For the brief, beautiful moment when my eyes first opened, I could have been anyone, anywhere. I had no memory, no self, just a flicker of pure, unfettered consciousness. Of course, the headache kicked in almost right away, followed by the even more painful memories of who I was, and what I had done the night before.
I was on the floor with my arms spread out, an empty spirits bottle in one hand and an empty spray paint can in the other. My walls, ceiling and floor were dripping red. I winced, and saw flashes of myself howling, a can in each hand, twirling in the center of my room, slashing at the walls in broad strokes of messy crimson.
I had started with the three Ms: Meth, Mesc, and MDMA. After downing the spirits (a personal combination of every near-empty bottle I could find), I had discovered the perfect recipe for sweet mental arsenic, emotional anthrax, strychnine for the soul. A bad trip guaranteed, the resulting brain damage just icing on the fucking cake. I had spent the night bloodying the saccharine floral pattern on the wallpaper, after pissing in my cactus and attempting to flush it down the toilet. Although I couldn’t recall whether the cactus went down or not, the smell indicated that the toilet must have clogged and overflowed. I turned my head to the bathroom door and saw it slightly open, the floor inside muddy and rippling. Light reflecting from the mirror over the sink caught my eye and I winced and turned away. All in all, a successful night.
This may seem a little masochistic, but compared to my flat-mates I was the picture of practicality and stability. Alice and Lewis liked having unprotected sex, and not just with each other. Over the year I had been living with them, they had managed to turn me off of intercourse altogether. Lewis constantly scoured the meat market bars (fag or breeder) looking for AIDS, because he liked the image associated with it, and Alice loved not knowing who her baby’s father was. It made it a lot easier for her to poison it.
Having one in the oven didn’t stop her from making a few cooking experiments. She still got high on everything illegal, and drank everything available, including some shit she ordered over the internet that she said would mutate the fetus. She wanted to give birth to a monster, and she wasn’t taking risks. That was the only real reason she decided to keep this one. Before I had moved here, she had gotten pregnant just for the thrill of having an illegal abortion.
She told me that she was getting her hood split. When I gave her a blank stare, she explained that her clitoris would be made irreparably useless. When I continued my blank stare she said that she no longer enjoyed the pleasures of sex, and wanted that aspect of it removed. When my blank stare became even more blank she just stuck out her surgically forked tongue and walked away.
Lewis didn’t love her, but he was in love with her and it was mutual. He had tattoos and piercings too, but his were pretty tame, mostly stuff you’d find in any high school. He was addicted to a few things. Well, he said he was addicted, but we had no way of knowing for sure because he never actually tried to stop. I’ve had to beat the shit out of him before, when he really begged me to. It was difficult for me at first, but when I realized how much he enjoyed it I didn’t feel as bad. I’ve given him countless black eyes, and one time I fractured his rib.
I remember walking in on the two of them in bed one night, before quietly walking out, attempting to erase from my mind the grotesque absurdity of what they had been doing.
Why?
Their responses have varied with each new atrocity.
“Why not?”
“Because it gets a reaction like yours.”
“Really, because it’s the only thing left to do that’s not a cliché.”
“Look out the window. Look at that concrete fucking mess, that scar on this planet that’s our home. We rape the earth and scrape the sky and what do we have to show for it? A big fucking factory, a big smoke machine that milks us for all we can give it, chews us for just long enough for us to fuck and spawn more fuel for its engine, then spits us out, forgotten. It’s the death of everything natural, so fuck it. Let’s beat it at its own game. It hasn’t won yet, because we can show it what unnatural truly means.”
“Because I’m bored. Who are you to judge?”
That was my favorite response. Really, who was I to judge them? I may not have had their nihilism, their narcissism, their misanthropy, or their strict loyalty to the lunatic fringe, but in a way, that made me weaker. At least they were uncompromising. At least they didn’t struggle to find some middle ground, some moderate, measured outlook on life. I admired them in the same way I admired suicide bombers, and doomsday cult members. To believe in something (or in their case, nothing) that strongly, that devoutly required a certain resolve that I felt lacking.
The middle was so uncertain, so timid, so fickle. Only the most extreme side of any spectrum was pure, untainted by hypocrisy or compromise. Hardline or flatline. There seemed to be no other path to truth.
At least that’s what I learned from my flat-mates. The guy who had my room before me had killed himself. I never asked them if they had intentionally drove him to suicide, because there was never any doubt in my mind that they had. I was pretty sure they didn’t have the same plans for me. They probably wanted to pervert me, make me like them.
Before I came here, I was normal. For a freak, I mean. I was an anarchist for a while back in high school, before people convinced me that the idealistic beauty of it was overwhelmingly crushed by the realistic impossibility. I got a tattoo on my arm that said something cool in some Asian language, and I got my nose pierced because I liked how it looked in the mirror, and in the eyes of old people who passed me on the street. I had good friends who I loved, and a wonderful girlfriend who loved me, and my days were spent in heaven, getting high and talking, analyzing everything around me into submission. Then, one by one, they all sold out. My friends got jobs, some white collar, some blue collar, some anti-collar non-jobs like “professional protesters.” My girlfriend moved to Montreal to get a higher education, and I stopped returning her calls almost right away. So I came to the wasteland. I moved into a small room with a view of smoke and cement, with the flat-mates who loved the label “flat-mates from hell.” I was more unhappy than I ever hoped to be.
As I lay on the floor that morning, gasping what precious little oxygen was left in the room, I realized that I needed to vomit. For once, the prospect of vomiting on myself was not appealing, so I made a dash for the balcony. As I leaned over the edge, violently pushing waste from my body to the sidewalk six floors down, I decided that this needed to stop. There had to be another way. I wiped my mouth and looked up at the city skyline.
The smog taunted me, the outline of skyscrapers a row of middle fingers held up in my direction. A massive billboard stared me down from blocks away, the smiling face of a child hugging a dog, stretched to quadruple my height as a reminder to buy Ritalin. I had crushed Ritalin on my coffee table and sniffed it a few days ago. They say that blasts holes in your brain.
I remembered my girlfriend’s last words to me, spoken with a concerned, empathetic contempt.
“The hardest problems to solve are the ones you make for yourself.”
I spat over the balcony, at the world. This is what you want, isn’t it? If I die, you win. If we destroy ourselves and each other, we can’t taint your bloodstream, clog your system anymore. Well, fuck you. Alice and Lewis, they must have it all wrong. You who destroys all that is natural can never be outdone. Sure, we can commit our own little personal abominations, but we’ll never have the power and resources to accomplish your level of astounding monstrosity. Alice and Lewis still compromise, in their own way. They still have jobs and use money and eat fruit loops and watch god-awful TV. The only way to truly hit the hardline is to strip it all away.
I turned and walked with purpose back into my flat. In the storage room I found a bottle of Mineral Spirits. I had always found the name misleading, so pure, natural. I splashed it everywhere, on the walls, floor and ceiling, and soon the powerful smell of paint was replaced with the overpowering smell of paint-thinner. The red slashes on the walls went flesh pink and bled down to the floor.
I dropped the rest of the container next to my loose pile of bottles and shot-glasses in the corner, and stepped back outside. I tore off my clothes, and threw them, one article at a time, over the ledge. The wind was cold, clean. The smog cast everything in a beautiful gray. Lastly, I removed my nose ring and flicked it into space. As I stared down at the scattered pile below, I realized that my left sock still remained up here with me. It was soaked with Mineral Spirits, and picking it up made the skin on my hand itch. Almost without thinking, I started rubbing it against the tattoo on my arm, squeezing out the toxic liquid onto the fucking Asian writing, which still remained.
I stopped, as it hit me that the tattoo was only the tip of the iceberg, the visible rash for a tainted spirit. The real shit, the real smog was still inside, in my lungs, in my bloodstream.
The sock was wet against my face, and I nearly wretched. The smell was overpowering, but satisfying. I could imagine all the filth inside me flushing out with each inhalation. I coughed, and my head swam. The world went sideways, and I found myself pressed against the edge of the balcony. Razor wire seemed to grow around the bars of the guardrail.
I turned and looked inside. A shot-glass was rolling in circles on my floor, taunting me. The final solution. Purity.
My hands shook as I filled the shot-glass. It was so clear, so clean. It would have been easy to pretend it was Vodka, or water, but I was past pretending. It was soap. It was medicine. Minerals for my spirit. There was enough left in the container for three more shots, if I could make it that far.
A cool breeze of fresh smog wafted in from the balcony, and I inhaled. With the shot-glass feeling like a bullet in my hand, I threw my head back, opened my throat, and hit the hardline.
Jay Heisler is a 19-year-old student from Nova Scotia, Canada. He writes mostly about what interests him, so he writes mostly about love, drugs and politics.