Demon Core: Part 3

[heya_baru]

Part 1

Wing-loading Death-Dynamics Under an Electron Regime

“The suburbs are a site of psychic death.”

Sestos spun around on a socked foot to fill a small beaker from the kitchen sink while he delivered his monologue—rehearsed from his bed the night before—to his disinterested roommates. “The godhead of alienation spreads across the properties like a plague, her children imprisoned in badlands of over-manicured lawns and sidewalkless streets. The quaint anachronisms of low-cut wooden fences hide the underlying violence of suburban property law: There’s always a man with a gun, hiding behind Venetian blinds, behind the tinted windows of an unmarked Ford.”

He gingerly emptied a watchglass of white powder into the beaker, mixing it with a plastic spoon before pouring the solution into another flask that rested precariously atop the burner of a butane camping stove. On his roommates’ insistence, he had covered the peeling vinyl countertop in tin foil, lest they have a repeat of the acetic acid incident from two months ago. Leander sat in the corner, as far away from Sestos’s experiment as the geography of the kitchen would allow, his free hand resting on the handle of a fire extinguisher. The ink-black sludge inside the flask started to loosen, tendrils of off-white steam snaking over the rim of the glass.

Sestos continued his sermon. “There’s no family in the suburbs, because the families are broken across the miles, the freeways, and the retirement homes. There’s no culture, because there’s no corner shops, nowhere to walk, nowhere to spend time which doesn’t involve pulling out your wallet. There is nothing here.” He waited for a moment, swirling the beaker in his hand to dissolve the sediment at the bottom. “The suburbanite is in a perpetual state of death, the only thing left to do is go under a wheel of a 30-something wine mom’s Chevrolet, and complete the process that started the moment you moved here.” Sestos stopped to calculate the remaining stages of his drug production; two ingredients down, five to go.

Hero poked a chopstick into one of the remaining mushrooms from her takeout yakisoba, half-listening to Sestos’s speech. “There’s a lady in a white GLA who’s nearly hit me twice when I’ve been crossing the street to get off the 155 bus. If she does it again I’ll take it as a sign from god at let her hit me. I die, or I sue the Lululemons off her ass. Either way I win.”

Sestos’s concoction started to churn anew, forming sweating welts that boiled up from tarry liquid. He rested his chin on the fake granite countertop, watching his bitumen child evolve while he chewed on the end of a dead vape. “The only solution to the death-drive of the suburbs is absolute negation. Death cannot be defeated, one can only burst into flame, then burn the world around them as they are dragged to Tartarus.” After a set period of time known only to him, he cracked open a sealed vial of off-white liquid and poured it in.

“GLA is the cheap Merc. You won’t get shit. Just bend over and let it fucking kill you.” Leander sat slumped over in a lawn chair Sestos had stolen from from a house down the street and hid in the kitchen. “You really want us to fucking try that, dude?”

“Yes.” He spat out his vape and chucked it into the trash can, where it bounced off yesterday’s takeout containers and joined the growing detritus and potato chip crumbs that lived against the plastic baseboard. “Is no one going to comment on my manifesto of a suburban explorer?”

Leander polished off his IPA. “It’s cool. Try, uh, Tumblr.”

Sestos pinched the bridge of his nose. “Fuck you, man. I’m trying to do something with my life.”

“Yeah. That’s why you’re cooking up Kazakh deliriants at a flophouse in Los Lunas. With a camping stove. Because no one paid the gas bill.”

Hero let her head fall into her hands, scrunching up tangles of dark hair. “I knew I needed to get my fifty back from Josh for something.”

Leander limply reached out his hand to rest it on Hero’s lower back, grazing his knuckles across her spine, his sole form of affection.

Sestos wrapped his hand in a towel and took the beaker off the stove, upending it onto a sheet of aluminum foil. He spread the dubious sludge out with the back of a plastic spork before running off to the bathroom. Leander pulled himself to his feet to search the back of the fridge for another beer. The alcohol eluded him, their recession-era GE offering up only a landscape of diet soda and pre-shredded cheese.

“We’re out, unless you decided on 7-Up.” Hero pressed her thumb and fingers to her temples and squeezed, as though her persistent headache was a cyst that she could drain out her ears. “Although I wouldn’t mind if you laid off for a bit.”

She tried to soften her voice, but she could tell by the way he stopped, hunched over by the fridge, that her words had driven themselves between each of his ribs. He collapsed back in the chair, saying nothing. Sestos stomped back into the kitchen, Hero’s hair dryer in hand.

“Yeah, that’s just what all hallucinogens need, a perm. Where the hell did you get the recipe for this?” Hero shifted her lawn chair away from the kitchen counter, anticipating another incident. Sestos plugged in the hair dryer. “Do you know what sleep paralysis is?”

“What?”

“It’s—nevermind. I woke up last night, and—actually, fuck that. If I tell you, you won’t believe me.” He used his free hand to rummage around in his cargo pants for another vape. “Just wait and see.”

Propelled through the afternoon by a combination of nicotine and anticipation, it took Sestos less than an hour to dry out the mind-altering sludge, mix in his remaining three powders, and portion the product into a dozen empty pill capsules he had pilfered from Walgreens the day before; after all, the government can’t discover your drug operation if you rip-off everything. He dropped every pill onto a scale (also stolen; Lowe’s off the 25) to verify the weight: four hundred of god’s own milligrams. Precisely what god was the real question.

Mostly out of habit, he packed two pills each into sandwich bags, strutted into the living room like he had been pissing liquid gold, and chucked the bags into his roommates’ laps. “I call it Aella. Or whatever.”

Leander pulled his attention away from his phone and looked down. “Yeah man, I’m sure the high school kids who hang out behind the DMV will just love this shit.”

“Take two.” Sestos popped two of the pills in his mouth and chased them down with a stale can of 7-Up. “And burst info flame.”

Sites Of Hemmorage

I bribed an on-duty EMT with a Lotaburger gift card that had taken up a years-long residence in deep corners of my wallet, and from him I learned the address of my missing patient: a two-bedroom rented house in the southern corner of Los Lunas, New Mexico.

Pressed into the asphalt ossa like a dozen rows of impacted teeth in a tellurian maw, the suburbs of Los Lunas are peopled in equal measure by humans, patchy lawns, and the carcasses of long-dead Fords. The home in question was easy to identify—the peeling door pocked by a bright red crime scene sticker.

Mao said that war is merely politics with bloodshed, but the soul of the New Mexico suburbs does not bleed red; it exsanguinates bright orange syringe caps, empty beer cans, takeout bags and shipping boxes, convenience and desperation pumping from the heart and pouring uselessly onto the firmament. That blood is everywhere in this house, piling up in the corners, annexing the paucity of floorspace. There’s a faint smell of weed and stale beer, the back patio door bisected by a large crack. Out of morbid fascination I briefly scan for the blood of my Jon Doe, and find it in the bathroom.

Aside from empty beer cans and drug paraphernalia, the only items of note were a large collection of prescription medication, including Methadone, Clonidine, Physostigmine and Naloxone, as well as a small cardboard box with Kazakh import labels and a partly destroyed return address. I was unable to discern or restore this shipping label, although the postal code pointed to a city in the Abai region.

The kitchen had morphed into a shrine, not to any Christian or Pagan god, but to the divinity of psychoactives, centered around the camp-stove-turned-bunsen-burner eidolon, flanked by votives of beakers and flasks, a holy site where precursors are laid before the divine image like a feast. The belly of the ewe is split open, neurochemistry read from the creases in her liver.

In Bourgeois Utopias, Robert Fishman describes the birth of suburban life in the UK as the unholy child of classism, patriarchy, and Evangelical Christianity, stating:

This contradiction between the city and the Evangelical ideal of the family provided the final impetus for the unprecedented separation of the citizen’s home from the city that is the essence of the suburban idea. The city was not just crowded, dirty, and unhealthy; it was immoral. Salvation itself depended on separating the woman’s sacred world of family and children from the profane metropolis. Yet this separation could not jeopardize a man’s constant attendance at his business—for hard work and success were also Evangelical virtues—and business life required rapid personal access to that great beehive of information which was London. This was the problem, and suburbia was to be the ultimate solution.

Two hundred years later, and the apartheid of the upper classes has started to unwind. Frankenstein’s picket-fenced monster litters bolts and sutures as he stomps balefully towards death, the insurgency of the lumpenproletariat long underway inside his veins, consuming the gilded beast from the inside.

I folded up the imported box and stuffed it into a free pocket; the suburbs thereafter released me, a hundred bony hands listlessly reaching for the hem of my jacket before returning to the unmarked graves that rested under the miles of asphalt.