Stone Junction

paced, flapping his arms for warmth as well as to burn off the manic energy of amphetamine meeting exhaustion. He tried not to think, to let all sensation simply loop through, fly away home. He tried to imagine his mind as a hole in a net, but thousands of speed-amped fishermen repaired it faster than he could rip.

‘That motherfucker dosed me!’ It felt so good to hear his own voice aloud, to move his speed-jammed jaws, that he began babbling to drain off the flitty, jangled, ganglia-scorching rush of amphetamine.

‘I’ll hire Mott, goddammit. Mott said a guy dosed him once, STP, B-1 brain-bomber of psychedelics, twenty- seven hours of spiders crawling out his nose and his great-granddaddy – shrunk down to miniature, inch tall at most – standing out on Mott’s dick, digging his caulks in as he revved up his chainsaw. So Mott would take care of Volta for dosing me, I know he’d do it, I’m sure he would, Volta, that arrogant prick deserves it, fucking power freak, dumps crank in my tea and then tells me to empty my poor fucked mind, sure, right, so wired I can feel my pores open and shut, right, you bet, make it more amusing, mix in some mumbo-jumbo soul-and-spirit shit for the mystery/romance crowd, then tie their brains to the track.’

Daniel listened to himself with the faceless intimacy between confessor and priest, feeling both the mechanical emptiness of sin and the weary forgiveness. He listened, heard, let it go, a lake barely ruffled by the breeze until suddenly he doubled over with a pain so complete and consuming he couldn’t tell at first where it was coming from. It left him trembling in a cold sweat. He’d just started to straighten up when a grenade went off in his small intestine. He jackknifed to the floor, flopping like a clubbed fish.

When the GIFLUV X-27 1-20 PSB virus took full effect an hour later, flopping became a luxury. Gastro-Intestinal Flu Virus (GIFLUV), Experimental Lot Number 27 (X-27), had, as its code explained, an hour lapse between ingestion and full release, a twenty-hour duration (1-20), and with the general effect of making the victim puke and shit bad (PSB). Daniel’s stomach and bowels emptied their various loads in the compost toilet as he whirled helplessly. When he pulled himself up on the bed at last, shook off his pants from around his ankles and piled the quilts over his quivering body, Daniel looked up at the grimy plastic skylight and moaned to the heavens, ‘Only a monster would double-dose another human being with food poisoning and amphetamine. Making sure you’re awake for the misery. Only a monster. A fucking fiend.’

Sometime after sunset the savage bouts of vomiting and diarrhea gave way to a deep, steady, skeletal ache accompanied by flashes of fever and chills. Daniel was forced into a state of nonresponse. He felt himself shivering under the quilts, saw and released the image of himself shivering in an instant, let it pass into the parade of sensation. He began to feel calmer, almost floating. He desperately wanted to sleep, but the pain and the falling edge of speed prevented him.

Daniel tried harder to focus. He saw himself sitting in the straight-backed chair in the center of the shed, fishing through a hole cut in the floor. He didn’t remember a river under the shed, but he could hear the water and feel the current carry his line. The drift paused and his rod-tip twitched. He set the hook instinctively and moments later lifted a golden fish from the water. He had to show Volta. Holding the fish in his left hand, he headed for the door. But when he opened it, expecting to step outside, he found himself in another room, a duplicate of the one he’d just left. He crossed the room and opened the door into another empty room. And another, room after room. He held the fish tightly. When he opened the next door, a faceless man holding a small automatic pistol shot him in the head. Even though he knew he couldn’t possibly survive the wound, Daniel put his hand to his temple to see how bad it was. Pieces of his skull moved under his hand like continental plates. His shock-bloated tongue couldn’t form words. His ears roared as his sinuses filled with blood. He sagged to his knees and, in almost the same motion, toppled forward. Still clutching the golden fish, he tried once to push himself up but his body was too heavy. The last thing he felt before he died was the fish thrashing in his hand.

The fever finally broke an hour before dawn the next day. Daniel slept into the early afternoon. He woke with a raging thirst. He gathered himself and threw back the sweat-damp quilts, but when swinging his legs to the floor proved too complicated, he crabbed himself around and reached over the foot of the bed, uttering a small moan of pleasure as his hand circled the neck of one of the gallon water jugs. He had to use both hands to lift it. He leaned back against the abutting wall, legs splayed for balance, and drank greedily.

A dull headache was getting sharper, and his eyes felt like they were on stalks. Better than yesterday but worse than shit, he decided. A few moments later he burst into laughter, spraying a mouthful of water through the rectangular shaft of light from the skylight. The droplets of water hung suspended for an instant, round and molten in the swath of light, then disappeared.

Daniel tried to imagine himself as a droplet of water hurled into light, but he couldn’t come close.

He wiped a dribble from his chin and lifted the jug for more. He was light-headed, he realized, almost giddy – but not disoriented. He knew exactly where he was, why, what had happened yesterday, who was responsible, and how he might take his revenge. He considered whether he should give Volta a Mott Stocker chili enema before he skinned him alive with a dull linoleum knife, or apply the enema as the coup de grace once Volta was flayed. He’d about settled on the former when he realized that if Volta had put the double-whammy dose on his breakfast, drinking the water was probably on the dumb side of chancy. However, he was still thirsty. He drained the jug. As he set it down, he noticed the envelope shoved under the door.

It was a journey across the Sahara to get out of bed and go pick it up. He brought it back to the bed before opening it. The message was in a neat hand.

I hope you’re feeling better today, Daniel. I also trust you appreciate the force of necessity. Extraordinary undertakings require extraordinary means. Be assured, on my honor, that the water is untainted.

Your instructions today are again simple. By sevens, count to 63,000 as smoothly as possible, and then, without pause, count backwards by sevens to zero. When you finish or fail the exercise, relax or sleep as you will. Let your mind glide.

As he wondered how long it would take to count to sixty-three thousand by sevens, Daniel opened the second jug of water and enjoyed a dread-free pint. He set it back on the floor, sat up on the bed, closed his eyes, and began aloud, ‘Seven, fourteen, twenty-one …’ He started swiftly to establish momentum, and in a few furious minutes had passed a thousand, but the addition of one thousand before each number soon slowed the pace. Without missing a beat he began saying the numbers silently. That sped him up briefly, but it was still slow. At 2,401, he quit saying the numbers silently and tried to see them in his mind, a digital display progressing smoothly and quickly in increments of seven. It was like gliding on ice as the numbers flew by, and he almost skated past sixty-three thousand in no time at all.

He paused a moment, looping a circle around the figure, then headed back. But the shift to subtraction lurched him from the groove. He had to retard the rhythm to the point of slow motion before he could pick it up again, quickening it to a pulse, then speeding till it nearly blurred. He felt like he was sailing through a tunnel without walls. As he passed 490, he slowed down to savor his return, and then celebrated with a long drink of water.

Daniel was pleased. As far as he was concerned, he had completed the exercise efficiently and close to flawlessly. He acknowledged there’d been some shaky moments the day before when the poison hit – very shaky, actually – and his recent attempt to imagine himself as water in light had been a bit feeble. But such a reaction to systemic poisoning was certainly understandable, and the attempt to