The first time, we boned in a series of increasingly precarious ecosystems, and your tits looked bigger than regular but not outrageously bigger, and I looked like Utahraptor ostrommaysorum but mostly in the head/collarbone/shoulders area. My genitalia were regular, meaning unburdensome and circumcised. 

The ecosystems generated procedurally and with only some delays. Mostly, they dissolved into each other like PowerPoint transitions. My “Goa Trance Vibes” playlist bubbled up from all around like birdsong, and it was like, when I turned my head, the music was louder sometimes and sometimes softer, but it was there, in the world, on the perimeter or periphery. 

By the time we got to the Costa Rican Cloud Forest, which was lovely in the wet season, we came down from the PiKHAL. Something like a standard deviation lower than the expected duration. The PiKHAL arrived in a birthday card that said, “Happy Birthday to a Very Special Grandson.” 

Here, a motmot sounded off in the valley, past the music, and everything else in the jungle seemed to thrum or vibrate anxiously. The neuromachinic interface of the Mimir tingled. I wondered when I was going to come because sometimes I don’t when I take these kinds of phenylethylamines but only then. 

Then you yelped, and I pulled off the headset. Something’s wrong, I was thinking. Something threatens us in the Cloud Forest. Some panther or myiasistic fly or spider monkey. It was you, though, your hands over your mouth. “Bit my tongue,” you said. “Bad.” 

There was no blood, or the blood was in your mouth. Your voice sounded different but not in a way I could explain really. I felt bad. 

I went, “I’m sorry,” or “Do you want me to get you something,” or maybe something less empathogenic. I can’t even remember. I was coming down. 

You went, “It’s fine,” but your voice still sounded different, as if teary. In the apartment, the lava lamp’s stuff kept splitting and merging. The laundry kept piling up under the radiator, accreting mass, like sedimenting. The wind and the rain kept hitting the window. The glasses of water on the formica. Three of them. You went over nude to one of these waters and drank out of it and spit into the sink. The diffuser hissed and kept aerosolizing this dry and smoky matter. You came back, hopscotching between the loops of cords. We lay therein. 

On our backs, you hit your vape; then I did. You were sweaty and wan and said, “I didn’t like the dinosaur thing. Let’s not do that next time.” You put a hand over my eyes and nose and then down to the jaw, as if detecting, yes, still globular in the braincase department. Eyeballs still binocular sans Mimir headset. I couldn’t shake the voice thing. Your voice just sounded different than regular. 

I said, “Ok,” and it was like, now I’m in the dog house. I felt like I was going to vomit likely symptomatic of our PiHKAL dose. Originally synthesized for schizotherapeutic applications due to its anti-libidinal properties. Initial trials demonstrated moderate success in deoedipianization protocols. Side effects: several, including numbness in the mouth. Adverse interactions: I forgot.  

I felt bad about the whole thing. I hadn’t seen you in a week almost on account of, first, your UTI then an ear infection and then the dread recurrence of your chronic lyme/fatigue/psychophysiology, now your tongue. You had a week. I wanted to be sensitive to all that. You hit the vape again; then, I did. 

When you went pee, you took the vape with you. You used to leave the door open whenever you peed, and it was like, even on the other side of my apartment, I could see you there, peeing, which I liked but not in some pee-liking way. I just liked seeing you all the time. Whenever. You don’t do that anymore, and you don’t run a second pot anymore when you leave half a cup in the coffee maker. It’s things like that. 

On my phone, I read Question.com posts about guys who are going to prison for life. They say things like, “I’m a 23-year-old going away for a long time. What will happen to me?” It’s like, good question, man. 

In there, I heard your pee rattling, heard you laugh at something on your phone. 

 

We came back to each other a year ago, almost. The bar was called The Public Service Electricity and Gas Co. of Despain County. You said, “Oh my goodness. I heard what happened.” You meant the FTC fiasco. You read my affidavit. You heard about the payout. Maybe Johnson told you. Or Franklin Molina, the idiot savant. 

I’m saying this because, earlier tonight, before the PiHKAL and the Mimir and the sex, you said, “I don’t even remember how we met.” It was like this. 

The first time, we were fifteen, and it was unremarkable, involving stalled cars, new moons, and a pulpy hellish sky, given the wildfires on the rim of Despain County. The second time, you came up to me at The Public Service Electricity and Gas Co. and said, “Oh my goodness.” 

We talked for a while in the bar, which was backdropped by these colossal skeletons of industrial equipment. Girders and stilts and the understory of a big pylon, in which we sat and drank mojitos. I didn’t want to talk about the case, but I did want to talk to you, so I relented. 

At the time, I was staying with my parents. I had just wrapped up the trial, my testimony having supported the swift arm of justice, my quick wits and promise having impressed the Honorable Whiting Eggerhart. I slept in my sister’s old room because my parents had replaced the basement with a survival shelter that moonlighted as a home gym. I told you all this, and you said, “Ok, then we’ll have to be stealthy.” 

 

Now for sure, you were talking to someone on the phone on the toilet, and as if in response, the wind and the rain kicked up outside. I lay back in the heap of cords, which spawned and propagated from a bud, a navel, the hub of the Mimir, which still ran hot and loud a few minutes into the cooldown protocol. It helped that a draft seeped through the window, at the limits of the AC unit, which the contractor installed a couple days ago. A bloom of air, a florescence, a something other bursting into the room from all the wildness outside my apartment.

You laughed again. I was like who could you be talking to? At this point in the evening? What could be so urgent? I meant what other than me.

Then also, a cross-breeze. I sensed it drifting through the stagnance of all the intraroom atmosphere. I got up, still nude, now a little chilly even. I moved through it all. You could use the word traipse. I tracked the negative pressure, felt it out with all the pores of my skin open. The Mimir still hummed, behind me now. The diffuser sputtered and spurted.

I turned and, there, the front door. Wide open. Outside, the red fire extinguisher. The gray hallway. The draft coming from there. What the hell, I was thinking.

 

In the morning in my sister’s room, you had many questions about my situation at Mimir, and I tried my very best to answer all of them in a way that felt satisfying to you. My parents had gone to work. We made eggs in the kitchen. They burned.

You said, “What was it like there?”

“I mean first I should talk about where there was,” I said. Mostly, I had put together a script for this question, except the problem was that, when I talked to you, it fell apart in my hands. My voice slipped into something different than regular. “They put the town in a very funny place. Not so far from the exact geographic center of the country. Also not far from the headwaters of four rivers. The Gihon and Pishon dry up mostly in the summer, but the Gilead feeds into the Missouri, and I can’ remember what the last one’s called. They were very careful to deploy us in late spring, I think. I missed a couple of my finals for it. Flew out to the local airport. Kind of emerged from the twin engine turboprop like from an egg. There, wow, the height of wildflower season. I walked over the tarmac to the terminal, which was smaller than a high school gym. It’s something you have to see, I think. I don’t think I can put it into words. I mean there’s no way to name them all. I’d be here all day. They had arranged a private driver to take me a few hours east to the town. Wildflowers the whole way, and prairie. Real prairie. This was the land, I thought. This was the land for sure. Then, dipping into the basin of the town, I came into this stand of perfume trees that ringed the facility. Still rings it, I guess. I don’t like calling it a facility. It wasn’t a town though. I don’t know. We don’t have perfume trees here. They’re tuberous and dry. Very brittle and dry. They smell great though, and in the late spring, they go crazy with all this startling, waxy vegetation. It’s really beautiful. Everything sort of arranges itself around the perfume tree. The tree weevils bore into the wood pulp. The woodpeckers eat the weevils. The finches eat the seed pods. The vampire bats nest in the creviced hollows, and in the stunning midwestern sun of evening, they cast themselves out in search of something to drink. The snakes eat the bats. It’s really beautiful.”

“I didn’t know they had vampire bats there.” 

“You don’t see so many on the day to day. One thing they don’t tell you about Mimir is that the dorms were really shitty and falling apart totally. One time, one of the vampire bats came through the crawl space and got my friend Nigel. He woke up to the thing suckling on his toe. He screamed and had to get a battery of rabies shots at the clinic. Maybe, there, the beginning of the end of the whole thing.”

“Why did it shut down? I mean, why do you think?”

“Because Mimir committed a fucking crime. I mean, what else is there to say? They paid us in company scrip basically. They flung it at us like a crypto thing, like some kind of peer-to-peer decentralized thing, but it was scrip. The center was right there. We fell through it. I think that’s what the FTC got them on in the end. The scrip. You’re really not supposed to do that. Mimir was a company town. It was sort of hellish and despotic. It was unreal how hot it got in the summer. We hauled ten hour days usually. The corporate stuff didn’t feel like work exactly. Mostly, we were just there. In a very dream-like and insubstantial way, we were there. I don’t know.”

 

Remember, at this point, I was still coming down from the PiHKAL, but the door thing really freaked me out. It was like, when I really thought about it, anyone could have entered the apartment, seen us, hung around here. They could still be around. I wished you had entrusted your vape in my care. Wished it a lot actually. 

When I really thought about it in a serious way, I had no recollection of opening the door. It seems sort of improbable that it opened up on its own. Possibly, you did it. 

Also at this point, I remembered I was completely naked, completely unclothed before the open door, so I shut it and left, and knocked on the bathroom door. 

I went, “Hey you.” 

You went, “What?”

“Did you know that the door is open?”

“The bathroom door? I locked it.”

“No, the front door. It’s just wide open. I think it was open the whole time.”

“I really can’t hear you.” Then, into your phone, “No sorry, he’s just saying something, and I can’t hear him.”

Ok, so not you, I was thinking. And not me. A something other. 

 

You poured some grapefruit juice from my parents’ fridge. It was unsweetened, and you hated it, and my dad, who drank a glass every morning, surely noticed the deficit. You asked another question, this, the real question. “Did you know what you guys were doing?”

“I mean yes and no. They used us for some of the trials, and I was like this is great. We are propelling our science forward through the jungles of the future. Every time they hook us in and boot up the prototype, we are advancing, without fear. We are losing ourselves every time we cinch the chinstrap of that headset. Then in the day, we put together a prospectus and filed shit with the SEC and did whatever to get to IPO, probably dooming the company town to its eventual FTC bust. We got obsessive. I don’t think we knew. At the end of it, I don’t think so. We smoked a lot of weed together, out the window of the dorm that Nigel and Jack shared. I saw more stars than I knew hung around even. The chain, the bird-dog, the trout. A stale wind blew in from the perfume trees.”

 

In the apartment, I looked around for my boxers but couldn’t find them. Lost among the cords and laundry and my other sparse belongings all flung across the room. I heard you moving in the bathroom, washing your hands or something. I tried to imagine exactly how you moved in there, exactly how you planted your feet on the wet linoleum, exactly how you fixed your hair in the mirror, but I had trouble. 

 

When I say the first time we boned, I’m lying a little. After we pulled off all the plastic wrap and installed the mount point of the Mimir, which took half an hour, we watched a movie I had seen already but when I was twelve, so maybe it doesn’t count. 

In the movie, this guy and this girl fool around on the shore of a lake. They wear matching t-shirts and jean shorts. The night fluoresces, and a loon calls from far off. Water hyacinths make purple and bright under the day-for-night lights. It’s really beautiful, and a mist falls in at the limits of the water. The guy touches the girl’s tit. She kisses him with an open mouth. 

We’re still getting used to the headsets of the Mimir, which fix themselves tightly to the temples. We’re looking at them make out, and it’s sort of sweet, and you reach your hand towards my crotch, and I look away, down, towards the water hyacinths that bob gently in the waters of the lake. The deep and living waters. 

Farther, they stumble into the shallows of the lake, and the guy starts swimming and says, “Come on, babe. Get in,” but she’s nervous. She says something about the kids, and you’re supposed to go, oh, they’re camp counselors. She moves through the hyacinths. Her ankles drag a wake behind them.

Then without warning, the stitched and sagging shape of something not exactly human rises up behind the guy, and she screams, and the title card flashes before us. Slaughterhead 2: Return of Slaughterhead. You can smell him from this side of the lake. 

 

You release yourself from the bathroom, phone in hand, vape in hand. You look almost like you’ve been crying, but it’s hard to make out. I squint a little. The wind and the rain. The window. 

 

I guess this is all just to say I love you. Maybe that’s all there is to say. It’s you and me. There’s nothing else here. It’s like there’s nothing at all. It’s us, and I love you. I want to say it as regular as I can.