Arcane Desires

Lapis lazuli eyeshadow, exposed pipes, and Scandinavian metal greeted Brendan as he opened the loft door. There was no welcome mat. Eyelashes windshield-wiped and obsidian eyeliner mixed into the canvas, turning the delicate pockets holding the eyes a deep, dark violent violet. Marble blended with lapis in a kind of contact metamorphism. The pipes carried electricity, tap water, gas, cable, and sewage around the makeshift apartment. The door was makeshift too, cardboard which created a portal in a sheet of knockoff imitation cardboard which was designated as a wall. The allure of the hue, like ambient lights reflecting in a new age opium den, enraptured and entranced him.

“Hey, what’s up? You can put the beer in the fridge for now.” That was Liza. It was her loft. It was her oil paint smearing on skin like pure pigment settling on a peach countertop after floating in the air. And now it was her walking across the room to talk to some guido about the coke delivery.

Brendan’s arm twitched twice. He was hypersensitive to stimuli. His mother had always told him that. And two arm twitches with pain told him to back away. Two arm twitches without pain, if he felt bloodflow on the other hand, meant that he was right. One of his homunculi told him, “You’re a good person, Brendan. Keep doing what you’re doing.” He fingered a pill in his pocket. “Now would be a bad time to take the medicine, Brendan. Keep doing a good job and listen to the twitches. You know how hard it is to interpret the twitches when you take the medicine.” He took his hand out of his pocket and let the capsule fall to the soft cloth seam at the bottom. The homunculi were like navigators – backseat drivers, really – but Brendan was the one ultimately in control of the car. He had the keys. The homunculi were non-corporeal, but he could make those limbs move, make them stretch out if he knew for sure that a twitch or an itch would guide him the wrong way. He cleared his throat, and the sound reverberated and resonated through the refrigerator. He made room for the 6-pack and set it down. The first homunculus – the one who had guided him through the twitches – was a little gnome who was silly sometimes but mostly serious. He had a large red nose and eyes that insisted he spoke the truth. His imaginary physical representation only appeared when Brendan wasn’t paying enough attention to him.

The party was full of plenty of stimuli for Brendan to interpret, and he created new semiological systems with each new synapse firing in his brain. A Sharpie painting of a forlorn-looking woman with a long black dress was hanging on the wall at the other corner of the loft. Brendan couldn’t see far enough to know it, but the painting was signed by someone named The_Marauder. Obviously, Brendan knew this painting was a portal to a universe of ineffable desolation, and the closer he got to it, the more he could feel the spirits descend. The_Marauder didn’t even know what the word desolation meant, but he knew beyond reasonable doubt – beyond a shadow of a doubt – that this painting meant death. He slunk away from it, terrified of going through the portal. The doctor said this was Brendan’s problem: his surety, his certainty in interpretation. Everyone reads the signs, but the healthy ones stay unsure. That wasn’t exactly what the doctor said, but it was mostly.

The second homunculus began to converse with the first. This one was tall and gaunt, with a small, thin face. “You fucking idiot, you always do the same fucking thing. If you keep doing this shit, they won’t even let you go out anymore. Don’t you remember the hospital, the way that kind nurse looked at you with so much pity and simultaneous hate? You go crazy with the twitches, scare people, the paramedics come, and you wind up hooked up to a haliperidol drip trying to get some sleep on a too-small ER bed. How long can you do that before you become a life-long crazy?” Just as the second homunculus finished his monologue, he could feel the first taking precedence again.

“What if each time you get the drip, they’ve caught you and they’re controlling you?” asked the gnome’s nose. “You’re always fine until they give you the drip. You’re one with everything. You have certainty, you have purpose, and that--“

“Oh shit, the keg is kicked. Fucking sucks. It’s only 12:30. Where’s the fucking beer, man?” The guy was looking at Brendan. “Yo, can I borrow a stoge?”

“What?” asked Brendan.

“A stoge, a bogey. Cig.”

“Uh, yeah,” Brendan said. He didn’t hesitate before handing the guy a cigarette.

The gnome homunculus grew visible in his mind again, hairy ears slightly offset. “What, you want to end up like him? Do you think he has any purpose? Any gift for prophecy like you’ve shown? What does he know of the future? What does he even know of the present? Hey dick, why are you here? To get fucked up? To get some pussy?”

Brendan’s upbringing, some strain of agnostic humanism in his parents, acted as counterbalance. He wouldn’t say that. But he looked to the guy like he might.

“Where do you live?” asked the guy.

“Around here,” said Brendan. “Like 15 minutes.”

“Nice. Damn, check that shit out,” drooled the guy.

“What a goddamn surprise,” said the gnome, drowning out the protestations of his all-too logical counterpart.

“What a goddamn surprise,” said Brendan.

“What?” said the guy. “Damn, you missed her. Your loss. Okay, I’m gonna go get a drink somewhere. Plenty of half-full beers around. Later.”

Brendan didn’t say goodbye. The first homunculus was right again.

The music had changed to some 8-step-full-on-hardstyle-dub-rampant with musique-concrète influences that would be carved out as a particular sub-sub-genre of a sub-culture next week. It made Brendan uneasy, and he felt nauseated. What was his purpose at this party? It seemed like there was nothing to do. Just a bunch of unprophetic people wandering around trying desperately to silence the gnawing desperation. How were people having fun here? He saw three people making out in a corner. Oh.

Brendan had a girlfriend a few years back. He had courted her heavily. 1-800-FLOWERS.com boxes left at her doorstep by the deliveryman dressed up like a florist, or if he was lucky, making it inside Becca’s office accompanied by a security guard to ensure the integrity of physical goods brought inside the building. They had been out twice: first a movie, unmemorable. Second, a local symphony concert with a woodwinds section that made Brendan scratch his scalp vigorously. But it wasn’t just the woodwinds. He didn’t know it was going to be Wagner. Prelude to the 3^rd Act of Lohengrin. All Brendan could see were concentration camps when he closed his eyes. There was no separation between the music’s signification and any beauty it had outside of Wagner. So he opened his eyes, and they started appearing in his open-eye perceptions too, soldiers kicking starved prisoners, barbed wire fences. Wagner was the impresario. The piece wasn’t short enough. Brendan started screaming bloody murder. He was forcibly dragged out; the orchestra played through it all. Becca had been sleeping. Dark concert halls with music playing always made her sleepy. They didn’t see each other after that. Brendan knew the conductor was furious. They dragged him out on a stretcher. He was out in a few days. He signed his diagnosis paper without reading it during the evaluation, and that was that. Eat more vitamins. Omega-3. Fish oil. Snake oil. Brendan started reading anti-psychiatry books and journals. Thomas Szasz and shit. He knew he was right about these premonitions. Something was clouding his perceptions when he found out he was wrong. Someone changed everything around on him.

He came to a realization with some of the homunculi’s help: his system of interpretation, his hermeneutic method, was different from that of everyone else around him. The decisions he was making were justified by the way he read the signs. It all had this beautiful, elegant internal logic. But because others weren’t perceiving the world with the pre-requisite of his gathered experiences, they couldn’t comprehend why he would do the things he had done. A profound sense of loneliness followed this. No one could feel a total empathy with him, no one, because it would be impossible to dictate his emotional, mental, and spiritual impressions. That was what he had always longed for: a complete shared experience with another being, the notion of comprehension and two bound wills, but it was ultimately impossible. Becca could have kissed him, yes. She might even have fucked him. But she wouldn’t have heard Wagner the same way. Some people say that’s beautiful, some uniqueness which allows subjective experience to be had. But Brendan didn’t want subjectivity. Once he knew that was impossible, he felt resigned to his fate, and he vowed to live in the only way he could: treating all stimuli as his own and no one else’s. He would read the signs, and he alone would interpret the objective signification which all objects were endowed with: why they were there to begin with.

It was this will that kept Brendan solid in his convictions, clinging to them despite the doctors who claimed they were irrational and exhibited signs of dangerous and psychopathic behavior. The intensity of what he stood for, which was how each of the symbols would direct his life and the lives of others, shimmered in some perfect new world where he alone was the keyholder of meaning.

And so as he stood at the party, there was little doubt about what the gnome told him. He walked over to the guy who had stood in the kitchen with him before. The guy had apparently found some beer. He kept palming one of the bottles on the table, which was indistinguishable from the others except for the liquid inside of it.

“We meet again,” said the guy happily.

“Yeah, we do.” Brendan thought for a moment and then asked the question he already knew the answer to. “You looking for pills?”

“Yeah man, fucking always,” said the guy. “What do you got?”

“Check it out.” Brendan took out the haloperidol pill. It said GG 126 on it. 10 milligrams. “It’s kind of heavy shit, though. It’s an anti-psychotic.”

“Oh, like Xanax and shit. I know all about that. How much?”

“Te—twenty. I got it for 15, but I’ve gotta make money somehow,” said Brendan, acting cool, acting like he knew what he was doing.

“Okay,” said the guy. “I’ll give you 15. I can’t do any more than that.”

“Fine,” said Brendan. “15. Take it with water. And save it until you’re on acid or K or whatever and you want to come down. It’s better than milk.”

“Bottom’s up,” said the guy, with a devil-may-care smile seeping across his lips. “How long does it take to kick in?”

“Trust me,” said Brendan. “You’ll feel it.” Brendan walked away after the handshake, avoiding the Sharpie drawing at the other corner of the room.

Brendan saw what appeared to be specters encircling the bar. The walls started to shake. Brendan could see them shaking.

“It’s the wrath of God. This place is going to crumble like a house of cards,” said the gnome homunculus. “It’s coming down. Like the old song, you know. The walls came tumbling down.”

“We have to get out,” said Brendan. “It’s time to go. It’s time to go.”

A third homunculus, a jukebox flapping its metal mouth open, started to sing. “And you can talk about your men of Gideon, and you can talk about your men of Saul.”

Brendan ran out of the loft, knocking people over if they were in his way. The gaunt homunculus looked on, powerless. Brendan knocked over Lisa.

“You asshole!” shouted Lisa. “Get the fuck out of here.”

Brendan ran out of the loft and looked back up on it.

The jukebox homunculus kept singing. “But there’s none like good old Joshua, at the battle of Jericho.”

The lapis lazuli, the painting, the guy. Brendan saw the imitation cardboard walls collapse and crush the party with his own two eyes. There was no article in the paper the next day.