Hoshi ended up directing us to a place that looked as if it had been an opium den in its near past—and perhaps still functioned as one later at night. Beads substituted doorways once we went inside, and incense crept into every corner of the room. A faerie draped in scented ropes and wooden beads awaited us at a front desk, clacking her nails on the table. She was pale in color, nearly ice blue, with a point of blue on her forehead. Her black hair was pulled back into a firm bun, decorated by a number of hair items.
"Hoshiya—how wonderful to see you," purred the mystic faerie, her tone trying to be warm but coming out like ice crystals. Her voice had an exotic accent, but it was from an improper region to constitute a mystic faerie—more Eskimo than Brazilian. I withdrew slightly, but Hoshi surged forwards, bubbling with excitement.
"Taelia, it's great to see you. How's business been?"
"Ok, I suppose," Taelia whispered, the smoke of winter seeming to slip from her lips. "A bit slow, but I have been saving for my trip up to the mountain."
"Oh! How's that coming along? Are you having a house constructed there?"
"Not yet … the funds are too short for that." Taelia grimaced, and then her black-painted lips split into a frigid smile. Her teeth were as white as snow yet uneven, like icicles dripping from a window pane. "Perhaps I will travel there and build one myself." As Hoshi contributed laughter, Taelia's face quickly screwed into one of business—supernatural business. "What are you here for today, young faerie? And who is your companion?" She gestured to me with a hint of disdain.
"Taelia, this is Dr. Frank Sloth." Hoshi seemed to try to talk around my full title, as if it would not fit her windpipe. "Sloth, Taelia."
"Pleasure," I said, holding out my hand for courtesy. She took it sharply—a chill ran up my arm from the dry, anemic feel of her hand. I tried to release her hand, but she clutched mine like a tongue affixing to a frozen pole. She pulled me forward and stared me straight in the eye, forgetting etiquette.
"You …" That cold steam flowed from her lips, and her cold blue eyes narrowed. The nails of her free hand began to tickle between my knuckles, and I swallowed nervously. A cloudy gloss was overcoming her eyes, and she looked at me as if in a trance. "You … are an interesting one."
"Please stop throttling my hand," I insisted, jerking it away. Hoshi touched me on the shoulder, a welcome surge of warmth.
"Frank, don't be difficult. Taelia's a qualified psychic."
"Maybe a qualified psycho …" I mumbled. Taelia smirked at me.
"Ah, a man of science … a rare and skeptical treat." She jolted up from her seat, as if a rod had suddenly been thrust up her spine. Taelia was distinctly unlike my vision of a psychic—she did not flow through the cosmos but rather marched through it, cold and precise. "Come." She gestured to use with one finger to follow us into the back room, hidden by an elaborate shroud of glass beads.
Hoshi went first, and I after her, cautiously. Inside was a round wooden table with a clear crystal sphere in the middle, supported by an elaborate metal sculpture. The walls were draped with curtains made with a thick material, interwoven with golden thread. It was sumptuous and so unlike Taelia, who was strictly a chilling beauty. Taelia immediately dimmed the lights, as if she recognized the uncomfortable dichotomy between the room and her presence.
Taelia directed us to sit around the table on provided cushions, and we complied. She sat on a slightly elevated bench, giving her a falsely superior presence. When she waved her hand over the globe, a smoky light came from inside of it, illuminating her face in a sickly fashion.
"I thought you said this was a palm reading," I whispered to Hoshi.
"Madame Taelia does whatever reading she feels you require," Hoshi whispered back, taking on a certain formality.
"And by any chance, does she always do the most expensive procedure?"
"Shh!"
With sufficient silence from my shushing, Taelia began. She instructed me to hold out my hand flat on the table face-up, which I did. She put one hand on top of my hand, her black fingernails tickling the crevices of my palm. Her other hand was placed atop the ball. She closed her eyes, and a guttural hum began to emit from her throat, somewhat like the throaty alto she spoke in. Hoshi and I watched on in stunned silence, although I had to stifle a fit of laughter bubbling in my stomach against how utterly stupid Taelia appeared.
My hysteria was turned off like a spigot as Taelia's eyes opened with a snap, the sound instantly ceasing. She stared directly at me, never letting her eyes wander an inch past.
"Dr. Frank Sloth. Is this your name?"
"Pretty sure." Hoshi elbowed me in the ribs. "Yeah! Jeez, Hoshi. Yeah it is."
"I see your future."
"I bet you do."
"You are shriveled and ugly, and a greenness plagues your person."
"Well, that blows."
"Frank! Be serious!"
"I'm sorry, Hoshi, this is so fucking stupid!"
"SILENCE!" We obeyed. "This one is very brilliant … a beacon of intelligence in a sea of ignorant darkness … but I see … I see this light shifting, turning sinister … the booster jets of a far away ship … a sea full of stars, consuming the light, turning it into a vacuum … terrible, terrible … a voice …." Taelia began to rock back and forth, as if something was physically rising from the crystal ball and into her arm, filling her with an unexplainable terror. Her eyes were flashing open and shut as if in dreams—her body swooned at each word, as if she were pulling something up from her intestines to her lips. "I see … pain … and … suffering … and I see space … so much empty space … !"
She let loose a manic scream then, as if electrified by her globe, attached to it by the arm. With her hand still fixed on the globe, she began to utter curses in a foreign language, incomprehensible yet simultaneously arrestingly familiar. I wanted to laugh with my science-born incredulity, laugh like a haughty skeptic with a pipe stuck in my lips and brush it off as psychosis. Yet objectivity was being rubbed clean by the sheer stock of emotion poured into Taelia's actions; there was such conviction in every sway of her body, each obscene syllable, that something deep inside of me was shaken.
The spectacle seemed to go on for an unnecessary amount of time, and when I had taken my fill, I stood up abruptly and grabbed Taelia by the wrist, jerking her hand off of the ball. Her wailings immediately stopped, and a blankness filled her eyes, as if the burning star that had goaded her to such obnoxious acts had suddenly collapsed. "Stop it," I whispered, silent but serious. "Stop shouting."
"You're a demon, Frank Sloth," she suddenly hissed back, her voice disturbingly serpentine. Exhaust steamed from her mouth, and her turquoise eyes were red around the edges. "A demon, and a plague to Faerieland."
"A demon, huh?" I replied dryly. "Really. You know, you could be more original. Maybe something I haven't a million times from the Faerie Counsel. Demon, abomination, blasphemy, blemish … take your fucking pick."
"Don't touch me, you snake!" she shrieked, suddenly pulling away from me. She hissed as she clutched at her wrist as if burned. I looked at her wrist, just barely visible between her white knuckles. Perhaps it was an illusion of the light, but her wrist suddenly seemed scarred, as if all of the flesh had withered from where I touched. I didn't care. If I had some supernatural power, it would be the first time I had ever experienced it—and she had so ignited my temper that pain dealt to her seemed inconsequential—even soothing.
"You know what the problem with you faeries is?" I demanded, my voice low and dark, a tone I had never used before. "You've got this … tendency about you. This inerasable prejudice for the ugly, the different, the unique. Not only will your race never evolve—never improve—because of it, but it makes those you stigmatize worse than they could've been. It's bad enough for a … mutant like me to just be conscious of how terrible, how repulsive I am," I boomed, my teeth clenched. My voice reverberated through the bone, filling the room like an imposing phantom.
"It's even worse having everyone wear an accusing mirror everywhere I go, so I'm only reminded of my deficiency. And you know what?" I leaned forward to her, blocking out the light of the crystal ball from her face. The iridescence now poured on my chin, creeping up my neck so as to make me into a demonic of shadow and light, my eyes caved in deep into my skull. Taelia shrank back into the wall, trying to cover her face with the curtains, but I ripped them from her countenance. I wanted to see her face, see her horrible, screaming reaction to my final statement.
"It's enough to make me kill a man."
That's when Taelia began to sob, warm, gushing tears that split her white cheeks into fountains. It was shocking to see her body produce anything that was warmer than freezing temperature, and took me aback. The heat drained from my body, and left me in the chilly air of the room, making me shiver. I turned to Hoshi with a defeated look, but she too had retreated from me, her face ashen. She scuttled behind me, making sure to keep a meter radius between us, and went behind the table to console Taelia, sitting her down and stroking her hair.
I felt my feet carry me after that, but no sensation of conscious movement. I felt the cold steel of the Moltenore under me, the deep rumblings of its start and hum beneath me, and far away I knew of the tingle of wind against my skin. There was me unlocking the door, and the smell of the brass on my hand, and then my cheek against the couch, scratched by the rough texture. But inside I rang with the hollowness of a tree struck by lightning, its insides dissolved by a burst of revelation.
It was only when Meep jumped onto my lap, a ball of short, soft fur, that I became conscious. He rubbed his tiny nose against my neck, and it tickled slightly. While I hoped to see Hoshi, I knew it was Meep by the tiny purrings, and I turned on my back, picking him up in my hands. I pressed his belly against my face to feel the beat of a living organism, and inhaled his scent as far as it would go in my lungs. Meep cooed a bit, perhaps in consolation, or perhaps in content.
After a while, I placed Meep back on my chest. His belly fur was tangled with my tears, and stained the front of my shirt. I petted him between his two ghostly eyes and managed to choke out a question.
"Am I a killer, Meep?"
Meep was utterly silent in response, staring me straight in the eyes with no wavering glance. In the glassy mirrors of those eyes, I saw a deep darkness staring back at me, and I wondered if it was Meep or me that we condemned without a word.
I went back to smack.
This would be a good time to tell you that I have two phases in my life: the junkie phases and the straight phases. Because of the smack, I'm not sure which phase has dominated my life largely; but in the straight phases, I attended my job regularly, could keep up with my mortgage payments, ate vegan, and smoked a decent amount of cigarettes. I also rarely thought about smack, unless I was depressed.
During my smack periods, I was a delinquent at work and with bills, ate rarely but sat on the pot religiously and smelled like a chimney. (That's what I've been told, at least—I could care less about my smell when I'm shooting the horse.) However, I had a great deal of friends as a junkie, for my house made a convenient shooting gallery for the street bound smack heads.
This time, I wasn't in to being social. I mostly wanted to kill my sexual drive towards Hoshi and the lingering feeling of foreboding. As soon as Hoshi didn't come home from Taelia's, I was on the corners searching for a dealer. As a junkie—even a junkie who's been straight for three years—the smack in your cells jumps whenever you see a dealer, regardless of whether you know her or not. It becomes instinctual—you need to satiate your need, and your body adjusts to satisfy smack's demands.
As soon as I had a needle in my vein shooting warmth deep in my bloodstream, I felt the warm swell of home. I puked a little—it'd been a long time since my last fix—but for the rest of the duration, I sat within a sphere of euphoria and sprawled within microwaved blankets, my chin at my chest.
The days before the show passed with relative quickness, besides when I needed to find another fix. Smack doesn't let you skip doses. In those hours that passed by like salmon downstream, I lounged on the toilet seat for an elusive shit or sat slumped in the chair, enjoying the prolonged ride of pleasure. Meep seemed to understand that something was different—that something had inherently changed in my mannerisms. He quietly retreated from the house and ate elsewhere, though where exactly I'd never know.
It was a few hours before the show that I received a phone call. Well, I picked up the receiver—I'm not sure that counts as receiving it, as I gave my end a long expanse of silence to dwell on.
"Frank? Frank? Frank, are you there? Frank, I know you picked up. Frank, did you forget we have a fucking show tonight? Frank? Frank! It's Mowlia. You better be coming tonight, Frank. Frank! Are you strung out again?"
"No," I lied lowly into the receiver.
"You so are! I can't fucking believe this. I'm coming over."
There seemed to be little time between when I returned the receiver to the cradle to when Mowlia arrived at the door. She knocked furiously a couple of times, compounded by a frantic ringing of the doorbell, and finally let herself in by way of magical lockpicking. I really had to get my locks examined.
Mowlia rudely burst into me on the pot, and pulled me up off the toilet seat. I tried to dump one right there to get my point across, but my intestines had been stopped for days. She pulled up my pants for me (if I hadn't been strung out, a boner would have emerged) and zipped up the fly. Yelling obscenities at me about self-responsibility (she was straight-edge), she demanded to see my music and my keyboards. I gave a shrug, which sent her into another peal of fury. By that time I was already sitting on the chair again, and she was yanking me up again. She was a real shrill ass hole when I was mellowed.
Miraculous, with the power of her forward anti-charm, Mow managed to guilt me out the door, even managing to have me carry my music. (She strapped the keyboard on her back, along with the stand, knowing that it would be dropped—frequently—if I held it.) She found where the Moltenore keys were and shoved the keyboard into the passenger car, practically planting me on the back next to her while she fiddled with the controls. While I gave her a long, serious lecture about how the Moltenore was delicate and shouldn't be toyed with by amateurs, she flew us to the Wet Blanket, a place she often maneuvered the Moltenore to when I was too drugged to do it myself.
By the time we arrived, most of the band had already set up, and Kasey went off on a tirade on me. I wasn't listening to her too thoroughly, as I was slowly coming down from my high, and static was cottonballing in my ears. When I gestured for Kasey to hush, rubbing at my ears gingerly, she was only further enraged.
"Shut it, Kasey, you yelling at him isn't gonna get him any more sober," Paul said bluntly, testing the amp on her guitar. She hit a chord, closed her eyes to determine the pitch, and then grimaced. "Besides, you need to warm up." Though we all knew warming up her vocal chords would do no good to eliminate Kasey's banshee shrieks, it was often a clever tactic to distract her from obnoxiousness.
Yagsria, our bassist with a penchant for silence, helped me on stage while plucking her low strings for tuning. After she plugged my keyboard into an amp, me standing on the seemingly shifting stage, she came up from behind me, idly playing slap bass. She hit me with her tuning pegs lightly, and I turned around as if she had stabbed me. Using a nod as a gesture, she indicated her fingerboard, where the majority of her fingers were dancing serenades. One, however, remained stagnant, holding down what appeared to be a postage stamp. I knew better than a newbie, though.
I slipped the stamp from underneath her fingertip and put it on my tongue, slapping her on the back chummily. "You're my only friend, you know that?"
She smirked, calling my bluff, but walked away with a nod, playing her bass like breathing.
A show is just different on acid. Granted, there's the same energy, and the thrill from having people hear your music—and appreciate it by screaming along, sweating, to the lyrics. But acid turns up the intensity. It's as if there's an extra amp on the stage, and you're plugged in by your spine to it: it heightens your awareness, and the former dimensions of excitement hidden by sobriety have their curtains peeled away. Your artistic ancestors dance in shadows on the wall and encourage you by a shake of the fist. As your fingers test the stability of the keys on the keyboard, pressing them to the depths of hell, fire shoots from the speakers, and the crowd slamdances with Satan.
We were the opener (we were frequently placed in that position for our known energy), which allowed us to get to the core of our music quickly. Kasey's voice came out like distortion on Paul's guitar, and I followed soon after, trailing her with power chords. Paul and Yags came in together, lasers shooting from the pegs on their guitars, and Mow caught up with the beat, her skinny arms like strobe lights against the cymbals.
My parts often only occurred intermittently, unless we came upon the rare slow, meaningful song that required blues-type piano, but after an endless array of shows, most keyboardists learn to bide their time creatively. I sent the crowd into approving screams with handstands and cartwheels between bandmates, barely not knocking them over. My friend acid also aided my imagination, making my ass play the keys during crunchy chords and turned a round of programmed rhythms fashionable.
But it wasn't only the acid and the insane atmosphere that fueled me. Up on stage, I was no longer the outcast faerie, made to smoke in corners and watch socialization from afar. The people in the pit admired me—I was their god on keyboards, pounding out melodies for their debauchery. I showered them from above with my godly grace—and that glowing feeling of superiority overcame me, surging through my veins like a hot shot to the jugular. Among pierced and tattooed warriors, I was an immaculate idol, gilded in tight pants and glasses.
Towards the end of our set, we got our second wind. Previously, we had been slowing down, throwing in a number of piano-and-soulful-lyrics numbers. Kasey hastily grew tired of waxing her soul in minor keys rather than blasting it for an adrenaline rush, and seemed slightly irritated at my desire to add garnishes to normally droll notes. Finally, Kasey proceeded to "The Trumpet Song," one of our most popular yet poorly named (we were not a ska band in the slightest).
Streams of light seemed to pour more intensely down on us from the stage lights, sending waterfalls of illumination across the stage. Every so often, a rainbow would shed itself from Paul's guitar and twirl its way into Kasey's screaming mouth. I played in the higher register of the keyboard to pay tribute to the cherubs that hoisted our music in the air on red ribbons, bonding it eternally into the permanent smoke of the building that slept in the rafters.
And then, in the middle of the song, she appeared. I was pounding out chords, and the crowd was screaming for the final climax, desperate for orgasm. Kasey was milking the crowd for what they were worth, squeezing out all of the excitement into one final burst of sweat. I followed her tunes in a frenzy, always slipping half a step down to accommodate for her pitch problems. Yet all of this was wiped away as a crowd surfer was launched onto the stage, hitting me square in the chest.
The sweat, smoke, and booze on her body served for a unique, tangy smell, but I was not so blind as to fail to recognize the surfer as Hoshi. My bandmates continued their furious jam towards the end as all my attention centered to Hoshi, her features twisting in a Picasso fashion across her face. Though the majority of the crowd was still entranced by my pals gesticulating across the stage, a select few had turned their faces to the budding romance on stage.
"Hoshi!" I croaked, blinking a little. My left hand continued to play the obligatory notes, programmed into my fingers, but my heart had fallen out of it and into Hoshi. Her eyes were bleary with alcohol, but it only served to accent her intensity. She was breathless, and her clothes stuck to her in odd places from sweat, but a bright smile filled her face, flashing shocking white teeth against tan skin.
"Frank," she murmured, smiling drunkenly. Perhaps it was the alcohol in her and the acid in me connecting strangely, but something—maybe a cherub—whispered in my ear that all outbursts were forgiven, and from this conflict so cunningly resolved, something new had bloomed. My hands levitated from the keyboard, and as Kasey split into the final climax, I reached forwards with both hands for her face and kissed her.
A loud cheer went through the crowd—whether for my romantic success or the amazing job of my band mates was unclear. All I was sure of was Hoshi's steaming body against mine and her back falling onto the keyboards, throwing dissonance through the air. With our tongues united as birds spiraling airbound in mating season, the crunching chords were as elegant as algebra, and their piercing melody made sense.
Even when they coaxed us off stage we stayed adhered, social standards unable to restrain the passion that enveloped us. While a band succeeded us and my band mates retreated to the front to peddle merchandise, Hoshi and I remained in the back, continuing to speak the soft, sticky language made mouth-to-mouth.
"I love you," I told her in quiet tones as her lips brushed against my cheek, caressing my collarbone. My voice came with unnatural timidity with that statement, a set of words until then I had reserved for lonely rooms. She looked up from her passion, eyes wandering to mine as if in question of how I could form such a phrase. Finally, she kissed those lips from whence those toxic words came, as if in consolation.
"I really want to fuck you right now," she replied, between hungry bites at my neck.
The acid was beginning to wear thin, and I could feel the crawling flesh and jerking legs of a minor withdrawal from smack blooming inside of me. Much as I had dreamed of her speaking such words, they seemed so deplorable and repulsive at that moment, as if she had just spit bleach in my eyes. Yet another part of me ached for her body against mine in the ultimate act of unity, and a possibility to drown the pangs of withdrawal.
The head in my pants overruled the one screaming warning signs between my temples. With tech crew dashing past us like forgotten props strewn on a set, I unfolded myself for her for the first time. She let me come quietly inside of her, and she trembled minutes later when I made her come to a peak, clutching to me as if she might fall apart. She was absolutely silent in her orgasm, and the secret moans she projected in her fingertips made me want to keep her close in my chest pocket to cherish and cradle at dawn.
We walked out nonchalantly, as if we had not been changed; but as we strode to the Moltenore, there now remained a cord between us that had not been there before: an elastic cord that stretched like glue but connected us at the chest. I put my keyboard in the passenger seat and she nestled her cheek into the bend of my back, her lashes grazing my shirt as we flew.
When we arrived home, we parked the Moltenore and repeated our actions inside, this time tussling amongst the sheets. We relieved ourselves of the excess of shirts and when I buried my face between her breasts, I promised to never harm her. She laughed as if I were a child proclaiming something endearingly naïve, and tousled my hair.
"Frank, it's faerie nature to hurt one another. The hedgehog dilemma."
"The what?"
"The closer we get, the more our spines hurt each other."
But we were spineless in that bed—bodiless, too, submerged into one another. After we made each other's backs touch the ceiling, I sat at the edge of the bed for a smoke; Hoshi laid back on the pillows and took a drag of a clove cigarette, giving her a daintily husky scent.
"So should we be together, Frank?"
"Like as a couple?"
"Yeah. I mean, I've only known you for a week, but you're pretty cute. And I like a smart guy that can make me come." She ashed over the side of the bed.
"What about what Taelia said? Doesn't that make you nervous?"
"Taelia's been wrong before."
"And you don't mind that I'm an occasional junkie?" The words slipped out of my mouth. I couldn't control it—the turkey skin covering my arms prodded it out of me. Hoshi was silent for a moment, rolling her clove in her fingers. Sticking it in her mouth, she then leaned forward across the bed and placed her hands on my shoulders, rubbing them firmly. Placing her cigarette between the joints of her fingers, she whispered smoke into my ears.
"Don't tell me shit like that, Franky. But yeah. Even if you're a smack addict … let's be together."
"So you … love me?"
"Shhh … don't say such dirty words." She massaged my back with a series of kisses, her eyelashes cover over the trail of her lips. We were quiet in our intimacy until she spoke, directing the question to my left shoulder blade. "Did you ever kill a man, Frank?"
"Is this about Taelia?"
"Sort of."
"No. I've never killed anyone. I've gotten into plenty of fights, but the majority of them I've lost anyway."
"Do you … do you think you have the capacity to kill?"
"I have five fingers and a palm. Of course I have the capacity."
"No, not like that. I meant … do you have the mindset?"
"I've never come across that situation, so I couldn't tell you. Hopefully, I never will."
Hoshi looked at me introspectively, seeming to see more of a mirror than her face. She blew out a trail of smoke parallel to my cheekbone, grazing across it gently, and then kissed my earlobe delicately.
"I'm going to bed, Franky. Be along shortly?"
She didn't wait for my answer, reclining back, butting out her cigarette in the ashtray and twisting her body into a comfortable position. I nodded, half hypnotized, and smoked another before retreating to bed next to her, reaching of her body to put out my light in the ashtray. My body was quaking for another shot of heroin, and would likely send me into waves of insomnia, but I was determined to get some rest.
Instead of pulling my arm back to my side, I experimented with putting it over her body, hooking it around her waist. She made no motion to remove my arm, and we fell into our respective subconscious worlds linked in reality, shielding us from the nightmares of our brains.