Didn’t mean to lose you all. It was a happy accident. I’m fucking Captain Oates with a whiskey and Coke. I’m going outside. May be some time. I look back out across the main room. Seven shades of sound. Let it flood in. Break your levies. Back here the depths are laced with black chemical foam. Ecstatic interference coming down inch thick. Cshhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Hooded heads bob and weave in a cotton wool cave. Five hundred featherweights. Eyes down, hands out. Float like butterflies, sting like 303s. But this tide is going out. Come to. The room seeps back in. Planes of plastic light spike the dark. The air’s thin, dusty with concrete and cigarette smoke. Got lost looking for you. Head like an echo cabinet. Get caught up in someone else. Face with fangs. Dead of night. Locked smile. Booze bleeds down the pipes into his open mouth. Consciousness crawls past me laughing looking for a corner to be sick in. I just stare. I’m pushing past and out. Up for air. Sorry mate, excuse me. ‘One?’ says the attendant abruptly. I squint into the narrow letterbox of light shining out from the black glass wall. Two strained eyes stare back at me through the slot. ‘One?’ he repeats sourly. ‘Yes.’ The attendant pushes a fabric bag through the slot. ‘Clothes and shoes in there,’ he says, ‘valuables in here.’ A tiny safety deposit box appears from the hole. I look into the eyes. ‘Everything?’ I ask. ‘Yes, everything.’ He stares back at me through the slot. Brave with lust and booze I strip. I stuff my things into the bag, put my wallet in the deposit box and push it back through the slot. The attendant slides a necklace out to me. ‘Lose this’ he says, handing the necklace to me, ‘and you lose these, right?’ On the necklace is a gold pendant with an inscription that reads Fantasy No.157. ‘Go on then,’ says the attendant impatiently and slams the slot closed. I pull the pendant over my head and look down at my bare feet on the concrete floor. I push on the heavy velvet curtain and step forward. Inside I’m blind. The room is thick dark. Black as dreams. Fluorescent patterns trip behind my pupils, backlit by the dark. Loud synthetic music deadens my senses. I’m feeling my way, arms out, one step forward at a time. Disorientated. Dark dizzy. Bodies pass by without appearing. I feel something brush my leg. And again. It’s warm. It goes. It comes back. I step away and into something else. I touch skin and recoil. Noises. Short breaths. I smell skin. As my eyes slowly adjust to the dark I can make out movement. Human silhouettes tangled and intertwined. I look down. The floor is a viper’s nest of moving flesh. Somebody grabs my hand out of the dark and I’m inside a kiss. In motion. It slows. Changes direction. We open our eyes together. ‘Hi, I’m April,’ she says. ‘Hello April.’ I tell her my name, only I lie. I make something up. She pushes me backwards, her fingers in my mouth. I feel the shapes of her. The line of her shoulders, the bumps of her ribs. I taste her again. She’s greasy on my mouth. Peppermint and alcohol. We’re lurid and badly timed. We bang teeth. My fingers go from her ribs to her abdomen. Goose pimples take flight across her belly. I trace the tributaries that run from the peaks of her hips down past the tops of her legs. I hoist her up onto my thighs and she wraps her legs around me. We edge nearer. We touch. She sinks into me and we fill our lungs of each other. We kiss as far as we can. We go as far as we can. The nubs of our bones jar. Her hands are wrapped around my neck. We help each other. She scratches me. Digs her nails in. The pain is good. I fuck her thanks for the pain. She leans back. I’m pulled tight. Deep inside. The music changes. Percussion. Flashes of strobe light paint the room. ON. OFF. ON. OFF. They bleach April’s face and my eyes send time-delayed messages to my brain. A slow wave of elation goes up around us. April and me don’t move. Frozen. Feeling sinks back in. Can’t stop. We move slow. The left side of her face is a painted skull. I blink and it stops. I blink and it restarts. The lights fire again. I look down. The floor is a serpent of skin. Forbidden shapes of sex. Boys on girls. Girls on boys. Boys on girls on boys on boys. Carnal. Raw red meat. They peck and claw like vultures shrouded in shabby feathered wings. The beat starts, the strobe fires. ON. OFF. ON. ‘April!’ I see him straight away in the strobe. He’s wading through the bodies towards us, fully clothed in a lumberjack shirt and a woolly beard. Seething. Hell bent. He pushes his long wet hair out of his face. He sees me. The lights go off. I grab April’s hand. The music’s harder and louder now. ON. Whiteout. Strobe blind. I’m swaying with the floor. Human swamp. OFF. I’m trying to walk with faces on my toes, hair on the balls of my feet. April squeezes my hand. Somebody grabs my ankle. Almost pulls me over. ON. I look down. A girl’s flat on her back at my feet laughing hysterically. I see the back of somebody’s head between her legs. OFF. ON. I look back. The lumberjack is closer now. I can see the sweat in the pits of his shirt. Gritted teeth. He’s got his fist at a skinny boy’s throat. His beard is wet with spit. OFF. I grip April’s hand and pull her through the pit of limbs. ON. Out. April and me see each other but there’s no time. No stopping. We’re naked in the main room, both of us laughing, spilling drinks and dancers as we run across the dancefloor, pendants swinging low from our necks. Numb faces pass left and right. April keeps going heavy behind me, half falling. I pull her along. I Don’t see him. Into another room. We don’t stop. The crowd parts as we come through. There's cheering. We keep on. Somebody grabs April but I just drag her through. I'm out of breath and we’re slowing down but I see the entrance. We’re down the stairs. I jump the last half flight. April screams and lets go of my hand. Five white teeth spill out across the black waxy floor in front of me. I spin around. April is foetal, naked, twisted down on herself, crumpled into a ball. Barbed heat splits my temple. A burning cathode ray spurting black-blue ink into my brain. April’s eyes are locked open, chin down, mouth sodden with blood. Bites where lips should be. Pink gums and the raw meat of her tongue. People are crowding. April starts to sob. The tears run down her nose into the blood. Somebody holds her hair up out of her eyes. People look away. Girls cover their mouths. I’m shouting for help. Somebody help me. Exit. I slap the iron bar down and run naked into the street. The pavement’s rough on my feet. The morning sun hurts my eyes. I’m running for help. I’m running for somebody, anything. But soon I’m just running. | Originally written for Turbochainsaw Magazine. All words © Paul Dixon 2009 |