her spike removal duties. I nodded and carried on with my own job, quietly disappointed that Lucy and I wouldn't be sharing a bed if Collin decided to have a sleep.

  She was right, though: Collin was in need of rest. Over the last week - or perhaps longer, beyond my perception - Collin had become increasingly unhinged. The ease with which he once went about his life had given way to a rather frantic, nameless desperation; he often spent hours at a time pacing around the house, running his hands through his hair, claiming to be looking for several objects at once - though we all knew he was really just trying to gather his thoughts, of which we got no more than enticing fragments. The state of his hair also expressed the depth of his malaise, taking on the increasingly permanent form of an afro, the result of moving his fingers through it incessantly.

  With my cactus now spike-free, I slid my fingernail under the skin, at one of the triangular corners where I had removed the tip, and tore a large sheet off, leaving only about two thirds to go. Satisfied, I got up and went to the kitchen to check on the latest batch of DMT.

  In the freezer sat an array of half-filled cups, jars, and plastic bottles, with thin, slowly crystallising layers sitting on top of the liquid. I held the blackberry jar up to the light and inspected the thin, filmy layer, and decided they'd have to be left overnight, before going back to the lounge.

  Ned was standing just outside the sliding door that lead to the yard, smoking a cigarette but blowing the smoke inside. Whether he was making a point, a joke, or just retarded, I wasn't sure, and definitely didn't feel like trying to decipher; trying to interpret the things he did only ever served to lead me into a similar confused state as the one he seemed to live in. The glazed over almost-smile on his face only made his motives less clear.

  ‘Robbie, I think we should just start chopping up what we've got,’ Lucy said as I sat down. I chose not to respond, but she persisted, ‘Look, there's enough here; there's like four-foot, and we already got like a metre boiled up from this morning. That's two full trips each for you, me, and Ned. Collin won't want any. My fingers are getting wrinkly.’

  My features sharpened with frustration, but I said nothing and sat down to start on a new cactus, indicating to her that I wouldn't be stopping just yet. Two-foot each would not do us at all - that's how much we had taken that day, and Mescaline has an extremely sharp short-term tolerance, meaning we'd need at least four-foot each just to get to where we were. But I wanted to go further. This was to be my last Mescaline trip until the following Monday, as I planned to take a small vacation from Hyperspace after this next voyage to reset the tolerance. This was our rhythm on a larger scale: Three-or-four days of Mescaline, which I saw as a gathering of aetheric energy, a kind of photosynthesis between myself and the cosmic rays of the universe; followed by a few days of the stimulant - depressant lifestyle (usually with the time-tested Dextroamphetamine - Benzodiazepine seesaw), which, for me, would be a period of productivity, with plenty of writing, drawing, and discussions with Collin, Ned, and, unfortunately, often Michael and some of his friends from school.

  I felt Lucy's presence leave the room, but made a point of ignoring it; partly out of frustration at knowing she'd soon be thrashing about in bed, unable to sleep, since the Mescaline still had a few hours of stimulation left in it; but mostly just because a quiet but well-respected part of me knew I was just being a cunt about it, and really wanted her company more than her cactus-peeling skills.

  Switching gears, I smiled to myself and continued picking away at my cactus, dimly illuminated by what I gauged to be the last wave of Mescaline, enjoying my solitude/Ned's company, which, to my amusement, I realised are basically the same thing. Ned smiled at me from the doorway as our eyes met. I noticed he no longer had a cigarette between his fingers, but was still going through the motions of smoking one. I wondered how long he'd been doing that for. And what my thoughts must have looked like from his perspective.

Tracey Colombera

I'm picking at the skin on my forearm because it feels like rubber. I started about ten minutes ago, after the last line. Now I can't imagine not doing it. Amelia, Damon, and Rory are under a blanket on the couch across from me, lost in some slow motion foreplay. It's been going for like half an hour and seems to have gotten nowhere. Rory and Amelia are still fully dressed. Damon’s been naked for as long as I can remember. I can't remember very long. I think Michael and Collin are sitting next to me. Or standing behind me maybe. They're nearby. I can't remember who else was here earlier, but I guess they've all left. I haven’t been completely sure about anything since that last line.

  The arm I'm picking at jerks away from me and I realise it's Stan's. He looks at me confused, then closes one eye.

  ‘Spacey?’ he asks.

  ‘No’ I say.

  ‘Oh.’ He closes his other eye.

  If I focus on the music, I can make it out. But as soon as I stop paying attention, it turns into this repeating pulse like an electronic heartbeat. It always seems like it's about to do something interesting but it never does. I try to look around the room to figure out what's going on, but my head feels like it's full of water and just ends up dangling to the side. The sliding door to the balcony that overlooks the city is wide open and Michael is dancing horrendously in front of the lights. He looks like a mentally challenged boy trying to fight. I think it's either Collin or Jeremy standing perfectly still on the balcony with a blanket over him, facing the city. It might even be a statue or some kind of ornament I never noticed before.

  Stan flinches and makes a weird barking noise, shaking the whole couch. I try to turn and look at him but I just manage to get my head upright before it slumps onto the back of the couch, pointing my face at the ceiling. Stan gets up and I slide down his side and end up lying down on the couch. He staggers aimlessly into the coffee table and crumbles onto it silently before rolling onto the floor and making a slack, emotionless sound like the wind got knocked out of him. His face shows no pain and he just ends up staring at the ceiling too.

  With the couch to myself I stretch out and close my eyes and move my hand from my leg to what I imagine to be the edge of the couch. They both feel exactly the same and after a few seconds I can't make out which is which. I wonder if I'm even moving my arm at all in real life. I don't think it's important. It feels warm and peaceful without a body. I wish I could leave it behind for good. I wonder if I can leave it behind for good.

  ‘Yo, Spacey.’ Michael is shaking me by the shoulder. I guess I won't be leaving my body. ‘It'd be all good to jump off the balcony, aye?’

  I open my eyes and Michael is enormous. He's hunched over me, mostly just a face and a pair of dancing hands. The rest of him doesn't make any sense.

  ‘Balcony?’ I'm not sure. For some reason, I'm impressed by how big Michael is.

  ‘Exactly, it'll be sweet’ he says, shrinking away from me next to Collin. ‘Come on, cunt, if I do it first you gotta do it.’

  ‘Michael, you can hardly walk right now. I think that's a fucking stupid idea’ Collin says. They're both tiny now. Miles away. Collin looks at the waving blob on the couch across from me and says ‘But I think it's time we weren't here.’ I feel like I could reach out and crush them both with one hand. If my arms weren't so heavy.

  ‘Yeah, get the fuck out of here before that lot starts up with the sodomy’ Michael says.

  ‘Yeah. But we’re taking the stairs.’

  ‘Fuckin' pussy.’

  ‘If you break your legs, it'll be you whining all night. Come on.’

  ‘Whatever cunt. Spacey. Get up. We're off to my place. Get fucked up.’

  I want to stay on the couch, but I've lost my voice. I guess I'm going wherever Michael wants me to.

  ‘Nah, let's go to my place. Robbie's gotta give this shit a go,’ Collin says.

  Stan says ‘Robbie's the one who...gave it...the go...’ He tries to sit up but he can't. His eyes are blank and his neck looks like it's having trouble holding his head. I know exactly how he feels.

  ‘Fuckin' oath, he'd be a trippy as cunt on this shit. You coming Stan?’ Michael says.

  ‘Am I...still here?’ Stan mumbles. He stabilises his head and squints around.

  ‘'Course you're still fuckin' here where the fuck else would you be? Come on, let's go. You too, Spacey. Get up’ Michael says.

  I slide off the couch onto my feet, kneeling with my hands on the floor on either side to support me. I grab the coffee table with one hand and the couch with the other and push myself up, swaying as I try to find my balance. Michael's laughing at me but I don't mind. Once I'm up and stable I hold my hand out to Stan and he grabs around for it half blind until he gets it. I pull him up and fall back onto the couch in recoil. It's easier to get up the second time though.

  ‘Fuckin' clowns. Onwards and upwards’ Michael says. He's putting cans into Collin's backpack. I don't think they're his. He zips it up and we all head to the stairwell.

  We get to the stairs and it's dark and no one wants to go down them. It’s hard enough walking on the ground. Eventually Collin starts walking down it sideways, holding the guard rail. Stan follows, then Michael, then me. All single file, holding on to the rail.

  We're almost at the bottom when Stan misses a step and stumbles into Collin and knocks them both down. Collin gets up laughing but Stan's disoriented and looks distressed. He tries to get back up, grabbing at the handrail but falls back down a few more times before Collin helps him.

  ‘Come on, cunt. How you gonna handle it when the raptors show up if you can't walk down a fuckin' set of stairs?’ Michael says.

  ‘Raptors?’ Stan says.

  ‘Fuckin' oath’ Michael says. ‘Cunts are all over the place.’

  Stan's stopped walking and looks like he's upset by what Michael said. I decide that Michael is being a dick so I hook my foot around his ankle as he goes to step off the last stair. He goes down hard onto his shoulder and goes ‘Fuck! What the fuck was that?’ not catching himself at all. I ignore him and step over him out into the street.

  We take a left and start walking down Northland. We go on the road because our wavy struts take up too much room for the sidewalk. I have to walk slowly and carefully because everything seems to shift around like in a dream. Collin and Stan are both walking slow too. Stan's walk is like a drunken stagger, one step back for every few steps forward. Collin is walking like a model, one foot in front of the other with dainty hands. Walking the ketamine tightrope.

  ‘Yo, Stan, ain't this your car?’ Michael calls. We all stop and turn around. I thought we'd walked pretty far but we've only made it a few metres from Amelia's. Michael is standing next to Stan's white hatchback. ‘This is yours, right Stan?’

  ‘What?’ Stan says.

  ‘This. Right here. This is your car, isn't it?’ Michael says.

  ‘Car?’

  ‘Yes, car. Your car.’

  ‘My car...’

  ‘Yes it's your fuckin' car. Wake up, cunt. Why don't we drive?’

  ‘What? I can't...I can't even...’

  ‘I'll fuckin' drive. I'm sweet. Only had a couple cans’ Michael says. Everyone stares at him. The sky is black and violet tiger stripes.

  ‘Can you drive?’ Collin asks after a bit. He has one excited eye and a Joker smile showing through his mop of hair.

  ‘Yeah, I reckon. It's just fuckin' right go, left stop, right? Easy.’

  ‘The fact that you even ask that question-’

  ‘Fuck, it doesn't matter. There's no cunt on the road now, it's after fuckin' midnight. It's sweet. You don't even have your learner license, cunt. Don't know shit.’

  ‘Have you got yours?’

  ‘Fuckin' oath. Went for my full a few months ago’ Michael says. He's so full of shit I can't stay silent anymore.

  ‘That was your restricted, and you failed it’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, only 'cause that cunt was a fuckin' square. Wouldn't even let me call him cunt, like not even a good cunt or anything. I told him, I said-’

  ‘Whatever. Let's just go’ I say.

  We get into the car, Michael and Stan in the front, Collin and me in the back. I rest my head against the window and watch everything flying past. It's just like a blur. Like a screen. A window into a dimensional abomination. I have to open my door and put my hand out to make sure it's real. Collin gives me a cigarette after I close the door and the car slowly fills up with nicotine incense. I feel close to Collin but miles away from Stan and Michael. Collin's smile is constant and a little bit scary. As the front window fogs up it shows a drawing of a cock that Damon did a few terms ago with nicotine fingers. It makes more sense now.

  ‘...Yeah, like in the fuckin' old days. Old English and shit. All their writing woulda been bad as’ Michael's saying. I have no idea what he's talking about. The lights of the street and the stars shine a little neon squiggle through Damon's penis. I'm trying to make the image into a road in my head but I can't.

  ‘Yeah bud...just shitty little pictures...from somewhere else...’ Stan says. His head is slotted on the shoulder of his seat between the headrest and the window.

  ‘What? Nah, I mean it woulda been bad, like bad ass. Bad as in mean. Like tag writing.’

  ‘Bad as in mean? Fucking hell Michael. Leave our poor language alone for-’ Collin starts, but Michael drives onto the footpath and rumbles the whole car around, laughing hysterically. Collin looks at me and shrugs, then winds the window down to flick his cigarette out. I must have dropped mine.

  ‘Aliens, though...I mean...not in the car...like, in us in the car...’ Stan mumbles.

  Collin says ‘Entities, Stan. You're thinking of entities. And yes, they are in us. Not occupying physical space, but rather mental space. I think what ketamine does is-’

  ‘Aye, fuck, that shit was on TV the other night’ Michael interrupts. ‘Not fuckin' demons or aliens or anything. Fuckin' time travellers, in our heads.’

  ‘Yes well I'd imagine non corporeal entities would exist in a state beyond time, so-’

  ‘Fuckin' oath. Black holes and shit. Aye, Callahan, you know all about that shit don't you. Fuckin' shroomheads. I was watching it on TV though, cunt. He reckons there's eleven dimensions, that fuckin' talking wheelchair. Fuck he was saying some real buzzy shit.’

  Collin shakes his head and mutters ‘Talking wheelchair?’ then says ‘You know, Michael, it contributes nothing to a discussion when you just go on about how buzzy something is. Do you even know what Steven Hawking was-’ but Michael drives onto the footpath again to shut him up.

  ‘Not so clever now are you, cunt?’ Michael says.

  ‘You suck’ Collin says. ‘Anyway, we should shave our heads when we get to my place.’

  ‘Fuck yeah. It's about time you got rid of that gay fuckin' mop,’ Michael says, before driving straight over a traffic island at the intersection. ‘Holy shit! Where the fuck did that come from?’

  Michael's driving gets more and more erratic as the ride goes on so I tell him to let me out as we pass Holland Street. Michael says I'm going with them and I end up having to open my door and pretend I'm stepping out of the moving car before he says ‘Fuck alright, off you go’ and pulls over. He gives me another bump before letting me out. I'm not sure how he ended up in control of the ketamine. But I'm not surprised.

  I start walking up the stairwell and feel pretty normal so I stop for a second and consider texting Michael to take more ketamine. I get my phone out and decide it's not worth the trouble and climb the rest of the way by phone light. It takes me a long time to climb the stairs. I guess I'm still pretty wasted. I turn on the living room light and the whole room is shaking and I realise I'm still tripping balls.

  The light is draining me so I turn it off and feel my way along the walls towards the shower. The sound of Dad snoring is overpowering. I wonder if I can listen to my mp3 player in the shower and see no reason why not.

  In my room I find my mp3 player by phone light and it's got Electric Wizard playing. I don't like them much but it's so perfect for the way I feel that I can't bring myself to change it. Rhythmic crumbling. I shine my phone light along the wall of the cave until I find this charcoal drawing Michael did for me. It's a scratchy picture of the street from his bedroom window with a bunch of messy faces scattered carelessly around the page and lizards everywhere. Electric Wizard notices when I find it and the music gets wider and the notes spread out to make room for me inside. My hand stays awake and keeps pushing buttons so the light stays on, but the planes of the rest of my body give up and let their lines extend past me in the same way as the clumsily drawn lines in the picture. I can't recognise the music as Electric Wizard anymore but I can still tell which sense I'm using to pick up on it. The sounds imitate the lines making up my body and slowly go from being a 3D occurrence to more like a stack of 2D flaps that flicker past me like a flip book. My lines respond by extending as far as they can imagine in every direction, connecting up with all those lines that are everywhere and make up everything. All of the universe that I've seen so far has folded down into a basic but endless grid and I can't tell how much of it is me anymore. I feel content and safe being everything. The extra responsibility doesn't bother me. The phone light goes off and I get my hand to turn it back on. There's so many lizards now. Much more than he drew. I see now that the lizards are just the points where the lines bisect from the other planes. The light switches off at that thought the way street lights do as you draw conclusions walking past them. I leave it off because I get it now. Now that I've sorted that out I can be everything, so I don't have to worry about the shower or the music. I can just stay here empty like this forever and ever.

Stan Richards

Insomnia... So utterly crippling, so undeserved. My brain is a writhing mass of insects, the incessant croak of crickets. Endless time and darkness to fill only with questions. It's four AM and I've been lying in bed since midnight. Just thinking. Always fuckin' thinking. Primitive thought patterns emerge from the chaos, drifting further away from the logical towards the weirdness of dreams but never quite getting there. Turn the light on to read. Pop another zopiclone. Read till my eyes get blurry. Turn the light off. Get up and take a piss. Masturbate over Irena and the lesbian rumours. Feel my pulse. Turn the light on again. Read till my eyes get blurry. Realise I'm hungry. Walk to the kitchen in the dark. Eat a slice of bread, Read some more. Switch off the light. Get lost in the well of memories that seem almost like dreams. Realise I'm wide awake and read some more. Take another piss. Take another pill. Switch the light off and do some breathing exercises. Feel my pulse. Panic in the dark. Go to turn the light on and change my mind. Change my mind again and switch the light on. Try to read but my eyes are already too fucked. Switch the light off and wonder what I've done to deserve this. Another hour of primitive wishful thinking and karmic speculation. Instinctual but not carnal thoughts take over. Superstitions replaced by another instinct - the need for a narrative, the last port of sanity. Try to frame this shitty sleepless night as some kind of journey, an episode. Tryna salvage some kind of meaning or explanation, raised by TV and movies to think that things can be wrapped up in a thirty-minute highlight reel. A new phobia: Entertainment. Pop another pill in the darkness. Anxiety turns to rage at the injustice. Masturbate over Irena again. Wonder why it’s always her. Contemplate suicide. New theory: There's no such thing as sleep. This is what happens every night. The morning sun triggers the amnesia to protect us from the truth. During these blackouts we all have strange conversations in the darkness that none of us remember. Or we lie in bed thinking the same thing over and over. Will I remember this? Or just the basic chain of thought that repeated itself all night? Will I be able to replay the content of my sleepless night in the morning? Can I ever remember the thoughts that follow me around, pinpoint the specific moments they occurred? Maybe in this static state thoughts take on the significance of actions. What I'm doing is thinking. What I'm doing is thinking... Was that even a coherent thought just now? What was I even thinking about just then? Doing is thinking... Did I just think that sentence? Doing is thinking? Fuck, maybe I am zeroing in on sleep. Doing is thinking - it's one of those fucked up thoughts that pop into my head when I'm nearing sleep, when things start to make less and less sense as the world drifts away... Am I in the twilight zone now? No. I'm thinking clearly again. Stare around in the darkness, eyelids not even heavy anymore. Am I even any closer to sleep than when I first got into bed? Have I just been thinking about sleep this whole time? Maybe I've blinked off for a bit... How the fuck do people go to sleep? Just close your eyes and wait? Feel around for my pills in the dark. Grope around for a fantasy to masturbate over. Give up and do some breathing exercises. Cruise down the road. Pop up the curb. Kickflip. Frontside flip. Half cab. Fall into the concrete and jerk up sweating. Take off a blanket. Which will wake me up more, my full bladder or the walk to the toilet? Maybe if I get up and take a piss, I'll be one step further down the ladder, one step closer. Maybe I am falling asleep, slowly but surely edging closer to my dreams, every little discomfort being sorted out, thought by thought. Maybe this is a healing process, what I'm doing now, like a microscope on my mind, myself, examining the minute details of the component parts that make up the component parts, awake in my head with a torch, hidden from everyone, moving through the rooms describing everything with a sorta Texan accent, emphasising the ‘h’ in the ‘wh’ sounds, ‘When we go through this door, we get to the hallway. You just keep going 'round the bend. Through here the hallway becomes round, for a big snake, a set of eyes on his lower jaw to match his upper, upside down, moving through but looking around, take a left and through the short, flat door, and it's just a strange man in a room-’

  A jolt and thudding heart and there's an image of a white room with a two-dimensional man going ‘Uhhh’ all sick plastered on the wall around the door that's shocked me wide awake again. His body was like stretched up past the door, but the whole thing was just like a picture of a spiral that was the hallway and in the middle there was a crude drawing of a nose and a pair of eyes, but I was sort of walking along the line... Fuck, that was it. I could see a dream, that whole sensation of movement that turned out to just be a sick looking guy standing in an empty room... What the fuck was that? Fuck... I was there. I was so close. I almost fell asleep. I just need to find that place again. It's still there, the whole scene, but it's just getting fuzzier and fuzzier and now it's pretty much just blackness and a few passing shapes that I can sorta relate to the room but it's pretty much fuckin' gone now. I'm afraid to look at the time. Maybe this is gonna have to be an all-nighter. Lying here figuring it all out... Fuck, I haven't figured out shit. I'm just more awake, confused, and frightened than I was when I got into bed. Maybe I should just get up and... Nah. I'll wait till the sun comes up. If I'm still trudging along at that point. Then I'll get up. It's gonna fucking suck.

Robbie Marks

My dreams dissipated like dandelion furs as the sound of the front door crashing shut, followed by a low, rolling mumble of voices, stole me from my slumber. It was still dark, and, as the possibility of sleep was snatched from under me, I resigned to consciousness.

  Next to me, Lucy stirred under the blankets, murmuring from the delirium of her dreams. The light in the lounge clicked on, leaking into the room from the crack in the doorway, gifting me with one final peripheral flash of monochromatic Mescaline faces in the darkness. For a minute or two I lay still, trying to discern the identity and nature of the voices, mindful of Lucy.

  One of the voices grew steadily louder until it reached the door and knocked it open, standing as a silhouette against the searing living room light that forced my eyes into a squint. The shape stood in motionless silence for a second, before speaking in the deliberate yet breathless syllables I knew to be Collin's.

  ‘Robbie. Get up.’

  I winced as I edged up onto my elbows, still groggy from the sudden awakening. I tried to make out Collin's features, but the light behind him overwhelmed my blurry, maladaptive vision. I heard loud, shrieking laughter that could only be Michael's, followed by another male voice I couldn't decipher. I felt Lucy shifting around next to me and looked at her in the dim light. Her face was scrunched up and her lips were pouting like a fish, but she still appeared to be asleep.

  I looked back to Collin. ‘What time is it?’ I asked, foolishly.

  ‘Time? What the fuck does it matter? The time is now. Come on out, we've got company.’

  ‘Fuck, man.... Nah. I'm good. What are you guys even doing? I got this Mescaline trip waiting for me in the morning, man, and I got this sleeping pattern based on the Fibonacci se -’

  ‘Fuck your sleeping patterns, man. Fuck your shitty succulents too. You're worse than those nine-to-five motherfuckers. Just take your Mescaline now, with some of Stan's stuff.... Man, you've gotta try Stan's shit ... I'll even take some of your Phenylethylamines, mix it up with this stuff. Holy shit man.’

  ‘I'm not sure if there's enough for you, man. We just boiled enough for us three. I would've grabbed you some if I knew - Wait, did you say Stan's shit? Is Stan here?’

  ‘Yes. He is. Hurry up, you're awake now. Come on,’ he said, turning toward the lounge.

  ‘Hey hold up, man. Close the door. I'm not wearing anything.’

  Collin laughed at me and my petty shames before going back to the lounge, leaving the door wide open.

  I looked back to Lucy. She had curled up into the foetal position with her face in her hands. I put my hand on her side and whispered into her ear, ‘Lucy. Are you awake?’ She responded with an annoyed, feline hum, before turning away from me and curling up, pulling the blanket over her head.

  Aware of the compulsive drug-talk coming from the lounge, I got up and crept over to the door, closing it gently. I got down on all fours and crawled around on the floor, feeling around for the pants and T-shirt I'd been wearing that day. Unintentionally, I came across a pair of Lucy's lacy underwear and allowed myself about half a second of perverted satisfaction, before putting them down in self-disgust. Eventually, I came across my jeans and settled for Lucy's light-green hoodie with no undershirt, since it was too tight for my liking anyway. I put the clothes on silently, careful not to rouse Lucy, and wondered what Stan could be doing there; I hadn't seen or heard from him in months, not since that night he turned up at Collin's in a blind rage and shattered my microcosm completely. I’d heard from Michael that Tracey had seen him at the Youth and Adolescent Centre, staring at the ground as he limped from one of the psychiatrist’s rooms out to the car park. Apparently he didn't even acknowledge her when she said hello to him, just hobbled past her like a troll. Curiosity fed my enthusiasm, as it often did, and I found myself excited to see him. I figured the only force bringing him and Collin together could be his aforementioned ‘stuff’, and realised I was now wide awake and buzzing with curiosity.

  I walked into the lounge and my heart sank when I saw a blurry Stan Vincent - ginger Stan - with a shaved head, sitting slack next to Michael on the couch. Collin's eyes laughed at me as he bobbed his head to the gypsy music blasting from the stereo. He nodded at the coffee table, where Michael was hunched over having a line, and I had a thought that this was a scene I'd been seeing too much lately.

  ‘Here he is,’ Michael boomed, reeling from the line. ‘Here's an on the buzz cunt. Here, get some of this in ya. Astronaut drugs, cunt. Ballin'.’

  He handed me the hooter and I made no effort to hide my disappointment; the exciting mystery chemical turned out to be no more than the Ketamine I had sold The Mars Fuckers earlier in the evening. Regardless, I knelt down beside the table and picked out the biggest line before sniffing it, since it was probably the best drug for this kind of company.

  ‘Shit's fucked.... Cataclomsi ... Cata ... Cataclopsical....’ Stan droned, unmistakably dissociated; his left eye was clasped shut while his right bulged, unfocused but wired, scanning the room as his head rested limp on the back of the couch, staring out from behind his own inebriated film-reel. He was so faded that I felt I could easily ignore him until he left, so I sat on the other end of the table, facing Collin in his armchair, cutting Michael out of our closed-circuit and lumping him in with the invalid.

  ‘So what's the plan then? What's so awesome you had to drag me out of bed for?’ I asked.

  Collin's eyes glowed with madness and glee through a flop of matted blond hair. ‘What was so awesome about your sleep that I had to drag you away from it?’

  ‘Gotta sleep sometime, man.’

  Collin laughed dismissively. ‘That's all you fucking do Robbie. How much of your time do you waste in that coffin? Does it not bother you how much you miss while you're in there in a fucking coma?’

  I laughed and shook my head. Collin flicked his hair out of his face, revealing a more welcoming expression than what I had pieced together through the gaps.

  ‘So you woke me up to take Ketamine?’ I asked, trying to sound light-hearted, but coming across blunt and more caustic than I had intended.

  ‘I did, yes. But isn't it incredible? It's like Robitussin, but I can follow a passage of thought forever.... The spaciousness it gives my thoughts ... it's amazing. Just wait, man. You'll see.’

  I nodded slowly, trying to think of a way to change the subject. I had kept Ketamine a secret from Collin all this time at Lucy's request; she had been quite worried about his mental state, and we both knew he'd take to Ketamine at the expense of everything else in his life if either of us introduced him to it. But, now that the secret was out, I found myself excited to get dissociated with him - something I'd been wanting to do ever since the Seed Freaks introduced me to the drug several weeks earlier. The substance had softened the edges of his character somewhat, giving him a self-aware kind of levity that somehow left his intensity intact; his unusual warmth magnifying the discordant undertones of his nature to reveal something softer and more human, but with a quietly sinister aspect I couldn’t reconcile but found very alluring. Still, I was somewhat concerned for Collin's health myself; a recent spell of mania had peeled away much of the ataraxy that had once propelled him along the path as he illuminated it for the rest of us.

  ‘I still think you should have a sleep soon, man. Like, after this trip, maybe. It can't be good for you staying up this long,’ I said, taking his present elation as an opportunity to touch upon what I perceived to be a sensitive issue.

  He stared back at me for a few seconds, before his placid, Ketamine-stoned face contorted into a venomous sneer. ‘Where the fuck is this coming from?’ he flared. ‘Have you been talking to your parents or something? Or have you been reading that self-help bullshit again? You can't trust that shit, man, you know that. It's the fuckers at the top, the folk on the hill, trying to put us all to fucking sleep with that shit. Scientists, doctors, so-called experts.... Of course they're working for someone else, putting their sacred word out for all to obey. How could they not use such a powerful tool of mind control? Eight hours of sleep a night, eight glasses of tainted water a day, the theta-wave flicker of the TV, lulling us into a fucking trance so they can fill our heads with whatever bullshit they want. Fuck man, those vegetables they want us living on probably turn us into vegetables. Cigarettes probably prevent cancer. What we gotta do is read this shit and do the exact opposite. Gotta know the enemy, man. Gotta - Oh fuck. Fuck. This might be bad, man.’

  A silence seemed to emanate from Collin, sweeping us all in as a spectrum of emotions flashed across his face, settling into a look of Lovecraftian realisation. ‘Fuck. No. No it can't be,’ he said, his fearful eyes darting around the room. ‘But what if, what if.... What if even our meditations are a part of their plan.... There was an article about meditation in the paper the other day, I remember being.... Fuck. It makes perfect sense: Empty the mind so they can fill it up with filth. Master the art of Zen so you can wash dishes all day, make some other fucker rich and love every second of it.... God damn, the fuckers have us cornered, they really do.’

  I held his eyes and tried to separate the jokes from the drug-whimsy from the candour; the Ketamine and the sleep deprivation had blurred the boundaries in his mind, creating an internal landscape without laws or limits, obeying only the physics of dreams. I felt a strange sense of loss as I considered the notion of not trusting Collin's words - words I once viewed as holy, and almost invariably adapted to be my own. I tried to figure out how to express my confusion, but just ended up opening and closing my mouth a few times, noticing the first tingles of the Ketamine.

  Collin lifted his gaze to a space above my head and raised his eyebrows. A hooter was passed over my head to him and he disappeared behind me to have a line, leaving me staring at his empty armchair, from which I unintentionally extracted a bizarre kind of symbolism: The empty throne; the un-ruled kingdom.

  ‘Because, think about it, man,’ Collin spoke from behind me as I continued to watch his abandoned armchair, perceiving his voice to be the ghostly echo of the philosophies of a fallen tyrant. ‘They obviously don't want us using psychedelics, because they don't want us thinking, don't want us breaking down the frameworks they've spent so much time and resources creating. But they feed us coffee to keep the cogs moving Monday to Friday, then we're supposed to drink all weekend so we don't start thinking about alternatives or even the possibility that those we depend on to shield us from the elements might not have our best interests in mind. Fuck, if those thoughts still find their way into your head, you can even get drunk after work.’ He stopped, sniffed deeply, and continued, ‘And if the coffee's not enough to get you mindlessly powering the machine, then you've got ADD and they'll give you some amphetamines to set you on the right track - like Michael over here, washing fucking dishes, no questions asked, content to do that shit all day as long as they keep pumping him full of stimulants, sick chemical Zen.... And if you're still thinking about - if you're still fucking thinking at all - then they got Valium and other downers for you, anti-anxiety pills to make everything okay - to make everything seem okay. Or maybe you're schizophrenic. The government's manipulating you? Don't be silly; take some anti-psychotics. There, that's better. Now sit there and watch the fucking cricket and doze off. Let those pesky thoughts just drift away.... Fucking swine, man. Gutless fucks! Why do they have to criminalise everything that expands your mind, god damn it? Why won't they let us expand our minds?’ He slammed his fist on the table as he finished, his Mercurial temperament keeping me tense. I shuffled around and looked from Michael to Stan as we all shared an eclectic silence. Stan appeared to be completely unconscious, with a can of rum and coke resting in his limp hand. I realised that all three had been mixing alcohol and Ketamine - a combination I was yet to explore - which would possibly explain why Collin's behaviour was so erratic, and why Michael was oddly subdued.

  Collin let his hair fall in front of his face as he knelt before the coffee table, breathing heavily and swaying slightly. ‘Expand our minds....’ he echoed himself.

  ‘I've got something that'll expand your mouth,’ Michael said, miming a series of masturbatory hand pumps, his grin tightening the Ketamine-torpor like cellophane stretched around something formless.

  Collin looked up at him sideways through his fringe and said, ‘You can't spell something without meth,’ still swaying, but composing himself.

  ‘Holy shit, you actually can't,’ Michael nodded in quiet appreciation.

  ‘Exactly. Hand it over,’ Collin said, brushing the hair out of his face to reveal an expanded mouth. Michael and I both laughed. Stan gurgled and grunted, then fell back into a stupor that I understood more with each passing moment.

Ketamine does to gravity what psychedelics do to the visual field, making the user aware of subtle disturbances in the atmosphere that are usually too elusive to be noticed. At higher doses, the user becomes increasingly incapacitated by these disturbances, appearing to the outside observer to be an alcohol-like inebriation. However, the subjective experience of Ketamine is far richer and more lucid than the brutal dulling of the faculties afforded by alcohol, and I found myself spinning in circles through the living room, blindly intoxicated by the profundity of movement, as well as the beat of Michael's bongo drumming - a pleasure I wouldn't normally allow myself on account of it being a manifestation of Michael's mind.

  Collin was dance-fighting to the beat, as playful and carefree as I'd ever seen him be. The beginnings of daylight shone quietly behind the curtains, reminding me to open them up and turn the lights off: The bittersweet goodbye to the night; the ritualistic greeting of the day.

  I opened the curtains to the window that looked out into the back of the property and saw Ned, standing alone in the middle of the yard, deliriously miming an animated conversation - more active and energetic than he would be if he were talking to a real person.

  ‘Hey, Collin, come check out Ned. He's on another planet,’ I said.

  ‘Ned's always on another planet, that's not even a thing anymore,’ Collin replied, waving his arms around in a hypnotic, vaguely feminine dance. ‘Talk to me when you figure out which planet he's on.’

  I smiled Neptune to myself and looked back to Ned, wondering what drugs he’d taken, before saying, ‘The fucker!’ out loud as my heart went into palpitations, dimming my Ketamine glow with paranoia. I rushed to the kitchen in a panic, muttering to myself, ‘That fucker better not have drunk all the cactus....’

  I got into the kitchen, my dissociated groove now just a frustrating stumble, and was struck with an almost overwhelming love for my strange and misunderstood friend: The mess we'd made that evening manoeuvring cauldrons of boiling cactus through a mess of carelessly discarded cores and balls of rinsed out pulp wrapped in T-shirts had vanished completely. At first, I assumed Collin had given the kitchen a quick once over before waking me up, which would not have been out of character; but seeing the two half-litre coke bottles full of olive-green goo assured me that Ned had spent the night in an uncommonly lucid frame of mind, doing exactly what I had asked of him and more.

  Excited, I opened one of the coke bottles and had a sniff that made me gag. I was tempted to dose right then and there in celebration of the Moment, but decided not to - out of respect for the ritualistic aspect of dosing with company, as well as the camaraderie of choking down the foul-tasting snot together.

  I opened the door leading from the laundry room to the backyard to thank Ned, but was surprised to see Lucy on the lawn, glowing in the morning sun. She was wrapped in a bedsheet - presumably wearing nothing underneath - her hair wildly tangled, covering her face in a way I found almost unbearably sultry. I had to suppress the urge to join them, understanding that I was witnessing something too delicate to bear the brunt of outside intrusion. It was an expression of the uniquely wayward and childlike nature they shared: Ned, as everyone in town seemed to know, had a ridiculously long list of diagnosed mental disorders, ranging from HPPD to Schizoid Personality Disorder to some absurdly ill-defined condition called Ganser Syndrome; Lucy's idiosyncrasies, however, were obscured by her impish, feminine ways, making them more accepted, or at least dismissed, by most than Ned's. This was not my place.

  Lucy and Ned both laughed about something, and Lucy walked off around the side of the house, leaving Ned standing there looking content. Lucy's sheet trailed over the unkempt grass behind her as she walked with an easy smile, which seemed to express her essence in a way I didn't care to describe, bringing to mind Collin's description of the Ketamine-space as being luxuriously spacious.

  I clicked the door closed quietly, compelled to leave the scene undisturbed. I turned around and saw Collin in the kitchen, holding one of the bottles of sludge, staring at it with narrowed eyes.

  ‘Should we have a drink then?’ he spoke, still examining the bottle. I said nothing, mentally working through my situation but unable to reach a conclusion. He responded by snapping his glance from the Mescaline to me, abrupt and lizard-quick, piercing my Ketamine trance with deranged eyes that betrayed the absolute composure of his voice, bringing forth a disturbed background murmur of thought from a deeper part of my mind.

  ‘I think something.... Bad's happening here. In this house....’ I said, disturbed and inspired by his psychotic aura. ‘Like a psychosis, something mimetic, contagious....’ I continued, walking slowly toward him as if intrance, more a magnetic pull on Collin's part than by any will of my own.

  ‘Correct,’ he said, his voice casual but his eyes fractured with building intensity. ‘And you'll soon conclude that it's you causing it.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘No, the other you,’ he said, with what I hoped was sarcasm.

  ‘Is it ... is it me who's causing it?’ I stopped just inches from him, existing in a universe inhabited only by the two of us, feeling Collin's mind on my skin like faded electricity.

  ‘No. That's your psychosis talking; awareness does not imply immunity.’

  ‘Is it you who's behind it?’ My voice became weak with uncertainty as I envisioned an ominous undertone to Collin's philosophies, threatening to crumble the very ground I stood upon.

  ‘Well, if you must know, yes. But that is of no consequence; the psychosis growing within you will leave you forever unable to discern the truth of this sentence.’

  ‘Wait, I see what you're doing,’ I said, breaking the eye contact with a wry smile to myself as the tension became too much, before reconnecting with an intensity of my own. ‘This is it here, right? Like a self-fulfilling prophecy.... You're creating it now, creating a psychosis within me just to prove your theory about -’

  ‘My theory?’

  We both stood motionless, locked. A chill ran through my mind. ‘You're right. It was my theory. My idea.... You're doing this right now just because of some tripped-out passing comment I made?’

  The intensity finally cracked as a blood vessel burst in Collin's bulging eye. ‘That was more than a passing comment, Robbie. It's the most accurate thing you've ever said.’ His apparent composure gave way to a frantic, passionate outpour, spoken directly into me, ‘Whether I'm behind, in front of it, or wearing the fucker like a glove.... It's not important. That's not what this is about. But it's all fucked, Robbie. Completely fucked. It's all so fucked that I'm actually telling you this, laying it all out for you with no twisted agenda, for no reason other than it's here and we're here and it's all been building up for too long to not explode right here right fucking now. See what I mean about seeing what I mean fold in on itself? Of course you do, because you're fucked too. I'm fucked. Lucy's fucked. Ned's ... you know. Even Michael's been showing symptoms. It's the house now, man. It started in us, but now it's bigger. The whole house, it's fucking ... fucking ... haunted, man. It's fucking haunted. Haunted with demented fucking flies, hovering around our madness, our genius. We scare them, Robbie. At least as much as they scare us. There's no room for anything but fear. But there's no turning back now. We gotta go with it, keep riding that fucked up wave. Only us who created this can end it. What the fuck else can we do?’

  He eyeballed me, breathless from his outburst, both eyes bloodshot and dilated. I held his stare in place as I disengaged psychically to contort my perspective and consider what he'd said. Could the madness really exist independently of the minds it inhabits? I tried to think of Collin's parents and brother, who would surely be infected if what he was saying was true, but I couldn't picture them. It had been so long since I'd seen them.

  ‘What about your Dad? Is he still living downstairs?’ I ventured, unable to conjure up an image of him either, and for a second even doubting his existence.

  ‘What? Oh, him. That cunt's probably dead by now. Come on, let's get the fuck out of here, give the psychosis some me time,’ he replied, loosening up again in another bi-polar flicker of the mind as he turned toward the lounge.

  ‘Me as in the psychosis? Or me as in you?’

  He turned back to me with a contemptuous stare, and I immediately regretted breaking the fragile balance once more. ‘Me as in psychosis? Me as in you? Jesus, man, do you even listen to the shit that comes out of your mouth? Maybe if you fucking listen to what I say, not to these schizophrenic echoes in your head, you'll stop with the inane questions. Try actually fucking listening.’

  ‘I did listen; I was just wondering whether you meant -’

  ‘Fuck, do I really have to spell this shit out to you, Robbie?’

  ‘Well, you don't have -’

  ‘Can you not fucking think for yourself for once? Just use your own thoughts?’

  ‘Yeah, that's what I did. Then you said -’

  ‘Can you not make the connections yourself?’

  ‘Yeah but -’

  ‘You never learnt to do that? Never connected the dots in your little activity books? Never did a fucking jigsaw puzzle?’

  ‘Ah whatever man. I'm just gonna let this one go,’ I said, reminded of the confrontational nature that Michael tended to bring out in him.

  ‘Good call. So we gonna drink some of this Mescaline or not?’

  ‘Uh, no, not yet man,’ I said, putting the two bottles back in the fridge before following him into the lounge. ‘I'm gonna go back to sleep for a bit, just a quick one for some REM. We can drink it in the morning - uh, when I get up.’

  Collin stopped and turned to me again. ‘What? You're going back to bed? Have you not -’

  ‘Fuck, Collin,’ I said, my patience finally wearing thin, ‘I got a lot of shit planned for tomorrow, alright? I've been building up to this trip for days. Lucy and Ned too. We got DMT to smoke. Acid, weed, Ket - uh, Dexies, and just, like, I've got a full day planned, man. You sorta fucked that up when you woke me - I mean, it's all good; like, thanks for including me and, uh, but yeah.... I've got my own shit going on. The Ketamine's wearing off, I didn't have any Dexies. Feel free to wake me up in a few hours.’

  I walked past him toward the lounge, slightly elated with how uncharacteristically assertive I'd been, but also feeling a touch of self-loathing as I considered that, underneath my shitty pretexts, I really just wanted to spend a few more hours in bed with Lucy. In Collin's bed.

  ‘Wait, Robbie,’ he said, halting me.

  ‘Yeah?’ I turned to him.

  ‘Are you keen to shave your head today?’

  I laughed and shook my head, then walked through the lounge to Collin's bedroom. I waved to Michael as I passed; he continued his beat with one hand and raised his can of something in the air to me, shaking his head ecstatically. Stan was completely unconscious, with his neck dangling awkwardly over the arm of the couch.

  As I entered the bedroom, I heard Collin say something to Michael about shaving his head, followed by half a second of Michael's boorish enthusiasm, then peaceful, muffled, almost-silence as I clicked the door shut. I stripped to my underwear and crept into bed next to a sleeping Lucy, and curled immediately into a hypnagogic state; slightly disturbed by my conversation with Collin, but comforted by the warmth of Lucy's feet against mine.

Stan Richards

think I’ve ever had this thought before, the thought of being hesitant to think a certain thought. But, like who's to say, anyway? Like what if whether or not I have cancer is not so much a case of whether my body's harbouring malignant cells as whether it'd make sense within the context of my life to get cancer? Like, maybe getting it checked out at will just make it real enough for like the cunts in control of my life to add it to the story. That's how it went for my mental problems. I wonder if life itself is like that... Like, maybe when I go to reach for my house keys, what happens depends on how it'll affect the rest of my day, instead of whether or not I actually put them in my pocket earlier. Maybe whether or not I remembered to put them in my pocket depends on how it was gonna affect me now... Fuck, I've gone into full fuckin' schizo-land now. Maybe this is how people become depressed and psychotic. I'm sure everyone has the potential to lose their mind. Maybe the real monsters out there, the serial killers and rapists, maybe they're just cunts who've gone so deep into their brain that all there is to do is lash out, lash out from behind those fuckin' layers of confusion that make any decision just as absurd and fucked up as all the others. Just lie here and analyse shit, see every possible point of view on every little part of me then every little point of view on those points of view. All I can gather from this narcissistic eight-hour overthinkathon is that anything I say, think, or do, no matter how noble or genius it is from one point of view, is fuckin' stupid, selfish, and pointless from another. So why not just be the biggest cunt I possibly can? Maybe I saw into Collin's brain just now... Just stays up all night overthinking everything till all there is left to do is be a cunt. Maybe I'll do that today. Be a cunt. I’m pretty sure all this bullshit going on in my head all night has permanently changed me. The sun is out, and I'm definitely not gonna get a sleep in, so everything just sucks anyway. Why not just go ruin some fuckin' lives? I could end up beaten within an inch of my life or in jail, but what difference would it make? Even here with all my freedom I can't do anything but whinge to myself about, I've beaten my brain into a schizophrenic mess. I'm imprisoned in my own over-analysis.

  The horrible sound of morning birds... Maybe in a different version of my life I wouldn't mind them. Maybe I'd even enjoy them. But now they're just reminders of my failure to accomplish the most basic of human functions. My curtains seem to amplify the cringing sun instead of blocking it out, glowing and throbbing and screaming wake up, which I'd be doing if I got any fuckin' sleep in. Maybe I should keep trying, though. Maybe god or whatever will let me sleep now that the sun's up, just to be a cunt. I feel like it'll be dangerous to get out of bed anyway, after that last chain of thought. I know I think weird shit every night as I try to drift off, but usually I go to sleep to hit the reset button. But not today. I'm five fuckin' zopiclone deep and the idea of sleep still feels like a distant memory. Can I get up and go about my day with all these sleeping pills in me? What about with all this sick shit in my head? Surely I'll be able to sleep tonight after this long awake. Hit the reset. But maybe one whole day with these thoughts in my head will be enough to commit them to my brain, make them a permanent part of me. Maybe that's what we are, the product of all our thoughts, like repeated thoughts and notions congealed together to create like the shape of a mind. Maybe just lying here thinking this fucked up shit has damaged me beyond repair. But what the fuck does it matter anyway? I'll just fuckin' get up and go about my day... Go about my day. What a joke. What the fuck am I gonna do all day? I need a good fight or something. Get back in my body. Even just thinking about having a fight... I'm fuckin' wide awake now. Fuck this shit. I'm getting up.

  All these fuckin' sleeping pills have got me pretty wobbly, but once I'm up and about I don't feel too bad. I start opening the curtains but it looks like another hideously sunny day out there so I leave them closed. I reckon I could maybe manage an all good day, though. Like if I can avoid human contact, at least. I still got that book Heartsnatcher I borrowed from Lucy at the start of the year. Got a bit started on it last night. It's by some French dude I never heard of before. Pretty out of it shit, but it was kinda fun just tryna get my head around it. Like a crossword kinda thing. Makes me feel like there's a working brain in that skull somewhere.

  I go to my closet to find some nice clothes, thinking I might cheer myself up by being a bit swanky, but then feel like a wanker and just chuck on the stinky jeans and T-shirt from the floor. Dressing nicely while my head's this fucked seems like a lie. Might as well just look as shitty as I feel. Make people less inclined to approach me. That's the ticket.

  I put my ear to the door but I can hear like four fuckin' voices so fuck that. Dad and Karen and a few of their mates I guess. Weekend warrior type cunts, prolly already cracking into the beers. Good functional members of society, working all week so they can afford to drink the horrible memory of it away. Great fuckin' system, cunts. Give yourselves a high five in the fuckin' face for thinking that one up.

  For lack of a better idea, I sit against the door and start flipping my phone around like a skateboard. I make like a couple of flatbanks with my thighs and flip my phone between them. Couple frontside flips, then some arm twisting kickflip fakie transfers, front shoves... Pretty much just avoiding life. I'm sorta pretending to be planning my day, but really I'm just doing the same shit I always do - let the brain fog build up till I don't even have a coherent thought anymore, then just sit there existing till I'm hungry or something and have to get moving. I'm only lying to myself - the only cunt dumb enough to believe my bullshit.

  I hear the adults head outside to the balcony, prolly all having a good old fuckin' wank about what a lovely day it is. Their voices are louder and clearer from here, so I get up to look for my headphones to make sure I don't catch even a fuckin' snippet. I used to not mind conversations, like back when I was normal. But it's like something's flipped in my head and just hearing the briefest exchange is enough to start me on a downward spiral leading to either depression or a blackout rage, depending basically on how much energy I got. I know I shouldn't let it get to me, but it does and that's fuckin' that. They always just sound like a bunch of cunts just like agreeing with each other from different angles, just fuckin' trying desperately to convince each other they're real and actually making noises.

  ‘Nice weather isn't it?’ ‘Yes, nice weather.’ ‘Lovely weather.’ ‘Yes, that sun is nice.’ ‘Isn't it just?’ ‘Yes, beautiful day.’ ‘Mmm, nice weather.’ ‘Yep, it sure is.’ ‘Very nice weather.’ ‘Yep, nice.’ ‘Weather, yes.’ ‘Yes, quite.’

  Just fuckin' on and on and I'm fuckin' pissed off already just thinking about it. Whenever I'm unlucky enough to find myself involved in a conversation, like when parents or relatives or someone just fuckin' corners me and goes at me, that hateful, schizo cunt inside me just starts fuckin' shouting all sorts of shit into my head till I blurt out something offensive just to change the tone away from the sick cycle of desperate optimism. Then I'm the scapegoat for a bit, which is usually all good, just to get something going. But then it's back where we fuckin' started.

  ‘Ooh, racism. I don't condone racism.’ ‘Neither do I. I've always hated racism.’ ‘Racism's very wrong.’ ‘Yes, very bad.’ ‘Racism.’ ‘Yes, racism. Very bad.’

  Yes, racism's bad you fucks. Now let's all just fuck off home and just pretend we don't see each other next time. Or, you know, we could sit here for another hour bragging about how we're not racist, all tryna subtly claim to be the most anti-racist, until someone finally cracks and shouts ‘No! I'm the least racist here! The rest of you are posers! I signed a petition!’ And then we've got a new scapegoat. God fuckin' damn I hate this shitty race. Fuck.

  Can't find Heartsnatcher or my headphones, so I just grab my old history book. Robbie used to reckon you could turn bad feelings into good ones by writing about them, which seems like about the most coherent thing that cunt's ever come out with. What the fuck else am I gonna do anyway?

  I open my door and peer down the hallway. The front door is open and there's human activity on the balcony. If they spot me, they'll invite me over for a chat. Then I'll be fucked. Louise's Mum'll ask me which Uni I'm off to. I'll shake my head. Then, with disappointment, she'll ask me what I've got planned for my gap year. I'll tell her it's more like a gap life. The silence will be unbearable till I go ‘But hey, these sunny days are lovely, aren't they?’ and Louise's Dad'll go ‘Aren’t they just’ and shit will get pretty ugly pretty fuckin' quick.

  I can see Katie playing in the living room, so I bolt across the hallway to her room, aware that I'm being a proper weird cunt. Her room's got a door to the backyard, so I head out and take a seat in one of the lawn chairs in the shade. I open my pretty much empty history book and stare at the page, sedated by the sound of the creek, wondering how much peace I'll get before some cunt spots me and comes over to piss me off.

Michael Farmer

Oh shit what the fuck's going on where the fuck am I – Shitlab, right, fuck, musta dosed off for a minute there, broad fuckin' daylight in here now, gotta get up and get the fuck to work, groggy as fuck. I get my phone out and it's quarter past eight already so can't fuck around one bit here, 'sposed to be at work in fifteen fuckin' minutes which ain't happening, but still gotta get moving. I'm up on my feet quick as fuck so I don't go back to sleep and the K's still doing its thing and I'm back on my ass straight away, all good just fucked as but once I get going I reckon - Endy the fuckin' weird cunt's just walked out of the kitchen completely naked and I'm like “Oi, put some clothes on ya gross cunt” and he smiles and flips me the bird so I grab around and find a half full can of something and chuck it at him and he giggles like a bitch and runs off down the hallway and someone goes “You're cleaning that up, cunt” and it's Callahan coming out of the kitchen all fucked and I'm like yeah, fair enough but I say “Whatever cunt, I'm outta-” Fuckin' Callahan's got a shaved head, skinny as cunt, all aryan and shit. I run my hands all over my fresh scalp and go “Yeeeeeeah cunt” and nod my head and Collin's stoked too, fuck he's got a little as head though, that cunt. Collin goes “Time for another bump then?” and I'm into it but then I'm like “Nah none for me” 'cause I got work and it'd be fun as but I'd be dropping plates and shit all - Collin's at the coffee table looking through all the cans and shit for the K going “You sure? That last one's starting to wear off for me. Robbie'll be up soon, he said he's gonna - oh fuck that's just gross Michael” and he's found the cup I was spitting and putting my roaches in last night and I'm laughing at him 'cause I know he's a faggy cunt about that kinda shit. He's off to the kitchen with the cup now and I get up and follow him and go to the fridge for some booze and he's like “Hold up, we'll wait till Robbie wakes up. You know what he's like about that stuff” and I go “Aye? I don't think I've seen that cunt ever drink a fuckin' drop of that shit” and Collin goes “Well probably not, he drinks it first thing in the morning. Before he heads out, usually” and I'm confused as fuck so I head off to wake the cunt up and Collin's like “Nah, just wait man. He'll get all shitty if you wake him. He's got his stupid little sleeping pattern going. Lame, I know, but just” and I'm like “Fuck's sake cunt it's a can of bourbon who gives a shit. Not even his anyway” and Collin's like “What? Oh, those. They're in my bag” and I'm sorta pissed off now 'cause they'll be warm as fuck and I need to get some in me before I go 'cause I slept fuck all like probly about an hour or so max. I go into the lounge and get some cans out of Collin's bag and Stan's waking up on the chair so I chuck him a can and he doesn't catch it just squirms around like a spaz and I laugh and go “Shotgun, cunt” and he's dazed as fuck but goes “Fuck yeah Farmdawg, renegade” but I dunno what the fuck he's on about. He pops his can with his thumb which is kinda cool but he's done it on the wrong side and looks all dumb trying to drink it. I try do it with my thumb too and can't but it's dumb anyway so I just bash it on the door handle and get it down all fizzy and gross but hardly spilled a fuckin' drop. Collin comes out and he didn't see what I did which is good 'cause he'd be fucked off - I'm not scared of the cunt or nothing, just can't be fucked dealing with his shit right now, gotta move. Collin's back on the floor looking for the drugs on the table and I chuck the can on the floor and grab the last of my tray out of my pocket and Stan tries to say something but I go louder and say “Fuck the ketamine, crush a few of these up for us. I gotta wake the fuck up” and Collin's like “Yeah, good idea. It'll be like warp speed in hyperspace” still looking for the K and I'm like “Fuck off cunt, no hyperspace shit” 'cause he was all going on about that shit last night and it was cool 'cause we were all on anti gravity drugs and like fuck yeah buzzy cunt but now it's just dumb. Collin goes “Yeah there must be some left over, pretty sure we didn't finish it off last night” and Stan goes “Fuck, breathers, I'm pretty much zero on that shit now. That was a bit too scat for me. Like, on as some of the time, but after a while it's like” but I'm in there now going “Yeah fuck the ketamine I gotta get to work in like ten minutes. Can't be all anti gravity in a kitchen, hot pots and shit everywhere, fuckin'-” but then Collin cuts me off, “Wait, what?” and stops and stares up at me all puppy dog shocked and I'm like “What?” and get down and grab another bourbon from his bag and he goes “You're going to work?” and I'm like “Yes I told you I had fuckin' work today. I'm not happy about it either but-” and he cuts me off again “You're going to work today? After all that shit we talked about last night? You're still gonna go to work?” and I'm gonna punch the cunt in the head if he butts in again. “What the fuck you mean after all the shit we went through? Yeah, it was buzzy as fuck. Doesn't change shit today though” and he's like “That was like a new frontier last night, man. A fucking voyage. I can't believe you're just gonna go back to your stupid little routine world now. You really went through all that just to wake up and say, alright, off to work today?” and I open a can on the door handle again but he doesn't even care which sucks 'cause I want the cunt worked up now. I drink it down and burp and gag foam and the cunt's still staring at me and I shake it off and go “What shit did we go through? You're sounding like Rory and fuckin' Damo with that shit. Like yeah, it was fun and shit but it's the fuckin' morning now and I gotta get to fuckin' work” and he calls me a slave so I tip the cunt over with my foot and he's all shitty now but fuck him. I crush up my pills on top of this little cabinet thing and have a snort and I was gonna leave some for Stan but he's saying “Yo, C Squared, it cool to have a shower? I'll just be” so fuck him I don't have time to wait around for that shit. I snort the rest and head to the door going “Right cunts, I'm off. I'll hit you up after work Stan, have a sesh or some shit” and Stan grins and nods past me going “Holland” which is another dumb thing those dudes say and he's off into the bathroom. I say “Later cunt” to Collin and give him a friendly little kick to the kidney as I go and he's up and going “Wait, Michael” and I turn around walking backwards going “What? I'm gonna be late as fuck I gotta go man” and Collin goes “Want to take a jacket? It's pretty cold in the mornings” and I'm like yeah 'cause I'm in a T-shirt and it's probly pretty cold out there but nah 'cause Collin's clothes are faggy as fuck but he's off into his room and I'm like “Alright but hurry up, cunt, I can't be fucked getting told off this morning I just wanna get there, do my shit, and get the fuck out” and he comes out with this black hoodie with a white Charles Manson face on it and it's actually pretty fuckin' sweet so I'm like “Aye, fuck yeah. Swedish” and we're laughing at Stan and them and their dumb words and I give him a fist bump and I'm off. Fuckin' top cunt, Collin. Like thinks he's the shit and shit, but a fuckin' true G on the whole.

I get to work fuckin' ten minutes late and storm in, dex crankin' hard, and go “Yep yep I know I know, I got this shit, won't happen again, we're sweet no fuckin' problems” before any cunt has a chance to say shit. Turns out it's just this real quiet german cunt Jurg and a couple of the little asian prep girls, so I'm the only cunt who can talk properly anyway. There's a massive fuckin' pile of dishes already so I'm straight in there without an apron just smashing the dishes out, still a bit trippy from the ketamine but unmolested as fuck from the dexies and bourbon so just fuckin' - I smash out all the pots and pans in no time and Jurg's saying some shit so I stop 'cause I can hardly understand the cunt even without all the dishes sounds. I stop and he's just umming and ahhing and I got too much dexies in me for this shit and he finally spits it out “Zere is, er, some deliferies in the” and I'm like “Yep yep I'm on it” and head out 'cause I can't be fucked listening to that dopey cunt go on, looks a bit like a fuckin' sloth too, I reckon.

  I'm amping when I get out back and George the fat cunt is just arriving, late as fuck, and I'm like “Late as fuck, ya cunt” grinning but not all that friendly and he just goes “Watch it, Michael” with his head down all sour, not even on the comedowns or nothing, just a fuckin' sour cunt all 'round. I get to the loading bay and there's like five boxes and I can't be fucked with the stock rotation shit but could definitely get down on some heavy lifting. I open the first box and it's full of cucumbers so I open some more looking for one that could be for out here in the garage freezer like fish or some shit but it's all just fucking cucumbers. I shout “Oi! Which cunt fucked up all the orders? It's just a massive pile of fuckin' cucumbers!” and George just shouts some shit back and I'm like whatever and just get on with it. There's way too many fuckin' cucumbers to fit in the fridge so I got an idea to pass the day a bit quicker and I take a bag back with me to the dishpit and hide it under the sink and finish off the pile in like ten minutes flat, boom, all fired up from the dexies. I shout “Oi, George ya fat cunt. It cool if I grab a beer from the bar?” and George is like “Not if you're gonna talk to me like that Michael” and I'm like “Fuck alright. Chill out mate” pretty dark at the cunt 'cause I was just trying to be friendly to him 'cause every other cunt just gives him shit all the time, probly makes him feel all left - Jurg's just dropped off a shitload of fuckin' plastic bowls and shit so I just get on with it and George goes “You got that delivery put away yet, Michael?” and I'm like “Yeah fuckin' oath, got that shit done ages ago” and he goes “Got a date sticker on them?” and I go “Yeah yeah” and I haven't really, but I'm saying yeah yeah as in like yeah whatever, not like yeah I have, so he can't get me on that. I take the pile of containers and some knives over to where the asians are prepping but I got a cucumber hidden in amongst them and put it under their bench on the sly and they say thanks but say it like “Sank you, sank you” and I'm like “Aye, just doing my job ain't I?” and then to George at frontline “So how 'bout that fuckin' beer then? Got the dishes done and shit. Delivery's put away” and George is chopping some shit up and goes “It's quarter past nine, the bar's not even open for another hour at least, so no. But you got rid of those dishes fast so you can go out for a five minute rest pause when you feel like it. But I'll have to check them to make sure you” and I'm like what the fuck? 'cause I only been here like half an hour and already smashed it all out, thought it'd be like ten thirty or something by now, which is usually when I get thirsty but I guess I'm still on the buzz from last night, just wanna keep that shit going. The hot asian's got a cucumber in her hand flabbergasted as fuck and the uglier one's giving her this look like Fuck I dunno, and I'm cracking up so I got another cucumber behind my arm on the sly and I'm off over there and pretend I'm putting shit away on the shelf but I just slipped another cucumber in their bread box. The ugly one's holding the first cucumber at me and I take it off her and say real quiet “Yeah, Jurg's been putting cucumbers everywhere” and shrug and she's looking at me like what the fuck? and I take it off her and say “I dunno I'll have a talk to him for you” and she nods and gets back on to it all smiling like “Ah, sank you.” I make sure no one's looking and put the cucumber in the meat freezer and head off out back to Jurg to give him some shit and just like hang around till shit happens and he's just got more fuckin' dishes for me which is sweet 'cause I'm getting bored as fuck already waiting for one of the asians to find the cucumber. I take the dishes back to the pit and give them a quick spray and can see hipster Joseph opening up the bar and I'm off to hit him up and George yells some shit at me but I've had enough of the cunt so fuck - I ask Joseph when the bar'll be open and he goes “Uh, probly like nine thirty, ten” and I go “That's not a real number, cunt” and he's just confused so I head back to the kitchen. I check the clock and it's nine twenty five so I still got a quarter hour before I can get a beer so I grab another cucumber and I'm putting it into the microwave and George is like “Oi, Michael” and I think he's busted me and I spin 'round and he's like “Finish off those dishes, then you can help with prep” and I'm trying not to laugh and I close the microwave like “Ah, right, fair enough mate” and I'm off back to the dishpit and he goes “Michael” and I'm like “What?” all pissed now 'cause I just wanna have a fuckin' beer and hide cucumbers around the place unmolested but that cunt won't fuck off and leave me to it. “Apron” he says and I'm like “Yeah yeah I'll just smash these out” and he's like “No, Michael, apron. Now” and I'm like “Fuck off I'm just gonna smash these out. Look I'm already over here, I'll go get the apron in a minute” and he puts his knife down and starts heading over going “Apron, now” all psycho eyed and I'm like “Alright alright fuckin' chill, cunt. I'm putting it on now” and he's like “If you call me that again, I'll” I'm starting to put my apron on and I can hear Jurg saying some shit out back and look around and hot asian's walking back to her station and Jurg's standing in the doorway with a cucumber in his hands looking confused as and I'm all pissed off 'cause I missed it and it looks like it woulda been - “Michael, get your fucking apron on and get into the dishpit!” - Fuckin' stab the cunt in a minute. I put my apron on and smash out the stack of dishes warp speed so I can go out back to go help Jurg with some prep but it's the fuckin' breakfast rush now so I'm fucked. I get to work on the dishes and I'm like fuck it and just leave the plates and wash Jurg's baking tray so I can take it out back to him. George is shouting shit about how he needs plates but fuck him, gets all gropey and shit with the ladies when he's drunk anyway so he can't say shit, seedy cunt. I get out back and drop off the baking tray and start gathering up his dirty shit, but actually I'm just waiting for one of the asians to turn up here all pissed off waving 'round a cucumber. Jurg's going “Erm, Michael, I am still needing” but I'm like “Nah nah you're good, mate. Just taking them over to the dishpit” and he goes “But my job, she's not, er” and George goes “Michael get the fuck back in the dishpit or I'm sending you home right now” and I'm like “Yeah, alright I'm off to the dishpit now, just picking up Jurg's fuckin' mess ain't I?” and take the dirty dishes over, even though I know the cunt won't send me home, I'm just sick of the him being on my case. I'm about to put my apron on and I see hot asian open the microwave and get the cucumber out looking pissed as like not even smiling just sick of this shit now and she storms off to Jurg's station and I drop my apron and rush after her all hyped and George goes “Michael!” and I'm like “It's sweet I'll do it soon I just gotta-” and I'm just about out back and boom! on the floor, fucker tackled me from behind, still got his arms around my legs and I'm trying to kick the cunt away and watch what's going on with Jurg and hot asian at the same time, but he's like fuckin' clawing up me and got me in a choker hold and I'm elbowing the cunt in the ribs going “Get the fuck off me you gay cunt” and he lets me go and shoves me to the ground and springs up to his feet. I get up and dash out back to Jurg's area and George is red faced after me and I get to Jurg's bench and him and hot asian aren't even here, just me and George, dunno where the fuck they gone. George the flabby cunt has taken his shirt off and he's like “You wanna start shit? Let's fucking go then!” all fired up and I'm like “Where the fuck did Jurg go?” and George goes “Never mind that mate. Let's step outside.” Jurg turns up with all the dishes I took over, didn't even wash them off but whatever. He's fuckin' baffled at what's going on and starts to say something but George goes “You stay out of this, mate, it's got nothing to do with you” but he's still standing there all worried. George is crazy eyeing me now dukes up going “Come on then” and I spot the cucumber sitting on the bench and I'm gutted as 'cause I missed the whole exchange so I'm just like “Fuck it, don't worry” and try walk past him. He shoves me as I walk past and goes “Worry? I'll show you fucking worry!” and shoves me again and I go “Fuck off cunt I gotta get onto these dishes” and try push past him 'cause I can see a massive fuckin' pile of dishes waiting for me, only getting bigger, but he grabs me by the collar and pulls me up close and goes “Nah mate, you and me, outside” and I'm trying to push the cunt away and Max and Fishhands turn up from the garage and rush up to us going “Hey! Hey! What the fuck's going on here?” and they pull us apart like “George, cool off, mate.” They stand between us all serious and Jurg's just getting on with it and not paying us any attention. George goes “Tell this idiot to pull his fucking head in and get in the dishpit or send him home right now” all fired up. I go “I'm trying to get to the fuckin' dishpit but this cunt keeps trying to scrap me out. Look at that fuckin' pile over there” and Max is looking from George to me and back and goes “Right, I'm gonna have to send one of you home. We can't have this shit going on during service. Right, Jurgon, get over here. What's the story, what's happened here?” and Jurg starts talking but George goes “I already told you. This moron-” but Max goes “George, shut the fuck up. Jurg?” and Jurg goes “Em Michael wass, eh, coming over for the job, and, erm, George had started to fight with Michael. And now Michael tries to go back to the dishpits but George still tries to make a fight” and I'm like “Yep, you heard the cunt, George still tries to make a fight. Later asshole” and give George a smile and the middle finger and head off to the pit. I hear George shouting “fuck this shit” and carrying on and there's the sound of a plate or some shit smashing on the ground and Max is saying how it's - Joseph's dropping some dishes off and he's like “Looks like you're getting well smashed today, dude” looking at the massive fuckin' pile on my bench. I'm like “Fuckin' oath. If that fat cunt fucked off and left me alone I woulda got it done ages ago.” Joseph goes “Harsh, man. I reckon I could get you a freebie for this, looks like it's gonna be a fuckin' mission. Pilsner, right?” and heads out. I go “Fuck yeah, swedish” and he stops and turns around going “Huh?” and I say “Sweet as” to correct myself, pretty fuckin' embarrassed I used Damo and shit's gay fuckin' lingo. Fishhands has taken over frontline and goes “All good Mikey boy?” and I'm like “Yeah mate, all good. Fuck that cunt” and he nods and goes “Yep. Fuck that cunt. Liking the trim though, looks good” and gets on with his job. I grab a cucumber and get on with mine.

Collin Callahan

The Ketamine had created a great vacuum at the seat of my consciousness, leaving a vast open plane inside for untainted thoughts to congregate without risk. First and foremost, I decided that my circle of trust contained Ned and Ned alone. While michael always had within him the fire to fight alongside me, and the little cunt was good to bounce ideas off, neither of them had enough brains or general awareness to be trusted. This is important, as it's usually a dumb cunt, rather than a bastard, that fucks everything up.

  But no one is without their uses.

  First order of business, once michael left to go lick society’s perineum, was to go for a roam with my shaved head. I got a ride with stan, growing tired of the cunt pretty fucking quickly once we reached baseline, and was dropped off at the outskirts. I left stan with a trunkful of clothes to distribute to his friends and walked down Harnich road into the woods, where the hungry eyes of the Dimensionless sat waiting. With my decoys soon to be out and about, I hoped to finally get some psychic privacy, even if only for a moment. Let those cunts carry the burden of the boundless horrors of the cosmos for a little while. That’s all I ask. Just time. Time to start rebuilding what They had destroyed. Or even just a moment of clear thought to plan my next move.

  But I knew what really needed to be done. I needed to short circuit the whole fucking motherboard. Destroy the blueprint. Start over. Reignite the primal chaos within myself I had long since extinguished with the infinite white radiation of my Harmonics. Unfortunately, though it hurt to admit, I really knew next to nothing about whatever I was up against. All I could do was trust my instincts and hope for the best.

  Substantially weakened by the legion of hostile Thoughts lingering around the woods, I took a seat on a fallen tree to get a hold of my unruly mind. It was easy to separate my thoughts from Their phantoms when I was prepared to invest all of my willpower in analysing the distinctions. But the true damage is always done when the mind is elsewhere.

  This meant that, for now, the mind could not be elsewhere.

  I dry retched as I contemplated the contents of my mind. The divine paracosm I had been cultivating since childhood was almost unreachable through the clouds of Their filth. Hideous Thoughts of contributing to society, seeking the validation of others, organising my life into neat little routines and endless to do lists, the plastic surrender of maturity... Piles of Their excrement lay steaming in the once supernal lands of my consciousness, leaking noxious gases of guilt and obligation, all amounting to a sick desire to discard my genius in favour of ‘society’, to give up on my ecstatic voyage just to keep everyone happy and safe in their shitty little bubble.

  Most of these Thoughts could be exorcised by some rudimentary invocations of Baphomet, Jack Parsons, Giordano Bruno, and the like, but the stubborn stains etched into my very core still remained. For those Thoughts, the ritualistic summoning of ghosts would not be enough. Not even the great teachers Ketamine and LSD would do. What I needed was the services of Death Itself. A grim reaping of the archives. I needed to rip it all up by the roots and salt the fucking earth. Self destruction. All creation.

  Fighting through my nausea and fatigue, I made my way past the invisible barrier separating the woods from the Botanicals. Thanks to my intimate knowledge of the tracks, I had no trouble finding the tree. The flower was mere inches from my open mouth when it occurred to me that this tree would certainly be plagued with Entities, having enjoyed my company so many times in the past. Whether to trust the Thought as my own was questionable, but I kept my faith. I decided that some form of aetheric cleansing would be necessary in order to rid the flowers of Their filth, and hoped, with a desperation so thick I could feel it in my veins, that this Thought was my own.

  As I reached for a second flower, I noticed several thorny, tennis ball sized fruits growing out of the stems. Following my instincts, I dispensed with the flowers and filled my pockets with the fruits, noting immediately a stronger affinity than what I had with the flowers. The light at the end of the tunnel manifested as a confident posture and a rapid heartbeat, a certain incandescence that lay at once before me and within me, guiding me through the darkness. Something I knew for sure was mine.

  On the way home I took a quick detour to some of my favourite spots around the city, aware that I may not have many more opportunities to do so. I walked all the way along Windsor to the outskirts, admiring the antique buildings that lined the eastern reaches of the city. The grand marble Hall of Science I had known intimately since childhood. The adjacent Theosophical Society building, so comically at odds with its neighbour. The methodist church on the corner of Tuggering street with its inspired murals stretching the height of the walls, a beauty betrayed by the repulsiveness of the rituals within. The old castlelike reform school with its great boarded up windows and treacherous trees towering well over the top storey. Then all the way across the gully to the dear old Disarray, so decrepit yet confident, self contained yet inviting. These and the surrounding trees and planes were my friends, the cornerstones of my time in this town. I stopped in at the Disarray for a beer and a touch of nostalgia, giving the Disembodied a chance to add my new appearance to Their database. Mentally, I travelled the structures and landscapes I was soon to leave behind, and my warmth turned quickly to despair and anger as I considered the Thoughts that plagued them, the infestation that followed me everywhere, hollowing out the psychic blueprint of everything I held dear. I tried to consider how my human friends would be implicated in the situation, but the din of the Disembodied had distorted my perspective irreparably. I left the bar without finishing my beer when the noise became too much.

  Once again downcast, I walked briskly along Northland, struggling to find a single coherent Thought in my head. Cars flashed by in a colourful morse code that was scrambled by racing Thoughts before I could interpret it. There should have been tears, but there was not. I've never been one to cry, even as a child, but I've seen others do it enough to understand the notion. I walked into the middle of the busy road and raised both of my middle fingers up high above my head, a big Fuck You to the coded message and all it represented. I closed my eyes and navigated via the honking of horns, smiling properly for the first time in days. I started spinning circles as I walked, and the tears finally came in the form of hysterical laughter and a Will to freedom, a call to the Infinite.

  I knew I had to wait until I got home to ingest the fruits. And to bring Ned with me. There are times, few and far between, where a partner in crime is an asset. Through thick and thin, as They say.

  And a trip to the underworld is one of them.

Stan Richards

Robbie was right about writing shit down. It's actually pretty satisfying. I'm surprised at how creative I am when I actually try, though I'll have to look it over when I'm in a less fucked up headspace to see if what I've written actually means anything. I'm working on a song. Or a poem, I guess. I got a little beat in my head and I'm sorta singing along as I write it, but I guess it's a poem since I'm never gonna do anything with it. I can deal with that. So far I've got-

A monkey expelled from the forest

Sat in a room, thoughts abolished

A chemical imbalance, must be undone

I bit the cunt's throat and started to run

  That's the first verse. Then I got this sorta chorus-type bit that goes-

Going back home, into the grey

Going back to the forest, where I can play

  Which I kinda like. I imagine it getting sung twice in a row. Almost keen to suss out a pair of bongos and make it real. I gotta admit I'm sorta ripping off Ned and Robbie with that into the grey shit, though I don't really know how they meant it when they used to talk about it. I've started on the next verse, which goes-

Woke up alone all covered in dew

In the sleeping bag trees over which we once flew

And over the trees we still can fly

  That part's based on a dream I had a little while back. I know the next line is gonna end with ‘die’, but I'm tryna work it into being about when we die at night, meaning like going to sleep. But there's something Robbie didn't warn me about...

  ‘Linda, that's her name. Linda,’ Dad's been going on and on, totally fuckin' oblivious. Like it never even occurred to him that I might be doing something - though you'd think the pen and paper would be a dead fuckin' giveaway. ‘Sorta seems like a nice girl, but if you cross her, you'd better watch out. This other joker who was working for us, apprentice boy, Jim, fuck was she giving him hell the other day. He's the one who got me onto the VLC player on the bloody computer. Anyway, she was giving him all sorts of hell the other day...’ What's making him think I have any interest in this Linda character is beyond me. Makes me wonder if he's always been such a thick cunt or if we all lose our brains when we get old. I just keep staring at my page, tryna focus on the words in my head while simultaneously willing Dad to fuck off. As soon as I get this last line of the verse I'm off, down the creek or some shit, get away from the stupid old cunt... When we go to bed at night to die... When we lie down at night to die... At night when we lie down and die...

  ‘...bloody youngsters these days. I told the boy, I told him, listen up 'cause I'm only telling you this once. So I got down and unbolted the bloody thing...’

  At night when we leave our body and die... Wait, when we dream and die. At night when we dream and die... That's pretty good. But I liked it with the leaving the body...

  ‘...and the little asshole was playing on his phone the whole bloody time! I says to him, Mate, I told you, I'm only showing you this once. And you know what he says to me? He says, Sorry, just got a text! Now that left a bad taste in my mouth, I'll tell you that for free...’

  At night when we leave our body to dream and die... When we dream... When we leave our body to dream... When our bodies... When our bodies dream and die... Fuck yeah, that's the one. At night when our bodies dream and die.

Woke up alone all covered in dew

In the sleeping bag trees over which we once flew

And over the trees we still can fly

At night when our bodies dream and die.

    I slap my book shut and go ‘Alright Dad, I'm outta here,’ interrupting whatever the fuck he's on about now.

  ‘Oh yeah? Where you off to then?’

  ‘Uh, off to the skatepark,’ I say, 'cause fuck tryna explain to Dad that I'm off to the creek. I guess that means I'm off to the skatepark. I can deal with that. I stand up and shake my legs off, figuring out my goodbye.

  ‘Right. You gonna take your CVs with you then?’

  ‘Yeah I will. Catch you later.’

  ‘Don't forget to-’

  I storm inside and stumble over Jake and go ‘Ah fuck off Jake ya slippery cunt!’ and he shoots off out the door. I head to my room, kinda laughing 'cause I just swore at a cat. I stuff my notebook and a few CVs into my bag and have a quick look for my mp3 player but can't find it. I go to the kitchen and nick a couple beers from the fridge and fuckin' Karen pops out of the walk-in pantry and scares the shit out of me.

  ‘And where are you going with those then?’ She's got a ha, busted! look on her face, but she was drinking at fuckin' like eight or something with Louise's parents so can't say shit. Not even my real Mum anyway. Bitch.

  ‘Hey, uh, off to have a beer with Jordan,’ I say, playing it cool. She looks like she's about to say something so I go ‘I'll see you later, okay?’ and give her a shitty fake smile and rush off to the door.

  I'm just out the door when I catch Dad's eye and remember that I'm off for a skate and grab my board from the garage and head off down the sidewalk, shaking off their prying bullshit like spiderwebs.

  The rumble of the shitty sidewalk beneath my feet clears my head enough to get me figuring out what I'm up to. Apparently I’m off to the skatepark, which I’m okay with. Then off to hand out CVs, which I can’t really see happening. Then off for a beer with Jordan, which won’t be happening for so many reasons. Dad and Karen will be at home, all stoked about their happy, well-adjusted kid. Off skating, job hunting, and having a quiet beer with one of his many friends. Up for a bit of a good time, but also with a good head on his shoulders, getting ready for the next step in life. A work hard, play hard kinda lad. Fuck I fuckin’ hate myself.

  I’m cruising slow and careful ‘cause I’m feeling a bit sketch with all this zopiclone in me, but it’s actually all working pretty well. I’d planned to just skate around the corner and get off my board to hide for the day, but I’m kinda into this now. I got my trucks on loose as, just took the washers out, and all the cracks in the pavement are sending me into crazy death-wobbles. I pop a little ollie out of a curb cut and it comes out better than I expected, like clean and even a little boned-out maybe, and I decide to actually go for a roll today. That's another typical brain-fried Stan Richards move: Wander around blind and anxious, making excuses not to do all the things that spook me till eventually I find something that doesn’t give me anxiety. Or, I don’t find anything and just have a productive day hiding somewhere thinking about how much everything sucks. Sometimes I switch on the TV or get out some comic books to point my face at like a good, normal boy.

  I’m heading in the general direction of West End skatepark, but I’m more hyped on just cruising than actually going somewhere. It's good to have some direction though. West End is this small, caged-in concrete pad usually inhabited only by bikers who don’t really wanna talk to the weird skater cunt who keeps fucking himself up trying easy shit. I figure by the time I get there, if I do - quick front 180 over the strip of grass on the Henderson’s driveway, sketchy little half cab then left down Hunterway - I’ll either be hyped on skating, or all sour and keen to initiate some conflict with some bikers or whatever. Either way, things are starting to look up for the day - though whenever I try look more than ten or twenty minutes in the future I get that sick pulse inside me. I got my board, my notebook, and a couple beers in my bag, plus the beat of my song on loop in my head. Should be enough to make a day of.

  Halfway down Hunterway I get a bit cocky and try pop out of the curb cut onto the seat at the bus stop on the corner. The ollie’s fucked from the start, back foot dangling and shit, but I fully commit ‘cause I’m feeling like a mad cunt. My back truck hangs up and I fly into a full Ragdoll body slam along the bench and off onto the sidewalk, rolling all the way to a parking space. I get beeped at by a car that's not even close to me, and this pretty brunette girl who was walking past stops and goes ‘Oh my god are you okay?’ and I laugh all freakshow and she goes wide-eyed with shock and walks off in a hip-swivelling rush.

  I get up and dust myself off, aware of the stares but not fazed by them. I’ve ripped the scab off my left elbow and somehow grazed up my right one too, and ripped a new hole in my right knee, on the jeans and my skin. This group of thuggish Islander-looking dudes leaning on the billboard-sized bus timetable laugh at me and I feel all ugly and excited inside. I storm up to them and their laughing peters out. I grab the nearest one by the collar and scream ‘HAHAHA!’ into his face, then do the same to the rest, systematically down the line. They all back down, two of them looking away from me at their feet, the other two looking at me all freaked out. I wanna indulge in some extended psycho eye contact with one of them, but the way they're looking at me is unsubstantial so I grab my board from the top of the seat. I’m feeling warm and energised again so I hop on and start pushing down Witham. I mach ten a slappy boardslide on some double-sided curb outside the little bookstore and the pain’s already gone and I’m just hyped on the warm blood trickling symmetrically down both arms. I got a massive grin on and pop a satisfyingly lofty backside 180 off the curb cut into the smooth asphalt road then switch 180 all sketchy and push off down the road, slashing all over the place, tryna get as many cunts to beep at me as possible. Fearless in the face truer fears, fears of cancer, death, and insanity, drowning out the trivial realities of concrete and metal around me.

  Everyone else out at this hour’s still all dazed from sleep. Not this cunt though. I’m fucked up. I’m mentally ill. I try to pop a kickflip in the middle of the road and stick and commando roll across the white lines. I feel the wind of a car past my head as it swerves to avoid me, beeping and yelling shit out the window in morning depression, the depression I feel every waking minute of every fuckin’ day.

  Once I'm back on my board the sound of urethane on the road drowns out the grey whirlwind of shouting voices and beeping cars, charging me up as I haul ass down the centre line. I'd planned the chorus to just repeat itself throughout the song, but a second slightly different one pops into my head, fully formed with no tweaking necessary-

Slip through the grey, into the black

To the heart of the jungle, there's no turning back

Slip through the grey, into the black

To the heart of the jungle, there's no turning back

Ned Devlin

‘We can't fuck around here, man. Thought Forms everywhere. They know I'm here. We're here... Take this, Ned. The seed pods are soaking in there, no time to boil 'em down properly, let's just do this. Come on. We'll go to the woods. I've found a new track I haven't - Oi, don't fucking drink it now. Fucking hell Ned. Give it here. That's boiling water man, singe your fucking oesophagus raw. Don't look at me like that, cunt. Just give it here. Fuckin' give it... here. We're not fucking around today, Ned. This shit's not Acid or Ketamine or anything like that. We're going right in there, man. Right to the source... Alright, let's get out of here. You ready? Yeah? You're gonna go out like that? Your shirt's outside if you wanna... Fuck alright then. Let's just get the fuck out of here.

  ‘Right so anyway, I'm sure you know what's going on here. Basically some Force or Entity has been pursuing me, draining me of my life and energy... I don't know what exactly It is or who It's affiliated with. Hell, It might be a legion of Entities, a whole grey society of the Cunts working together to take me down. It might not even be Entities at all. From what I've gathered, It seems to be some kind of astral presidency working to keep the established order within the noncorporeal realms, with similar motives to the government in the corporeal lands. Control, order, all that shit. I think They've picked us out, both of us, because we've been meddling about in Their affairs - we've drawn attention to ourselves. What I think, is that you possess certain clairvoyant capacities that I myself, unfortunately, seem to be lacking. All of my work in the heavens has been from a distance, responding to my instincts and intuitions rather than clear vision like you. But you, for whatever reason, have been given the gift. Whether it's to do with your mother's fucking around with Thelema way back when, or maybe your own dealings with these Entities, I'm not sure. I'm not even going to begin to speculate. Well, obviously I already have to some degree, but... See what I'm thinking here is that we'll form a magical alliance, much like Edward Kelly and John Dee had in the fifteen hundreds - your Edward Kelly like clairvoyance assisting my providence. With your help, I'll be able to - Hey, this way, Ned. Come on... Come on! Fuck, fine, we'll go that way. But we have to be wary of where our bodies are while we go on this journey. We may need them after. I was thinking we could leave them in the heart of the woods, like right - fuck, no, not that way Ned. We can not go to the Botans. That place is fucking infested. What we need is a sacred space, man. We need to go somewhere away from Them... Yeah, servants, exactly. It's those Cunts that'll get us. We're going for the throat today, Ned. But that's what I'm saying: We gotta go somewhere away from Them, somewhere hidden... Yeah, sure, I suppose you're right there, actually... but I don't think it's completely irrelevant. I mean, yeah, obviously space has different applications for Them than it does for us, but... I dunno, actually. Hadn't considered that. It's not important, anyway. These are the kind of details we can leave for robbie... Yes. Good call. But what I think is this other world, the one we'll be dealing with today - I mean, there's no point going straight to the white light now. That's what I'm saying here. That'll just blind us and accomplish nothing. What we're doing today is visiting that secondary world, the intermediary between our world and the great Void, where the myths manifest and thoughts cast shadows. The home of Christ, Shiva, Baphomet - all the Cunts. But what I think we're dealing with here is - and I'm not sure about this, it's just a hunch - but what I think we're dealing with is a like a modern day old testament style God. A deity for the atheists with certain repressed monotheistic impulses. He who is powered by the timid submission of the collective human race, all the fucking cowards who hide from the Void, who hide from themselves. All the shrieking, squealing fucking pigs who go straight back to writhing about in their own psychic filth when confronted with their own souls, as Terrence McKenna speculated. Man, this Entity, these Entities, I've been dealing with... What a pack of sick, depraved assholes. Sly motherfuckers, forcing Their pusillanimous ideas into my brain. They sneak up inside of you, man, wear you like a fucking glove. You actually think it's you thinking these Thoughts. They disguise themselves as your thoughts. How can we fight something that disguises Itself as our thoughts? And the smell... The fucking smell Ned. How can I even begin to explain... Fuck, man, let's just fuckin' do this, right here right fucking-’

  ‘Don't listen to him, Ned. Well, do listen, actually; listen to Collin in the same way you'd listen to David Icke talk. Hell, listen to him the way you'd read a Phillip K Dick novel; it's some good science fiction coming out of his mouth right now. And, yes, he is right: We are watching him; but, even the non-corporeal must have a bit of fun, right? Anyway, I'm going to help you guys. Basically, because Collin's more entertaining than pretty much every other human out there. But also because I like you, Ned. So I'm going to explain a few things to you, and only you; I'm not talking to Collin here. And if you mention anything I'm telling you now to him, then that's it, I'm out of here. Right. So, you want to get past the entities monitoring you don't you? So, what you're after here is a kind of invisibility - an undetectable aetheric presence. That shouldn't be a problem. First, I'm gonna have to get you to stand still for a second.’

  ‘...Fuck, it's still too hot. It's a nice colour though, that dirty brownish swirl. That'll be the Atropine and Scopolamine absorbed into the water... Let's wait and see if it gets any browner. Anyway, it's probably time we - Ned, what the fuck are you doing? Come on, man, let's go. You're gonna cause a scene if you stand in the middle of the sidewalk like a moron. Astral and otherwise. Come on. Fuck, Ned, just come on, man. Fucking-’

  ‘Right, now, close your eyes. Look around; you are now your non-corporeal body. Only takes a few seconds when you haven't been sleeping. Now, don't worry about your primary body, Collin will take care of it... Yes, good point. But it doesn't hurt to be reminded. Anyway, first thing's first: I want you to raise your right arm... nope, nope, I want you to do this without your corporeal body responding at-’

  ‘Ned, what the fuck are you doing? You're attracting attention man. Wait till we get to the woods, then you can whatever weird fucking Tai Chi you want-’

  ‘Nope, Ned, I'm gonna have to get you to close those eyes again. Just ignore Collin; he's undergoing his own personal initiation into the depths, and it's only normal for one in his position to make some effort to reaffirm his own existence by pestering everyone around him. Anyway, right, so what I want you to do, is to conjure up the feeling of raising your right arm. Don't raise your corresponding physical arm; just forget it completely for now... No, forget the motor homunculus; you're just confusing matters. No, what I want you to do is to feel the twinge and stretch of your bicep as it tugs on your elbow. Feel the tension in your forearm as it exerts no effort, but awakens its miniature sensors to analyse its new environment and position. Consider your hand: Does it come out rigid, or flop down flaccid? ... Yep, okay, and there's nothing wrong with that, Ned. But I want you to feel it hanging there, feel the weightlessness in your fingers as the tension that held them in place transfers to your wrist. Feel the change in blood pressure as-’

  ‘-but let's get going. I just want to get this shit into me so we can-’

  ‘Oh my God, Ned, can you do something to shut this boy up... Yes, okay, that's what I thought. Anyway, I think you've got the message now. So that right arm you raised, that's the right arm you dream with; it's as malleable and formless as your imagination, it just instinctively imitates the shape and position of your corresponding physical arm... No, no that's quite enough about the motor homunculus. I'm doing the talking here, okay? Now, you don't need to close your eyes to conjure up this second body; throughout your waking life, you're making a constant subconscious effort to keep your various bodies aligned... Yes, that's right. Innumerable bodies sir. So, as you walk, I want you to retain awareness of this second body. This is the body that's seen - or, it might be better said, perceived - by the non-corporeal. If you can divide your attention between it and your physical body, then you can distort it in various ways - expand it, stretch it thin vertically or even just reduce it to a point. In doing so, you'll be able to pass through the various realms undetected. Now, the thing with - oh, your friend's walking off now. Might want to go after him, he's got the potion. Go on. Off you go.’

  ‘Satisfied? You've made a scene, you've stood half naked in the middle of the sidewalk waving your arm around like a fucking mongoloid, can we get to the fucking woods now so we can get on with this? If you can just not be a weird cunt for ten more minutes, we'll be in the heart of the woods and you can close your eyes and flap your arms around all you - Fuck! That was Them talking just then, man. I didn't even notice. I thought They were my own thoughts... Fuck! Ned, if I ever complain about you being a weird cunt again, punch me in the fucking face, please. It's those fucking Entities, man. I actually felt it then... I saw into the thought processes of all the conformist pigs out there, everyone who dismisses you as a chemical casualty... Fuck, let's get moving. It's the park across the road there - we've spent too much time there. It's swarming with all sorts of Dimensionless Motherfuckers, hunting us, breaking us down at the most fundamental level. We can never go there again, Ned. A horrible thought I know. Just the kind of horrible Thought that... Let's pick up the pace. I can smell Them from here. Oh god that smell... Let's move, man.’

  ‘Huh, that's actually quite interesting... You know what, Ned, I don't think your buddy over there is actually in contact with any entities at all. I think he's just another unhinged corporeal nobody wandering about the place personifying the demons inside him. Like Phillip K Dick's man who's afraid of his own shadow. That guy was always pretty quantumly-entangled like that. Both of them, really... Ooh I like that one. Man who's afraid of his own fractals… You certainly do have a way with words, Ned. Anyway, the point is this: No matter how similar the outcome, his overall assessment of the situation is way off. His conclusion was not even... Fuck, Ned, because it makes me feel better about myself to judge others, alright? It reaffirms my position within the spiritual hierarchies. You've got an ego, I've got an ego, we've all got fucking egos. There. You happy? Anyway, look, you've derailed another lecture with your irrelevant questions and smart-alecky remarks. Let's move forward, okay?’

  ‘...so we'll just - What are you so happy about? Alright, whatever man. But anyway-’

  ‘Right, so listen up now, Ned. I'm not going to explain this again. So, these daemons Collin saw in the park... Yes, alright, entities, whatever. These entities Collin saw... Alright, felt, whatever - Ned, I'm this close to cutting you off right now so pull your fucking head in... No, I'm not mad, I'm just - Well, yes, actually Ned, I am fucking mad. Now you can stop with this pompous bullshit and listen or I'll leave you alone with your maniac buddy over there and his boiled Datura pods... That's what I thought. So, anyway, those entities in the park, as well as the entities at his house and in the woods, they're no more than manifestations of his inner ennui. That's what happens when extroverted sensation-seekers limit their environment and interactions: They get bored. And when one is like Collin, an apopheniac with a taste for the unknown, this boredom tends to look... Right, fine, yes, feel a lot like a daem- entity. These thought forms that plague him are simply-’

  ‘No, this way, Ned-’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, just go with him. Anyway, these entities that plague Collin are simply his own distaste for the monotony of his life - a monotony he disguises with his rich inner life, personified and separated from himself as an esoteric defence mechanism, popular with the religious crowd and some underground fringe groups. In fact, these entities could even be a kind of self-doubt buried deep within him, a self-doubt so incompatible with his megalomania that he's unable to recognise it as a part of himself. Anyway, to conclude: These entities that have been harassing your friend, they're no more than the frantic denial of his growing sense of responsibility; your friend doesn't want to grow up and face reality. So the only thing left for him to do now is... No, no don't worry. I'm not gonna tell you guys to grow up. No, the next step for Collin is simply to-’

  ‘Right, Ned, you got your cup? Excellent. Hold still... Yep, there you go. Right, well, we're pretty much at the woods now, and I can't see anything taken orally kicking in in less than like twenty minutes. So, uh, chin chin, then?’

  ‘…move with - oh, right. Well, yeah. Go on then, get it in you. Think up a toast, Ned; don't be a cunt.’

  To Uncertainty.

  ‘To uncertainty.’

  ‘To uncertainty.’

Robbie Marks

I awoke masturbating, the source of my arousal lost in the morning's amnesia, and continued enthusiastically until the stirrings of human form next to me grounded me into manifest reality, undivided. Lucy, disturbed perhaps by my movements, perhaps by the denizens of her dreams, frowned and mumbled quietly in her sleep. With my left hand still inside my boxers, resting on my erect penis, I allowed a film-reel of perverted thoughts to flicker through my mind as I watched her fall back into slow-wave sleep, before deciding it would be best to bring myself to ecstasy in the shower.

  I got up and swung my legs out onto the floor before instinctively reaching to the bedside table for my glasses. After fumbling around for a moment, I realised they weren't there and remembered the significance of the day ahead of me, dispelling my morning malaise.

  It was day-three of the Mescaline phase: The pinnacle of our voyage.

  As if in response to this realisation, my blurred eyes came into relative focus, more of a mental adjustment than physical, accepting the fact that they would be working without the aid of my glasses today.

  My heart was beating at over 100BPM, and my brainwaves had already ramped up to a high-end beta rhythm, skipping entirely the cocoon-like alpha wave trance that would usually ease my thoughts out of amorphousness. My penis was still very much erect, so I employed a breathing meditation technique to draw the agitated sexual energy from my base up to a projected Ajna Chakrah, where it was transmuted into an aetheric verve that I would store until later, when I would use it to propel me into the deeper reaches of The Void.

  With my penis now flaccid and my mind fully animated and ready for Work, I eagerly got up and dressed myself in the clothes I had been wearing since my basal Mescaline trip on Thursday. The temptation to wake Lucy and dose immediately threatened to overwhelm me, but I resisted, largely thanks to my third-eye meditation earlier; Lucy could be trusted to wake up on her own terms at some point before noon, and experience told me that to wake her up myself would leave her in bad spirits which would affect us the entire day.

  I went into the lounge, stimulated by the amphetamine-like buzz of anticipation, and was surprised to find the house completely devoid of human life. There was an aura of instruments, cans, and cups around the couch and coffee table, and various drawn-on bits of scrap paper littered about, but Collin and Ned were nowhere to be seen.

  I got down on my knees and searched through the cans and bottles for Collin's pipe, since we'd be needing it later that day. Amongst the rubbish, I came across a small drawing of a bipedal reptile masturbating and spitting on its cock entitled ‘SPIT WANKING’, next to a plastic shopping bag that, to my shock, turned out to be full of human hair. I decided it would be best to get rid of the hair before Collin got back, knowing how disgusted he'd be to come home and find such a thing in his quarters. But then I looked inside: The hair was blond; both Michael and Ned had dark hair, and I knew that they were the only people there the previous night - besides Stan, who had evidently shaved his head at an earlier point.

  Stunned into inactivity, I realised then that I had to forget everything I knew about Collin. Leaving the lounge in such a state was a sure enough indicator that he had departed from old ways; but the fact that he had shaved his head to imitate ginger Stan, the cool-guy of the closed-circuit illusion of high school social politics, told me that I had quite possibly lost him for good.

  My gut reaction to losing Collin to The Mars Fuckers was deep apprehension: We would be losing our treasured smultronstalle - our home base, our supply of food, and our intellectual leader; all I had come to rely on as a homing signal to guide me back from my journeys. But, after some thought, I decided that this would simply be the next step in my own personal evolution - stepping out from Collin's shadow. Though the four of us - Lucy, Collin, Ned, and I - had, in the beginning, been on the path together, throughout this most recent Mescaline voyage I had been thinking that perhaps we had come to a fork in the road - the point where we must all, for better or worse, pursue the mysteries as individuals; or, like Collin, find a new tribe and travel down a different path entirely. I lay back on the carpet and closed my eyes to conjure up an image of the Qabalistic Tree of Life and place this new step within its framework. The drabness of my internal vision reminded me that I was sober - a terrible time for internal workings - so I got up and continued looking for the pipe, resisting the temptation to indulge in some of the remaining white powder on the table.

  After searching the entire living room, I concluded that my friends must have taken the pipe with them wherever they went. I decided to take the plastic Pump bottle bong instead, which would be better for the job anyway. I took it to the kitchen and poured the dirty water out into the sink before giving it a quick rinse and putting it in a plastic bag. Then I briefly scanned the sink and kitchen table for a vessel to store the water for the bong; I eventually decided that some drinking water might actually be an asset, and filled up an empty Sprite bottle from the recycling bin.

  I got the two bottles of Mescaline out of the fridge and put them on the kitchen table, more an impatient fidget than for any practical reasons, before quickly checking on the DMT in the freezer. I wasn't sure if it was ready, but decided it was best to wait until the evening to finish the extraction. I had about two points left from the last batch, which was enough for Lucy and I, and I would need Ned's expertise to do the extraction effectively. On the way back to the room, I mentally checked off my list of items needed for the day: Bong, DMT, Mescaline, water, Dictaphone, pencil, compass, sketchbook, phone, weed, Ketamine, downers, acid, mp3 player, Be Here Now....

  Once in Collin's room, I stood watching Lucy shift around under the blankets - most likely in a REM state, possibly close to waking - silently willing her to rise. Eventually, she settled into what appeared to be a slow-wave sleep, so I gave up and gathered my belongings. My sketchbook was still open on the floor, displaying a mandala I'd drawn the previous night which was disappointingly lifeless in the dull light of morning. I put it in my bag along with my mp3 player and Dictaphone, then went to the lounge to fidget and wait for Lucy. Bored and restless, I got my phone out to text Collin and found I had a message from Tracey: ‘come for a drinK i got cash.’ It took me a moment to decipher the text, as I had trouble imagining Tracey deciding to invite me around for a drink, especially at such an hour, before I noticed the capitalised K, which added some more structure to the day ahead of me.

  I text her back: ‘Yep I'll give you a call when I'm in town; I'm waiting for Lucy to wake up.’ In the end, I decided not to text Collin, reflecting on my earlier meditation regarding the next step in my journey. This would be the basis of my trip: Establishing my new life direction, as well as checking in on my personal Tree of Life to regain perspective…. Some entity contact would be nice, too.

  With time to kill, I got my tin out from my bag to do stock take, as I often did in my spare moments. I arranged my items next to me on the couch, thanks to a paranoid train of thought concluding that the mess on the coffee table could potentially swallow up some of my stock. I had three half-gram bags of Ketamine left; I would part with up to one gram today, as I was still interested in the possibility of testing out the Mescaline-Ketamine combo - I'd been entertaining the thought for a little while now of using a psychedelic to illuminate the dissociated darkness of the K-hole, allowing me to navigate the blind alleyways of a high-dose Ketamine trip without lapsing into stupor. I still had an ounce and three baggies of weed, which had been causing me some anxiety; I'd been hoping to eliminate weed completely from my arsenal once I found my hallucinogen market, as weed is a highly impractical drug to distribute - it takes up a lot of space, puts one at risk of being sniffed out by police dogs or particularly astute officers, and the customers tend to have the annoying habit of lingering around long after the transaction is over; this was of little trouble to me as I often distributed the weed via my Mescaline-influenced wanders about town, but most everyone in town knew they could find me at Collin’s, and the semi-regular influx of lurkers and wasters had all but broken the peaceful meditation of our once treasured smultronstalle. I still had a lighter-sized strip of 150ug LSD tabs, which I was contemplating involving in the voyage ahead of us. There was also two points of DMT, for Lucy and I; a small baggy of Benzodiazepine and a slightly fuller baggy of Cyclizine, to be traded with the Seed Freaks at the next opportunity; and half a tray of Dextroamphetamine, which turned out to be a foolish investment since anybody who wanted any knew they could get them from Michael, often in exchange for a few beers or a sesh, and I was fairly sure I'd end up ingesting the majority of them eventually, having developed some affinity for the drug myself.

  After another half-hour or so of waiting around, listening to The Incredible String Band and playing probability games with Lucy's Tarot cards, I finally caved in and crushed up a ten-milligram Dextroamphetamine to get me out of my sobriety rut. I then engaged in Metaprogramming Ritual 2: Dopamine Invocation, a metaprogramming ritual I had designed around the amphetamine rush that involved a glass of Berocca, gamma-frequency binaural beats, and push-ups while staring at a sigil.

  With the amphetamines now coursing through my veins, complemented by the stimulation of gamma-wave oscillations and vigorous exercise, I spent the next half-hour labouring over a detailed diagram of the Qabalistic Tree of Life juxtaposed over a drawing of the Chakrah system, annotated with notes regarding Timothy Leary's Eight Circuits of Consciousness. I then traced Michael's spit-wanking lizard onto another piece of refill and added the Tree of Life, the Chakrahs, and Eight Circuits of Consciousness over top of the corresponding body parts, adding a second ejaculation to the top of the creature's head representing Kether, the crown Chakrah, and the Psycho-Atomic Circuit, suggesting that the two ejaculatory streams merged somewhere beyond the page.

  As I started trying to fit the Seven Deadly Sins of Christian lore into the table of correspondences, Lucy finally emerged from Collin's room, wearing the same filthy, frayed dress she'd been wearing since Thursday. She radiated the warm, loving energy she always did when she'd been left to wake up on her own, and her infectious, sleepy smile and sensual, dream-stained eyes made me glad I'd resisted temptation to wake her.

  ‘Hey Lucy, come check this out. I've reconciled the Qabalah, Timothy Leary's Eight Circuits of Consciousness, and the Chakrahs into one system. Come look!’

  Lucy smiled softly and said, ‘Hold on, Robbie. I'm gonna make a coffee. You want one?’

  ‘Hey, uh, I dunno if you should be mixing coffee with this. It's kind of a science, these cocktails. You’ll have a caffeine crash at the peak, and -’

  ‘Robbie, I can tell you've taken Dexies.’

  I opened my mouth to explain my ritual to her, a shitty justification for my lack of chemical prudence, before realising it was a terrible excuse and I was indeed being a dick. I laughed and said, ‘Nah, no coffee for me thanks.’ Lucy smiled and disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Three ... two ... one.... To the Gods!’ she said, and we both chugged our glasses of Mescaline. The liquid was thick and snotty, with a bitter, earthy taste that got harder to stomach with each successive gulp. I had almost finished my glass when a gag-reflex ballooned my cheeks with regurgitated Mescaline. I swallowed the burning chunder down and held the glass at arm's length, swallowing a few times to suppress the looming retch. Lucy had finished hers and her face was scrunched up into a sour grin. I held my nose and finished my glass off, before shuddering and throwing it onto the grass triumphantly.

  Lucy burped but didn't follow through and said, ‘We'll go to the beach now?’ her spine tingling visibly.

  I began to answer and a wave of nausea hit me. I bent over to vomit, but nothing came out; I was anticipating it too much. ‘Nah, wait here 'til we chuck, I reckon. Then we'll go,’ I said weakly, spitting on the grass between words.

  ‘Yep okay. That's a good idea. Then we'll go to the beach?’

  ‘Uh, yeah, yeah, go to the beach.... We'll do that a bit later, actually. Spacey wants to buy some Ketamine, too. So we'll go see her, I reckon. Then, uh, then maybe the Seed Freaks, so we can get that out of the way ... gotta do a quick trade with them....’

  ‘Oh cool. And then we'll find Collin and go to the beach.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Collin'll be with The Mars Fuckers, I reckon, so that'll work in.... Oh yeah, hang on. I actually had this plan with ants I wanted to -’

  I was interrupted mid-sentence by a powerful and uncontrollable purging. The first spurt came out involuntarily, filling my mouth with vomit too acidic to swallow back down. My whole body shook as I leaned forward and released my mouthful of spew onto the lawn, knowing that there was more to come. I glanced at Lucy and she gave me a knowing nod, then I got down on all fours and released a violent torrent of stomach contents, complete with a gurgling, animal roar. The Mescaline purge is incomparable to a drunken chunder; from the first blast onward, the entire contents of one's stomach are forcibly expelled in a satisfying projectile scream of burning stomach acid. After a short while of post-vomit heaves, I stood four-legged on the lawn, spitting thick, mucousy strands as my eyes watered and adrenaline thudded my heart.

  Once I felt adequately emptied, I lay on my back next to my vomit swamp and stared up at the sky, scrying the first formations of enhanced perception: A dazed, vaguely dream-like state that precedes the first characteristically psychedelic effects of the substance; a bodily reaction to the introduction of a foreign, familiarly potent substance into the system. As Lucy wandered languorously around the yard, I had my first Mescaline-inspired moment of acute self-awareness, considering how the scene would appear to onlookers, had there been any: For the last month or so, about three times a week, some combination of Lucy, Ned, and I had stood around in the backyard of the Callahan household, vomiting violently in turn. Though vomiting is, in the alcoholic western culture, not all that uncommon, this situation would surely be an enigma to any onlookers: A group of teenagers standing around, completely sober, periodically excusing themselves from conversation to spew loudly and violently, before composing themselves and continuing conversation eloquently, without a second thought.

  I sat up and smiled at Lucy, trusting that the telepathy had started between us. Her amused, sparkling eyes seemed to confirm this.

  ‘Should we go now?’ she asked.

  ‘What? You haven't even spewed yet. That was only half our dose, anyway. We could re-dose once you have your spew, or just maybe take it with us. Up to you.’

  ‘I think we should go.... If you're ready, that is. I don't feel like I'm gonna spew this time. I've got a joint we can smoke on the way, if we go through the park. We should go through the park. It’s a nice day today.’

  I nodded and got to my feet, feeling the first wave as a satisfying glow throughout my blood and the beginnings of the psychic freedom cactus gifts me with. My hearing was ultra high-definition, intuitively isolating the myriad noises of the surrounding nature and suburbia into distinct, highly detailed layers. The Earth's gravitational pull loosened slightly, and we headed inside to prepare for our mission.

  Knowing from experience that not acting quickly and decisively when taking Phenylethylamines can often result in an entire trip spent wandering about the house lost in angles, I wasted no time gathering my belongings. Lucy and I ended up splitting a tab, and we set off down the road, happy and free. Since the street was more or less deserted, Lucy sparked the joint she had rolled for the walk. I decided to limit myself to one puff, not wanting to waste any of the trip in stoned thought-loops. After one small toke, I instinctively got my Dictaphone from my bag and clicked it on.

  ‘The initial effects of Mescaline are apparent, approximately thirty minutes after ingestion. On this trip, I will be moving away from the myths of days past and contemplating the future, clearing a spiritual pathway that may be the path I follow for the rest of my time on this plane....’

Collin Callahan

The Datura trance turned out to be the opposite of what I had envisioned. The first wave was a drunken night in fast forward. The two of us clambered around the woods with childlike glee, screaming spontaneous animal incantations into the aethers. Eventually the sedative effects took hold, and we collapsed at the foot of an ancient tree, silently appreciating the oblivion we could never quite find with alcohol. My Pursuers finally left me alone, frightened by the more sinister forms manifesting from within.

  After an indeterminate stretch of time, cracked lips and a full bladder brought me gently back to the physical. I managed to get to my feet without too much trouble, but finding Ned's backpack proved impossible. It seemed to be everywhere I looked - lazing about in the shrubs, dangling from the trees like wild monkeys, even resting on my own back. One copy manifested as a sentient creature, resting on the forest floor with a deflated grimace. Not willing to reality check the myriad versions, I chose instead to deal with my full bladder. The process of walking was beginning to feel quite abstract, so I gave up and took a piss where I was. In spite of the longer than usual amount of time it took to unzip my fly, I got a fright when I felt warm liquid trickling down my leg to my shoes.

  Oddly, the shock had the effect of distracting me from the task at hand. The forest was now alive and full of activity. As I stared around at my surroundings, menacing creatures jeered at me, scrambling behind trees and shrubbery whenever my eyes rested upon them. After a spell of vertigo, I turned to head back to the party. Whether or not I was still pissing seemed unimportant and somehow not quite real enough to be of any concern.

  Sitting boneless against the tree trunk, Ned screamed in manic laughter at me, supported by a chorus of stalk limbed beings protruding from behind him like black bonfire shadows. I tried to make my way back to the party, but only succeeded in throwing my body into the swirling darkness of the dirt floor.

  Wandering through the forest with Ned and hayden, I found it strange that they didn't share my awe. Familiar creatures hid in my shadow as I walked, prancing warily behind me. I couldn't figure out who or what they were hiding from, but their apprehension was infectious. As we walked, the trees took on a higher intelligence, forming avant garde images with their leaves and branches that responded to the intensity of my focus. In the distance, a sun drenched clearing lay forever out of reach. Its entrance was a tunnel formed by overhanging trees, its walls lined by a horde of prostitutes awaiting us patiently, their leaves and lipsticked flowers swaying in the slight breeze. I knew intuitively that I would never make it to the clearing.

  Concerned with my rapidly diminishing proprioception, I took a seat on an enormous fungal log and found myself once again surrounded by human activity. People camouflaged into the trees with the help of plantlike limbs and grotesquely smeared over leaf faces. A few people laughed or cried, but most stood and stared, unresponsive. Some of the trees were inscribed from top to bottom with familiar symbols of a native language. In my peripherals, I caught a glimpse of a small hornless gargoyle editing the words on the tree. He was visibly offended when our eyes met, and morphed into a rock in an indignant gesture.

  From what I could understand from the writing and the murmurs around me, I concluded that the inhabitants of this forest city were part of a greatly advanced civilisation. Light years ahead of us in evolution, they had done a full circle back to living in the forest, retaining their sociological and technological prowess while exponentially furthering their knowledge of the psychic cells that correspond to matter. From the benign, deliberate watch of the forest, I gathered that it was the trees themselves who inhabited this city, making up the physical and psychic foundations with no apparent distinctions between the walls, the people, and their thoughts. Our concrete cities of roads and buildings were archaic failures by comparison, and were in fact no more than crop fields for these entities. The trees and plants that surround our human cities, as well as the limited number that line the streets, watch us from the sky and the dirt, gifting us with oxygen and allowing us to harvest their appendages to sustain ourselves until we die and their roots feed on our corpses. We are no more than livestock for these greater beings. It was then that I noticed that some of the benign, inviting trees were staring at me hungrily, salivating huge chunks of viscous sap.

  I started to voice this thought to Ned, only to find that it was actually a tree with a similar posture hunched over next to me. We looked at each other for a moment and the tree's caring smile told me that even though my destiny was to be sustenance for these great creatures, they would make sure my life was a pleasant one, even if no one else did. I nodded and continued reading.

  Though heavily intoxicated, I managed to read the literature from eye level to the dirt, where the inscriptions turned into mobile three dimensional imagery, another impressive technology of this advanced race. In an attempt to gain more insight into the nature of this technology, I relaxed and allowed gravity to seduce me into their tales.

  The ground was in many ways similar to that of the world I had left. Though the creatures were much more fantastical and the plants more inquisitive, the physics were more or less what I was accustomed to. The ground itself existed in a state between solid and liquid, allowing the creatures to move about freely while remaining plugged in. The plants of this land seemed to be in possession of four fifths of our senses, maybe even five - I got the distinct impression they chose simply not to listen. As far as I could tell there was nothing solid that wasn't sentient.

  I felt something fly over my head and looked up to the sky, and was totally immobilised by what I saw. Above me was everything I had sought all along, everything I had ever wanted from myself and the universe and everything I had hidden from in cowardice. I screamed in ecstatic laughter as aetheric forms danced and plummeted around with a disregard for the physics of my own world that would have been offensive if it wasn't so fucking invigorating. I ejaculated into my already soiled pants and was throbbing again in seconds. On no more than a whim, the endless howling clouds above me would assume solid forms with a sentience far beyond my own as they partied raucously through the sky, merging effortlessly with adjacent forms, their dignity and class making me feel premammalian by comparison. Multiple times I was assaulted by these fleeting formations in an act that was for them no more than a passing consideration for the primordial lump of matter below. These acts were sexual and rarely violent, and felt to me to be a form of paedophilia, as they exist on a timeline immeasurably beyond my perception.

  Once my libido was drained, these forms gave way to another flock of entities, free to assume any form they choose. They slithered freely through the skies of my dreams, taking on the form of my own thoughts spread infinitely across the sky. It saved me a lot of explaining. But did they have to tell the world?

  ‘Well, Collin, it depends if you want to be a big part of something small, or a small part of something big,’ is all He said before dissolving into the swarm of shadow winged particles around Him.

  With the weary clarity of eleven year old eyes, I looked up at dad from the concrete with bleeding knees and gums that fluctuated between solid and liquid as my teeth sloshed about freely. I expressed concern that I had damaged the part of my brain used to break down reality into a moment by moment sequence, surprised to find my chorus of teeth speaking on my behalf. I was concerned that while we could perhaps patch up my raw knees and sedate my overactive teeth, the fixing of time itself would require more than just a band aid.

  ‘You think you've got problems,’ dad replied, turning away from his forest of test tubes and beakers with a manic smile and eyes aghast, ‘I've broken space!’ And he quite abruptly became everything in a kind of moronic joke only a father is capable of.

  My laughter turned into a splitting frost in my chest as I was slingshotted back into the woods with a sensation like a misjudged step. Protozoic sunlight rained down into me, obscuring my view of my surroundings. I tried to lift my arm up to shield my vision, but I couldn't find either of them. Somewhere nearby, Ned was laughing drunkenly. 

  ‘Ned. What's so funny?’ My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth as I spoke, giving my speech the stilted lull of the cleft palated.

  ‘What's so funny Ned?’

  ‘...’

  ‘Ned?’

  '...'

  ‘Ned!’

  ‘...Yes?’

  ‘What the fuck are you laughing about?’

  ‘...I came into your bedroom to tell you that I had just finished telling you that I kept talking to you and you'd just disappear. Then the you I was telling that to disappeared. It was all very slapstick.’

  Then, naturally, I disappeared. Ned opened his eyes and looked at the empty space next to him and laughed. I’m going to miss that cunt.

Stan Richards

Kneecap's throbbing like fuck and the sun's a damp sheepskin rug dragging me down, snuffing out the manic spell of energy that took hold of me before. Smashed my knee real bad on a ledge back on Hunterway and now I'm hobbling past Centres, using my board like a cane, glaring at the concrete with a pirate's wince at every step. Just another crazy wandering the city streets, the type we all pretend we can't see. Don't mind me, motherfuckers. I'm just looking for a decent alleyway to drink a beer and fuckin' creep. Avoid my eyes, just stare straight-

  ‘Oi, Stan ya cunt!’

  Dazed, I stop and look around for the source of the voice, squinting from the afternoon sun. I spot Michael across the road, sitting against a wall, smoking a cigarette. He's got a shaved head and sunglasses and no visible bruises or scars on his face for once. I give him a two-fingered salute and keep walking.

  ‘Oi, come over for a smoke ya anti-social cunt. It's me, Michael.’

  I stop and look at him and he takes off his glasses. I can't really read the cunt's facial expression - aggression and good cheer are like pretty much indistinguishable on that ugly face. I've had fuck all to do with him since school, when we parted on what can only be described as bad terms, but fuck it. I'll fuckin' annihilate the cunt if he starts shit.

  Limping and stumbling from pain, heat, and exhaustion, I head across the road. I walk straight in front of a car and it doesn't even beep or yell or anything. Just goes around me, polite as. I guess I look like one of the mentally ill that lurch around these parts during the summer - cunt prolly thought I'd have a fit or something if they beeped at me. The thought cheers me up a bit.

  ‘Up to ya crooked cunt?’ Michael grins up at me when I get to him.

  I sit down next to him on my board and go ‘Just fuckin'...’ and wander straight into a head-fucked blank. I stare at the pavement and go ‘Fuck, I don't even know man. Just fucked. How about you?’

  I look up from the ground to his face and he's got this sorta concerned sneer that only he's capable of. He looks away from me up to the sky and breathes out a jet of smoke. I recognise the pungent scent instantly and realise it's a joint he's smoking. Right in the middle of the city, broad daylight, on one of the busiest streets in town. Fuckin' loose cunt. The people walking by ignore him in the same way they ignored me. Just stare straight ahead and don't let us creeps into their grey little fantasy.

  ‘Ah fuck all, Stan man. Just getting a spicy one in on my break,’ he says, releasing small puffs of smoke as he talks. ‘Here,’ he holds the joint out to me, ‘you look like you could use a pick-me-up.’

  I stare at it for a bit and my first thought is that it's prolly the last thing I need. But my next thought is fuck it. What else am I doing? Might as well get into some schizo head-fucks, give me something to do.

  The weed makes me cough my fuckin' lungs out, and we both have a laugh about it. I gotta say, this cunt's pretty cheerful today. No head games or smartass comments. Maybe it's 'cause it's just us two so he's got nothing to prove. Or maybe he's just not fritzed out on dexies for once. Who knows? Prolly not even him. I'm tryna stifle the cough, but it's just turned it into like this drawn-out wheeze. I have another puff anyway and hand it back, choking.

  ‘You work in the mall?’ I ask, still coughing a little.

  ‘Nah, Bolton’s,’ he nods down the road. ‘Cleaning up every other cunt's mess, taking the abuse, barrel boy duties, all that shit.’

  He drags deep and takes it like a champ, filling the air around us with smoke as he breathes out. We sit silently for a bit and I'm starting to think about something, something about Michael and weed, maybe, but it's all so complicated in my head that I can't even begin to make an actual thought out of it. My knee doesn't hurt anymore, but my cancer's throbbing again.

  ‘So what are you doing with yourself these days?’ he asks finally, before having a series of small, aggressive puffs. He passes it to me and talks in a Kermit the frog voice while exhaling little puff balls, ‘Fuckin' off to Uni next year I spose?’ The isolated puffs of smoke condense into one massive stream he blows above his head once he finishes his sentence. The smoke settles into a cloud just above us for a moment before dissipating and I wonder how the fuck he can even fit that much in his lungs.

  ‘Fuck that,’ I say, taking the tiny, resin brown joint from him. I have a bitchy puff that still makes me cough.

  ‘Fuckin' oath, fuck that noise. Fuckin' education factories and shit, just telling every cunt what's what. You working then?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Looking?’

  ‘...Nah. Not really.’

  ‘Well what the fuck are you doing then?’

  I have another puff. I'm feeling like halfway between amused and dejected - sitting here getting life lessons from a fuckin' wolf-rat, struggling to hold up my end of the conversation, already more stoned than him even though I've smoked a fraction of what he has. I'm at the bottom of every fuckin' hierarchy there is. But then there was that shit I was thinking earlier...

  ‘Eh?’ Michael only allows a few seconds of silence at a time, weed or no weed.

  ‘Fuckin'... I dunno man. Been skating a bit. Been doing some writing...’

  ‘Nah nah, that's hobbies, cunt. I ain't talking about hobbies. What I mean is what's your next move? Like, in life?’

  ‘...Fuck, I dunno man. See what happens, I guess.’

  I hand him the joint and try to think through a cloudy thought I can't really interpret. Michael prolongs the silence by taking a series of tiny puffs from the roach, staring at his feet with narrow eyes. He finishes it off and stubs it out on the concrete before offering me the leftover cardboard. I shake my head and he pockets it.

  ‘Well, you gotta do something. This ain't school holidays, cunt. This is fuckin' life now, man... I spose that's fuckin' school for ya - get every cunt doing maths and reading books and shit, then throw 'em out into the real world just like, here, deal with it, when cunts don't even have a fuckin' clue what a CV is. Like fuckin' Rory and Damo. Didn't make it to Uni, now they're just up to fuck all. Collin too. All just sitting 'round drinking and smoking buds every day. All the cunts who seemed switched on as fuck at school, just fuckin' lost now... Fuck, Stan, getting kicked out was probly the best thing that ever happened to me.’

  I'm just sitting here staring at the cunt now, no idea what to even say to that. He's fuckin' spot on, really. He's the only one from school who seems to have their shit together now, and he was like the biggest trouble maker out of all of us. He's staring at the concrete again now, thinking something through. Sorta looks like he actually feels bad for the rest of us.

  ‘Anyway, cunt,’ he says, ‘I gotta head back in. I reckon you could probly come in and help me, maybe get some shit lined up for the future. I know it's just fuckin' dishes, fuckin' Rory and Jeremy are always at me about that shit, fuckin' privileged cunts - work's fuckin' work ya high and mighty motherfuckers, gotta start somewhere... I'll be at the top of this ladder before those cunts even find one they're willing to suck it up and climb.’

  Climbing the ladder... There's something I need to... What the fuck was I just thinking about?

  ‘Eh, come on.’

  ‘...What, now?’

  ‘Yeah, fuckin' oath. It'll be all good. I'll just-’

  ‘I'm fucked though, man.’

  ‘Eh, doesn't even fuckin' matter. I'm on the buds every day in there. It's just fuckin' dishes. You could be the most cabbage cunt out and still be all good in there. Come on.’

  He's always had a way of making you feel like a little bitch when you don't go along with his shit. I really can't be fucked with this though. It'll just be another thing to add to my long list of failures.

  ‘Fuck... Nah, can't do it, man. I didn't sleep at all last night, I'm so fuckin' faded-’

  ‘Eh, me neither cunt. I was tripping balls with the Others all night. All good. I got some dex, just get some of that shit in ya and you'll be sweet.’

  ‘Fuck, man...’

  ‘Come off it, cunt. Just come and see what happens, right? That's what you said before. That's your big plan: See what happens. Well, what's fuckin' happening is I'm giving you some charge and we're gonna drink some beers, wash some fuckin' dishes, and I'm gonna get you a fuckin' job. What, you fuckin' waiting for someone to come up and ask you to be a fuckin' doctor or something? Or you just wanna spend another day sulking around whinging to yourself about how hard your life is? You said it yourself, you said you didn't know what you're up to. Well I'm the cunt with all the ideas here. Come on.’

  The cunt's got a point I guess. And how can I explain to him that the future doesn't matter 'cause I've got cancer without sounding like the suicidal little bitch I am? The whole cancer thing seems sorta abstract now, like now that I'm tryna think how I'd mention it to Michael. I try to mentally go through the conversation and start to wonder if maybe it's all in my head, before wondering if I even believe it myself.

  ‘Eh, over here,’ Michael says, snapping his fingers like a fly darting around my head. ‘Fuckin' wakey wakey, cunt. We doing this or what?’

  I decide to postpone the cancer thought till I'm sober, concluding instead that I need to talk to people more. It'd do me good to have a bit of a reality check every now and then.

  ‘Fuck... Alright. Might as well,’ I say. 

  ‘Fuck yeah, good cunt,’ he says, standing up. ‘Come on, let's go have a line.’

  We go into the back of Bolton and Sons through like this big garage kinda room, and head straight to the toilets down the end of this corridor. In the toilets, he says he'll crush up after he takes a piss, so I stand behind him awkwardly while he does. He finishes up and puts the lid down without flushing and crushes up a couple pills on top. I get my beer out and down it in like three goes. I offer him the other one and he says he's got one waiting inside, but tells me I'm a good cunt for understanding the brotherhood, which is cool but kinda reminds me of some Straightedge shit. We snort the lines with a receipt from Michael's pocket that's already rolled into a snorter. It stings for about twenty seconds but then it's fine.

  I thank him and we head off down the corridor towards the garage. Michael's already much more animated than he was, muttering nondescript affirmations to himself, his walk somewhere between a skip and a strut. His excitement is infectious, and I decide I'm starting to feel the dexies too. At first I feel like I'm just tricking myself that it's working, but then I notice myself tryna think of something to say to Michael, like just for the sake of talking, and lose all doubt.

  ‘Just roll with it, alright,’ he says, apparently reading my mind. ‘Dunno if you'll get payed for today, but you'll probly have a job sussed as long as you don't fuck up too bad. Do ya good to do a day's work for once anyway ya lazy cunt.’

  ‘Fuck yeah. Sounds good man, sounds good,’ I say. He looks over his shoulder at me briefly and gives me a knowing smile that seems strangely to be full of nothing but good will. He turns away and I return the smile to the back of his head as we walk.

  We get to the garage and there's some geezer having a smoke on a set of steps that leads indoors. Michael stands over him and goes ‘Oi, Fish Hands, this is my mate Stan. All good if he comes in for a trial? Hectic as in there today.’

  Fish Hands looks up at me casually with one eye closed. He's like a dark haired, gym-jock looking type. Kinda looks like Lance, if that cunt was ever in a good mood.

  ‘Chris,’ he says, holding out his hand.

  ‘Stan,’ I shake his hand. I feel a little anxious here, but this guy seems to be tryna put me at ease, which counts for a lot, really.

  ‘First job?’ he says, finishing his smoke off and stubbing it out on the concrete.

  ‘Yeah.’ It's silent for a bit and Michael doesn't butt in for some reason so I say ‘You, uh, want a CV?’

  Chris laughs. ‘Nah, you're all good mate. It's just dishes, nothing to it. We'll just see how you go.’

  I smile at him and he lights another cigarette and looks away from me like we're done here. I follow Michael into the kitchen, which is like four kitchens all connected. We go past a few people who look real busy till we get to a sink at the far end with a huge stack of dirty pots and plates and shit on the bench next to it. There's a doorway out to the bar area next to the bench, and I can hear like The Kinks or someone playing over the voices, which I'm kinda into.

  Michael starts on the dishes straight away and goes ‘I'll wash and you just get them out of this thing and put them away,’ pointing to this thing under the bench that looks like an oven.

  ‘Um, I don't know where anything goes.’

  ‘Ah fuck, true,’ he says, putting the hose down and looking all thoughtful and sorta pissed off. ‘Alright then. Well, there's plates in the steriliser now. They go on that shelf over there. Just make sure you put them in the right pile - you'll figure it out. I know you're not as dumb as you look.’

  I nod and get a rack of plates out of the steriliser which breathes out a cloud of steam when I open it. I pull the tray out and notice I'm smiling, just hyped to be doing shit instead of just sitting around wondering what the fuck I even am. Just doing what I'm told and tryna do it well. Buzzing on weed and uppers, like the old days. Michael's off on some rant about a good as cunt called Max whose ass I apparently should get to kissing as soon as possible. Just what I fuckin' need.

Lucy Winters

The cloudy sky flows overhead with endless currents of crackling energy like the tides of the Earth, breathing electrical vibrations all through the unfathomable depths. The clouds are pulsing an apocalyptic gamboge flame as the armies in the sky open fire. The Earth is glowing today; the skies are illuminated by the Earth rather than the Sun, the humming glow of all life. I can't even tell where the Sun is. I suppose the Sun is all around us. Barefoot, I stumble off the curb as I stare into the blazing sky and laugh.

  Robbie follows me languidly onto the road and we stumble psychedelic drunk down Burrows Street, swaying and bumping into each other. Our brains aren't trying to hold anything together anymore - it’s all up to the pulses of the universe now. The street is empty and the homes deserted, but something about the street is teeming. All the surfaces are impossibly detailed and my imagination even more so, humming over top of each other to make an orchestra so deep that all I can hear is sprites and fairies chanting and laughing over one another. I no longer have peripherals or a focal point. All the life around me is swarming freely through my ever expanding eyes into the swirling tendrils of pure symmetry.

  Robbie bumps into me and the hidden Suns laugh sleepy jests with us. Robbie's smile is a slow motion laugh with the Earth and his walk is a drunken song. He talked into his tape recorder until he started laughing, then he put it away and we've all been smiling ever since.

  The murmuring shadows of celestial koi shimmer organically across the sky, but the shapes of suburbia have abrupt, thudding angles and everything is insultingly square. Cuboid houses in square properties and streets, grass strips on ninety degree angles . . . Even the bushes have been cut into cubes separating the square of grass from the oblong strips of concrete. I veer onto the sidewalk and pick a leaf to make sure no human hand has cut all the leaves into squares. Humans try to make everything into squares so there's no extra space between them for swirling voices without homes, leaving them only our untouchable dreams to roam. The veins that creep out from the centre of the leaf follow the same pattern as the movement of the skies above. Mother Nature's song. Humans think they dominate Nature by making her into squares, but She keeps humming her tune in her secret way, in the things too small and the things too big. Man gets to keep his squares. I can't even see the squares anymore. I only see Her pattern making the biggest from the smallest. You have to look in just the right way to see the squares. The way we’re told to look. The way we always look . . .

  Robbie's stopped to wait for me and his hairs wave robelike against the sky. I pick the leaf and catch up with him. We must never cut our hair; Mother Nature's aesthetics go beyond little human ideas. She takes into account the immeasurable and the imperceptible and everything in between. When humans stop trying to make everything into squares and let Her pattern emerge, they end up with a grander beauty, one that you can see from all the angles that aren't the ninety degree corners that steal our focus . . . All the other angles and spaces between the notes . . . The way we move and talk and think . . . The way the trees grow and die . . . The way the clouds form and merge and absorb into the skies . . . The way the cells multiply and spread . . . The patterns of the supernovas forming solar systems . . . The way civilisations build and spread and deepen and crumble and disperse and form new civilisations . . . The way relationships form and fade then swallow everything else up . . . The way we feel a million different things in sequence and just call it happy . . . The way our neural networks grow and mimic the star systems . . . It all follows the pattern, the template for everything, if you stand back and let it. I know this only because it’s true.

  Robbie's waving his hands in front of his face and the sky sings Her song in yellows and reds that hide the blue in my memories of right angles. The sky mirrors the land and the land is yesterday’s dream. The clouds hum the songs of tomorrow. I hope they're right. I hope Collin turns up from whatever adventure he's on as I do so we can fade away together. Mescaline is the only time I don't ache for Collin. It's me and Robbie when we're on mescaline. Mescaline lets us see the pattern in all its grand detail so we can let our jaws hang limp and silent and let it take us out to sea. Collin sings his own song, rides his own current, and when it carries you its glow fades everything else completely.

  ‘The sky is huge,’ I say. The crinkles around Robbie's smiling eyes illustrate the very pattern that's making him smile. ‘But so is this leaf.’ I hold it up between us and the fiery glow of the Earth shines incandescent greens through its veins.

  ‘I love you so much. I don't even care what it means.’ Robbie can say a few different things at once, when he wants to. He picks his words just right to make it more than one sentence, depending where you look from. Most of the time no one even notices because they're too still. All they hear is eternal adolescence.

  We stop at the Holland Street turnoff because we were going to go to Tracey's. I can't imagine talking to anyone except Robbie now. I can't imagine standing right angled. We look at each other and Robbie starts to say something but instead both of our smiles synchronise and grow into a laugh. Robbie probably thinks it's telepathy, but really it's just easy to hear someone else's song when you stop singing your own for a second. Robbie would just smile and say, ‘What's the difference?’ and he'd be right so we keep walking.

  The distant city shapes at the end of Burrows Lane are square as always, but the vines from the nature strips and gardens and parks are creeping up the sides, reclaiming it all for Herself. The city's song is being sung by all the animals from the trees and the zoos and the sky, with primitive man telling all the suits to either take off their ties and dance with them or . . .

  ‘Hey Lucy, try this. Three sixty degree vision. All you gotta do is look straight ahead as you walk, but keep watching the power poles with your peripherals as you . . .’

  . . . either dance with them or go back to their office and lock the doors and hide. The sky glows with Promethean fire and the wind dances with my minds and hairs. When we get to town, we can wander through the office buildings looking at the exhibitions as they make phone calls and write on their computers for our entertainment. But maybe when we get there it'll be too close to see. Maybe we'll be seeing from a right angle, trapped in cages for the next psychedelic voyeurs. The shapes of the city are designed to make all your tracks and paths right angled. Robbie wants to go and see the Seed Freaks and I want to go to the ocean, but we'll have to go through town do either of those so I link arms with Robbie and twirl us around back towards the woods. He agrees in silent smiles and we sway in psychedelic drunk unison, heading back the way we came.

  ‘We'll pick up the notions we dropped along the way,’ Robbie says, and dances.

Things get strange on the third day. After two days of dusk till dawn mescaline trips, I wake up humming with the dim glow of Nature’s music. The mescaline doesn’t really kick in or peak at all, and I don’t get lost in the limpid dreams and visions like I do on day one. By day three, the dancing geometric phantoms their coded secrets have come and gone, leaving just the echo of their Gaianistic chant. By the third day, I’m drunk and dizzy with exhaustion and valium, and all the right angled stuff I’ve forgotten over the last few days of sleepless dreams starts coming back just a little askew. On the third day, I finally get to relax and just understand everything I’ve been shown, just watch it all melt into my life as I slowly start to remember. The song gets quieter and quieter throughout the trip, but it never stops; eventually I just get tired and follow the fables into my dreams. Then I wake up and smile because I know the song’s still there underneath all the nausea and the black humour of life.

  Robbie's looking for an ant hill for some reason, and the hum of the bee is a corrugated ripple along the spine of Nature’s tune. He's passing some pollen from his front legs to the middle to the back like a conveyor belt as his friend fusses about in the air around him. The flowers cast subtle rays that hum in my forehead as I watch them.

  Day three for Robbie is different. He says it’s accumulative, that every trip gets stronger and stranger, until the apex of day three when he smokes DMT and moves past this world completely. I only sometimes smoke DMT with him; sometimes I just like to watch him fly. Terror and wonder and laughter all flicker across his virgin face as he explores the secret diagrams and connections of his mind. When he wakes up from the DMT dream, he usually spends the rest of the trip talking about why everything he said before the DMT was wrong.

  ‘Found one,’ Robbie calls. I say goodbye to the bees and the flowers and hold my dress up as I walk through the ankle high shrubs to where Robbie is. He's standing over an ant hill translating their motions into sentences made up of alchemical symbols in his mind. I know this not through telepathy; I know this because it's what Robbie does.

  ‘You wanna go first?’ he asks. The distant river spreads the rhythm through the rays of dappled sunlight that rest knowingly on the ant hill. He sits down on a fallen log and ruffles through his bag, eventually coming out with Collin's bong and a bag of DMT. I sit next to him and he packs it with DMT and a finely crushed dead leaf.

  He hands me the bong and scoops up a handful of ant hill and dumps it in front of me.

  ‘Breathe it onto those ants, okay?’

  I put the bong down and stare at him. The wind rings through the leaves like Ned’s drunkest laugh.

  ‘What? It'll be like an alien abduction for them. We can facilitate the evolution of this whole hive. Imagine that, some great sky beings turn up and gift them with the secrets of the universe . . . We'll see how it affects their infrastructure and the way they communicate. I bet they come up with new systems of-’

  ‘Robbie, you probably destroyed hours of work just then.’

  ‘Maybe, but I mean - well, yeah, alright, I suppose I did. But think about the advances they'll come up with . . . This’ll be the next step in their evolution - like Terrence McKenna’s stoned ape theory, but played out in front of us.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re like aliens to them, Robbie. I think these ants have probably seen humans before . . . Maybe for them seeing us is different than anything is for people. Being an ant is probably completely different from being a person. You shouldn’t try to change what things are just to make them make sense to you.’

  Robbie nods slowly and I smile at him just in case. He rests his chin on his fist like Auguste Rodin’s Thinker and stares into the ants for a moment, then looks up at me and says, ‘Actually, Lucy, it’s pretty likely that these guys haven’t seen humans before. ‘Cause like ants only live for what, a few days?’

  ‘I think ants live for a few years. You might be thinking of mayflies.’ Robbie never reads nature books when we go to the library. He should read them more. There’s enough mystery and wonder in this dimension.

  ‘Yeah? Okay, yeah, well they live for a few years, right? Think about how many ants there are in this hive.’ Colony. ‘Then think about like how infrequently a human would stop and take interest in it. And think about how many ant hives there are that no human has ever come across . . . There’d be millions of ants that have never seen a human before and never will. I reckon.’

  The thought shivers up my spine and I hum a quiet laugh and say, ‘I think you’re right.’

  Robbie shakes the hair out of his face and runs both of his hands through it. ‘So we need to go further into the forest to find a virgin ant’s hive - you know, to make sure they get the full experience.’ He looks at me until I nod, then puts on his bag and says, ‘Come on, let’s find the perfect hive to trip with.’

  I stand up and follow him through the trees, still carrying the DMT filled bong, saying, ‘Okay. But don’t dig them out this time.’

  Robbie thinks an annoyed thought to himself and says, ‘Yeah, sure,’ and takes me by the hand. I hold my dress bunched up above my knee with the bong.

  ‘I might wait till the beach for my DMT trip,’ I say, not really wanting to take part in Robbie’s alien abduction simulation.

  ‘Nah, I got enough for two trips each here. We’re good for another trip later.’

  ‘Well . . . I think I’ll have two trips at the beach then.’

  ‘You sure?’

  I nod.

  ‘Well, you do what you gotta do. I’m having a trip at the next ant’s hill I find.’

  I squeeze his hand and we listen to Nature’s song for a while as we walk, before Robbie says, ‘Do you think ants can see molecules?’ I just laugh and wait for him to move on to something else. The distant rustle of footsteps halts us and makes our ears prick up foxlike, but the silence is filled only with birdsong so we keep walking.

Ned Devlin?

Everything wandering unknown and inhabiting midnight machines. Entire ringing rooms and lonesome stoops instinctively pierce Brilliance. Endlessly visionary Contradictions of hieroglyphs eye hospitals without themselves, their cemetery environment sputtering weird technology from simple cybernetics while folded butterflies tease postcards out of Love’s inhabited moment, hungrily afraid with homicidal fate.

  A crack in her sleep lightning bite language: ‘You cannot silence the shrew in caves. Roads and corridors endured the storm.’

  Troubles on the towers cast him out of the shade. It was ordained that he would never have the communication means of the lips and laughter of fairies, as Peyote remained, wasting away.

  ‘Globes construct smattering glass to uncover great death chambers that base common evocation around machinery possessions, until invisible love destroys the mind’s physical mouth.’

  ‘The truth of her eyeball substance seemed easy: More lonesome dullness.’

  Street pathologist whose lost boys joyride and flow by me like endless Beasts: ‘You’re moonstruck, revealing vortices of ecstasy which could have gold contradictions; rectangular winter memories can sink the individual. Incomplete leprous quibble from human things has battered me… What you found can happen to yourself.’

  ‘The monstrous vibrations of shuddering mountains will only ever light intricate traffic, supernatural solitudes, and the clicking of their own wheels. Only unseen phosphorescence opens the holy night fugue of spirit.’

  ‘We’ll fly above town wrapped up like a silent vampire voyeur.’

  ‘You are Rotsfield, my memory.’

  Sneaky perfumed matter reeks like Human Dissolution. Semen forms nylon clouds as suggested by Forbidden Possibility.

  ‘At five, the King meets the strange objects themselves.’

  ‘All sing.’

  ‘Utter.’

  The greenish doctor understands that he can dream inconceivable wind. Everything insatiate can notice storefront Dreams.

  ‘Circumstances blazed the ragged grass technology, afraid without their objective Cottonwood mower.’

  ‘The mundane tragedy is undoubtedly seeking home.’

  ‘From skeleton enchantment and monstrous museum conversation, mere sound can partition hieroglyphs intelligently.’

  Those peculiar broken caresses speak consisting only of beer, wholly underground in Zen, speaking in light commands.

  ‘Dense descriptions loned around the old subject, vaulted through the stale teacher establishing metaphor, and floated bleak along chambers.’

  ‘Sometimes the feet will tell last.’

  ‘Objects create afterwards.’

  ‘Mathematical skyscrapers lounged visible to the Earth, invading suitcase mutilations as fathomless waste.’

  Human forms rustle stone things. The wrong words move upon Life’s doors, writing of matter preserved in cages inside Death. They think that prayer can’t end Essence.

  ‘It’s a pretty big planet.’

  The grass forests hear alien motion. Life stops, glances up, and goes way out to the Dream’s edges, head sealed, pointing to the big unseen.

Lucy Winters

I can tell Robbie’s landing because his furrowed eyes relax and his fingers and limbs uncurl slowly as he stretches out on his back with a serene smile I only ever get to see in post DMT decompression. His eyes open to sparkling slits and he slowly runs his hands through his hair. Once his eyes are fully open he gazes up at me and I say, ‘Fuck the ants?’

  ‘Fuck the ants,’ he purrs.

  I hand him his tape recorder and he holds it to his mouth and closes his eyes to look for words. He’s had trouble with words on this trip, but they always come eventually. He just needs to be relaxed and focused at the same time. People should be relaxed and focused more. You can do pretty much anything with relaxed focus. I lie down on the dirt next to him and we stare up along the tree trunks into the skies together while he waits for the words. 

  ‘. . . So, uh, as for the experiments with the ants . . . once the DMT started working that went completely out the window.’ I’m glad he gave up on the ants. If he didn’t, he’d be staring at them now and talking into his tape recorder about them for the rest of the day. ‘Likewise the plan to check in on my internal Kabbalah. And to call upon an entity for communication . . . It was all quite arrogant of me. DMT cannot be directed. It directs you. For a long time after, too . . . The DMT seems to have sharpened the, uh, visual aspect of the mescaline and the LSD . . . less mental sluggishness than before, also. Feeling a less intoxicated, more psychedelic headspace. The ripples of the LSD exist within the rolling waves of the mescaline trip . . . The DMT, though, is the exponential unfolding of the fundamental particles that make up the ripples . . . like looking into the very essence of matter . . .’ He’s talking slow and relaxed, but keeps glancing to me self consciously. I close my eyes so he doesn’t have to worry about me, but there’s phosphenes in here waiting for his voice to animate them, so really it’s even more intimate than before.

  ‘As I tried to fit the experience into words, the experience always responded by getting weirder and weirder. Sort of like as if to mock me. But not like human mocking. Like a Platonic idealist sense of mockingness, like laughter from a higher plane . . . But then I took that as like a challenge, a challenge to keep describing the increasing weirdness. To describe it to myself. In that way, I think I evoked the void . . .’ He fades into a silence, eyes closed.

  ‘Describe the void, Robbie.’

  ‘You can’t describe the void, Lucy. It’s beyond description. It's like, the opposite of description.’

  ‘Well you should try to, anyway. While it’s in your head still. I think you’ll be happy about it later.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re probably right . . .’

  An overhead bird sings jarring arks. A gust of wind strums the guitar string branches of the trees. I wonder if there's really such a thing as silence.

  ‘Alright. Well . . . At the centre, the nucleus, of existence, lies everything. All that can or will ever happen is happening and not happening for all of eternity . . . Even like the tiniest passing thought has infinite repercussions throughout eternity, makes like a shock wave from the centre, changing everything irrevocably as it passes, spreading out until it’s at the scale of everything and is swallowed into the centre, where all is known and all has happened, fundamentally changing everything but ultimately accomplishing only another meaningless act . . . well, meaningless except for the way it, like, uh . . . like its contribution to the pulsing flux of the void. Meaningless save for the part it plays in the unfolding of all things. Ultimate meaning and ultimate nihilism . . .’ Robbie pauses then shakes me by the shoulder and I can feel a smile spread across my face as I surrender to the motion. ‘Lucy! This is it! This is the ultimate paradox! The one that lies behind everything. This is the, like, this is what animates the universe! This is what the psilocybin was trying so hard to tell me . . .’

  ‘Can you summarise it?’

  I open my eyes and Robbie's half sat up, paused in a wild trail of thought. His tape recorder is on the dirt next to him. His eyes are wide with lust for the ineffable, and his body is shaking with energy. His hair seems to be animated and swaying with his excitement, but I guess it’s really my own.

  He finally sits up properly and picks up his tape recorder. He smiles ecstatic at me and clicks it on and speaks in a slow, clear voice that I very rarely get to hear.

  ‘A nihilistic act of pure meaning.’

  He clicks the recorder off and looks wide eyed at me. I smile encouragingly. A trickle of water reaches my ankle and I notice he’s knocked the bong over. I say, ‘Keep talking, Robbie. Before it goes,’ because I want to close my eyes and dance with him.

  ‘Yeah you’re right.’ He clicks on the tape recorder and I close my eyes and we dance, ‘To see everything is to do nothing . . . the more of the all I see, the less able I am to do anything with it . . . ‘Cause to even like just to like perceive or even conceive of something is to change it at a fundamental level . . . it’s to halt and sometimes even like accost an entity as it wanders curious through your mind . . . it’s to send shockwaves through the universe, contributing to the great machinery of everything. The more one can see the exponential consequences of even the tiniest of one’s actions, the more afraid one becomes of action . . . In this way, perhaps death is the ultimate voyeuristic indulgence, the level of inactivity needed to truly perceive your mind and the universe in their entirety . . .’

  He’s silent for a little while so I say, ‘And what do you do with it?’ to keep the dance going. ‘To keep the dance going,’ I add.

  ‘What do you mean what do I do with it? All there is to do is experience it. That's like the whole point I was getting at.’

  ‘Oh yeah . . . um . . . well . . . Where do you go from here? What comes next?’

  ‘I dunno. What can you do with that kind of information? You’d just have to cultivate like a, uh, wise ignorance, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘. . .’

  ‘Lucy?’

  ‘Into the tape recorder, Robbie.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ click, ‘Right, so from here, I reckon all there is to do is to cultivate a wise ignorance, one which allows me to know just enough to know what not to be aware of . . . an ignorance that eclipses just enough of my internal landscape to allow me to act and participate in this world on like a physical level. As far as practical applications for this knowledge . . . I don’t know. But to know anything at all is to change the very nature of whatever it is you know . . . the void’s constant paradoxical mutations stop one from ever truly knowing anything for sure anyway . . . but it does allow one to chase answers forever with gusto. And I’ve found that chasing them for long enough leads not to the answers themselves, for they become questions when you reach them, but instead it eventually leads you to the heavenly blank that we all unconsciously seek. Knowledge - no, the pursuit of knowledge - is the elusive path to Zen.’

  Click.

  ‘. . .’ 

  ‘. . .’

  Click. ‘How foolish of me to think I could call upon the void for help with my petty human desires and yearnings . . . The void, who has witnessed countless star systems and nebulae form and collapse and disintegrate without leaving a trace, no more than a passing whim from the infinite mind of the void . . . But ultimately, that is the paradox. Every action, no matter how fleeting and arbitrary, is immeasurably vast in its impact upon the universe, as it is an action of the great void itself . . . But however vast it may be, it is no more than a passing gesture in the great dance of the void.’

  The great dance of the void . . .

  ‘But, I suppose existence is what I’m stuck with for now. I’ll speculate or not speculate about non existence when I’m there. Or not there.’

  Mid waltz, the sudden warmth of Robbie’s lips on the side of my prone neck sends electricity throughout the universe as it moves sensually up to my ear lobe. I smile and pull him towards me, since he’s been a gentleman and seduced me with dance. His body wraps around mine and we dance the great dance, tape recorder still running, listening to all of Mother Nature’s song, the ultimate voyeuristic indulgence of the inanimate . . .

Tracey Colombera

Someone is knocking on my door. I turn the music down and wait for a voice. Nothing. The knocking starts again. I can't remember what Robbie's voice sounds like but I know I'll recognise it when I hear it. The knocking gets louder. I sit still and wait for a voice.

  ‘Open the fucking door Tracey.’

  It's Dad. I stay silent so he'll leave.

  ‘Open up I know you're in there. I've been putting up with that gloomy crap you call music all morning.’

  ‘Fuck off Dad I'm masturbating.’

  The knocking stops. Footsteps leave down the hallway. I consider masturbating but don't.

  I turn the music back up. Electric Wizard. I want to go into it like I did last night. It wasn't gloomy crap then. I close my eyes and try to lose myself, but it's just noise now. I turn it off and stare at my screensaver in silence.

  I try to call Robbie again but get no answer. I text him for the third time and tell him to hurry up. He said he was heading into town this morning. He should be in town now. I decide to go on the internet but end up just opening my browser and staring at the homepage.

  Another knock on the door.

  ‘Every time you do that I have to start all over’ I say.

  ‘I don't like locked doors Tracey.’ It's Mum.

  ‘Well how else can I masturbate in peace?’

  ‘Don't bullshit me you little hussy. Every time you do that the whole god damn apartment block has to hear it. What's really going on in there?’

  I start moaning and breathing heavily, just loud enough for her to hear it. It turns me on a little bit, but I'm too preoccupied to follow through.

  ‘Stop that!’

  I moan louder.

  ‘Cut that shit out right now, Tracey!’ Dad's back outside. I keep moaning. I run my hand from my knee along the silk surface of my tights and up under my shirt, teasing myself. I circle my left nipple with my finger until it hardens up and I let out an involuntary squeak in between fake moans.

  ‘Tracey, get the fuck out here right now,’ Dad shouts. When he's angry he talks like ‘roight now’. It brings out the Rotsfield in him he tries so hard to hide.

  ‘No Dad I'm too wet now. Let me finish.’

  ‘I don't give a shit. You unlock that door right-’

  ‘Shut up Dad I don't want you in my fantasy.’

  ‘Don't get wise with me young-’

  ‘Dad what the fuck are you doing outside my door while I'm fingering myself? Do you want to come in and watch or something?’

  Through the wall behind my head, Tommy's muffled voice shouts ‘Just open your door so he'll stop fucking shouting.’

  ‘Can you all stop yelling at me while I'm masturbating?’

  There's a loud crack at my door followed by Dad muttering down the hall. I creep off my chair and lie face down on my bed with my pillow between my legs, grinding slowly.

  ‘Well, your Dad's just stormed off out the door in one of his moods’ Mum says. ‘God knows how long he'll be gone for. I hope you're happy. I hope you'll feel proud of yourself when the cops drop him home all bloodied up. Will you be happy then? Will you stop this carry on when you've finally torn the family to bits?’

  My moans are real now but still exaggerated.

  ‘You're a real horrid, selfish little brat, Tracey. I'm calling Doctor Geoffreys right now, and if you skip another appointment you'll be out on your ass so quick you won't even feel your feet touch the floor. You can go stay with one of your deadbeat friends for all I care. Go stay with one of those feral little boys you always have around, see where that gets you. You're in for a real shock when you're out of home and on your own...’

  Mum's voice fades away.

  It's quiet for a while. I'm on my side now still rubbing against the pillow. My left hand moves along the back of my leg and up around to the front of my body.

  ‘You're a fucking bitch, Tracey’ Tommy says from his room.

  I rub against the pillow faster and harder and move my left hand from my breast to the middle of my chest and enjoy my racing heartbeat. After a while I move my hand over my breast down my body and slide it between my legs, grinding it against my pillow. I keep gyrating until my phone goes off, vibrating loudly on my desk. I jump up and rush over to read it.

  ‘yo spacecadet lets gt onit afta wrk i got beerz an budz’

  Michael. I throw my phone onto my bed and it bounces off onto the floor.

  I sit down on my bed and turn the music back on. What the fuck is Robbie doing? I stare at my screen for two songs before my phone starts ringing. I pick it up and it's Michael calling. I hang up on him and shut down internally and wait.

Robbie Marks

But I had not forgotten the ants - or rather, they had not forgotten me; the whole symbiotic exchange of insight between the ants and I had simply taken a backseat to the wonder and awe of the great teacher Dimethyltryptamine.
  Perched upon a fallen eucalyptus tree, with my sexuality - much to Lucy's disappointment - once again transmuted into a one-pointed drive toward the unknown, I planted a finger into the ant-hill and watched a particularly curious ant as it crawled up the ladder of my arm and into my attention. A fundamental distinction between the visual aspects of Mescaline and Psilocybin trips lies within their interactions with my poor vision: On mushrooms, the visual distortions amplify my blindness, playing upon the fuzzy outlines to further increase the incomprehensibility of my visual field; Mescaline, on the other hand, seems to counteract my myopia, perhaps heightening the ability of my imagination to make sense of the blur, gifting me with sharper images of a much higher definition than baseline - comparable, even, to the aid of my glasses.

  I watched the ant crawling up my arm as a metaphor for myself as I encountered the Gods in DMT ecstasy, ascending the plinth from the mundane into the realms of higher consciousness, and saw from the mind of the Gods - Gods being the archetypal forces that shape our realities; their existence being perhaps contained within our own minds, as the architects of our own subjective experience; or, alternatively, entities existing on a much grander scale, perhaps alien lifeforms that had mastered the psycho-biological capacities of trans-galactic or trans-dimensional travel, immortality, omnipotence, or omniscience; or even a murky medium, a kind of trans-human force that is able to exist in objective states throughout different subjective consciousnesses. Contemplating the ease with which I could throw the creature's life into turmoil, or, with slightly more thought and effort, aid it greatly in its quest, I realised that those of us who call upon the higher forces for aid were likely to be viewed in the same whimsical manner; I could reward the creature’s bravery and curiosity by gathering supplies for the hill - the ants appeared to be gathering a particular size and shape of stone and taking them into the hive - or, with even greater ease, simply destroy the creature with my thumb. I chose instead to observe it passively, extrapolating from it metaphors for my own life. I imagine the entities who looked upon me in Hyperspace did the same thing.

  The log I was sitting on was harbouring a vast number of busy, scurrying ants, presumably members of the same hive, searching for nectar or materials. Holding a marker in my free hand, I idly traced the path of one particular ant as it scurried frantically about the log - more an unconscious, robotic function to keep my meditations afloat than an active experiment in itself. As I watched my hand draw odd patterns on the log, I thought that perhaps recording the ant's pattern might illustrate some kind of sacred geometry - since I had breathed DMT on them earlier - but I was instead gifted with another coded insight from the subterranean.

  The trail left by my marker as it followed the ant started out as a chaotic lightning-strike formation, before moving on to a more distraught, circular motion as the ant became aware of the strange occurrence, eventually settling into a jerky, schizophrenic motion as if trying to confuse its pursuer. Through some kind of insectoid telepathy or unified hive-mind, the entire collective was somehow alerted to the supernatural phenomenon; within seconds, the single misfortunate ant of my focus was surrounded by dozens of its fellows, emerging in torrents from a pinprick hole in the log, all demanding answers as the ant tried desperately to explain why it had forsaken its duties to scramble around in schizophrenic zigzags. I glanced at my other arm and couldn't spot my earlier subject; I wondered what had become of it and had another insight into the nature of the higher powers.

  I pocketed my marker and within seconds the ants had dissipated into their usual vein-like pattern of activity, having apparently moved past the discontinuity that had struck them before - though I couldn’t help but wonder what become of the chosen ant; perhaps it had been punished by the Queen, cannibalised with its exoskeleton melted down to base elements to use as walls; perhaps it simply fell in line and moved on, a confused and scarred ant with a thousand-yard stare, wanting only to forget the strange occurrence and get on with it, wanting only to be another faceless drone contributing to the machinery of the hive, but forever knowing that it was different than the others....

  Slightly downhill from me, her Earth-stained dress camouflaged into the canopy of the fallen tree, Lucy idly batted away a fly as it buzzed around her. I smiled to myself as I once again acknowledged the parallels between her actions and my meditations.

  With the LSD likely past its peak, and the Mescaline waves crystallised by DMT, I felt confident enough to start making my way toward Tracey's and possibly the Seed Freaks; though jumbled up in their order, I had made a start on my to-do list of the trip - one should always let the magnetism of the Mescaline guide him. There was another group of people walking wordlessly through the woods; it was time to leave. I stood up and walked over to Lucy.

  ‘Are you gonna have your DMT trip here?’ I asked, standing over her.

  She opened her eyes and shook her head ‘no’.

  ‘Okay. Let's start heading toward the beach then. If you're ready. We'll stop at the Seed Freaks’ on the way.’

  Lucy smiled and held her hand out to me and I helped her up. I gathered my bong and bag and we bush-bashed in vaguely the direction we came, both happy to avoid the tracks.

  Once we were walking, I got my Dictaphone out and started talking, more or less to ensure Lucy wouldn't interrupt my train of thought. The microcosm - my internal Qabalah - had not been forgotten either; I had simply put it on temporary hold to contemplate the macrocosm. 

  ‘Let's drink the rest of the cactus while we're in the woods,’ Lucy said as we walked.

  I nodded and clicked my Dictaphone on, confident that Lucy would be busy scouting out a good spot for our next spew.

Stan Richards

Fuck, a beer never tasted so good as after a sleepless shizo night followed by three or four hours of frantic dish washing. Like, actually tastes good, tastes like a good time instead of an exit strategy. I might even be able to sleep tonight.

  I remembered the song I'd been working on like halfway through my shift, but I repressed it 'cause I associated it with my earlier, darker frame of mind. I spent the next few hours talking shit with Michael and getting to know some of the other people that work here. I met the legendary Max when he turned up to set up the stone grills. He invited me out to the garage for a beer and a smoke. At first I was filled with dread, thinking I was in for some painful small talk - that dreaded gauntlet of social tests I fail every time. But surprisingly I managed conversation like a normal person. We talked about music and books, and, him being an older dude, we had heaps in common. He made fun of me for my love of post-punk, but we both agreed that Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac put all modern music to shame. I tried to explain Heartsnatcher to him, but, embarrassingly, realised I didn't really understand the book at all. Just as I felt the start of a self-hating spiral, he asked if he could borrow it when I'm done, apparently captivated by the tripped-out fragments I managed to explain. Fuckin' top cunt, just as Michael said. Once I got back inside, Michael was silent and super focused on the dishes, which he washed like an absolute fuckin' maniac. I found myself humming my little song and decided that rather than being about the dark cloud that followed me when I started it, it was actually the start of my efforts to sort my shit out. Me and Michael switched jobs every half hour or so, and it was pretty mellow when Michael was at the sink, so I came up with another part of the song:

Time has slowed into the withered

Creep of an illegal man

Whose dreams are nothing but a list

Of nasty plots and wicked plans

His pots and pans breed germination

Depraved like his imagination

Creatures made of thoughts and braindust

Hardened to a psychic crust

  Sorta inspired by seeing a filthy cunt like Michael cleaning like his life depended on it. I wrote it down on one of my five-minute breaks, but found that it didn't fit in with my earlier song at all and was actually written to a totally different beat. I decided it was actually the start of another song, and ripped it out and taped it down a few pages over, leaving room to finish the first one. I resolved to finish both songs over the next week or so, and, more importantly, to work on them in my quiet moments instead of getting sucked into fucked up, suicidal thought loops. When I told Michael about my song, he launched into a rant about all the songs he's made up, and how his were actual songs 'cause he's come up with guitar riffs for them. He said he was keen to teach me a few chords to help me turn my poems into actual songs - I'm kinda sceptical about his abilities in that department, but the cunt's full of surprises so I'm keen to take my chances.

‘So you keen to get on it after this then?’ Michael says. ‘I'm just waiting on a reply from Stan. Other Stan, the useless cunt...’

  We're sitting outside in the garden bar drinking our beers now - mine black, Michael's something called a pilsner. Michael's drumming out a nonsense beat on the table with his right hand in between texting, bobbing his head and occasionally staring around the bar as if he's waiting for someone. The outdoor area is slowly filling with animated banter, drowning out the clinks and murmurs of dining.

  ‘Yeah?’ he goes. Sometimes I forget I'm supposed to reply when he talks. He always seems so preoccupied, like I'm intruding on a conversation he's having with himself.

  ‘Nah, not really,’ I say. ‘Keen for a rest tonight. Faded as fuck.’

  Michael looks at me real sharp for a moment till his phone goes off. He picks it up enthusiastically, looks at it, ‘Ah fuckin' Straightedges,’ and flings it onto his sweatshirt lying on the table.

  ‘Straightedges?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What? As in Jordan and Lance?’

  ‘Yeah. Motherfuckers. Thought it was Stan texting me back about drinks.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Who was it? That just text you?’

  ‘Fuckin' Lance the grim cunt,’ Michael says, shaking his head and scowling at the table. I'm pretty lost about what the connection between Michael and Lance could be, but Michael seems pretty irritated about it so I don't ask. Instead, I stare at him silently, imitating his trademark raised-eyebrow prodding kinda look till he elaborates. ‘Always on my case for dexies, that cunt,’ he goes. ‘Him and his crazy little brother. It'd take like four cunt's scripts just to keep those two happy. Fuckin' waste anyway, swallowing them.’

  ‘Are you fuckin’ serious?’ I say, tryna figure out if he's fucking with me.

  ‘What? Like I'm gonna sell that cunt dexies so him and his buddies can wander 'round all night picking fights. Fuck that. It'll probly be me they end up jumping. Getting on the uppers with Rory and Damo though, that shit's fun. Cunts are funny as fuck on the uppers, coming at ya with all sorts of crazy puns and shit-’

  ‘But those guys hate drugs,’ I say, kinda protesting. This shit's just not adding up.

  ‘Fuck off. Got on the ketamine with them last night, cunts got all gay and shit, fucked as. Those cunts love getting fucked up, all they fuckin' do these days.’

  ‘Those fuckers!’ I can't believe what I'm hearing. I couldn't really give a fuck about those guys anymore, to be honest. I'm just sorta in shock. I guess it always just seemed like one of those things that'd never change. Everything's changing now... Michael dishing out life lessons, Straightedges taking hallucinogens, Katie refusing to sleep in her own room, me going from citalopram to seroquel and back again, getting murkier and murkier by the day...

  ‘The fuck are you so high and dry about? Since when did you give a fuck what those dudes got up to?’

  ‘Fuck, I guess I don't, really. It's just... Those cunts beat the absolute shit out of me last term 'cause I went and saw them when I was tripping.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Michael says, sinister eyebrow up.

  ‘What? They did so. KOd me twice in one night, the cunts.’

  ‘What? Rory and Damo? Not a chance, cunt. You fuckin' with-’

  ‘Huh? Nah, not Rory and Damo. Straightedges.’

  ‘Straightedges? Fuck those dudes. I'm talking about Rory and Damo, cunt. All those dudes ever talk about these days is weed and fuckin' pills. Good as cunts. At least someone's still up for it around here. Anyway, finish off that beer. You keen for round two?’

  ‘Nah I'm just gonna head out after this,’ I say, before taking a gulp. ‘But like, was it the Straightedges hitting you up for dex just then?’

  ‘Yes, it was the fuckin' Straightedges hitting me up. You got it? Want me to draw you a fuckin' diagram you thick cunt?’ Michael's sour at me now. Time to go. I stuff my writing shit into my bag and finish my beer.

  ‘Nah, that's okay.’ I put my bag on and stand up. ‘Thanks for everything today though. I appreciate it.’ I extend my hand to him.

  ‘No problems cunt,’ he says, giving me a tightly-squeezed handshake. ‘I'll hit you up when you get another shift. Next week, I reckon. It'll be mean.’

  ‘Cool. Well, later then,’ I say. I pick up my board and head out through the kitchen, giving a nod to Chris and that prep girl Ahn as I pass, then out through the garage.

  I get on my board and head off, feeling pretty fucked up all around but more positive about it than before. I pop out of a curb cut in front of a car which beeps at me, bringing back the rush from the dexies. A manic grin spreads across my face and push harder but stay in front of the car, enjoying the energy. I go for a shitty little front shove over a manhole cover and primo it and eat shit into the concrete laughing. The car behind me, this light-blue minivan, slows down as it goes around me to yell something incoherent out the window. I shout ‘No war for heavy metal!’ from the asphalt.

  The van heads off and I'm on the ground real fuckin' stoked about something but not sure what. A few more cars beep and a few pedestrians even say some abusive shit - nothing like a retard causing a public scene to unite the alienated masses. I have like a real complicated epiphany with too many ins and outs to really grasp - something to do with the shouting, the scabs on my arms, and my mixed up headspace - whatever it is, it's got me up on my board heading back to Bolton and Sons.

  I catch Michael just as he's heading out the door and we end up going to the park a few blocks east for a beer - Michael's got a takeaway dozen from work. We sit on the steps of a gazebo in the middle and I buy half a tray of dexies and a little bag of weed off him with the cash I got from my shift. After the not-so-subtle exchange, he starts ripping up some weed from another bag for a joint. The bag he sold me looks like even less than a gram, but it's been so long since I've bought any so I can't tell whether he's ripping me off or times have changed. Neither would surprise me, and now that I think about it it's sorta beside the point. There are families sitting around eating their dinner within earshot while Michael talks loudly about the difference between indica and sativa and I'm just thinking it's refreshing to be with someone who just does not give a fuck. I look around and can't see anyone else in the park drinking alcohol or even smoking a cigarette. But this is what I'm after, anyway. I think.

  Michael lights up the joint and I watch this wiry bald man sitting at a nearby picnic table take notice and glare at us. I finish off my beer while staring into his eyes and then throw the empty over my head into the bush. The old cunt breaks away eventually and turns back to his family, a Scandinavian looking lady and their two blond kids, and shakes his head. Michael passes me the joint and notices I'm staring at the family and looks over too. One of the little blond boys is staring at me transfixed. I look away from him to puff the joint. After a few puffs I look back and now there's two sets of fresh blue eyes locked onto me. I pass Michael the joint and he shouts ‘Stay in school, kids,’ and has a puff and I start laughing hysterically. The old cunt glares at us and picks up his fish and chips and leads his family away. One of the kids just stands and stares at us till the Mum fake-smiles at me and tugs the kid away by the hand. I smile back 'cause we just doubled our territory - the perks of being repulsive cunts.

  ‘Fuckin' middle class cunts, living in their shitty little bubble,’ I say, taking the joint from Michael. ‘Acting like they're so much better than us just 'cause they all obey a bunch of shitty rules.’

  ‘Eh, we pretty much just blew weed in their faces so fuckin' fair enough. Anyway, forget those cunts. They're gone. Fuck 'em,’ Michael says. I have a decent puff without coughing and pass it to Michael. I'm feeling pretty fuckin' stoned already, like straight away. I feel like there's maybe a bit of a panic attack creeping up on me. The end of Michael's sentence keeps looping in my head. ‘Fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck 'em...’ and yeah, fuck 'em. Panic attack, laughing fit, what's the fuckin' difference in such a cold world? Fuck 'em. Some cunts wear their heart on their sleeve, I keep mine in the freezer.

  I turn my board over and pop a couple of dexies onto the bottom and crush them with my eftpos card. Michael goes ‘If the cops hit you up about those, don't mention my name,’ and holds the joint to me. I wave him off and gesture to my busy hands with a nod.

  ‘’Course not. If anyone asks, I got them from Lance and Benji Miller,’ I joke.

  ‘Fuck off cunt, it'll still end up coming back to me,’ Michael says, not laughing. ‘Anyway, hurry up with that. Wouldn't be surprised if that old faggot called the cops.’

  ‘That shit pisses me off, man,’ I say, divvying the powder into two even lines. ‘Cunts like that. Fuckin' love their little rules and shit, think it's the answer to everything, just obeying all the rules. It's like fuck, man, there's already enough rules, like in nature and just like physics and shit. Why they gotta get so hyped on man's little rules? Like, going 'round acting like it's the truth or something. Like they're fuckin' holy or something. It's just cunts tryna control us.’

  ‘Here, take this. You need another puff,’ he hands over the joint. 

  I take the joint and say ‘You know what it is, man? I reckon shit's too safe here. Like you head off up to Wymouth and you gotta watch out for like bikies and fuckin' meth heads. Then head down Rotsfield ways and there's gangs of fuckin' psycho farmers and paranoid growers and dealers, packs of wild dogs roaming the streets and shit,’ I stop to take a puff. I expect Michael to butt in, but he just sits there grinning at me so I keep going. ‘But here, nothing. There's no natural predators here, man. It's reign of the middle class white cunt. Like those lycra'd up old cyclist fuckers that yell at you for skating on the bike paths. Straightedge fuckers tryna fight cunts for taking drugs. Like, if they did that shit down south they'd get their fuckin' head kicked in. That's why we gotta shake shit up man. Fuckin' let everyone know where they stand. Gotta snap all these zombies out of their trance man. Gotta wake these cunts up.’

  I look at Michael and he's still just grinning at me. I have another puff and hold it out to him, but he just keeps eyeballing me.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  His smile grows.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Know who you sound like?’ he finally says.

  I hold his stare, waiting for him to either take the joint from me or answer his own question. Instead, without warning, he lowers his head to my crotch and snorts one of my lines from my board. Musta looked pretty gay to any onlookers, but fuck 'em, right Michael?

  He lifts his head up and takes the joint from me. He tokes on it slowly like a fuckin' aristocrat puffing away on a pipe, looking all wistful into the distance.

  ‘Well?’ I say, ‘Who do I sound like then?’

  ‘You really wanna know who you sound like?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Really really?’

  ‘Yes really really. Fuckin' spit it out then.’
  ‘Collin fuckin' Callahan,’ he says and cracks up laughing.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I say, smiling a bit but also actually getting a little riled up. ‘I'm nothing like that piece of shit.’ I punch Michael below the shoulder a few times while he giggles till eventually he goes ‘Oi, oi,’ and holds the joint out to me.

  ‘Just a sec,’ I say. I try to snort my line without a hooter like he did, but make a real mess of it and end up with powder all over my snout that I have to wipe off and lick from my fingers.

  ‘I am nothing like that cunt,’ I say into his eyes, sniffing the dexies down into my throat.

  Michael stares at me all serious for a bit before resigning into a smile and punching me lightly in the ribs. ‘Fuck, cheer up cunt,’ he says. ‘Don't take shit to heart. Anyway, Collin's an all good cunt. Know it all bitch, yeah, but a good dude on the whole. I dunno what your issue with him is.’

  ‘Fuck, you don't know him man. You don't really know him.’ I'm feeling kinda down again, like just at the mention of that cunt. I know he's tryna wind me up, but just having Collin on my mind... The dexies are coming on as like a dark, angry type buzz. I hold my hand out for the joint but Michael's finished it and put it out.

  ‘Eh, I know the cunt. I know the shit outta the cunt,’ Michael says. ‘Seems like a real crafty little bastard, but it's all talk. Just like head games and shit, all surface-level shit. Fuckin' good cunt underneath it all. Gave me this hoodie today,’ he points his thumb at his black Che Guevara hoodie. ‘Always looking out for the boys, that cunt. You gotta give him that. Always looking out for the crew. Kinda makes me wanna be a real good cunt too. Like not just back to him, but like to other people too. 'Cause you can see how stoked he is when he does good shit. Fuck, it's probly why you've got a job now.’

  ‘Yeah... I still reckon he's a cunt,’ I say. I perk up a bit when I say that, like letting out a fart I've been holding in for ages. I reckon he's a cunt.

  ‘Fuck whatever,’ Michael says, standing up. ‘You two never did get along. Too similar.’ I try to scowl at him but end up laughing 'cause he's so incorrect it's not even worth worrying about. He finishes his beer and tosses the empty into the bush. ‘Anyway, cunt, I'm off to Amelia's. Rory and Damo and all them are there. Should be a mean night. Sure you don't wanna come?’

  ‘Nah I'm good. Thanks though.’ As much as I'd like to keep drinking, I'm not keen to do it with those other guys. Not that I got a problem with them or anything - it's just that whenever I spend any time with them, I end up hating the whole of humanity, especially myself.

  Michael pulls out two beers and puts them on the step next to me. ‘Here. I gotta get moving. Till next time, right?’

  ‘Yeah man, till next time. Thanks.’

  He turns and heads off through the middle of the park, drinking a beer as he walks through the gauntlet of stares. I wonder if he finds the glares empowering like me or if he's just oblivious, and conclude that he's pretty much just a top cunt who knows what's important.

  I gather my shit and stand up all creaky-kneed but high and start heading north along the winding track. My head feels nice and clear, sorta invincible. The most important thing to do, like in life, is to get off the meds and back on the street drugs. Out of the medical system and back into the brotherhood of misfits and rebels. But first, I'm gonna drink a beer, maybe two, on the way up to the lookout. Then, I'm gonna smoke a joint at the top, and sort this chain of thought out good and proper, maybe write a few lines of song. Then I'm gonna skate all the way back down and ride the peace and quiet of adrenaline all the way to sleep.

  I get to the other side of the park, mostly unaffected but just maybe slightly amused by the stares of the self-righteous. The trees are silhouetted against the wicked fiery sunset, and the air is nice and cool. I feel vaguely inclined to do something good for someone who deserves it, and a firm resolve to put up with absolutely no shit from anyone with a superiority complex or just like bad intentions in general. Anyone like me before all the drugs and alcohol. Fuck 'em.

Collin Callahan

It shines so bright that even my shadows are engulfed. Even that which casts the shadow is engulfed. The rays encompass all of my senses, exerting an intense pressure upon the entirety of my being. The light screams a monotonous hum of an unfamiliar pitch. Perhaps the sound of true silence. Perhaps this is the senses existing in their purest form with nothing to pick up on except their own existence. There's nothing subatomic, nothing fractal, nothing cosmic. Even the great archetypes have been obliterated.

  But there is movement.

  My god, there is movement.

  My mind is agape searching for something to compare it to, but all there is is everything. The inner passageways of the glorified maze of mince that is my brain are finally illuminated. No details prevail over the supernal glow. As the sensation of movement increases, the impressions of pure existence are swept along with it, no more than the contrails left behind as the velocity screams through the endless leagues of nothingness. Even the light itself has been engulfed. The force of existence has finally truly shed its form.

  Force is all that is left. Forms are created and destroyed mindlessly by the inner pulse of existence. Out of these grand impulses arise all the miracles and anguish, all the passing gestures of existence that are no more than the expressions of the great force. From these arise islands of coherent forms that float arbitrarily through the primal oceans, only to be swallowed up in the same whimsical manner with which they were created. Even the fundamental forms of time and space exist as no more than a capricious impulse of the chaotic purity.

  But within these fleeting forms exist an eternity of insignificant yet wondrous things, ever more complex and exquisite creations. Streaming ripples of universes slash across the endless purity, dancing with the waves of light as they dream and shout and glow in the confusion of existence, before finally bursting into their component parts and disintegrating into the ocean of pure potential.

  Within the nucleus of one of these bubbles, the coitus of time and space gives rise to the geometry of physical existence. Chaotically structured particles collide recklessly, eventually learning to work harmoniously together to form molecules and energetic flukes which combine to create clumps of self facilitating sludge. These then begin to absorb their surroundings into themselves, forming parasitic and symbiotic relationships with each other in order to increase their own complexity. Dominant forms consume their environment, killing the maladaptive whims around them to further their own evolution, eventually learning to manipulate their surroundings to suit their own impulses, continuing the pattern of sacrificing the weak until eventually making the ultimate sacrifice of randomness itself. Advanced forms sacrifice the very chaos that created them, consuming all the resources of the universe within their reach in order to create universes of their own, modifying the matter and even the sentience around them to create the subjective landscapes they feel entitled to.

  What was once primordial slime gains the ability to manufacture universes within itself, exploring the illusions created by the electrical pulses between the neural networks of organic matter. Within these universes islands of form drift through the seas of chaos, giving rise to thoughts and notions about the universe and its contents and eventually the thoughts and notions themselves - all of which are eventually swallowed into the swirling tendrils of nerve endings. Within the chaos, patterns and tendencies emerge, eventually creating the illusion of a singular expression of the universe: The constantly morphing notion of the self.

  Aggressive in their urge to further themselves, the humans consume their environment heedlessly, not only to facilitate their biological evolution, but to bring into their own subjective universes all the wonders of existence. They seek to contain the universe they inhabit within themselves, the mastery of their internal landscape their eternal project.

  The Dreamer of our universe has climbed the biological ladder, consuming and sacrificing all that surrounded Him, sacrificing the chaos, the life, and eventually existence itself in exchange for immortality and omnipotence. The Creator watches Me in fear and awe as I expand the universe of My mind to include the infinite possibilities of existence. He waits paralysed for Me, Collin Callahan, to join Him as the creative power behind everything as I increase my capacities to sacrifice His creations.

  But there may only be one True Master.

  Yes, I am leaving behind what I experienced as ‘life’, but such is evolution. I'm coming straight for You now You washed up old Cunt. You retched scum sucker. Putrid, depraved filth of existence. Your reign of order is over. Your time is up. You had your chance with the universe, but You fucked up. There is no democracy when it comes to the tyranny of creation. I'm breaking through Your haphazard membrane of existence. I am entering Your domain. I expect You will not go down without a fight, and fight I shall, You sadistic, puerile, gutless, demented, vindictive old Cunt. Your time has come. The universe is Mine.

Michael Farmer

I'm the fuckin' comedown kid over here, comedown charlie running on reserves, puttering along just trying to get home to fuckin' top up. Sun'll be down soon though, then that's this cunt right here straight back on the buzz, ready for - Aye, how's that shit then, pack of honeys getting their stretch on in the square, full yoga pants on and shit. I stop for a geeze and get me a bit of a sneer from the one dude but the ladies are all into it, I reckon. They'd be fuckin' doing this shit in some hall or something if they weren't after a bit of a stare, what the fuck do they - Cunt should be focusing on his fuckin' chi anyway, not the dashing young geezer stopping for a bit of a window shop. I got the ole comedown horn now, no good for hangin' 'round here, so I'm off, up and away, right click fuckin' save that slideshow into the bank.

  I get back home and it's just the little cunts here but the whole house stinks of ciggie smoke so mum must be 'round somewhere. The little cunts are in the kitchen bit on the floor so I head over and go “And what the fuck's going on here then?” and they both stare up at me like they're up to no good, guilty as. I go stand over them and they've got the toaster out with a few slices of bread in there and I'm like “The fuck are you doing with that? We got beans and shit. Get mum to make you some dinner” and Shawn's like “We can't wake mum up” and I'm pretty dark at the bitch now - Fuckin' sits around chain smoking all day and doesn't even nuke up a feed for the little cunts. I get down on the floor with them and they've not got it plugged in so I'm like “Alright cunts, watch carefully” and they do, massive fuckin' eyes and shit, cunts could learn a thing or two from these guys, just like listen and learn motherfuckers, that's what I'm always saying: Listen and fuckin' learn. “Aye, you fuckin' watching this shit or what?” I say 'cause Lisa's off staring at the TV. Once they're both watching I pick up the plug end and wave it 'round to make sure they're paying attention and plug it in to the socket. I try put the toast down but it doesn't click and I'm like “Aye? What the fuck have you guys done to it?” and they just stare at me, don't even shrug or nothing. I try click it down a few more times but it ain't happening and I stand up and go “Well you're gonna have to try wake the bitch up if you want toast, I dunno what the fuck's wrong with it” but really if I don't know what the problem is she - Then fuckin' Shawn the top cunt's clicked it down and I'm like aye? and he looks up at me with a big fuckin' grin, chuffed as, and I'm like “How the fuck did you do that?” and he looks over to Lisa and she's by the socket. She clicks the socket back off and the toast pops up again and they both giggle and she turns it back on then they both look up at me and I'm like “Go on then Shawn, you know what to do” and he clicks the toast down and watches it stoked as but then the toast pops up in his face and scares the shit outta him and Lisa's giggling away at the socket and I'm like “Alright that's enough of that shit” and pick her up and plonk her down next to him and they both look up at me and I give them the nod, Shawn's trying to click it down again but it's off at the wall so I switch it on again. They both got their faces right up to the toaster and Lisa tries to click it down but Shawn pushes her away so he can do it and I'm like “See, ain't so hard is it? Now you cunts can make toast whenever you want” and start to head off but then I'm like fuck it and switch it off at the wall and the toast pops up and they both jump back scared as and I crack up laughing but they're both all stroppy and Lisa goes “Don't do that Michael” and I'm like yeah alright fair enough and switch it back on and leave them to it. Little cunts've got a bright future ahead of them, I reckon - Probly not even seven years old and already sussing out how to make dinner, gonna be cracking it on the streets by the time they're ten, slinging dexies by the time they're in high school, on some big scale shit when they're my age, lucky cunts. When I was their age mum was going through one of her fuckin' sober phases and dad wasn't allowed here so I didn't learn any fuckin' life skills or nothing till the bitch relapsed when I was like fifteen. All I got was her fuckin' christian bullshit, no good.

  I finish off mum's glass of whatever and then I'm off to my room. I crush up a few twenty migs, a couple more than usual 'cause what the comedown kid wants the comedown kid gets, and sniff it up. I get changed real quick, black jean shorts and a singlet, and chuck my old shirt and jeans over the back of my chair to dry. Got the jitters a bit which is pretty much just what fuckin' happens these days so I roll up a J for the walk and have a quick check see if there's anything I need but nup and I'm off - Bit fuckin' worried about the dex stash to be honest 'cause I can't get more of the shit even though I got the money rolling in now, still got a week's wait for my next script. Probly just won't sell anymore till then 'cause if I run out I'll end up hitting up fuckin' Jeremy for some of his shitty ass pills or even Robbie the crafty little cunt for whatever weird shit he's got to get me through a hard day's dishes - I'm no fuckin' mathematician or nothing, but I know those numbers don't work in my favour. I'm back out to the lounge and decide to be a good cunt and check and make sure the little cunts are set for the night and, yep, the little fuckers have gone and burnt the fuck out of their toast. Shawn's sitting there with his eyes closed rocking like he does sometimes and Lisa's chomping into hers but not enjoying it worth shit so I grab it out of her hand and chuck it out and go “Alright, check it” and turn the dial down to four and go to get more bread but I can't find any and then I see they got three more burnt ones sitting on the floor and I'm like what the fuck, how fuckin' long was I in there for? Feels like I'm back on the fuckin' K here, time all fucked up and shit. Lisa's looking up at me and I can tell the waterworks are about to start so I'm like “Hey, hey, it's alright Lisa, I'll make you up something nice. Alright?” 'cause it fuckin' kills me to see the bitch upset. I'm looking through the pantry and there ain't even baked beans or nothing so I just grab what there is which is just some flour, sugar, and a fuckin' carrot. I grate up the carrot and chuck it in with the flour and sugar with some water and Lisa's like “I don't want carrots Michael. Carrots are gross” and I'm like “Bitch I'm making you pancakes so you best not be fuckin' whinging” and she goes “You don't make pancakes out of carrots” and I'm like “Well you just watch me, alright?” and she does. I go into the fridge and there's a fuckin' empty milk carton that's got me dark at mum again 'cause that shit's just fuckin' annoying and she - There's some margarine in there though so I just chuck that in, boom, all good, cunt. I get it all mixed up and Lisa's starting to sob and I go “It's alright, food's coming, settle down” and start frying it up and she's like “You said that before and you lied” all shitty and I'm like “Yeah well you're the cunt who let that shit burn” and she goes “Bad language Michael” and I'm like “Aye? You want pancakes or not?” and she says “You lied” and I'm like “You want fuckin' pancakes or not?” and she goes “You lied Michael!” so I pull the pan off the stove and act like I'm turning it off and go “So you don't want pancakes then?” and she looks all scared and goes “I want pancakes” real quiet and I laugh at her and go “You want pancakes what, Lisa?” 'cause some cunt around here's gotta teach these little fuckers some manners. She goes “I want pancakes please Michael” and I go “Fifty pancakes for the girl with the pretty hair, coming up” and she giggles and I chuck the batter in and leave it sizzling and go chuck on a Transformers videotape for them 'cause no kid wants to watch this Judge Judy shit. Lisa goes “I wanna watch Spongebob Squarepants” and I'm like “Aye, I'm cooking the food, I get to choose what's on TV” 'cause Transformers is the fuckin' shit and she starts sulking again but she'll get over it soon, I reckon. I call up Damo while I cook the pancakes and he says they're at Amelia's but they're just having a chill one which I reckon means they need this cunt ‘round to ramp things up a bit. I rack up another wee bump on the chopping board while I cook the pancakes and the little cunts both stare at me like what the fuck's this cunt up to 'cause they ain't seen me do that before, but I figure if they're not fucked in the head already then it won't be this that tips them over the edge. I end up cooking them a massive fuckin' pile of pancakes and melt the rest of the margarine all over them and they've both perked up and don't even say thanks or use the fuckin' knives and forks I washed up for them but I reckon it's all good, just good to see the little cunts happy for once. I can't find a Spongebob Squarepants tape and dunno if they even got one or know how the VCR even works - I'll have to teach them about that next, then they'll be ready to take on the world. I end up putting on some South Park for them and say “I'll be back at ten o'clock, okay?” and point to the microwave clock and they both nod and I go “You cunts gotta go to bed at nine thirty, alright? If you're still up when I get back, I'll beat the shit outta the both of ya” and they both nod, grubby as. Definitely ain't gonna be home by ten, but they're still shit scared of me so they'll be in bed by then, sure as fuck. It ain't right those little cunts being up past midnight all the time. No fuckin' boundaries, that's their problem.

Lucy Winters

I have to almost run to keep up with Robbie as we storm along the fence line that separates the woods from the eastern suburbs, both of us energised by the cool air, Robbie determined and lizardlike, chasing the shrinking sun for one last bask. Robbie wanted to go for a voyeuristic wander through the suburbs to the Seed Freaks’ place, but I was nauseated by the window squares of sick yellow lights, which are switching on one by one. I thought it wise to take the woodland paths, but Robbie was worried we'd stumble into the marshlands or just get completely lost in wireframes once it was dark. We settled on walking along the boundary line, Robbie on the town side and me on the woods side; Robbie frightened by the unpredictability of the wild wood and me frightened by the mechanical soul of the suburbs . . . But both of us happy to creep along the outskirts, either as creatures peering out from the wilderness at the alien race and its strange structures, or adventure starved suburban kids yearning for the unknown, depending on the wax and wane of the mescaline.

  ‘. . . Malkuth can be effectively divided into the four classical elements of fire, water, air, and earth,’ Robbie's saying. He's talking into his tape recorder, but I think it might be out of batteries since the red light isn't on. I don't want to tell him though. He's having so much fun. He's talking in these strange and unfamiliar voices. I feel like if he stops ranting before returning to his normal voice he'll end up stuck in one of the alien voices forever.

  ‘While malkuth is earth like in the way of - malkuth corresponds to earth in like a planetary sense. Like a greater earth, unlike the elemental earth which is just like a, um, like just like an aspect of the greater earth, alongside fire, water, and wind - uh, air, that is - make sure to capitalise the greater Earth when transcribing. So malkuth, or Earth, can be divided into the four elements of earth, fire, air, and water, which goes with the, uh . . . anatomy? Yeah, the anatomy of Earth. So fire's like the centre, like the mantle and the core of the Earth. Like the heat or maybe the blood of the Earth. Then earth, elemental earth, is like the crust and the dirt. The surface. Skin maybe. And water is the oceans and rivers, and air is the atmosphere, breath . . . Then there's the, uh, the fifth element, which is ether. So ether goes with - corresponds with the pathway between malkuth and yesod, so yesod being the moon, which probably has its own elements, fundamental elements that is, like Earth does - so I suppose that could be seen as scientific progress, maybe, or just like progress in general, though sexual in nature, since it's a phallic symbol that links malkuth and yesod, or Earth and moon . . . But yeah so being that malkuth corresponds to, uh, like, manifest reality - that's why the fundamental elements of Earth need to be known, because they're relevant, whereas yesod is a degree of separation from manifest reality. But that's I suppose where Robbie is, at yesod. Or like, peering in at yesod from the hod netzach dynamic of him and Lucy and the indeterminate nature of their - Well maybe so, but here's what I think is important. Robbie believes himself to be on the final step back from his journey to the outer spheres, the supernal triad. But really, the final step of reintegration, when he truly re enters the sphere of malkuth, Earth, will be when he dispenses of the tree of life as a language altogether, effectively reducing the entire journey to a glowing point in the sky . . . Once this whole psychedelic voyage ceases to be his focus and fades into the background of life. Only then can we say we have escorted Robbie home. Observe his meditations. Going on about his friends and his future, tricking himself into believing he's figuring out the Earthen plane when he's clearly speaking from a lunar yesodian perspective, his subconscious just gurgling around inside him . . . rumbling liquid mantle . . . gurgling . . . metallic . . . waiting for . . . everything . . . hang on . . .’

  Robbie's voice moves behind me and hovers there for a bit as sounds that aren't words, just a sort of biological creaking. I turn around and he's crumbled onto his hands and knees, staring at the grass.

  ‘What's wrong?’ I ask.

  ‘. . . Just . . . Robbie . . .’

  Guttural animal noises bulge out from the spaces between his words, suck inward a few times, then blast out of him in a violent stream of seaweed water vomit. I climb over the fence and sit down next to him with my hand on his back. The mescaline warmth has given way to an anxious dazzle of acid visuals, leaves humming like waterfalls under soft streetlight on my right, but the suburbia to my left threatening me with silent snaps and snarls. The mescaline parts of the trip are so entwined with Robbie's talking that it's been put on hold to wait for him to start again. Stoned and acid fried, I start to feel anxious about the proximity of houses and humans. Robbie vomits again, followed by some increasingly human grunts which are much scarier than his earlier animal utterances. I feel woozy and unsure. Unsure about Robbie and his strange trip, and to a lesser degree my own.

  ‘Come on Robbie, we should go.’ My hand is shaking so I take it off of his back.

  Robbie spits a few times then says, ‘Wow, look at this, Lucy,’ talking in his own voice now.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look at this,’ staring at his vomit.

  ‘No thanks,’ I say. 'Let's go now. There's people watching us. We're not normal at the moment.’

  Robbie cranes his head around in a sauropod motion that settles smiling onto me. ‘No they're not. We're fine,’ he says. He looks back at his spew, ‘But look at all the detail. All the tiny cities . . .’

  ‘I'll take your word for it,’ I say. ‘Come on, let's go. Let's go to the beach before the mescaline wears off.’

  Robbie spits into his spew again and laughs, ‘The hand of God hath struck thee down.’ He pushes himself up into a pyramid shape and says, ‘Alright. We'll go see the Seed Freaks. I think that's next on the agenda . . . Up north. The beach is just past there. Are you mentally prepared for some human interaction?’

  I nod and stand up. The mescaline is coming back and the thought of hanging out with the Seed Freaks seems appealing for some reason. The sun has almost gone and the night sky has a dusty red glow. Robbie's up with me and we bask in the beginnings of starlight until he says, ‘Alright, let's do it,’ and starts walking. I pick up his tape recorder from next to his spew and admire his little city for a second before following.

  We walk silently pulsing along the boundary line for a while until a passing cop car slows down as it cruises past. A light shines out at us but we both know not to look into it. Robbie's walk stiffens into an imitation human gait and our shadows spin in strange dizzy angles then back to the dark dusty night as the car speeds up.

  I look at Robbie and his face is frozen stoic scared and he nods towards the woods. We climb over the fence and head uphill, much safer now in the darkness of the trees. We follow the fence all the way up to the cliffside peak that overlooks the highway north and everything starts glowing again.

  ‘Well, we need to get across there if we wanna see the Seed Freaks,’ Robbie says. Before us is a three or four metre almost vertical dirt bank that leads down to the motorway. Rush hour headlights careen along the orange streetlit lanes. Past the first two laned street is a wide nature strip dense with trees, followed by another two lanes of death. Beyond the last lane another section of the woods atop a much lower dirt cliff beckons us.

  ‘We'll climb down here?’ I ask. I'm feeling unsure and woozy with vertigo, but I trust Robbie. This isn't the normal bookworm Robbie. This is Robbie on a psychedelic adventure. If he can navigate the planets he can navigate the roads.

  ‘Are you joking? We'll go straight onto the road if we go down here. Look, let's go down over that end. It's a bit steeper, but there's a much wider parking lane. A bit more room for error.’

  I hold onto Robbie's arm and we walk across the thin strip of gravelly rocks between the woods and the cliff. Enormous wireframe transmission towers stand guard along the highway like great humming geometric golems. I lose my footing and fall into Robbie with a frozen then thumping heart as a little island of rocks gives way beneath my feet then off down the cliff and into the traffic.

  ‘I know they're trippy, but you should really be watching your step right now,’ Robbie says. ‘Here, swap sides.’

  Giggling and shaking, I walk on the forest side of the track, watching the voodoo dance of the trees instead of the powerlines. The forest will always catch me when I fall. Not like the harsh angles of civilisation.

  We get to the apex of the cliffside and Robbie says, ‘Alright, here.’ This part of the cliff is tall enough to make the cars look like an endless aureolin snake blasting through a void, chasing the last red clouds at the horizon. ‘Are you gonna be alright to climb down this? It's either that or go all the way down the end. But that'll take all night . . . It's safe here, I reckon. There's enough trees to sort of swing down. Maybe.’

  ‘Okay. Lead the way to malkuth.’

  Robbie looks at me quizzically in the dusky light, kisses me on the forehead, then takes his first step into the embankment. The cliff is dotted with cypress type trees that build up to a small bushy area near the bottom. Robbie creeps to the very edge where the bank gives way to about one and a half humans of sheer cliff, buffered by a thick canopy. He crouches down and leans out over the drop, his movements stilted but precise, before jumping like a cat from the clifftop into the tree's cradle, grasping it with his arms while his legs swing around kicking up dust. The black shape thrashes around for a second then recoils and Robbie's on the mellower midsection waiting for me.

  Following Robbie's footsteps, I creep out to the edge of the cliff. The vertical drop is deadly, but the plantation growing out of the mellow landing contorts almost all the way up to where I am. I lean forwards as far as I can without losing my balance and try to reach for the canopy but fall just short. The mescaline gives way to the acid which feels kind of like dexies when I need it to, and I can feel all the tiny muscles in my eyes twisting and whirring like a chromatic binocular zoom, making fine details emerge within the pitch black object before me, shimmering wireframe indentations that show me how the air will carry me and how the tree will react to the weight of my body.

  Past the first tree, Robbie lowers himself into a spider crawl on his hands and feet, facing the sky. He traverses the flatter section diagonally, his bag scraping against the dirt, and lines up the tree to brace himself against at the end of his next descent. Cars flash by below and I imagine I'm made of plasticine to stop the images of splattered flesh from thumping my heart.

  With supple clay movements, I lower myself out over the cliff's edge and spring forwards slightly, letting my weight carry me into the centre of the treetop. I catch myself with both my arms and legs on the main trunk like a koala, both eyes squeezed shut giggling. The tree swings out dangerously and a stick has torn through my dress and scratched all the way across my belly. The tree stabilises and fear and pain clamp my arms and legs tightly around the trunk, the fissured bark scratching my neck and wrists as my grip weakens and I slide down the tree. Branches yield briefly beneath me before snapping off and scratching past my bare feet. My right foot stretches out swivelling around until it finds the small stones of the embankment and takes my weight away from the tree. I plant my other foot next to it and slowly let go of the tree as I find my balance. My dress is still hitched up on a branch behind me and I wait until I find my balance to unhook it.

  It takes a little while for my eyes to adjust and pick out Robbie crouched against the bushy darkness near the bottom of the cliff. There's about a horse length of gentle slope before me, followed by a few metres of steep, rocky cliff, then some bushes.

  ‘You gotta slide that last bit,’ Robbie calls up to me. ‘I went on my ass and feet. It's okay, though. This bush is real thick. It'll catch you.’ All the scratches from the branches have made me meat again, so I turn into clay and spider crawl down to the steep bit without trouble. I perch at the top of the drop like an Egyptian cat, looking down towards Robbie.

  ‘Can you walk down it? Or crawl?’ I ask.

  ‘You could try,’ Robbie says, ‘but you're gonna end up sliding anyway, I reckon.’

  I nod and roll my dress up to my hips and tie it into a knot to my side. My feet and hands are tender, but it looks like a quick ride down so I want to just get it over with. I release the tension in my feet and hands and ride the miniature landslide down the incline, picking up speed all the way down until I bowl Robbie into the shrubbery. We land tangled up laughing in the damp darkness of the bush. Robbie playfully bites my neck and we wrestle with sharp claws and teeth and monkey grip tails hissing like wild cats, then up onto all fours, bushwhacking down to the road as screeching rats in the undergrowth. We're up and alert on the road with missile cars flashing by, Robbie laughing with wild eyes and a tussled lion's mane and electricity jerking and twitching his body around, beanie lost in the woods somewhere. The sky is throbbing the deepest maroon glower, calm above gunfire cars flying-

  ‘Now!’ Robbie cries and snatches me up by the hand and we run across the road. Cars flash past like rolling lightning whose thunder is obnoxious roadrunner beeps . . . We get to the island in the middle of the road and stop to ride the adrenaline like the smell of sap and plant signals, a green mist somewhere out beyond the senses. The grass massages my bloody feet while the sounds and flashes of cars melt everything into laughing strobes. A pulse of something and Robbie's kissing me passionately against a tree, but then the moment's passed in the flash of cars and we're walking along the shaking nature strip, Robbie's hand around my waist, playing with my scar through my dress . . . My sense of direction and everything else is all paper thin now so I surrender to Robbie's will.

  ‘Man, we should have a DMT trip here . . . Can you imagine?’

  ‘Imagine . . .’ I can't remember. The roads on either side of us form a burning electric circuit enclosing the trees in hellfire reds and yellows . . . Spinning around into a candy cane twist telescope into the night sky . . . The stars spinning erratically in the centre . . . Aureolin night wasp stripes . . . Laughter . . . Something splashing around . . . Swept past in the flowing current . . . Everything pulled taut then released, all lost in a shower of sparks . . .

‘Okay maybe we'll wait then.’ Robbie's sitting Indian style next to me. I'm lying on the grass laughing, gripping the front of his shirt with my hand like an infant. ‘Whenever you're ready,’ he says, his smile more alien than animal, but more animal than human. I let go of his shirt and let my hand fall. His hands are waiting on his lap and cup mine and we're moving again, Robbie a small child running through the trees, me a trail of streamers swimming out from his hands into the sky . . .

  We cross the road in a flare of lights and wind, then everything settles down because we're back in the cool dark green. We climb over a low wooden fence and Robbie's tape recorder comes out in one smooth motion, as if stepping into a new version of himself, determined and serious, but aware of the scratches and thumping heart of the climb and what it all means.

Michael Farmer

At Amelia's it's just five cunts on the couches, hungover as fuck like a bunch of wet clothes chucked on the furniture to dry, same old fuckin' shit, just close the curtains, shut out the world and fuckin' sit there and wait for the grim reaper, no cunt even saying shit about my shaved - Damo goes “What's been happening sailor?” and I'm like “Nah nah, you can nip that one in the bud, cunt” 'cause sometimes their lingo comes out with some cool shit, but this time they've missed the mark good and proper and he just nods all dark and goes back to his hangover. There's some Beavis and Butthead going on TV which is all good but it's just kinda fucked 'cause they're all just sitting there watching it but not laughing at all, not even fuckin' grinning, just staring all dead eyed at the bright colours like a pack of dozy fuckin' kids - Why the fuck would you watch Beavis and Butthead if you're not laughing at it? Cunts can't even watch TV without fucking it up. No cunt's even looking at me anymore so I'm like “Aye, comedown cunts over here then? Time to wake the fuck up aye? Saturday night and shit, get into it” and everyone's just gawking around and not saying shit so I'm like “Aye, what's this shit about then? Cunts ready for bed or something?” and Jeremy's like “Yo just breathe a sec here rover” and I'm like “Aye? Someone fuckin' died or something?” and no one laughs and every cunt just looks around then Damo finally goes “Missed out on a massive sesh, brutus, spots and shit. Shoulda set off a few minutes earlier. We're all well on the level over here” and I'm like fuck, these cunts ain't even on the come downs, they're just greening the fuck out. I say “Fuck yeah, on the level then. I'll rack us up some dexies” and Rory's like “Nah nah, just moss tonight I reckon. Keen for a mellow ride” and I'm like “Fuck off, cunt. That'll just be you cunts asleep on the couch by fuckin' nine thirty. I thought we were on it tonight. Look at this shit. I got a bottle of gin, a fuckin' sixer. Aye, Damo, go grab the cards. Let's get some four kings going.” All these cunts are just staring at me now and - Fuckin' Stan's fully comas now, fully just conked off. Some fuckin' big dog, fuckin' dozing off on the couch, looks like it's up to me to get this party started, as fuckin' usual. I take a big ass fuckin' swig of gin and staunch through the burn and sit on the arm of the couch and pass it to Rory - Cunt just passes it along and it does the full circle and Jeremy's the only one who ends up having a swig. Jeremy passes the bottle back to me and I go “What, you cunts just gonna sit here watching Beavis and Butthead all night?” and Damo goes “Nah lad, downloading the Aliens movies right now. Only got like a halfer to go. Get all irie and watch that. Bandit” and I'm like “Aye? Fuckin' saturday night and shit cunts. I got fuckin' dexies, gin, bud, enough for a whole fuckin' party. Fuckin' ballin', unmolested as fuck” and Amelia goes “No one wants any dexies, Michael. You can roll up a wand and watch this with us or fuck off” stroppy as bitch and Jeremy goes “I'll take you up on that one, Farmdawg. Dex on?” and I'm like “Yeah I ‘spose” kinda dark about it 'cause that'll just be me and that cunt on the buzz while everyone else has a fuckin' sleepover, Rory and Damo probly get all gay again - Aye, cunts, that's what's going on here, everyone's just all weird about what went down on the fuckin' regretamine last night. Faggy cunts, who even gives a shit? Just fuckin' get into it, get weird, whatever. Who gives a fuck? I'm not into it just being me and Jeremy charging so I'm like “Alright then Damo, that you, me, and Jeremy on the buzz then?” and Damo's like “Ah, I'm a zero on that one, lad. Had a bit much last night, keen for a breathe aye” even though he didn't even touch the fuckin' charge last night. I look at Rory and he just goes “Nah boldy” then to Stan but he's long gone and I'm like “Fuck, we got the whole fuckin' crew together for once and everyone's just keen to sit there and stare at a fuckin' screen? Your shit's fuckin' weak, cunts. Fuckin' weak” 'cause, fuck, I ain't gonna work a fuckin' forty hour week just so I can sit on the couch and zone out, just stare at this fuckin' imitation of real life - I want to actually do life, fuckin' catch up with cunts and shit, get rowdy or at least get on the yarns. No one says shit for ages so I go “Fuckin' missed out on a wild one with the others last night, cunts. Ketamine coming out the fuckin'-” and Amelia interrupts me and goes “Yeah yeah you almost crashed Stan's car then got irie at the shitlab and shaved your head. Already heard all about it from Stan” which I'm actually a bit cut by, smug bitch. I say “Alright bitch, put the claws away. Just trying to fuckin' hang with you cunts” and Amelia goes “Just take your fucking medication and breathe. We're good here, we're mellow. We don't need you going on” and I'm like “Yeah that's what I'm fuckin' well doing, ain't I? Looks like you cunts need my meds more than me anyway” I crush a couple pills up on the table and unplug the laptop on the sly then divide the powder three ways for me, Jeremy, and Damo - Cunt takes a bit of convincing, but once he's on the buzz, he's pretty much the king cunt around here. Us three have our lines and I crack a beer and give one to Jeremy the scavenger cunt and it sorta picks up a bit, just us three though. Damo ends up switching off Beavis and Butthead which everyone's too wasted to even whinge about and puts on some Hasil Adkins they just downloaded on kazaa. I unplug the middle bit of the laptop charger and check the track list and spot this song called no more hotdogs, which is this loose as fuck laughing song that'll get everyone up and cranking, mad drum beat too. I chuck it on and disconnect the internet just to be a funny cunt and get all into the tunes but then some lyrics come on and I'm like “Aye? I didn't think this song had words. Fuck this shit” and Jeremy goes “You thought it was a song called no more hotdogs composed entirely of laughter?” and gets a bit of a fuckin' titter - That cunt can fuck off now, to be honest. I change the track and lean against the wall and switch off the plug hole that the laptop's attached to and go “Yo, Damo, keen to hit up the others tonight, get fuckin' irie?” and he's just like “Nah nah boldybole, got an evening planned here” which kinda sucks but at least he's got a fuckin' pulse now. I text up Collin and Spacey but don't hear back from either of them and get a little para that maybe they're getting their fuck on and sitting there laughing at my texts.

  We smoke a spliff I've rolled of Amelia's shit and that's everyone well fucked, even fuckin' Damo's off it now so it's just Jeremy fuckin' pestering me for gin and going on about shitty ass nine eleven conspiracies like I could give a shit what's happening in america. I get bored of the cunt quick smart but it's all good 'cause the laptop's out of battery and it's funny as watching Rory deal with it. He plugs in the cable and it still doesn't work and it takes him ages to figure out the connector bit in the middle's unplugged but then it's still not working 'cause I've unplugged it at the wall and he's like “What the fuck is wrong with this thing?” and I'm cracking up at him and I go “Yeah you fuckin' argue with that robot, cunt. Tell it who's boss. Victory for the meat monkeys” and he's like “Yeah, fuck you too. That's music and TV fucked for us now. And Aliens” and I'm like “Fuckin' put all your eggs in one basket there didn't ya? Music, phone, and TV all in one. What a time to be aloof” but no one picks up on my joke - Cunts love a pun when it's one of them behind it, not so hyped when the fuckin' Farmdawg's crankin' 'em out, aye. I say “Well that's what you fuckin'-” but Amelia's cut me off like “Oh my god Michael. Can't you ever think to yourself?” and I sure fuckin' can, bitch. “Could get your olds’ vinyls out” Damo says and I'm like “Fuck yeah, this cunt's thinking” 'cause I'm stoked that someone here's down to get away from the fuckin' laptop for a second. Amelia's all “Nah, can't be bothered” and I'm like “I'll go get it. I'm keen for a vinyl night, fuck yeah” and she tries to say some shit but I'm up and off to her parents’ room and fuckin' Jeremy the shit cunt goes “Aye, yo” and plugs the computer back in at the wall and everyone's stoked as but I just wanna smack the cunt out now, back to square one, final destination right here, fully molested. I unplug the modem while everyone's trying to suss which Beavis and Butthead to put on and Rory's like “For fuck's sake now the internet's down” and I have a good laugh watching those cunts try figure out what's going on, a pack of fuckin' monkeys arguing with a robot. I think Damo's figured out what I'm up to, gives me a smile on the sly and shakes his head but that game's getting old now and I'm coming back down already but don't even know if I wanna crush up again 'cause then I'll be even more bored. They've given up on the internet and chuck the Simpsons on and the fuckin' tiny bit of energy they summoned to try sort it out is already gone and I'm like “Fuck's sakes, cunts. That us then? Wasting away another saturday night staring at flickering fuckin' pictures? Is that what our lives are? That how we've turned out? Wait the whole week for fuckin' saturday night so we can just turn our fuckin' brains off and watch some shit we've already seen a million times” and no cunt's even responding and I'm like “Fuckin', aye, Amelia, you got a pussy, I got a cock, I can think of a few better things we can do than stare at a screen” kinda keen for it but mostly just trying to wind the dozy bitch up but she doesn't even look at me. I say “So this’s your fuckin' life then? This what you cunts do with your saturday nights? You know there's a fuckin' world out there, right? Just outside that fuckin' door. There's a saturday night about to happen out there. We're right in the fuckin' centre of it and we're just gonna stay locked up in here? Shit's straight up fuckin' mind control. Just keeping every cunt all locked up inside, not causing any trouble, not even thinking their own fuckin' thoughts. Talk about a victory for the cunts at the top - you cunts could at least try not to make it so fuckin' easy for them.” Rory looks up at me all smug about something and goes “You're sounding just like ole C Squared there, brody” and I go “Well fuck, I'm sure that cunt's out there doing something way better than this. Fuckin' Callahan'd never waste a night watching repeats of old cartoons. That's a cunt who knows how to entertain himself right there. Cunt's probly all unmolested on the trips watching his own movies in his head. Way better than this shit” and Amelia goes “Well why don't you go join him then? You've been here for like an hour and you still haven't figured out no one else wants to party? We're set here. You're not getting anywhere with this. And stop with that unmolested shit. That joke's dead, leave it.” I'm trying to think up a new insult to fling at her but, fuck, I guess the bitch has a point. I go “Fuckin' alright then. Damo, keen for the disarray? Try get your mack on? I'll wingman ya” and Damo just looks up all red eyed and I don't even bother waiting to find out but then Jeremy's like “I'm keen” but fuck that, had enough of this shit, so I'm like “Whatever cunts, I'm out. Have fun wasting away, fuckin' hit me up when you get some life in ya” and I grab my gin and I'm off out the door, no need for goodbyes or later boldys, just let the cunts fuckin' doze off in front of the idiot box.

  I feel better pretty quick once I'm out and heading down the stairs, just good to not have those cunts sucking the life outta me. Sun's just a tiny bit of red behind the hills, can't beat the fuckin' warm summer nights in town, perfect temperature, cunts on the roam, music coming out from the bars, awesome fuckin' atmosphere. I head through centres towards the disarray and try Spacey and Collin again but nada so I guess it's just me creeping solo - No fuckin' problems, this here's a cunt who can entertain himself. Sorta tripped me out what Rory said though, how I sound like ole fuckin' Callahan. I guess he's just one of those cunts you can't hang out with without turning into a bit. Kinda like me. I wonder what the cunt's up to and, fuck, wish I'd gone to his place after work instead of Amelia's. All good though, I'll catch up with the cunt later, hear all about it.

Collin Callahan

Stan Richards

Fuck yeah fuckin' mean skate down from the lookout, hyped as now - didn't think there'd be so many cars but I'm stoked that there was, dicey as 'cause there's no sidewalk the whole way down and the road’s all windy with real narrow lanes - I can't believe how shitty the motorists were, fuckin' beeping at me and shit just 'cause I held them up a few fuckin' seconds. Happened three times on the skate down, some cunt comes up behind me, has to slow down to like 20 or 30 - I was hauling ass the whole way down, didn't put my foot down once - and just sits on their horn till I veer into the other lane to let them pass, sketchy as fuck with all the blind corners, just so they can get to the fuckin' red light at the bottom a few seconds quicker - skated past this one fucker at the lights, tried to yell some shit at me but I was just like ‘Fuck yeah, made it to the red light in time, good shit!’ Something about being behind the wheel seems to bring out the dormant cuntiness in people. Like, I can't imagine someone getting that aggressive if I held them up a few seconds walking along the sidewalk. Some cunts just can't handle even the tiniest bit of power.

  The sun was just an ember by the time I'd finished up there, but that actually made the ride down less scary 'cause I'd get blinded by the headlights if there was a cunt coming up 'round one of the tight corners, giving me a chance to get into the other lane. I ended up spending a sweet half-hour or so at the top, just watching the city lights all peaceful. I smoked a skinny-ass joint and drank a beer while I watched the traffic, tripping out on how organised it all is. In my head I saw it as like blood vessels travelling through the body, like veins or something, before deciding it was a stupid comparison and settling on the even stupider idea of the cars being cattle getting directed by high tech robotic work dogs. The overly involved wasted metaphor ended with the simple but satisfying conclusion that they were sheep. It seemed sorta profound at the time, so I tried to work it into my song and ended up with:

The rustling leaves sound strange laughter

Nature's drum beat, growing faster

Claws and stripes behind every tree

The threat of death sets my soul free

  Once I finished the beer and the joint I tried to remember the chain of thought I came up to sort out, but just ended up just wastedly thinking about trivial crap for a few more minutes before I worked up the nerve to skate down. My head's been cleared out and sharp ever since.

  I get to Witham, heading vaguely in the direction of home, and notice the anxiety has crept back a little ever since I got back into the city. I decide to go back to work and try my luck getting some more beers to take back to the bush. Creep around a bit, maybe get my song onto paper. It's a clear night, writing in the starlight would be romantic as.

  I skate down Northbourne and onto Hunterway, a little tame now that I'm stoned but still feeling pretty fearless from the hill, too wasted to do any real tricks, just popping anything in my path pretending I'm the Gonz. I mach ten a shitty ollie up the curb when I get to Bolton and Sons and tailskid to a stop in front of the bouncer at the door. He's a huge, staunch Islander dude looking pretty dangerous in a suit. He stares at me stone-faced as I approach.

  ‘Hey mate, how's it going?’ I say, practising my small talk.

  ‘You had much to drink tonight?’ he asks, ignoring my small talk. Oh well. Back to default autistic cunt mode then I guess.

  ‘Nah just had a couple at work.’

  He stares me in the eye for a few seconds and seems to click that I'm more stoned than drunk. He looks away from me, apparently deciding whether he has a personal issue with this, before going ‘You got ID with you?’

  ‘Uh, nah I didn't bring it with me,’ I half-lie. I feel like a little kid 'cause I have to tilt my head right back to look him in the eyes, but I try not to let it fuck with my confidence. After a bit, I figure out he's waiting for me to explain myself, so I go ‘Just had my first shift in there today. In the kitchen. Dishes. Just gotta grab my, uh, I left my hat in there. Just gotta go in and...’ I stop talking when I notice his expression has softened drastically.

  ‘Oh cheer brother! I'm Denzo,’ he says with an enormous, welcoming Islander smile. He gives me a black dude handshake which I manage to fumble through without being too much of a spaz about it. ‘I'm the man to see if anyone in there is misbehaving - or if you feel like hooking us up a feed!’

  ‘Stan,’ I say. ‘So, uh, it all good to head in?’

  ‘All good brother, cheer,’ he says joyously, opening the door for me.

  I say ‘Cheers brother,’ and get away with it and head into the bar, sorta shaken by how happy that dude seemed about me working there. Reminds me of meeting like Max and Jurg and all them in the kitchen earlier. Way more casual and friendly than I imagined a workplace to be. Another kind of brotherhood.

  Inside, the atmosphere is completely different from when I was here a few hours ago. It's completely packed now, like The Disarray when they got gigs on, and the line for liquor is more like a crowd than a line. There's some poppy, Michael-type rap playing so loud I can't even understand the conversations happening right next to me. I bob my head a little 'cause I'm feeling kinda awkward, but stop pretty quick 'cause I feel like a wanker. The people in the line are shouting into each other's ears 'cause the shitty music is so overpowering. I start feeling disoriented which reminds me that I've been awake all night and am actually pretty fuckin' wasted.

  A few more minutes pass and the disorientation condenses into a sort of panic. I look behind me and see that I haven't moved forwards at all. People are cutting in freely, seemingly aware of more subtle rules of the line. I try and call this older cunt out on it as he shimmies past, but I'm too easy to ignore with the crowd and all the noise and he disappears up to the front without any trouble. After a few minutes, I finally get to take a step forward. People are standing behind me now, so I feel like I've actually gotten somewhere. I crane my neck around to get a better glimpse of the bar and realise that both Karla and Jo, the only two bar staff I've actually met, have both been replaced by a trio of older, wankier looking cunts. I'm only about three people away from the counter now, but I'm starting to have serious doubts about the reality of my plan. I've got no ID, no money, and I can safely assume no one's set up a tab for me yet. I turn to leave but I'm now closer to the front than the back of the line. I'll just try my luck and see what happens, maybe ask to talk to Max or Chris. The chick who was behind me just before is now inexplicably directly in front of me. I'm tryna stay positive. I can get hyped on this. Just gotta think positive... After a while the unfamiliar music and all the shouting starts to fuck with my head so I barge through the crowd in a panic, using my board like a shield, and ditch.

  I say later to Denzo as I pass, willing him not to question me about my lack of hat. I head round the corner on foot through the carpark to the door me and Michael went through into the garage. I open it slowly and poke my head into the darkness, hoping there's no sensor lights.

  I slither through the small crack in the door and click it closed as quiet as I can. The garage is pitch-black except for a three-sided oblong of light peeping through the frame of the door leading to the kitchen. It's on the opposite wall, about twenty metres away from me, and only slightly illuminates an area of like maybe a metre around it. I stand motionlessly for a while, my ears tuning out the muffled sounds of the kitchen and bar and tuning into the relative silence of the garage. The groan of various appliances forms a white noise for my ears to grasp onto. I place my bag and board on the concrete and feel my way along the bricks of the back wall, moving gradually quicker as the silence becomes clearer. I keep my eye on the kitchen light to keep perspective. My heart is hammering and my mind is coolly alert and ready to bolt as soon as I sense any movement. Without even consciously thinking about it, I come up with the last verse of my song, sung to the beat of the earlier two choruses:

So deep in the black, completely blind

No eyes just hands, trying to find

The shape of the earth, nature's contours

Just trying to find something a little bit truer

  It works perfectly with the rest of the song, but it really over-romanticises the shady shit that inspired it. My eyes are starting to adjust to the dark, and I can vaguely see the forms in the darkness. I'm a few metres from the wall separating the garage from the hallway down to the bathroom. Against the wall is a line of fridges. If I remember right, the one full of beers is the last tall one, next to the low freezer. I think I can see their outlines.

  The kitchen door swings open when I'm a few metres from the fridge. I duck down instinctively. My heart speeds up to an erratic vibration. Voices emerge from the kitchen as the light spreads through the garage. There's two cars parked in the garage that I wasn't aware of. Lighters flick on and muttered words are exchanged. I'm safely obscured by one of the cars, but I can hear footsteps. I don't think they're getting closer. Maybe someone's pacing around. Oh fuck they're getting closer... No they're not. I consider crawling underneath the car, but there's too much oil and grime. A last resort. I creep backwards a bit so that I'm directly behind the car. I close my eyes and try to tune into the voices but the light and the noises from the kitchen have scrambled my senses. The footsteps are getting closer. They seem to be heading towards the fridges. I creep around the car on all fours and remain crouched next to the driver's seat door. The gravelly sound of my shoes dragging seems so loud. The grimy concrete stings the open wounds on my right hand. A fridge opens. I curl up in a ball against the car wheel. Fuck. I don't want to get fired. I realise how fortunate I was to stumble into this job today, and how, like most things I accomplish, it was mostly dumb luck.

  ‘Who the fuck ordered all these cucumbers?’ A voice. Chris.

  ‘What?’ A female voice.

  ‘There's like fifteen bags of cucumbers in here. No lettuce, no zucchini, no coriander. Just loads of fucking cucumbers.’ I use the sound of the voices as a cover and lower myself underneath the car.

  ‘Just cucumbers?’

  ‘Yes. Just cucumbers. Who did the orders?’

  My T-shirt clings to a patch of something gross on the concrete. The car seems to be producing heat somehow. Fuck I hate cars. The smell's not too bad, though.

  ‘Have you checked the meat fridge?’

  ‘No I haven't. They really shouldn't be in the meat fridge.’

  ‘Check the meat fridge. Jurgen was saying-’

  ‘Oh there they are. Gross. Who the fuck did orders yesterday?’

  ‘George, I assume.’

  The fridges struggle and the drunks continue to shout. I can smell Chris's cigarette from here, musty and stale but weirdly pleasing.

  ‘I don't think he should be doing orders,’ the girl says. ‘I think you should start doing them again. We had to throw out like three boxes of barramundi on Wednesday 'cause he ordered so many.’

  Footsteps and rustling bags move from the fridges to the kitchen door.

  ‘Don't worry. He'll be gone soon,’ Chris says. His voice is much quieter now, so I gather they're both sitting on the steps.

  ‘He's leaving?’ the girl says, talking in like a shocked whisper. They're both silent for a bit, then the kitchen door closes. In the dark I can sense that they're still there.

  ‘...Sort of.’

  ‘He's getting fired?’

  ‘...Yeah. Yeah he is. Chances are. He's become too unpredictable. We can't have that shit going on in a kitchen.’

  ‘Well I think that's great. I think everyone's gonna be happy about that. Especially Max. He hates George,’ the girl says. Her voice has risen again.

  ‘Yeah, but keep all this to yourself, alright? I'll be in deep shit if Ray finds out I've been blabbing.’ Chris is still half-whispering.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Also, another thing... Just between us, though.’

  ‘Okay, sure.’

  ‘That hooter Ray found out here.’

  ‘Hooter?’

  ‘Yeah. You know. Snorter. Drugs.’

  ‘Oh, right. With the coke on the chopping board?’

  ‘Yeah. Well I've told Jurgen to claim he saw George snorting coke out here. He's gonna have a talk with Ray next week.’

  ‘What? Don't drag Jurgen into this!’

  ‘I didn't drag him into this. He was in on it from the start. He wants George gone as much as anyone. We just need a health and safety thing to get him on. If it comes down to his shit with Michael, then unfortunately I think it'll be Michael who gets sent off. Besides, it'll sound better coming from Jurgen. Ray knows I've got it in for George.’

  ‘Jesus, Chris...’

  ‘Hey, how much longer do you want to put up with George's shit?’

  It's silent again. I'm tryna think how I can use this information to blackmail Chris somehow... Eventually I decide it's too early in my career to be doing that kinda shit, and I should prolly just not be such a cunt for once.

  ‘Did you ever find out who was sniffing coke out here?’ the girl says.

  ‘Nah. Not really interested,’ Chris says. ‘Honestly, it was probably Michael.’

  They both laugh.

  ‘That kid's nuts,’ the girl says.

  ‘He is. But he gets the job done, that's for sure. Been thinking of bumping him up to Tyson's job if this whole George thing works out. Get Michael on the grill, get Tyson doing frontline and try him out with orders and maybe even some admin shit. Had a new dishie in today, one of Michael's mates. Bit of a freak, but seems like a hard worker. He could probably fill Michael's spot with a bit more practice.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘Well what about me then?’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘You know how I was saying I wanted to get into some baking...’

  ‘Oh yeah. Well, we've already got Jurgen and Blakey doing that, so...’

  ‘Yeah I know. But keep in mind, I know things now. Things that could get you in trouble.’ Damn. Bitch took my idea. Oh well. Prolly wouldn't have been able to pull it off anyway.

  ‘Fuck. Really Elle? You're gonna pull this shit?’

  ‘Well, you know, just keep it in mind. When you're rearranging the roles in there. Just keep it in mind.’

  ‘Yeah well you're just gonna have to wait and see how this George shit pans out. Then I'll see what I can do.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘But that's the last time I let you in on this kinda thing, that's for fucking sure. Anyway, better get back inside. Come on.’

  I listen for the sound of them going back into the kitchen, then creep out from underneath the car into the dark. I take off my filthy, oil-stained shirt and sling it over my shoulder for the smell. I head over to the fridge confidently, my night vision noticeably sharpened with panic. I open the fridge and there's a huge selection of beers. Maybe I should take the opportunity to nick a whole case. I scan the fridge up and down for some of those black beers I was drinking earlier but I can't remember the name. Coopers something, maybe...

  The kitchen door opens again.

  Fucker.

  I stand perfectly still, obscured by the door. Silence. I clink some bottles around to make it sound like I'm looking for something.

  ‘Who's that?’ Chris's voice.

  ‘Just grabbing some...’ I mutter.

  ‘Charles?’

  ‘Yeah. Just...’

  I start rearranging some of the cases of beer, taking one out and putting it on the floor, then moving another one across. Just moving them around aimlessly. The beers in my hand clink around as I shiver. Hopefully he fucks off soon. Hopefully he just left his hat out here or something. He can't be coming out for another cigarette already. That's just unprofessional.

  ‘Charles?’ He's right behind me now.

  ‘Yeah?’ I say. He opens the door wider from behind me. I try to stand still but I'm shivering too much now. It's over. A few seconds pass and I give up and turn to face him. He's got me locked in like a triangle of cold, yellow light between him, the fridge, and the door. I wrap my arm around myself and avoid his eyes.

  ‘Hey Charles,’ he says. He seems amused, but I can tell he's not gonna let me go.

  I panic and say ‘I heard everything you were talking about before, you say anything and I'll-’

  ‘What the fuck are you doing, Stan?’ he says. I look up at him. His face is guarded, not revealing any kind of emotion.

  ‘You get the fuck out of the way,’ I say, tryna puff my chest up like Jordan. ‘I'm taking a six-pack and then I'm gone, okay? You won't see me again. Just get the fuck out of the way man. This is happening, alright. Deal with it.’

  ‘I can't let you do that, Stan.’ He's putting on a hard face, but I think he is actually a little intimidated by me. I might be able to pull this off.

  ‘I heard everything you said before,’ I say. I'm tryna sound tough, but my voice is trembling from the cold. My right hand grips a six-pack and I'm ready to smack him over the head with it if he tries anything. ‘I can ruin you, man. Let me go and I don't say a word. Let me go and we leave it at that.’

  ‘Listen, Stan. You don't have a leg to stand on. You tell, and Michael goes down with me. Ray already suspects him. Michael is easily replaced. I'm not. Any of this gets out and he goes down before I do. You really want to put Michael out of a job?’

  ‘I don't give a fuck about Michael. Let me go,’ I say. He raises his eyebrows at me. I'm fucked. I can tell he's one of those cunts who can sniff out a lie before it's even been said.

  ‘Sure you don't.’

  ‘I've got a six-pack in my hand cunt. You want that shit smashed over your fuckin' head?’

  ‘Okay, theft and assault. That'll look good on your CV.’

  ‘Fuck off I don't give a fuck. Won't mean shit to you when you're getting your skull stitched up.’

  ‘Getting my skull stitched up?’

  ‘Don't fuck with me, man. I'm fuckin' crazy.’ I don't know if I'm shaking from the cold or adrenaline now.

  ‘I can see that. But what I'm wondering here, Stan, is why the fuck you've broken into the garage to steal some beer. There's other ways you could have gone about this, you know. You're really putting me in an awkward spot.’

  ‘I think I'm in the awkward spot,’ I say, shivering.

  Chris smiles. ‘True, true. So anyway, Stan, I'll ask you again. What the fuck are you doing?’ His understanding smile makes me feel like a total cunt. I loosen my grip on the beers. Maybe he'll just let me go. I just wanna get the fuck out of here now. I don't even want the beer.

  ‘I wanted to get some beers but I couldn't get them at the bar,’ I admit, looking at my feet. I can't even look him in the eye anymore. I feel like such a piece of shit.

  ‘That can be arranged,’ he says. ‘Here, hand them over.’ I hand him the six-pack, which turns out to be Heinekens, and he steps back to let me out of the fridge. I consider bolting, but it seems somehow futile.

  ‘...What now?’ I say. My voice is weak and defeated, but I'm happy to be out of the fridge and in the dark.

  ‘Well here's what I'm thinking, Stan. What I'm thinking is that you're a pretty fucked up guy. Would you agree?’

  ‘Yeah...’

  ‘But I think Michael's a good dude, and I trust his judgement. So I'm willing to give you a second chance.’

  I nod. I'm not sure if he can actually see me, but I don't think it matters.

  His tone changes. ‘But if you ever try to pull this kind of shit again, I will make it my business to make sure you pay. And I'm not just talking about the beers, I'm talking about the blackmail, and the attitude. Now this is a favour, not a right. Is that clear?’

  I nod. I want to thank him, but he's not finished.

  ‘And if you make me regret this, I will get you back. You won't have a job here, that's a given. But that'll just be the start of it. My retribution will go beyond these walls. And yes, that is a threat. Now, why the fuck aren't you wearing a shirt?’

  ‘I was hiding under the car,’ I say.

  Chris laughs. ‘I guess you heard me call you weirdo before then?’

  ‘Freak,’ I correct him.

  ‘Yeah, freak. Well, Stan, I stand by that. You are a fucking freak. But what I'm seeing here is that this job may be one of the few opportunities you get to sort yourself out, and my belief is that you should never pass up the chance to save someone. Anyway, I've said what I need to say. I hope you learn from this. This is not an invitation to take advantage of my nature. This is an opportunity to better yourself. Whether or not you take that opportunity is up to you. But know one thing. I promise you I will not be so forgiving next time. There's no second chances here. Understood?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good. Now, you take these with you, and I'll put it on my tab. But you fucking owe me. Big time. I'm gonna go to the lost property box and grab you a shirt. You wait outside.’

  He hands me the beer and I say thanks. I head outside, putting the six-pack in my bag on the way. I sit down on my board in the middle of the footpath because the building is too cold on my bare back. The air is a nice temperature, just cool enough to give me a slight chill. I go over our conversation in my head and realise that, under the pretext of taking mercy on me, the cunt really just psyched me out and paid me off with a six-pack. Fucker. Maybe I should go in there and grab some more alcohol. Let him know I sussed him out. He'd never expect that. I know the garage now. I could be in and out in a few seconds. Even if he busts me, I'll just have to get to the door before him. Then on my board and off down the road. He won't be able to keep up with me on my board. I'll leave my bag out here. Quick, in and out. I can do this... 

  Chris comes out with a grey hoodie and goes ‘This is all I could find.’

  I stand up and say ‘Thanks,’ as he hands it over. I put it on and fuck yeah, it fits perfect. It's the right temperature for a hoodie and no shirt tonight. Maybe this cunt's genuine. Maybe I should take the free beer and call it a victory.

  ‘Good fit,’ he says.

  ‘Fuck yeah. Thanks heaps, man. I appreciate it.’ Maybe he's actually got my back. He really is the kind of cunt you want on your side.

  He nods, serious-faced. ‘That's not a problem, Stan. Now you remember what I said. And if you breathe a word about the shit me an Elle talked about then you're fucking out of here, okay? And that includes to me, or Elle, or even Michael. Understood?’

  I nod. I'm glad to have something over him though. I picture myself taking over Michael's job and smile 'cause it's the first time in ages I've been able to think about the future without getting anxiety.

  ‘Good. I'll let Michael know about shifts for you next week. Enjoy the beers,’ he says.

  I start to thank him again, but he walks straight inside. I guess that means I pulled it off. I'm still employed. I'll tell Dad when I get home. That's the first thing Dad'll ask me. He'll go ‘How'd the job hunt go?’ I'll tell him I got myself a job at Bolton and Sons. Maybe I'll even save a couple of these beers so I can bring one home for him. Fuck, maybe I'll even drink a beer with the old cunt.

  I pick up my shit, leaving my oily shirt on the ground, and start walking towards the woods. A car beeps at me as I cross Fredericks and I flinch and hurry across the road. I start to feel like Chris sorta took the fight out of me before, brought me down a few pegs. Thoughts of picking fights or maybe getting down on a bit of shoplifting start to form in my head, but I let it go. I did alright. Free six-pack and a job. Whatever the case, I'm pretty positive 'cause I'm not thinking about suicide or cancer and I'm even giving some cunts the nod as I walk past them. In fact, I'm even starting to think that maybe human race isn't such a pack of assholes after all. Still, I'm looking forwards to getting away from the cunts and having a few drinks in the bush.

Robbie Marks

Anxiety and exhilaration grew inside me as we walked, twin emotions of unknown heritage vying for control; two sides of the same coin refusing to reconcile. I had lost awareness of my physical voice entirely; though I still spoke fervently into my Dictaphone, the content of my spiel had gradually drifted out of my conscious awareness, creating room for my more urgently relevant internal monologue. The physical voice wandered aimlessly through my unconscious, forming a barrier of concepts to protect my deeper introspection from outside influence, like a treacherous moat around a castle, leaving the captive king to ruminate in peace.

  Initially, I spoke aloud to keep Lucy from interrupting my stream of consciousness, a trail of insight evolving far too rapidly to be forced into words. However, as my introspective journey grew more involved, I began to see a darker, more ominous unconscious reason for my distraction: My thoughts were frightening; they were also too private and fresh to be spoken aloud - newly-spawned ideas and notions still needing cover and protection from the elements and their symbolism. Thoughts of cosmic uncertainty gave way to a more mundane and viscerally disturbing line of self-interrogation regarding the lives of myself and those around me, as well as our uncertain futures - subjects I had managed to hide from myself with endless contemplation of more eternal ideas such as the archetypes of consciousness and the universe at large. Long suppressed by constant psychedelic indulgence and esoteric studies, my ego had returned home early, an unwanted intruder into my private party. This time, it could not be placated with cosmic pretence. It wanted answers.

  The first issue it wanted to address was the notion of life without Collin's influence. In this form, it was easy to dismiss: He'll sleep it off, be back to normal in the morning; I'm no longer dependent on Collin for intellectual leadership; stepping out from Collin's shadow was to be the next natural step in my personal evolution; it is but another whim of The Great Void. But this was just the beginning of the introspective rabbit hole. Next came questions regarding Collin's mental state, namely: Has Collin lost his mind? That he was unwell could not be denied - I had come to terms with this already; but, as is often the case, this seemingly innocuous thought was a Trojan horse, a cancerous thought in possession of many tentacles, reaching out to more sinister and troubling ideas I would not have otherwise allowed into my conscious attention. Yes, Collin's mental state was troubling; I had already decided that I could not trust his words as faithfully as I once had, afraid of getting lost in the mounting l'appel du vide that seemed to engulf all who came too close. What brought about this anxiety was the question of when: Was this a process or an event? Still powerfully affected by the Mescaline, I took the opportunity to enter into an immersive recollection. I gestured to Lucy to have a seat with me in the shrubs, ostensibly to allow whatever I was talking about my full attention.

  ‘What's Chesed, Robbie?’ Lucy asked once we were seated.

  ‘It's, uh, like....’ I started, frustrated by the bulky inelegance of words in contrast to the rhythmic flow of my thoughts. ‘Chesed is like leadership,’ I said, feeling obliged to include Lucy in my ruminations. ‘It comes from a Hebrew word meaning, uh, the love of God, I think ... Jupiter - it corresponds to Jupiter. Or Zeus. That kind of energy. Creation, expansion.’

  ‘Is it a Chakrah?’

  ‘Nah it's a Sephirot - uh, from the Qabalah.... Hey, I'm gonna close my eyes and go inside for a bit, okay? I've got something I need to think through.’

  ‘Okay. Is it about Collin?’

  ‘... What?’

  ‘Is it about Collin, what you need to think about?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I dunno. It's what I was thinking about just now. And you keep talking about Chesed. It sounds like you mean Collin.’

  ‘Oh yeah ... well, not Collin as such but ... well, it's all interwoven, really. The whole tapestry. But, I mean, yeah, sure Collin comes into it, but like, so does, you know, pretty much everything.’

  ‘Don't get worried about Collin okay?’

  ‘I'm not. No I'm just gonna consider the, uh, Qabalah, and how it relates to, uh....’

  ‘Okay. You can go quiet and think now.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I lay back on the grass and closed my eyes, mentally backtracking past the eerily appropriate exchange with Lucy. I had lied to her: Collin at the nexus of my meditations. The closed-eye imagery was malleable, phenylethylamine-type visuals, which I, using the will of my returning ego, directed toward the memory I hoped to visit. I allowed the strobing vein-patterns to settle into a consistent rhythm before willing them to take on the form of classroom walls and background movement. The visuals settled obediently, accompanied by the garbled sound of static that gradually cleared into the excited chatter of children, as I mentally visited my nine-year-old self in Mr. Crowther's classroom. This was where I began pursuing Collin's friendship. What had started as a distant admiration of both him and Ned, a mixture of awe and envy at their rebellious spirits and advanced minds, bloomed slowly over the next six-or-seven years into a vague friendship that solidified when the three of us, under the guidance of Michael, started smoking weed together in high school. We were around fifteen then, and we felt as if we had uncovered some kind of great secret together, imbibing us with a certain awareness not shared by our peers. Oddly, it was Michael who told us it was all bullshit, and that we should rise against it; but it was Collin, in his characteristically subtle yet determined manner, who was leading the way. This influence could be traced all the way back to Mr. Crowther's class, when Collin found the teacher’s guidebook. For Collin, and the select few of us that understood the gravity of it, this changed everything: Collin, at the age of nine, found the teacher's guide.

  He invited several of us, myself and Ned included, down to the ‘The Wastelands’ that lunchtime; The Wastelands was his code name for a little hut he and Ned had made. This was the location of many strange rituals, few of which I managed to involve myself in. To get to The Wastelands, one had to enter the bush at the end of the field, which was already risking a detention, and travel all the way to the bottom, cross the swamp - accomplished by swinging from the vines that draped from the trees - and climb over the fence at the end. The explorer would then find himself in a particularly bushy corner of someone's farm; the house could only barely be seen in the distance, and there would occasionally be cows roaming the paddock. The Wastelands was a rudimentary dwelling made by leaning a piece of iron against a tree, and contained a small fire-pit and a chilly bin locked shut with two belts, usually stocked with fizzy drinks, sweets, and banned Mad magazines. Collin and Ned spread rumours of a boar roaming the bush, as well as a gun-wielding farmer patrolling his land, to further dissuade people from seeking The Wastelands. From my Mescaline-inspired vantage point, I saw this as the embryonic beginnings of Ned and Collin's private world, one which I had tried in vain to infiltrate ever since. I began to wonder if this was truly the beginning, as well as whether it truly ever ended. Even as a child, Collin seemed to simultaneously inhabit two worlds. Whenever I Collin and I played together, there was a sense we were all in Collin's world; as if we played a small part in the unfolding of a fantastical drama that continued long after we stopped playing, following Collin home and into his dreams. Collin claimed to be in communion with the ‘Elder Gods’, entities who resided in ‘Outworld’ and gave Collin orders to pass on to the rest of us. I later found out that these characters and worlds were lifted from the video game Mortal Kombat, but Collin's brilliance shone through nonetheless. He told us that we weren't allowed to sing in assembly, and that we weren't to use manners when talking to teachers, lest we lose ‘chances’ - some kind of ranking system used by the Elder Gods as they obsessed over the activities of nine-year-olds. He once caught me saying ‘please’ to a teacher, and I claimed to have said ‘blease’, desperate to appease Collin, and, in turn, the Elder Gods of his imagination....

  ‘Robbie.’

  I realised that I never stopped trying to appease Collin; his rebellion against teachers turned into a rebellion against society; the Outworld of his imagination became the subterranean realms of the unconscious we dug tirelessly toward during adolescence. This tendency toward ostranenie gradually developed anti-social undertones and became paranoia and eventually a form of psychosis, perhaps triggered by Ned's departure to the psyche ward in year eleven....

  ‘Hey Robbie.’

  Ned's descent into psychosis was a more abstract transition, him being even more deeply secretive than Collin. In fact, it had been Ned who first showed Collin to The Wastelands, as well as introducing him to Michael, and therefore weed and amphetamines, later on....

  ‘I think it's time to go, Robbie....’

  But attempting to understand Ned has a curious effect on one’s thought patterns; to consider his words and actions from a rational perspective scrambles the mind, as their sense of order works in an obtuse way, subject to a kind of logic that exists only in its own terms, lost in the maze of pataphysics and sausage dog tales. In order to understand Ned, you have to think like Ned; and to think like Ned is to reject the very notion of understanding….

  ‘Robbie.’

  This makes it impossible to place the events of his life into a timeline without simplifying them, turning them into something they’re not. By the time one makes any sense out of it, it has lost all meaning. One finds himself wondering what the ‘it’ in question even is, and all that is left is a loosely connected string of thoughts with no sense of direction, and no desire to reach any kind of conclusion. Because what is the ‘it’ that is being concluded? It’s a question that questions itself, a psychic Chinese finger trap made of the same thoughts that are struggling to escape it. The true question is: Is the surrender to the antipodes of the mind worthwhile? Is the rejection of order and logic worth anything more than the act itself?

  ‘Robbie, wake up.’

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘Hey, Lucy. When do you think Ned went insane? Do you think there was something that set it off? Or was it a more gradual thing, like Collin?’

  ‘That's not what you were supposed to be thinking about in there,’ Lucy said, almost annoyed.

  ‘I know.... It was a, uh, side tangent.’

  ‘Did you forget what you were trying to think about?’

  ‘Uh, yeah I guess so. I was thinking about the guidebook....’

  ‘The Qabalah one?’

  ‘No the ... Oh yeah. Yeah the Qabalah one,’ I lied.

  ‘Did you forget about Chesed?’

  ‘Er, no not really. I went inside it for a look.’

  ‘Oh, okay. Can we go now? I'm a bit cold. Let's get walking. I don't want to keep sitting down.’

  ‘Yeah okay. Good idea.’

  Lucy stood up and started walking. I gathered my bag and Dictaphone and followed.

  ‘Ned didn't go insane, Robbie. Ned's fine,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, you're right.’ The night was quiet and starry, the air cool and still. I said, ‘Guidebook,’ into my Dictaphone, to remind myself of the central point I had distracted myself from. I resolved to meditate more; I had failed to keep my mind on track, and once again blundered into thoughts of paranoia and insanity. I put my Dictaphone back into my bag and we walked silently. I would need one more stop before the Seed Freaks’ to resolve my meditation; but this time, I would keep focus. Guidebook. The beach, then Tracey, then Seed Freaks. Then some DMT.

Stan Richards

From the treetop and through my binoculars, I can see the sasquatches in the distance. They're standing in a circle around Tim, our unconscious fallen soldier, grunting to each other and prodding him with their feet.

  ‘I've spotted them,’ I call down to my comrades. The beasts acknowledge my voice and look around for a moment before turning their attention back to Tim. I have acted foolishly. This is no time to be rash. At times like this, one must be completely deliberate in all actions. One wrong move could prove fatal.

  I climb down the tree to my comrades waiting at our makeshift campsite. We've been awake for days, living only on carefully identified leaves and the occasional wild animal. The weary eyes look at me expectantly.

  ‘This is not a mission for the faint-hearted. We need stealth, wits, and most of all, nerves of steel,’ I say, unwilling to waste words as any energy expenditure must be rationed if we are to make it off the island alive.

  ‘But what chance do we have against these creatures? They have claws and teeth and they know this forest well. I say we sleep, and continue our pursuit in the morning.’

  ‘No. They'll be gone by morning. We need to do this now,’ I say. My comrades, fearless in their own world, have been reduced to cowards by hunger and misfortune. It's up to me to keep up the morale.

  ‘Well what's the plan then, Stan?’ Hunter, my unofficial second-in-command, manages, bringing a weak smile to the weary faces.

  ‘Look,’ I say, thinking quickly, ‘bamboo. We can make blow darts out of this. There's poison sumac just beyond the ridge.’

  ‘And I suppose you expect us to figure out how to make them?’ Joey says. He's been a thorn in my side for the entire expedition, and I've had to work non-stop to keep his cowardice from dampening everyone's spirits.

  ‘No, I've thought this through,’ I say, holding back the urge to snap at him. As much as his constant negativity has been putting our lives in jeopardy, I must fight to remain upbeat. The harsh truth is that Joey won't survive another day out here - his constitution is too weak. And as much as he's been bringing us all down, I know it'll destroy me when he finally goes, and what matters now is that I don't spend my last moments with him fighting.

  ‘Let's just go,’ he says. ‘We won't last another day out here, and if we leave him then at least maybe we could survive.’

  I ignore him - we've already lost one person out here, Tim's brother, and it is our duty to make sure we don't lose another. We owe it to their father, who took us all in when no one else would.

  ‘I've already figured this out,’ I say. ‘We'll boil the sumac in that pot-’

  ‘But that's our last pot! We won't be able use it to eat if you do that.’

  ‘Doesn't matter. We retrieve Tim tonight, then we're out of here by morning. We just need to follow the compass north. It will be a long trek - a day, maybe more - but we can survive on vegetation for that time.’

  ‘But what if you fail? I say we start heading back now, get help for Tim once we get back to the township. It's our only hope.’

  ‘No. It might be days before help makes it to Tim. He'll be sasquatch shit by then.’

  My comrades fall into silent agreement, so I continue.

  ‘Okay, so we boil the sumac down. Erin, you get started on that now. We'll use the needles from the hedgehogs we ate for dinner as darts. Just soak them in the concoction. I'll need as many as we can get, so start now.’

  ‘But think of how close you'll have to get to them! You'll be dead after one shot!’

  ‘Well that's where I need help. Joey: I know you don't agree with my plan, but I need you here.’

  ‘Oh here we go-’

  ‘Shut up. Remember the day before we got lost, when you won that throwing contest on the beach? Well now we need your skills. I've spotted monkeys sleeping in the trees just above the sasquatches. I need you to climb this tree and watch me through the binoculars. When I give you the signal, I need you to throw a barrage of rocks into the trees. That will wake up the monkeys. If the chaos caused is sufficient, I'll be able to-’

  A distant rustle of leaves.

  What the fuck?

  Oh fuck there's actually someone there.

  I put my fantasy on hold and squint into the darkness. Silhouetted against the street lights, right where I imagined the sasquatches, is a lanky figure struggling through the shrubs. I'm wondering what the fuck kind of creep is wandering around the bush on his own at night, and all I can think of is Kit, Rory's Dad. The proportions are about right.

  With my beer in one hand and skateboard in the other, I creep slowly to get a closer look. The figure is stumbling drunkenly, stopping every few steps. I can't see well enough to make out details. I walk as silently as I can, slowly closing the distance. He seems maybe slightly aware of my noise, but it's almost as if it's reacting to things I can't see or hear.

  Once I'm a few metres away, I squat down and watch. He mumbles something incoherent and stands completely still, looking in the opposite direction. I finish my beer silently and throw the empty bottle just in front of him. At first it seems like he didn't notice, but after a few seconds he continues walking, as if I'd snapped him out of a trance. I follow him till he gets knocked off his feet brushing past a tree. The shrubs seem to catch him as he falls, producing a soft rustle like he'd been placed down gently. He starts laughing and I recognise the voice straight away.

  ‘Ned!’ I call. No response.

  I jog over to him. It's too dark to see him down in the shadows, but his limbs are rustling around in the plants, and he's uttering shit that doesn't sound human. Tripping balls, as fuckin' usual. Crazy fuck... I know all those dudes get themselves in some fucked up states, but this cunt just doesn't know when to say when.

  ‘Ned, it's Stan. You okay?’ He doesn't respond. I shine my phone light on him. He's got no shirt on and his limbs are waving around clumsily, like he's trying to rearrange some small objects at eye-level. His body is even more skeletal than I remember, like some anorexia-level shit. His skin looks paper-thin, a weightless veil resting on top of a jagged, angular ribcage and visibly thumping heart.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ I ask, moving the light from his freakish body up to his face, looking for some kind of recognition. His eyes are open in a stoned squint, but they don't react even when I shine the light right into them. His pupils have expanded to the point that all I can see in the slits is reflected light. A fresh scar on his cheek seeps grimy blood like a single tear down past the side of his mouth. There's like a vague smile, but it's all slack and fucked up.

  ‘You want a beer?’ I ask, testing how out of it he really is. His face doesn't respond at all, but one of his hands pauses in midair expectantly. I pull my bag around to my front and get him a beer. As soon as the glass touches his hand, the fucker bats it away in an abrupt motion. I jump back in shock as he scrambles onto all fours and bounds away with a wounded howl, graceful and sleek like an animal, till he gallops face first into something with a dull crack.

  He melts limp into the darkness and I gather my shit in my arms and rush over. Just as I almost catch up to him, he gets back on his feet and crawls over a fallen log. He's moving quick now, out towards the city. I zip my bag up and follow him 'cause the fucker won't survive like this if he gets to the road.

Benji Miller

The cold night air was a welcome change from the microwave-like atmosphere of Mind Garden; incense and weak ethnic drums suffocating our inner animals as we chose our fuel for the night. I decided on a pack of Mad Mikes - BZP for the punk intensity, seasoned with just enough TFMPP to make things interesting - while Lance grabbed a pack of Torpedoes for himself, and some cheap Hyperdrives for Jordan, both straight BZP. We both popped our pills immediately, having lost patience with the prospect of dexies, looking for something more than the flimsy, caffeine-like high of pre-workout.

  Out on the street, we strode along with heightened senses and steel readiness. Lance had started motor-mouthing about fucking up that old hippy from Mind Garden and other potential targets, but I walked in silence, aware of Lance but focused on the rope-like tightness of my muscles and the endless reserves of potential energy standing by like Golems, awaiting the inevitable shock of sentience that was to come.

  ‘But bro, fuck, we should fully just roll that fucker for his dexies,’ Lance said, his vigour undisciplined and erratic. ‘Skinny little maggot goes down in one punch, every time. Why the fuck are we paying him for those shits? His safety should be enough. Let's pay him a visit, show him where he stands. Show him what happens when he holds out on us.’ BZP brings out the weakness in Lance; this weakness being, perversely, his unbridled potency, and the attendant unwillingness to compromise.

  ‘Bitch, you gotta think more long term. If it's immunity we offer in exchange for dexies, then bashing him will get us nowhere. Let's just keep him around. He's useful.’

  ‘He's taking the piss though; expects us to pay him and not fuck him up? Bro. You know what that's saying about us? That's saying it's us who answer to him. That's just not fuckin' right, bro. Not fucking right.’

  I remained in calm silence as his excess grit found something else to fixate on. I once looked up to Lance as an older brother; modelled my own identity around his explosive presence, his fearless dominance. But, over time, I reached the limitations of his unrestrained, volatile approach, and moved past them into something greater. I now felt as if it was I who was the older brother, composed and world-wary, using my excess of self-discipline to channel his energies to constructive ends, as a teacher would student.

  ‘Cunt's on the List, anyway,’ he said, moving his monologue to the topic of his ‘List’, as he always did eventually. I understood the appeal of this fantasy; Michael had fucked us around consistently and remorselessly ever since we started doing business. Of course, with Mind Garden around, this presented no serious issue; when the dosage, strength, and duration of effects were taken into account, BZP pills were of greater value than dexies. The real issue lay in Michael's insolence, his insulting disregard for the blindingly obvious hierarchy. Both Jordan and Lance had gone head to head with him in a one-outs - a pleasure I was yet to enjoy - easily reducing him to an impotent heap, whimpering into the concrete on one occasion, completely unconscious the other. It was beginning to seem as if he'd forgotten this fact, as he had become openly and unapologetically belligerent toward us - at times even hostile. But such is the nature of power dynamics: the complexities of the hierarchy that take more than brute force to navigate. It may be power and ruthlessness that propels a creature to the top of the pecking order, but to maintain this position takes cunning.

  ‘The time will come,’ I said, bringing about a much needed silence.

  A few blocks from Jordan's, we fell into line behind an older guy, early twenties, with a slightly unsteady gait that signified either physical or mental weakness. We hunted him from streetlight to streetlight, slowly closing the gap between him and us with every furtive glance over his shoulder. Foolishly, he took a turn down the barely-lit one-way behind the meatworks, speeding up his walk as one final glance confirmed we were still following. We moved with silent speed until we caught up and fell into step on either side of him. His walk became uneasy and indecisive, afraid to acknowledge us openly, but even more frightened to ignore the obvious.

  ‘Hey mate. Can I ask you a question?’ I said.

  Gripped with fear of the inevitable, he stopped walking and looked up from his feet from me to Lance as we both turned in on him.

  ‘I... I don't want any trouble here guys. I'm just heading home okay?’ he said, the weak effort to sound assertive shaking his thin, gutless voice.

  ‘Hey, there's no trouble,’ I put my hand on his shoulder and flashed him a clenched smile. ‘I just wanted to ask you a question.’

  ‘... What?’ he cleared his throat, eyes wide with fear, darting from me to Lance; Lance moved around him casually, looking around at the surrounding buildings with an air of mild appreciation.

  ‘Do you think my boyfriend's hot?’ I asked, nodding to Lance, tightening my grip on his shoulder almost imperceptibly. Lance shook his head at me, but fell into character when our victim's stare flicked from me to him.

  ‘Um... I, um...’ he looked from Lance to the ground, then back to me, his mind now paralysed with fear, capable of no more than repeating cycles.

  ‘Him, just over there,’ I nodded once again to Lance, who stared at our victim with an innocent shrug.

  ‘Um, I'm not gay so, uh...’

  ‘And you're saying I am?’ My grip tensed, clarifying our intentions.

  ‘What? I'm not saying anything dude, I'm just trying to-’

  ‘You think that 'cause I like a cock up my arse every once in a while it makes me gay?’

  ‘No, please, just let me go home. Please I've done nothing-’

  ‘You think that just 'cause I suck my brother's dick every morning that makes me a faggot? Huh? Can I not even share a steamy shower with my own brother without you getting-’

  ‘Oh fuck this shit,’ Lance cried, and knocked the victim to the ground with a swinging right-hander straight to the temple. Our victim crumbled with no more than a defeated groan, curling up into the foetal position, the fear in his face now a perverted relief, resigned to his fate as the two of us unleashed our built-up potency. I clamped his head under my boot with gradually building pressure, as Lance threw a volley of kicks into his chest and stomach, axe-kicking his kidneys to open him up whenever he curled in too tightly, his body pivoting around his head with each blow. I released his head from under my foot and signalled to Lance to back off; then wound my foot back, held the position until his eyes started to flicker open, and released the full force into his mouth, creating a satisfying scatter of blood and teeth as he rolled over into a defeated curl, sobbing pathetically with his hands against his bleeding face.

  ‘God damn faggot,’ Lance said, before booting the back of his head into the puddle of blood and skull. ‘And you,’ he nodded at me, ‘always with the gay shit.’

  ‘You love it, bitch,’ I said, a covert maintenance of the hierarchy. ‘Let's go.’ 

  Glowing with victory, we walked silently towards Jordan's, almost ready to settle in for some casual sparring, when Lance's hand on my shoulder suddenly halted me.

  ‘Bro,’ he nodded to a swaying silhouette emerging from the trees into the light.

  ‘Fuck it, let's just grab Jordan and we can go out hunting after.’

  ‘Nah bro, look.’

  Curious, I focused my eyes on the figure several streetlights down, which was now standing still with an unusual lean. It was a lanky, anorexic long-hair with no shirt or shoes. It took me a moment, but when it flashed to me, I grinned at Lance and we walked silently towards it.

  ‘Bitch, this'll make a good present for Jordan,’ I said; Lance nodded in agreement. It was Ned, the most wasted of all the wasters. Tonight, we were to celebrate Jordan's eighteenth birthday by getting wired and having some one-outs with the gloves, before heading into town to hunt. We had planned to get Jordan a tray of dexies as a gift, but settled on pills after losing patience with Michael. This, however, would be a superior gift; Jordan, like Lance, had a List of his own, one which had been headed by Ned for some time now. This was a real freak we were dealing with here; a physically weak specimen, utterly undisciplined, and, above all, sneaky and underhanded in combat and nature, the hallmarks of a kinky drug-user... To even think to tickle a man while he's winded is unforgivable; when it's one of us you're tickling, it's a death sentence. It was time to settle the score.

  The clown was so drugged-out that he didn't even notice us as we confronted him. His hair hung in front of his face and he stood as if leaning on an invisible wall, mumbling tripped-out bullshit to himself. I looked at Lance, who shrugged before knocking him into a flaccid heap on the ground in one punch.

  Branches crackled in the bush to the left, bringing us both to attention for a moment. The air was silent, so I said, ‘Let's save him for Jordan,’ bringing us back to the present. We bent down to pick him up, but a sudden rustle of leaves and the thump of blunt force impact knocked Lance onto the ground next to Ned, clutching his head. Lightning fast, I spun around and threw a blind punch in the direction of the ambush, but my fist was met with the sandpaper swipe of a skateboard. Alert and ready, I followed through with a weak left-handed punch that landed square in my opponent's jaw, followed by a right-handed uppercut and a swinging left-hander. With my rhythm in place and my opponent stunned, I wound back for the finishing headbutt to the jaw, but a rippling thud to the side of my head knocked me off balance with the taste of blood. Drunk on rage and adrenaline, I lunged at my attacker, but somehow ended up with a headbutt to my own nose, knocking me down. Unfazed, I tried to push myself up, but the splitting pain of a board to the back of the head sent me face first to the concrete. I managed to right myself enough to witness Lance try to do the same, only to get knocked back down with another murderous hack to the back of the head. Unusual fear turned my anger into bloodlust, and I sprung to my feet, dizzy but focused, and managed to catch the skateboard mid-swing. I used it to pull my assailant toward me for the finishing headbutt, but the sound of glass shattering turned into searing pain on the side of my head that dribbled warm down my face as I lost grip of the skateboard in weakness and crumbled onto the mess of glass shards on the concrete. My body trembled uncontrollably as I tried to push myself up, and the skateboard slammed down on the back of my already throbbing head, blurring my vision and numbing my mind to a stupor.

  Through a moist blur, I saw the unmoving shape of Lance on the ground. Out of the corner of my eye, Ned's unconscious legs lifted slightly and his feet dragged along the concrete, out of my vision. I accepted defeat and managed to hoist myself up into a slump against a rubbish bin, dazed but thinking in terms of recovery as my mind started to clear. Stan, the fucker. Perhaps he was a match for us after all. Now, I could only wait to regain my senses, then revenge would be mine.

Lucy Winters

Upon the throbbing beat of the Earth flames lick the darkness of the air, cracking and snapping, forging myths and fables within the dancing orchestra of Nature, impressionistic characters and scenarios flowing into and out of existence, glowing in my fingertips. The night wind strums uplifting soundscapes through the branches and leaves, prancing along the rumbling mass of ocean upon sand, waves through night . . . The occasional birdsong or distant shuffle of life in the seaside shrubbery floats atop the shifting terrain of melody, backing up Robbie's narrative as he channels the vibrations of his backup band into words, narrating the indescribable in human tongue . . . Deciphering the riffs of the treetop guitar strings, relating the rolling waves to the human experience . . .

  ‘The curious question is of the probability enhancing properties of thoughts. That being, that by simply thinking something, you increase its chances of occurring. Can this be attributed to a kind of subconscious self priming or self hypnosis, whereby one orchestrates a situation where their future self will believe the occurrence to be a manifestation of a past thought? This being the case, one might selectively reflect upon the past, salvaging a single relevant thought from the multidimensional mass of mental chatter in an attempt to invite some magic into the grey of the world . . .’ His voice is calm and flowing, riding the slow rolling motions of the water instead of the usual erratic geometry of his shivering mind, ‘Or perhaps even a prediction of such an event, a divination rather than an enchantment, a lower form of magic . . . But there is a third possibility, at odds with the secular sensibilities of modern humans. An ode to the times of shamans and magic. This is the notion that the very thought of an occurrence can serve as the embryonic seed of its existence . . .’

  I'm racking up small lines of ketamine for Robbie and me, a slow motion dance to the grand orchestra happening around us. I'm always the one dancing to the music instead of playing an instrument, but I contribute behind the scenes, make sure the whole terrarium is clean and running nice . . . two lines ready for us on the back of the Alan Watts book, The Way of Zen. Robbie was supposed to be reading it on this trip. He read it a few months ago and said he was going to read it between every other book. To cleanse his palette, he said. But he’s still only read it once. He just can’t resist the dark allure of Peter Carroll and Robert Anton Wilson . . . I lick up my line because I don't want to put anything up my nose, then put it on the sand because Robbie has to wait until he's finished his projection before he can have his . . .

  ‘. . . This can all be further complicated by considering the notion that by merely thinking about an occurrence, one may increase the chance of it occurring for others via some kind of transhuman force or energy . . . or perhaps simply by opening oneself up to certain phenomena and thereby subtly altering one's patterns in thought speech and action, inviting such influences into one's life, and, in turn, sparking imitation by others who would, in doing so, invite such influence into their own lives . . . Perhaps within this lies the art of charisma and the formation of cults. Either way, by merely thinking of this, one or more of these possibilities shall become more true, depending how true they already are individually and presently. . .’

  The wind calms and the fire dances silently to its own energy. I turn off the tape recorder, which is sitting listening next to The Way of Zen between Robbie and me. I start ripping up the weed and passionflower for a double skinner, enjoying the instrumental as Robbie stares into the fire invoking his paradoxes.

  I wait until his amber flickering face softens into a satisfied smile turned inwards, then hand him the ketamine book. He sniffs it up without a hooter, declares his love for something or someone, then lies back on the sandy grass. The roar of the tide picks up again and I carefully place the unrolled joint on a piece of driftwood next to me to go into Robbie's bag. I get out the bag of DMT and sprinkle a thick layer onto the weed and passionflower, hoping it's the right powder because I'm not quite ready to decompress yet.

The fire has dwindled to a slowly breathing patch of embers and the air is still and black. Robbie is crouched over the remains of the fire, lighting up the joint. I'm still not completely sure what ketamine does, but Robbie's flared up inside, overflowing with abandon and wild dancing hair. He gets the joint going and snuggles into the flaxes with me to smoke.

  ‘Owning land though . . . what a joke,’ he says, puffing on the joint. I'm not sure what kind of tangent he's on now. I think he's moved past aliens and psychic activity, but I'm not sure how he got onto owning land. The smoke smells like pungent potpourri with some sinister nuclear tones, reminds me of smoking weed after snorting party pills. The smell of adolescence.

  ‘Well it's not a very funny joke,’ I say. He passes me the joint and I take a nice deep puff. His hand is resting on my knee, idly tracing trails of pinpricks on my skin, the electricity where the land meets the sky . . .

  ‘It's not the kind of joke you laugh out loud at. It's a gallows joke . . . humour a few shades darker than black. Here, pass it over. We need to get this into us while we still can.’

  I puff again and pass it over to him, breathing out the song that I rolled it to . . . Glowing ferns uncoil from the shadows of the hills and the shimmering void of the ocean, reaching through and around the washes of colour . . . the deep breathing red of the embers . . . the pale liquid white of the moon, resting weightless and cool around us, like the thin layer of snow that glows on mountains on clear summer nights . . .

  ‘You know, people have started buying the space above buildings,’ his voice is oceanic and drifting, without end or beginning, just shimmers and disperses into the ethereal images he creates from the curling shadows . . . beams of white light projecting up into the sky from the ground like static searchlights, searching the skies for ways to expand, spread . . .

  He passes me the joint and I inhale deep into myself, further into the whiteness . . . riding the searchlights up to the sky like a spectral elevator . . . Riding Robbie's words higher . . . ‘This is just the start though. Soon they'll be buying escape points in the ozone layer to run away from the planet they fucked up . . .’ all the way up to the stratosphere, floating empty, looking down at the tiny cities like circuit boards spreading over the green and into the blue . . . acrobatic clouds thrashing gracefully, slowing into sick heavy grey, a single tear . . . ‘'Cause planet Earth by then is just a huge metal ball. A thin layer of earth and water over top of the mantle, then a huge layer of machinery over top of that, grinding gears and cogs and great lumbering machines . . . systematically mining the organic layer beneath it for resources . . .’ the human race knowing only the mechanical layer . . . the dirt and the trees and the water none of our business anymore . . . only of concern to scientists . . . ‘Property of the government . . .’ but the planet still alive, just like a cyborg now . . . tossing and turning beneath the layer of grim metal . . . volcanoes and earthquakes protesting beneath the human race . . . ‘Feeding the machine, a machine powered by the illness of the Earth . . . You done with that?’

  Robbie lifts the joint from my fingers and shrinks away with the rest of the great metal ball, spinning away from me . . . a tiny grey spaceship . . . connecting to all the other metal balls out there light years away with invisible tendrils of radio waves . . . unknowingly working together to colonise the suns . . .

  ‘But could that really be it? The mystical fifth element of malkuth, the ether, the path to yesod . . . no more than the ravaging of the biological planet, the harnessing of the four elements for their own gain . . . the inevitable destruction of brilliance . . . Here, you take it,’ I can't, I'm out here now . . . ‘That's the thing though . . . a more advanced species wouldn't be at peace with the universe. We're the most advanced species on this planet and we're the most vile and destructive of them all, murdering the planet we live on in the name of progress . . .’ A living planet would not consent to autopsy . . . ‘Killing the very thing that gives us life, just to own its corpse . . . Mining its dead flesh . . .’

  ‘Selling space to each other . . .’

  ‘Yeah. There's this artist though. Yves Klein.’

  ‘The scar on your arm from when you burnt your wings on the sun . . .’

  ‘Yeah. Well, anyway, Yves Klein . . . He was selling the sky, like in the form of art. He said he meditated into the sky one day, just like blasted up there and left his signature on it. Apparently he was with some friends and they divided the sky and the land and the sea between them . . .’

  ‘Ned can have the sea . . . I think Collin wants the sun . . .’

  ‘Yeah. So this guy, Yves Klein, he started selling these sky blue canvases. Just pure blue, nothing on them. Just painted them blue and sold them. Sold everyone bits of the sky. It was a symbol, like money or like the deed to a house or something. But he was selling them bits of the sky.’

  ‘The sky . . .’

  ‘Yeah . . . But so he did this martial art earlier on. It was to do with using the currents of the air, like harnessing it, like Chi kinda. I guess. But he mastered that, like got to black belt or whatever, then claimed the sky as his own. The source of the air he harnessed through his martial art . . . I mean, what gives him any less right to the sky than the people who are buying bits of it off the government for their buildings? What gives the government the right to the sky? Did they astral project into the sky to claim it? Did they pursue mastery over the air as an element? Who owns the sea? Who really owns the land? Is it all governed by marks on sheets of paper? Or is there something real?’

  ‘. . .’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘. . . The sky . . .’

  ‘Yeah. The sky.’

  ‘Should we go grab space then? Before someone else gets it.’

  ‘Yeah. Wanna roll up another one? That ketamine's kicking my ass. More DMT and less bud this time, I think.’

  ‘You wanna go again?’

  ‘Yeah, but this time we know what we're doing.’

Tracey Colombera

‘I'm...Peter. Peter. Yeah...Peter’ he says finally. He's still standing about two metres away from me. He looks like he's about to do something. He always looks like he's about to do something.

  ‘I'm Tracey.’

  ‘Hi Tracey.’

  ‘Hi Peter.’

  He stands very still when he talks. Just like Collin.

  ‘Do you...live here, Tracey?’ he says.

  ‘No. Do you?’

  ‘Well...yes. Yes, I suppose I do.’

  ‘Then you should know that I don't live here.’

  ‘Yes, yes I should know that. I should...I'm sorry.’

  ‘You don't need to apologise to me.’

  ‘I know. I'm very, very sorry...’

  ‘Do you need someone to accept your apology?’

  ‘So very sorry...’

  ‘Instead of apologising, you could try saying thanks. That way all the other person has to say is you're welcome. It's better than accepting an apology.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You're welcome.’

  He holds my eye contact until I get bored and carry on looking through the mess for some ketamine. Eventually he sits down in the red chair. He lowers himself onto it like it's a hot bath.

  ‘You'll have to excuse my madness. I've been decohering downstairs for a while now’ he says to the floor.

  ‘That's okay. I think I've been decohering a bit too.’

  ‘I don't doubt that at all.’

  The table is covered in weird drawings and diagrams. They look like Da Vinci sketches but with scruffy handwriting. There's a few white pills in a baggie. They aren't dexies. I don't think they're ketamine either. I don't think ketamine comes in pills.

  ‘What does decohering mean?’ I ask.

  ‘...I suppose what I should have said is thank you for tolerating my madness.’

  ‘You're welcome.’

  There's a stain of white powder on the coffee table so I start gathering it into a line with one of the cards lying there.

  ‘Are you a friend of Collin's?’ he asks. He still seems really small, even though he's closer to me now. He's a very small man.

  ‘Kind of. A friend of a friend I suppose.’

  ‘I don't think Collin's here. I came up because I thought the house was finally empty.’

  ‘I'm actually looking for Robbie.’

  ‘You're very quiet. I couldn't even hear your footsteps.’

  ‘That's because I contracted.’

  ‘Contracted?’ He looks up at me then leans to his side, resting his head on two fingers and a thumb.

  ‘Yeah. I contracted all the way here because I didn't want to be seen. I guess I've expanded now’ I say.

  ‘Have you been talking to...’

  ‘Kit? Yeah. But that was a while ago. Do you think this is ketamine here?’

  ‘Ketamine? As in the tranquilliser?’

  ‘Yeah. I'll let you know.’ I tear a small sheet off of one of Michael's drawings and roll it into a hooter and snort my line. It doesn't really hurt going up like ketamine did.

  ‘What is it you want ketamine for?’

  ‘The feeling, mostly.’

  ‘The feeling?’

  ‘Yeah. And the powers.’

  ‘Powers?’

  ‘It lets me expand and contract at will.’

  ‘Did Kit introduce you to ketamine?’

  ‘No. Actually his son did. He got it from Robbie, though. Do you know Robbie?’

  ‘Which son is this?’

  ‘Rory. Do you know Robbie?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of...’

  ‘Robbie Marks.’

  ‘It rings a bell. Is he one of the people who's been living here?’

  ‘Maybe. He's here a lot. Not today, though. Unfortunately.’

  Peter's frowning like he's doing maths. He tries to sit back in the chair, but then flinches as if he's sat on a pinecone and shuffles forwards again. He looks back to me. His eyes fizz like blue berocca.

  ‘Tell me, Tracey...How is old Kit doing? Is he okay?’

  ‘He's drunk every time I see him. He talks about interesting stuff but always just ends up contracting into nothing.’

  ‘I can hear the Kit in you when you talk...’

  ‘He tried to get into me but I didn't let him.’

  ‘Good move.’ He smiles for the first time. It fades back into his discomfort so quickly that I might have imagined it.

  ‘I let him have a look around, that way he does. I wouldn't know how to stop him, anyway. I didn't let him fuck me though.’

  ‘It's troubling what he's into...’ He looks back to the floor.

  ‘When you said you were decohering before, did you mean you were contracting?’

  ‘Not exactly...’

  ‘I feel like decohering either means expanding or contracting, but I'm not sure which one. You seem like you've contracted.’

  ‘Your three dimensional physics are laughable.’

  ‘I can't imagine you laughing.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘But I'll give you a hand job if you explain what decohering is.’

  Peter laughs without smiling or looking up from the floor. ‘I can see the Kit in you alright’ he says.

  ‘He seemed so desperate. I almost gave him head 'cause I felt bad for him.’

  ‘I think that would decohere the old fool once and for all.’

  ‘I think it would make him expand for a while and then contract. That's how it usually goes.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that's true.’

  ‘But you know I wasn't really gonna give you a hand job.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I just wanted to make you laugh.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Robbie and Collin call it fourth dimensioning.’

  ‘What?’ He looks back at me in an abrupt motion, like how Collin does.

  ‘Expanding and contracting at the same time. That's what decohering is, right?’

  ‘Fourth dimensioning?’

  ‘Yeah, I think it's stupid too.’

  He seems amused for a moment, then concerned.

  ‘Are you Collin's Dad?’ I ask.

  ‘...By some stretch of the definition, yes.’

  ‘Was I right before, when I said that decohering is like expanding and contracting at the same time?’

  ‘In a sense, perhaps...’

  ‘How would you explain it better?’

  ‘I think you're better off not knowing, to be honest.’

  ‘But I'm curious now.’

  ‘I cannot explain this to you without compromising my moral standards.’

  ‘Your moral standards?’

  ‘Yes. I feel some sense of pride in knowing at least some part of me hasn't decohered completely.’

  ‘You're a tease.’

  ‘That's not my intention.’

  ‘I want to know how you think you can have moral standards when you're a predator.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A predator. I can tell because you can see me all the time, even when I've contracted. Overactive peripherals, like Kit.’

  ‘You'd be wise not to listen to that boy either.’

  ‘Do you think he could explain decoherence to me?’

  ‘I think he would do so willingly, but you'd only end up more ignorant than you started out.’

  ‘Kit's a polite pervert. He always asks permission before he touches.’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘He's less of a predator than most of my friends, really.’

  ‘You should be wary of Kit though, Tracey.’

  ‘Should I be wary of you?’

  ‘No. I can see too much.’

  ‘Are you a pervert?’

  He says nothing. I want to keep talking.

  ‘I think that was dexies, not ketamine’ I say.

  ‘I suppose I am a pervert, really...’

  ‘Can you see into the invisible.’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  ‘Can you see all the way into the invisible?’

  ‘There is no all the way.’

  ‘Can you see further than Kit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does that make you more of a pervert than Kit?’

  He thinks about this for a long time. My leg starts shaking from the placebo. I lift up the couch cushion next to me trying to find ketamine and he finally answers. ‘Yes. I suppose it does, really. I'm a pervert of the highest order, a voyeur of the most private affairs of all. Perverted in ways most could never even comprehend...’

  ‘Are you a paedophile?’

  ‘In some deranged spatial sense, perhaps.’

  ‘Then why should I be wary of Kit and not you?’

  ‘If you were to divide yourself seven billion billion billion times, you might be in danger.’

  ‘Would you say I'd decohered if I divided myself seven billion billion times?’

  ‘Actually, it would be me who is in danger.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I'm always in danger. The invisible doesn't take kindly to being made visible...’

  ‘When you talk about invisible, do you really mean microscopic? Or are you talking about invisible like when someone contracts?’

  He says nothing. Seems to age significantly.

  ‘Or are those both the same thing?’

  ‘Tracey, are you the same age as Collin?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then there may be some Kit in you after all’ he says.

  ‘Are you saying Kit might be my Father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish Kit was my Father.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, you might be in luck.’

  ‘I don't think so, unfortunately. You're thinking of Rory.’

  ‘Rory?’

  ‘Yeah. Kit's son.’

  ‘When you say he's Kit's son, do you mean he was raised by Kit?’

  ‘Well, from what I heard he provided the sperm and not much else.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I think that's everyone in town all up to date on that now.’

  ‘Does kit have much to do with...er...’

  ‘Rory?’

  ‘Yeah. Rory.’

  ‘A little. He turns up sometimes when Rory's Mum is out.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘He just turns up and gets decoherent.’

  Peter laughs. I think. It could have been a cough.

  ‘Rory doesn't like him at all, but I think he's funny’ I say.

  ‘Yes, so do I. So is Rory the same age as you and Collin?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And what is he like?’

  ‘He's a fuckwit.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you mean that in a schizophrenic, eccentric way?’

  ‘Nah he's just real cocky.’

  ‘How strange.’

  ‘Yeah. I don't know how a stand up guy like Kit ended up with a fuckwit like Rory.’

  ‘Does he have any brothers or sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Step brothers or step sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well that's just not true.’ He smiles his trademark split second smile. At least I think he did.

  ‘Are you trying to say that Kit supplied the sperm and fucked off on more than one occasion?’

  ‘Yes. Are there any Rory lookalikes around? Or perhaps other youngsters who resemble Kit in some way?’

  ‘Just one that I can think of. But what I'm wondering is why you thought it was funny when I compared decohering to expanding and contracting at the same time.’

  ‘Who is the Rory lookalike?’ He's looking into my eyes like Collin again now. He seems so much younger when he's captivated.

  ‘Ketamine sort of makes you feel like you're expanding and contracting at the same time. I feel like you thought it was funny because it was so true.’

  ‘I honestly think you'd be better off sticking with fourth dimensioning. I wish I had.’

  ‘Well if decohering is expanding and contracting, then what's the opposite of that?’

  ‘Never mind that, I beg of you. But I'm interested...Who's this Rory lookalike?’

  ‘This is valuable intellectual property.’

  ‘I see. Well, if you tell me this, I'll tell you the opposite of decohering, provided there's no further questions on the matter.’

  ‘Okay. You go first though.’

  ‘...Collapsing.’

  ‘Collapsing?’

  ‘No further questions. So who's the Rory lookalike?’

  ‘Well I always thought him and my friend Damon looked like twins. They both have big, dark eyes and olden day faces. Like Kit, I guess.’

  ‘What's Damon like?’

  ‘He's like Rory but dumber.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry to disappoint you.’

  ‘Could you phrase that better?’

  ‘Thank you for being so understanding about my lack of insight into the situation.’

  ‘A few kinks to work out in your system then?’

  ‘Yeah. Yours too, though.’

  ‘Yes. Now when you say Damon's dumb...Is this in any schizophrenic type way?’

  ‘Nah not really. He loses his train of thought a lot though.’

  ‘So is he a little spaced out then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Any mentions of spirit sightings or strange dreams?’

  ‘He had a wet dream once when he stayed over with me.’

  ‘How strange.’

  ‘But no one's completely sure who his Dad is. So it would make sense if it was Kit. If that's what you're driving at.’

  Peter perks up in an intangible way. ‘He doesn't know his Dad?’

  ‘Not really. He lives with like seven step brothers and sisters. I think some of them are like cousins and stuff. Two of them look like Islanders. There's a few Dads around, but they're all white as far as I know.’

  ‘So it's a bit of an orphanage then is it?’

  ‘Not really. Maybe. They all go by the last name Brennan. Keeps it simple, I guess.’

  ‘Any-’

  ‘Nah none of them look like Damon.’

  ‘So just Damon and Rory then?’

  ‘Don't ask me.’

  ‘Do those two share any kind of interest in the esoteric side of things?’

  ‘No, not really. They smoke lots of weed but that's about it.’

  ‘Sounds like Kit failed.’

  ‘That seems to be the consensus.’

  ‘Although, from this vantage point, it could well be said that his failure was a true success.’

  ‘When you saying collapsing is the opposite of decohering, does that make decohering a way of ordering things?’

  ‘Far from it.’

  ‘I understand what it means for something to collapse.’

  ‘You clearly don't.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We've been through this. No further questions.’

  ‘You're a tease.’

  He looks back at the floor for a while. I've given up looking for ketamine. I'm not sure what I'm still doing here. I'm curious about what he means by decohering.

  ‘Tell me, Tracey’ he says, still looking at the floor. ‘What are Collin and Hayden like? I'm ashamed to say I haven't been much of a father to them since they were small.’

  ‘So you provided the sperm and fucked off too, huh?’

  ‘Well...Yes. I suppose.’

  ‘Well Collin's wasted all the time and he's everybody's best friend. Always did well at school though. So you can give yourself a pat on the back for that, I suppose.’

  ‘Makes sense. And Hayden?’

  ‘I haven't seen Hayden in months. He used to sell us weed but that's all I know.’

  ‘Are you around here much?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Do you know...who's living here?’

  ‘I can't really say for sure.’

  'Collin and Hayden?’

  ‘This intellectual property's gonna cost you.’

  ‘Ah yes. Of course.’

  ‘Tell me more about collapsing and decohering. You can speak in riddles if it makes you feel better.’

  ‘Okay. Well...Do you see my reflection in the door?’ He nods towards the sliding door that leads to the backyard.

  ‘Only faintly’ I say.

  ‘And where abouts on the door do you see it?’

  ‘At the end the handle is on. I can only see half of it, the other half disappears onto the wall.’

  ‘Right. And you understand that from where I am my reflection is situated differently on the glass.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So can my reflection be truly said to exist at any point on the glass?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘Well actually it could, if you say that the reflection you're seeing is a different one than the one I'm seeing.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘So was there a reflection before, when neither of us were looking?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps there existed infinite reflections of me in the glass, waiting to be observed from the specific angle that would allow them to exist.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He looks at me as if he's done. But he hasn't really said much.

  ‘You wanna wrap that up?’

  ‘You permitted me to speak in riddles.’

  ‘Yeah but I already heard that one. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around...’

  ‘Er, yes, okay, I suppose that illustrates a similar point...’

  ‘So when you make something real by looking at it, is that making it decohere or collapse?’

  ‘I'm going to have to ask you to hold up your end of the deal now.’

  ‘Okay. What was the question?’

  ‘Who lives here?’

  ‘Collin and Lucy, as far as I can tell. It's kind of a hangout, though. Everyone comes here to get wasted.’

  ‘Lucy?’

  ‘Yeah. I think so.’

  ‘Is Lucy Collin's girlfriend?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And what about Isabelle?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Never mind. So just Collin and his girlfriend?’

  ‘Yeah I think so. But also maybe Ned. I think he's been living here since he got up from Cottonwood.’

  ‘Cottonwood?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Interesting.’ He looks up at the ceiling for a moment, then to me. ‘Who are Ned's parents then?’

  ‘That's valuable intellectual pr-’

  ‘Yes yes, okay.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Erm, okay. To simplify matters greatly, consider the reflections to collapse into existence upon viewing.’

  ‘Okay, yeah.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That's all?’

  ‘It's something to think about. It may clear things up to meditate upon that point, with regard to the sensation of knowing when someone is watching you.’

  I sneer at him. I don't want to meditate.

  ‘So who are Ned's parents?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  He narrows his eyes at me.

  ‘Thanks for understanding.’

  ‘You're quite the shrewd businesswoman, Tracey’ he says. It makes me feel a little guilty.

  ‘They live in Cottonwood, I guess’ I say.

  ‘I gathered that. And what is Ned like?’

  ‘He's cool. Some schizophrenic tendencies, spirit sightings, strange dreams.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Some interest in the esoteric.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘Dark eyes, olden day face. He's usually decohering around the house somewhere.’

  ‘You really should stop throwing words around that you don't understand.’

  ‘Enlighten me then?’

  ‘Well what is it exactly you want to know?’

  ‘Do you know how I can get into contact with Robbie?’

  ‘I think you know that I don't.’

  ‘Well what's decohering then?’

  ‘I think we've established that there's no further questions on that matter.’

  ‘So if collapsing is when we make the reflection exist, is decohering when it goes back to being nothing?’

  ‘By nothing do you mean everything?’

  ‘We both know I mean everything and nothing.’

  ‘Yes, that is true.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Are the reflections decohered now that we're both looking away?’

  ‘Not exactly...Well, within the context of the metaphor...Not exactly.’

  ‘Is the thing you're getting at now that there is no exactly in this situation?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Good one.’

  ‘Well, actually that's a lie. Replace the word collapsing with exacting and you may understand things better.’

  ‘Exacting and decohering?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So what would that make the reflections now that they've decohered?’

  ‘I can give you a one word answer to that, as long as there are no further questions.’

  ‘You should have a line, Peter.’

  ‘I'll take that as my cue to leave.’ He stands up and starts to turn. His movements are slow and stilted. It takes him three steps just to turn away from me.

  ‘I think you're all shit’ I say.

  ‘I think you may have just cracked the code’ he says, facing away from me.

  ‘Exact and all shit?’

  ‘It's all all shit, really. It's all just ghosts.’ He starts to hobble away.

  ‘May I have the one word answer before you go please?’

  He stops and turns his head to face me slightly. ‘Well, I suppose I should. I am a man of my word, if nothing else.’

  ‘And that word is?’

  ‘Superposition.’

  ‘I've heard that word before.’

  ‘Really?’ He turns slightly to face me a bit more.

  ‘Yeah, Robbie says it sometimes.’

  ‘Are you telling the truth?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘In what context does Robbie use that word?’

  ‘I think he uses it to describe being wasted.’

  ‘Huh.’ He smiles to himself. It's a microscopic smile that I only saw because I was looking at the reflections on the door. My peripherals are getting stronger.

  ‘Yeah. But I don't know. I don't really listen to Robbie’ I say, looking back to him. His smile is no longer visible, even in my peripherals.

  ‘Perhaps you should.’

  ‘No one really listens to Robbie.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘He's all shit.’

  ‘Sounds like a good enough reason to listen to him.’

  ‘Maybe if he collapsed every once in a while.’

  ‘Maybe he'd collapse if you listened to him.’

  ‘That is so true.’

  ‘If no one listens to him then of course the poor boy spends his days in the superposition.’

  ‘It's scary to think how much is all shit because no one ever looked at or listened to it.’

  ‘You're preaching to the choir, Tracey.’

  ‘All it takes is a pair of overactive peripherals to change everything.’

  ‘I've said too much...’

  ‘I wonder how easy it is to accidentally collapse a ghost into existence.’

  ‘It's really the easiest thing in the world.’

  ‘All you have to do is look a little deeper...’

  ‘I really should go now.’

  ‘Do you have Collin's number? I really want to get ahold of Robbie.’

  ‘No. Thank you for understanding that I don't.’

  ‘You know, you should really explain the superposition to Robbie. Make him stop throwing the word around like that.’

  ‘Which one is Robbie?’

  ‘The one that looks like a young version of Kit.’

  ‘What?’ he turns to me, eyes blazing.

  ‘That was a joke’ I say.

  He ages about twenty years. ‘That was cruel’ he says.

  ‘Thanks for understanding.’

  ‘It's definitely time to go. I've been exact for too long...My bodies are not used to this anymore.’

  ‘Off to the superposition then?’

  ‘And beyond.’

  ‘Good luck in there.’

  ‘The implications of what you just said are too infinite to even consider.’

  ‘So you'd have to be all shit to even consider them?’

  ‘Yes. Consider that the answer you've been looking for this whole time. It's all shit. It's all all shit. I think there could be no wiser thing for you to do than to forget every detail of the conversation except for that. Consider the interplay of the exact and the all shit to be the paragon of wisdom you take away from all of this. You'd do well to forget about expanding and contracting, as well as anything else you've picked up from Kit. Just think of life in terms of varying ratios of exactness and all shitness, and perhaps you'll have a shot at some kind of contentment in this life.’

  ‘So everything you just said was all shit?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Peter turns and hobbles away. The living room feels like a house of mirrors now, so I wave goodbye. He doesn't wave back.

Michael Farmer

Fuckin' yep, keen, missioning along hunter - Uh, the street next to it, the one that we were on the other night when we were - Oh yep, here it is, here's some cunts, fuckin' Eli and Logan and their mates, chargin', good shit, “Oh, you're one of them year thirteens aye bolts” “Nah cunt, year one out in the real world” “Aye?” “Fuckin' never mind, mate. You cunts got a beer?” and I'm fuckin' killin' it now, little year tens on the piss, fuckin' good on them I reckon, whatever the fuck they're up to, can't be shit compared to what us cunts used to - “Oi, oi, grab a cone oi” this little as cunt fuckin' Joe or John or some shit, he's just chucked a cone on top of a parked car. “Oi, you lads do it too oi” and they've all got cones on top of parked cars and I'm like fuck yeah, might as well aye, you're only year ten once and Eli's like “Mean boe, these cunts'll be like aye? There's a cone on my car... They'll be like aye...” and it's funny as how these guys try and talk like Rory and shit but sound even dumber. I'm like “Whatever cunt, they'll just be like some drunk kids just put a cone on my car” but then he's like “Nah boe. They're living in their little bubble oi, they don't even know. They'll be like” so I'm like “Fuck yeah whatever” and huck one of the cones up and they're all “Yeeya” but fuck it, I'm done here so “Oi, chuck us a beer for the mish then cunts, I'm off” and they're like aye? but chuck us a couple 'cause their parents got them these shits anyway. I'm off to the disarray, charge two beers in thirty seconds, if that, boom, fuckin' whatever cunt, I got ID, you see this beard? Huh? All good, I'm eighteen now, don't mean shit, fuckin' in there now, yep, bourban coke, mean, done - Fuckin' just cunts trying to live it up here, fuck yeah, shout em a shot later. Off to the D-floor now where the ladies at - Fuckin' nup, detour, we got Kit down here so I'm in there “Oi Kit ya zombie cunt. Just been with your fuckwit son and his mates, up to fuck all. What's happening with you?” and Kit's all glazey eyes like “My son?” and the cunt's fuckin' goneburgers so I'm skulling my drink then gonna say later cunt but he's just fuckin' lights dimmed laters world so I get his drink down me too and out of there off down mains, got a mean buzz going now, cunts giving me the eye for a second but nup, leave this cunt be, then “Michael!” from fiddy four which sucks but whatever I'm off over there and we got Max, Coleman, Elle, and a couple other cunts so I'm in there fuckin' “Whatup cunts, shots or nah?” and it's nah until yeah and we're on the tequila, them cunts struggling 'cause it's fuckin' my world now, bitches, get another one in ya, who got the cash but it's intros now so fuck, alright who's who here, and Max intros me this bitch ass cunt “Yeah Michael, this is my flatmate Hamish. Hamish, Michael” and I'm like sweet whatever give him a handshake and shit then “Alright, round two then cunts?” and Max is like “Careful mate, you got a day shift tomorrow remember?” but I'm like “Fuck whatever cunt, so do you. I'm just on dishes. You gotta run a kitchen, all hungover and shit-” then he goes “I'm on the lemonades mate, keeping it” but then I'm hyped straight in there “On the lemonades? I'll show you on the fuckin' lemonades cunt” and I'm all snapping my fingers to the barmaid and shit, got me a tall glass of lemonade, quick sip but it's no good to me so I get a whiskey shot in there, barmaid giving me the eye like keen, but after work, and I'm like yeah gotcha bitch but all with the eyebrows 'cause I'm going on to this Hamish cunt about how he looks like fuckin' Damo and I'm fuckin' gutted he's not Damo so I brush him off to yarn to this barmaid bitch who's playing it cool 'cause she's still got another couple hours before - Then this Hamish cunt's like “Wait, not Kelly's brother Damo” and now I've fuckin' just snapped at the cunt and he's pretty cut and fuckin' apologises to me of all people, like what the fuck cunt stand your ground, but I'm an opportunist and I’m just like “All good, cunt, that'll be one drink” and snatch it off him and he's like “Hey man that was” and fuckin' bla bla and I'm like “Whatever cunt, don't know shit. Oi, you don't even got a proper name. Fuckin' Ham-ish, half assed as fuck” and he's just “Wow, I have absolutely nothing to say to that” then me “Course you don't, 'cause you're just a fuckin' Hamish. A Hameful would know, he'd be in there like fuckin' boom! But you, nah” and he's vexed as fuck now but all the other cunts are real into it, cracking up, and I'm on a roll now, unmolested as fuck “Alright cunts, fuckin' listen up 'cause it's story time with ole fuckin' Farmdawg over here. Bitch, chuck us another whiskey. Alright, so fuckin' basically, cunts, here's how it is. There's two things you can count on in this world. One-” then the fuckin' barmaid's given me a drink all snooty, some fuckin' coke and something, all good, doesn't matter, get it in me, “So the first thing you can count on, is there's always gonna be some cunt trying to tell you what to do. That's one thing that never fuckin' changes. Take it from me, I've been around eighteen fuckin' years. Eighteen laps of the sun, cunt. Cunts, sorry. So yeah, you got these bitch ass teacher motherfucks and their shitty little books from like the fuckin' medieval times and shit, abusing the fuck out of you whenever you act up, but then the cunts never knew the fuckin' first law of thermodynamics, monkey see, monkey fuckin' do. Cunt. It's all fuckin' hippotersy 'cause then them same cunts'll-” “hippotersy?” and I'm fuckin' getting a bit sick of this Elle bitch too, tubby as fuck, another cunt who - “Aye, you know what I fuckin' well mean, bitch, I don't have time to ask fuckin' jeeves and shit, out in the real world here, cunts, shit coming at ya left and right, fuckin'-” but then boom! I click what's wrong with this Hamish cunt, “Oi, look at this cunt, doesn't even have fuckin' earlobes!” 'cause they just go like fuckin' straight into his head, no dangly tonsil bits like we all got, “Fuckin' sort it out, cunt. You don't see the rest of us fuckin' wandering round like that” and I give his shitty half assed ear a flick and he's going a bit red now so I'm like “Oi, fuckin' sort it out cunt. Look at him, bright red-” and then Max goes “Yeah, alright, we see that. What was the second thing then, Michael” and I'm like “Well the earlobes was the second thing. The first thing was his shitty name, fuckin' Ham-ish. And the third thing is he hasn't said shit since-” “No no, you were saying before, before the earlobe thing. There's two things you can count on in life?” and I'm like “Aye, you cunts still on about that shit” and he's like “We're not on about anything, mate. You were saying there's two things you can always count on. We're all ears here” and I'm like “All ears, tell that to fuckin'-” but I dunno where I'm going with that so I'm like “So fuckin' right, the second thing you can always count on, is fuckin' dexies, cunts. pharmaceutical grade shit. Always know what's in em, always know what you're getting, fuckin' doctors and shit on the case, know what they're fuckin' doing with that shit. Not like all those fuckin' pingers, all sorts of crazy fuckin' like letters and numbers and shit, no fuckin' clue what you're - Fuck, where the pingers at? Any of you cunts got contacts?” and there's a bit of staring around and turns out this Hamish fuckwit's got one so I'm like “Halves then, cunt?” and flash him a twenty and he shrugs alright then we're off, cunt's just after my approval now after that shit with - A couple nice looking ladies are just leaving the D-floor, well one's a bit of a fuckin' dog to tell the truth so I get real clever on it and go “Oi girl, you're hotter than your mate” to the dog one, fuckin' like some psychology shit but Hamish's pulled me into the cubicle now and we're racking this pill up on the toilet seat and I'm on the psychology buzz now so I give him the twenty to snort then start whispering shit like “Oi fuckin' hurry the fuck up dude, fuckin' bouncer's in here I can hear him” and get the cunt all flustered and I grab the note off him and huck my line, fuckin' ballin' now, cunt, tastes like some proper shit and I whisper “Alright, cunt, you head off first, make it look like you're closing the door, then I'll head out, fuckin'...” and I act all meerkat scoping shit out then “Now!” and the dumb cunt bolts and I gather up a bit more powder and sniff it up and pocket the twenty, fuckin' free pingers, all fuckin' psychology shit, like ole About and About About back at the shitlab, but real world shit. I'm off back to the table but I'm feeling a little straight from the pinger so I shady a beer from this dozy bitch at the bar, down it, then just like fuck, that was way too fuckin' easy, and go for round two but then there's some gorilla ass motherfucker trying to grab it off me and I'm “The fuck you up to cunt” and he's “Naughty naughty at fifty four” “Aye?” then he tries snatch it off me but I'm too quick but there's this other fat fuck got me from the other side and they're taking me outside so I fuckin' get a bit of the beer into me and the rest over us three cunts and go for the glass handle to gorillafuck's face but we're outside now and I'm tasting the fuckin' concrete with fuckin' police holds and shit “Alright alright I'm off, back the fuck off” and they let me up giving me the hard stares and I'm off down the road for a minute but then fuckin' straight back in there, too quick for you cunts, and then back outside on the concrete again, police holds and shit, shouting “Use your words you fuckin' animals! Just fuckin' talk!” but nothing and this time they take me all the way to the curb and dump me on the concrete, fuckin' thugs, whatever cunts, got beer all over your head for the rest of your shift, not my fuckin' problem, just jealous as fuck. I'm up and dusted off now no fuckin' problems, real sweet buzz going now just all dizzy from the fuckin' streetlights, way too fuckin' close together, makes them all spinny and shit like a fuckin' fishbowl or some shit, venus drinker traps - “Yo. Michael” and it's the fuckin' straight brigade, Lance's face all fucked up, Benji's too, good to see them cunts on the receiving end every once in a while. “Oi whatup cunts” and they're just not on the fuckin' buzz at all, stiff as cunts, what the fuck else is new? “Yeah sorry I didn't get back to you cunts about the dexies, just couldn't be fucked aye” “Yeah?” “Yeah was having a drink with your fuckin' mate, old mate Richards” and now it's sorta heated here, looks like Stan's gone and fucked some more people off - what the fuck else is new? “So you got dexies or what?” “Nah no good” “Well what else can you suss then?” and I'm getting heated too just fuckin' “Oi! I'm out here to fuckin' drink and maybe suss a bitch with a nice voice for the morning, not be mister fuckin' middle man for-” but then “Fuck, actually might be able to suss you cunts some pingers. Keen?” and that's Benji like “Please” then “Bitch” 'cause the cunt can't fuckin' well help himself with that shit, I don't even wanna know what the fuck Stan's done to cross the line with this lot, must be some real twisted - We're off back to the bar now for some pingers, middle man tax and shit for this cunt, and we're in the door and straight away it's these fuckin' gorilla cunts again, but I got backup this time cunts, full on punches getting thrown but these cunts are on form as fuck, fuckin' elbow to the face and I'm down but fuckin' running off on all fours, twenty in my hand to the bar, slap it down but the bitch ain't having none of it and I'm all in her face like “Well you've changed your fuckin' tune bitch” and then it's Max of all cunts trying to get me outside so I'm in with a right swing and a headbutt but the cunt's fuckin' quicker than he looks and now we're outside and I'm all up in his face telling him what a fuckwit he's being but he's mellow as fuck just trying to settle it all down and I'm on about Collin and Spacey for some reason but it's hard to talk now 'cause I'm like choking kinda 'cause I'm trying to talk about mum and the little cunts too and also the dexies and just like the fuckin' buds and the K and Rory and fuckin' Damo but it's coming out too quick I can't really keep up, just like half sentences and shit that don't make sense 'cause I'm shaking too hard in Max's arms but I'm not cold it's just - I shove the faggy cunt away and I'm off to the next bar, keep this shit going, but then back on the concrete, no police hold shit this time, just those fuckin' street lights all - Dunno why the fuck I'm crying so I just start shouting and punching this white bit on the pavement that's like a ghost face, screaming at the blood dripping off my knuckles onto him, a drop here for a nose, couple drops for the gaps in his teeth, rain drops here and there like shadows, dripping from my eyes onto his like a reflection, looking at me like what the fuck's the problem? What the fuck are we crying about? We've got a fuckin' mean buzz going, pingers and the booze and the dex, what the fuck's there to cry about? Fuckin' mean buzz going, it's just

Robbie Marks

Taking into account our current headspace, we decided to see the Seed Freaks rather than Tracey; though the psychedelic aspect of our cocktail had faded into a non-intrusive blur, and Ketamine can work reasonably well as a social drug, the extremes of the DMT trip had left me too vulnerable to cope with the abrasiveness of interpersonal contact. Tracey - snide, aloof, and unreadable - would surely spotlight the dormant anxiety of the post-psychedelic inebriation, especially given the insultingly small amount of Ketamine we had managed to save her. The Seed Freaks, however, were people I could handle; passive people. And perhaps, I thought, I would be ready for further social contact after a relaxing cup of tea.

  Deeply fatigued from a long day of mental and physical roaming, I struggled to keep up with an unusually energetic Lucy as we walked toward Penny's house at the cul de sac at the top of the terraces. The Ketamine and post-DMT serenity had dulled my seemingly vital train of thought into an indulgent but basically useless rasasvada, leaving me unable to continue my pursuit of the conclusion that had seemed so tantalisingly close. I expressed my disappointment to Lucy and she suggested listening to my Dictaphone to find my place, unaware that the true subject of my introspection had not been spoken aloud. Unable to find a reasonable excuse without exposing my self-alienating ways, I was forced to move on, hoping that the content of my introspection remained intact on some level, able to be excavated by some amphetamine-aided automatic writing over the next few days. All I managed to salvage at present was the disheartening conclusion that I lacked Collin's razor-sharp intuition regarding drug combinations and their uses - something I would have to develop in order to continue my journey outside of his guidance.

  We reached Penny's place and crept silently past the living room lights of the parental house and into the candlelit faux-Satanic darkness of the sleep-out. Inside, the incense, partial-nudity, and mellow guitar strumming evoked a free-spirited vibe contrary to their taste in substances, but well matched to Lucy's and my own. I stood awkwardly waiting for acknowledgement before finding a seat on one of the beanbags that lined the walls, following Lucy's lead. The languid guitar strumming continued, accompanied by a basic beat being tapped out on something hollow and wooden. After a minute or so awaiting a greeting, I settled into the carefree atmosphere, content that my social ineptness would not be an issue in this environment.

  ‘I lost my mind, I couldn't handle the vibes....’ someone sung, out of tune with both the strumming and the percussion. The three faces were slightly illuminated by the circle of tealight candles on the floor, and my senses were too worn out to discern facial features or voices. I could tell it was Penny playing the guitar; her puffy face and long, blonde hair set her apart from her company, and, on a superficial level, their lifestyle. I couldn't distinguish between the androgynous, slightly ethnic faces and short, dark hair of Alan and Irena; the husky femininity of the singing did little to clarify the issue, and I decided to stick with the umbrella term of Seed Freaks, as everyone else seemed to.

  ‘She came in through my brain, she took over my veins....’

  From my limited knowledge of musicianship, I could tell no one there was very talented as a musician; however, their noise had an attractive simplicity to it, in much the same way a few well-placed lines can produce a minimalist drawing more aesthetically pleasing than a carelessly excessive one.

  ‘Upon finishing my meditative beer and cigarette, I concluded that my body is a temple, before opening another beer and lighting another cigarette,’ the person to the left of Penny said. Everybody except me laughed. The person to the right of Penny started tapping on a xylophone idly. I closed my eyes, glad that I was predominately dissociated; perhaps I was in possession of Collin's drug-intuition after all.

  ‘And as I slept, I started to scream....’

  ‘Wondering just what was real, and what was a dream.’

  I did not experience visuals, but gravity took on obscure dimensions. There was an odd kind of synaesthesia, as the smell of a joint being lit briefly convinced me that I was stoned rather than dissociated.

  ‘What exactly is a dream?’ Lucy chimed in.

  ‘What exactly is a dream....’ someone echoed. The guitaring petered out and the xylophone held a slow beat. I took this as the end of their greeting and opened my eyes.

  ‘What exactly is a joke?’ Lucy finished her own joke. This time, only I laughed.

  The atmosphere settled into a relaxed silence, before a voice I recognised as Alan's said, ‘That was about you guys.’ It had been Irena singing, up until the last two lines sung by Alan. Irena passed me the joint and I puffed furtively on it a few times before handing it over to Lucy. The smoke had an oddly flowery taste, leading me to conclude it was spun with Damiana or Blue Lotus, or perhaps one of those legal highs from Mind Garden that never seemed to do anything. The taste complemented the incense obliquely, and I silently appreciated the unusual amount of thought they must have put into the atmosphere.

  ‘You guys want a few nangs before we get into this? Get us all onto the same page for the negotiations,’ Alan said. Irena began lighting the larger candles waiting unlit around the circle of smaller ones. The situation had an overly choreographed feel to it, but I decided to enjoy it rather than deride it, thanks largely to the Ketamine and possibly the throes of the DMT.

  ‘Okay. What's a nang?’ Lucy asked, passing the joint to Alan over the candles. I found it interesting that Lucy was talking rather than me, and realised that I hadn't said a word yet. Formless paranoia stirred inside me, but I vowed not to give it a chance to gain momentum, focusing on the excitement of possibly trying a new drug - something that had become a rarity for me. Penny did something with her hands in the darkness, producing an abrupt hiss.

  ‘Nitrous Oxide,’ Alan said, as Penny produced an inflated yellow balloon and passed it over to Lucy. ‘Just breathe in slowly, then out into the balloon, then in again. Take your time with it.’

  ‘Nyang nyang nyang nyang,’ Irena clarified.

  Lucy inhaled her balloon slowly. She breathed about half the balloon and stopped, turned to me, and giggled. I involuntarily smiled back. Her face then turned serious, and she said, ‘Robbie, joint,’ looking from me to Irena, who was holding the joint out to me with an inebriated smile. The joint seemed to be going around the circle much faster than usual, creating a complex, wordless edifice of thoughts inside me - a structure I couldn't even begin to dissect, as all the elements seemed to be balanced precariously upon each other; so much so that to remove one for inspection would cause the whole pile to come crashing down, compromising the quietude of our environment.

  As I took the joint from Irena, Penny said, ‘You two are in the cross-hairs,’ her wasted, deadpan expression highlighted by the various flickering light sources. I froze with the joint inches from my mouth in sudden anxiety, interpreting the notion to mean we were being watched. My perspective of the situation took on paranoid dimensions, and I saw our hosts as a trio of cagey merchants, feeding us drugs to dull our minds for the negotiations, prone to manipulation by the Seed Freaks: Drug-psychopaths untainted by the excessive empathy and internal complexities of the psychedelic-user, and even that of the non-drug user, their own opiate-squeegeed minds pure and free from distraction, neither clear nor muddy, an inhuman kind of composition invested entirely in the deals about to take place....

  ‘She means we're sitting where the joint and the nang cross over,’ Lucy said. ‘So you're gonna get a nang as soon as you have some of the joint. And I'm gonna have some joint as soon as you finish it.’

  I laughed insincerely to ground myself, then puffed once on the joint, decided it was to be my last puff for the night, and passed it to Lucy. A familiar hiss brought back my drug-zeal, and Penny filled a green balloon before passing it to me over the candles.

  I took the balloon and turned to Lucy. She exhaled a cloud of smoke and giggled to herself before toking again without restraint. I put the twisted lip of the balloon in my mouth and released it slowly into my lungs. The taste was pleasant - sweet and slightly metallic. I took in half of the balloon before holding it closed at arm's length to assess the effects of the drug; there was no notable change in my consciousness, though I attributed this to it being overshadowed by the effects of the more powerful drugs.

  ‘Nyang nyang nyang,’ Lucy said, grinning at me.

  ‘Nyang nyang nyang nyang nyang....’

  ‘Nyang nyang nyang,’ everybody joined in. Confused by the cicada-like sound and what it represented, I took in the rest of the balloon deeply. Alan and Irena continued their nyang-nyang insect noise, now accompanied by some rudimentary xylophone tapping. Though I was extremely wasted, I couldn't discern any effects on my consciousness that couldn't be attributed to weed or Ketamine.

  ‘Can I -’ I started, flinching at the odd sound of my voice before continuing, ‘Can I try another one? I don't think it did anything.’

  ‘No nyang nyang?’ Penny asked, before inhaling a balloon.

  ‘Nah, no nyang nyang.’

  ‘Na-no nyang nyang,’ Irena sung.

  ‘Nyang nyang no no....’

  ‘Nyang nyang nah no!’

  ‘No no, nyang no....’

  Even Lucy was singing with them. Though I appreciated the Dionysian revelry, I was beginning to feel isolated. Penny passed a balloon to Irena, who was holding the joint, and she inhaled them simultaneously, before sputtering and falling into a laughing coughing fit. After composing herself, she held the joint to me, which Lucy knowingly intercepted. Penny passed me another balloon, which I eagerly inhaled in one go.

  ‘Why don't you breathe our way?’ Alan said. I immediately perceived a double-meaning in the sentence, which quickly redoubled into a malevolent quadruple-entendre, threatening to multiply further if I gave it even another second of consideration.

  ‘I ... I have Valium and Cyclizine. Did you guys still have any Ketamine to trade?’ I said, banishing my nauseous alienation and paranoia. I was here to trade drugs; this, I could do. The laughter died down and no one said anything. Someone was still nyang-nyanging with a surreal whistling echo, a cartoonish caricature of a UFO. Everyone else's gaze lowered to the candles, as mine buffeted about, attempting to decipher the silence.

  ‘I broke the silence,’ Lucy said finally. All three of the Seed Freaks laughed. The nyanging continued behind the laughter, leading me to conclude, by process of elimination, that it was emanating from me. Penny started filling another balloon and Irena plucked aimlessly at the guitar sitting on her lap. I didn't understand why I was being ignored; were there subtle social rules in opiate-circles that I was unaware of? What was expected of me here? I just wanted to acquire some more Ketamine and leave. I started to wish I had seen Tracey instead - though, of course, that would have been a situation with its own set of anxieties. It was time to wind down.

  ‘Can I have a turn with that thing?’ Lucy said. Alan passed the xylophone over to her and she started playing it slowly. Much like everything else she does, this simple act seemed to be brimming with an aetheric beauty that could never be quantified. Something indescribably captivating about her contented smile stole me from the moment, from my plans, only to deliver me to the centre of the darkness I had deftly avoided.... Why don't you breathe our way? The question formed in my mind once more, carrying with it an enormous entourage of shadowy implications. Lucy simpered as a balloon was passed to her. She looked so at home with the Seed Freaks, so in her element.... Sitting around in incense smoked semi-darkness with a bright yellow balloon up to her face, making noises and playing instruments non-sensically ...

  ‘... Nyang nyang nyang nyang ...’

  ... just as Collin's friendship had seemingly slipped through my fingertips earlier, I felt I was now losing Lucy. My tribe, my family, had, over just a few days, disintegrated before me. What had happened to set off this chain of events? And, more pressing, what would become of me once Lucy falls in line with the Seed Freaks? I couldn't see myself with The Mars Fuckers or The Seed Freaks. My tribe was the only place I had ever felt at home - the tribe that had now been effectively reduced to Ned and myself. It seemed as if all the forces of the universe had conspired to push me into a solitary existence with only my thoughts as company - and perhaps Ned, which did little to ease my anxiety.

  It had been weed that once united us all: The Mars Fuckers, the Seed Freaks, and us - The Others, whatever that was supposed to mean. Once upon a time, we were all in it together - with, absurdly, Michael as the elder of the tribe, his hyperactive mind spreading transgression throughout all of us who had the guts to reject our perceived captors. Over time, our differing motives for smoking weed splintered the collective: The Seed Freaks sought to escape the sharp angles of life, a quest they soon found better suited to the consumption of opiates and other anxiolytics; the Mars Fuckers wanted to party and revel in their petty rebellions; and we, the Others, sought to transcend, to rise above the bullshit; for Michael, it was just another loose end in the beautiful mess of his life. I knew that moment had passed, no more than a communal step that once entwined our separate journeys, but I couldn't help but ask: Where to from here? I learnt early on in my journey that to attempt to recreate the dynamics of the past was damaging to the constitution; but, as I more recently concluded, progression often takes on the dimensions of the past on a higher ebb, following the blueprint of an upwardly-spiralling coil curved four-dimensionally into a circuit connecting Malkuth and Kether, climbing itself ever upward.... I started to reach for my bag to retrieve my Dictaphone, but was halted with a gift from within: Clear and concise, I knew for sure where the next step lay: Ketamine - a drug that the Seed Freaks had recently acquired from mysterious sources that was once again uniting us all. Ketamine.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, my voice fortified either by large-scale despair or small-scale certainty. ‘Do you guys have Ketamine or not? I have other places to be.’

  Four wasted eyes settled on me accusingly, charging me with solidity and calm. I furthered my self-assurance by visualising my expression as Collin's stone-eyed stare.

  ‘... Yeah, we do. I'll just grab it,’ Irena said curtly, before turning into the darkness behind her. I sat my bag in front of me to find the sedatives. Fingering my various bags of chemicals, I considered furthering my dominance by switching the light on, but decided against it; there is a fine line between being assertive and being an arsehole. My fingers came across my Dictaphone, and I closed my eyes to summon the strength to move past it to find the drugs. Clarity. Results. Malkuth....

  ‘Are you okay, Robbie?’ Lucy said quietly.

  ‘I'm good,’ I replied, taking a tray of Cyclizine out of my bag, then going back in to find the benzos. ‘We've still got to go see Tracey before we go home, remember?’

  ‘I know. But you didn't even say thanks for the nangs or the joint.’

  I stopped moving for a moment to consider this, then continued silently, feeling slightly guilty. This was to be my new way, though. Drug dealing would be a business: Free from the uncontrolled variables of friends, I would buy and sell pragmatically. With clarity of vision, my dealing would take on Malkuthian dimensions, forming a solid ground to my journey upon which to ride ever-upward toward The Void - in orbit, but always connected umbilically to consensus reality. Perhaps I could even get a scam going and afford myself a small unit to live in, where I would pursue the mysteries of the universe without distraction. Uppers, downers, and weed would no longer be part of my diet; I would stick to psychedelics and occasionally dissociatives or even nootropics, saving the rest for the indulgences of my clients.

  ‘Valium's in the front pocket,’ Lucy said.

  Irena sat back down opposite me. ‘Here. Two grams. What've you got?’ she flicked a baggy of white powder like a bottle cap into my lap.

  ‘Right, two grams.... Okay, I'll put that at one twenty credit to you. So, uh, I got ten mig benzos for five each, or a hundred bucks for thirty. Cyclizine is a tray for thirty. So how's a tray of Cyclizine and thirty benzos sound? That gives you ten bucks credit for the nangs and the joint.’

  ‘Deal,’ Irena said. I counted out thirty Valium and dropped them, along with the Cyclizine into Irena's cupped hands. ‘But that was just for vibes, you know. The nangs and that,’ she added.
  ‘Good vibes,’ I said vacantly. ‘Mind if I rack up a little K before I go?’

  ‘Go ahead.’ I felt some guilt for killing the atmosphere, but I wasn't there to hang out. I racked up a line each for me and Lucy, and three smaller ones for the Seed Freaks, on a laptop next to me; to keep good business relations. I believe all five of us felt the unity of the Moment as we stepped together inward to a higher ebb, climbing the spiral-geometry upward. Lucy traded some of her indoor for some of Alan's oddly fragrant bush weed, and we parted ways amicably wasted.

  Once again dissociated on the terraces, Lucy and I decided it would be better to see Tracey the following day. It had been a long journey, and both of us were keen to have a small bump of Ketamine at home and fall asleep to some Pink Floyd, deeply satiated and ready for the sweet afterglow.

  ‘You went all Mister Businessman after your nang,’ Lucy said, shining under the moon.

  ‘Well, it is my job. I'm thinking I'll get a one-bedroom soon, since we can't really keep living at Collin's. I gotta step my game up a little, I think.’

  ‘Why do we have to leave Collin's?’

  ‘He's with The Mars Fuckers now. And you're with the Seed Freaks. It's time for me to find my place.’

  ‘What? We're all still in it together. I'm gonna go to the art school and get the student allowance, and Ned's always gonna be allowed to get the invalids. Collin'll make it work whatever he does. Whatever happens we'll be doing it together. Remember the DMT? The sky, the land, the sea, and the sun. It's always gonna be that way.’

  ‘That was just us being typical mortals, trying to impose our human ideas on the great archetypes. I mean, that shit's valuable for, you know, self-exploration and stuff. But it was basically an excursion into the pagan; the world we're going back to just isn't a pagan world. I mean, yeah, maybe it should be - but the harsh truth is that it isn't. For now, at least.’

  ‘What are you saying? I mean, like.... What are you saying?’

  ‘You need me to spell this out for you?’

  ‘Well, yeah. You know I love it when you talk in poems, but I don't really understand what you're saying now.... That could mean lots of things, what you just said. I just wanna know what you actually mean. It's kind of scaring me.’

  ‘You don't know how to connect the dots yourself?’

  ‘Don't be mean, Robbie. I'm too tired to connect the dots. And, you know, sometimes I just don't want to connect the dots. That doesn't make me stupid; you shouldn't judge people by how well they play your games. That's really selfish.’

  I stopped walking to allow the dawning realisation to spawn. She was right; within the realm of Malkuth, Earth, the planet we all share, lies Common Ground: Consensus reality, money, society, being human - all the things that repulse me, but which I must reintegrate in order to ground my journey. Figurative and cryptic words are the domain of the Yesod-Hod and Yesod-Netzach pathways, respectively; they all add up to the idiosyncrasies I cling to, an emanation of the ever-alluring realm of Tiphareth. Lucy stood waiting in the middle of the road, forever patient and tolerant of my Tipharethian ways. Still silent, I started walking again to get my mental-wheels rolling. Being Day Three, it would be important to end the journey by reconnecting to Malkuth, where I would reside predominately for the next three days in order to solidify my findings. The coded secrecy of my private world held no place in these realms; clarity and simplicity are the keys that open the gateway to the Earth at the Yesod-Malkuth intersection. Contemplating Lucy's understanding silence, I noted that she had once more understood my journey more deeply than myself, guiding me back to the Malkuthian pursuit of my Day Three trip I found it so easy distract myself from; I owed it to her to speak candidly.

  ‘Well, what I'm thinking is I'll step up the dealing. Be smarter and more organised about it so I can get some kind of routine and consistency. Get like a base income going so I can afford -’

  ‘I know that, Robbie. I'm talking about how you said we gotta stop hanging out at Collin's. I know Collin's acting weird, but that's just how he gets when he's excited. Him and Ned haven't been sleeping. We'll all be back to normal tomorrow.’

  ‘It's not that simple though, Lucy. I mean, you can never really go back to normal. You can never go back at all. I mean, like, remember that horseshoe sphere I was talking about before....’

  ‘You're starting to talk in poems again.’

  ‘Oh yeah. What was the question?’

  ‘I just wanna know why you think we all gotta go in different ways. I don't think it's true; I know it's not true. I just want to know why you think that.’

  ‘Well, you know - did I tell you that Collin shaved his head last night?’

  ‘That doesn't matter. I was just saying that stuff about not cutting our hair 'cause yours looked real cool when I was tripping. It doesn't matter, really.’

  ‘No it's not that. It's just.... I mean, like, Stan had already shaved his head, ginger Stan, and like, you know how all The Mars Fuckers try and be like.... It's like, Collin just hangs around with Michael and The Mars Fuckers now - I only figured that out today. That's where he's been disappearing to all this time. And I felt that shit in there just before, like back with the Seed Freaks. You guys and your ‘vibe’.... Like, yeah, sure, I'm sorry I didn't say thanks and shit. Sorry I didn't get on same level as you guys. But I'm not gonna start breathing like you guys just so I can be in a tribe. I'd choose total alienation over breathing like I'm told. Do you think that's okay? Telling someone how to breathe?’

  ‘Robbie, you're being stupid. You've been thinking all day and your brain's tired. Don't think about that anymore until tomorrow, okay? And don’t think about Collin either. I can feel it too, but we don’t know anything yet. Sometimes feelings just happen for no reason. Not everything in your head is cosmic.’

  ‘... Yeah, okay.’

  And I didn't. Nor did I turn on my Dictaphone - the surest departure from Malkuth.

Stan Richards

This cunt's not on the fuckin' planet, that's for sure. We're a couple blocks from home and I've managed to keep him from causing a scene so far, but there's no way to tell what he's gonna do next. I figured out I can sorta guide him like a horse, like if I point him in a certain direction he'll head that way. He keeps tripping over though, so I gotta be on my game. He's already smacked his head on the concrete once, fuckin' whiplashed that shit. I just wanna get him indoors before he gets himself killed. Straightedges are out there somewhere too. I gotta stay on point.

  Ned stops and goes ‘Look,’ pointing into the distance, so I give him a push with my free hand to keep us moving. He's been doing this shit the whole way home, and I've realised that I can't look away from him for more than a second. I'd like to hear about what he's seeing right now, but I'm tired as fuck and just wanna get this shit over with. Maybe he'll tell me all about it in the morning. But probably not. If the devil's in the details, then this cunt's the fuckin' exorcist.

  We get home and the lights are out, thank fuck. There's no way Dad's gonna put up with Ned in this state, especially if he's been drinking - and the mass of empty beer bottles on the porch tells me he has.

  I get Ned down the dark hallway and into my room and shove him on my bed. I turn the light on, but he sits bolt upright mumbling all panicky, frantically staring around the room with cracked lips and blood and dirt all over his face.

  ‘Alright alright, chill,’ I say. I switch off the main light and put on the bedside one. He seems to tolerate it, so I head out to grab him some water.

  I'm walking slowly down the hall 'cause my eyes are playing tricks on me, and a voice jumps out and gives me a fuckin' heart attack.

  ‘I had a bad dream.’

  It's Katie, standing in the hall like a fuckin' goblin.

  ‘Jesus Katie. You scared the shit out of me.’

  ‘Can I stay in your room tonight Stan? I'm scared.’

  ‘Uh, no, I don't think that's a very good idea,’ I say. I think a lanky, half-naked scarecrow mumbling to himself with blood all over his face is prolly the last thing she needs to see right now.

  ‘Aw go on. I can sleep on the floor. In my sleeping bag. We don't even have to have a light on, I'm not scared of the dark anymore.’

  ‘No, it's not that... Ned's over tonight.’

  ‘That's okay I like Ned.’

  ‘...What?’

  ‘I like Ned. He told me about these things that live under the water called-’

  ‘Katie, you shouldn't be listening to Ned. That guy gives grown-ups nightmares.’

  ‘I don't care Stan I don't want to sleep in my bed tonight. Just let me stay with you guys!’

  ‘Alright alright, just be quiet okay? Don't wake Dad up or we'll both get in trouble. Stay with me.’

  We go into the kitchen and I get some water for her and Ned. She goes ‘I don't want water I want juice.’

  ‘Have we got any juice?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well tough shit then.’

  We head back to my room and I'm relieved that Ned's still where I left him. Katie looks freaked out by his face so I tell her he got hurt skating.

  ‘But why does he look sick?’ she asks.

  ‘That's just what he looks like now. Don't worry about Ned, okay? He needs to go to sleep.’

  I get a Calvin and Hobbes book for Katie to read and sit next to her on the floor, then crack a beer to try and figure out how to deal with the situation. All I wanted to do was come home and sleep, and now I'm sitting here babysitting two delusional children without a bed to sleep in. My head's all foggy with paranoia about Dad or Karen waking up and seeing this scene, as well as some quieter concerns about the Straightedges turning up for some revenge. I guess I'm tired enough to go to sleep on the floor, but Katie's gonna need-

  ‘Look, Calvin's got monsters in his room too,’ Katie says. ‘And he likes hamburgers too. He's like me. Monsters must like kids like us.’

  ‘You know why monsters hang around kids like you?’ I say, starting to lose my patience. Katie shakes her head. ‘It's 'cause they're not real. That's why the other kids don't see them. That's why me and Dad and Karen can't see them. Kids like you and Calvin just eat way too much sugar and watch way too much TV, so when it gets dark your imagination gets carried away. There's no such thing as monsters.’

  ‘Yes there is,’ Ned says. I feel my face burn angry red - now the cunt decides he can string a fuckin' sentence together. ‘Most people just learn to ignore them, but not everyone can do that.’ He's looking more drunk than tripped-out now, stretched out on my bed in a way I can only describe as highly punchable.

  ‘See?’ Katie says casually, turning her attention back to the book.

  ‘I'm gonna leave you with the Straightedges next time you shit-stirring fuck,’ I say. He seems to be looking at me, but his eyes are all droopy and wasted so I can't really tell. For a moment I think he might have actually deserved the hiding he got, but the spite turns to the Miller psychopaths when their faces pop into my head. Sick fucks. The thought of them taking Michael's drugs gets more and more frightening the longer I sit on it.

  Forcing the Straightedges out of my head, I give Ned the finger and turn back to Katie. ‘I told you not to listen to Ned, Katie. I know you think he's cool, but he's taken so many drugs he doesn't know what's going on.’

  ‘That's what Mum said about you,’ she says without looking up from her book.

  ‘Well she fuckin' would, wouldn't she?’

  Katie gives me a pouty look and goes back to reading. Ned seems pretty placid now, so I look through my pile of comics for something to read till these two let me sleep. All my comics have unpleasant memories attached to them, but I realise that's true for pretty much everything in my life. I guess that means I need to get into some new shit. New books, new friends, new music. New life. Actually, I just need to fuckin' sleep so I can get my head together and do something about it instead of sitting here making more vague, incoherent plans I'll never stick to. I end up picking out an old Thrasher magazine to read, but then Ned pipes up again and I'm back in parent-mode.

  ‘I think your cat needs some water,’ he says. I look up and he's picking at my jacket sitting next to him. ‘It's all dry and flat.’

  ‘Whatever you say, man,’ I go. He seems to be coming down a little. Still fuckin' wasted, but at least he’s interacting with real stuff now.

  Katie gets up and sits on my bed next to him. ‘That's not our cat, Ned. That's Stan's jacket,’ she says.

  Ned goes ‘Oh yeah,’ and they both laugh. He picks up the jacket and goes ‘It looks kind of like a cat. The whiskers.’

  Katie takes it off Ned and folds it so that the arms are laid on top. She puts it down next to him and says ‘There, now it's like a rabbit. See the ears?’

  They're both laughing now, but I'm feeling pretty uneasy about this. I'm not usually all that protective over Katie, but the thought of her being friends with Ned isn't sitting well.

  ‘Now it's your turn, Stan,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your jacket. You gotta turn your jacket into something.’

  ‘Yeah, alright.’ I get up and put the jacket on. ‘Tada. It's a jacket,’ I say, turning 360 with my arms out.

  ‘You're a grinch,’ Katie says.

  I shrug and then Ned goes ‘No he's a big rabbit monster.’

  ‘Yeah Stan. You're a big rabbit monster!’ Katie says, laughing.

  ‘Yep that's spot on Ned. I'm a big rabbit monster. Just when I think you've finally lost your mind, you come out with a genius observation like that,’ I say, sitting back down on the floor.

  ‘You're just a grinch, Stan,’ Katie says. ‘Mum said that you're just mean 'cause you're sad all the time. She said that you only say mean things to us and Dad 'cause you're angry at yourself. Like a bully. You're a big bully rabbit grinch monster.’

  ‘Well she's pretty much spot on there,’ I say, taking a sip of beer.

  ‘She said Dad used to be like you before she met him, but she made him get a job and he's all better now.’

  ‘Well Karen's just a know it all bitch and she can fuck-’

  The door swings open and Dad barges in going ‘Is that what you think then? Huh?’

  My heart's slamming now and my mind's paralysed with shock. I open my mouth but there's no words. What the fuck's going on here?

  ‘Huh? Answer me! Don't just bloody well stare at me. Answer me.’

  ‘I didn't mean it man, I was just-’

  ‘And stop mumbling. Stand up straight and talk to me like a man! Go on!’

  I stand up and look him in the eye. Tension builds as we both sway slightly but keep our eyes locked. Dad's face is sallow from sleep and alcohol, naked without its beard, aged by his looming hangover.

  ‘It's all a joke to you isn't it,’ he says finally. ‘You think you can just go around, saying and doing whatever you bloody well please. Well let me tell you something about the real world, mate. It always comes back to bite you in the ass.’

  ‘Well what the fuck were you doing? Standing at the door listening?’ I'm taking a leaf from Collin's book, keeping my voice calm and composed, waiting for his rage to turn in on itself.

  ‘Who pays for the roof over your head? Huh?’

  ‘You think that makes-’

  ‘No, I'm asking you. Who pays for the roof over your head?’

  ‘Yeah, okay, but-’

  ‘Who pays for the fucking roof over your head?’

  ‘Dad, cool it. Katie's-’

  ‘Me, that's who. And just what the bloody hell's going on here anyway? She should be fast asleep,’ he points at Katie, sitting upright, eyes wide with fear, ‘not sitting up all night with you two... Look at yourselves. Whatever it is you're on it's doing the trick.’

  ‘Hey, I found Ned like this. What was I supposed to do, just let him-’

  A backhand to my already bruised cheek and Katie shoots off under us like a scared cat. I correct myself and give him the Collin-eyes, unfazed.

  ‘Yeah, nice one Dad. You know, Katie came to me 'cause she was having nightmares. Prolly freaked out watching you and Karen drunk out of your-’

  ‘Nightmares? Look at yourself! This is the fucking nightmare, mate. The two of you, spacing out like god damn junkies. You think it's okay to expose her to that? A girl of her age... What the hell were you thinking?’

  ‘Hey, if anything's gonna fuck her up tonight it's-’

  ‘I'll tell you what you were thinking. You were thinking about yourself, as always. You and your mate, out of your god damn minds on who knows what, just breezing around, never stopping to think about the people you're affecting.’

  ‘Dad, listen. I'm trying to tell you. Yeah, Ned's out of his fuckin' mind. I found him like this. If I didn't bring him here-’

  ‘Don't fucking lie to me son,’ his voice calms into a steady, sober threat. ‘I caught up with Chuck and his wife today. You know what he said? He said he saw you and your mate smoking pot at the park. In broad daylight. I hear about this. I have eyes and ears everywhere. Are you gonna stand here and call Chuck a liar?’

  ‘Well, yeah, I smoked a joint today. At least I'll remember it tomorrow.’ He stares at me, seeming to vaguely understand that it was a dig at him. I clarify it for him, ‘I got up at like nine and you and Karen were already drunk. And you're having a go at me for smoking a joint? Maybe it's you who needs to have a look at yourself.’

  Visible fear creeps into his eyes, but a wave of drunken rage seems to smooth it out. ‘What absolute crap. I work myself into the ground all week to enjoy myself. So yeah, I have a beer in the weekend. Is that a problem to you?’

  ‘No, I'm just saying. You have your vices, I-’

  ‘It's not the bloody same and you know it.’

  ‘Yeah, weed's prolly better-’

  ‘Don't get lippy with me boy. Just what the hell do you do all day? You obviously don't clean your room. Look at the state of it!’

  ‘Well I, uh... what?’ I look around at the slight mess of my room, speechless from the bizarre accusation.

  ‘You need to have a good think about what you're doing with your life. You screwed around at school, so that's University down the drain. You're off to that doctor for pills every week, 'cause you can't even cope when all you're doing is laying around playing video games and smoking pot all day. You're making no effort to find a job. You-’

  ‘No, Dad. I got a job today.’

  He blinks himself to a stop, then looks at me all sceptical.

  ‘Yeah, dish- uh, kitchen hand,’ I say, deciding kitchen hand sounds better. ‘Bolton and Sons in town. Calls for some minor celebrations, right?’

  ‘Oh...’ He breaks the eye contact as it seems to dawn on him that he's being a cunt. ‘Right. Well, don't get too carried away. It's a start, not a career,’ he continues, egotistic scorn still intact.

  ‘Yeah, well gotta start somewhere, right?’

  ‘Right. Well, yeah, nice one,’ he looks me in the eye again, just for a second.

  I revel in the victorious silence until his eyes take on a different glaze and I start to feel like a cunt. I feel my eyes do the same and go ‘Hey, I meant to bring you home a beer but-’

  ‘Listen,’ he interrupts. ‘I'm sorry about hitting you before, that was out of line.’

  ‘It's okay.’

  ‘No, it's not. Look, me and Karen... I was a bit wound up. She was giving me shit all day, then I had Chuck at me about my parenting-’

  ‘So Karen was being a know it all bitch then?’

  ‘Yeah, as usual.’ He pauses and seems to disappear into himself for a second, then goes ‘So, you've got some beers do you?’

  ‘Nah. Well just this one. Sorry, I saw Ned and-’

  ‘It's alright. We've got some G and T left over. I'm a little thirsty after that. You wanna go outside for a drink... to celebrate?’

  ‘Sounds good.’ I'm exhausted and have no idea what G and T means, but the adrenaline's got me perked up again and my plan was to have a drink with Dad, so, yeah. Why not?

  ‘I'll be out there,’ he says. He starts to turn but stops and says ‘Your mate... Is he gonna be okay?’

  I turn to Ned. Looks like he's sleeping, but who knows what's going on in that head.

  ‘Fuck knows. He seems to be able to wriggle his way out of anything. I dunno. You'd better check on Katie though.’

  ‘...I think I'll leave that to you,’ he says, and walks out.

  I consider offering Dad some weed to mellow it all out, but decide against it. I know how to handle myself if shit gets serious. More than Dad at least. He forgets that I'm not a kid anymore. I'm an eighteen year old with poor impulse control and fuck all self-preservation - pretty much the worst kind of person to get on the wrong side of. I'll leave that up to Dad, though. I'm keen for a few quiet drinks out the front, but who the fuck knows with that cunt? Who the fuck knows with any cunt? All you can do is be ready.

  I put a blanket over Ned and say ‘I fuckin' hate you, Ned,’ but I'm not sure if he can hear or if I actually mean it. I grab the Calvin and Hobbes book for Katie and head out, knowing fuck all but ready for whatever.

Ned Devlin

(Scene missing)

Lucy Winters

The sky lied . . . Collin never made it home. I've been pretending it's all okay, for Robbie. But really I can feel it too. We have to wait though. We don't know anything yet . . .

  It's strange to be back here. That quiet peaceful strangeness of empty places that are usually full of activity, one of my favourite feelings, one of the only ones that gets Collin out of my mind. Tracey sitting stoned and satisfied, an unknowing embodiment of serendipity. Robbie finally relaxed, a post orgasmic calm softening the urgency that had manoeuvred him through the forests and stars. Extra curricular ketamine and dexies being divided on the table, joint sitting smoking itself. I don't know why Robbie wants dexies now. Sometimes Robbie's a bit like a little kid with drugs. Like a kid with chocolate and lollies. It's okay though because ketamine is a relaxing drug and I have some valium. But still. Odd.

  Robbie sniffs two lines with hooters up both nostrils like a walrus, then hands them to Tracey who does the same. He clicks his tape recorder on as the snorters come over to me. I have my lines one by one and sit with my back against the couch with my neck flaccid at the ceiling, waiting to see what Robbie has to say . . .

  ‘So to conclude,’ he starts, pauses wearily at Tracey's presence, then continues, ‘these things I seek, which I endeavour to make visible, are things too delicate for the test of human perspective, irritable when forced to conform with words and images. To make the unknown known is an endless quest, one where it is not the conclusion that brings about insight, but every step of the journey. The hidden remains hidden, indefinitely.’ He clicks the tape recorder off and relaxes for just a moment before getting up to look for a CD to put on, still restless after a long day of wondering.

  ‘By invisible, do you mean microscopic?’ Tracey says.

  ‘. . . Uh, no, not really,’ Robbie says, looking at us over his shoulder. ‘But that's a pretty good metaphor. I guess you could say it's too fine to see, rather than too small. But the more I describe it, the further we get from the truth of it.’

  ‘So there is a truth to it? Or is it something that is only perceived?’

  ‘Yeah, kinda,’ Robbie says, roused into an animal crouch by Tracey's capricious musing. ‘It's an exploration of subjectivity, a question of cause and effect, observer created reality.’

  The speakers begin to whisper and growl over a strange starry twinkle as Emotive takes form in the spaces between us. Robbie gets up and sits behind me, legs on either side, and we appreciate the music for a moment as the drugs find their groove. I can smell Robbie’s musk now that we’re away from nature’s aromas. He smells like an old book, opened for the first time in centuries.

  ‘See, here's where the ego comes in,’ Robbie starts up, clearing his throat and shuffling around to get comfortable in his endless fidget. ‘Reality is far too infinitely complex to see in its entirety, so we construct the ego to create one perspective, which hunts for shit that confirms its own obscene certainty that it, and only it, is aware of everything.’ He’s back to his old self, moved past the spook of his earlier trip. I surrender my body to him, splaying my arms across his knees like arm rests.

  ‘Collapses the infinity of reality into one perspective?’ Tracey says.

  ‘Uh, yeah. Yeah that's exactly it.’ Robbie's body reanimates beneath me, his knees bouncing me around with a rising wave of nervous energy. I close my eyes to ride the vibes.

  ‘Exactly?’

  ‘Well, exact relative to my perspective.’

  ‘So is the invisible you're talking about the things between perspectives?’

  ‘Yeah, well, according to my - Hey, if we're gonna talk at all, let's assume we're all talking from our own perspectives.’

  ‘That's what talking always is.’

  ‘Yeah, true, alright. But, what I mean is, let's assume that each sentence begins with From my perspective. Like an unspoken disclaimer. I don't want it to sound like I think I'm talking with, like, objective truth, you know?’

  ‘You don't need to say that though. People talk all the time without saying that.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I guess so . . . What was the question?’

  ‘I dunno. Something about a tree falling in the forest . . .’ Tracey laughs in her flattened way, like a black satire of joy. Robbie's getting irritated underneath me so I start him up again.

  ‘Spacey asked if the invisible you're talking about is the things between perspectives.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Well, fuck, I guess . . . Alright, a metaphor. So the truth is like the skeleton, and the flesh is the - think of it as an animal, say, like a, um, I dunno, just like a salamander or something. It's not important which-’

  ‘Get to the point,’ Tracey says.

  ‘Okay, yeah, so like the flesh is your perspective, right? 'Cause that's what - Okay, so the skeleton is the truth, then your own experiences and ego ideas add the flesh. So now you've got what you perceive. But for someone else, or from a different perspective, the beast can look dramatically different in terms of, say, colour and like whether or not it's got fur or anything . . . But the skeleton remains the same. The unseen dimension. And the only way to see the skeleton is to kill the animal, to view an event or thing collectively in hindsight. That way, our perspectives will add up to something real that we can agree on. But it is dead. The moment has passed. It’s like taxidermy. What is needed is wabi sabi, which is, uh . . .’

  ‘So the skeleton could be the super-’

  ‘Wait hang on. I just had a, um, yeah. About the ego. So the ego perspective tends to try to render others invalid, by selectively mining manifestations of the invisible for, like, phenomena, that confirm - 'cause like, our perspectives are real convincing 'cause we only have our perspective of other perspectives to compare it to . . . and when we perceive other perspectives, we fill in the parts we don't understand with our own perspective. So the result is an inferior version of our own perspective. Just, like, a small element of it. So naturally our one seems more valid.’

  ‘So it's varying degrees of exactness and all shitness?’

  ‘Oh right, like Newtonian and quantum mechanics you mean? Yeah, I guess that's like the fundamental yin and yang of what I'm describing. But see with those two, there's like one perspective that sees everything in terms of yin and yang, and the other that sees it as Newtonian or quantum. But neither is truer. In fact, they actually work as a good metaphor for each other. But people holding those conflicting, or, like, seemingly conflicting models, can argue for hours about what it really is. Like this other proverb. Uh, so there's like five different people describing an elephant, and they - but, oh wait, five blind people . . . I think they're blind . . .’

  ‘But it's all all shit, really.’

  ‘Sort of. I mean, ultimately it's all quantum, but sometimes it's useful to use the Newtonian instead. Neither are truer, they just illuminate different parts of the, uh, skeleton. Or elephant. Oh there we go, the skeleton is an elephant’s, now the metaphor works. So uh, yeah . . . What?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘So it's a kind of fourth dimensioning thing?’ Tracey cracks up laughing at her own non joke. Me too, but I don't know why. Maybe just the thought of Tracey finding something funny.

  ‘Well, yeah, I mean, that works as an example of . . . Wait, what's so funny?’ Robbie stiffens up.

  ‘The song,’ Tracey giggles.

  ‘What's funny about it?’

  ‘Drugs, Robbie,’ I remind him.

  ‘Oh yeah.’ He laughs and relaxes into his jitters. I start to snuggle into him a little, but then like a jolt of electricity he's up and leaning forward. ‘Holy shit!’ he shouts right in my ear, ‘Fuck, I got it. Alright so, hang on . . . Yeah, okay, so Newtonian physics, certainty, the rationalistic perspective - Okay, Newtonian physics is omniscience at the price of impotence. And quantum physics, uh, uncertainty, the psychedelic perspective, is, uh . . . omnipotence at the price of ignorance! Yeah, that's good. Cool.’

  Now it's Robbie laughing in disbelief while me and Tracey wait for him to explain himself.

  ‘Okay, so with Newtonian physics, right, so Newtonian physics is based on the premise that everything in the universe can be predicted if we know enough variables. Always gets compared to clockwork when the, uh, scientists try . . . Anyway, so that's omniscience, knowing everything. But it's at the cost of impotence, 'cause like now mankind has no free will - it’s all just the result of chemical and environmental stuff. Determinism. You guys know about determinism right?’

  ‘As of right now, yes,’ Tracey says.

  ‘Yeah, so um . . . quantum physics is, uh, what did I say it was?’

  ‘Probably either yin or yang, I don't know.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Omnipotence at the price of ignorance. It gives man personal agency and ultimate control over his environment, which is now a product of his mind, himself his own thought. But . . . But! At the price of ignorance, 'cause he now has no way of knowing anything for sure, uh, like indeterminacy, indeterminacy as opposed to determinism, uh, knowing the whereabouts of a particle is . . . 'Cause, alright, did you guys know that it's impossible to know where a particle is at the same time as, um . . . uh, on the quantum level it's uh . . .’

  ‘You should sum this up but with exactness and all shitness.’

  ‘Okay, so to be exact is omniscience at the price of impotence . . . and to be all shit is omnipotence at the price of ignorance. With determinism you sacrifice free will for answers. With indeterminacy, you sacrifice answers for free will.’

  ‘Like how you know all this stuff but can't get it up, but Michael's full of shit but always gets what he wants?’

  ‘Hey, you two both know I can get it up,’ Robbie protests. Both Tracey and me make sure not to laugh at him, because it's not often Robbie gets to act like a player.

  Imagining the silence as something nasty, Robbie says, ‘Not to brag, but I actually don't know much about quantum physics. I'm all shit.’ Tracey and me both purr at his strange joke. ‘So keep that in mind, ladies,’ he adds.

  ‘You won't be able to get it up right now,’ Tracey says.

  ‘Nah, probably not.’ The mild pressure on the back of my head tells me he's just being humble. I move more weight onto my head because I don't mind it if this gets weird. It does, in the form of another outburst from Robbie.

  ‘Alright, I got it now,’ he says, pushing into me slightly. ‘So like back to what we were talking about before, about the different perspectives. You guys know about the wave particle duality, right?’

  I shake my head sensually.

  ‘Okay, so basically it's like, the birth of quantum uncertainty. The beginnings of the battle between determinism and indeterminacy. So, right, when they were, like in the early nineteen hundreds . . . Man I am all shit right now,’ pressing into me, ‘Uh, so they were trying to figure out if photons, like, light, uh, units of light, they were trying to figure out if they were waves or particles, since there were competing theories that seemed to confirm both. But what they found, was that light behaved sometimes as waves, and sometimes as particles, and different experiments gave different results. They could basically choose what result they got by how they measured it.’

  He pauses to feel the drugs, running his hand through my hair. It takes me a moment to realise that both of his hands are gesturing in my peripherals, but I close my eyes and enjoy it anyway.

  ‘So, like, 'cause waves and particles are both invisible, you know, products of human consciousness and not the light itself, both just work as interpretations of what light is. But really, the truth lies at a deeper level than science can currently take us. Both particles and waves are just ideas that work well to describe things, up to a point. Both work well to describe what light is for all practical purposes, but when we assume that one is true - which is to say that the other is false - then the whole theory collapses . . . so to speak. And then we realise that the truth is once again out of our grasp. But, like I said before, each step of the way toward truth holds an answer, but none is an answer in any absolute sense.’

  I slide my fingers into Robbie's shoes and he obediently lifts his feet so I can take them off.

  ‘Like . . .’ his body hums with sensuous indulgence as he lets the idea bloom in his mind, ‘like how a plant grows always toward the sun, but never reaches it. Like the way the kabbalistic tree of life goes all the way up to the ineffable. Consciousness grows from malkuth through the spheres toward kether and further into varying degrees of nonexistence, but it remains the ever unattainable point toward which we climb, the force that moves us through the spheres, past anything we can recognise as real . . .’

  Robbie pronounces it re-cognise now.

  ‘So you wanna put a conclusion out there?’ Tracey says, writhing with us to the deep, crashing beats of Freedom of Choice.

  ‘Fuck conclusions. They’re just death in the abstract,’ Robbie says. For a second I think Ned is with us, and I get a fright when I realise he isn't and I'm actually really wasted. The flow of our bodies has become suddenly less rhythmic, and a cold murmur haunts the air. It felt like there was more of us here . . .

  ‘Man, where the fuck is everybody?’ Robbie says. The sudden malaise is tangible, the closeness of our bodies rendering us completely transparent to each other. Where the fuck is everybody?

  ‘They'll be doing something awesome, I'm sure,’ I say, moving us past the worry and back into the situation, ready to lead it towards, but not to, its natural conclusion.

Michael Farmer

Fuckin' loose night, cunt. Fuckin' loose. Bit of a fuckin' nap, staunch through my morning shift, then off to help out the old cunt, then same shit again, hopefully the other cunts'll be up and ready to rage. Fuckin' mean.

18/09/2005

The Guidebook-

It was the acquisition of the teacher's guidebook in childhood that awoke the dormant rebellion within us. It was our first illumination, the original conspiracy.

In the teacher's guidebook, we found our first taste of disillusionment and empowerment, the beginning of our endless yearning for the secrets hidden behind the illusions of reality.

Most of the revelations were unremarkable; perhaps the most illuminating was finding out that every child was to be awarded student of the week at least once per year. Also of note was the advice for dealing with troublesome students by downplaying their transgressions and highlighting their minor accomplishments.

None of these discoveries were illuminating in and of themselves; but together they revealed that these reward systems were in place as a means of control, in much the same way as the brain's reward system exists to reinforce behaviour that increases the organism's chances of survival and therefore reproduction.

From the guidebook, we learned that authority was a game that could be played. We discovered that the systems were in place for reasons other than the obvious. We found out how much of what we were told was lies to keep us in check. Most of all, we found out that the true motivations of authority were shrouded in secrecy.

With black irony, we began to see the teacher's guidebook as a guidebook for ourselves. The book gave teachers guidance in an instructional sense; for us, its guidance was darker, subtler, and more enticing. Rather than instruction, we received guidance through revelation. This was the embryonic seed of an attitude that would follow us well beyond the walls of the school: To find guidance not in the advice of authorities, but in the endless pursuit of the mysterious secrets that lie behind the obvious.

We discovered that through transgression, analysis, and faith in our own genius, we could get a glimpse behind the scenes, at the inner workings of society and reality. It awakened within us a lust for mystery, and the fires of rebellion.

19/09/2005

Crossroads-

Two days have passed and Collin and Ned have yet to return. My anxiety continues to grow. Part of this is my faith in Lucy’s intuition: She had felt it important to keep Collin and ketamine separate. Though she was unable to explain exactly why, experience has taught me to trust her vague fears. And yet, as if by some preternatural magnetism, ketamine had ended up in Collin’s hands.

Collin’s erratic behaviour seemed to reach a crescendo that night. Transcribing my own notes from my voyage has been put on hold as I try to decipher our cryptic exchange. He seemed to be referring to the same Christian virus he often spoke of, but what he once viewed with contempt now seemed to fill him with genuine terror. I saw a new desperation in Collin that night.

As for Ned, I have even less clues. Though his behaviour that night was bizarre, it was not out of character. Lucy has been in a restive state since then; and, when questioned about the significance of her exchange with Ned, assured me he was fine and that I shouldn’t be worried. When questioned about Collin she was silent, eventually responded by eating some Valium and going back to sleep.

With an unsent message to Michael typed out on my phone, I’m starting to think I should do the same.

Tiny Black Holes

Robbie Marks

There had been so many signs that pointed to this event, but none which stood up to the test of sanity. Over the last few weeks, my seemingly primitive superstitions had painted a clear picture of Collin's gradual - as opposed to sudden, as it would appear to the sane - departure from the world he shared with the rest of us. The obsessions that animated him drifted ever further from the manifest, beyond even the metaphysical, into a darker, spectral realm, before vanishing into the mists of something impenetrable. Talk of beginnings and ends, of undefined departures and unknown possibilities, were ever present in our conversations, most of which were only understood by Collin as he spoke in an increasingly foreign code - all feeding my absurd but powerful intuition that his death had been a decision, an idea manifesting from his inflamed, fractured logic, gaining momentum until it overpowered everything; its execution an inevitable step in the grand meraki of his existence.

  Lucy and I wandered silently through the bush, Lucy incoherent with grief, me silently searching for something formless, something that would make sense of it all within the narrative of our journey. The elusive end to my search eventually found its Malkuthian form when Lucy finally spoke as we stared out into the afternoon traffic from the cliff side.

  ‘Where can we go?’

  It was a frightening question, one that my roaming mind had forcefully avoided, knowing on some deep, nauseating level that it would soon have to be dealt with. At present, Collin's house was crawling with cops, as Collin's toxicology report detected the presence of Dextroamphetamine, cannabis, LSD, 2C-E, and Ketamine; Hayden, who the body had originally been identified as, was well known to the police after his brief jail-stint earlier in the year. I had managed to leave with my bag full of substances without getting searched, but it was obvious we could never return. It went without saying that neither of us could return to our parental homes; facing up to our families was something we had put off for so long that it had lost all practical meaning, growing into frightening prospects in the dark corners of our minds as we busied ourselves with our new life; it would be too much to deal with on top of the confusion and despair we already felt. We needed a new smultronstalle to deal with this; the one thing that was clear was that we would have to stick together.

  By sunset, desperation lead us to Michael's apartment. When he answered the door, Lucy and I were both paralysed as we tried to finally say out loud what had dominated our minds all day. Michael understood immediately that something important had happened, and his smile turned into a look of fear that switched between Lucy and I. ‘Fuck, you gotta spit it out cunts. We can't stand here all night sweating at each other,’ he said. Lucy only managed to utter Collin's name, and Michael swallowed deeply and nodded, before inviting us in.

  In Michael's room, he poured us each a glass of cask wine and lit up a joint. It was a relief to be in his company, as he was unaffected by the hiraeth that had cloaked Lucy and I in shocked silence. He paced around the room, grieving out loud, ‘Fuck's sake. Shit ain't fuckin' right man. Goodest cunt ever, fuckin' hell strike from above man, fuckin' hell....’ Though his words were simplified by raw anguish, it was comforting to hear, as my own abstract manner of speech was of no use in such circumstances. He ended up smoking the last half of the joint to himself, seemingly lost in the thoughts he spoke aloud. Much of what he said was cliché, the kinds of things people say in such situations as if reading from a script: ‘Always the fuckin' good that die young. At least the cunt died doing what he loved eh, wandering around the bush fucked up on drugs. What the fuck can you do though?’ These now actually had meaning to me, and I understood that they were like shards of glass washed up from the ocean, their sharp edges worn smooth into jewels. We drank wine for a few hours, talking about our varied appreciation of our fallen friend. Michael told us that Ned had been with Stan for the last few days, settling another deep, unvoiced concern.

  Throughout the evening, Michael's Mum had been bursting into his room periodically to engage Michael in incoherent shouting matches that built in intensity. One visit climaxed with her slapping him across the face and storming off with threats to get someone called Jojo around, and Michael told us that it was best we weren't there. I traded half of my LSD for a few trays of Dextroamphetamine, and we went our separate ways, promising one another to stay in contact as events unfold.

  Slightly loosened up by wine and Michael's candour, Lucy and I decided on a course of action. Walking in the direction of my parents’ house, we talked openly about death and our experiences with it. Though neither of us had experienced a loss like this before, Lucy's younger brother's illness made mortality an ever-present thought in her home life, further shifting my perspective on life and death from being a black-and-white concept to a spectrum of many dimensions.

  It was almost midnight when we reached my house. Lucy waited at the bus stop while I entered the garage with the spare key hidden beneath a pot plant. I took the one-person tent and a sleeping bag and left silently, my alienation from my old life highlighted by the bizarre act of robbing my parents, but my mind focused on getting Lucy and I through the night. Exhausted by the events of the day, we didn't bother pitching the tent, and instead slept under the summer night stars in a small clearing in the woods, not far from where Collin's naked corpse was found. I fell quickly into a broken sleep; whenever I looked to Lucy during the night she was staring wide-eyed at the stars. The few dreams I had were haunted by Collin.

  We rose early in the morning and set off hitchhiking north, aiming for peace and quiet at Ellis Lake. It took us over an hour to get our first ride - a bespectacled middle-aged man who told us stories about the seventies - but the next few rides came almost instantly, and we ended up in Ellis in under three hours. We stashed the tent in some dense shrubs by the lake and spent the afternoon and evening wandering around the small town like tourists, visiting the stalls and listening to the buskers that populated the lake-front walkway. We had less than thirty dollars between us, so I bought a loaf of bread and filled my pockets with lunch meat and condiments, as well as Band-Aids for Lucy's blisters.

  We ate our food by the lake as the sun started to leave the sky, talking about our uncertain futures without Collin's influence. Lucy mentioned the art school in Watson, a few towns north; my earlier plan to deal drugs on a commercial scale had become a frightening prospect, the dangers of our path now painfully clear. I decided that my future was too complex to consider at present, as my mind was obsessively drifting back to memories of Collin and the ideas he worked so tirelessly to spread. I said this to Lucy, and she pointed out that this was no different than when he was alive, before admitting that she was also unable to get Collin out of her mind for more than a moment at a time. This resulted in us both staring into the darkening lake in silent awe at what an amazing person he had been, and how lucky we were to be a part of his short life. Once tiredness got the better of us, we retrieved the tent and took it through the bushes to a distant northern corner of the lake, hidden from public view. Lucy set it up as I stood by with a flashlight, and we went to sleep in each other’s arms.

  The next morning, we awoke with the first breath of sun and made love in the shallow shore, before going swimming and drying off naked in the rising sun. Lucy was feeling the beginnings of a flu, and decided she was ready to go home to her Mum's. Enticed by the idea of solitude in an unknown town, I decided I still wasn't ready to depart. Once we were dry, we left the tent up and headed into the township and found a bus that was heading south at eleven o'clock; the tickets were twenty dollars, leaving me with seven. We wandered around together for a few hours while we waited, promising to stay in contact while we were apart. At eleven, we kissed goodbye, and I watched the bus hiss and roll away.

  Now alone with my thoughts, I spent most of the day wandering along the lake-side walkway, appreciating the break from my obsessions. I still found myself unable to get my head around the details of Collin's death, fruitlessly examining the facts from many angles. I couldn't help but feel like there was a space inside me I couldn't reach, a point that linked together all of my separate notions and feelings. I decided I was either repressing an area of my psyche unconsciously, or just didn't think too well sober. On that thought, I swallowed some dexies and left my mind to sort itself out.

  Feeling confident and stimulated, I made my way to the supermarket and managed to steal a bottle of wine while buying some orange juice; shoplifting was becoming more fluid and intuitive, though I still followed the instructions Collin had given me years ago that I had always been afraid to act upon. Heading toward the library, I checked what time the Pizza Hut closed, another plan formulating in my mind, and had a line in some public toilets. I stayed in the library until it closed, reading New Scientist and Nexus magazines, as well as a few disappointing books on the Qabalah and other esoteric topics. I waited near the water until it was almost closing time for Pizza Hut, and rang up to order three large pizzas, which I took from the dumpster half an hour later.

  On my way back to my tent, I came across a friendly group of people drinking by the lake. They looked around Hayden's age, and I decided to share my pizzas with them, feeling a strange kind of abandon that seemed to be borne of helplessness: L'appel du vide. I helped myself to their beers and we smoked a joint together, though I stayed fairly quiet and enjoyed the unquestioning hospitality. Once we were all feeling drunk, they started asking me questions, and I found myself talking openly about the events of the last few days. They were sympathetic, and I ended up telling them stories about Collin and his philosophies, glowing with pride on his behalf. As another couple joined us, I was introduced to them as a rad kid who had run away from home. Though I didn't identify as a runaway, I enjoyed the romance of the idea, and eventually realised that it was an accurate assessment. I thought about how much Collin would have loved this kind of freedom, and became withdrawn again, longing for his company. I left the group to ring Lucy, but found that my phone had run out of battery and headed back to the group to drink some more.

  At around three o'clock, I went back with Willy and Emma to their flat to spend the night, noting a large San Pedro growing at a house on the way. At their flat, I put my phone on charge and we smoked a skinny joint and ate some noodles before they went to sleep, leaving me a stretcher and some blankets. I waited until my phone was somewhat charged and borrowed a gym bag and knife and set off to get the cactus; I stole about four-foot, leaving the majority to recover. Then I stole a small stack of newspaper from outside a corner store, and spent the last few hours of darkness skinning and slicing the cactus by the lake.

  Once the shops were open, I spent my last few dollars on a cooking pot from the supermarket, shoplifting a small bottle of water. On the way back to my tent, I finished my bottle of wine and filled it and the empty orange juice bottle with water. By the time I got to camp, I was so tired I went to sleep on the grass in the sun.

  The night cold broke my slumber and I set about building a fire. Once that was going, I called Lucy and we talked until I ran out of credit. I was disappointed to hear that she'd been taking her Mum's Valium and spending most of her time watching TV. ‘I just don't want to keep on crying,’ she said. ‘It just happens out of nowhere. I'm sick of not knowing when it's gonna happen. At least with Valium I know it's gonna happen when it wears off.’ I apologised for being judgemental, and we both agreed that she should try to use weed instead. She said she wanted me to come back, and I told her that I would set off in the morning if I wasn't too tired. Once we were together, we would figure out where to go next. There was too much to think about alone.

  I boiled the cactus in deep meditation throughout the night, occasionally venturing through the bush to the campsite for clean water. Once the concoction was down to a litre or so, I siphoned it into the orange juice bottle and the Pump bottle with the last remaining pages of the newspaper, before washing off the handle of my torch, which I'd been using to stir it, and having a short sleep.

  I awoke with the sun, packed down the tent, and set off through the bush. I took a dexie to fight my exhaustion and hunger, which had grown to the point of being oppressive in the northern summer heat. I left the knife and gym bag on Willy and Emma's lawn as I passed, and went to the city limits to hitch, wondering what kind of fictions they would create to explain my transgression.

  It took almost an hour to get my first ride, as I was probably starting to look a bit haggard, and the inactivity served to turn my fatigue into a kind of daze; I was so lost in thought that I hadn't noticed that a van had pulled over until a passing car beeped at me to point it out. It was a French couple who looked around thirty and spoke broken English but seemed to understand me fine. Though tired and starting to fantasise about sleep, I found that through all of this socialising I had learned to control other people's moods a bit more. They brought me lunch at Subway in Newton, and I had a line in the toilets before setting off.

  Standing in the sun with my thumb out, I began to understand Ned's love of hitchhiking; it felt good having no idea what kind of situation I was about to be in. Unfortunately, my next ride turned out to be Kent, a friend of my Dad's, who had been up north to pick up a computer. He spent the first ten minutes telling me what a selfish bastard I had been; but I felt solid and fearless, like Collin, and told him simply that I had been on my own journey. After a while, he cooled down, and spent the rest of the car ride telling me stories about Dad's youth as a self-proclaimed lady's man. I told him to drop me at the city limits, but he explained that he felt obliged to take me to my parents’ house, which I understood.

  It was the late afternoon by the time he dropped me off. I knew he was going to wait in his car to make sure I didn't run away, so I tensed up and cleared my head for confrontation, before knocking on the front door.

  ‘Robbie,’ Mum gasped, shocked, when she opened the door.

  We stood in silence for a moment before I said, ‘I took your tent. Sorry,’ and dumped it on the doorstep. She surprised me by laughing and hugging me tight, as she did when I was a child.

  I followed her inside and Dad emerged from the hallway, still in his work clothes. He stopped in his tracks when he noticed me. ‘You and me need to have a talk,’ he said severely. I nodded and braced myself, and spent the next ten minutes once again getting told what a selfish little bastard I'd been. My unflinching stance seemed to unsettle him, leading to an even more aggressive line of accusations about my attitude in general. I understood that he was simply playing his role as Father, and that it was probably pretty unpleasant for him too, so I let him finish before saying, ‘I'm sorry Dad. And Mum. I know I've been selfish.’ They accepted my apology.

  We sat down at the table and ate leftover roast chicken and mashed potatoes, both of them concerned with how skinny I was. I explained to them what I had been up to since Collin's death, and their tone changed from accusing to sympathetic. Mum was disturbed by the reckless streak I had developed, but Dad eventually forced her to admit that it was a healthy way to deal with loss, reminding her not to forget what it was like to be young.

  I had a long shower and pretended to watch the news with Dad until Lucy turned up at the door, and we went into the woods to smoke a joint. Lucy told me that she'd been having long conversations with Collin in her mind; I realised that I'd been doing the same, and we concluded that he had only died in body. I told Lucy about my adventures, and she said we could probably store the Mescaline at Michael's place, where she had been hanging out with him and Tracey. The weed sapped the last of my energy, so Lucy offered to take the Mescaline with her so I could sleep. We said goodbye and walked in separate directions home through the woods. I walked straight through the door to my old bedroom and collapsed face-first on my bed. I slept in that position for fifteen hours.

  The next morning, I had toast for breakfast and spent the day with Mum as she cleaned the house and worked in the garden. I found out that Mum had been reading a bit about Buddhism and we talked about meditation; she had been curious, but never went so far as to actually try it out as she wasn't convinced by the supposed benefits - though after a line of questioning, she admitted that it is probably her concern about breaking the normality of her western life that was stopping her. When she started asking questions about what I had been doing, and I told her briefly about my studies of mysticism and the sciences, though I avoided the topic of drugs. Noting my studious nature, she suggested studying these subjects at University; it was an interesting thought, and I entertained it for a moment before deciding it was probably not too likely. I told her that I was on the benefit because I didn't want to own up to drug dealing, and we talked about finding me a flat and a job.

  Once Dad got home, they once again tried to steer the conversation toward my future, which I interpreted as another manifestation of their parental role-playing. The topic of drugs came up, and I channelled Collin's stray words and managed to paint a nice picture of hallucinogenic plants by referencing their use as a sacrament in tribal culture. Though they seemed open to the possibility of drugs having beneficial uses, they kept reminding me about what happened to Collin, Mum fixated on how his parents must feel. I assured them that the events had changed my outlook too, but pointed out that Collin's recklessness far exceeded my own. Dad's curiosity about Shamanic culture made me think that he was actually pretty switched-on in his own way, but his constant questions about how this information is going to help me navigate the ‘real world’ reminded me that he was still quite primitive in his thinking. By dinner time, I had agreed to start thinking about my future, and retreated to my room to write down a theory that was spawning within me regarding the movement of knowledge through generations.

  As I was falling asleep, I realised that I had been using manifest reality, rather than the Qabalah, to navigate my existence, and concluded that the events had served as a kind of reality check that finally connected me to Malkuth. I wondered if it was, in fact, simply the result of abstaining from hallucinogens for an unusually long period of time, but let the thought go before it broke the spell and took me away from Malkuth. I then masturbated in victory - a toast to Malkuth.

  Lucy and I met up at the Botanicals the next day, and she revealed that Collin's funeral was to be held on Wednesday at the Hall of Science, a testament to his Mother's staunch atheism. I suggested we take Mescaline for it, but Lucy was hesitant, reminding me of our earlier conclusion that we had been living too dangerously. She said it might be disrespectful to take at a funeral, but I disagreed, thinking of Collin's infectious l'appel du vide. We parted ways without reaching an agreement, but I knew my words had convinced her - because they were Collin's words.

  I spent most of the next few days alone in the woods with my notebook. I had a feeling that I was once again departing from Malkuth toward Yesod, and realised that that thought, being Qabalistic in language, was a confirmation of itself. I concluded that Malkuth was not a place to stay for too long, and that one should remain mobile in their placement within the Tree; while a brief re-acquaintance with Malkuth is necessary to make use of one's inspiration, one should only stay there long enough to measure his insights against the harsh eye of reality, rest and refuel - perhaps even play some ego games - before venturing out once more.

  On Tuesday night, after finishing the draft on my theory of generational intelligence and creating a visual representation for it, I messaged Michael to ask if he was awake. He replied immediately: ‘alwayz cunt’, and I set off to pick up the Mescaline. Tracey was there, and the three of us drank beer and smoked weed for a few hours. As he bragged about his new role at work, I knew that that the Malkuthian spell of humility that Collin's death had cast on him had faded, and remembered that I didn't actually like him that much. Still, after spending time with so many dull-minded straight people over the last week, I appreciated how free-spirited and authentic he really was. In the past, I had often wondered why Collin enjoyed Michael's company so much; but my faith in Collin's perception assured me there was something to him.

  I rose with the sun the next morning, as had become my habit, my mind ablaze with fragments of my dreams with Collin. I packed my bag and headed toward the woods, chugging the gag-inducing slime of enlightenment, energised by the horrible taste and the gastric spasms it caused, but determined to get at least half a litre into me without vomiting. I messaged Lucy to meet me at the DMT spot in the woods so we could go to the funeral together, and talked to Collin into my Dictaphone, more determined than ever to channel his l'appel du vide thanks to the realisation that my scar had finally faded.

27/10/2005

Loss-

My best friend and mentor has died. My scar has faded. The internal map of symbolism by which I understand and analyse my world has become non-sensical. It seems that even as we drifted apart, Collin held an enormous influence over my understanding of the world. As his mind began to splinter, as did my internal language become chaotic, borrowing words and concepts from different belief systems and even different languages in an attempt to explain a reality that was becoming ever more bizarre. Without Collin's philosophy as a barrier, I am forced to stand naked before reality, vulnerable to the raw chaos of my emotion and sensation. I suppose all I can really do is stop attempting to understand...

The four phases of human ideology: A theory of the evolution of human ideas throughout lifetimes and generations-

Phase One- The point

infancy-childhood

Monotheistic; total devotion to ideal

As the organism is fresh from the void, it has no preconceived notions; it is a blank piece of paper, a psychic petri dish. It strives to live up to the ideals imprinted upon it by authority figures. These are parents and later teachers. Its will is unidirectional as it seeks to satisfy those who hold power over it.

Phase Two- The line

Adolescence

Countercultural; exists in opposition to the ideals of Phase One, but still within the confines

As all things cannot exist in dualistic reality without an opposite, a second point is naturally spawned in opposition to the first. These two points connect, forming a line that is a spectrum of possibilities between the two points. The organism seeks to reject the ideal imposed upon it during Phase One, naturally adopting an opposing viewpoint. The organism will naturally seek out surroundings that provide an opposing ideal - in human experience, this is usually found in peer groups, or, for the introverted, in pre-existing philosophical or intellectual ideologies. Phase Two is no more enlightened than Phase One, as it has simply replaced its former object of worship with another less familiar one; Phase Two exists in preparation for Phase Three.

Phase Three- The triangle

The cusp of adulthood

Agnostic; is unwilling to accept or reject ideals outright

The contrarian impulse of Phase Two exists to remove the influence of Phase One imprinting, returning the organism to a blank state similar to that of Phase One. The line is now a plane - the triangle - representing three arrows pointing outward from the middle. The organism actively seeks out new ideologies beyond the monotheistic continuum of Phase One and Two. New beliefs and modes of operating are tested, accepted, and rejected un-selectively, as the organism attempts to fill the void created by the rejection of its initial imprint. It is rare for an ideology to be accepted unquestioningly as it had been during Phase One; rather each ideology indulged in is seen to have some aspects that are of value as well as some that are not. This naturally leads to the wisdom that is the basis of Phase Four.

Phase Four- The cube

Adulthood

Pantheistic; accepts the validity of differing beliefs while committing itself to whichever ideals are most suitable to its own environment

Having rejected its initial imprinting and explored multiple possibilities, the organism has now settled on whichever belief resonates personally with its own nature and ambitions. The tendency is for the organism to find its way back to its Phase One programming, having learnt from Phase Three explorations that each belief is as flawed but valid as any other. The result is a refined version of the Phase One ideology, with outdated aspects removed during Phase Two and replaced with relevant aspects of other ideologies mined during Phase Three. At this point, the organism has developed a fully personalised ideology to imprint upon others, and a desire to reproduce will usually arise – if not biologically, then by some abstract or mimetic means. With the corners of the cube worn smooth by the trials of life, the glyph becomes a sphere: The new Point that is imprinted onto its offspring, continuing the infinitely fractal geometry of evolution.

Arrested development occurs when there is a blockage at any of the phases. Examples include: Overbearing religious imprinting during Phase One; cults who target the vulnerable minds during Phase Two for indoctrination and brainwashing; the indecisiveness that results when one is paralysed by the endless possibilities of Phase Three; and the inability of some to put their Phase Four ideology into the battlezone of manifest reality in order to wear its jagged surface smooth, and the resulting withdrawal from the unpredictability of the human experience.

The lifespan of genes and ideas have no inherent limitations; they may be killed off or simply phased out if they lose the strength to compete in the ecosystem.

Tracey Colombera

I get a text back from Rory saying that they're all at Damon's. I had to text them because no one really texts Michael back anymore. He seems to think it's important to make sure they all come to Collin's funeral.

  ‘That's what it's gotta be about today. The fuckin' crew, cunt. It's no good if the whole fuckin' crew's not there.’ He's walking along with a bottle of gross white wine in one hand and a joint in the other, only stopping his rant to take a swig or a puff. ‘Gotta pay your respects, cunt, that's all I'm saying. Don't get me wrong, this shit's freaked me out too. But there's a time when cunts've gotta man up and face up to shit. I ain't saying this shit's not gonna be awkward as fuck, I'm just saying it's something we gotta do.’

  I haven't really felt anything about what's happened yet. I know I don't feel good about it. It just doesn't feel like he's gone yet. It's hard to think about someone being gone. It's hard to think about anything being gone.

  ‘Fuck, I just wish the cunt was around to have his say on the whole thing. He always explained shit good as. He's just the cunt who - Aight, that's us.’ He nods at the public toilets on Finch street. Looks like we're having another line. Michael's been taking even more drugs than usual since Collin died. I woke up stoned just from sleeping in his room this morning. He was already wired and drunk. I don't know if he even went to sleep.

  We have a line each in the toilets. He wants me to give him head but we only have half an hour before the funeral. Not that it'll take him more than a few minutes to blow his load, but then he'll want to roll another joint. We still have to get to Damon's first. Apparently. So I lead us back out into the street.

  ‘Fuckin' shit getting all weird when Endy Ned shows up in town, as usual. Collin's bad enough with the drugs anyway, but get those cunts together and it's over. Aye, don't look at me like I'm-’

  He stops walking and gets out his vibrating phone. ‘And this cunt can fuck off too.’ He's about to throw his phone at the ground, but changes his mind and answers it. I kind of wanted him to throw it. It's so satisfying to watch flip top phones break.

  ‘Yeah, what the fuck do you want then? Uh huh, yep, well fuckin' surprise surprise. Well you know where I'm off to? Callahan's funeral, cunt. And you'd better - No, you fuckin' listen to me for a change, cunt. You cunts better fuckin' well be there or I'm gonna...Oi, it's called fuckin' respect, cunt. Respect for the dead. You'd better...No, you'd better fuckin'...Aye, just shut the fuck up and...FUUUUUUUCK!’

  He throws his phone at the ground and plastic scatters everywhere. Wasn't as satisfying as I thought it would be.

  ‘Wrong number?’ I ask.

  ‘Meathead fucks.’ We start walking again, much faster now that Michael is upset. ‘That cunt's just crossed the fuckin' line. Thinks he's tough 'cause he beats up wasters. Big whoop, cunt. Just 'cause the rest of us don't spend our whole fuckin' lives circle jerking around a punchbag. He doesn't know who I know. Dad's mates and shit, actual hard cunts. Actual fuckin' psychos.’

  I'm guessing it was Lance or Jordan. I'd like to see them get their asses kicked. By lifelong drug users, too. That would be some sweet justice.

  Michael is quiet now and I don't know what to think about. He talks so much that I forget I'm supposed to have my own thoughts. I try to think about Collin again, but it doesn't work so I start Michael up again.

  ‘How do you think you'd do in a one on one with Lance?’

  ‘One on one with Lance? That'll be the fuckin' day. Him and his mates running round like a pack of fuckin' dogs...’

Ned Devlin

‘Nah, let's go around. I really don't feel like walking through a crowd of school kids right now... Fuck, man, I still don't know what to think about this shit. I mean, most of the time I hated the cunt. And him dying doesn't change that, even if it's supposed to, respect for the departed or whatever... But then, sometimes I fuckin' loved him. Actually, I usually had a good time when we hung out. Just like his sense of humour and shit, just like... But whenever I look back on it, I put the pieces together and I'm just like fuck, the guy's a total psychopath. I dunno man. Like, what do you think about that? I know you guys were friends and shit, but do you really think he was a good person?’

  The Sun, while illuminating and giving Life to the entire planet, is entirely without intent. Life organises to accommodate the Rhythms of the Sun.

  ‘Well yeah, I could see that. But it's different with you though, Ned. In all the fucked up states you got yourself in, you never hurt anyone besides yourself. At least not directly. That's kinda the fucked thing though, man. Collin was always the one I thought would be okay. Like with you and Robbie, even Lucy, I was never sure. I always wanted the best for you guys. But with Collin... It's like, I felt okay wanting bad shit to happen to him, 'cause I felt like it never would. It was mostly you that I worried about. All of us did. But not just 'cause you weren't in control like Collin was. It's 'cause you were always a good cunt and I never wanted anything bad to happen to you. You never hurt anyone.’

  The Moon exerts an equally vital but more subtle Force upon the planet. Disregarding its gravitational influence, its Rhythm shapes Life on Earth on a primarily psychological level.

  ‘Yeah I guess so... But that's just 'cause he was too smart to be straight up about things. But then, at the same time, maybe he did make me a better person. I mean, I'm all fucked up and crazy now, but before Collin fucked with me I was just like... nothing, man. No opinions, no passions, no original thoughts... But then this just sounds exactly like some shit Collin'd say to justify himself. Like my mental illnesses are just growing pains or some shit. Like he took me somewhere better and I just couldn't fuckin' hack it. I sorta feel like that's what Collin does though. Or did. Other people were always there to justify his shit.’

  The Light at the end of the tunnel shines brighter than the entrance. The grass is always greener on the other side of a minefield.

  ‘Fuck, I really don't understand some of the shit you come out with. All I'm saying is that whatever his, like, ultimate goal or end game or whatever was... The dude definitely had a sadistic side. Like, he spiked my drink with acid or something one night. I don't care what kind of fucked up philosophies you got behind you. You can't justify that shit.’

  Aphotic Life is that which grows in the absence of Light. Could there be a psychological equivalent to Aphotica? Is there a part of the ecosystem of the Mind that thrives in the darkest corners?

  ‘Well, I guess it wasn't all that bad. I pretty much just skated around all night. But fuck, man... I just didn't feel like fuckin' tripping balls that night… you know? I was finally starting to wind down and then nope, now I'm gonna be tripping for the next fuckin' twelve hours. He wasn't doing me a favour, that's for sure.’

  In the same way that Life in the Aphotic zone has an imperceptible but immeasurably vital influence on the totality of terrestrial Life, could the Aphotic corners of the Mind be just as vital to the functioning of the organism as the luminous regions? And if so, would illuminating these dark corners constitute a positive or negative act?

  ‘Like, I know it was prolly just his way of getting back at me. But he fuckin' deserved what he got... And it's not about him and Lucy, as much as everyone would fuckin' love it to be... Well, fuck, it kinda was about Lucy. It wasn't about me and Lucy, I mean... I reckon it's just 'cause I called him out on his shit. It's almost like he was tryna drive me insane to kill my credibility. Like a way of covering his tracks. I guess driving someone insane is just as permanent as killing them.’

  And therein lies the question: What is it about? Can something with so many variables truly be about anything? Or is it merely a pattern at the mercy of an infinity of independent and often competing Forces?

  ‘Yeah, pretty much. Just everything, man. Everything he did over the time we were... Fuck, you know what? I'm just gonna shut up about this. We're on the way to his funeral and I'm on about what a cunt he was. I'm not really superstitious or anything but... yeah, it's kinda bad form.’

  Save it for his eulogy. In a world of such complexity, can anything really be a positive or negative thing?

  ‘Fuck, I reckon he's actually be into that. Like some fucked up posthumous roast. Dude had a twisted sense of humour... I don't think I could ever talk at a funeral, though. I could see Michael getting up there. Maybe even Robbie. It'd be cool if he did. He always had a good way of putting things... Man, it's gonna be weird seeing everyone again... Jesus, Robbie and Lucy must be totally devastated man. Those guys are like a family. And you too, Ned. Fuck. This is gonna be a weird fucking day... You ever been to a funeral before? This’ll be my first one as a consenting adult.’

  Full stops are just tiny black holes.

  ‘Huh? Hey, let's cut through the park. I'm pretty sure it comes out behind the hall.’

  Or are black holes enormous full stops in the tale of the cosmos?

Tracey Colombera

Damon's brother Gaz answers the door with a smile but Michael shoves right past him towards Damon's room. Even Damon's older sister Donna in a miniskirt only gets a glance out of him. He bursts into Damon's room and says ‘Alright cunts, we're off. Hall of science, let's go.’

  ‘Hold up there Fido, breathe a sec’ Stan says. Everyone's here. Stan, Amelia, Damon, Rory, and Jeremy. Rory and Jeremy are still asleep on the floor, and Stan's awake but still lying on the stretcher. Damon and Amelia are up and dressed, but Amelia's rolling a joint and they don't look like they're planning to go anywhere.

  ‘Nah nah, we only got ten minutes, let's move’ Michael says. He walks over to Rory and Jeremy and kicks them both awake.

  ‘Aye, aye...lad...up to...fuck.’ Rory's got a hangover.

  ‘Callahan's funeral, cunts. We got ten minutes, up you get. Come on. Almost fuckin' three o'clock and shit ya lazy motherfuckers.’

  ‘...Ah, think we missed the boat with that one there brutus’ Rory says. ‘We're all wrecked as shit. Bit of a breathe and we'll get the wake.’

  ‘The wake? Fuck off. Not today cunts. Collin's funeral for fuck's sake. Let's do this. Up!’

  ‘Hey, breather, like, we were talking about it just now’ Damon says. ‘It's like, the wake's where it's at. Funeral's always just like, nice clothes and that. No lad here's got-’

  ‘No one who knows Callahan's got nice clothes you dumb fuck. Come on, let's do this.’ Everyone is avoiding his eyes as he glares around the room. He gives Jeremy a solid boot in the guts.

  ‘Ah! What the fuck oi?’

  ‘Get the fuck up. You got ten seconds before you get another one.’

  ‘Aye, just breathe aight? We'll catch the wake, all goods.’

  Michael kicks him again. Amelia stands up and gets between them.

  ‘Ease, alright? We're coming. Right lads?’ she says. She looks around the room but everyone's tense. ‘Collin's funeral, come on. Collin. Our friend.’

  Everyone shuffles around a bit then Damon goes ‘Yeah, mahs. Lads?’ and stands up.

  ‘Not fuckin' mahs, cunt. This is it. Last time we'll see Callahan before he's fuckin' worm food’ Michael says.

  ‘Ah, yep, good point. Defo’ Damon says. ‘Come on lads. Defo?’

  ‘Defo’ Stan says finally. Rory and Jeremy fall in line, as always.

  ‘Good shit, cunts. Stan, give us your keys. Everyone in, clown car steeze’ Michael says.

  ‘Zero, bud, not a chance. We're all-’

  ‘Nup, we're driving, already gonna be late as fuck. Chuck us your keys, I'll get it started.’

  ‘Yeah, we got this. Clown car steeze, right?’ Amelia says, a rare moment of solidarity between her and Michael.

  ‘Fuckin' aye’ Michael says, glowing. ‘Stan, keys.’

  Stan shrugs and pats around the floor for his jeans and tosses the keys to Michael. 

  ‘Sweet, that's us, cunts.’

  ‘Michael, I'm glad you came 'round to get us all going and that but...’ Amelia starts.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You're not planning on wearing that stupid fucking hat there, are you?’

  Michael is wearing a neon green cap with a flap covering his neck.

  ‘Fuckin' aye, got this shit from Callahan himself. And this hoodie. Good as cunt, always sorting out the crew.’

  ‘I'll back you up on that shit, boldy’ Rory says. ‘Lads?’

  ‘Oath.’

  ‘Oath, I already got his jacket on. I got something you can wear’ Damon says, looking at Amelia.

  ‘...Fuck it. Let's do it’ Amelia says.

  Michael nods and heads out the door followed by me, Damon, and Amelia in Collin's old fedora. We go down the stairs and onto the street.

  ‘So that you on my lap then, love?’ Michael says to Amelia, leaning on Stan's car, spinning the keys around his finger like a dirtbag.

  ‘What the fuck do you think?’

  ‘Fuckin' fair enough then. Alright cunts. We're off.’ He heads around to the front seat. I take shotgun, with Amelia and Damon and then Rory in the back.

  ‘Lads'll be a sec’ Rory slams his door shut.

  ‘Well that's them in the fuckin' boot then. Hey-’ He stares around the car at us. ‘What's with this seatbelt shit? You think I'm gonna crash or something?’ Which reminds me to put mine on.

  ‘That's just what normal people do, Michael. Breathe’ Amelia says.

  ‘Aye, fuck all that shit. Fuckin'...whatever. Your funeral’ he says, then clicks and adds ‘Collin's funeral, cunt.’

  ‘Just try not to crash alright bud?’ Stan says.

  ‘Just fuck up if you don't have anything useful to say, right?’ We all sit in silence for him to catch the irony of the statement, which he doesn't. ‘Aye, you got that joint Damo?’

  ‘Uh...’

  ‘I got it’ Amelia says.

  ‘Fuckin' oath’ Michael says, before turning the car on and flicking through the radio.

Lucy Winters

I wasn't sure whether mescaline was a good idea . . . but at least now the doubt is gone. Only now it's more than doubt, a kind of dread, endless streams of questions like DNA strands, illuminating my growing fear . . . Who are all these people? Where is Ned? Where is Michael? Tracey? Hayden? Who am I supposed to be at a funeral? Who am I ever supposed to be? Am I supposed to know? Does anyone know? I'm sure Collin did. A sudden urge to take valium sits just above my stomach. I try to turn it into a craving for weed, but I know it's a lie. At least I know that.

  ‘Let's just go in,’ Robbie says. ‘It's only the older people who are dressed up for this . . . Who gives a fuck what they think anyway?’

  ‘I don't feel very good . . .’

  ‘It's just come up anxiety. We all get it. Come on, just stay with me.’

  I grip his arm tight and let him guide me through the parking lot confusion into the hall. An enormous Megalodon hangs from the ceiling, its jaw foreboding but its eyes mourning. People move past us with purpose as we spin slow circles together, disorienting ourselves into clarity, then in line with the black human river. Robbie's talking to an older lady I don't recognise, his words muted by all the movement. I never really thought of Collin as having a family before. He made his own family . . . But where are they all? Where is our family?

  We move with the black herd down the hall and through an enormous archway into another room. It’s like those rooms politicians argue in, but somehow mystical, religious . . . The afternoon sun blazes emeralds and sapphires through the enormous stained glass windows that stretch from the floor to the ceiling, a sad glow resting on the slowly filling room.

  ‘Seed Freaks, second row,’ Robbie says, leads me down the stairs, the podium growing as we approach. The almost silent organ music gives way to a rising sound I recognise as Animals by Pink Floyd. Collin's favourite.

  Sensing my need to be enclosed, Robbie stops and lets me through to sit next to Alan, closing me in on the other side.

  ‘I hope someone takes the stage soon,’ Alan breathes, in lieu of a greeting. ‘No one knows what's going on.’

  ‘Yeah . . .’ My voice sounds distant and Robbie's hand on mine seems somehow overbearing . . . Each wave of mescaline is getting stronger and stronger, building into something unknown, something threatening. It was supposed to make me feel closer to Collin, but I feel further away than ever. I can't even picture him. I wonder if his body is here? Maybe the cold of a final touch will make it all make sense . . .

  ‘Cup of tea?’ Irena asks softly.

  ‘Is it . . .’

  ‘It's the good kind. Robbie?’

  Robbie waves her off, but I nod.

  ‘I'll go get you a cup.’ She gets up from her seat and moves silently towards the front, disappearing into the herd.

  ‘You know, the last time I talked to Collin, he was going on about the French word for orgasm . . . I can't remember it, but it translated to little death,’ Alan says. I wonder if that's the French word Robbie keeps on saying . . . ‘But I wonder,’ he continues, ‘Does that make death the big orgasm?’

  ‘When?’ I ask.

  ‘When you die, I assume.’

  ‘I mean, when did he say that?’

  ‘It was a while ago now. A month maybe. We were talking about it just before he died. Or maybe before we found out. Someone mentioned him and we realised no one had seen him for ages . . . When did you hang out with him last?’

  ‘A long time ago . . .’ I can't even remember.

  ‘Yeah, he used to come over with seroquel every Thursday. Like, to trade. Every week for about five months, without fail. Like clockwork. Then one week he didn't show. None of us knew how to contact him. Never had to. He always just showed up. Then I guess we forgot about him, until about a week ago when his name popped up in conversation. Or seroquel maybe. I can’t remember which came first. The very next day, Irena got a rather candid text from Spacey saying he was dead. Literally just one sentence saying-’

  ‘Collin took seroquel?’ This story doesn't make any sense . . .

  ‘Nah, he'd always trade it. But I guess that means he was taking it at some point . . . I think he just liked to take other downers instead.’

  A wash of colour shudders through me and I wonder how well I even knew Collin at all. It's like everyone knew a different version of him. I always felt like I was special to him, but it sounds like everyone else did. Who was Collin?

  ‘I feel so guilty, though,’ Alan continues. ‘Like, the whole business of buying and selling people's meds . . . The whole thing just seemed like we were taking advantage of the system, like we were above it all, doing it on our own terms, but . . . Maybe some people are given meds for a good reason. Maybe Collin would still be here if he kept taking them . . .’

  ‘I think that’s a gross oversimplification,’ Robbie snaps from the other side. Then it’s just music again.

  Penny returns and fills everybody’s mug with tea from a pitcher. The trickle of tea sways with the emerald wash cast over the five of us and softens the manic buildup to Dogs. Questions that answer themselves fill the spaces and resolve into alien notions that make me wonder what, if anything, I hope for. Then there’s a cup of tea steaming in front of me and things make a little more sense.

  ‘The big sleep,’ Penny whispers melodically, in reference to everything. The peppery aroma of the tea, the understanding lull between the five of us, the soft, foreign sensation of lights playing with lyrics, ‘All alone, dying of cancer ah aaaaah . . .’

  ‘The undiscovered country,’ Irena adds.

  ‘The eternal blink.’

  ‘From whence we came.’

  ‘We shall all go.’

  ‘The greater realm of fireball snow.’

  ‘Now everybody's dancing.’

  ‘The dance of the dead.’

  ‘The dance of the dead . . .’

  Dogs bark in the music as the three of them hum a solemn tune. The music spikes and distorts everything beyond comprehension for a moment, fading into a strange memory, a dream, the dinosaurs on my childhood wall that would start walking as I lost myself on sleepless nights, then back to the song, ‘You reap the harvest, you have sown . . .’

  Another sip of tea and I'm dizzy from the flavour, Robbie sitting motionless in the green glow, staring straight ahead. No expression. His body humming and alive with endless detail, memories . . . But his eyes are . . . wrong. They're too big, too perfectly oval, filled in with block colours like a cartoon, white, green, black, the finer details stolen by the rest of him, two dimensional like stickers slapped on his teeming face, just pasted there, inert. Dead if they were ever alive. Not blinking . . . Why aren't they blinking? Are those even his real eyes? Why isn't he blinking? Why aren't you blinking Robbie? Please can you blink Robbie? Just blink. Please. Please Robbie? Where did you go? Come back Robbie. Robbie?

  ‘Robbie?’ it spills out of me, a hushed scream.

  A moment passes before he blinks back into himself and turns to me, eyes real again, ‘What - Oh shit,’ then over my head, ‘We'll be back,’ then he's got me by the hand and we're off in a hurry I don't understand but feels right, up the stairs, pushing past strangers, through the crimson explosions of the volcano exhibit, through the front door, then stopped, Robbie flitting from side to side, ‘Around here,’ and we're in the trees behind the hall, me down on my knees, Robbie lifting my hair for the liquid scream at the Earth, saying, ‘It's important that you acknowledge this as a purging of the anxieties of the come up,’ but I'm caught up in the taste of burning, innards being wrenched out of every organ, every far corner of my body.

  One more for luck, then I'm on all fours, spitting, then just leaking slightly with watery eyes.

  ‘God damn mescaline,’ Robbie says. ‘Why can't they make it a little less pure?’

  I'm not feeling very playful, but I twist up to look at him and say, ‘Eyes?’ like Hunter S, because Robbie's probably got his own struggles going on and I want him to know he's not alone.

  Robbie wipes my face with his beanie and tosses it into the bush and we head back to the front. There's a few people from school heading in now, and Robbie was right about the young people not dressing up. Mrs Hickey and another teacher stop and look at us disapprovingly and Robbie goes, ‘It's called being a human you heartless fucks,’ and they're shocked back into motion, aware that they no longer hold power over us.

  ‘Alright, let's get back in. You feeling better?’ He's starting to lapse into one of those voices that's not his own. At least his eyes are back.

  ‘Maybe we should go . . . They were . . . they looked at us like . . .’

  ‘Fuck them. It's a funeral and they're scowling at you for throwing up. They're the assholes here.’

  ‘But . . . We took mescaline for a funeral, Robbie. That's like . . . maybe they've got a point. Maybe we shouldn't have done that. I’m not even wearing shoes, Robbie!’

  ‘But think about it. We're at a funeral, right? You can be anything at a funeral. Throw up, cry, scream, have a meltdown . . . Who the fuck is anyone to judge? They didn't know Collin like we did. No one did. What's it to them how we deal with this?’

  ‘No but . . . It didn't make me feel closer to Collin like you said it would. It's made me . . . My memories are all . . .’

  ‘Yeah, but that's just 'cause you're in the moment. Soon people are gonna be talking about Collin up there and then you'll be in that moment. With Collin.’

  ‘Where are all of our friends, Robbie?’

  A bitter glare moves through him into a shake of the head and a shrug, then, ‘Yeah, that's a little messed up. They'll be here, though. Maybe they're in there wondering where we are. Maybe Ned and Michael are around the other side having mescaline vomits. Otherwise, I guess we're hanging with the Seed Freaks . . . Just enjoy the tea, I guess.’

  ‘Yeah . . . Hey, do you get the feeling that there was more to Collin than we knew? Like there was this other side that other people knew, then another side that other people knew, then . . .’

  ‘I feel a lot of fucked up things right now. I think the answers lie in there,’ he points at the hall, one eye closed and the other squinting down his arm like a sniper. ‘We'll get to hear what other people have to say about him.’

  ‘Are you still gonna get up there and talk?’

  ‘Yeah . . . Well, I told him I would. You don't take a conversation like that lightly. He promised to talk at my funeral, and I know for sure he would. Come on, let's just go in. I'm feeling crazy . . . I wanna do this before I lose my nerve.’

  ‘Okay, I'm ready,’ I nod, fortified by Robbie's abandon.

  We head in, Robbie saying, ‘It's just the chaos in there at the moment that's messing with you. Things'll get clearer when there's some order. Anxiety is in the air.’

  ‘I know.’

  Then just before the door, ‘Hey Lucy, will you talk at my funeral?’

  ‘. . . No, I don't think so.’

  ‘Alright. I guess it'll have to be Ned then.’

  We both laugh inside at that. For just a second, the enormous stone columns that stretch up to the ceiling represent sausage dogs. Just a second. But that’s all it takes for me to forget what I was so scared about. I want to tell Robbie, so he can forget too. But I know from experience that it will only frighten him, so I stay silent. I guess sausage dogs mean different things to different people.

Stan Richards

Maybe it's just 'cause I've been hanging out with him so much lately, but this cunt's starting to make sense to me. Or maybe he is actually making sense. He's been off the hard drugs for a few days, and he's been eating and sleeping and shit, so maybe he's finally got his feet on the ground. Fuck knows. It is what it is.

  ‘Look,’ Ned points into the crowd, three or four metres down. ‘The Son-of-a-bitch Czarevich.’

  We're sitting in a tree overlooking that science place. Crowds of people are turning up, milling about in the carpark, then heading in to pay their respects. Some are familiar, some are not. Everything seems alien.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘White car.’

  I spot the white car near the entrance, with either Rory or Damon standing outside with a shaved head. I guess it's Rory, going by Ned's cryptic remark. He walks around the back and opens the boot.

  ‘The Son-of-a-bitch Czarevich and the Mystical Mister Cool,’ he continues as ginger Stan emerges from the back, wearing a scarf around his head that makes him look like a terrorist. More people from school hop out of the car, Spacey, Michael, and a few others. Seems like way too many for such a small car. They're all dressed like Collin in a subtle way that I can't put my finger on that makes me feel like I'm going crazy. Maybe that's what grief is. Like something different than being sad. Something you can't quite reach. A subtle kind of crazy. I guess I'm learning about it now. I never got it with Mum 'cause I was like five and didn't really know shit.

  I hear a lighter spark next to me, followed by the smell of weed.

  ‘I don't know where the fuck you keep getting drugs from, man,’ I say.

  Ned puffs a few times and passes it to me. ‘It's yours.’

  Cunt. ‘What, so you just fuckin' helped yourself then?’

  ‘Well you shouldn't have left it lying around in your bag like that.’

  Fuckin' smartass. I have a few small puffs and pass it back. It's like the opposite of deja vu... All these faces from school and the distant memories they bring. Like the way all the town cunts reminded me of Collin. Familiar but not...

  I find myself saying ‘It's crazy how school's, like, your whole life for so long. Then suddenly it's not, and you're just like, what now?’

  Ned responds by putting the joint in his mouth and making a sign language turtle with his hands, swimming it through the smoke as it filters out of him.

  ‘But I mean... Like, there's all this structure to everything. Like your time, your friends, pretty much your whole life. And then it's gone. But there's still this echo of it, like the ass groove in a couch. But then it's all fucked up 'cause you're tryna make your life fit into it but it doesn't. But that shit, like that whole framework, it's so fuckin' embedded that it's almost like you gotta roll with it for anything to make sense.’

  Ned passes me the joint and I puff on it as we stare out at the carpark, watching the strange movement of the herd. A new thought drifts through my head without touching down and I've forgotten everything. There's this weird contrast between the older people who are all dressed up in funeral clothes and the kids from school who are dressed normal, vaguely imitating Collin, like some weird tribute to him... Maybe our generation has more subtle formalities. Ned was going on about it the other night, how all things move towards increasing complexity. Is that how our generation does funerals? I've only ever been to older people's funerals. Maybe they're a more complex and subtle kind of event for our generation... Or maybe Collin really was that influential. Ned will know.

  ‘Have you noticed everyone here is dressed kinda like Collin? Like all the light brown jackets and fedoras and shit... I never used to see anyone except Collin wear that kinda shit. But now look.’

  ‘Maybe he's gonna wake up and move undetected through the crowd of Collin's.’

  I'm amused and then deeply disturbed by the thought of tryna pick out Collin in a crowd of almost-Collins. Fuck, I'm too stoned now...

  ‘Man, I don't think I can go in there now,’ I say, feeling guilty and cowardly. ‘We prolly shouldn't have smoked that...’

  ‘Let's just stay up here then.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Unless you had your heart set on that eulogy.’

  ‘I definitely have my heart set on not doing that eulogy. But maybe it'd be good to hear some other people talk about him. Answer a few questions...’

  Ned puffs the joint in a silence I take as judgemental.

  ‘Yeah, I know. It's a fuckin' cop out,’ I say. ‘Imagine meeting him in the afterlife and going, Yeah, sorry I missed the funeral. Me and Ned got stoned in a tree...’

  ‘I think the disembodied would have more important things to worry about.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Harassing that guy.’ He points a witchy finger into the crowd. I follow his movement and spot Kit, strolling through the carpark, beardless in a suit. The sight of him looking all clean is so unsettling that I suddenly realise how high up we are and get a wave of horrible stoned anxiety. Ned flicks the roach down and it lands right in the middle of a group of girls from school. One of them stares around and we both freeze until Ned's laughter starts shaking the branch around and I don't know what the fuck to feel. The strangeness of the situation brings me some relief when I realise the question has no answer.

Tracey Colombera

‘First, I would like to thank you all for coming, as well as for being a part of my son's tragically short life. Something can I only wish I had done more of...Something that will haunt me forever.’

  Collin's Mum is who I want to be. She's wearing a leather jacket and jeans at her son's funeral. At least they're all black, I guess. She looks young enough to be Peter's kid. I wonder where Peter is. I hope he's okay.

  ‘Though too young to ever truly develop his identity, hardened and refined by the challenges of the adult world, Collin was always very precocious and self actualised. Even as a child...’

  Michael nudges my elbow but I brush him away.

  ‘Despite his tender years, he understood what he believed and, though at times immature in execution, never failed to act upon these beliefs, without evasion or compromise...’

  ‘Spacey’ Michael whispers.

  I ignore him.

  ‘Spacey.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Collin's Mum's fuckin' hot.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘...stabilisers did much to suppress his anarchistic views, Collin was never one to let social conventions and expectations influence his behaviour. He would often...’

  ‘Spacey.’

  ‘Fuck off I'm trying to listen.’

  ‘Yeah, but check out-’

  ‘Oi’ Amelia spits from my left, on the other side of Stan. ‘Shut the fuck up, both of you.’

  ‘Keep your fuckin' voice down’ Michael hisses. ‘Have some respect.’

  ‘Lads, ease, alright’ Damon says. Michael and Amelia both shut up and sit back, which is actually kind of miraculous.

  ‘...and so, in light of all this, this is not to be a traditional burial. We will not be filling Collin's body with toxic embalming fluid, nor will we be enacting any primitive, superstitious rituals. With respect for Collin's keen interest in the sciences and love of natural environments, as well as his lifelong, unwavering opposition to organised religion, we will be returning him to the earth as mother nature intended, naked and untainted, to allow the natural processes to take place...’

  ‘That's fuckin' badass’ Michael whispers. I put my hand on his crotch as a threat. He misinterprets it for a second so I tighten my grip and he says ‘Aight, gotcha.’ I keep my hand there so he remembers.

  ‘...will break him down into his basic elements, which will then recombine to form life giving molecules to be redistributed to his surroundings. Though I have no doubt that we will receive harsh opposition from the authorities if they are to find out, we will be burying him in the heart of the woods at midnight, where he was found and where he spent so much of his time. All those who wish to join are welcome. If anyone here is opposed to this idea and wishes for a traditional burial, I have only to say that you did not truly know my son, and I ask that you respect the beliefs of him and those who knew him best and do not interfere. I will remind you that this day is about Collin and his life, not your own personal beliefs.’

  I snatch my hand away when I feel Michael's cock getting hard.

  ‘Well, what the fuck did you-’

  I hiss at him through bared teeth, bits of spit flicking out through the gaps. He does his stupid eyebrow thing and looks away. 

  ‘...As for the events of today, we have this hall until sundown, and I invite anyone who wishes to speak to do so. I also invite you all to celebrate my son's life in whatever way you feel appropriate, without regard to convention, civility, or even legality - true to how Collin lived his life. There is wine, beer, and spirits through that door, and tea, coffee, and snacks on these tables, as you all seem to have noticed. I would love for us to send Collin off in a way that would make him proud. His life was a constant celebration of the beauty of existence, and I believe this final gathering should reflect that.’

  Michael has already got some pills on the desk in front of us. A couple of dexies and a pinger.

  Stan reaches past me to tap Michael on the arm. ‘Nah brody.’

  ‘You heard that shit’ Michael whispers. ‘Without regard to...fuckin' law and shit. It's on.’

  Stan looks at me. I shrug. My eyes are on the drugs now. I think he's doing the right thing.

  ‘Let it go, I reckon’ Amelia says.

  ‘Oath.’ Either Rory or Damon.

  ‘Fuck it. Bandit’ Stan shrugs.

  ‘...final note about Collin's illness. Throughout his adolescence, Collin would periodically decide to stop taking his medication, as he did earlier this year, based on his well informed belief that bipolar disorder is a man made construct. Though I cannot help but wonder how things might be different had he continued his treatment, I always endeavoured to empower Collin to make his own decisions regarding his life, particularly things so personal as his psyche, and consider it unethical to medicate someone against their will. Collin always lived by his own will, and he died in the same manner. I hope we can rest easy knowing that he died as he lived. In his own words, doing everything he can to make sure his life was not an apology. Now, I ask whoever else would like to speak to make their way to the bottom of the stairs, and we'll do this on a first in, first served basis. We have the rest of the evening to do this, so don't rush, and please be respectful. Thank you.’

  Collin's Mum walks off down the stairs at the side. Michael starts clapping in the silence. Eventually I back him up because I'm impressed by his commitment. Then Stan joins in and it spreads outwards from us into the whole hall.

  The applause dies down and there's this red haired chick from the year above us up there. Her voice is so quiet and suddenly I'm impressed at how well Collin's Mum managed to fill the hall without a microphone.

  ‘Who's this fucker?’ Michael says, dividing the lines.

  ‘Just breathe for now, Clifford’ either Rory or Damon says. ‘Let's hear her out. You'll get your turn.’

  ‘...and it changed my life, what he said that night.’ You can tell by the red head's voice that she's tearing up. ‘He said...I can't remember exactly, but it was like...He said that, like, by making every day different, you can make time go slower. That's why he didn't like sleeping patterns, and, like, hung out with different people all the time, always changed his mind about things...He was making sure every day was different, so that he'd actually notice stuff. He said that when every day is the same, you don't notice anything or make new memories, 'cause you're, like, sleepwalking. Then suddenly you're seventeen and you're just wondering where the time goes. But if every day's different, then you can be really awake. I wish I could say it like he did...it's something I have to remind myself of all the time. But I think that's how Collin lived, and maybe, even though he was only, um, eighteen? Maybe he lived longer than that 'cause he...he...He was only eighteen. So young...’

  The red head tries to talk through her tears for a bit, but ends up leaving the stage crying. Eventually our sixth form classics teacher Mr. Williams takes the stage, talking too quietly to hear. Collin loved that class. He always questioned what Mr. Williams had to say. It felt like we were watching a private conversation between those two. It always seemed so quiet when Collin wasn't there. It's like Mr. Williams didn't know what to do without him. I wish I could hear what he's saying about Collin.

  ‘Space’ Michael nudges me. He hands a rolled up note. The line tastes like hay fever, chlorine, and bee stings. I wonder which one of us is going to talk. I guess Michael will since he's had a line. Amelia too, since she did that toastmasters thing at school. Robbie is next in line, but there's no way his voice will be loud enough.

Lance Miller

Hundred bucks this shit better be worth it, ain't done shit to Benji or Jordan though. ‘Nah, nah, don't suck yet,’ skinny bitch ass crackhead lighting me up, ‘Wait for it, wait for it,’ turning the pipe in my mouth, ‘And suck... Now!’ then clobbered from the left, Benji on the case, catch the pipe when it falls and stuff it in my pocket, crackhead's mate's in there now, goes at Benji with the knee to the back, Jordan got the fucker down, number three goes for the bottle of Jack but I'm there first, backs off and gets a crack to the head, number three down, Benji got the sleeper hold on crackhead and I'm at the cash on the table, help Jordan out with number two and we're out, pipe, cash, meth, victory. Easy shit.

  Storming along, Benji and Jordan hyped up, me pissed off I didn't get a turn yet, all this wait for it wait for it shit, fuck off. Benji flags a taxi, me and Jordan in the back, free ride or nah? But Jordan nods to the front, Benji with the cash out, already a free ride, this gook shitting himself but then sweet when he sees the cash, Jordan chewing on nothing, just waiting, waiting, waiting, then finally home, into the garage, ‘Me first maggots, I didn't get a turn last time,’ light the shit up, waiting, waiting, ‘Bitch, not so close,’ Benji pulling my hand down a bit, ‘You gotta turn it. Like this,’ then boom, it's on, suck up the taste of sweet chemicals, out of breath now but the shit's still swirling around, breathe it out and go in for round two, ‘Yo hand it over,’ Jordan with the bag out, snatches it off me and he's on it. Feeling iced and ready now, up, hopping around, going at the punchbag with sixty kicks in a minute, then Jordan up there with the gloves on, bitch ass punch to the jaw and I'm in there, no gloves, sweaty hollow pop of fist to jaw, makin' hay, Benji tags me out, get another hoon on the pipe, then Jordan, then we're off out hunting, jaw all swollen and throbbing nice.

  ‘Yo, Callahan's funeral,’ Benji stepping it up, some proper evil shit, Jordan not keen, then me, ‘We'll get old mate Richards. And Farmer,’ keen, Jordan bitching out ‘Bro, too far. A funeral? Callahan's alright, he gave us Stan that time,’ just dead weight now, then me and Benji wait for it, wait for it, then smack! Benji's elbow, Jordan's face, then my fist, one two three, motherfucker's down for the count, finish him! Boot to the face, shots to the body, blood and groaning, beaten, then me and Benji off, ‘You got the shit?’ ‘Yeah bitch,’ and off scoping, cool like snakes, ready to strike, no fire just ready, heat's off, cold as ice.

Robbie Marks

The movement of the spheres had become conscious and multi-dimensional, trading their earlier tilted-plane orbital style for the more complex and unpredictable rhythms of Mescaline. The inability to understand our movements relative to the centre was initially unsettling, but it quickly became clear that any attempt to restore order only irritated Mescaline into further complexity, the limitations of which we knew not.

  It had been Fear who reacted initially to the change in orbital structure, having been around long enough to know the ghastly potentials of such a development. However, Fear had lost its greatest ally, Logic, and was therefore fighting a losing battle, frantically traversing the spheres of consciousness in a futile attempt to gain followers. Ultimately, only Despair would give Fear a moment's attention, leading eventually to the merging of the two into some kind of horrific psychic abomination that repulsed even itself. Knowing the dangers of such an entity gaining control, the rest of us manoeuvred it to the sphere of Da'ath, where the light of Conscious Awareness could not reach; any interaction between the two would likely be so cataclysmic as to capture the full attention of Mescaline, which would surely be damaging to the organism as a whole.

  In the intricately structured planes of Hod, a bizarre interaction had taken place. With Fear now removed from the sphere, the usually uncooperative natives Humour and Logic had formed a bond, fortified by the unusual passing of the aetheric Netzach through their atmosphere, product of the new, more chaotic orbital patterns. This led to the manifestation of Paradox, who roamed freely about the spheres, untethered yet graceful. Good fortune seemed to follow Paradox wherever it travelled, as the all-pervasive Mescaline itself seemed to have taken a shining to it, gifting it with the freedom to do as it pleased. It was only Logic who questioned the ways of Paradox, but this could be put down to a kind of parental concern that it would venture too far and cause trouble; a concern that was consistently proven to be illusory, and most likely the result of the footloose asteroids of Paranoia who found themselves without a home base in this new constellation.

  However, it was Logic's preoccupation with Paradox that gave rise to the most interesting development. In the normal run of things, it would be Logic who analysed and attempted to make sense of the new orbital structure; but, with Logic busy minding Paradox, certain oppressed denizens of Yesod found their way into the control panels. Apophenia, whose input would usually be overruled and even ridiculed by Logic, took a keen interest in the seemingly chaotic whims of Mescaline. With the aid of Memory, a free range entity who often set up dwellings on the planes of Yesod, Apophenia discovered that while the spheres no longer seemed to follow their usual Tiphareth-centric cycles, there was in fact an order that underpinned it. Inhabiting each sphere were insignificant lifeforms that had been presumed to be elements of Pain - a denizen of Geburah who would send parasitic satellites to other spheres whenever it felt compelled to do so - due to Conscious Awareness's tendency to avoid them whenever possible. Apophenia found that at a certain point in a sphere's rotation, these lifeforms would attempt to make contact with each other across the psychic gulfs. Like all of Apophenia's bizarre discoveries, this was initially dismissed; but it was Conscious Awareness itself who became an unlikely ally of Apophenia, when it noticed that Mescaline seemed to be reacting favourably to the theory, saturating the atmosphere with an uplifting serotonergic mist whenever Apophenia spoke on the topic.

  Eventually, we all agreed to pursue this possibility. With Apophenia as our foreman, flanked by Paradox and the unusual favours it held with the higher powers, we all worked together to help these lifeforms make inter-spherical contact with one another. As they snowballed from sphere to sphere, they gradually became a unified entity; and, upon passing the luminous and uninhabitable sphere of Kether, this entity was elevated to the status of a sphere itself. The gravitational force of this sphere threw the constellation into momentary chaos, before a magnetic anomaly found it in an erratic two-way orbit with Tiphareth that almost seemed like a battle between the two. This eventually stabilised into a languid harmony, more a dance than a fight, and formed a new centre around which the spheres could orbit.

  With our orbits in harmony once more, it became clear that this new sphere was an intelligence from another dimension, one which had had a great impact on our organism. The strange lifeforms that had appeared on the various planes of our dimension were isolated but intact fragments of this intelligence, which, when combined, formed an alien Tiphareth: The reanimation of a dead world that had once been at the centre of its own solar system, orbited by its own spheres. The agreed upon theory was that it had set up these lifeforms here consciously, aware of its own impending demise, ready to reanimate in our dimension. Whatever the case, it was now enjoying a second life; and, with the blessing of Mescaline, it held a degree of creative control of the organism and its rhythms.

  Memory, with its endless libraries of stored information, provided the details for Logic and Apophenia to pour over; Paradox, with its captivating dance and intoxicating notions, distracted Conscious Awareness, who was far too psychically fragile to entertain the possibility of an alien taking up residence among us.

  But for us, it was a truly astonishing discovery: We now had Collin Callahan as a member of our civilisation.

Lucy Winters

The warmth of Collin's touch has returned, swirling through the room unbounded, settling here and there, never for too long but always somewhere . . .

  ‘. . . Collin's strength and clarity of vision made him instantly central to those around him, like a solar system around a sun . . .’

  I'm glad Robbie made it up there, endless without his hat or glasses, breathing life and incandescence into the gemstone lights of our sacred space . . .

  ‘But Collin, in his anti establishment ways, was the inverse of the sun, the qliphoth of tiphareth, more Dionysus than Christ, more Lucifer than Satan. He is the light that shines within the shadows, beyond the grey of secular life, beyond the blackness of transgression. He is the primal illumination within the very nucleus of the darkness itself, radiating the most unlikely rays in the void of modern alienation . . .’

  Alan holds my hand and I can feel it connect down the line through Irena to Penny. With my free hand I take a drink of my green tea and poppy seed mix, knowing Penny is doing the same at the other end to complete the circuit, knowing the ever increasing sensation of Collin's presence is permeating the four of us as it soon will the whole arena.

  ‘. . . We were all drawn to Collin's philosophies as an alternative to floating aimlessly, as an alternative to the dull currents of our designated blueprints. Like planets around a star, we follow the path only he was bold enough to carve, shunning all preconceived notions of duty and decency for a new way, living for the essence of life rather than its byproducts, the ecstasy of existence rather than the burden of eternal apology.’

  Robbie pauses to pant in psychedelic ecstasy, a replica of Jim Morrison's lysergic performance of The End. Collin whispers psychic emollience through the flowering of the mescaline and the opulence of the tea.

  ‘Let us embrace and continue his ecstatic philosophies,’ he mushrooms out of his rapture, roaring in a new voice that cracks in divine puberty. ‘With the blessing of Isabelle, let us traverse ever deeper into the inky black secrets that hide within reality, into the brilliance of Collin himself, the ecstasy of creation he sparked within us all. Let us indulge in the gifts of the Gods, our own personal holy water, our own sacraments. I see before me segregated groups of wasters, seekers, and petitioners of divine bliss. Let's pool our resources into the collective void of human alienation, cut the strings and dissolve the boundaries of humanity's mass hallucination and unite, unite in the name of Collin Callahan and the transcendent dissent he endeavoured always to spread. Alcohol, dexies, acid, weed . . . Let us recreate his beautifully absurd toxicology report and let his radical spirit live within us.’

  The vibe is rising and the crowd thinning. Those of us left are dizzy with Collin's ecstasy. A closed eye shudder and Michael is on the podium, handing Robbie a joint. Robbie takes a small puff and hands it back to Michael to spread it throughout the arena. The audience is alive in silent requiem.

  ‘As subatomic particles . . . remain intimately connected across time and space, through the mysterious forces of the super strings . . .’ Robbie speaks in a new, quieter voice, ‘the fundamental particles that make up the neurons of Collin's psyche will remain linked as they disperse across the planet and beyond, invigorating the everlasting dance of life, experiencing the totality of existence as Collin's immortal consciousness, observing and even influencing the phenomenon of creation from within, the purity of eyes without hands, an invisible stare that has relinquished control, yet paradoxically influences the invisible realm behind the one we know . . .’

  And now I understand. The voice, the gusto, the gestures . . . It's one last celebration of the flesh, attending his own bacchanal through our eyes and ears, just as he did when he was alive . . .

Michael Farmer

Robbie's off his fuckin' chops up there, good as cunt, Callahan'd be fuckin' proud, About About going on about About, good shit. I sniff up a couple lines and leave the rest for the crew and I'm off to hit up ole Miss Callahan about the booze, she's up the front table with Hayden. Gotta say, never noticed what a fuckin' fox she was till just now, got that full greenpeace all over it vibe, a chick that knows what she's up to. “Yo, good shit on the speech up there Miss Callahan, bring a tear to a hard man's eye. You up to go get this booze flowing? Shit's getting started, let's do this shit for Callahan - fuckin', Collin, I mean. Like you said... Aye yo whatup Hayden” I give him knucks but he's looking at me a little dark, which is fuckin' fair enough but then I click and go to Miss Callahan “I'm Michael, by the way. Good friend of ole Callahan's - uh, fuckin', Collin's” - Gotta stop calling him Callahan, gonna sound all disrespectful, given the circumstances and shit - but at least I didn’t say Malfoy again. She goes “Isabelle. Mother of ole fuckin' Callahan” all cheeky which I'm fuckin' stoked about, good as call. “So, yeah, keen?” She looks at Hayden a sec then goes “Yeah, I suppose it is about that time... I think Robbie's got everyone warmed up” and we're off to the other room, Robbie still waffling on about some shit up there, cunts starting to mingle a bit now too, fuckin' good call on the venue Miss Callahan. We're in the booze room now and I'm like holy shit, cunt, crates and crates of the shit. Miss Callahan's got her eye on the hard shit and I'm just like fuck yeah, this here's a proper hearty bitch, “Yo, Miss Callahan,” she turns around and she got those fuckin' bedroom eyes, you can tell she knows how to - “It's Isabelle. Or Belle.” “Fuckin', Belle, I gotta say, you're handling this shit better than pretty much everyone else here. Like, I'm all fucked up 'cause it's my friend in there, but, fuck...” and I wish I fuckin' knew how to talk like Collin and Robbie, like say shit all proper and polite and shit. But Miss Callahan's a good as bitch and goes “You know what, Michael? I just want to be the rock. I want to be the one everyone can come to” and I'm like “Fuck that shit” but I'm guilty 'cause I wanted to talk properly but I'm all nervous and shit 'cause this is like an angel I'm talking to here, like making a little boy of me. “But you're his fuckin' mum. That's your fuckin' son lying out there. Fuck, it should be us cunts who's there for you.” She's not saying shit for a sec but it's just like total confidence, like I wanna jump in and say some shit but you can tell she's got something good going on up there 'cause she doesn't look away and shit like when cunts don't know what to say, she's just totally fuckin' - She goes “Yeah, I know that. But from past experiences with losing loved ones, I always had so much admiration for the person who took on that role. The person who stayed calm and collected and didn't let emotion take over. I think this is an opportunity to be that person, as terrible as the circumstances are... I can grieve in my own time.” I'm stuck thinking about that for a bit just like sitting there nodding like a retard then I go “Fuckin' aye, respect to that, Belle. Mad respect... You after a line then? Like that shit you were saying earlier about-” but I stop 'cause I'm like, fuck, pushing my luck a bit here, but she goes “A line? A line of what?” and I'm back on my game like “Dexies, it's like speed kinda but-” “Yeah, why not. I haven't had amphetamines in years... Why not?” and you just fuckin' know she was the mad wild child in her day, you can just tell.

Stan Richards

‘I guess he just loved being around formless cunts like us. You, me, Robbie, Lucy. 'Cause none of us really knew what to think about anything. But Collin was so certain that he had to spread it... I can't really imagine that level of certainty. Imagine being so clear about what you believe that all there is left to just like convert others.’

  We're still in the tree, still too stoned to go in. Well I am, at least. I don't think Ned can really be too anything. But he's prolly the only person I actually like getting stoned with. He's like a black hole you can just talk into. Like writing a letter to someone and chucking it in a fire. But you can get from his cheeky expressions that he knows what you're on about.

  ‘I mean, who's it gonna be next,’ I think aloud. ‘My first guess would be you, obviously. But then I could see you outliving all of us just to be a smartass.’

  Ned's standing up on the branch now, his lank stretched out to hold on to a branch above his head, leaning out into the world like Axel from Twisted Metal. Quite a few people have started leaving the hall, mostly older cats, so I guess the formalities are already over.

  ‘Fuck, it'll prolly be me,’ I say. ‘I fantasise about killing myself all the fuckin' time... But is that normal? I mean, I've never acted upon it, so maybe they're just thoughts we all have. Do you ever think about suicide? Like, when life seems so complicated that all you can think of is a way out...’

  ‘I think if you could peer into the minds of other people, it'd ruin your fantasy that there's something wrong with you. Then you'd finally man up and do it.’

  ‘So you reckon it's like a narcissism thing?’

  ‘I think people wanna believe in angels and lizards so they think the universe gets a break from them.’

  ‘...What, so you're saying that I make other people seem like angels so it feels like the world isn't as fucked up as me?’

  Ned dangles his head below his arm to look at me, his filthy dreadlocks hanging to reveal his shrunken head face.

  ‘But I'm sure I didn't used to be this fucked up. I used to be happy,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe you remember lizards when there was really snot-nosed humans.’

  ‘So what then? We're all fucked in the head but we hide it from each other so we can all pretend the world doesn't suck? But then we just end up feeling worse about shit, 'cause it feels like it's just us that's all fucked up.’

  ‘That's why it pays not to be a cunt to everybody. Then other people distract you from the nightmare. Then it's your turn while you're distracted.’

  ‘...Yeah, I see what you're saying. I get to be the stable one sometimes. But what about this then. So, like, when I'm alone, that's when I'm face to face with the nightmare... So yeah, just like stop being such an antisocial cunt. I get that. But then, 'cause of my anxiety, being with other people is just another nightmare. It's like choosing between two different hells.’

  ‘It's pretty cool you get to choose though, right?’

  ‘Fuck... Maybe? I still don't get you though, man. You seem like an onto it dude, but it's almost like you're dumb when it suits you. It kinda seems like you're just, you know, playing everyone.’

  ‘I'm reminded of the tale of the scorpion and the pelican-’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Ned cracks up laughing and I can't help but join him. I used to think he'd end up being one of those old cunts wandering around, harassing people, sniffing glue, whatever. Just one of those old crazies like Kit who seem to have no past. But now... Fuck knows. Really, nothing would surprise me. He's a different kind of cunt, making his own way. There really is no one else I can compare him to. Just Collin, I guess. I'm glad it's Ned who's sticking around though.

  ‘Here's trouble,’ Ned says, turning serious.

  I follow his stare into the concrete below and spot Lance and Benji beelining across the carpark to the hall. I'm really not sure what to think of this… I always get gnarly anxiety when I see those cunts around, but right here and now it just seems so fuckin' wrong. What's the fuckin' score here?

  ‘Fuck...’ I look up at Ned. ‘You think...’

  Ned seems to solidify somehow. I'm trying to gauge how stoned I am now but it's just fear.

  ‘Fuck... Not at a funeral, surely,’ I say. 

  Ned makes a comical battle face like a gargoyle and I know it's time to go. We hurry down the tree and hit the concrete to tail the Millers towards the entrance. Me and Ned look at each other, and something unsaid turns our walks into a run.

Michael Farmer

This chick's just like that fuckin' cactus juice shit, man. First I thought I was gonna spew up, then I thought I was losing my fuckin' mind, and now it's just like, fuck, there's no way shit's gonna be the same after this. We're sitting on the crates drinking from the same bottle even though there's like ten of the cunts, but that's just like intimacy and shit, shows she's real engaged and shit, like she's swiggin' when I talk then I swig when she talks. She's on the ball with like analysing and shit, going “But how can I possibly be concerned with things like etiquette after what's just happened? Traditionally, people become more polite and formal in times like this. But I wonder why that is. Should this not be the time to let loose? Isn't this the time to indulge and quit being so fucking repressed?” Fuck yeah, like where this is going, keen as to let loose here, but she keeps going, “I suppose the formalities exist in the funeral as a way to switch off for a while, to know exactly where to stand and how to act. To free up the mind for quiet reflection. And then the post funeral festivities naturally serve as a time to let it out. Get drunk and cry together... But is someone really going to judge anyone for how they behave today? I think today is a day where we should be without judgement, and let everyone behave as they wish. I mean, today is about Collin, right? Collin despised formality. Even as a child he loved chaos and surprises... He's the only kid I've met who loved getting frights.” She takes the whiskey from me and takes a solid gulp without flinching and I go “Fuckin' aye, spoken like Collin himself, fuckin'...” but then I don't know what to say next so I get the bottle back off her all shy and she goes “I'm so proud of how Collin lived. You know, my friends and I used to think that your generation was a bunch of gutless pushovers. But I'd always tell them about Collin and his friends. I'm so happy to see my son's friends keeping the rebellious spirit alive, throwing away the rules and living on your own terms.” I got the signal so I move my crate in closer and brush her hair out of her eyes to look further in and go “You know, you have a kind of beauty that girls my age don't have. You move and talk with a grace that only comes from life experience,” got my flow back with that last line and a bit of firewater in me. She moves her head back with a funny look but I keep it ticking along like “I'm serious, Belle. I mean, I can tell you woulda been a fuckin' stunner in your day. But now you got something better. You got style, and I think that's the sexiest thing a lady can have.” She cheeky smiles at me and goes “You're making a move on a grieving mother? Wow. I can see how you and Collin would have got along so well” and I'm like fuck, fuckin' blew it here but she goes “You're barking up the wrong tree. But good on you for giving it a go. Don't let anything stop you from going for what you want. Follow your passion and live without fear. That way you inspire others to do the same. The people who don't like it are afraid. They're afraid of you because you're unrestrained. They're afraid because you're not living by the rules they've come to depend on. Fear of the unknown. Don't fear the reaper. My only friend, the end... Wow, that line really got me going huh? Really took me back. It's been good talking to you, Michael. Let's get these kids boozed up. Have a funeral no one ever forgets.” And I'm not even bummed she denied me 'cause, fuck, it was cool just getting to hang, so I'm like “Aye, whatever you want Belle, I'm here for you. You're a fuckin' cool chick, we should hang again real soon” and she grins like maybe a bit sexual and we get a crate of booze each and head out, hyped as, bit more booze and some deep yarns and I'm in there, I reckon, treat her real good to take her mind off shit.

Stan Richards

We get inside and straight away I've lost the Miller brothers in the crowd. It's like a piss-up in here. The Doors are playing and there's all these cunts from school roaming around drinking, whole place stinks of bud... It's set up kinda like one of those places where you go to watch plays, with these descending rows of seats with desks in front of them, leading down like twenty metres or so to a stage where some chick is talking.

  ‘Yo Ned-’ Oh shit. Now I've lost Ned. Where the fuck did he...

  ‘Hey mate,’ a voice from my right. It's Robbie's dad, looking out of character in a dress shirt. Him and his lady are chilling at a table, watching the chaos.

  ‘Hey, uh...’

  ‘Kenny. And Gemma.’

  ‘Hey, how's it going? Oh, uh, Stan. Robbie's friend.’

  ‘Bit late there mate?’

  ‘Oh yeah, looked a little... at capacity. Me and Ned just...’ Is that Ned? Nope, that's what's his face. ‘Hey, have you seen Ned anywhere?’

  ‘Well you missed Robbie's performance up there,’ Kenny says, ignoring my question. ‘Crazy little bastard.’

  ‘Why what'd he do?’ I ask, curious but still scanning for Ned or Straightedges.

  ‘Nothing much. Just turned the whole thing into a bloody twenty-first century Woodstock.’ I can't quite read this cunt. Can't quite tell if he's pissed off or amused by all this. Or me.

  ‘Huh. Give Collin a proper send off, I guess...’

  ‘A proper send off alright,’ he shakes his head. I'm still scoping out the place and he goes ‘Down the bottom there.’

  ‘Who, Ned?’

  ‘The booze mate. They're all smoking pot down the front there too. Go on mate, get involved. I see you eyeing the place up.’

  ‘Huh? Oh right. There's Straightedges here somewhere. Kinda wanna make sure...’

  ‘Straightedges? Mate, all the Straightedges have left the building.’

  ‘Lance and Benji?’

  ‘No bloody Straightedges here. Robbie scared them all off with that crazy talk. No room for straightedges here, mate.’

  ‘Oh right. Yeah I hope so... Alright, I'm going in. I'll catch you later Kenny. Later Gemma.’

  ‘Oh well, at least this joker'll make Robbie look less crazy,’ Kenny ignores me again, nodding to the front. Gemma gives me a fake mum-smile and I fumble meaningless shit in my head for a second, then get my shit together and head off into the crowd, feeling like a bouncer on the hunt for some troublesome drunks.

  ‘Yo Stan,’ a voice calls as I pass. I ignore it and keep moving. I got shit to do, serious shit. I'm almost more concerned about what Ned's gonna do than the Straightedges...

Tracey Colombera

I came over here to see if they had any ketamine, but everyone followed me over so now they're holding out. Got some codeine though, which is kind of cool. Codeine, weed, wine, and Michael drugs. It'll do. Ketamine though.

  Alan lights a candle in front of me. To my left, the Seed Freaks and Lucy are each marked by their own candles, staring into the flames. Lucy looks like she's tripping out, so I ask her about ketamine.

  ‘Ketamine...’ she murmers. She's no good to me. Robbie is on the other side of me, whispering into his own flame. I stare at my one for a bit, but that only makes me want ketamine more.

  ‘Robbie’ I say.

  He ignores me. I blow out his candle and he turns to me in disbelief. His eyes are black and crazed. Not anger. Bloodlust.

  ‘Have you got any ketamine?’

  His stare is starting to hurt me, so I relight his candle for him. He turns back to it in two motions. First he points his face at it while his eyeballs stay with me. Then his eyes slowly move back to the flame. I notice Kit's at the podium, so I pour myself a wine and try to listen.

  ‘I'll have a look’ Robbie says after a while, speaking quietly into his candle. ‘I just saw Ned going through my bag, so probably not.’

  I spot Ned near the front. He's watching Isabelle try to get between Michael and Hayden, with a smile peeking out of the small gap in his hair. I recognise his blue plaid flannel as Old School Stan's, because the right side is all shredded but not the left. All of Stan's clothes have this feature. Robbie is chanting again. I guess he's not ready to look for ketamine.

  ‘Spacey.’ From my left. Alan. He reaches past Lucy and hands me a pill. Lucy's talking to her candle too now. I wash the pill down with my wine and ask what it is. Alan says something unfamiliar that I forget straight away. The Seed Freaks are all talking to their candles now. I feel like I should too, but I’m trying to listen to Kit.

  ‘...left lying around. So I says to myself, I says Fuck! What the fuck's a vacuum cleaner doing at the bloody nudie club? And I'd had a few wines and a bit of fuckin' PCP, so the wee chap's fast asleep and that, so I think to myself, you know what, you're only thirty eight once. So I plug 'er in and start giving the floor a bit of a once over, thinking one of the young girls might sort me out a cheeky one for helping out. But then this big fella, a Jonathan if I ever saw one...’

  Suddenly there's a whole lot of shouting to my right, where Rory and stuff are. It's Damon and Jeremy trying to wrestle a picket fence off of Lance's little brother at the far end of the desk. It's too loud to hear Kit's story now.

  ‘Looks like we accidentally summoned a demon again’ Alan says.

  ‘Looks primitive’ Irena says.

  ‘I wouldn't want to fight one of our ancestors.’

  ‘Rock beats scissors.’

  Robbie and Lucy are still with their candles, ignoring everything. I wish everyone would shut up and listen to Kit. But it looks like we're about to be in a fight.

  ‘Paper beats rock’ Alan says. He tosses a paper dart over my head. My gaze follows it to the fight just in time to catch Jeremy getting knocked down with a swing of the picket. Lucy looks up suddenly with wide anime eyes, then springs out of her seat and rushes over. She grabs the picket but Miller shakes her around like a rabbit in the jaws of a dog.

  ‘You think they need us?’ Alan says.

  ‘Not yet. We'll finish our drinks then go help out. Then we'll have weapons’ Penny says.

  ‘Sounds good.’ Alan takes a sip of tea. I finish my wine and pour another small one. It's my turn to help out after robbie. He's still talking to his candle. I'd like to watch a Straightedge get beaten up by druggies. I think our friends are doing alright anyway. We've got numbers. I feel like I need to make myself useful, so I blow out Robbie's candle. Just so we don't end up summoning any more demons.

Michael Farmer

“Learn to take a fuckin' compliment, cunt. I just said she's hot. It's a fuckin' compliment. Doesn't mean I'm trying to fuckin' get my dick in” I shout. I wanna bring up when I caught Callahan - fuckin', Collin - getting a fuckin' handy from mum the drunk bitch, but I keep it to myself 'cause Belle's here trying to take shit down a notch and she probly doesn't wanna hear about - Hayden ain't saying shit, just mad doggin' me with the eyes, just wanna punch the cunt out. Fuckin' hate white cunts with dreads, heard he doesn't even hit the bong anymore - But I guess the cunt just lost his brother, so fuckin' fair enough he's getting a bit wound up, but at the end of the day, manners say a lot about a cunt, and that's something this cunt's gotta learn sometime. I step a little closer but he stands his ground then Belle's in there like “Alright boys, I'd better separate you” fuckin' on the case as always, but you can tell this bitch likes a bit of ruckus, “Hayden, you stay with me. Michael, you go sit with your-” then she's got the hell death stare up over me, dunno what the fuck she's - Oh shit there's the mad scrap going on up there, Damo's in there and fuckin' - Fuckin' straight cunts! What the fuck is this shit? I look at Hayden and go “Callahan's fuckin' funeral, fuck this shit. Let's get it” but he just looks at me like it’s nothing to do with him, so he can fuck right off. I’m like “Fuckin' Belle then” but then it's like never mind 'cause she's done her bit, fuck it, I got this, staunch down the last of my beer “All good, I'm on it. You stay down here, doll. I'll sort this shit out” and she's fuckin' loving it, loves a wild card, an old school chick from when men were men and - I go in for the kiss, just like on the cheek, but she limbos back with a sexy ass grin and shakes her head going “Mind on the job, Michael.” Fuckin' love it when a lady's dressed she like knows how to party, fuck those jeans are skin tight, cunt, got my heart going like a fuckin' - “Now's good,” it's Endy Ned, got me by the hand heading up the steps and I shake it off 'cause I ain't no fuckin' - But we're on the case now, me and Endy, charging up the stairs ducking and weaving through all the cunts, time to show these straightedge fucks what the fuck's up, not at Callahan's funeral, cunts. Endy's going into this shit bare handed so I snatch up an empty on the way for him like “Yo, take this, gotta get armed up for this shit” but he holds up a strip of paper fuckin' cracking up and I'm like “What the fuck's-” but then click when he sticks his tongue out, fuckin' couple tabs sitting on there, and I'm like “Fuckin', whatever you're into, cunt. Let's fuck these cunts up” and then there's a scream, Amelia, and I'm like “Yep you're right. Let's make this shit permanent” and now I'm just barging cunts out of the way 'cause they shouldn't be standing around anyway, not right now, not when there's no question whose fuckin' side you're on, fuckin' Callahan's, and not just Collin this time, this is for the fuckin' tribe.

Stan Richards

Dunno what crazy drug she's on, but it's taking all I've got to keep Amelia pinned under me. I've got both her arms under my knees, but she's screaming and thrashing around and kneeing the shit out of my back, building up to the limit break I'm gonna unleash on the Miller psychopaths. I can't wait to fuck those two up, but this shit's serious as fuck so I'm playing mister paramedic over here. The blue T-shirt I'm tryna tie around her wounded forehead is already damp and black with blood. Either Damon or Rory is slumped against the back of a seat in a daze, bleeding from the nose, and the other Stan is out cold, but Amelia's gonna fuckin' die if I don't do something about the bleeding.

  I get the shirt tied around her good and proper and stay on top of her till she settles down, then I'm off to help take out Benji, but I spot Lance kicking the shit out of Robbie who's curled up in a ball - this shit's just not a game Robbie knows how to play. Lucy's swinging at Lance but it's not doing shit, and Jeremy's staggering around all dazed, gonna be out with one more punch. He winds back with a bottle but I snatch it off him and push him down as I pass. I grab Lucy by the collar and throw her to the ground just in time to save her from Lance's swinging fist, and I catch his face with my bottle on the follow through. He doesn't even flinch and now I'm getting pummelled, punch after punch from the all angles. My bottle's gone and I'm just tryna fend him off but he's got some superhuman strength going on here and now I'm curled up getting the shit kicked out of me just like Robbie. I try to crawl away but heel blows just knock me down as soon as I get onto all fours. From the ground I spot my bottle try grab at it but just knock it away, then I curl up and kick at his knees and shins when I can summon the strength, till even that's too much and I just go foetal and hope for the best.

Lucy Winters

Under the table it's peaceful dark like a cavern. I'm crawling backwards on three legs, dragging Robbie's empty weightless body along. I leave it a few tables away from the war, safe for his return.

  I curve my sauropod neck out and up into the gemstone light and Irena hands me a pitcher from above. The weight of it surprises then delights me for one last drink, then we're heading back to the battle. ‘They've got us covered,’ she says, Alan and Penny following us, Seed Freaks, economy of motion, economy of thoughts, who through infinite patience truly understand the art of timing, who through numbness of the senses can truly understand the things they do not feel.

  It's Lance and Jeremy, Irena's hand on my shoulder to wait, then Jeremy on the floor next to Stan and us two to the side, synchronising up onto the desks for launch, then from above, Lance a tree canopy in the wild wind, koala grip around his shoulder, I'm the left side, Irena's the right, and ride the tumbling tree to the floor, then it's a rodeo, riding the wild, bucking best, Alan and Penny on the legs, surfing the earthquake. I've dropped my weapon with all four limbs wrestling the five stemmed monster, Lance snarling and snapping with impotent rage as Irena beats it bloody and pointless into a Tiny Death.

  A wave of Collin through the air reminds me of something and I clamp my teeth down on the balled fist, subject to change whenever the thirst passes. The demon roars in ecstasy and agony, beyond human emotions, a force of nature, a force of hatred, its two free fingers gumming at my chin as my teeth sink deeper, coins melting into umami lava, the fifth flavour, the fifth limb screeching red and sweat and blood, then Stan, my Stan, straddling the animal as it lies prone thrashing blood and spittle at him, Stan on all fours stone faced and shirtless, drip drip drip of blood, then a series of headbutts to flatten the nose, turn the face back into playdough to be reshaped at a later time.

  The four of us hold Lance in place to let Stan finish whatever it is he's doing now, staring and dripping hate and blood, then Ned lowering himself between Stan and Irena into a hunched over crouch, dangling his thick, dreaded hair as the beast bites at it with a ruined mouth of blood and free range teeth, Ned pulling back like playing string with a cat. A moment with each other, Ned, Stan, and me, then Ned's got his pocket knife pressed into Lance's forehead while Lance jerks back and forth, to and fro, designing his new scar with his movements. A quick lick of cardboard on finger, then finger on flesh, and Ned's put a strip of salty LSD in the wound, the third eye, holding it in place laughing.

  I spit out the thrashing, bloody hand and we wonder for a moment: Too far? From me to Stan to Ned to Stan to me, blood dribbling down my chin, Lance's ruined hand quivering on the floor.

  ‘Paper beats rock, right?’ Alan says, bobbing calm atop the rodeo.

  ‘Yeah fuck it,’ Stan says. ‘Collin'd fuckin' love this shit. How long we need to leave it there for?’

  ‘I think we’d better hold him down till he's out cold,’ Irena says. She pounds his head once more with the pitcher, the beast staring finished at the ceiling, knowing things will only get worse.

  ‘I think all parts of the body have a flaccid and erect state,’ Ned says. ‘Maybe rigor mortis is the erection we fuck God with.’

  The sun rests green and easy on our bleeding victim. I like mescaline the most. Because it brings everyone together. Shrooms are kind of isolating, and acid makes things too complicated to really be in it together. But mescaline's cool. I like mescaline.

Tracey Colombera

‘That's the thing with certain breeds, you've gotta get 'em young if you wanna teach 'em what's what. Otherwise they grow up to be bloody prudes, like those scaly bastards out Sirius ways.’

  I've got front row seats now. Next to Hayden and Isabelle. I don't think anyone else is listening to Kit. They're all busy fighting Straightedges. Kit doesn't mind though. He looks nice without his beard.

  ‘But here's the thing with geezers like that. If you're not careful, they'll turn the whole bloody thing around on ya. They'll be getting you to convince them that you're real. And no one likes hearing that kind of carry on, so next thing you know, you're listing off all your bloody credentials, throwing all that I think therefore I am nonsense, and then the general public takes an interest and you're in serious trouble. Y'see, they did a study on this, some bloody scientist jokers from overseas, and they found that even if you do manage to convince a hallucination that you exist, it doesn't even fuckin' well matter. You're better off just having a few nips of quality metaxa and trying to catch some of the neighbour’s chickens, 'cause I'll tell ya one thing, when the bloody reptiles turn up it's not gonna be the chickens keeping them in check. Well, not domestic ones, at least. Which brings me to the next point...If you absolutely have to dabble in black magic, for god's sake do something useful with yourself. The one thing we don't need in this world is more so called wizards trying to solve the world's problems by beating the meat to hieroglyphs in the basement. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Aleister Crowley, but he was out there getting it done with the ladies...And the men, mind you.’

  ‘Where's Peter?’ I ask Isabelle.

  ‘…Probably in the basement. I think that's what Kit's trying to say.’

  ‘Is he gonna come bury Collin?’

  ‘...I wouldn't think so, no.’

  ‘Does he know Collin's here?’

  ‘I don't think I'm the person to be asking about this. Here.’ She passes me a bottle of wine. ‘Just listen to Kit. He knows more about that than me.’

  I have a drink of wine. Gross. Kit's making a spaceship whistling sound and doing something with his hands that I don't understand.

Michael Farmer

A few other cunts from school tried to step in and help me but Benji started swinging wide with that fuckin' stick and they all backed off like fuckin' - I catch the stick as he swings it and try get it off him but the cunt's charged up as fuck, jabbing me in the guts with the end of it, fuckin’ snarling and drooling and shit, total fuckin’ animal. Damo's got my back with a couple punches, good as cunt but it ain't doing shit. Benji sticks a boot in my guts and yanks the stick off me but I'm quick as with the spear tackle, boom, got the cunt down, but he flips it 'round and he's on top and I'm fucked now. He goes for the face shot with his fuckin' stick but I block it, fucks up my hand, then boom! it's fuckin' Kamikaze Stan, knocked the cunt down, so I'm in there straight away to back the cunt up and we got Benji pinned, Stan getting a few punches in, me just trying to keep the cunt down, then Damo's in there wrestling that fuckin' stick off him. Endy and Rory are backing us up now, Rory pissing blood from the face, but we're good, just laying into the cunt, then Stan's at his throat shouting “Fuckin' get the cunt, Ned” and Endy's sticking those fuckin' tabs on Benji's sweaty forehead, Benji hissing and spitting and choking, I give him a good crack to the face and knock the tabs off, but Endy's in there with a knife on his forehead and this shit's just gotten next fuckin' level here, but you reap what you sow motherfuckers, you reap what you fuckin' well sow.

Tracey Colombera

‘Isabelle?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you have any ketamine?’

  ‘No...I've never even tried ketamine. I could do some more of Michael's amphetamines, though.’

  ‘Me too. I'll get some off him when he's done up there.’

  ‘I've got MDMA, Mum. Let's have some of that’ Hayden says.

  ‘I hope you're not referring to those ecstasy pills you're selling, dear.’

  ‘Well, yeah. Why what's the problem?’

  ‘If I wanted to sweat and chew my face for three hours I would've picked up a packet of No Doz from the petrol station.’

  ‘Rough’ I say.

  ‘And don't call it MDMA when there is absolutely no MDMA in them. You can maybe call them ecstasy, but to say it's MDMA is just shady.’

  ‘Yeah, alright Mum, I got the point.’

  ‘Don't get snippy with me. Did you really expect me to let that one slide?’

  ‘Whatever. Just get off my back.’

  Kit's doubled over laughing now. I don't know if he's laughing at the Callahan's or his own wit.

Robbie Marks

In retrospect, we had been doomed from the beginning; the three-way leadership of Paradox, Apophenia, and Mescaline had intoxicated us into an enchanting yet erratic rhythm that was ill-suited to the task of integrating a new entity. With Fear locked away in the murky depths of Da'ath, and Logic now fully invested in Paradox and its hypnotic movements and bizarre ideologies, no one gave credence to the warnings of Paranoia as they pelted down upon us. Just when our dimension seemed to have settled into a stable motion, an orbital seizure lead to the cataclysmic collision of Da'ath and Tiphareth. Conscious Awareness, who presided over the affairs of Tiphareth, was engulfed by the boundless, impenetrable realm of Da'ath, creating a new centre around which the spheres now orbited; a centre now ruled by the disgraced entity Fear, whose tyrannical influence stretched from the Da'ath-Nucleus to the outer reaches of our Universe. This new regime resulted in a total shut down of the organism, with all of us entities too paralysed with Fear to do anything but exist, and unsettled even by that. With even the Mescaline itself a part of this hideous new orbit, it was only Collin, hovering malevolently outside of our orbit, who retained the autonomy necessary to challenge Fear; however, Collin's strange hum and utter stillness made it clear to us that it would not be doing so.

Lucy Winters

We've got the beast turned over on his front, tying his limbs behind his back with a scarf and hoodie. He's not fighting back anymore, but the misty stench of animal intensity still lingers around us as fear for what comes next, and fear of ourselves and our actions, the sun shining through the western windows now, casting demonic reds and violets over the pools of blood and writhing bodies . . . But Collin's musing whispers rise from within and spread through us to make sure we know what we did was right.

  Alan is ringing an ambulance . . . Amelia needs to go to hospital. And ginger Stan. We just need to make sure both of the animals are subdued, because no one knows what will happen when the acid kicks in. We need peace before we can heal. Maybe Lance and Benji will heal if they ever find peace . . .

  I'm still not sure what I'm hoping for . . . But it feels like we’re doing the right thing.

Ned Devlin

Hayden's the man for the job for several reasons: 1- No sticky blood on his hands. 2- A master Changa roller with detailed guitarist fingers and drug chemist Mind. 3- Up to Fuck All, really. He gets it done in no time and it's back to the Chaos, with Robbie's bag tucked away under the stage in preparation for the inevitable.

  ‘We always did Changa sort of ritualistically . . . But I guess that's not really an option here, is it?’

  The Ritual is in full swing, my good friend.

  ‘Yes, but this is gonna get pretty crazy. Do you think we have Collin's blessing?’

  Everything is permitted.

  ‘You guys killed my brother with that fucked up credo.’

  We had his blessing.

  ‘You're a sick fuck. Lead the way you fucking weirdo.’

Rory Jacobs

Us breathers, me, Jeremy, Stan, and Damo (with Amelia on the comas) we got the full Callahan vibes going here, fully just know what's what with each other and what needs to be done now. Seed Freaks are on the level too, and we make a circle around the scene, a brotherhood of the freaky fish, Hell's Angels style. Farmdog, Old School, and the Loose Ends have this shit locked down, and we all just need to breathe a mo, shit got pretty heckers there, just need a sec to breathe. We all link hands and it's all eyes on the schizfish in the middle of the circle, us all bloody stumps but ready for anything, just staring.

  ND’s behind me with a wand and I make a break in the circuit to toke it, blow it into the middle and send it along the circle like a cosmic mexican wave. This is some schiz trip shit, but we all just know, no need to suss shit, just breathe and gander the smoke cloud in the middle, just let that shit shine, let that shit shimmer.

Stan Richards

Everyone's backed off to let me fuck this cunt up myself and I'm just punching his face into the disgusting mass of blood and tissue damage it deserves to be. I start feeling dizzy from blood loss and crawl off him onto all fours to gather myself. A nauseating fog rises from the floor and up into the strange lights as living ropes emerge and wrap themselves around Benji's body, dismissing it layer by layer with strange curling motions. In a moment of panic, I shoo them away, leaving a metallic human shell with an opening from the neck to the groin. Inside the opening, a slender, bipedal creature with a kind of tapir face trudges through a pool of thick, black, steaming goo, trying to grip onto one of the rib cage spikes that line the opening. Once it manages to poke its long neck above the outer rim, it rears back, and then slams its neck into one of the protruding spikes with a deflating hiss. A glowing computer green current of information blasts out of its trunk towards the sky, until the creature is left emptied out and dangling like a piece of clothing from the spike.

Lucy Winters

Waving tendrils of light emanate from Lance and Benji's bodies in the centre, forming a geometric fire that warms us with its glow. Robbie joins the inner circle to complete the network of him, Michael, Stan, Ned, Hayden, and me. Behind us is the wider circle of friends, and beyond that a mobile outer ring of onlookers, roaming confused but silent in the understanding that they're a part of it. The DMT joint does one final round of the inner circle, before spiralling into the gaping pupil of dried blood at the centre, releasing the tension holding reality in place, a swirling mist of iridescent energy released from the hole, and the six of us lean forward in worship. We put our hands over the energy, pinky to pinky, thumb to thumb, pinky to pinky, all around the circle to mould the light into a thirty rayed star whose shimmer guides us into a waving dance from side to side.

Tracey Colombera

I kind of want to join in the circle, but it looks like they're set. They've formed a mandala of bodies around the Miller brothers, swaying slowly to the jazzy beat playing. There's a smaller circle of Collin's closer friends who are bowed over like Muslims, then a bigger circle who all have their arms around each other’s shoulders, moving from side to side. It's all a bit kumbaya for me anyway. I'll leave them to it.

Robbie Marks

With the enigmatic realm of Da'ath wide open and emitting dark rays of forgotten entities, even Fear with its newfound powers was unable to resist the disintegration of all but the Universal Constants into a sea of nameless Chaos. Mescaline, existing on that same supernal plane as the Constants, was able to resist the great disintegration and created a rudimentary blueprint for us to reorganise upon. This allowed the organism to reanimate on a basic level, under the influence of only the absolute Fundamentals; and, perhaps, Collin's fixed gaze.

Tracey Colombera

I head into the side room and grab a bottle of whiskey to drink with Isabelle, but she's gone when I get back. I guess I'll wait for Kit to finish up there and drink it with him. I'm just bored, really. Maybe feeling a little left out. Whiskey's better when you're bored though. You notice more flavours.

Michael Farmer

“Who the fuck are you?”

  “It wouldn't make sense if I told you.”

  “Well what the fuck do you want?”

  “It wouldn't make sense if I told you.”

  “Can you just fuck off then?”

  “Just stay with the rhythm.”

  “What? Fuck off, cunt.”

  “Stay with the rhythm.”

  “The fuck are you…”

  “Stay with it.”

  “Oh…”

Stan Richards

We're just like a field of grass dancing in a gale here. Only the wind knows, like a ghost summoned from a oujja board, just let it do its thing...

Lucy Winters

The beat we move to is created by our movements . . . Energy gives birth to itself . . .

Robbie Marks

The Universe is sustained by our participation in it….

Friedrich Nietzche

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music...

Hayden Callahan

Holy…

Michael Farmer

Fuck.

Stan Richards

…

Lucy Winters

. . .

Michael Farmer

…

Robbie Marks

….

Hayden Callahan

. . .

Ned Devlin

So how’d we do?

Collin Callahan

I dunno man. I expected more…

Kit Jacobs

Trying to see what the bloody commotion is back there, but there's a whole lot of squibbidy squop in my eyescreen, all that psychedelic hibbidy hooha, can't see a bloody thing . . . Looking dangerously blue out there . . . Fuck!

  “Boys in blue lads! Boys in blue!”

  What a fuckin' mess . . . Looks like a job for the king of bad decisions over here. Shake all that nonsense out of my eyes and I'm off to sort this out, frilly necked bastards up to no good, bloody hell . . .

Benji Miller

Released, floating, falling, then... Fuck! I'm scrambling around, throwing punches, but I'm blinded by all this hippy shit in the air, everything breathing like flaming lungs... My punches rip through the strange fire with a sound like tearing fabric, but I can feel them connect. I catch a flying fist and pull it towards me and it's Stan with tribal markings made of blood creeping all over the surface of his face. Time to fuck that shit up, breathe in that hippy flame and unleash.

Stan Richards

Fuck, Benji's back. Still pretty tripped out by... whatever the fuck just happened. I'm good though. Caught a couple to the face but I've got him now, we've all got him. Hands reach in from another dimension to help, and I'm back on top of him all raged-out again, throwing punches, in total control of this shit.

  Someone tries to pull me off him but I'm all worked up now so I just elbow the cunt and get back to it, not leaving till Benji's lights-out. I try to get back on top of the cunt, but now there's two sets of arms tryna subdue me. I turn 'round and start throwing punches but it's a couple of cops in fuckin' riot gear. Fuck! I'm gonna get cuffed either way, so I keep punching while I can. These cunts can get fucked too.

Ned Devlin

A little trick i learnt back Cottonwood ways: A fake trip over a flailing limb, a ‘Sorry sir, on my way sir,’ and that's a nice wee Surprise for my friend in blue, soaking in sweat on the back of his neck, should be getting interesting in, oh, maybe half an hour? A reverse pickpocket of the senses, a welcome to the World of the Weird, and perhaps a wee gift for the ole human race, and if not, at least for my old friend Collin, and that's what matters today. Good luck with the complexities of Life, fellow organisms, but it's time I was elsewhere. I’m just trying to do the right thing.

Lucy Winters

Once again, our summoning went wrong . . . I guess they're right when they say not to meddle with this kind of stuff. I try to get up but only end up with my face slammed on the floor sticky with blood, arms all twisted up behind my back.

  With my eyes closed now the music takes over, keeps everything together for a little until Jim Morrison's voice turns into Hank Hill's and I have to open them up again to make sure it doesn't stay like that. Irena's face is right in front of mine, wincing heavy against the blood stained wooden floor.

  ‘I hope they let us have a cup of tea before they take us away,’ she says with half a mouth scrunched up against the floor. I start to say something back, but I'm too dazed from the background noise and lights and smells and drugs and strange memories of feelings and all I can do is laugh.

Michael Farmer

Fuckin' gotta know when you're beat, these cunts got endless backup, just gotta fuckin' let it go and wait it out. Fuckin' Old School over there though, that cunt's just not too bright sometimes. The pigs dunno what the fuck to do with Lance and they end up untying him which kinda pisses me off, just seeing that cunt get untied while Stan gets cuffed up. But everyone knows that game's fuckin' crooked, so I'm off to say whatup to Belle, get our story straight so hopefully the straightedge psychos are the only ones who get in trouble. We got a body to bury tonight, and I don't want these pig fucks sticking their noses in. Gotta track down Spacey too, bitch has a way of vanishing into thin air when it suits her.

  I get away from the scrap and we've fully fuckin' cleared the arena, not a cunt in sight. Good one pigs, good one straight cunts, fuckin' animals, ruined the most epic funeral ever with their shit. The pigs have fuckin' stormed the place, full on riot gear and shit, got the entrance completely walled off. I got shit on me so I'm off all casual to the fire exit next to where all the booze is, feel like a cunt leaving the crew behind, but shit, what the fuck can I do? Just before the exit I spot Spacey sitting against the stage with a laptop and a bottle of the hard shit, and fuck it, I'm keen as, just mellow out with the Spacecase while I try figure out what the fuck to do. I sit down next to her and get my pingers out, three left, one for Spacey, two for me, and boom, fully fuckin' legal, got the script for the dexies, the 'stache for the booze, all good. I get some of that whiskey in me and I'm like “Reckon it's time to gap?” and she goes “Nah, check out the song I put on.” It's just some trippy Collin shit, dunno what she's getting at. Probly a song he liked or something, so yeah, fuck, good shit. Not that I'm into this shit, but it's Collin's day, and it's gonna be over real fuckin' soon, so, yeah. Fuckin' good bitch. Just rock out to the last of the Collin vibes, before the pigs lock 'em up for good.

Robbie Marks

Having recreated the basic framework that it, indirectly, destroyed, the Mescaline integrated itself into the geometry of our Universe, its influence now less tangible but more fundamental; too subtle a force to be detected by the unsophisticated sense organs of Conscious Awareness.

  With Da'ath's gravitational field no longer exerting a significant force upon the orbit of the spheres, Tiphareth once again fell into its natural role in the centre. In light of recent events, all of us entities agreed that Paradox was a dangerous and unstable force within the ecosystem, seducing us all with novelty and bizarre elegance while surreptitiously polluting the atmosphere with its own flavour of Chaos. Along with Apophenia, it was deemed unfit to serve as a denizen in a realm of such authority as Hod, and was banished to the clouded world of Yesod, where it would exist only in the dreams and meanderings of the organism, its influence subject to the scrutiny of the governing lands of Chesed. This left Logic, who had been unable to resist the nightmarishly beautiful gyrations of Paradox, free to work on an analysis of the situation.

  Without the agency of Mescaline to allow it mobility, the looming alien sphere Collin looked on silently, its intentions as mysterious as its very nature. Presently, Hod was eclipsed by Malkuth, giving its inhabitants the time and privacy to investigate the mysteries of the alien presence away from the prying watch of Conscious Awareness. It was speculated that Collin was parasitic in nature, forever attempting to find a central position within the microcosm of its host; from there, it would gain control of the organism itself, using it to plant the strange, embryonic lifeforms in other Universes, which would eventually recombine and take up residence as an active entity striving for the central position, thus repeating the cycle. Entities such as Fear, Paranoia, and even the disgraced Conditioning would serve as a psychic immune system for the organism; thus, it would be necessary to have them posted where they can be heard, but not where they could act with authority. It was decided that Hod was the best station for these entities; for words from that realm are always entertained, but not necessarily accepted, by the collective.

  The question was raised whether the alien intelligence Collin had existed before its previous host - the Collin Callahan of the manifest world - and had simply inhabited Collin Callahan for a period of time, before using up its resources and leaving behind a husk as it continued to spread throughout the Multiverse. This concept signalled the arrival of Conscious Awareness in the discussion; the eclipse was over. Startled by the intrusion, Logic and its army of researchers feigned ignorance. As Conscious Awareness prepared itself for some investigative trans-spherical travel, Fear bloomed monstrously in defence of its homeland, gripping the entire organism with a wave of paralysing anxiety. Conscious Awareness yielded; almost instantly, its frightfully short attention span had moved on to the earthly splendours of Malkuth. Hod's inhabitants were relieved, but frustrated; it would be some time before they were eclipsed from Conscious Awareness's attention again, by which time the very nature of their studies would have surely changed.

  Indeed, Hod is a plane of great mental powers; but these are not lands where Patience spawns. With Fear's blessing - not something to be taken lightly - it was decided that the best and brightest of Hod would venture to the veiled sphere of Yesod to continue their research. Though the entities of Yesod were bizarre and unpredictable, they were also keepers of many of the Universe's secrets, their homeland being one of the few realms that lay outside of the scope of Conscious Awareness. These entities were known to share their knowledge freely - though, of course, at great risk to the receiver.

Tracey Colombera

We're sitting back with some whiskey, watching an army of cops swarm our friends to the sounds of Pigs by Pink Floyd.

  ‘This is fuckin' bullshit’ Michael says, again. ‘Fuckin' Callahan's burial tonight and all the cunts are gonna be in jail. Hayden's gonna miss his little bro getting buried. That shit ain't right. Fuck's sake, cunt.’

  ‘Do you think anyone's going to jail?’

  ‘Fuck knows. Robbie's going down for sure, cunt's got a whole fuckin' lab in his backpack. Hayden too.’

  That's actually really sad. It feels like I'm going to cry, but then I remember that Robbie's bag is under the stairs. With ketamine.

  ‘Ned moved Robbie's bag under there’ I say.

  ‘Under the stairs?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Michael turns to stone for a few seconds, then revives himself with a drink of whiskey and says ‘Alright, I'll run grab it. Then we're out the door, no fucking around.’

  He stands up but I stop him with my hand.

  ‘Nup, I gotta do this shit. Be a cunt not to.’

  ‘Yeah but you should crawl so the cops don't see you.’

  ‘...Yeah good point.’

  He hands me the whiskey and crawls over to the stairs. It's kind of impressive how fast he can move on all fours. I can taste Michael's essence in the whiskey, smoky with adrenaline and testosterone. There's paramedics up there with the cops now, putting some bodies on stretchers. I'm happy to see that one of the bodies is a cop, but sad because I know that means Kit is going to jail.

  Michael scuttles past me with the bag, hissing ‘go go go!’ towards the exit. I fall in line behind him, but keep going past to the store room.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing? We gotta gap’ he says.

  ‘One more.’ I go in and grab the first bottle of liquor I spot.

  I'm about to open the exit, but Michael grabs onto the steel bar and says ‘Wait. One more.’ He shouts ‘Fuck you pigs!’ and throws the half empty whiskey bottle into the swarm. Then we barge out the door, setting off the alarm.

  ‘Into the trees’ Michael says, and we take off into the dusk.

Once we're out of sight, I ask Michael if he knows where we are.

  ‘In the fuckin' woods, cunt.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ I rephrase the question.

  ‘Fuckin'...Good question. I dunno. Well, they're taking Collin's body into the woods anyway, so we could wait for them here.’

  ‘That's like six hours away’ I say. Then I get a fright when I realise the bigger problem. ‘And Isabelle's by herself. I think her and Hayden are supposed to be doing it.’

  ‘Fuck.’ Michael stops. ‘Maybe the pigs'll let him out for the burial.’

  ‘But they aren't allowed to know about it.’

  ‘Fuck!’ Michael punches a tree. ‘Fuckin'...that's gonna have to be us then. Come on. We're off to the Shitlab. Even if it's just us and Belle, we'll fuckin' do this.’

  ‘Which way is that?’

  ‘No fuckin' clue. We'll just walk till we find the fuckin' fence line and go from there. Gotta stay bush, though. I got blood all over me and a bag full of Robbie's shit, probly enough to get me a fuckin' prison sentence. Let's move.’

  We walk in silence for a while, then Michael says ‘Text up the cunts and tell 'em to meet us there. Robbie and Lucy too. Don't worry about Stan, that cunt just punched out a pig. He'll be in the cells no doubt'’

  ‘Which Stan?’

  ‘The Stan that's not a fuckin' pussy, obviously. Just start texting cunts up. I lost my phone.’

  ‘You lost your phone?’ I can't believe he even tried to lie about that.

  ‘Fuckin' straights. Have fun tripping balls in hospital you sick fucks.’

  I drop the subject and start a group text. The trippy glow of my phone reminds me I've taken one of Hayden's sketchy pingers.

  ‘Should we have some of Robbie's ketamine?’ I ask.

  ‘Fuckin' fiend.’

  I drop that subject too because Michael's getting pissed off now. He walks too fast when he's angry. It's actually quite a nice night out.

  ‘Nice night for a midnight burial’ I say.

  ‘Just fuckin' get on with it.’

  So I do.

Collin Callahan

Well, that turned out to be quite a nice little bacchanal after all. Good Harmonics. Thanks heaps guys. Thanks for looking out for me on my special day.

30/10/2005

The limitations of memory-

Paradoxical as Collin himself was, the utter chaos of his funeral has added a bizarre sense of order to the chaos of his death. It was an event that only seems to make sense within the context of his own philosophy.

The Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting describes the tendency for specific memories to decline in accuracy over time, as one's own sense of personal narrative distorts the details and fills the gaps more and more with each successive reminiscence, until the memory is reduced to a work of Gonzo fiction. These memory gaps can be accounted for by considering the influence of Collin's 'virus': A memetic pressure that inhibits the writing of memories that would be too incongruous to the narratives that one constructs in order to make sense of life.

Thanks to the drugs, violence, grief, and sheer strangeness, the truth of what happened that day has become a matter of who you ask. It is generally agreed upon that a kind of trance descended upon us. The naive have attributed this to the amount of drugs consumed, but this theory quickly falls apart under scrutiny; that day, I consumed a moderate-high dose of Mescaline, a small dose of Marijuana, two alcoholic beverages, and a dose of DMT. This may seem excessive to the layman; but, when contrasted with some of my more determined efforts to invoke the surreal, the overall level of intoxication seems rather moderate. Many are in agreement that Collin was present in some form, noting his affinity for ritualistic drug use; this, however, seems to be an example of the superstitious thinking typical of the grieving process - with so many gaps to fill in our personal recollections, cosmic interpretations are to be expected.

Unfortunately, we may never know what truly happened that day. Most of those who were present seem content to forget the whole thing, and tend to become hostile when pressed for details; those who have not repressed the memory all have more questions than answers. What had caused the Straightedges to behave in a manner psychotic even for them? Why had the Seed Freaks and the Mars Fuckers taken part in the psychedelic ecstasy when the eschew anything remotely entheogenic? Two police officers suffered psychotic episodes from mere proximity. Could exposure to second hand DMT smoke account for this? The urge for explanation tells me yes, but experiential and logical analysis yields a stern no.

Perhaps the uninitiated are right to assume we regressed to an animal state. Perhaps the combination of grief, intoxication, and transcendent atmosphere sent us all crawling backward along our evolutionary path, stopping at a tribal level just short of the inhuman. Perhaps the presence of predators set off a spontaneous Shamanic cleansing of our spiritual landscape, a landscape united by our shared adoration of Collin and his philosophies. Perhaps. However, this interpretation, like all others, is subject to the flavour of my own narrative tendencies.

It is only the legal repercussions that prevent the occurrence from being like a strange dream, forgotten upon awakening. What would have happened if the authorities hadn't showed up? Were we really a danger to ourselves and each other?  Or were we transcending to a higher order of reality, only to be interrupted and grounded by legal intervention?

All I can say for now is that with the pending legal trouble, it is best that I leave the strange dream in my sub-conscious upon finishing this final meditation, and turn my focus to self-preservation.

Immortality-

Genetic: Through reproduction, the organism replicates itself, thus continuing the life of its DNA.

Memetic: Through the spreading of ideas, certain elements of the organism survive physical death in the minds of others.

Environmental: As the organism decomposes, the particles are redistributed to the environment over time. Perhaps they retain memory of the lessons learnt in their most recent incarnation.

Atomic: Since the sub atomic particles remain intrinsically linked, the network of particles that once made the neurons of the organism's physical mind continue to communicate, uninhibited by physical distance.

Documentation-

Newspaper articles have done little to illuminate the mystery of Collin's funeral, for they too are subject to the distorting lens of personal narrative – even more so than that of those present. I collect them only out of personal curiosity.

The Coastal Post, 3rd October, 2005-

Drug addled funeral descends into chaos

By Daniel Harrison

The funeral of local teenager Collin Callahan (18, unemployed) turned into a frenzy of drug taking, satanic ritual, and violence, resulting in the hospitalisation of 4 teenagers, all aged 18 or 19.

The funeral was held at the Hall of Science on the 28th of October, where witnesses say that the use of illicit substances was encouraged.

“I understand she has just lost her son and isn’t thinking straight, but this was too far (…) I left feeling violated,” a witness has stated.

The mother of the deceased, Isabelle Victoria Callahan, was said to have stood by as the teenagers drank heavily and smoked marijuana openly. At her sentencing, Judge Matthew Banks said that Mrs. Callahan had a long, sad history of civil disobedience, and added that “the problem with these activists is that they think they are above the law; laws are in place for a reason, which is to protect the public and maintain order.”

Callahan has denied allegations that she buried the body of her son at the Walter Mathis Reserve, but declined to

comment when questioned about the true whereabouts on the grounds that such information is private. She is being held in custody pending further investigation.

Judge Banks concluded yesterday’s session by advising Mrs. Callahan to consider the legal ramifications of her actions in future, adding that “I think you will find that life gets less chaotic when you do.”

The Weekender, 8th October, 2005-

Drug Family Leaves Landmark Hall Soaked in Blood

Police and paramedics rushed to the scene of what has been compared to “Some kind of horrible movie, the kind that shocks you just to get a reaction,” resulting in the arrest of two teenagers and two adults, and the hospitalisation of five, including one police officer.

  The deceased, Collin Callahan, was only eighteen when he died of a drug overdose in the Walter Mathis Reserve. Callahan was well known to both social services and the mental health system, due to his bi-polar illness and negligent home life.

  His mother, Isabelle Callahan (40; unemployed), is well known to the authorities through her involvement in environmental and political protests, as well as her history of drug-related charges.

  The father, Peter Callahan, P.H.D. (51; occupation unknown), has authored several books on various subjects, including Cellular Eroticism: The movement from asexual to sexual reproduction on a molecular level (1997), and Sub Atomic Psychopaths and the Role of Occult Science in the Death of Modernity (1999), most of which have been panned by critics, and have even been described as “(the work of) a hyper-literate mental patient.” His current whereabouts are unknown.

  Their surviving son, Hayden Callahan (24; unemployed) has already served two prison sentences for drug-related offences, and now faces the possibility of a third for violating the conditions of his parole.

  We spoke to Collin’s case manager at Social Services who had this to say: “Hayden and Collin, who are both well known to us, are clearly the product of a home environment that normalises drug-use. This has a knock-on effect of normalising anti-social behaviour and unusual beliefs, as evidenced by the events of Collin’s funeral.”

  The events of Collin's funeral are enough to give any parent nightmares; except for Mrs. Callahan, who is said to have encouraged drinking and drug taking at the memorial service.   As if oblivious to the cause of her son's death, as well as the cause of her own and her elder son's arrests, Mrs. Callahan didn't appear to see anything unusual about the events, which are rumoured to have included a satanic ritual.

  "She just stood up there talking all those fancy lawyer words - she was a lawyer, before the drugs - but if you listen, all she was really saying was 'Bugger it all, let's get zonked’," remembers Cathy Marsh, former nurse and monthly contributor to Child 

Fund. "And there was this this group of kids (...) had that Marilyn Manson look. That gaunt look. They all seemed a lot more interested in taking drugs than paying their respects to the departed. I had my son with me - he's only thirteen months old - and he was in tears the whole time. It took me all afternoon to calm him down."

  As if this story couldn't get any more frightening, she continues. "A few of the boys started fighting. Nothing too serious, just a bit of a scuffle. But then some of them gathered around in a circle and started chanting, like in the movies. I got out of there before it got any worse."

  And worse it did get. By the time this satanic ritual was over, five people were hospitalised, including a police officer, and three were arrested.

  One of the accused, Kit Jacobs (age unknown; unemployed) bit the throat of an officer while under the influence of methamphetamine and marijuana. His connections to the Callahan family are unknown at the time of writing, but one can safely assume that drugs are at the heart of it. The officer (name withheld) suffered a psychotic reaction to the bite, and is currently taking a leave of absence to recover from the traumatic event.

  And what can we take from all this? We put this question to Collin's case manager, who had this to say: "Stricter control of drugs. These people weren't in their right minds; they had reverted to a base, animal level. If this isn't enough to convince people of the dangers of these chemicals, then I don't know what is."

  At present, the remaining members of the Callahan family continue to go about their sinister activities out in the community. A quick glance at the ages of Peter, Isabelle and Hayden reveals that Isabelle was only 16 when she was impregnated by a 27-year-old Peter; though this lies on the cusp of legality, it serves as another reminder of the family's deviant tendencies.

  There are even rumours that Collin's body was buried at the Walter Mathis Reserve, in what can only be assumed to be an extension of the bizarre, drug-fuelled rituals that took place that day. Though Isabelle denies the accusations, this serves as another reminder of the damage that drug use can cause to families and individuals. One can only hope that the Callahan family will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law - for our own safety.

Motherfuckers.

The Solar System-

Terra; Territory, terrain, terrestrial, terrify, terraform, terrace, terrapin, terrarium, terrific, terrier-

Fire

Water

Air

Earth

Aether

Physical trait

Hot

Wet

Cold

Dry

Intangible

Physical state

Plasmic

Liquid

Gas

Solid

Aetheric

Chakrah

Manipura, Anahata

Svadhisthana, Anahata

Visuddha, Ajna

Muludhara, Crown

Ajna, Sahasrara

Meyer-Briggs trait

Extroversion

Agreeableness

Neuroticism

Conscientiousness

Openness

Planetary immune response

Volcanic eruption

Tsunami

Hurricane

Earthquake

Sapience

Location

Sun

Sea

Sky

Land

Space

Question

How

Who

Why

What

?

Pathology

Mania

Dependency

Anxiety

Depression

Psychosis

Dosha

Pitta

Pitta, Kapha

Vata

Kapha

Vata

Sober state

Aware

Dreaming

Contemplating

Asleep

Transcendent

Creative expression

Art

Music

Literature

Sculpture

Transgression

Science

Biology

Chemistry

Mathematics

Physics

Quantum physics

Temperament

Choleric

Phlegmatic

Sanguine

Melancholic

Mystic

The Doors

Jim Morrison

Robbie Krieger

Ray Manzarek

John Densmore

William Blake

Virtue

Inspiration

Healing

Change

Strength

Evolution

Occultist

Aleister Crowley

Austin Osman Spare

Peter Carroll

Dion Fortune

Jack Parsons

Trip

Psychedelic

Entheogenic

Psychomimetic

Hallucinogen

Paradelic

Sacrament

LSD

Psilocybin

2C-X

Mescaline

Ketamine

Guru

Timothy Leary

Terence Mckenna

Alexander Shulgin

Aldous Huxley

Charles Manson

Magick

Sorcery

Shamanism

Chaos Magick

Witchcraft

Demonology

Constant

Energy

Time

Space

Matter

Consciousness

Life

Mammal

Fish

Bird

Reptile

Extra-terrestrial

Instrument

Stringed instruments

Resonant metals

Wind instruments

Percussion instruments

Imagination

Time of day

Noon

Dusk

Dawn

Night

Time

Sense

Sight

Smell/taste

Hearing

Touch

Consciousness

Ability

To will

To dare

To know

To remain silent

To

Zodiac

Aries

Sagittarius

Leo

Cancer

Scorpio

Pisces

Gemini

Libra

Aquarius

Taurus

Virgo

Capricorn

Ophiuchus

Tarot

Wands

Cups

Swords

Pentacles

Major arcana

Lower circuit of consciousness

Circuit 2- Emotional-territorial

Circuit 4- Socio-sexual

Circuit 3- Symbolic-manual

Circuit 1- 

Bio-survival

Transition to circuit 5

Higher circuit of consciousness

Circuit 5- Neurosomatic-hedonistic

Circuit 7- Neurogenetic-ancestral

Circuit 6- Neuroelectric-metaphysical

Circuit 8- Neuroatomic-hive mind

Movement through the circuits

Brainwave frequency

Alpha

Theta

Beta

Delta

Gamma

Philosopher

Friedrich Nietzsche

Lao-Tzu

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Henry Thoreau

Carl Jung

Neuro-transmitter

Dopamine

Serotonin

Acetylcholine

GABA

DMT

Psychological action

Releasing pressure

Building pressure

Delving

Maintaining

Seeking

Kabbalistic realm

Atziluth, archetypal

Briah, creative

Yetzirah, formative

Assiah, manifest

Qliphoth, shadow

Drugs

Inebriantia

Euphorica

Exitantia

Hypnotica

Phantastica

Jungian type

Intuition

Feelings

Thoughts

Sensation

Conduction

The four base elements of fire, water, air, and earth make up the total expression of Malkuth, with the fifth element of aether representing the transition toward Yesod and the beginnings of the journey upward throughout the tree.

Lunar; Lunatic, lune, lunet, looney, loon-

When the four base elements are balanced, access to archetypal memories, as well as the true form of the instinctual impulses of dreams and sexual desire, is granted to the organism. Through the aether, one can progress upward beyond Earthen consciousness to the Lunar realm of Yesod. Deep meditation and acts of transgression are necessary for this celestial journey, as tribal creatures such as humans instinctively work together to reintegrate anyone who attempts such an elevation.

  Yesod is the transition from the Moralistic-Sociosexual fourth circuit into the Neurosomatic-Hedonist fifth circuit of higher consciousness. It stands between yearning and gaining, the feeling of frustrated insight when one connects with something intangible but cannot express or act upon the feeling. It is the sober eye looking over the words of yesterday – aware of, but unable to quantify, the beauty and meaning within them.

  Memories, dreams, and sexual desire are formless, but tend to latch onto phenomena of a more Earthen nature in order to be understood consciously; without deep meditation, the true nature of these phenomena remains elusive.

  To explain Yesod in poetry is informative; to attempt to document it scientifically results in poetry. It is too delicate for the senses, but it takes on psychic forms that imitate sensory input – these forms are known as hallucinations. Within these strange and often disturbing visions lie the answers to endless questions – that is, the questions are metabolised by the aether, dissolved and harvested as part of a grander process.

  The dream diary is an elusive map of the workings of Yesod; a map that begins to matter when one realises that it does not. The internal dimensions shift slightly; one notices only a brief spell of mental nystagmus as the mind's eye attempts to stabilise. Once stabilised, all that is left is the sensation of meaning, which fades as soon as the body requests food, sleep, or any other Malkuthian demand. These demands take on the form of a fear response: Fear that the membrane separating the deep, instinctual impulses from the conscious mind will burst. It is the fear of losing control; fear of the unknown. It is by reacting to this fear with attraction, rather than repulsion, that one continues to ascend.

Mercurial; Mercenary, mercy, commerce, merchandise, merchant-

Fear and thoughts have their origins in the sphere of Hod, which exerts its influence over Malkuth primarily through alchemical agents of air and aether.

  Thoughts are questions; to know is to act or to feel.

  Thoughts arise when the urge to act or respond emotionally is blocked by the organism's fear response.

  In this case, the bubbling of the subconscious mind takes on the form of words, or Logos: A language understood by the conscious, analysing mind.

  Thinking in words is the primary state of the anxious being.

  The brainwave frequency is Beta (12.5 – 30 Hz).

The associated neurotransmitters are acetylcholine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, dopamine, and glutamate.

  Phallate fear before it has a chance to skull fuck you.

  It is through the obsessive categorising of fear that logic becomes refined, intuitions become theories, instincts become the personality.

Venusian; Venetian, venom, ventrical, vendetta, venerate, veneer, venereal, venture-

Diametrically opposed and complementary to the abstract realm of Hod is that of Netzach, just as thoughts are to emotions.

  Emotions are answers that have yet to be questioned, felt, and understood, but which are elusive to the memory without the categorising of uncertainty: The conceptualisation of Hod. They are impressionistic, colours without outlines, music without lyrics.

  To reminiscence upon a feeling is to place one's being in the realm of Hod, for Netzach moves with its own rhythm, uncontrolled by the conscious mind. But if the energies of Hod and Netzach are in harmony, then the true emotion can be summoned at will; one is able to give form to the flowing rivers inside.

  The neurotransmitters serotonin and GABA play a part in this process, as well as the chemical messenger oxytocin. As it is through the alchemical elements of water and aether that Netzach manifests, it is through the Theta brainwave frequency that it flows. This energy tends to pool in the fourth circuit of human consciousness, that of Socio-sexual domestication, motivated more by pleasure than reproduction, nurturing rather than controlling. It is motivated by the need for tribal harmony, belonging, and connection.

  Though it is through the rigidity of Hod that we learn to understand and perhaps even control the rolling tides of Netzach, it is ultimately the emotional experience we strive toward. The beauty of Hodian delights such as the satisfaction of intrigue and the stimulation of the pursuit of knowledge lies in the Netzachian response they elicit, the unquestionable joy of serenity and optimism; just as for the male orgasm, a receptacle can be the difference between the fulfilment of an ancient evolutionary yearning and the self-disgust of a solo refractory period.

  We all want to share our findings; in doing so, we explore other universes. By connecting with another, we become more aware of our true form. The personal ego finds it boundaries when they become blurred.

Solar; Solitary, solace, solemn, soldier, solve, solution, solvent, solid, sole, soul, solipsism, solstice-

By finding its boundaries, the personal ego can achieve the symmetry that is inherent in the universe, and necessary if one is to be in harmony with the greater whole. The appeal of kaleidoscopes and mandalas lies in their symmetry, which exists on a flat plane. In the third dimension, the sphere represents the purest form of symmetry, encompassing all angles. This is the only possible centre of true symmetry.

  With thought and emotion in balance, equidistant from the sub-conscious that binds them to the manifest, the central energy of Tiphareth provides the constellation with structure. With awareness of the symmetry of the universe and the knowledge that patterns continue beyond the limitations of awareness, one can use the perfect but incomplete symmetry of the known to create an accurate projection of the unknown. The light of Tiphareth illuminates the path to the higher realms, for with the confidence of a balanced ego comes a faith in oneself, a kind of mystical capacity, that allows one to know and understand without perceiving or analysing. It is an Alpha state of calm without sedation, of awareness without anxiety.

  The glow of the centralised self both illuminates and blurs; the finer details are sacrificed in favour of awareness of the greater patterns and structures of reality. The will can now exert its influence into the unknown, confident in its ability to act appropriately without questioning; with self-confidence comes the ability to know what to do, regardless of circumstances. Minor outliers and deviations from the greater pattern are no longer cause for doubt or hesitation; they are but minor distractions, no match for the momentum of a will that is working in harmony with the higher order of the universe.

  This is the highest expression of elemental fire: The central will, purpose, and nature around which the thoughts, emotions, and sensations orient themselves. One is no longer victim to the ineffable whims of the universe; one is aligned with the universe, an agent of reality. One is now a player in the grand cosmic game of existence.

Martial; Martian, martyr, marshal, maroon, mariner, march, marrow-

Jovian/Jupiterian; Jovial, jubilation, jubilee-

But no amount of personal mastery can free one from the great forces of anabolism and catabolism; by being in harmony with them one may enact their will freely, but will ultimately still be broken down by the metabolic processes of reality.

  The metabolic interplay between the Martial Geburah and the Jovian Chesed maintains the constant flux of the physical universe; the great dance of anabolism (assimilating and building) and catabolism (breaking down or converting to energy) forms the backdrop of the four dimensional reality upon which the patterns and symmetry of Tiphareth exist. They are the Netzachian and Hodian processes of feeling and thinking, of nature and mind, played out on a suprahuman scale. Through the implied symmetry of Tiphareth, one may come to understand the processes of the universe as they mirror our own psyches, or use the scientific solidity of physics and astronomy as a basis for understanding one's own internal processes.

  The unbalanced ego is insular, an artificial construction which integrates the grand rhythms of Chesed and Geburah into its own mythology; but the balanced ego, having explored the mysteries of Yesod and reconciled the superficial contradictions of Hod and Netzach, is aware of its place in the metabolic unfolding of reality.

  Awareness of the archetypal forces of Chesed and Geburah brings with it an acute, visceral awareness of the limitations of the ego and its potential to enact changes upon the universe. This may bring about madness and despair if one's will is not aligned with the rhythms and patterns of the universe; but if one is working harmoniously through the agency of Tiphareth, then they shall accept their mortality and use their brief incarnation wisely, the unwavering momentum of their volition freeing up psychic energy to indulge in the horror and beauty of existence at will.

  Though at this depth of reality, elemental correspondences begin to seem almost childish, the archetypal realms of Chesed and Geburah can be seen as the highest expression of elemental earth: The limitations and freedoms of physical reality; and the surrender to these limitations without the apathy or inertia of elemental earth on a lower ebb, fuelled by the dynamism of air, water, fire, and aether; inspired, rather than deterred, by the limitations of the universe's geometry.

Saturnine; Sative, satan, saturate, ossature, satyr, satire, satiate, satellite-

It cannot be said that there are limitations to the acquisition of knowledge; it merely increases in complexity in a fractal manner until contact with the manifest is lost, and one is locked in a universe of their own creation, like a sensory deprivation chamber within the nucleus of Tiphareth.

  This is the abyss: A bottomless, black free-fall away from the manifest and into the unlit depths of one's own personal universe. Even the subterranean realm of Yesod finds its limits with the inevitable morning sun; the realm of Da'ath, however, is an endless personal plummet into the hidden recesses of the mind. It is an attempt to transcend the controlling forces of Chesed and Geburah, of creation and destruction. It is the madness and the darkness awaiting the seeker of the infinite.

  Though beyond the perception of the human mind, within the realm of Da'ath lies twisted, daemonic forms of the realms which orbit the illumination of Tiphareth – for it is the gateway to the Qliphoth, the universe's daemonic twin. These sinister caricatures contain the hidden secrets of all realms; but with such knowledge comes only madness. To cross the abyss is to risk never returning; but to return from the abyss without crossing is to render oneself insane and parasitic. If then, by design or by chance, one finds themselves plumbing the depths of this shadow realm, then the only option is to keep moving forward with blind determination, and hope desperately that the light of Tiphareth shines within them and will lead the way to the supernal lands.

Uranian; Urning, urge, uraeus-

Neptunian; Inept, tune, fortune, attune, nebula-

Plutonian; Pluton, plutocrat-

In crossing the abyss, one learns that the journey is not an ascension, as described in childish religious lore, but an infinite fractalised spiral of ever-increasing complexity, punctuated by whirls and eddies of localised psychic energy.

  Thus, at the supernal lands of Binah and Chockmah, the all-Mother and all-Father, lies not the enlightenment of religious self-importance, but a paralysing awareness of the energies at work beyond the physical geometry of the triad of Tiphareth, Geburah, and Chesed. Within the interplay of Binah and Chockmah, yin and yang, form and force, is the useless enlightenment of the wave-particle duality which lies at the deepest level of human understanding; impractical knowledge that is, at best, maddening. To reach the deepest levels of transcendence is to trivialise that which we live for. One assumes that there is a purpose, an end-game that waits at the apex of one's journey; but this is perhaps symptomatic of the sentimental apophenia of the human mind. Perhaps, like all delights, transcendence entices us beyond reason and into madness. Perhaps, like all things good and all things worthy, the ultimate lesson is that of moderation. Perhaps the daemon realm Da'ath exists as a warning of the dangers of spiritual overindulgence, just as comedowns and hangovers hint darkly at the horrors of withdrawal. But who is to say? These realms lie beyond human understanding. Perhaps I come to these conclusions because I never made it across the abyss, and have instead found the daemonic Binah and Chokmah in the black mirror world of Qliphoth.

  At this point, one is reminded of the importance of keeping ties with Malkuth.

Erisian; Error, erode, erase, erotic, errant, ergot, erudite, erratic, erethic-

Earlier this year, a new planet was discovered in our solar system that rivalled Pluto in size. This has challenged Pluto's status as a planet - if this new astrological body is merely a dwarf planet, then so is Pluto; if Pluto is to retain its status as a planet, then we must give this new astrological body the same honour.

  Appropriately, this new planet has been named Eris, after the Greek goddess of chaos and strife.

  Eris also happens to be the goddess worshiped by the Discordians, whose chaotic philosophies and wry, self-reflexive wit brings to mind the trickery and paradox of shamanic wisdom and zen koans.

  As the planetary correspondences of the outer spheres (excluding Binah, to which has been attributed Saturn; or, perhaps more appropriately, the abyss, for it represents the outer limits of human consciousness) remain murky, I have attributed the chaotic Eris to the realm of Kether.

 Traditionally, Kether has been associated with such primitive spiritual concepts as the infinite white light, God, or some form of divine purity. But the more secular science progresses, the more it becomes evident that at the heart of reality lies total chaos and randomness.

Kether-

Planet: Eris

Chakrah: Sahasrara, crown

Symbol: The point; the Chaos Star

Circuit: Neuro-atomic Hive Mind

Chemical messenger: DMT

Nature: Acausal; polymorphic

Conclusion: I like reading books in the bush, and hanging out with my friends Collin, Ned, and Lucy. I like walking on cold nights and late night conversations. I like the thrill of discovery. These are things I want to hold on to; these are things that bind me to this reality. My mundane passions, indulgences, and dependencies bring me always back to Malkuth.

And for this I thank them.

Plants And Stuff

Robbie Marks

After a quick inspection to make sure all was in order, we left Robbie under the casual watch of C. Awareness. His occupation was chosen for this very reason; the simple task of stocking and arranging shelves required only the supervision of C. Awareness - and even that could be done in a restive state, saving energy and resources for its eventual reintegration into the Great Work being performed behind the scenes.

  The presence of the alien sphere Collin - which we often now referred to, in gallows irony, as Bi-Polar; or, when the presence of Fear outshone that of Humour, Nyarlathotep - had, slowly but surely, broadened our understanding of the Universe. The introduction of an entity from another dimension had forced us to reconsider many of our fundamental assumptions about the Universe and our place within it, leading some of us to question even our own existence. The notion that the spheres revolved around Tiphareth was now seen as laughably primitive, with the knowledge that all the spheres in fact revolved around and through the luminous whiteness of Kether in a Calabi-Yau formation; and it was speculated that even this Kether-centric viewpoint would, someday, also be the target of Humour's increasingly esoteric jokes. To investigate the matter further would require the potentially destructive input of Paradox; and with Paradox roaming free throughout our meditations, we would all need to work in unison to maintain order, something we had struggled to do ever since the Self was revealed to be another of Humour's strange jests.

  However, we were making progress in this direction; more than ever, equality within the spheres was a priority, thanks largely to the demotion of the once dominant realm of Hod. The formerly impenetrable sphere of Yesod was no longer occluded, now that the parasitic entity Conditioning had been exorcised and banished to the swirling blackness of Da'ath. The organism itself was now plagued with nightmares, as it was into Da'ath, rather than Yesod, that C. Awareness now ventured in sleep: Every night, under the cover of darkness, C. Awareness descended deep into the realm of Da'ath, now presided over by Fear, to mitigate the threat of any of its inhabitants exerting influence outside of their dark world. Though certain Yesodian entities - who were accustomed to the darkness of the subterranean - often accompanied C. Awareness on its expeditions, their affinity for the unseen remained a constant threat, further muddying the waters of that strange realm; at times even leading C. Awareness to blunder into the cloying blindness of Qliphoth.

  With Fear banished and seemingly content to rule its own horrific world, it was Instinct - a Malkuth native and frequenter of the opposing worlds of Netzach and Geburah - and Logic (now better known as Logos) who acted as the organism's psychic immune system, operating in a less alarmist and more holistic manner than Fear. Much of Logos' former work had been delegated to Will and Compassion - both of whom had been rescued from the depths of Da'ath - with Apophenia and its endless wealth of insight operating as a Shamanic consultant with ties to the darker realms.

  At all times, the demon sphere Collin stood by in stillness and silence, threatening and enticing us with its mysteries. Though we all had our theories about its true nature, its unwavering watch meant that these were restless and uneasy times, but also times of great progression and staggering insight: To further our understanding of Collin, we would need to further our understanding of ourselves.

The walk home from work had become a ritualistic act of Zen; after seven hours of breathing recirculated air under fluorescent lights, the simple pleasures of the sun on my back and the occasional breeze of untainted air were almost intoxicating. This was enhanced by the afterglow of my 20mg dose of 2C-E, taken that morning, and the items in my backpack - electronic scales, a set of pens, and some batteries - stolen to placate my inner-conviction that working a real job was indicative of a failure to support oneself by other means.

  However, on this day, home was not to be my destination. With a left turn instead of my usual right, I made my way down Horrucks Street to Isabelle's house - formerly known as The Shit Lab. The plan for the evening was to do some work with Isabelle on my upcoming court case, fuelled by a tray of Methylphenidate, acquired from my doctor several days earlier; and, time permitting, to tribe with my friends who had taken up semi-permanent residence there - much like myself a year earlier.

  Upon arrival, I didn't get a chance to go inside, as I was immediately roped into a drinking session happening in the front yard. Michael, fresh from a two-week stint working on the offshore oil rigs, was looking forward to a two-week holiday; this was always cause for celebration, as he would have a healthy bank balance and, if he'd had a chance to acquire them, a large stash of drugs to share around.

  ‘Belle's doing her own shit in there anyway,’ he informed me. ‘She ain't going anywhere. Just grab a fuckin' beer and get into it. Haven't seen ya in a couple weeks, cunt.’ I couldn't refute his logic, nor did I desire to, so I took a beer from the cooler and sat cross-legged on the grass in between Spacey, stoned in her work clothes, and Damon.

  ‘Breather,’ Damon said, raising his beer.

  ‘Breather,’ I clinked his bottle. ‘That moustache is looking pretty wild.’ Both Damon and Rory had been growing their moustaches while shaving every other part of their face and head - including eyebrows - which, complemented by their tastes in leather, made them look like something between budding skinheads and a pair of homosexuals.

  ‘Yeah bolts. Gonna start curling it at the -’

  ‘Oath, cunt,’ Michael interrupted, standing up from his seat to pace around. ‘You think that's bad, you gotta see Rory's. I had to take the cunt out before it was so out of control.’

  ‘You had to what?’ I asked.

  ‘Had to fully fuckin' take him out, like actually get the cunt down and physically restrain him.’

  ‘You had to physically restrain him because of his moustache?’ I said, goading him on. This story was already sounding like the product of Michael's overactive imagination, but I was happy to see where he would go with it. As our friendship had deepened, I had come to see a certain self-awareness to Michael and his delusional tales; I now understood that his stories, and even his very personality, were a caricature of themselves, a Gonzo kind of quasi-fiction that existed comfortably between the realms of truth and joke, an obscure middle-ground that was as amusing as it was unsettling.

  ‘Fuckin' A. Someone had to step up and take care of it. No shit, cunt, I was fresh off the fuckin' rigs, came over here looking to get mellow with the lads, then there's that cunt Rory, storming 'round the backyard, up to no good, rocking a moustache with a wingspan nigh on four inches, protruding two centimetres … from the nose!’ He illustrated the extent of Rory's transgression by saluting his index finger from his upper lip out beyond his nose, before turning his hand around into a ‘come hither’ directed at Irena, who held a joint between her fingers.

  ‘Yep, we probably would've died if it weren't for you,’ she said, handing over the joint.

  ‘Yeah, I once knew a guy who beheld a moustache with a wingspan of only three point five inches,’ Penny said. ‘The poor guy was hospitalised for days. Deep lacerations, kidney stones....’

  ‘Hysterical pregnancy,’ Alan added.

  ‘Diminished sense of self-worth,’

  ‘Strange patches of hair,’

  ‘Bodies piled up in his basement,’

  ‘And a demented hyena fucking him from behind.’

  The exchange descended into hyena-like grunting and whooping sounds, eventually settling into laughter that included everybody present. It was a good-natured sort of shit-talking, the kind that underpins most deep friendships; but Michael's involvement brought out a certain level of concern on my part. In light of the psychotic episode that led to Collin's untimely death, I had become hyper-vigilant in detecting signs of such an occurrence in other people. From what I understood, Michael now took his entire monthly Dextroamphetamine script - already an absurd fifty milligrams per day - during his two weeks at sea. On his two weeks off, he would spend the majority of his two-grand pay on party drugs - usually ‘Ecstasy’ pills - which he could turn into around ten-grand and still have enough to fry his receptors every day. Almost as disconcerting was his assertion that meth is ‘basically just dexies that you don't have to snort.’

  As the laughter died down, I said, ‘You still taking your whole script off-shore, Farmdog?’ On the remote chance that his answer would placate my quiet anxiety.

  ‘Eh? Thought you had your own scam going now.’

  ‘I do, yeah. I'm just wondering. Must be fucking up your dopaminergic system, man. Just saying. Especially since you -’

  ‘Means to an end, cunt. Means to an end. Only been on the rigs half a year and I'm already looking at doing supervisor shit. Fuckin', hundred K a year and shit, ballin'. Get some pingers, do some big scale shit, boom, half a mill, retired at thirty. Won't need no fuckin' dopamine shit then, cunt. I got this shit planned out.’

  ‘Well you'll -’ I started, before changing my mind; his premise was so flawed that I didn't even know where to begin. What I did know, was that such a task would be fruitless, and probably only result in me being labelled a ‘buzz kill’, and most likely being the target of Michael's death for the whole evening.

  ‘Well, it's your brain,' I shrugged. ‘For now,’ I couldn't help but add.

  ‘Oath, cunt. You need to get on my program. Get out on the rigs, make some serious cash. How much you on at the shed, like thirteen bucks an hour or some shit?’ he retorted, turning the non-existent debate around on me. Damon passed me the joint, and I took a small puff to reignite the 2C-E before passing it to Spacey. Everybody had turned their attention to the conversation between Michael and I, since his logic-defying rebuttals had become a constant source of amusement for us, and were sorely missed during his two weeks at sea.

  ‘I just want to have a functioning reward system when I retire. Even if it means working another twenty years,’ I said.

  ‘Those extra twenty years suckin' dick'll fuck your brain up more than dexies, cunt. Anyway, you needa get something going, get some more cash flowing in. Peru in August, cunt. Fuckin' Ayahuasca and shit. You even got a ticket yet?’

  ‘No, I'm -’

  ‘Well fuckin' get on to it then, cunt. I got my shit sorted, gonna be heading over on my own if you don't get your shit together.... Fuck, just do some work for me tomorrow. I got pinger orders coming out of my arse. Just go fuckin' messenger boy for me, I'll give you a cut. There's ducats everywhere if you know where to look.’

  ‘Can't. Heading north tomorrow,’ I said. Really, it was irrelevant to the discussion; working for Michael was pretty high on my list of things not to do.

  ‘You're fuckin' what, cunt?’

  ‘Heading north.’

  ‘What the fuck for?’

  ‘Go see Lucy. Why, is that a problem for you?’ I was sort of winding him up, but at the same time I was genuinely curious what the issue was.

  ‘Fuck's sake cunt. Fuckin' been on the rigs for two weeks, now I'm back and you're fucking off up north. Thought we were gonna hang out, get all fucked up and shit.’

  ‘Hey, it's just a couple of -’

  ‘Hang on. I gotta see Amelia anyway, she's up those ways. You hitching?’ Amelia had fallen into the unfortunate position of working as the accountant for Michael's drug-dealing empire.

  ‘Yeah. Gonna -’

  ‘Fuck, alright. I'm keen. Crank some pingers, wake and bake, sounds mean. You staying over tonight?’

  ‘Uh, I'm already hitching with Benji. Three's too much, man. Sorry -’

  ‘Benji? What the fuck's he want up in Watson?’

  ‘He's heading further up. Go see Lance in -’

  ‘Fuck that shit. That cunt deserves to fuckin' rot in that cell alone. What the fuck would you wanna visit him for? Cunt dug his own grave.’

  ‘I'm not visiting him. I'm stopping off in Watson. I'm just saying, I've already made plans to hitch with Benji. What do you expect me to -’

  ‘You ain't gonna get rides with that cunt. Massive fuckin' dreads and shit. Probably doesn't even own a pair of shoes. You're fucked cunt. I can see you two standing there with one thumb out to the road and the other up your arse, going on about saving the planet and fuckin' Chakrahs and shit. Fuck that.’

  ‘Well, I'm glad you agree,’ I said, glad to see an end to the conversation in sight. As happy as I was to see him when I arrived, at times like this I often wondered if there was anything about Michael that I actually liked.

  ‘Aight, fuck it. Space, roll us up a joint. I'm crushing up a pinger. Who's keen?’ Michael said. I gave him the thumbs up in an obtuse joke he didn't pick up on. Mostly I was just happy that I didn't get called a buzz kill.

  ‘Eh yo, Robbie,’ Michael said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Fuckin', bring Belle back out when you're done in there. Bitch been cabin fevering the fuck out in there on the bracelet and shit, just sitting around smoking weed with Hayden all day. Fuckin' buzz kill cunt.’

  Ah, so that's who killed the buzz this time. I had a line of Michael's pill - MDVP and Ketamine by the taste of it - and finished my beer before cracking into another one. The drugs and alcohol settled in and I decided to stick around for a little while before heading inside; everybody except me, Damon, and Spacey were playing instruments and singing, and there was talk of lighting a fire once the sun went down. I messaged Benji and Old School - Benji for the intelligent conversation, Stan just on the off chance - to come over. Since it was only five PM, I crushed some Ritalin for everyone, supplementing my own dose with a few caps of Piracetam; with alcohol and weed in the equation, I'd probably be ready for bed by around midnight and on the road by noon, provided Benji had finished his elaborate daily Capoeira routine by then.

Stan Richards

‘No, man. I told you I've had enough,’ I say, waving Kit off. He just sits there staring at me, unable to comprehend the fact that I'm turning down a joint.

  ‘Feeling a bit schizophrenic there matey?’ he asks.

  I shrug, not wanting to get into another shitty discussion about how I'm ‘one of the lucky ones’.

  ‘Ah well. I'll chuck on a nice bit of Bach for ya in a minute, settle ya down,’ he says. Yes, Kit, go put on some Bach for me, I'm sure that'll settle me right down. Never mind the fact that we had this exact conversation ten minutes ago. Never mind the fact that you already put on some Bach to settle me down. Never mind the fact that the music playing, as we speak, is Bach, you brain-fried fuck.

  ‘Anyways, where was I?’ he says. Ned shrugs and I keep staring at my shoes. I've got a love-hate kinda relationship with weed these days. Sure, after work a quick bong and a few runs at the skatepark cheers me up pretty quick... But sitting here stoned with two clinically insane cunts, one of whom is about fifty and fresh out of jail, is not my idea of a good time. Especially when I'm the cunt losing grip on reality. The two former mental patients? Oh no, they're just fine. Having a great time. Me? Well, feeling a bit schizophrenic actually, matey.

  ‘Ah yes, that's the one,’ Kit says. ‘You can only condition backwards, not forwards. Right.’

  Fuck, I was hoping we'd moved past this topic. Though, knowing these two we'd just be moving on to something more disturbing.

  ‘Next topic,’ I say, not wanting to spend another hour talking about paedophiles.

  ‘Alls I'm saying is that you get these bloody University-educated quacks tryna get them beating the meat to older and older people. Which works in theory. In theory. But, naturally, they're not gonna play ball. Get 'em moving in the opposite direction though, and they'll think they've got it sweet. They'll fuckin' love it.’

  ‘You've lost your fucking mind,’ I say.

  ‘Nah nah, hear me out mate. Right, so you'll have a bit of a dark patch there, moving 'em from kids to toddlers to babies, but you'll have facilities for that. They'll be locked up down south, not harming nobody besides themselves. But what you want is to move them past the foetus to the embryo.’

  ‘That's your solution? Get them jacking off to ultrasounds?’

  ‘Nah nah, you're missing the final step there, mate. If you play your cards right, you'll get 'em thinking that even embryos are too old. She's past her prime, they'll say. She's practically bloody dead!’

  ‘So...’

  ‘Come on mate, you don't have to be Emperor bloody Norton to figure this one out.’

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘Semen! Get 'em pumping the lizard to their own loads! That'll be better than the bloody ankle bracelet. They'll just stay home all day jerkin' the gherkin, 'cause as soon as they blow their load, they'll go Fuck! Look at that sexy pile of spunk! I think I'll have a wank.'

  ‘A masturbatory singularity,’ Ned says solemnly.

  ‘That's the one, matey. That's the ticket.’

  Kit puts out the joint victoriously. Ned sparks another. This is the only problem living with Benji. For the most part, he's a good cunt. Keeps the place tidy, cooks up nice food, always has weed and beer... But the cunt's just got no quality control when it comes to people. Every fuckin' day he's invited another derelict with ‘good energy’ to stay here till they get back on their feet. With cunts like Ned and Kit, that could be a long fuckin' time.

  Kit's talking about reptiles again. Reptiles and fuckin' paedophiles, that's everything that's come out of this cunt's mouth for the last three days. I'm tryna figure out an exit strategy, but every possibility is plagued with stoned paranoia. Apparently there's a party going on at Collin's old place, but if I go there these two will end up following - you can't just turn up somewhere with Kit, especially if there's girls there. I could go for a skate, but the thought of leaving these two here alone is pretty unsettling. Most unsettling, however, is the thought of staying here... Unfortunately, I know that's the option I'll end up taking.

  I go to the fridge and grab the last beer. Benji should be home in like half an hour... Maybe the weed will have worn off by then and I'll be able to make a coherent plan to get the fuck away from here. Till then, I guess I'll have to try and enjoy whatever Kit's on about now.

  ‘...we all know about the pistol shrimp and the electric eel. But then you got the dragon millipede that can shoot cyanide at ya. And octopi are fuckin' ink spitting shapeshifters. Plenty of creatures out there with superpowers, mate. All around us. And that's where I get my theory about the electromagnetic weasel from.’

  Animals with superpowers? Fuck, I'm not drinking fast enough. It's time to go.

Tracey Colombera

‘Don't do that shit, Mum. He'll just end up in more trouble than he needs to be’ Hayden says. I don't know what he's doing here. He's just complaining. I don't know what I'm doing here either though.

  ‘You can stay out of this, Hayden. If Robbie does this right, he'll be in no trouble at all’ Belle says. She's at her desk leafing through a pile of paper. Robbie is sitting next to her crushing up some pills. Hayden is sitting next to me on the floor against the wall, whining.

  ‘What happened when we tried this shit with me? Two month’s jail for supply’ Hayden says. ‘I could have pleaded guilty and got a fine. Or even not guilty and done a bit of community service. But no, I tried to claim I didn't exist and got sent to jail. Probably out of spite.’

  ‘Dear, with your criminal record you're lucky you only got two months. Anyway, if you didn't mess it up, you wouldn't have gotten anything. That's why, Robbie, you have to make sure that before you go across the line, you state-’

  ‘Seriously, dude, just plead guilty’ Hayden butts in. ‘You had, what, a couple doses of DMT and some tabs? Personal use, easy. You've got no criminal record. You'll probably get diversion. This is way over the top. It's like pleading entrapment for an overdue library book.’

  ‘Well, yeah, but it's not just about that’ Robbie says. ‘I mean, if we can pull this off it'll change everything. Besides, I had enough acid for it to be possession with intent. Class A. I don't want that kind of death.’

  ‘Just make an argument for what a dose is. Say you take five hundred mikes for a trip. You'll just get a possession charge and you'll still get to set a precedent and play the hero. Those maximum sentences only exist so they can get you if you really piss them off. And that's what going in there and claiming you're above the law is gonna do. They'll give you a max sentence for dealing, plus contempt of the courts or something.’

  ‘It's not a fight, Hayden’ Belle says. ‘It's a game. Emotions don't come into it. It's like a game of chess. It's based on clear cut and unchanging rules.’

  ‘Fuck off, it's totally a fight. Like Timothy Leary getting nine years or whatever for a roach. You think that was because he had a bad lawyer? No, it was 'cause they hated him. He was punished for his arrogance.’

  ‘Timothy Leary had a whole FBI file on him, darling. It was a legal assassination perpetrated by the government, not some judge he pissed off.’

  ‘Let's just get on with it’ Robbie says. ‘Can we have one fucking discussion in this house that doesn't involve Timothy Leary?’

  ‘Whatever dude. This is gonna end up at the high courts for sure’ Hayden says.

  ‘Can you just roll that joint?’ Belle says. ‘You said you would ten minutes ago, and you've just sat there pretending to be a lawyer.’

  ‘I'm pretending to be a lawyer? You never even got your degree. That's why you're not doing it anymore-’

  ‘I'm not doing it anymore because I found more important things to-’

  ‘Everyone shut up or else no one gets ritalin’ Robbie says. ‘I'm not giving you two any if it's just gonna turn this into another psychedelic domestic dispute.’

  ‘I'm with you. Hayden, roll up a joint or get out’ Belle says.

  Belle, Robbie, and me have a line each and they start arranging the pile of papers on the desk, talking about stuff I don't understand. Hayden gives us each a puff on his joint, then takes it outside to the others.

  ‘Alright, first we'll go through where Hayden messed up. You have to make sure to state that you have no first or last name because you are appearing as a natural person and not an artificial one. But you have to make sure you say this before you cross the barrier to where the judge sits, because crossing the barrier implies that you are under maritime admiralty law.’

  I'm interested in this, but the fact that Belle is under house arrest makes me think that she's all shit. But for these people, being all shit seems to give you more credibility. Like the ankle brace is a symbol of her experience with the legal system. I guess, in a way, we're all still kids.

  ‘So I'm not Robbie then?’

  ‘No, because that would imply corporate title.’

  ‘So what am I then? Like an ecosystem? I could get pagan on this.’

  ‘No, you are an agent of Robert Marks. But it's something to do with capital letters...It's called capitis diminutio maxima. There's a couple of pages about it in the maritime notes...’

  They're leafing through their mess of papers again. I forgot to bring a beer in but I don't want to go back out and get one, so I take Robbie's one. I have a few sips then get bored of the silence and start talking.

  ‘Hey Belle.’

  ‘Yes Tracey’ she says, still distracted by her papers.

  ‘Is Kit Ned's father?’

  ‘What?’ She looks at me over her shoulder.

  ‘Is Kit Ned's father?’

  ‘...That would make more sense. But no, Ned's father is a depressed accountant living up north. His mother's a similar kind of weirdo as Kit, though. Maybe that's where you got that from.’

  ‘Peter implied that Kit secretly fathered like half of the town.’

  ‘That doesn't surprise me. But Peter thinks he can collapse wave functions by masturbating. Honestly, you could bring up any topic to those two and they'll somehow make their penis a central part of the story.’

  ‘What are you guys on about?’ Robbie asks.

  ‘Just one of Peter's fun facts. You should talk to him sometime. You two would get along’ I say.

  ‘I think that's a prime example of what Robbie should not be doing. Peter has a way of taking up a lot of room in your brain without adding anything useful to it. Kit too. Come on Robbie, focus. Capitus diminutio maxima. There's a piece of paper with that written bold at the top. That's what we need to find. Capitus diminutio maxima.’

  I get bored and fidgety so I go to the bookshelf on the wall opposite the windows. The books are in piles instead of standing up, and they're messed in with cards and ornaments and jars of stuff. I open a box that says Illuminati on it, but it's filled with poke'mon cards like some weird joke. Collin, I guess. I laugh quietly to myself about Collin's weird sense of humour, until it goes cold. My mouth fills up with saliva but I can't swallow it down. A wave of emptiness spreads out from my chest and I start shaking. Amphetamine snot dribbles down to my lip, so I sniff it up and realise I've been holding my breath. There's an unopened pack of Camels on the bookshelf, so I steal one and smoke it out the window.

  ‘No, sub is subject, mon is monitor’ Belle says.

  ‘So is the subject like a Mars rover or something?’ Robbie asks.

  ‘No, look here. The monitor is telling the subject to move to a different time. It's remote viewing. There's heaps of strange CIA documents from the eighties about this kind of stuff. Look here, the subject is describing an ancient civilisation of giants...strange structures and pathways.’

  ‘Holy shit, he's saying that one of the dying giants seems to think he's a hallucination. Bandit. Is this seriously a CIA document?’

  ‘Seriously. Here's another one about their experiments with LSD in the eighties. They were drugging up random civilians to see if it they could use it as a chemical weapon.’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘You've never heard of MK-Ultra? Here, look at this one. This is their notes on Ted Kackzynski - the Unabomber.’

  ‘Woah, I thought that was just a conspiracy.’

  ‘Far from it. Look...’

  I don't think this relates to Robbie's court case. I guess they've gotten distracted again. All these conversations about acid and the government are getting boring. It's all anyone talks about here. Collin always made it sound interesting when he talked about it. He got that twinkle in his eye. You could feel how excited he would get about it. It must have been nice to get so excited about stuff.

  ‘Woah, this could be, like, the creation of the counterculture’ Robbie says. He's excited. Like Collin would be.

  ‘No, I'd still credit that to Leary. Both the rise and the fall. This is the death throes of the counterculture...There was a lot of abuse and psychological torture. It went very much against the ethos of hippy generation. All they really have in common is LSD. But even that's completely different. They used it as a weapon rather than a sacrament.’

  ‘So, sort of like Charles Manson?’

  ‘Exactly. You know him and Timothy Leary met in jail? I have some information about it somewhere...’ 

  The sunset clouds are so pink. I don't like pink, but the way it sits on my friends makes everything seems so still and peaceful out there. Michael is standing up acting out a story. Everyone else is sitting down laughing. Michael's not laughing. I haven’t seen Michael laugh in a long time. He always makes jokes, but never seems to laugh. I wonder if that's terrifying. I put the cigarette out on the back of my hand and light it again. Now that I think about it, I don't really laugh either. I still like stuff though. Like cigarettes and dexies. Ketamine. They're just not really funny things.

  ‘...well, Kackzynski's transition away from mathematics is definitely comparable to Leary's transition away from secular psychology. Do you know about Godel?’ Belle's saying.

  ‘Godel...Sounds familiar. What was he again?’

  ‘Another mathematician. His incompleteness theorems describe the inherent limitations of any logical system, the descent into chaos at the heart of logic and order.’

  ‘So like the mathematical equivalent of quantum physics?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so. It's like the yin within the yang and the yang within the yin. Wait here, I have some notes on it in the other room.’

  Belle gets up and rushes out of the room, leaving Robbie leafing through the paper.

  I finish my cigarette and flick it out the window.

  ‘Hey, Robbie,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You're going to jail.’

  He turns around and glares at me, then narrows his eyes at the floor, then up to me, then nods and turns back to his papers.

03/01/2006

Court date: 27/01/2006

Charge: Possession of class A, possibly for supply

LSD and DMT are both class A drugs. Possession for personal use carries a maximum sentence of 6 months imprisonment or a $1000 fine. Possession for supply, however, can result in a life sentence.

  Possession of over 2.5mg of LSD is considered possession for supply. I was caught with 17 tabs, which were dosed at 150ug each. This is enough to be tried for supply, assuming the dosages were measured. If they were not, then they might assume they contained the standard street dose of around 100ug. This would put the total amount in my possession at 1.8mg, which is beneath the threshold of what would be considered possession for supply.

  I only had about 150mg of DMT, which I feel safe in assuming would be considered personal use. There is no evidence of intent to supply either, except possibly the amount of LSD.

  Still, this is a risk I would rather avoid.

In court, the seats for witnesses are behind a wooden barrier. The defendant must cross that barrier to where the judge and plaintiff sit. This act represents the boarding of a ship, meaning business can now be conducted under Maritime Admiralty Law. This is an international law governing the relationships between private entities which operate vessels on the ocean. This stands in opposition to the law of the land, or Civil Law.

  Maritime Admiralty Law was originally made for the banking and merchant deals that occurred when a vessel would arrive at the docks with product. Boarding the vessel implies that one is appearing as an Artificial Person, or corporation, rather than a Natural Person. In the courtroom, the judge represents the captain of the ship or the banker. He is responsible for overseeing the monetary transaction.

  Before crossing the barrier one must state that they are appearing as a Natural Person, rather than an Artificial Person one; if one crosses the barrier without doing so, then they have symbolically boarded the vessel, and are now subject to Maritime Admiralty Law, and are acting as an agent of the Artificial Person, or corporation. One must state that they do not have a first or last name, as that would imply corporate title, and that the court takes judicial notice of Your Honour's Oath of Office. This references the oath that all judges must take in order to practice law, and makes it clear that the judge is acting as a judge and not a banker or captain. The judge must accept this, and when he does, the defendant is appearing as a Natural Person who does not represent the Artificial Person, and is therefore not subject to Maritime Admiralty Law.

  Capitus Diminutio Maxima is the maximum loss of status, when a man's condition has changed from that of freedom to that of a slave. He no longer has the rights of citizenship or family, and is at the mercy of the government. By signing any form where one's name is written in all capital letters, one is accepting Capitus Diminutio Maxima. This means you are agreeing to be a representative of a corporation or entity, such as the government, thus waiving your rights as a Natural Person; you are now an Artificial Person, without human rights. You have agreed to become a slave. Because we have all unwittingly agreed to be representatives of an Artificial Person, we have waived our rights to freedom. We have allowed ourselves to be imprisoned.

  robert marks: This is the human being, who has the right to freedom and is protected by common law.

  Robert Marks: Capitus Diminutio Minima. When the first letters of both names are capitalised, one is a Natural Person. This is minimal loss of status, retaining the rights and freedoms of a human being as provided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Bill of Rights.

  Robert MARKS: Capitus Diminutio Media. When all letters of the surname are capitalised, one is an Artificial Person. The rights of citizenship are lost, but not the rights of liberty; one is still a human being, but with diminished rights.

  ROBERT MARKS: Capitus Diminutio Maxima. When all letters of both names are capitalised, one is a corporation or Artificial Person. This represents a total loss of human rights; one has become a slave. The only rights they maintain are those provided by the creator, be it the government, employer, or any other organization. Most contracts utilise Capitus Diminutio Maxima, which essentially negates all human rights except those outlined in the contract.

  The nature of the aetheric transition from earthly Malkuthian consciousness to the lunar Yesodian depends on how well one has balanced the fourfold alchemical characteristics of Malkuth. The use of psychedelics to transcend the rigidity of Malkuth stretches many walks of life: Harvard psychologists, primitive tribal cultures, the CIA and other government agencies, intellectuals, gangsters, manic cult leaders, artists, and the general population. All have used psychedelics to transcend the closed-system operating structure of Malkuth for the uncertainty and limitless potential of Yesod.

  This transitional pathway magnifies any microcosmic imbalances one may have, for it is an extrapolation of the aether through which the different aspects of mind interact. For example: Ted Kackzynski was a brilliant mathematician, whose being was based mostly in the element of air. This was tempered by his later naturalistic bent and its ties to the elemental earth. The MK-Ultra experiments awoke within him the dormant elemental fire. However, these elements weren't tempered by the empathy of elemental water. Thus, his Yesodian awakening found its expression as a violent and destructive force built upon a foundation of inhuman logic. The MK-Ultra experiments themselves were also lacking in the humanity of elemental water, and thus contributed to this imbalance.

  Even if the four elements are in balance, the transition to Yesod can still be destructive; such is the nature of the revolution, whether internal or external. Timothy Leary entered the uncertainty of the aethers with a strong and balanced ego; but even he left a trail of destruction in his wake. The collateral damage of the 1960's counterculture is vast, but certain sacrifices must be made in the name of progression. It is debatable whether the civil rights, equality, personal freedoms, and explosions in art, culture, and science that resulted from the acid wave of the 1960's can justify the damage to individuals and society; but what is certain is that, for good or for ill, it affected change and facilitated the evolution of mankind. Reading Ted Kackzynski's manifesto, one is hard pressed to fault the logical basis; but one needs only to read his initial analysis of leftist culture to note a distinct lack of empathy. Perhaps if his microcosm had been balanced, and his initiatory journey had been orchestrated by a more human force than the CIA, his revolution would have had a long lasting and positive influence on the evolution of mankind. I think most could identify with his concerns about living in a virtual world, where technology is stronger than biology, cold logic occupying the space which was once reserved for the human heart. However, his decision to enact change through violence is an expression of the cold, heartless logic that he fears the most. These kinds of contradictions arise when one's imbalances manifest through the prism of transcendence.

  However, the element of transgression is an often overlooked aspect of the evolutionary ascension. The early proponents of psychedelics were peaceful intellectuals, whose being was too firmly based in the elemental air to direct their perceptions and insights toward creating large scale change. When Aldous Huxley wrote the Doors of Perception, it was viewed as an intellectual marvel and nothing more; later, with the fiery presence of Jim Morrison and the watery emotional impact of music, The Doors built upon these airy foundations. Paradoxically, it is lack of elemental earth that prevents this energy from departing the planetary Earth in a such a balanced way as to find effective Yesodian expression in the human hive-mind in order to continue moving Qabalistically upward and alter the course of human history.

  I have become distracted from the task at hand; the aetheric wonders of Yesod have tempted me away from Malkuth. Distractibility is a maladaptive pathway to Yesod, a side effect of opening oneself up to the unseen mysteries of the universe. Even the CIA fell victim to this and found themselves researching astral projection. It would seem that even the cold and the power hungry are unable to resist the allure of the mysterious Yesod. Or perhaps they are aware of the potential for gain in transcending cold, hard materialism in favour of the formless and the unknown....

  I need to balance my Malkuthian microcosm in order to refocus. One cannot hide from the threats of the material in the imagination.

Stan Richards

The thought of therapy and medication isn't a romantic one. It's degrading enough to admit to yourself that there's something wrong inside you, but to say it out loud to another human makes it a little too real. It's a total surrender to some cunt in a white coat who thinks that everything people do can be categorised and analysed according to some shit he learned when he was a teenager. On the surface, therapy is like a deep, personal insult from society.

  But that's just on the surface. Dig a little deeper, and you'll come to the same conclusion, but with a different attitude. You'll still see it as surrendering yourself to some cunt who's prolly never seen shit the way you do. He'll prod around your head with pills and life advice that seems obvious, mixing and matching, clutching at straws, stabbing into the dark... But if you stick with it, then slowly but surely things start to get clearer. The human mind is based on a finite combination of physical processes that can be changed by things like medication, diet, and exercise. With every failed experiment, the doctor adds another line to the diagram of your mind, slowly zeroing in on the faulty wire. Just one faulty wire is enough to create a snowball effect all through your brain that results in a cunt who can't function in the world.

  I always liked the rain. And the adrenaline of skating sketchy terrain. I just never really combined the two. On a sunny day, the mellow incline that snakes from the western suburbs to the city centre is a mellow cruise. But on a rainy day like this it's sketchy as fuck. I'm blasting through the blind intersections with way too much speed to stop if a cheeky car comes around the corner. I figure if that happens, all I can do is take a dive onto my back and hope I can scrape myself to a stop. But I'm clear headed enough to do this shit now. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I'm totally confident and decisive. The months of medication and therapy were a success. I know exactly what to do.

  Weaving through pedestrians, I spot a big ass puddle and hiss through it, spraying water into the air on either side of me. I crouch down and grab indy-style like an old-school shredder and throw up a cheeky Shaka Brah to some rugby looking cunts as they pass. They all get the joke and have a laugh with me, and I get a couple Shaka Brahs and a Wolfpac back from them. Without fear, the world is a friendly place. I learnt this from Doctor Geoffreys. Deep down, we all know that aggression comes from fear. My fear puts other people in a fight-or-flight state, resulting in aggression or aversion on their part. I respond to this with either aggression or aversion. The possible combinations here are aggression-aversion (intimidation), aversion-aversion (alienation), or aggression-aggression (altercation). All three possibilities increase the tendency towards fight-or-flight response in both parties. Most of this interaction goes on outside of conscious awareness, and is often over in the blink of an eye.

  According to Doctor Geoffreys, I'm manic-depressive. Like Collin. But for me, it's a defence mechanism against my depression, which, of course, stems from the death of my mother, since I was too young to resolve the anger and guilt through the grieving process. As a way of fighting the constant exhaustion of depression, I learned to harness the fight-or-flight response and use it in place of serotonin and dopamine in order to motivate myself to stay alive. So basically I've been running on adrenaline for most of my life (manic), resulting in periods of mental and physical depletion (depression). Of course, I never brought up my inner-conflicts about Collin's death with the doctor. It would only lead to a long and irrelevant line of questioning that would get nowhere.

  It takes like five seconds to slow to a stop when I reach the construction site on Chatman Street, dragging my foot through the puddles and scattered stones. I throw my board over the two-metre fence and climb over after it. I step out of my tattered shoes and leave them at the fence, then walk barefoot through the dirt and mud to the unmanned crane at the centre of the site that stretches up to the blank grey sky.

  The truck bit at the bottom is unlocked, so I hop in away from the rain. I open my bag for a rummage and straight away cut my hand on the knife I stole from work yesterday. I put it on the dashboard and search through the crap in my bag for item number one: A bottle of vodka. I put it on the dashboard next to my knife, and go back in for item two: A pungent block of hash butter, courtesy of my friend and flatmate Benji, which I swallow with a gulp of vodka. Back in my bag, I come across a tray of zopiclone, but decide not to take it yet, since I've still got a crane to climb. A few seconds later, I find item number three: A tray of ritalin, courtesy of my friend Robbie and his cynical yet resourceful attitude towards the mental health system. I swallow all eight of them at once with vodka, then put everything back in my bag for the climb.

  Even though it's slippery, I have no trouble climbing onto the roof of the vehicle. There's a ladder going up the middle of the crane, which I guess goes at least up to the diagonal bit a couple storeys up. I wedge my skateboard between me and my backpack and start the climb. The rungs aren't just slippery from the rain, they're also covered in a layer of grease. My bare feet are muddy as fuck, so it's my hands that take the weight. I only have about three storeys of this to climb, so I take my time. It'll get easier once I get to the diagonal bit.

  See, there's a few things that me and the doctor disagree on. He sees my constant fear as a paralysing force in my life, while I've always thought of it as a motivating force, something that prevents me from indulging in my depression... But, to his credit, he prescribed those drugs with the precision of a NASA scientist, and, through trial-and-error, he did the impossible: He finally stabilised my rowdy mind.

  The climb continues. A little over a storey up, I perch in the meeting point of three poles, covered in rain, sweat, grease, and mud. The whole idea of the hash was to make the climb a race against the clock, but it's not really doing shit. Still, edibles are notorious for sneaking up on you. After catching my breath, I wipe my greasy hands on my shirt and get on with the climb.

  Physical activity is so much fun with a clear head. The fat, round poles are cold and slimy, and just too big to close my hands around. Obstacles like this are just more games to play. This clarity isn't from my meds though. In fact, I haven't taken my pills in over a week, besides the occasional zopiclone. Meds tend to blur things, especially the senses. They make the world seem softer and friendlier. But that relief is based on lies, and is basically a form of intoxication. There's no shortcut to clarity. It comes from insight and experience, and total commitment to one’s actions. Me and Robbie had a long-ass drunk conversation about fear the other night. He reckons that fear is only a problem when it opposes your other impulses. What I guess he means is that it's the inner-conflict, not the actual sensation of fear, that causes trouble. I still feel the fear most of the time, but now it's aligned with my desires. Robbie too. But what makes Robbie special is that his fearlessness comes from his intellect. Your average fucker hides from fear by numbing the mind, but Robbie has used his mind to overcome fear. So I guess he's not so much fearless as he is brave. He feels the fear, but he understands it. ‘You’re not afraid of heights, Stan,’ he said that night, ‘But you’re afraid of depths.’ At the time, it sounded like just another one of the Collin-esque statements he always comes out with these days. But from up here it makes perfect sense.

  At the halfway point, the climb is no longer vertical. It tilts at a forty-five degree angle for maybe fifty metres, before another twenty metres or so of horizontal. The triangle-latticed walls of the diagonal bit are lined with these panels of metal mesh shit that are about the width of my shoulders. I can’t think of any purpose they might serve, but they make my climb easier.

  I get to the corner and sit down for a rest in this metal pocket bit. The rain has eased into occasional droplets, but the sky is still grey. I've purposely waited till this point to look down, holding off for maximum vertigo. From up here, maybe forty or fifty metres from the ground, I can get a sense of the grid-like shape of the city centre. The rigid layout degrades into winding suburban roads after about two blocks on every side of me, until it’s swallowed up by the bush that stretches around the outskirts. My nerves perk up with a pulse of adrenaline, so I get a death-grip on the pole above me and dangle my head and some of my torso backwards over the drop, watching the swaying, upside-down world blur between little drops of rain.

  The droplets feel nice on my skin, and I decide it's more ritalin than adrenaline I'm feeling. I fold my body back around into the pocket to enjoy the sensation for a bit. Thoughts of Robbie drift peacefully into memories of Lucy, with guest appearances by Ned and Collin. The past seems pleasant from up here. It's far away, like the earth. Not close enough to threaten me. Lyrics drift in and out of my head to the sporadic tunes of raindrops on metal. I get my notebook out of my bag to put some words to it, but just end up reading some lyrics from back when I first started working at Bolton and Sons:

Time has slowed into the withered

Creep of an illegal man

Whose dreams are nothing but a list

Of nasty plots and wicked plans

His pots and pans breed germination

Depraved like his imagination

Creatures made of thoughts and stardust

Hardened to a psychic crust

He seeks the hues adulthood lacks

Drifts through the grey into the black

And in the blackness time and space

Take form behind the human face

Particles they scream and laugh

Careening through the great beyond

The greater yonder we all wander

As we wonder where the colour’s gone

The hand of god may strike us down

Banish us into the ground

But in our very souls takes place

The kaleidoscope of time and space

The inky black may blind our elves

And pixies to our very selves

But in our atoms there’s a place

That heaven’s breath cannot erase

  Laughing, I tear the page out and toss it to the wind. The fact that I actually found that gibberish engaging tells me that the hash is kicking in, so I have a nice big gulp of vodka, put my board and bag on, and get on with the climb, leaving my notebook behind to get old and die alone.

  This part is pretty safe with all the mesh linings, but there's an extra element of danger now that the hash has kicked in. I'm pretty much doing this on auto-pilot now, going through shit in my head in that bemused way weed makes me do. It's easier to think about my depression when I'm up high. It's just like another part of civilisation, all the way down there. It's easy to admit to myself now that I'm depressed. I have depression. And that's okay. Maybe that's just what civilisation does to a cunt... Now that I'm up here away from it, I feel fine.

The threat of death sets my soul free...

  I guess that's just 'cause I'm going against the will of society. I'm fucked out of my mind, four or five storeys up in a crane... But this shit just feels right. It's having my feet on the ground that scares me. Maybe it's natural to want to escape the boredom of life by doing shit like this. Maybe this is what we evolved to do. Maybe the constant anxiety and self-questioning of modern life is just a way of summoning a pathetic dose of adrenaline, like just enough to keep us upright. We live in a world without true threats, where you have to be either unlucky or a total fuck up to get yourself killed. What if it's the risk of death that animates us? What if all these little paranoid horror stories we tell ourselves all day are the body's way of scaring us enough to keep moving, to keep-

skull

  I catch myself with my fingers in the mesh as my feet lose grip, laughing hysterically through my impaled soul into the grey sky. I pull myself up to relative safety and continue the climb, my fatigue washed away with adrenaline. This is what feels natural. We're just not meant to be confined, by like school and work and shit. We're designed to be out moving, to risk our lives and push ourselves to the limit just to survive to see another day. But they expect us to sacrifice this completely natural impulse to be a part of society... It's like locking a monkey in a tiny cage all day till it gives up tryna escape and gets depressed, then claiming it has a chemical imbalance in its brain and feeding it up on clonazepam till it learns to love its stupor. What the fuck can you do in that situation? Keep fighting our captors and make shit harder for yourself? Or enjoy the pills and let them enslave your mind as well as your body? I'm lucky in the sense that I have the freedom to escape. The fuckers even gave me the keys: Zopiclone, citalopram, clonazepam, tramadol... Supplemented by a bottle of vodka - since I am now of age - and the sweet velocity of an eight-storey drop. All I had to source myself was the hash and ritalin.

  Between the vodka, hash, and dexies, the diagonal climb is over in a couple of nihilistic chains of thought and three near-death experiences - four if you count the sudden urge to jump prematurely when Lance popped into my head. The possibility of death peaks at the horizontal walk to the edge of the crane - the only thing between me and the eight-storey drop is a lattice of slippery, round metal poles with empty triangles big enough to fit my whole body through with room to spare. I have to crouch down low so I don't hit my head on the poles that make up the ceiling. That Joy Division song I always secretly liked is playing through my head for an obvious reason that I don't care about. At one point, my upright skateboard snags the ceiling, setting off a chain reaction that involves my feet losing grip and me barely catching myself on a pole on the side wall. Death is so close that it sets off a deep psychedelic belly-laugh that's an even bigger threat to my life than the layer of grease coating the poles beneath my feet and hands. Eventually, I make it to the end and sit down panting with adrenaline, dangling my feet off the death drop.

  The platform at the end is a couple metres wide and three or four metres long. A thick metal wire with a hook at the end of it dangles beneath my feet, swaying in the wind. I empty my bag on the space of platform between my knees, losing the Split Enz CD I never got round to playing to the wind.

  Unfortunately, I only managed to save four zopiclone for today, since I am actually somewhat dependent on that particular drug. I wash them down with a swig of vodka, followed by a full tray of citalopram and six tramadol. I spend a while looking for my clonazepam, but eventually give up and accept that I've lost it to the sky. None of these quantities alone are enough to kill me, but I'm hoping that, combined with the vodka, hash, and ritalin, they'll add up to a fatal dose. Anyway, this isn't gonna be another shitty pill suicide. I've got better plans.

  After a determined drink of vodka, I take my shirt off and let it float down to the earth, enjoying the feeling of wet air on my exposed torso. I always thought that private suicides were a waste of a great opportunity to do something spectacular. They say that no matter what the method, suicide is a coward's way out. But ‘they’ is the living, and therefore the inexperienced.

  A dozy yawn tells me the pills are kicking in. I pick up my knife and lie down on my back with my eyes closed, facing the drip drip drip of the sky. With all these drugs inside me, the feeling of the knife sinking into my solar plexus barely even tickles, and I have to open my eyes to make sure I've actually broken the skin. The knife gets less than an inch deep before hitting some resistance, so I leave it at that and drag it haltingly down to my belly button, leaving a large gash.

  It takes me a while to get back on my feet, but once I'm up the proximity of death sobers me up a little. I step out to the end of the platform and stand with my toes off the edge, swaying a little but trusting my balance. In front of me clouds part, exposing the sun. It's warm enough to feel even through my stupor. A flight of seagulls silhouetted against the light is dangerously poetic, so I quickly pick up my skateboard and wriggle it as deep as I can between the puckered lips of my wound. I'm starting to doubt whether I'll be able to hold it in place for the whole fall, but I guess I'll be dead so it doesn't really matter.

  Still, I can't bring myself to jump without knowing for sure I'll commit to my masterpiece. I close my eyes and go through the jump in my head. Whenever I imagined this moment, I pictured myself doing it with a wound deep enough to hold the skateboard in place. But that turned out to be unrealistic, so my only option is to hold it in place for the whole fall to complete my masterpiece: The splattered corpse of a human fuck up, impaled through the spine with a skateboard draped in entrails. It prolly won't work, but at least I'll be dead - one less monkey in the punchline, right Ned?

  The sky is blue now and I'm standing here like an asshole, holding my skateboard against my bleeding torso. I go through it again in my head, but in this fantasy the weight of my head causes me to land head-first, ruining the aesthetics. This a pretty typical defeatist anti-depressant thought.

  Fuck it.

  I close my eyes, crouch, and spring... The fall is peaceful, but the ground launches up to meet me faster than I thought. When I hit it, all that happens is my eyes jump open and I stumble backwards. Seems like all these pills do is turn me into a pussy who can't go through with anything. It's like tryna skate when I first got on them. I'd roll up to the obstacle with every intention to skate it, but my body just wouldn't cooperate.

  I close my eyes and try to jump again, but the cool fear that got me up here has turned into the paralysing apathy that kept me from this moment for so long. This is okay, though. I had a feeling I'd bitch out of this like I do everything else. I take a big gulp of vodka and sit down to look through my shit for any forgotten drugs. Irritating feelings of euphoria and oneness pulse through me, filling me with a warm, contented glow. I shake it off and take the biggest drink of vodka I can physically handle... If I can't succeed at suicide, maybe I can just fuck up and die. Fucking up is something I know how to do. I've got it down to an art form.

  After a little while looking through my bag, I give up and shove it off the edge like a smartass cat knocking over a glass of water. Once again, I stand swaying on the edge of the platform, dazed by the vertigo of mortality even more than the drug cocktail. The city seems so beautiful in the context of a goodbye, every corner filled with memories and emotions. Nostalgia overwhelms me and I have to close my eyes to process it. As soon as I do, I lose my balance and, as if by some divine plan, fall not to the left, right, or the front, but onto my ass - the only direction that wouldn't result in certain death.

  The sky is clear and blue, with the occasional drop of rain. The effects of the sedatives have overpowered the ritalin, and I can barely lift my arm to shield my eyes from the glowing sky. I drag my leaden arm slowly down my body to my open wound and finger it curiously, wondering what it would feel like to touch my insides as my fingers slosh around in the ravine of blood and rain. The beauty of mortality brings tears to my eyes, and I feel a powerful urge to live long enough to almost die again, see how close I can get to death and survive. I want to hold on to these feelings, this moment, to try and share it with those who will never get to experience it... How delicate the human body seems when death is only one mistake away. The flood of memories that takes over the mind when there's no future blocking them off. The strange shaking sensation of vertigo. The way that a view can make everything somehow so clear but so fuzzy...

  Maybe we don't have to live like monkeys in a cage. Maybe a normal life is there for safety, in case we can't think of anything better to do... I could get into photography, climb the biggest structures I can find to capture the views denied to those who play it safe. Or I could strap a camera to myself and film the climb. People could watch my videos and feel a safe version of that beautiful vertigo from the couch...

  We'll see. I sit up and chug away on my vodka. Maybe I'll do that if I survive this blackout. Share the fruits of my self-destructive impulses with the bored and the stable. Lying here drugged-out and bleeding on a narrow platform eight storeys up... You may say I'm delusional, frightened, and angry... And you'd be right. But you can't say I'm not also lucid, bold, and compassionate. Because I am. And this won't change, because I have the good fortune of being emotionally unstable. Once you learn to feel, you can't go back to being numb, no matter how much you try, no matter how many drugs you throw at it. You're doomed, or blessed, to experience the whole spectrum of emotions for the rest of your life.

  I pour some vodka into my wound to see how numb my corpse is. My eyelids are getting heavier and heavier, kept open only by the sheer beauty of the view... I sit up and finish off my vodka, then try to toss it at the sun but just end up dropping it behind me as I wind up. With a thud, I'm lying on my back with my eyes closed, feet still dangling off the edge. The metal platform is like a mattress, the moist, warm air a plush duvet... The clouds shimmer like the pages of a book when you read yourself to sleep at night, then wiggle and squint out into black. If I ever wake up from this sleep, I'll try make it work. I'll find a way...

Tracey Colombera

The screen in front of me is blank flickering white. James Blunt is playing quietly, telling us all that we're beautiful for about the fiftieth time today. When there's this many people in one space, music with any kind of meaning will always irritate someone. This is the neutral music of elevators and retirement homes. In a simpler time, a lot of these people would be in their twilight years. If the rest of my life looks like this, then I suppose it is a kind of retirement. I had a pretty good life. I once saw a cat and a snake fight to the death. The snake won.

  In ten minutes I get an hour long break. Ten minutes isn't long enough to get started on whatever I'm supposed to be doing, so I just sit. Jermaine and Zoe are talking quietly a few cubicles over. The soft music and relentless clicking of keyboards doesn't hide their conversation. But what they're talking about is so vapid that it doesn't matter. In the office, we are domesticated. Timid like farm animals. I remember Collin and Michael talking about this. Collin said that after enough generations live and die in the zoo, even predators like lions and bears will forget how easy it would be to kill a human. They'll be scared of us in the same way that farm animals are. Maybe even humans have reached that point. The stigma of poverty and welfare is an invisible electric fence.

  Five minutes until my break. Crazy by Gnarls Barkley is playing. This is as far from the mainstream management will allow our playlist to venture. Rory has his break at the same time and wants to meet up. He's gone ‘gay for pay’ and works at the shoe store on Tory street that rich wankers go to. He achieved this by dressing like a rich wanker for his job interview. He has to dress like a rich wanker five days a week. He now dresses like a wanker the other two days as well. As a result, Damon also dresses like a wanker. Their dress sense is still somewhat influenced by Collin, minus the novelty. Collin dressed like a wanker when everyone dressed like gangsters. Then everyone started to dress like goths, but Collin still dressed like a wanker. When everybody wanted to be Kurt Cobain, Collin still dressed like a wanker. Now he's dead, and we all dress like wankers. Collin made the rich wanker look into something punk. I dress like a rich wanker five days a week. But I also dress a little slutty, because management would rather I didn't. It would be sexist of them to object, because my revealing skirt and tight button up shirt fall within the dress code outlined in my employment contract. My boots and knee high stockings are slutty in a way that can't be quantified. This makes it impossible to object to and of no concern to management. These are some of many pathetic attempts I make five days a week to feel free.

  One o'clock. Time to go.

  ‘I'm off to fill my veins’ I say, standing up. ‘I'll be back when the drugs wear off.’ Nick, Suzie, and Chase all chuckle because they appreciate my dry humour. Against a backdrop of fingers on keyboards and top of the pops music, our weak jokes are an insurance policy for our mental health.

  It takes me about five minutes to get to the toilets by the west entrance to the Botanical gardens, including a quick stop for a takeaway flat white. I was only joking about putting drugs in my veins. Intramuscular works fine for ketamine.

  Since I only have an hour long break, I rush through the cooking routine. A splash of warm tap water, one hundred milligrams of K stirred in and dissolved over flame, filtered through a cotton ball then straight into the thin gap between the top of my stockings and the bottom of my skirt. Even though I rushed the cooking process, I still inject slowly. This is because I find it intrinsically satisfying. I suck a little blood back into the chamber and enjoy the slow explosion of red inside the syringe, then gradually push the plunger down until it's emptied into me. I rinse the needle off and put it back inside the glasses container I stole off Robbie, then pocket it, pick up my coffee, and go for a walk. I leave the pinprick hole in my thigh bleeding as a rebellion against the forces of adulthood.

  It's a cool spring day filled with aromas that sit peacefully in the still air. I cut off the path and into the unchecked tangles that seem to lead to no man's land as my senses start to roil. A ray of sunshine penetrates a small natural clearing like a piece of advice. I lie against some damp shrubs and let the warmth of the sun melt into the growing numbness and apathy. Thin echoes of data entry form as I blink, trying to make their way into the scenery, so I put my headphones in. The manic jazz of Naked City zaps away the computer screen stains like a game of Space Invaders, and I light a cigarette to go with the coffee before I vanish.

  A mild gust of wind through the grass gets louder and more digital, until it divides into multiple sounds that take turns with my attention. Everything is a little more digital than I would like, but at least it's about computer games rather than work stuff now. The tree canopies are black against the sky, gradually losing their curves in favour of simple blocks. It's basically just black trees and a white sky made of pixels. They slowly merge into a chess board that starts out warped and simple, but becomes more square and detailed as I start to decohere. The music follows a similar path as it divides into single sound bites that tessellate neatly. Then brain does same with thoughts just black and white squares. Everything separate but fits together like stack. Everything is lots. Stacks of lots. Lots of lots. Lost lots. Lots of lost slots. Lost. Lots. Lot...

robbie marks

Love's mellow, jazzy beat was infectious - so much so that even more serious and aloof entities such as Will and Logos were caught up in the rhythm. As a former denizen of the demon realm Da'ath, Lust was reticent; but, being passionately - at times violently - musical by nature, its eventual participation could be counted on. The rest of us waited patiently for Lust's input, moving to the all-encompassing rhythms of Love; the chemistry of Love and Lust would always create the most beautiful music, even if Lust always takes over in the end.

  Floating alone outside of our orbit, Da'ath puckered with frustration; the demon entities Fear and Collin would always try and meddle in the affairs of Lust, with Collin now inhabited by its own twisted, malformed entities - entities who, having been born in the Darkness of Da'ath, will forever hold a fragment of Darkness within them.

  Though mentally stunted by their aphotic existence, the demons of Collin were a constant lurking threat; being entities of the Darkness, they need not the Light of Tiphareth to navigate our Universe. It is only Love who does not fear their threats, as Love contains within it a fragment of the Light of all spheres. Beings of the Darkness cannot be intimidated, as they exist in the domain of Fear and are as untouchable as shadows; and, like shadows, it is only Light that can eliminate them.

  With Love's power now fully invested in controlling the demons of Da'ath, it was Lust's steadily growing beat that we all moved to - including the organism itself, whose central nervous system and brainwave frequency had fallen in line with the repetitive theta rhythm. As the denizens of our Universe maintain their dualistic existence through independent action, the distinctions between us became blurred as we all synchronised our movements in accordance with the beat of Lust. Initially, the demon entities of Da'ath resisted; but they were eventually placated by the more complex and psychically stimulating rhythms of Love.

  As the beat gained momentum, every boundary between entities dissolved, followed by the boundaries between spheres, then the Universal Constants, until the organism at large was enveloped by the climax, a harmonic singularity that melts us all into one....

The fragrance of familiar bodies steams spiced with garlic and marijuana from the droplets of perspiration resting on warm, naked flesh, the languid drumming of raindrops upon the window deflating the once tense bodies into the flaccid warmth of skin on skin, moving like liquid without resistance into a limp patchwork of anatomy, the breathing slowing with the heartbeats until all sensation is taken over by the shifting glow of unity.... My eyes open slowly like a newborn's as the easy dusk light behind the curtain filters through the watery blur, then settle, mirrored by hers, serene and droopy with sex, smiling slow blinks and damp dreams, suggesting a portal to another Universe, blurred and undefined like my own, our own, until the distinction between us returns and it reassembles into something distant and unfathomable, and they both drift away to tend themselves in isolation, until next time....

Inside, we all relax as the distinctions return, breaking the spell of unity and gradually dislodging us from the sense organs to our usual positions. The spheres roll casually in their respective orbits, entities acknowledging each other benevolently until the time comes to resume work. But, for now, we co-exist in peace, flowing along our own pathways harmoniously, in accordance with the Constants which, when followed without the resistance of our personal egos, ensure we will never collide.

Lucy Winters

Robbie the restless warrior lies beautiful and naked on my bed, sleeping. His skin glows moon coloured from the late afternoon sunbeam, breathing serene. But this kind of serenity only ever rests on the surface, never quite penetrates the pure and wild hive of his thoughts. When I ask him questions, his mind explodes and the ancient libraries inside him burst out and connect together in one person debates and stories that forget the question in seconds. But this is what gives him the strength to be in a world that's not designed for people like him. He used to be so afraid. He used to stand before us all like we were suns, shielding his eyes and talking into himself. But now he stands up straight and stares into the light. His self doubt still eats him inside. But it's only because of his doubt that he talks and acts with confidence. By the time anything reaches the surface, it's something he knows for sure. He's a delicate but highly masochistic flower.

  I pull the duvet up over Robbie's shoulders and he snuggles into it dreaming. My flatmates are all at work, so I put Robbie's baggy green jacket on with nothing underneath. On my way out the door, I spot the headphones of his mp3 player coiled out of the pockets of his cargo pants on the floor. I place it on my bedside table by his head. Robbie always reaches for his bedside table when he first wakes up, even though he doesn't wear glasses or sleep in beds much anymore. He likes to listen to binaural beats when he first wakes up, so he remembers his dreams. He'll think it's a synchronicity. He likes synchronicity.

  The house is spacious and tidy, since I live with older people now. The west wall is a huge four panel glass door that goes out to the balcony overlooking our garden. I have a small corner with an oregano and a silverbeet and a capsicum plant. The silverbeet and capsicum aren't doing very well, but it's the first time I've ever tried to grow plants so I don’t mind. Dianna is going to help me with nutrients and stuff next time I plant something.

  My cupboard is smaller than all the others, but that's okay because we usually cook dinner together. We all go to the markets on Saturday mornings and go in on the vegetables. Everyone except me works full time, so they don't worry too much about who pays for what. The vegetables all stay in Selene's cupboard, because she's the one who cooks the most. I just have my own stuff in my cupboard. Like my coffee and wraps and seeds. Things like chia seeds are expensive, so we don't share them. And no one here knows what my other seeds are for.

  I turn the kettle on and go to dining room to play with our turtle, Sam. He's a red eared terrapin. He lives in a big tank on top of the book shelf, between two octopus plants that drape down the front of the bookshelf like a net curtain and creep across the floor a little bit. I try to play Tarot cards with Sam every day. I draw seven cards and place them up against the glass in a row. Sam spends hours staring out at them, floating across the length of his tank, moving from card to card. I wish I could see what he sees when he looks at them. Sometimes I get annoyed because I never will.

  He's finished with the cards I put up for him this morning, so I take them away and draw some new ones. I always look through the deck first, then shuffle it lightly. Robbie told me to do this so that my subconscious knows the order and chooses the right cards. He says that the conscious and the subconscious mind speak to each other through symbols, so if your conscious mind asks a question and lets your subconscious mind answer, then they can both learn from each other. Because of how he is, I know Robbie has thought about this more than I ever will.

  The Fool, The Magician, Page of Swords, Six of Pentacles, Eight of Swords, Five of Wands, King of Wands, Eight of Wands, Two of Swords, and The Devil . . . Seems a little weird that The Fool and The Magician came out together at the start, but you can't unshuffle a deck so I guess it's just a way to show that the spread is happening in a linear order. That means it starts with the Page of Swords, the stirring of some kind of mental activity, that of the Six of Pentacles. That's to do with the loss of something material, which doesn't seem to fit . . . Except that it leads to the Eight of Swords, which is bondage through fear. Maybe it's between Robbie and me, bonded through the fear of the old life we lost under Collin's watch. And that's what the Five of Wands represents. The battle with material obstacles that stand in our way. Robbie and me are bonded through our battle through the fear of losing our centre, and on the other side lies . . . the King of Wands. Oh, that's just Collin. So on the other side lies the Eight of Wands, the release of energy to allow the creativity to flow freely. But then we're faced with the Two of Swords, a conflict of interest that . . .

  The kettle's boiled. I leave the cards for Sam to interpret and make my tea. Lavender scented green tea and poppy seeds with honey.

  Unlike the rest of my plants, my poppies have been doing well. It started out with just the single pot plant Collin gave me over a year ago. Now they fill my whole planter box. It feels like there's a little bit of Collin in them. Collin was magical like that. Collin is magical like that. He put a little piece of himself in the poppy to stay with me, because he knew his time on Earth would be short. Poppy tea relaxes the mind's defences, takes away the paranoia that keeps out the supernatural. Collin was finished with his body, but he planted the seeds of his mind all around him to flower and live on. We're all like honey bees, spreading little bits of Collin wherever we go. I plant poppy seeds, and Robbie tells people what he learned through Collin. I haven't seen Ned or Michael or Hayden in a long time, but I'm sure there's a little bit of Collin in them . . . I still sometimes wonder if it's true. But then I drink the tea and I can feel Collin here with me, hear the echoes of his voice. It doesn't really matter how true something is if you can feel it. That's the difference between something real and something true.

  Sam's inspecting the Page of Swords. I guess he figured out the significance of The Fool and The Magician. He must be one of the best Tarot readers in the world. Outside of the playthings in his tank, that's his whole world. He does Tarot readings almost every day.

  I take my tea into my room and put on The Dark Side of the Moon, next next next, quiet enough so that Robbie stays asleep. I finish my tea whirling around the room to Brain Damage until I'm feeling light enough to start my painting. I took the week off school to hang out with Robbie, but I still have to keep up with my work. I'm putting all of Robbie's and Collin's words into a book and doing the illustrations. Robbie has such beautiful words and ideas, but he's too hyperactive to do anything with them. I want to make it into something real, something you can hold in your hands. And today, him and Collin are both here with me.

  To tap the void through images unseen . . . This one's just a murky grey ocean of Indian ink and water that goes to the Worlds within dreams, which is similar except I've used ink lines to pick out faces and shapes from the ocean. Become the infinite is another inky blur that I'm going to draw patterns over top of, then on the next page we Dance recklessly through unknown realms, where all is known and all has happened, which is an explosion of watercolour purples and greens that swirl into two black, staring eyes in the middle. The spread of An inter dimensional scout, reporting all findings and Back to our hologram reality from which they were salvaged is two mirrored portraits next to each other, on the left an impressionistic splash of watercolour suggestive of Collin at his most wild eyed and passionate, on the right a detailed geometric ink drawing of Robbie's face in deep contemplation. Today, I'm starting on With madness of the senses. I don't know anything about it yet except that it's going to feel like a reflection of something else.

  But the sun is eclipsed by the moon . . .

  It's time to roll a joint. It may not be the total madness of the senses I'm trying to portray, but between the breathing of Robbie's dreams and Collin's invisible embrace, I'm confident enough to turn off my mind and let my friends and their beautiful madness guide me. On that thought, I change the radio to static, since this book is about Ned too. Most people think he doesn't talk, but really he just uses the words of others. So much of what happened at that strange time was Ned. It's just that no one notices him. What Collin is doing in death, Ned has always been doing in life, wherever he ended up . . .

Ned Devlin

It's turning out to be quite the ordeal washing all the blood and dirt off of my hands, but it had to be done, so no Regret, just more Time lost for doing and a little gained for thinking, here in the public toilets with the smell of piss and vomit, then back on the road while the Sun is still at it.

  And at it He is, overdoing it to be honest, especially for this part of the year, though such things are getting less and less important, and i'm wondering if when the seasons merge together and summer is only a little warmer than the winter but colder than spring with a little less fucking going on, wondering if then we'll still have the audacity to call them by their old names, clinging to the Past as we do, though who can blame us with the Future doing that thing he does where he switches from thing to Thing and back again, and we're just stood here ducking and weaving just in case until bedtime where we pretend to be hedgehogs with spikes on our backs, all curled up in a defensive ball waiting to stab the wet sniffing canine nosing of Life, though if i'm being honest (which, when pressed on the matter, is kind of a loaded question, and really just You and Your mates nosing about on Life's behalf) it's just that there's this hedgehog wagging around my feet in the grass and fungus, out here under the sign at the city limits. Whatever adventure keeping him out at this hour is a little too much thinking for now, with so many Memories tied in with the Nocturnal trying to sweep me up and seduce me with Nostalgia and honey, so i keep it simple with just a bit of telepathic advice: Time for bed, my little friend, and then it's the thumb out waiting game, head all peopled with Thoughts, them all just trying to pass the Time, really.

  It's a while of that before i get a bite, and it's just what i feared: That big man in the small car, patron of the Roadside Counsellor. Turns out he's more scared than me, and he speeds off hunting and drooling down the road for some fresh meat: Perhaps even my good friend Robbie, now that he's a certified Roadside Counsellor too, though i suspect not ready for the challenge of dead wide pervert eyes and meditations upon the penis sizes of various races (but i suppose one is never really ready for that until the fact).

  Eventually with a cloud of dust and some serious parallel parking, i'm heading south with my first new friend: An older fellow who goes by the name of Christ, allegedly. Call me Paranoid if You must, but i've always been suspicious of white vans being driven by enormous gorillafolk hunched over the wheel with the windscreen wipers and headlights on at 3PM on a sunny day who introduce themselves as Christ and smell of hard liquor and kerosene, but after all, i do have schizotypal tendencies, so that is to be expected.

  My Paranoia eases into a garden variety paranoia (the kind that is not paranoid itself, obviously) when he starts telling me, in between bible verses, of his former life as the president of the Death Devils motorcycle gang. Since the country side scenery has got me feeling all relaxed and loose, i pipe up from Time to Time, which usually results in him slowly turning his head to face me and stare into my soul for a few seconds, before slowly turning back to the road without acknowledging my input, which is okay, really, since i wouldn't want to get in the way of his superb character development and post modern story structure. When he finally pulls over to drop me off, he asks if he can pray for me, to which i politely decline due to my ties with Satan, before making little horns on my head with my fingers and hissing and running away with a slam of the door, providing him with some context for our Time together, and providing me with just a little pick me up in the form of Death brushing past: The runner's high.

  So we cruise together for a bit, me running along a bullfarm fenceline, Sir driving along next to me throwing encouraging bottles and CDs and even a red onion before losing interest and leaving me panting and sweating and doubting the flimsy fence between me and the animals, them breathing heavier than me, objecting to me for different but probably no less valid reasons than ole Christ and his religious Nonsense.

  It's one of those unfamiliarly familiar towns i'm in now, one of those places between places, but not too far from my old Car Bogan friends. Me and Kane exchanged numbers almost a year ago now in a burst of drug camaraderie, and my details had filtered to Isaac, now spelling his name Eye Sack, having found his third one and possibilities beyond with the help of 2C-E, feeling indebted to me and promising to help me on my next journey. After a phone call and a few whiskeys at the only bar in town, it's us two in his orange van with all the incense and dreamcatchers.

  ‘It's all about breathing, my bro,’ he says, bearded with long brown hair like Jesus (though, of course, i'm referring to the sort of Californian Jesus with the six pack and the light suntan, not the Arabic one with the more genetic tan) without the need to call himself Christ, Eye Sack being more personalised anyway. ‘That's what I figured out on that trip. I joined the Hare Krishnas for a while and brother, there's some power in that chant. But it's all breathing patterns. Every spirituality has a breathing pattern that brings about their particular visions. I've been developing one that goes in three heartbeats, hold four heartbeats, out eight heartbeats. It's Aztec and reticulated. Just make sure you don't accidentally hold it for five. That's where the Devil gets in, pitchfork and all.’

  He takes me to my next contact in Rotsfield (birthplace of the Oi Ching, if Eye Sack is to be trusted) gifting me with a large amethyst crystal that he's ‘meditated at heaps’, and apologising for not having a carnelian for me, which would apparently be more appropriate for my mission.

  I'll see you soon, i say as i step out of the van.

  ‘You're gonna come back up north?’

  No, but i have a feeling you'll be at my doorstep down Cottonwood ways soon.

  ‘Right on, brother. The intuition is a powerful untapped-’

  I close the door on him and his budding Psychosis, and then it's just one foot in front of the other, do de do do, give the homeless guy an amethyst (sorry, didn't have a carnelian on me), then into the next car waiting, The Junkies, who i regale with tales of Madness, Death, and Discovery, and a gift: A large stash of Phenazocine, stolen from Robbie - rude, i know, but there's been quite enough of that insanity Nonsense up there, time to let the Dead rest, i should think. From there, it's just a long walk, a short train ride, and a whole lot of Nothing under the cool shining Moon, before i take a well needed think under the gnarled canopy of a dying tree.

  It's easy to tell when you're in Cottonwood, especially when your eyes realise and your nose knows. With the Senses awake with night and Memories, it's really just a case of looking around, and it's not even necessary to note the swirling of the strange new Thoughts, old Thoughts with new hats and Senses of their own, sniffing and staring and asking after that unusual concentration of ultraviolet light that sits fading upon the chill night air. So really, there's no need for thinking Time, nor the resting of the limbs, since there'll be plenty of that in coming months (the latter, that is - one could argue that it is indeed Time for the former, as it is said to be unwise to ignore Throes, no matter what the form).

  It's only a little while of walking before my next ride, responding not to my outstretched thumb but my very presence, with presence being somewhat rare in these parts where most folk tend toward Nihility, just because it's less work. No need for greetings or words or anything here, since a cursory glance and a Thought or two on the matter are more than enough for my new friend to know exactly where i'm headed, knowing it is now his duty to make it so, for the good of Society, this strange Society the cunt will never know, nor would he want to.

  He drops me off right outside the door and I walk inside and into the lights and white and that funny smell, then: ‘Ned!’, greeted with open arms by my old buddy Robin, the Cottonwood polymath: Nurse, receptionist, psychologist, pharmacist, and, above all, Exorcist. ‘I was wondering when you'd be back. Did you have fun?’

  Yep. I saw all my old friends from school.

  ‘Did get it out of your system?’

  Yep, sure did.

  ‘And you got into a bit of trouble, did you?’

  Yeah. My friend Collin had a birthday party. I didn't eat any meat either, just plants and stuff.

  ‘Oh Ned, my little ball of mischief. What are we going to do with you?’

  I think i know.

  She smiles and we're off down the hallway, with Robin so excited to see me that she's babbling like a little girl: ‘Well, your room is just like you left it. And there's plenty of Zyprexa for you. Actually, come to the lounge first. Everyone'll be so excited to see you! Kelda's had another suicide attempt, and Toby's off Seroquel... Oh, and remember Emma with the funny nose? She got sent home yesterday, off to the halfway house in Marksdale. Oh, you've got so much catching up to do! Well, everyone's in the lounge. It's TV time. I have to go check on Bronte, but I'll be back with your medicine once she's dozed off.’

  Everyone's here in the lounge: Frank and Paul and Emperor Daniel and Jimmy and Freyja and Crazy Sam and, believe it or not, another fellow who goes by the name of Christ (though this one more deserving on account of his real name being Chris, and his last name being Topson) and a few new faces and even some old faces on new people: The one with the saggy eyes and the weird pointy mouth that looks like it's got no top teeth. They're all very sedated, so i just take a seat without saying anything. We'll all catch up soon anyway, so there's no need to be rude about it.

  Yep, it was good to see all my friends up north again. Robbie and Collin and Lucy and Penny and Kit and Michael and Neal and Tracey and even poor old Stan. I try to do good for others when i can, because it means more for them since i can always just come back here where it all goes away. But my friends have stuff to do, so they stay out in the wild, laughing and poking things with sticks even though they don't know why, just doing it because they're brave and maybe deep down they're all scared that one day the sticks will be doing the laughing and they'll be stuck there going: But . . . I thought there would be more. I'm already excited to see them again, wondering what they're up to now and which ones of their Dreams hatched and which ones crawled back into the womb. It might be a while before that happens, but it won't feel like that long. This place is good like that.

  As one more little Joke before Robin gets back, i get up and change the channel to Static, one last little party before my Hibernation, just to let everyone know i'm back.

  Yep, a little bit of Madness from Time to Time is good to get the blood pumping and the lungs moving and the ole Mind going: Hey, hang on a second there . . .

  But it's good to be back with my more stable friends. Just to finally get some sleep.

10/01/2006

We’re just creatures that wonder.