John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

(For the Hollow Head was drug paraphernalia you could walk into. The building itself was the syringe, or the hookah, or the sniff-tube.)

And then the room’s second phase cut in: the transmitters stimulated the motor cortex, the reticular formation in the brainstem, the nerve pathways of the extrapyramidal system, in precise patterns computer-formulated to mesh with the ongoing Bone Music. Making him dance. Dance across the room, feeling he was caught in a choreographed whirlwind (flashing: genitals interlocking, pumping, male and female, male and male, female and female, the thrusting a heavy downhill flow like an emission of igneous mud, but firm pink mud, the bodies rounded off, headless, Magritte torsos going end to end together, organs blindly nosing into the wet receptacles of otherness), semen trickling down his legs inside his pants, dancing, helplessly dancing, thinking it was a delicious epilepsy, as he was marionetted up the stairs, to the next floor, the final room…

At the landing just before the third room, the transmitters cut off, and Charlie sagged, gasping, clutching for the banister, the black-painted walls reeling around him. He gulped air and prayed for the strength to turn away from the third room, because he knew it would leave him fried; yeah, badly crashed and deeply burned out. He turned off the receptor for a respite. In that moment of weariness and self-doubt he found himself wondering where Angelo was. Had Angelo really gone on to the third room alone? Ange was prone to identity crises under the Nipple Needle. If he’d gone alone—little Angelo Demario with his rockabilly hair and spurious pugnacity—Angelo would sink and lose it completely… and what would they do with people who were overdosed on an identity hit? Dump the body in the river, he supposed.

He heard a yell mingling ecstasy and horror coming from an adjacent room, as another Head customer took a nipple. That made up his mind: like seeing someone eat making you realize you’re hungry. He gathered together the tatters of his energy, switched on his receptor, and went through the door.

The Bone Music shuddered through him, strong now that he was undercut, weakened by the first rooms. Nausea wallowed through him.

Angelo wasn’t in the room, and Charlie was selfishly glad as he took off his jacket, rolled up his left sleeve, approached the black rubber nipple protruding from the metal breast at waist height on the wall. As he stepped up to it, pressed the hollow of his elbow against the nipple, felt the computer-guided needle probe for his mainline and fire the ID drug into him.

The genetic and neurochemical essence of a woman. They claimed it was synthesized. He didn’t give an angel’s winged asshole where it came from, right then; it was rushing through him in majestic waves of intimacy. You could taste her, smell her, feel what it felt like to be her (they said it was an imaginary her, modeled on someone real, not really from a person).

Felt the shape of her personality superimposed on you, so for the first time you weren’t burdened with your own identity, you could find oblivion in someone else, like identifying with a fictional protagonist but infinitely more real…

But oh, shit. It wasn’t a her. It was a him. And Charlie knew instantly that it was Angelo. They had shot him up with Angelo’s distilled neurochemistry—his personality, memory, despairs, and burning urges. He saw himself in flashes as Angelo had seen him… and he knew, too, that this was no synthesis, that he’d found out what they did with those who died here, who blundered and OD’d: they dropped them in some vat, broke them down, distilled them, and molecularly linked them with the synthcoke and shot them into other customers… into Charlie…

He couldn’t hear himself scream over the Bone Music (Darkness of an iron cask, lid down and bolted tight). He didn’t remember running for the exit stairs. (And three more kinds of darkness, three I cannot tell), down the hall (Making six kinds of darkness, Lord, please make me well), out into the street, running, hearing the laughter from the shantyrats on the roofs watching him go.

He and Angelo running down the street, in one body. As Charlie told himself, I’m kicking this thing. It’s over. I shot up my best friend. I’m through with it.

Hoping to God it was true. Lord, please make me well.

Bottles swished down from the rooftops and smashed to either side of him. And he kept running.

He felt strange. He felt strange as all hell.

He could feel his body. Not like usual. He could feel it like it was a weight on him, like an attachment. A weight of sheer alienness. He was too big, for one thing. It was all awkward, and its metabolism was pitched too low, sluggish, and it was…

It was the way his body felt for Angelo.

Angelo wasn’t there, in him. But then again he was. And Charlie felt Angelo as a nastily foreign, squeaky, distortion membrane between him and the world around him.

He passed someone on the street, saw them distorted through the membrane, their faces funhouse-mirror twisted as they looked at him—and they looked startled.

The strange feelings must show on his face, and in his frantic running.

Maybe they could see Angelo. Maybe Angelo was oozing out of him, out of his face. He could feel it. Yeah. He could feel Angelo bleeding from his pores, dripping from his nose, creeping from his ass. A sonic splash of— Gidgy, you wanna do a video hook-up with me? Gidgy replying, No, that shit’s grotty, Ange, last time we did that I was sick for two days. I don’t like pictures pushed into my brain, couldn’t we just have, you know—have sex? (She touches his arm.)

God, I’m gonna lose myself in Angelo, Charlie thought. Gotta run, sweat him out of me.

Splash of: Angelo, if you keep going around with those people, the police or those. SA punks’re going to break ya stupid head. Angelo’s voice: Ma, get off it, you don’t understand what’s going on, the country’s getting scared, they think there’s gonna be nuclear war, everyone’s lining up to kiss the presidential ass cause they think she’s all that stands between us and the fucking Russians —His mother’s voice: Angelo, don’t use that language in front of your sister, not everyone talks like they do on TV—

Too heavy, body’s too heavy, his run is funny, can’t run anymore, but I gotta sweat him out—

Flash pictures to go with the splash voices now: Motion-rollicking shot of sidewalk seen from a car window as they drive through a private-cop zone, SA bulls in mirror helmets walking along in twos in this high-rent neighborhood, turning their glassy-blank assumption of your guilt toward the car, the world revolves as the car turns a corner, they come to a checkpoint, the new Federal ID cards are demanded, shown, they get through, feeling of relief, there isn’t a call out on them yet… blur of images, then focus on a face walking up to the car. Charlie. Long, skinny, goofy-looking guy, self-serious expression…

Jesus, Charlie thought, is that what Angelo thinks I look like? Shit! (Angelo is dead, man, Angelo is… is oozing out of him… )

Feeling sick now, stopping to gag, look around confusedly. Oh, fuck: Two cops were coming toward him. Regular cops, no helmets, wearing blue stickers, plastic covers on their cop-caps, their big ugly cop-faces hanging out so he wished they wore the helmets; supercilious faces, young but ugly, their heads shaking in disgust, one of them said: “What drug you on, man?”

He tried to talk, but a tumble of words came out, some his and some Angelo’s, his mouth was brimming over with small, restless, furry animals: Angelo’s words.