BLAST 03: ALTÆR

ANVIL

Leaning out the window, his head looked like a pig’s testicle left out in the sun.

“Have you heard the good word?” he bellowed, his mouth a graveyard of teeth, all the teeth, a goodly amount of them distinctly shaped like shovels. “The good wooooooorrrrrrrd?”

I sighed, looking at his car─an asinine display of hot-rod-ishness with a shiny paintjob that would have been cool to an eighth-grader in the fifties─and atop his sunglasses waggled dye-job black eyebrows offering lascivious solutions to problems I didn’t have.

“Is it just one?” I asked, frowning. “Because I get confused if somebody tells me too many things.”

“It is one,” he cackled, reaching from his window in an awkward attempt to pat me on the shoulder despite my standing a solid seven feet away from him. “One that expands infinitely and compassionately into the ever of forever, into the endless heavens of amalgamated delight, pulling the tiny thread of you into the quilt of us.”

“That sounds terrible,” I said, scratching my head like a dimwit. “Is it like a password or something?”

“Something like that, yes,” he said, the creases in his nutsack-head pulsing in unison like a slew of angry bugs trying to escape. “This word, in this place, has magical qualities.”

“This place?” I said, making a show of looking around. “This is a gas station.”

“INDEEEEEEEED!” he shrieked. “It’s alllllllll fuel, son.”

“Fuck that’s awful,” I said, so acutely offended by his boomerang smile that my dipshit routine went out the window . . . or at least the part of it that was an act did; as always, my natural dipshittery remained on full display. “Are you honestly trying to rope people in with that shit?”

“IT IS WITH THIS SHIT, AT THIS PLACE OF FUELING AND REFUELING, THAT YOUR INSIGNIFICANCE IS CRUSHED AGAINST THE BLACKTOP OF GOD’S WORD, CRUSHED INTO POWDER AND FORGED INTO GOD’S TRUE CREATION.”

I grimaced and weighed the pros and cons of urinating on that car’s sweet paintjob when a small voice quietly erupted from somewhere in the backseat.

“Look at his face,” it said, a string of indecipherable muttering following like a garbled echo. “Jesus christ, Gerald. I told you to tone it down.”

“HE IS THE OOOOOOOOOONE,” Gerald screamed into the backseat.

“They all are,” the voice said. “You gigantic idiot.”

“You know he can hear you, right?”

“Good! I hope he can hear the shit out of me, Gerald, because he should know that he’s not resisting the word of god so much as you’re fucking it up!”

“My job is to entice, Alice,” Gerald said, craning his neck into the backseat and shoving his sunglasses atop his noggin. “Bring ‘em in with a little bit of honey.”

“Oh, is that what you’re screaming at him? Honey?”

“I SCREAM WITH GODLY ENTHUSIASM,” Gerlad responded, with a forward shake of his head that caused all the loose skull-skin to slide forward and shoot his sunglasses into the backseat, presumably into the face of a chagrined Alice with a clunk, an ow, and many apologies from Gerald.

“Um,” I said, reluctant to remind them of me but needing closure before I left. “Imma go?”

Gerald turned to me with hands smoothing back his head-skin like tousled hair and revealed a pair of empty holes where his eyes should have been. “I HAVE SEEN GOD AND MY─”

“God,” I said, curling my lip in disgust at those twin abominations . . . and Gerlad’s eye sockets. “You must drive like an asshole.”

“I CAN DRIVE JUST FINE.”

“With no eyes?” I said, shaking my head. “Not likely.”

“ARE YOU─WHY ARE YOU NOT─I DRIVE LIKE AN ANGEL.”

“Sure, pal,” I said, waving him off and walking away through a chorus of his complaints like it was my own personal background music.

LASSO

“Yeah, that guy’s a moron. Basically co-opted the parking lot a while back. Huge number of complaints every weekend,” she said, leaning heavily on the counter with her elbows. “I never see him pull in or pull out, but he is always yelling. And often─yep, see: there he goes─he ends up doing donuts in the parking lot. Then he’s just gone.”

The nametag said Naoki and she saw me seeing it with a smile. “It’s boy’s name, traditionally, but my parents didn’t care. And nowadays nobody cares about anything.”

“Right,” I said, looking to see if that was cynical observation or grudging complaint, settling on both. “Has this gum been here a while, or do you get fresh─”

“And another thing is,” she continued, leaning in to confide, “I’m pretty sure he stole my good luck kitty cat.”

“Your . . . what?”

“I can’t prove it anything, but my cat? It’s a maneki-neko. With the little waving arm? It vanished a few weeks ago, and with it went all the luck in the world.”

“Oh,” I said, frowning in discomfort as she stared sadly out into the night. “Yeah, um─yeah, so I’m trying to quit smoking and stale gum really doesn’t─”

“I think it’s still around here somewhere,” she said, gritting her teeth frighteningly before resuming her generally squeaky tone. “It just isn’t where it’s supposed to be.”

“Right,” I said, staring hard at the rack of gum as though I could determine freshness by exterior colour and imagining how I could possibly steer the conversation back toward one involving the relative pliability of her various chewy wares. I managed a so in anticipation of something more relevant following it when I felt something snaking around my waist, something slick but solid, creaking like the tendril of a branch that wanted to be friends. I immediately looked down to find myself unencumbered, looking back at Naoki to find her not only unsurprised by my discomfort, but, in fact, hurt, as though an advance had been offered and rejected. I felt responsible for heartbreak despite only wanting gum.

“Naoki,” I said, consolingly. “Are you a real person?”

“Wh─what?” she said, no longer wearing anything on her face but confusion. “Oh, you’re a freak too, huh? Yeah, I see it─you should probably hit the road too, weirdo.”

“But,” I said, holding my hands up in an attempt at calming the situation. “The gum,” I whined, gesturing with my head in the hopes that she’d point out the freshest option.

“I’m calling the cops,” she said, picking up her phone and hoisting an angry eyebrow that said don’t make me. “Freak.”

Withdrawing backwards, hands still up in surrender, I turned and opened the door agonizingly gumless. I watched as Gerald chose that moment to crash his ridiculous car into the fence and heard a voice behind me say you don’t have to make this so difficult.

I turned to look at Naoki, who angrily shook her phone at me, and back to the parking lot to find nothing but dust in the air, the remnants of a crash that never occurred.

No car, no Gerald, no Alice, and I looked back again to find no Naoki.

And me without a lick of gum.

TASTE

I had run out of cigarettes earlier and taken the opportunity to consider quitting. But as I wandered around the gas station in a fog the flavour was on my tongue, the deathly satisfaction pulling at my insides and whispering dirty delights in my ear. I was only going to be able to hang around for so long before Naoki, presumably hiding out with phone at the ready, alerted the fuzz, and the prospect of walking back to my car─I had left it at the burger place thinking a walk might distract me from the cravings of both hunger and nicotine─not so much as even a scrap of gum made me reconsider what I knew about stimulation vis-à-vis addiction, i.e.: how much is too much when the substance is taken out of the equation. Was I wandering around in the dark under threat of arrest to stave it off or to discover more?

I crisscrossed between the pumps in a slow-footed figure-eight almost certainly to see how much I could get away with in re: Naoki and took what I presumed to be a final perusal of the backside of the gas station, the building itself abutting the fenceless woods like a spade edging a garden, and as the motion-sensor lights flicked on like a prison spotlight I caught a glimpse of something shiny just past the tree line, my legs far less hesitant than I to answer the question of stimuli and my addicted-mind’s relation to such.

It was far deeper into the trees than it looked, glinting in rhythm like a beacon on a timer, and as I forced my way through the grabby foliage I reflexively tasted the roof of my mouth with a lip-smacking sound like a cartoon wolf licking his chops, as though whatever lay ahead was sure to fill the hunger in my soul. Eventually, in an abruptly circular clearing, atop a concisely leveled tree stump, sat a golden cat that greeted me with a perpetual wave that reflected light back at me with the metronomic precision that had drawn me to it in the first place. This cat, however, had been bastardized: no longer wearing its affable squinty smile, its head had been wholly molded into a leery-eyed Chungo, whose suddenly three-dimensional teeth protruded from the general vicinity of its mouth like the aftermath of an orange somehow nail-bombed from the inside, his smile that of one who had seen hell and returned specifically to spread the word.

Food, a cigarette, even a chewed lump of gum─I would’ve scraped any of these off a dirt floor and consumed them like a five-star meal at that point. I stared into the shoddily magic-markered pupils in Chungo’s eyes and tried to decipher the hieroglyph carved into his belly, deciding simultaneously that quitting stimuli itself was the singular option going forward. But those eyes followed me, somehow, and long dormant roots rose from the ground like every goddamned forest nightmare anyone’s ever fucking had, innumerable filthy branches coiling around me like a multi-armed hug of the damned, pulling me down through the mangled dirt while Chungo stared dead into my eyes and waved goodbye.

ÆTHER

What was here before; question and statement. Space and time, the big bang, carbon, carbon, and more carbon. Lightspeed, pushing away but coalescing. Spread like a spider’s web, connected in the unseen depths, along the edges beyond definition. Closest equivalent for comprehension’s sake is the tree. But there are no trees in the pre-matter universe, just ethereal footing on conceptual chaos and a mammoth lightshow.

The clumps of dirt that filled all my head’s open cavities fell away once the sky opened up. The light available was of a colour unrecognizable yet familiar, multiple earthly hues gently melted into one, leaving behind ever burning fires. I could move my arm but couldn’t see it, could feel my weight balanced on the balls of my feet despite gravity’s long reach as yet evading me, could smell the creation of the universe but couldn’t hear a goddamned thing.

Chungo arrived─the real Chungo, in all his grotesquely cartoonish realism─like a character from outside the panel of a comic book, just suddenly there, in from the left. A happy cat with eyes the size of mountains, unnervingly pleasant, like we weren’t looking at each other across the epicentre of a burgeoning universe. The cat’s tongue, which split into seven redwood trees that swayed and curled and coiled independent of each other, told me the word; told me the word seven times over and was the only sound I had ever heard. It was the hieroglyph carved into earthly-Chungo’s belly, a symbol I knew inherently and not at all.

I was annoyed. As far as hallucinations went, this was a pretty cookie-cutter version of a creation-mythos as seen through recent events, and I had always assumed I was better than that. There was no sense of urgency, of suspense, of resolution; there was only resignation to the idea that I would just have to wait for the psychotropic venom that had infiltrated my system to run its course. There was no threat, no distress, nothing that was going to surprise me out of my own head . . . and all that was left was unmitigated boredom.

“Ooh,” I said, with words that didn’t make a sound no matter how much sarcasm I doused them with. “Lookit the stars. GOLL-EE.”

Chungo looked aggravated, but fuck him: I was the one making him aggravated─I was the one who made him full-stop─so he could go suck a tailpipe for all I cared. A galaxy-sized paw swung around toward me, and I feigned shock with a pithy oh no before his claws cut me to ribbons. At least, I think I was ribbons; it might have been confetti, sure, but the point was that it hurt, and, worse, hurt more than I could have even imagined. That last bit was key: more than I could have imagined. Little bits of me were everywhere, and I could see Chungo from the vantage of each piece, like a fly cobbling together an image out of shards of information, and he was still angry; and as I scattered through space and time like the shredded remains of a person who thought he had it all figured out, Chungo looked angrier still.

REIGN

Gerald was there, his slippery nutsack-skin head glistening in the rays of four suns, and Alice stood behind him with a bayonet poking into his back, smiling upside down. The air was predominantly ammonia-based, and the water was the colour of worry; this world was almost certainly not Gerald and Alie’s original one, but it suited them and their proselytizing ways just fine, as the incumbent species were both extraordinarily receptive and theologically ignorant. How they ended up here I didn’t know, but how I ended up here I knew just fine: I was everywhere. I was millions, more than, each piece of me flitting through the universe a whole and distinct me, yet each of me could see what all respectively saw─we were one and legion.

I was taking a beating at chess from someone named Chet on the moon of a planet that was yet to be; I was also doing backflips on a trampoline made from a type of metal-wood that was not only elastic enough for gymnastics but also tasted like scallions and mustard; forty iterations of me died in the space of a few seconds, all due to the same misunderstanding in a galaxy where there is little to no visible difference between a shiny planet and a molten star from ten lightyears out; I was doing many things, but at the back of each of my minds was one burning question: where was Chungo?

The lives I was experiencing were far beyond my scope of understanding, far too varied and unique to be creations of my own. There was no context apparent or necessary; just lives being lived, millions of lives, living at once and being experienced subjectively. So I died─so what? That guy sucked. Look what this guy is doing─that guy’s awesome! They were all me, and the awesome greatly outpaced the suckage.

I turned to Gerald, who tittered out, “Have you heard the good word?” as Alice stabbed him through the solar plexus. I nodded, and he continued with, “The good wooooooorrrrrrrd?”

I nodded again and said, “kaputski.”

And everything went dark.

And every me died.

And out of the darkness of death came the face of Chungo, grinning with a literal twinkle in his eye, staring into what there was left of me, either perceptually or conceptually; the nerve endings of me that still retained sensory capabilities. The redwoods he kept in his maw darted toward me, in and out, making faces, Chungo’s face on each, laughing at me, changing their faces into mine, each of my faces prodding me and pulling away in terror, as though I was the horror, as though I was the problem . . . and Chungo laughed, the redwood mes rocketing back into that cavernous mouth, the laugh tearing through me like I was reconstituted only to be torn apart by that laugh. In an enormous voice, the universe spoke through Chungo:

We only want to help. Why won’t you let us help?