Frightful. That could be the only word to describe everything about everything. It wasn’t just that the walls were breathing, or the floor was moving, but the simple fact that the chemicals in his brain convinced him of how real it was. He didn’t want to believe what he was seeing yet the unconvincing realist side of the tortured rotting piece of meat inside his head was on a downward slope while losing an uphill battle. The hit of acid that he had popped… wait, he didn’t do drugs; apparently, they weren’t a part of, or necessary in, his life. Yet the only thing that could explain the psychedelic mind-fuck in front of him would have been a grand hallucinogen of 60’s proportion.
He peered left. The couch was speaking to him in tongues, none of which he understood or even pretended to. To his right the wall, just moments before heaving air into their lungs and blowing it straight back at him with the force of hurricanes, was now speaking back to the couch, yet it seemed not in the same language. The argument between the plaster and the leather, obvious to him somehow, was about to explode in a fit of fury as if to prove which of the two was actually in control of his current altered state. Stuck in the middle there was little to do, helpless, and so he endured for as long as his will might let him. Hoping only to survive, with reverence of the intensity of such formidable foes and at the same time, condemnation for his inability to confront either, his head tucked between his legs as a dogs tail might. A glance between his legs towards the kitchen told him that the refrigerator’s temper would not hold beneath its puke-green skin for much longer. He closed his eyes hoping it would all go away, as so many things did in his life as long as he ignored them, yet the battle continued on, no matter how hard his lids squeezed together. And as he squeezed, they bled. And they bled. Then they bled some more. Was it possible for eyes to bleed from squeezing them together? He wasn’t so sure. Yet bleed on they did. And as the blood began to pour out of him, nay, roar out of him as a river might in early spring after break-up, the noise too became a thunderous god that threatened to explode his eardrums. And, of course, it did. Left helpless writhing on the floor, as might a child, he let out a screak loud enough to drown the offending noise, which had grown into a constant reverberation a hundred decibels above anything the human ear might handle. Yet he bellowed still louder so that the wall and couch stopped in mid-sentence and the refrigerator, obvious from the lower hum emitting from the kitchen, had cooled down and lost its temper. And with that, he lay on the floor, the blood running from his eyes and the liquidity of his brain seeping from his ears onto the ground beside him, and the entire world was black.
2
“Is he going to be alright?” Carl looked in through the window to the tiny hospital room holding the prisoner.
Dr. Yansic peered in over Carl’s shoulder to peer through the plastic window at the slumped body on the floor. “Oh, I don’t know. He’s been like this since he was admitted three days ago. Apparently he just wandered in from the street preaching the word of God and condemning the sinners to hell.”
