The Psychonaut

tw: institutional violence, visceral body horror, existential horror. Happy Halloween

I used to say I ain’t no fuckin’ junkie. I thought just ‘cause I’m locked up don’t make me the same as those fuckin’ zombies, the ones that wander ‘round the dorm, too fucked up to find their way back to their cell, the ones you catch froze up in the bathroom, all seized up, eyes giving off 404 errors, soul not found, please try again later. That ain’t me. Wasn’t me.

But on the flip side, well, I guess nobody’s perfect. Ain’t no need to be. Though I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t know what I was getting into. But I wasn’t wrong. I ain’t no junkie. I’m a goddamn psychonaut. And if you’ve been where I’ve been, seen what I’ve seen, knew what I know, you’d just as soon cut my throat as look at me for the chump change in my pocket and be on your merry way. Because everything you hold dear in this world doesn’t matter. Nothing does.

Prison sucks. I know, shocker, but damn, man, it really does suck. I ain’t the prison-going type, like, okay, sure, I might have bought some fulls off the dark web, I might have opened some credit lines and made a few bucks, but it ain’t like anyone got hurt for the most part except the big banks. Sure, so people had to call SunTrust and report some fraudulent activity, but it wasn’t like they were on the hook for it in the end. Alright, well maybe some old people had to cancel Key Largo in favor of Sunny Acres Rest Home, but that’s their fucking fault for using the same password for every goddamn thing. I gotta eat too, y’know, and even without the DUIs and domestic violence raps, in this economy landing a good job is like being alone in the woods and running across Bigfoot: it’s hard as fuck to do, and if you do manage it you still might end up the one getting fucked. You know what I mean? Like I said, getting fucked, that ain’t me. I’m a fucker.

Just ask my wife. Ex-wife, now, I guess. At this point I hadn’t heard from her in months. She’s out west somewhere, ‘finding herself.’ Left our little girl with my parents. She’d be about eleven around this time, I think. She’s grown now, does something with AI or some shit. I dunno. I’m bad at that sort of thing. I used to try to call her when I could, but the phone lines inside are fucking crazy, and calls were real expensive. Like I said, I gotta eat too; I mean, if you saw the kind of shit they serve in the chow hall, you’d eat summer sausages and ramen noodles three meals a day too. Plus I was a sucker for sweets. Still am. I guess me and junkies got that in common too.

Something like seventy percent of jerkoffs in prison have some sort of substance abuse problem. The rest, I assume, are pedophiles, which is a different kind of addiction I guess. I was addicted to porn for a while, at least if you ask my wife. I just like watching rough stuff, y’know; I like seeing a woman put in her place. That sounds horrible, I know, but you know they like that kind of shit. Or at least they like the money, otherwise why would they be doing it? And it doesn’t matter anyways, which you’ll come to realize by the end of this story. Anyways, when I heard that statistic I thought ‘sweet, so prison’s not all stabbings and dropping the soap; it’s really just one big party.’ In reality, though, getting your hands on, like, meth, or heroin, or some shit, only happens once in a blue moon and the prices are so astronomical that you really can’t even enjoy the high without thinking about how badly you just got fucked. And like I said, if anyone’s doing the fucking, it’ll be me. So yeah, I mean, they’ve got this shit called Suboxone that the junkies go crazy for, but that shit only gets you high once and then you just kind of don’t feel anything. I guess you’ve got to really be a junkie to get anything out of it, like, if you don’t need the shit, if you’re not sick, hardwired for opioids to begin with, it’s just nothing doing. It’s a drug for pussies and women I think, for quitters. I wasn’t looking to feel normal; like I said I ain’t no junkie. If I’m gonna get high, I want to get fucked up, right, like I’m a coke guy on the street, though these days it’s whatever I can get my hands on, whatever the dumbfuck that picks the wrong alley to duck through after copping and gets his throat slit for the trouble has on him. They don’t have coke in prison though, it’s too expensive and I guess the dogs can smell it easy. Same with weed. But they do have this shit called K2, and let me tell you, that shit makes you wonder why our brain even has all these fucking holes in it, right, for these fucking molecules or whatever that fit perfectly into those holes and fucks us up. Like how there’s like thousands and thousands of these fucking holes, all with jigsaw-perfect matching molecules. Crazy, right?

K2 is shorthand for synthetic cannabinoids, or basically any type of shit that’s active in the microgram range such that you can spray it on paper and send through the mail or tucked away in a crooked C.O.’s spank mags or their Vince Flynn novels or some shit. The jerkoffs that smoke this shit are called deucers, and you can see ‘em coming a mile away. The shambling, stutter-step gait, those glassy, wide, spooked-horse eyeballs. I used to laugh at these pathetic fucks, you know, this shit costs like a couple stamps a hit, so like a dollar a throw, and they’d still be spending like a hundred stamps a day on the shit. They all have matching stick-and-poke tattoos of like gas cans or flames or some shit, the message being: shit’s fire, shit’s gas. They live in a world all to themselves, you know, and it got me thinking—if they’re off in la-la-land, that means they ain’t really there for the time being. They ain’t locked up. They’re slaves to these tiny pieces of paper, their fingertips scorched from lighting up with a fucking AA battery, but that’s the price of admission to a world that was so enchanting that every half hour as the shit wears off, they’re either immediately lighting up their return ticket, or hustling up the stamps to punch that ticket by any means necessary. They sell their commissary, even their shitty lunch trays, all to get back to this other world they live in.

I gotta say, the longer I looked at them, the less frightening and the more appealing it got.

I assumed, of course, that they wanted to keep going back. It didn’t occur to me that they might need to. That they knew something we didn’t, something they were trying to fathom. I’ve seen the end of the rainbow, though, and I know why they kept looking. It’s a form of madness, the Truth right in front of you that your brain just refuses to accept because it’s so horrible at least half of the history of modern man has been centered around making up stories to wish it away. These days the favorite story is called “atheism”. It’s a story of a dreamless sleep, a peaceful forever-never, a layabout by the fire after a long day’s journey. It might be the most pathetic story yet, and the farthest from the truth. Oblivion ain’t a state of non-being, not by a long shot. But I guess it’d be pretty nice if it was.

My mom died on July 3rd, a few hours before Uncle Sam’s birthday. It was a car crash, a fucking horrible one apparently. I don’t know all the details. All I got was a call-out to report to the chaplain’s office, where this fat, alcoholic fuck gave me the lowdown on what happened, that my mom was dead and my dad was all fucked up in some sort of psychotic coma, and that my little girl was crashing with the family of one of her schoolmates while the state tried to track down my ex-wife. They gave me a number for the family looking after my daughter, and I tried to call once or twice, but they never picked up. I hear she’s a pretty smart cookie, though, so I’m sure she’s alright. I wrote her a letter, but I didn’t know where to send it, so I just mailed it general delivery. I figure if she really wanted to hear from me she’d, like, go to the post office or call the prison or something like that and we’d get it sorted out.

It kind of hit me hard, you know, like just the idea that I was completely and totally alone. It’s funny, like, I never really talked to my folks all that much unless I needed some money on my books, but, like with my wife, once they were gone I sort of missed them something awful. I got into a couple scuffles and even went to the hoosegow once—that’s what we call the SHU, the hole, the jail inside the jail, jailception—I don’t know, I just felt restless, reckless. I needed an escape. That’s how I got into deuce.

They say it’s supposed to be like a weed high, but if that’s what it’s supposed to do then I have no idea what I was smoking, because that shit opened me up like a tin can. I hadn’t even exhaled before it washed over me like the blast wave from an IED or some shit. My skin got all hot and prickly and it was like this portal opened up around me. It reminded me of when I was a teenager and tried head-shop salvia for the first time, like I was just this cog in a machine that was grinding away and had been since the heat death of the universe, which in deuce-world was like a trillion years ago; time was backwards, forwards, and to my uninitiated brain it was completely meaningless like everything else. I was alone in my cell and yet I felt like I was in a crowd, these hollow-eyed forms that had all assembled for some sort of black mass. My celly had loaned me this book by this guy de Sade, and that’s kind of the vibe I got from the place I went when I got high, this libertine sort of freedom where I was at once impotent and omnipotent, I could do whatever I wanted to whomever I want and there would be no consequences. The assembly seemed to egg me on, to think the darkest thoughts I could, like I got it in my head that if I killed my daughter I could live forever, that when they said children were the key to immortality it was actually literal and no one ever quite figured it out. The assembly shuffled and swayed in approval. I took a pencil and stabbed myself in the arm and broke off the lead. I had Marked myself. The assembly thrummed with applause. I soiled myself. They shrieked—but while it sounded more horrible than anything I’ve ever heard, I was damn certain that was their way of cheering me on.

I came to in a scalding hot shower, my clothes still on. Did I find my way here myself or had someone deposited me here? I thought back on my ‘episode’ and felt ashamed, physically sickened. I thought about the three years I had left to do, what sort of opportunities I had to instill meaning and purpose into my miserable life, but of course I came up snake eyes. Immediately, I loaded the contents of my locker into a laundry bag and went back to the deuce man. He offered to give me a few postage stamp-sized pieces in exchange for my commissary, plus a ‘list’ of sundry goods payable on commissary day each week for the next three weeks.

My mom’s life insurance money had hit my books, so I readily agreed. Those weeks passed by in a blur. I found out that the different stamps were completely different chemicals, different, like, analogues, or what-the-fuck-ever. The blue one made me feel like the Antichrist walking, but it didn’t transport me, y’know. I think it had fentanyl in it, because I passed out one time and pissed myself, and after it was all smoked up I felt like microwaved shit for days on end.

The white paper made it so I didn’t need to eat or sleep. It made my pupils big as saucers and my movements short and jerky. I realized this must be what most of the deucers I encountered usually smoked, because I often had a hard time finding my way back to my cell. Once I was in the bathroom and I saw what looked like a portal open up under the sinks. I wanted to return to the place that was not a place, so I crawled under there. The other inmates just kind of shook their heads and laughed at me, but I didn’t give a fuck. They didn’t know what I knew, and they hadn’t been where I’d been.

The red paper lasted me the longest; it was the strongest by far, and after a misadventure on the recreation yard I resolved to only smoke it late at night, because if anyone saw me on that shit, I’d end up back in the hoosegow faster than you can say ‘code’. This shit got me higher than giraffe pussy. As soon as the smoke hit my lungs, I’d start retching and seizing violently, like my whole body was rejecting the wispy tendril of brownish smoke that lifted up off the red-hot wire; as the strip of paper turned to ash, it felt like a part of me too was afire. Voices, vaguely mendacious and accusatory, whispered at me through the white noise of the prison’s HVAC system through the grate in the wall, like mariachi music at triple tempo in reverse. I’d get that sensation again that I was at once alone and in a room filled beyond capacity, like a crowd waiting for a spectacle to begin. I knew I was vulnerable when I was like this so I began sharpening a piece of plastic that came off my radio, which I had smashed to bits to make a lighter (the sores on my fingers had turned strange colors and began to ooze pus).

If I smoked enough—which was a challenge, because my hands locked up like arthritic claws as soon as I began to inhale—I would find myself adrift in a world that was like a hollow, black pearl, filled with rheumy fluid that my lungs could breathe as easily as air. I even saw my mom! Her face was twisted in anguish, her body contorted as if accustomed to walking on all fours, but I like to think she was happy to see me nonetheless. She lived among a herd of creatures that looked just like her, their bodies like those of some type of twisted centaur created by some sick fuck in a lab in like Nazi Germany or some shit. I got the impression they were being hunted, culled somehow, though I never really got to flesh that unsettling feeling out, because whenever they started to moan and tremble and force their broken bodies into excruciating motion my high would wear off and I’d be back in my sweaty, clammy, piss-soaked corpus on the sticky floor of my cell.

By this time, I had the cell to myself; my celly had moved out and most people just didn’t come near me unless they wanted to buy something from me: my lunch tray or some of my old clothes, or my trazodone, which I had stopped taking altogether because it weakened the high and made my legs all restless. Before long the paper was all gone, and I had to wait for the first of the month to go to commissary before the deuce man would extend me any further credit. I’d load up two or three mesh laundry bags with chips, ramen, sodas, candy, fish, enough food to set a con up for weeks, and apart from a few ramen soups I’d keep for myself to keep the lights on, so to speak, it’d all go to my various creditors. I didn’t give a flying fuck, of course, I just wanted more paper. I know that sounds bad, but at this point I felt like I was an explorer, a modern Cortez, traveling to new lands and conquering them. When I did sleep, I’d see the thing my mother had become. Oh how she screamed! It was a scream of longing, of absence, I decided, and I resolved to only smoke the red paper so that I could be closer to her. It’s important to be there for family. I was a shitty kid and a shitty father, but here I could make a difference, it seemed like. I was in uncharted territory—communing with the dead! Coming to the realization that the dead have it pretty rough, having to walk around on hooves that looked like broken bones that never seemed to heal, pausing and straining to suckle what I guess was marrow from them, their only source of sustenance as far as I can reckon, rolling in the black dust to scratch some agonizing itch that couldn’t be scratched, howling at once in agony and relief as abscesses on their suppurating bodies would boil and pustulate with each excruciating movement.

Late one night I was coming down when I heard the panic alarm go off in a nearby cell. It was another inmate, a relatively new commitment. He was an older guy, probably on like his third bid or some shit, and, well, I guess he got some of the good shit because he started banging on the door and screaming bloody murder, just screaming `‘not like this, not like this,’ over and over. The lieutenant and a nurse came in, flanked by two of those psychopathic fucks you only see when something has gone pear shaped, real CTE cases who get their kicks going down to the SHU and locking themselves in a cell with the biggest, meanest motherfucker still on solitary and seeing who comes out on top, just to keep themselves sharp. They dragged the poor old bastard out by his nape and his legs and flung him bodily into the wheelchair. The nurse checked his pulse, his pupils, nodded to the lieutenant, who in turn nodded to his pet gargoyles, who dragged the man back to the cell with the practiced economy of men who throw human beings around for a living.

Not half an hour later, the alarm went off again, followed by the same man’s piercing screams. They were exactly what I imagined hell sounds like before I learned what really happens to us when we die; it’s not a pleasant sound, but frankly knowing what I know now I’d prefer the pitchforks and brimstone. Anyways, the guy goes apeshit, smashing his head against the wall, mule-kicking the door the way a convict only does when he doesn’t give a damn about the consequences. So the goon squad comes back, they don’t even bother with the nurse this time around, rather she just hangs back by the pod door in case they accidentally hit the poor fucker too hard. The rest of us watched through the slits in our cell doors as these fuckers (and I mean these boys are the kind of roided-out, fuckin’ cyborg cocksuckers those short fat fucks in ICE jerk off to) grabbed the old bastard and flung him like a sack of meal out his cell. Like dogs on a kill they ripped his clothes off. One put a knee to the back of his neck and pinned his arm behind his wrinkly, liver-spotted back. Not once did the poor fuck stop screaming or even seem to react to what was happening to him. The other fucker went into the old man’s cell and removed everything: clothes, mattress, books, even the guy’s prescription medication. Once it was completely empty, they picked him up and bodily threw him back in. I’ll never forget the sound his head made against the iron bunk, how quickly his screaming stopped.

Well, the two fuckers froze. They looked over at the nurse, who swore under her breath and spoke in hushed, urgent tones into her radio. The convicts banging on their door began to pound out a tattoo in unison. Bang clank. Bang clank. Bang. Bang clank. Bang clank. Bang. The death row salute. When they stepped back out of the cell, just as every available officer in the building poured through the pod door, it was clear on their faces that they had fucked up. They hauled the old corpse out on a stretcher, his grey hair red and matted with blood. Nothing would come of it. It never does.

The next morning we were on lockdown, but I guess the orderly didn’t want to clean up the cell ahead of the bus coming in and putting another walking corpse in the old man’s place. As the cop made her rounds, I volunteered. Said I was on the biohazard cadre. That was a lie, but since she was too dumb to know to actually call out the biohazard cadre to begin with, it worked. Even if she didn’t buy it, she got her mess cleaned up and I got to leave my cell. A fair trade.

The blood actually came up easy with a mop and bucket, but I got on my hands and knees and scrubbed anyways. Wanted to be thorough. Also, my eyes were scanning the ground like those of a practiced carpet-surfer. Sure enough, under the dead man’s desk I found a little square of black card stock. The paper was oily, and smelled acrid, like the sludge left behind from a batch of shake-and-bake meth. I knew, of course, that I was taking a pretty crazy risk, seeing as what it did to the old bastard, but hey, I mean, by this point I was a fucking professional. And besides, no one would sell to me until I paid down my debts some, and from the looks of things we probably weren’t getting commissary any time soon—prison administrators love to punish prisoners for their own fuckups—so if I was going to get back to the other side, this was my only ticket.

I’ve never smoked something that made me vomit the second it hit my lungs. I mean projectile, splattered against the wall and oozing down into the bedsheet like I had put a 9mm to my temple and pulled the trigger. It felt immediately like someone had poured kerosene on my skin from head to toe and set it aflame. My body convulsed violently, and all I can remember thinking is that death would be such a welcome respite from what I had just done to my body, like it was like I knew right off the bat that death might very well be the only relief I could look forward to ever again. How naïve I was even then.

My heart hammered in my chest. It seemed to come detached because the pounding, the pulsating I could actually see under my shirt as my vision oscillated wildly and clouded around the periphery seemed to come from different parts of my chest and abdomen. It was like my heart was bouncing like a racquetball around my insides. I bit back a scream—never let them see you sweat, that was the old fool’s first and final mistake—as I rode out what I guess you’d call a tonic-clonic seizure if it weren’t for my perfect, terrible lucidity throughout the incident. This continued for what felt like a lifetime: the retching, the convulsing, my fingernails digging red furrows in the palm of my hands. Every breath in I took felt like a victory, every exhale like losing something precious. I felt a terrible loss for people that loved me, that I just didn’t have the wiring to treat the way they deserved to it. I cursed God as an absentee father, for allowing me to become such a fucking piece of shit. Once the convulsions began to decrease in frequency, once the waveform began to flatten itself out, I opened my burning eyes to see myself back in that miasmic place between places, a jumbled mess of limbs and effluvia. I tried to rise, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. I tried to look down, but it was like my neck was fused to my spinal column. Everything hurt. I tried every motor function I could think of, but nothing happened. I could only stare straight ahead, into the ruined faces of my mother and the Others. She, they, looked towards me and let out a collective moan of something like anguish. Something was . . . something was feeding off of them, some ancient living machinery that had set upon them like a family of four on a KFC bucket, grabbing off pieces and (I can only assume) devouring them in what I could only assume was a great and terrible maw. It was terrible, it was beautiful, and I knew instinctively that it was forever. I tried to reach out to them, but it was not my time, I was still being made in the god’s image, I still had life to pour into this broken vessel, this pulsing, twisted mound of flesh. And I nearly wept for joy, wept when I came to in the prison hospital, my limbs in traction, all my fractures and lacerations and abrasions “self-inflicted” according to multiple witnesses who would live long and miserable lives before they could ever truly bear Witness, because with my newfound knowledge even as a convict I was freer than any man walking this condemned planet.

I try to tell anyone that will listen but they never fucking listen, they just mumble about spare change or cross the street to avoid me or sometimes even summon the courage to tell me I’m scaring their children, but their children should be scared. You should all be scared. And you should also learn what I learned, that even though when I sleep I find my way back to that place, to take the seat of consciousness in my eternal flesh—the weeping bones and harlequin flesh and eternal, communal agony—that life, no matter how shitty, no matter how bleak and fucking miserable it might be, is fucking beautiful. That it does not matter how much I love my neighbor, or whether I covet his wife’s ass or whateverthefuck, whether I use a public restroom or just piss on myself to relish the momentary warmth, whether I rob or kill or sell my broken body as rough trade for a bag of stardust—you, me, your mother, my daughter, Donald fucking Trump, we’re all heading to the same fucking place, and when we get there we’re all gonna get real acquainted. That after a while the agony becomes like bliss because it is more than nothing, it is a flower that blooms in an otherwise vacuous void, and as my soul is slowly poured out of my vessel, consumed by the true shape of god, I will have only an ever-fleeting memory of my time on this earth, of what I know now is, by comparison, by default, heaven, our temporal reward, the necessary coalescence of our soul, fattened up with joy and pain and love and grief and so much fucking hatred, for the eventual and eternal harvest.