Space Madness
Our Stray and Sordid Son
Born into an outlaw backland of dirt roads, distant factory lights that bled up through the thinning, thinning trees. An unclean, unseen, dirty past, and lanky-muscled beneath the vintage black t-shirt that reads "space madness" in white wavy letters.
Another punk runaway of the illegal club circuit, not a dancer but a drifter at the edges of the crowd, a pocket half-full and his mint eyes sharp.
He discovers his sensitivity when he sees by a rusted-out brown van the tremblings of a vossdrome. And he cannot help what he does to it – because when he puts his hand on the noodle-armed creature it goes so still. It doesn't seem to mind at all, and he pulls the switchblade from his pocket.
He's read his handbooks and his primers; he already knows a lot about the strangers, and learned his chemical extraction techniques from Ellie Prauzner. It just takes some trial and error.
And so the small ones are the first he catches, and like toys he yanks them, breaks them up. Puts wires in them, pulls out their guts and stuffs in soggy garbage, sews them up. Bolts them down and spreads them open.
It doesn't take long for him to move onto larger strains, and with it too does his conduct grow more perverse, sadistic. Knives by the dozen and full vivisections, hands a-grip on nearly human flesh and fingers knuckle-deep in juiced-out tear-marks.
From cotton-candy candyglass to ice blue "new cocaine", then LZD and LYZ and every compound in between, this sharp-toothed kid who'd grown up hungry never spends a sober day again once he learns how useful it can be to be a dissembler – after he figures out a few tricks; how hollowed-out fridges and wired-up microwave ovens can be filled with all the insides needed to create household "refining boxes", for example. From there, crushed-up over-the-counter pills, purified bleach crystals, and a few other household cleaners and solvents can be used to refine into all the drugs he sells – first, to pay rent, then to party, then to upgrade his jank-boxes to fully internally-mounted bins - with only more extravagant endeavors from there.
By the time Bracey makes Default his live-in plaything, he makes enough to pay for a coveted high-ceiling'd apartment two blocks down from the warehouse district. He no longer distills his drugs in the apartment, but instead rents a secluded garage space on the opposite side of the club-beat zone. No neighbors across the street, and at night the other animals, and a long but not incovenient stretch to his customers in the clubs, and their 800$ trappe pants and vinyl-ribbed jackets.
It's 3:33AM; in the vats bubble another successful batch, and Bracey puts on his jacket for a night walk back to his hopefully still-dazed boyfriend.
By the time the dissembler comes back, the blood, the burnt-up meat, scraped and sterilized veins will have been boiled down into the distilled chemical ingredients used in the batches of drugs he makes by the bottle and sheet. He knows how to make the tricky ones now - Material D, red mess... and the cold blue psycholy.
Yeah... it's this psycholy he really loves, how it melts like tin onto his tongue. And yeah, it makes him twitch. And, he uses it. A lot. Somehow, he doesn't want to see people as much. Doesn't socialize - except with Default. To all the rest, he's just a dealer now - with an awkward smile whose edges drift down towards the floor.
He out-of-breath staggers home, and enters the apartment to Default who sits cross-legged on the shaggy carpet floor, hands on a controller, and eyes fixed on some voidspace expressionist movie, or Xenoquest, or Sonic & Eggman on the screen. And the dazed toy smiles when he turns to face Bracey, and opens his mouth, his tongue out.
And it's natural that he and Default want to have some fun. All that psycholy... going at it, the tinfoil-glitter blue substance on their tongues that they push against each others' lips all night. Gaze rolling on the pinned-up posters and the glow from neon lights below, in that narrow space.
return to goodbye strangers