Street Station and play the odds whether the train will come before any meatfolk catch wind of us on the stale ozone breeze in the tunnels of the underbelly, and come shambling out to investigate.
The train is late again, and here we are sharing the platform with the usual suspects, and we all look at each other like we don’t really trust our eyes to tell between the living and the dead. Only the old Hasidic stands there with a sense of peace in his rheumy eyes. I figure it’s because his faith forbids a belief in an afterlife and so he doesn’t believe this shit is actually happening. Evidently we must be his idea of hallucinations. In black he already looks like an undertaker.
Today we lose, and people start to scatter with the practiced panic of retreats that leave their dignity intact after the first of them notices the meatboy lurching out of the mouth of the tunnel. When winos and bag ladies still slept down here, meatfolk bred like blue rats. He shows his saggy ashen face and the warmbloods run for the stairs and the streets, forgetting about their spent tokens. No thought to economic sacrifice. The solitary meatboy crawls from track level up onto the emptying platform, and I can hear his slobbering grunts and it still makes me wonder what all the fuss is about. The meatfolk all sound like asthmatics to me.
“Time for toasties,” says Frazzle, and he takes the meatboy by one shoulder while I take the other and before he can snap at us we pitch him down below again. He lands on the third rail and starts to smoke and pop and flop like somebody’s gray steak and a gas buildup blows out the back of the meatboy’s pants and shoots him off the rail, between regular tracks. Everything’s quiet and we’re looking at each other through the charbroiled haze. The old Hasidic views it all without judgment, turns away.
Frazzle’s got the works in his hand even before he jumps down off the platform. Clears the rails like a kid playing hopscotch, and I think I start to sweat when he kneels by the moaning meatboy who’s sluggishly waving a pair of burnt matchstick arms in the air. Frazzle sinks the heavy bore needle into the meatboy’s skull, better than a doctor. He hits the pituitary every time, like an old junkie finding final life in a bruised and flaccid vein. The syringe fills and he leaves the cripped-up meatboy for the next train, whenever it decides to show, and I can already hear the squeal of brakes and the shear of meat from bone and bone from socket.
“It’s already cooked for us, even,” says Frazzle.
“Fuck the tokens, we bail,” then I turn to the old Hasidic’s back. “Shalom.”
We hide the works like couriers like spies like jesters of greed and take the stairs three at a time and the afternoon sun slams us bright in the face. We almost can’t wait until we get back to the hotel room before tying off and nailing up. After transfer, we slide the smaller needle home, staring at that beautiful plumage of bloody backwash in the syringe, its second of blown-crystal perfection before it thins out, dilutes, drains back into the arm. Always the last aesthetic we appreciate.
Death’s a bitch, and then you live.
*
The H dealers are out of business now, most of them, because dealers sell a product they don’t make. Dealers are smart but not particularly creative, so they can’t figure out how to make any profit off selling a fix that anyone can go out and find for free, or if not, and they have no moral objection to murder, manufacture for themselves. Meatfolk everywhere, for the taking or the making. Dealers have to shut down in an economy like this, but the way I see it, they just don’t try hard enough to find the really stupid, lazy, rich junkies, if there are such things, the kind can be convinced of anything,
Some new kind of kick: pituitary extract drawn from recently reanimated corpses, then treated with heat; cooled fluid medium bears attenuated form of virus known among scientific quarters as Quayle-Beta Syndrome, otherwise known informally as Pitchback Fever, the Resurrection Rag, Cancelled Ticket, Highway to Limbo, God’s Little Joke, the Indiscretion of a Lifetime, Rotten Johnny, etc etc etc. Attenuation renders virus incapable of cannibalizing host cells. Intravenous injection results in purgatorial death trance, is metabolized out after six to ten hours.
“The times, they be a-changing,” said the East Village’s Twitching Kalvin Khrist before he shot himself through the eye with a nail gun. Here was a man who truly lived for his work. He was still sitting on a half-kilo of junk at the time. When we find him we have a shooting match and it just like the old days, all the old familiar addictions in all the old familiar veins.
The city’s now filling with meatfolk and we suppose it really is possible to have too much of a good thing because they don’t surrender their pituitaries without a fight, then there’s their own habit to support. More of the slow groaning stinkers every day. In a sense I figure there’s a karmic balance at work here, we two species each feeding off the other, the last cannibal couple each trying to sink the teeth while slow-dancing in the gray hungover morning.
So we hot-wire a Lexus, stock the trunk with fresh meatfolk heads, and start west.
*
We come out of the northeast looking for the last free town in Amerika, because it’s the way we feel ourselves. For the first time in our memories uneaten by the fluid charcoal reclamation, we’re not tethered to our connections. We score in cornfields as easy as Bleecker Street now. You know what it’s like when God pukes manna, you don’t ask questions, just stoop for the harvest.
Eight hundred miles and then Frazzle gets weird on me, tells me how every Christmas he took down his decorations and threw out the tree, and listened to Christmas records backwards and heard Satanic messages oozing from the speakers. These spells of his, never the same twice. Tomorrow he’ll be singing the last stock reports to Gregorian chants or blinking Morse code haiku in a broken mirror. We get cold in the car as the Lexus’ heater broke down in Indiana so we slice up the back seat and start to burn the pieces in the hubcaps set in the floorboards until the smoke forms a cataract over the windshield. I draw maps in the soot, Byzantine aortas from some other peeled body under the gloom, never mine.
The trunk of heads runs out west of Kansas City and it’s desolate country, fields of nothing waiting to grow. Not even the meatfolk stayed around here. Sun goes down and we shiver. Sun comes up and we cry. Sun goes higher and jonesing we face hard facts, remember a time when they said junkies shared their last fix. A time we never lived through, never wanted to live through until now. A time we never even believed in.
“Cowards die many times before their deaths,” Frazzle say. “But so does everyone else now. And we give it a shot, you and me, Hallucinogenius One and Hallucinogenius Two.”
“I regret I had but twelve veins to give for my sickness.”
“Explorers are never so honest as to explain what they’re really looking for, so history invents it for them.”
“How will we go down, you think?”
“In flames, most likely.” Frazzle dries day-old tears. “Make it quick, if you’re going to.”
So I stab him in throat with gnawed bone. Frazzle tries to hold in his life for a minute then gives up and watches it puddle in his lap, pool of old secrets where avatars lie submerged and suffocating. Ten minutes and he’s back again, so I bust out his teeth with the Lexus’ tire iron, Frazzle looking out at me with a toothless frown and handfuls of desiccated ivory, sad in his way. It’s not fun when they’re strangers, even less if you know them. I’m not as good with the heavy bore needle as Frazzle was, but it’s a learning experience, and for a moment he almost seems to turn his head to give me a better shot at the pituitary, something of the old Frazzle remaining to help me along.
I cook him down and he goes into my arm, in burnt clouds of hellfire and a hundred discussions with whispering maggot voices. For a few hours I think maybe I know what it’s like to be Frazzle and dead, dead for real. All the rest of them, they’re no role models, stumbling around way they do, that’s no death. This is something to hope for? They all stumble for oblivion, are too fucked up to find it.
But Frazzle knows now, he teaching me from the veins out.
It gets me down the road another day, still not afraid to die because now I remember again, but then there’s always tomorrow, and you know me. I forget easy.
*
