#hydroxise

     “Of course I can fight. Just look at me.”

     Yeah--just look at him. Less than a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet and about as tall as the average middle schooler, he’s surely intimidating. But under that suit that sits a little too loose on his arms and waist, is sinew and power, lining his thin but strong muscles. 

      He shrugs off his jacket, begins to unbutton his shirt, revealing the irezumi stained skin beneath. His forearms are covered with cloth, but his upper body, below the neck, is inked thoroughly, until his skin is hidden behind the design of black clouds, a coiling snake the color of pink salamander skin mapping over his bony chest, his small shoulders. He scans Tyler with his eyes, trying to gauge if he’s impressed. He doesn’t know why he wants to impress this guy--but he does.

With breakfast I have one green and yellow fluoxetine capsule and two tiny white discs of perphenazine. Perphenazine is a typical medium-strength antipsychotic, roughly ten times as potent as chlorpromazine. It has no antidepressive effects, which explains the fluoxetine. Perphenazine in high doses can cause temporary dyskinesia.

This is why I’m shaking all the time.

The last time you saw me I was a fucking mess. I guess not much has changed.

I took my pills this morning. I remember this because I was looking at Henry while I did it. Henry is labouring under the illusion that he is an android and spends most of the day saying yes and no in a flat monotone and staring unblinkingly at people until they cut their losses. But this morning halfway through eating his porridge he picked up his bowl and threw it across the room. I wonder sometimes why I don’t have the robot delusion. I wish I had the robot delusion.

In this place everybody has their own bathroom because they are afraid that if we shared we would all start fucking each other or smashing mirrors and stabbing each other. My room is a cuboid, seven feet by fifteen. I have a view of the yard that I’m not allowed out to walk around in yet. I have to be level four for yard privileges.

My point is: for the last forever I’ve been alone in a bathroom. Tyler notwithstanding, this is weird. I took my pills this morning. Somehow Tyler is pressing through, an intrusion, a pain that borders on physical. Because I can feel him looking at it, I rub the blistery lump on my cheek, keloid-thick and heavy even in the inside of my mouth like a gobstopper.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

Don’t overthink the speech marks. I don’t know why they’re here either.

My head is on a constant jerking roll like I’m on repeat. This is cliché, but like a broken record.

“You’re supposed to be gone. I’m in remission.”

    ‘ do i have to wait like everybody else, or are you gonna let me in now because you’re already standing here? ’ 

THE MIST STARTERS, ACCEPTING. @hydroxise

what is it about men who let their mouth run? how does marla always end up here, listening to them air their philosophical bullshit? it must be something primal, a guilty predilection buried deep in her lizard brain, because on the surface she’d really rather collect her shoes and leave. blood parasites meets tonight, that’s the priority. 

THE MASTER, accepting.@hydroxise​

Maybe the best thing for me to do right now is take a timeout.

When I was a kid and I got mad about something my mom used to send me to sit on the bottom step of our staircase and stay there until I got over it. I imagine myself now, a grown man, removing myself from this room and from Tyler to go sit at the bottom of the stairs. He wouldn’t let me go.

I am having a temper tantrum. I am so spitting fucking mad I could cut Tyler’s throat, I could rip his fucking head off. He’s right and I don’t want him to be and that makes him wrong. He is WRONG and I am ZEN. I am an empowered and informed member of society and I am going to dig my thumbs into his eyes and pop his eyeballs like two peeled grapes.

He is supposed to be my roommate.He is supposed to be my friend.He is supposed to be my Tyler.

If I sat down and listed all of the friends I have I wouldn’t get past Tyler. Marla is not my friend, Marla is my problem. Bob is not my friend, Bob is my charity case. Fight club is not my friend, fight club is my saviour. That leaves Tyler, alone. Tyler star-sixty-nined me after my condo blew up and let me stay in his shitty house. Tyler told me how to make soap. The raised scar on the back of my hand, the shape of Tyler’s lips. Tyler’s kiss on the back of my hand, Tyler’s words coming out of my mouth.

Then nobody likes you either, I tell him.I say, You and me? We’re the same.

I’m pointing between us. My index finger pressing at my sternum and jabbing at the air in front of Tyler.

I tell him it doesn’t matter if he likes me anyway. I tell him that only sycophants and doormats care who likes them. I tell him if he’s going to be a jackass then fuck him, fuck him, I wish he’d walk in front of a sixteen-wheeler, I wish that sixteen-wheeler would paste him into asphalt, I am so sick of him looking at me.

I am having a temper tantrum. I put my body, the one in my head, I put that body on the bottom step of our staircase and I leave him there sulking and oozing into the wood, the wood that swells and creaks in the night.

When my father was still around and I would whine and pull at the leg of his pants to get his attention he would call me a lickspittle. Like those dogs that drool all the time, elastic water that slobbers and drips, the consistency of precum. It knocks sickness into me like a physical pain, like retching from a foot or a knee or an elbow to the stomach. Lickspittle. My father’s voice, hard on the consonants. I don’t remember what he looks like any more.

If I don’t let go of Tyler he will hate me, and then I’ll be alone, and I’ll make up another Tyler in my head just so I’ll have someone to talk to.

Tyler tells me he is the only one who likes me. Tyler says he is the only one. Tyler asks me who fucking likes me except for him. Tyler tells me nobody. Tyler’s kiss on the back of my hand.

Tyler might have kissed a hundred hands and left a hundred scars but he did me first. Tyler told me how to make soap. Tyler’s kiss on the back of my hand: the possibility that God does not want me. That God never did. But Tyler does.

GENERATION KILL, accepting.

Tyler tells me that what we need in America is a holiday where once a year the blue-collar man gets to go into the home of the white-collar man, eat his food, sleep in his bed and fuck his shit up. Tyler tells me this as he’s eating a Big Mac. It might be that I’m getting sick, but looking at him crush processed beef into mush with his molars is making me want to vomit.

Maybe he’s right about this. Maybe America does need a holiday where once a year the blue-collar man gets to go into the home of the white-collar man and fuck his shit up. But Tyler tells me this like I’m supposed to do something about it. He has a vision of me in my best suit knocking on the doors to the White House: excuse me, can I take just a moment out of your day to talk to you about a holiday where once a year the blue-collar man etcetera etcetera? Thank you so much. Yes, I would like a coffee, if you don’t mind, Mr President.

I tell Tyler that America needs someone to bypass its security lock in the dead of night, creep up the stairs of its house, wake it up with a hand over its mouth, and kick the shit out of it. I tell him: Tyler, America is the last bastion of bullshit. We clink beers and my bottle runneth over and slosheth over the back of my hand.

Excuse me, can I take just a moment out of your day to talk to you about Tyler Durden?

I ask Tyler what’s so good about white-collar men anyway. I say, would you wanna spend a state-sanctioned holiday eating kale in a fucking McMansion?

“Who are you, some big philosopher or something?” She scoffs.

The gym they’re in—a literal underground ring—is dingy and not well lit. It has a district odor of years and years of sweat, not even alleviated by the huge fan that gives the air some circulation.

Valerie is busy practicing her hooks on a punching bag that looks like it’s one good roundhouse kick away from bursting. But even the viciousness with which she’s attacking it doesn’t seem to make a dent, so maybe there’s more fight in the old thing than it appears.

She stops to wipe sweat from her sticky hairline with the back of one glove. Her face is flushed red with exertion.