Outside, in the rain, behind the house, huddled, crouched down near the shed, you don’t see me. I’m there though, doing a line of semi-wet coke and asking Jimmy whether the acid should have kicked in yet. He reminds me it’s not acid, that it’s a new chemical compound we’re trying and that we’re suppose to blog about it tomorrow or else it won’t be free.“Scientists,” he says, “we’re like scientists, doing research.”
But we’re nothing like that.
We’re using street drugs, variations, to experience something greater than our own realities—until tonight—tonight I find the blue and become part of you.
But before you, before us, when it’s me traversing the universe alone behind your grandfather’s house, Jimmy encourages me to think as if I’m a researcher bettering mankind, not an addict breaking in for a score, so I say, “I’m not a fucking scientist, I’m a Neanderthal at best, clubbing my crude way along for survival,” and Jimmy shakes his head because I don’t get the big picture, only cute life-like drawings of tigers attacking cavemen on subway station walls. That’s just how I am before the blue.
“Fuck, you don’t know a thing,” Jimmy says and lights up a glass pipe full of something no scientist would approve of.
He’s right, too. I have no idea why I’m covered in rain, watching your window. “Come on,” he says, “we’re going in through the back door.”
And we do.
Inside our flashlights shine thin beams of light onto kitchen appliances and Jimmy says, “The guy brings the shit home from his lab and stores it here in his own fucking office.”
“What is it?” I ask, but don’t care, because I don’t listen when Jimmy explains that the guy makes something new, something special, something different—instead I raise my hammer, the one I hold in my left hand—because there is a man in a lab coat standing in front of me whose eyes glow neon blue and when he speaks little wisps of electric blue smoke escape his lips.
“There you are,” he says but I’m already closing the distance and bringing down the hammer in all its crudeness.
On the floor, the scientist Jimmy somehow knows lays still and I can see a hint of the blue glow behind his closed eyes.
“Is he dead?” Jimmy asks, making his way over the body to the stairs.
“No, I don’t think so, I don’t know,” I say.
Upstairs, you sit alone in your grandfather’s office. You huddle in the corner understanding something has happened below in the kitchen.
You can feel it.
The blue pulses through you and your grandfather, connecting you to him, him to you, making it as if you were momentarily struck with a hammer and, for your grandfather, as if he weren’t lying on the kitchen floor downstairs, but in fact huddled upstairs, being as much you as you are him—part of the growing blue.
And when I find you, Jimmy stands there next to you, saying he doesn’t understand. He points at your little blue glowing body. “What the fuck is this?” he asks. I shrug, stare into your blue, fixate on the intensity of your eyes. You search through me with a hot blue-white fever—and I see the universe. In the dark of the room, the incandescent pale of your blue body creates the same effect glacier ice has in dark water—it illuminates and attracts, calling my vessel to it, so I step a foot forward using your eyes as stars to navigate by.
We’re connected.
In the dark, your eyes crackle like live wire sparks, zapping against a wet street.
In my head, I hear you, your grandfather too—“This is evolution” —and those words, our words, it’s an electric unison, a soft fuzz humming around syllables empowering them—and it makes perfect sense to me, words I can feel vibrating in my head.
Perfect sense.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Jimmy yells, but I don’t care. I don’t listen. You outstretch your hand, offer me a little blue cube, radiant, pulsating, formed from your palm. “Is that it?” Jimmy yells. “Is that the goddamn compound?” He grabs you by your little blue shoulders and I bring down the hammer against his head. In my other hand, I hold the cube, and when I open it, it absorbs into our skin, leaving a blue square to mark our palm.
By the time our eyes start to flicker, our grandfather walks into the room illuminated and we feel less like us and more like the rain outside. And by the time we begin to glow, like you, skin and all, we wonder together in our blue mind if we should show our friends this, if they will understand we’re an ocean, that they should learn to swim in us, to dip into our radiant blue existence and become something blue, something more than their caveman struggle to survive out there alone.
We wonder, we blue, we wonder.
Photo By: Mark Chadwick
