Drug Series # 14: Psilocybin by Sean Lovelace
In the elbow room I flap the jacks. I flap the jacks with Andy Warhol. There are gods to coddle, gods to slouch, later.
“Memory is a type of god,” I tell Andy.
He gives me a look. A look of black light, pretty ugly, or boneless rib; a look of the mind, the mind as folding itself into a velvet box, or the one day, an entire day, my life was bees humming over clover (talk, dance, kiss, talk, dance, kiss), free with intent—something impossible.
“God of effortless conversation,” I say to Andy. “God of first-touching-while-naked. God of soft triangles. God of words. Like that collapsible Tuesday, the morning she said, ‘You move my sadness over to dread.’”
Andy holds his fingers to translucent lips. Origamis his hands, and then gets to work. Andy does the blackboard application, painting it green. Andy epoxies the pine to the apple. A tremendous mirror Andy lifts, and does the hair fornication, hard, then flat, vertical Des Moines, farm field of soft serve vanilla.
Take a photo. Signature stamp. Place photo on EBay. Take a photo. Signature stamp. Place photo on EBay. Andy tells me to trust only my Polaroids and my PayPal now. (He means my eyes and pelvis.) The entire world is cleavage: the Golden Arches, the sweet jumbo engines, jumbo bombs, clover, clover, Volkswagen emblem, the kaleidoscopic peacocks of NBC.
(odor of shadows taking off, landing. a hushed gym of tracers enter my eyelids, left. over there some kid is happily coughing into a river)
“That phone is going to ring,” Andy says. It is a silver phone perched on a windowsill. Andy airbrushes all his phones silver.
I tell Andy, “I’m still waiting. To feel something. A pressing weight or maybe just a flutter.”
Andy gives me this look. It is the look of the bird that pretends to have a broken wing.
“…A look of black light, pretty ugly, or boneless rib; a look of the mind, the mind as folding itself into a velvet box, or the one day, an entire day, my life was bees humming over clover (talk, dance, kiss, talk, dance, kiss), free with intent—something impossible…”
“Where does an orbit begin?” Andy asks me.
I don’t get you, I think.
“Where does a revolution end?
I don’t get you.
“The way you mope around, “he says, “I think you must have forgotten that life is the skin of a beach ball.”
The silver phone rings. Andy sits totally silent. I want to say in prayer. I walk over and answer the phone.
“Hello?”
A dark, thin voice. “It’s over. The search is canceled. The bones have been identified.”
“What? Who is this? Sara, is that you?”
The phone falls away, a wilting daisy chain. Outside thunder goes syllabic. Outside the vertical sky rains, or reins, or reigns, some pun, some word play about the impossibility of anything human, the folly of our sorrows, our triumphs.
I open my eyes and Andy is standing in front of a large window, the sunlight bathing him in rays. He has a wide sheet of aluminum foil, and he’s waving it, waving it in the air, airing out a dusty metal rug, glitter shards of light off the flux and dents and crackle.
(melody of black smoke threading the air, melody of falling asleep on my roof)
Pop! A blue flash. As the tracers swirl and grind, a naked woman glides into the elbow room and hands Andy two bottles of water. Her body is a thoughtful pause before creation, more concept than actual possibility. I hang up the phone. It returns to my ear. I hang up the phone. It becomes school children playing below street signs, then a phone again, and returns to my ear. I hang up the phone and the naked woman tells me everything Andy does is a compassionate struggle against the allure of suicide.
I don’t get you, I think. I don’t get you.
My tongue wants to quiver, to levitate. My eyes go zeppelin, floaty, yawning free. The naked woman turns and floats away.
Andy sits down. “I want you to buy something today, or sell something. To validate. Even now, out there, something wonderful is being constructed. Even now, something old and tired is being cast away.”
Andy twists opens a bottle, hands it over. Its skin is cool and smooth. It fits my hand perfectly.
“It was born to fit your hand,” Andy says, holding his own bottle up to the light. “Here is something to feel. To flutter. To believe. All the gods live inside these now. Where did you think they would be?”
__________________________________________________________________________
Sean Lovelace teaches creative writing at Ball State University. HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS is his award-winning flash fiction collection by Rose Metal Press. His works have appeared in Crazyhorse, Diagram, Quick Fiction, Sonora Review, Willow Springs, and so on. He blogs at seanlovelace.com. He likes to run, far.
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