Road Trippin'

    Not that it wasn't, you know, traumatic and all. That sheepgirl was right about my initial trip—it did indeed last for days, and it was far from mild. My brain was not inside my body, and even if it was, I cannot guarantee that I was inside my brain. I can't really recall any specifics about the whole experience, like what I was hallucinating or what happened to me physically during that time, but there was this one, strange feeling that I remember vividly, one that I've only ever experienced on that very first glit trip.

    It was the strangest sensation. It is like I was viewing the world from the future, as if everything is a memory. Like I was viewing this all from a television in my living room, like watching an old home movie that is playing all around me, sped up and thin, pleasant and sad, real but harmless.

    The sun comes up and goes down. The others in the house stand up and speed about like ghosts. The sheepgirl is constant through it all. At some point, I must have leaving the house. The girl disappears, then the tub, then the walls. I am floating across the grass, watching the stars turn on by. The moon looked like a laughing smile. I remember that much.  

    I'm in a car. Someone's yelling at me. Oh—there's the sheepgirl again. She's getting yelled at too. But she's like me, grinning, just enjoying this great TV show that's happening all around us.

    And then she's gone again, for good, that time. I never see her again. The car I'm in is gone too, along with the stars. The sun is back, and it's bright, and it's annoying. But, the longer I stare at it, the less it looks like the sun, and the more it looks like colors.

    Then there's people, and laughing, and poking. I don't like it, so I go away from it. Things were simple, I had thought. Go towards what you like; go away from what you don't like. Life is simple. Life was good.

    No more people, but I do eventually find a pack of feral Teddy Bears. I like them much more than the people. They live off the land. They don't try to be a part of Society. They are a gang. They do things together. They have eachother's backs. They share. They are cool, and I like them, so I go towards them. They sniff me. I sniff them. I accept them. They accept me.

    The sun goes away, the stars come back, and the silver smile in the sky is even happier to see me than it was before. I blow a kiss up to it, acknowledge its love.

    I run with the Teddies through the mud and the dead leaves and the gutters and the weeds. I play with their litter. (Our litter.) I sleep in their den. (Our den.) I lick the stuffing from their wounds. (Our wound stuffing.) I fight over their trash meat. (Our trash meat.)

    One of my sisters growls, and we are alert. Suns—one, two, five, too many!—shine upon us. The pack scatters. There's scuffles. I dash about. But all I can see under the light of the suns are shoes—black and shiny and tall—and a memory, a real memory, takes over—(No one ever escapes the Shack. They only go missing...)—and I am filled with terror.

    Spiders.

    My plush brothers and sisters are being sucked up by the suns, snatched by webbing. Spiders. I thought for sure, with no doubt, that space spiders from the sun were abducting us all. Man, I was toasted...

    And then I'm sucked up too and thrown into the web, which is dark and cold. I can hear my brothers and sisters whimpering, but I cannot see them or touch them. I can barely move. The deeper the fear sets in, the further I pull from the scene until once again I'm watching everything like a crazy memory that is. I don't even know how much I'm remembering correctly and how much of it has just been distorted with time. I'm sure the fact that I was loaded with drugs at the time probably doesn't help.

    Of course what had happened, as opposed to being kidnapped by alien sun spiders wearing boots, or even captured by Correctional Officers, was that I was snatched up by Thing Catchers. I must've been so dirty and gross and covered in stuffing and fluff that I probably looked like a deformed Toy. I can't blame them for the mistake. Heck, if it looks like a Thing, growls like a Thing, and smells like a Thing...it's probably a Thing. I was all of those things. I'm pretty sure I even hissed at one of them.

    My time at the pound is a blur. I only remember some things, like being separated from the other Teddies, and biting some poor aide who tried to give me flea medicine. I don't even know how long I was in there for. I'm pretty sure I slept through most of it. There was one point, though, when I woke up because I hear commotion outside. My eyelids barely opened up, just for a quick second, and just before my eyelids collapse shut again, I catch one last glimpse. All I can see, except for the shiny concrete floor and the bright lights and the iron bars and the dish of hairy water, is a pair of giant, ugly, yellow rubber shoes.

    And back off to La-La Land I go.

A CELEBRATION ROARS about me. Wherever I go, masses of euphoric fans orbit, showering me in affection and sparkling drinks. When I walk past men, they raise their glasses to me, and when I pass by women, they brush their bodies against mine and chew their bottom lips. Every song is dedicated to me, and every toast is made in my honor.

    Without hesitation, I accept any and all paraphernalia passed my way, grab any swell of feminine flesh that meets my liking, and let the torrents of adoration rush over me without resistance. 

    But this time my attention is divided.  A new actor stands on the stage, and I refuse to acknowledge it. The new thing is always in the crowd, sometimes in a corner, sometimes sitting on a bench with its wrists on its knees, sometimes outside a window breathing on the glass. As in any dream, I possess a limitless intuition, and through this intuition I understand the thing’s sole emotion: bottomless disappointment. 

    I try to party and dance away from it. I continue to deny its presence, and every time I see a figure out of the corner of my eye that isn’t moving with the crowd, just standing against it like a dead tree in a raging river, I pretend harder. 

    I soon discover there are no exits in the dream house, something I had neglected to notice because I had never tried to look. I push my way through the crowd and over to a couch, dragging myself onto it like a castaway crawling onto a piece of wreckage. I sit between two couples, each one too involved with their momentary partners to notice me. There is a bowl of candy on the table. I pick out a piece and notice that it isn’t a sweet, but a pill. I almost throw it back, but stop. The nightmare thing is behind me, and I can feel its shaming gaze melting into the back of my neck. 

    I swallow the pill dry. I lay down flat on my back, and the noises of the party swirl and fade. I close my eyes, and when I open them, I am looking at a Dancerlady who has mounted my lap. Her tassel-like nipples swing across my lashes. I smile and close those eyes again. The sounds from the party dissolve into the ether, as do the Dancer, the party, and the thing that judges.
    When I open my eyes, I am no longer looking at the dark side of an exaggerated bosom, but at a child’s mobile as it creeped in a circle above my head.

    I took my time returning to reality. Even though my eyes were open, the only action my waking brain could accomplish was to stare at the mobile above. It was adorned with seafaring icons like sailboats and buoys and albatross...except for one overweight addition that caused it to tilt to one side. A stuffed frog hovered on the end of a string—and I don't mean a toy, but an actual piece of taxidermy. Its glass eyes reflected my face, and for a moment I could not recognize the person in the bloated reflection.

    Cognizance struck. I bolted up and batted the decoration to the floor. Immediately I sweated, and I had to take deep breaths to push my diaphragm back where it belonged.

    Morning sunlight seeped in through pink curtains, drenching the room in a rosy glow. Nets draped the ceiling, buoys hung from curtain rods and drawer handles, and at least two-dozen model ships were scattered neatly about.

    “...the muck?”

    I tossed the dinosaur blankets aside and slipped off the edge of the bed. Instead of carpet, my toes sunk into a pile of cold sand. I barely had a chance to revel in this new insanity before a larger one took its place. 

    "What the muck?" 

    I was dressed in an outdated schoolboy’s outfit, complete with a linen nightshirt, a ruffled cravat, and buckled slippers. A drop of sweat rolled down my face and landed on the back of my hand. The perspiration was cloudy, and when I touched it with my fingertip, it dyed my skin gray. My arms prickled into goosebumps. I sprang off the bed and ran to a dresser, yanking off the cravat and tearing open my shirt along the way. A mirror hung above the dresser, framed inside the wheel of a ship's helm.

    "Oh, God, what the muck?!"

    Through the mirror, a zombie gazed back at me, with white skin and purple hollows under the cheeks. In shock, I pressed my palms against my temples and dug my fingers into thick hair that had been powdered and curled.

    I remembered the ghost story I had told the guys back at Crumshack, the one about Jacob Panini turning into a slugboy. I remembered the inference I forced on them, the one about falling asleep with makeup on and waking up with a different face—kids into Kellies, overnight. I remembered how cocky I had felt when I saw the fear in their faces, how proud I was of my own bravado towards the idea. 

    But there I was, alone in an alien room, mortified by my own face, having a waking nightmare about turning into something I wasn't.

    I clawed at my cheeks, and even though the color came off as I did, I was unconvinced I hadn't somehow transmogrified. There was a duck-shaped humidifier in the corner billowing steam out of its beak. I dashed over to it, unscrewed the head, and poured the water reserve over myself—a decision I soon regretted, because whatever lunatic had engineered the room, whoever had gone so far as to vacuum wave shapes into the carpet, had filled the humidifier with salt water.

    Following a period of gagging and wiping out my eyes, I calmed down enough to realize that I hadn't changed. The water had removed the makeup, and my hair, which I could now tell was not mine at all, slid from my wet scalp and plopped against the floor like kelp. I looked into the mirror again, and I barely recognized the face looking back. The sunken eyes, the scratches and bruises, the fuzzy head from a thirteen-day-old buzz cut. I looked like one of those kids in history books who are wandering around the rubble of a warzone searching for their parents; I was even dressed like one.

    I gave my heart another minute to slow down, then I considered my situation. I walked over to the curtains and slung them open. The sunlight hammered through my eyes and drilled into the back of my skull; that morning's adrenaline rush had distracted me from how utterly hungover I was. With one hand I shielded my eyes, and with the other I fumbled the latch on the window. It swung open, and even though I couldn't see yet, I could tell by the muffled sounds and firm breeze that I was in a very high place. I stuck my head out the window, and the wind whipped about me. 

     From the looks of things, I knew I was in a city somewhere. Judging by the size, it had to be Townville, and according to the run-down buildings around me and the sight of the sun just beginning to rise on the further end of the skyline, I was in Westie, a slum on the edge of downtown. I knew of Westie's reputation. Everyone did. It was the butt of a lot of jokes, and it was the setting of many a news story. I had once read about a Westie Butcher who was performing amateur surgeries on anyone desperate enough to knock on his door. Most of his operations were technical successes, but for those he botched, he would harvest the organs, sell them on the blackmarket to Vampires and Cannibals, and then use the rest to make a gumbo that was popular with the locals.

    To my disappointment (but not my surprise), escaping through the window was out of the question. I was at least twenty stories high, and there was an absence of ledges or poles. Out of habit, I whistled for Toby, but he didn't show up, of course. I took one last look before tucking my head back inside and closing the window. 

    The sunlight made the room seem less like a nightmare and more like a stupid gag. Until then, I hadn't even noticed that the bed was shaped like a racecar, despite the obvious clash with the room's nautical theme. With a sigh, I sat on the edge of the mattress.

    A lump pressed against my butt bone. I reached under and pulled out a throw pillow. Hand stitched on the front, alongside drawings of lambs and flowers and schoolhouses, was the message, "Friends don't let friends get TYPE 1 DIABETES".  Too exhausted of oddities to wonder about the pillow and its origins, I used the thing to mop the sweat off my brow and then discarded it over my shoulder. 

    I sat still and listened. Somewhere above me a shower ran, and somewhere below a baby cried, but this level was quiet. I went over to the door and pressed my ear against it. I heard nothing other than the ticking of a clock. After some internal debate, I took a breath and turned the knob. To my utter disbelief, the door opened, and its creaks echoed into an empty hallway.

    There were five other doors in the cramped hall, and all of them were shut. The walls were covered in polka-dotted wallpaper, and picture frames crowded almost every open inch above chest level, each frame still displaying the family photograph sold with it. I stepped out and closed the bedroom door behind me, abandoning the sunlight.

    Starting with the door to my left, I began to inspect this new place as stealthily as possible. This next room turned out to be another bedroom and, thankfully, it was deserted. It was decorated more maturely than the room I woke up in, but it was also twice as preposterous. There were items of adult comfort, like a rocking chair and a four-poster bed, but there were also things that represented no age or attitude other than insanity, like the lineup of porcelain figurines of men on horses, each with their backs turned to the room, or the collection of wineglasses on the nightstand that were filled with varying volumes of mouthwash. There was one hopeless window like the one I had opened earlier, and two additional doors. One door opened to a closet with a dressing table and a lighted mirror, and the other opened up to a wardrobe almost as large as the bedroom itself. Inside this second sub-room, there were a few items of particular mystery: rows and rows of colorful dress shirts and slacks (perfectly organized by color), one out-of-place Astronaut's outfit, and two cardboard boxes filled to the brim with blue notebooks. Every page of every notebook was crowded with nonsense. Like this one:

[Image: (NEED: a requirement for existence/ WANT: a requirement for the desire to exist / TO BE ALIVE IS TO HAVE NEEDS/ TO LIVE IS TO WANT / LIFE IS ABSURDITY /ABSURDITY IS WANTING )
  
    I left that room and checked the next. It was a bathroom. With only a curtainless shower, a toilet, and a sink, it was oddly dull in comparison to the bedrooms. It had no mirrors and no light. There was one fogged, glass-block window, but it was too small and too high to consider as an escape.

    The next door in the hallway was a closet for coats, and the door after that was another closet stacked to the ceiling with unwrapped board games. I came to the last door, and when it opened to a dark living room and not an exit, panic crept its way back in, sliding coldly under my skin. I checked behind each door in the hallway again, and as each one repeatedly proved not to be an exit, my anxiety and my recklessness increased. When I reached the original bedroom door for the third time, I grew delirious with claustrophobia. I started to theorize I was still in Crumshack, locked in some kind of deranged solitary confinement, or even that I had overdosed in that creepy house and died, and was now repaying my debts for always running away from my problems. But now I couldn't run away, could I? No matter how hard I tried. Again and again, I stumbled through every room desperately searching for an escape by breaking windows, knocking over furniture, tearing off wallpaper, and ripping up carpeting.

    By the time I discovered the skinny door in the living room, which I had earlier missed because of a large grandfather clock obscuring my view of it, I was once again convinced I was trapped in a nightmare. Before even trying the knob, I rammed the door with my shoulder, considering too late that it could have opened into nothing, just an emptiness twenty stories above a city sidewalk.

    My step landed firmly, however—and yet I was still greeted by the morning's sunny brilliance and exhilarated by fresh, open air. I had found the kitchen, which was so small one could navigate the entirety of it by standing in the center and twisting one's hips. On the opposite corner was a screen door, propped open by a bucket of cooking utensils. The sounds of birds and barking dogs floated in through the doorway, as they also did through an open window above the sink. The smells of breakfast sizzled up my nose. 

    Barging into the exposed room had the same effect on me as crawling out of a freezing pond and jumping into a hot tub. My panic rushed out the open door, but I was not yet relieved or disillusioned, only empty and absent. My attention latched onto the sounds in the room, making me first look up at the record-sized ceiling fan wobbling above me, and then bringing my gaze back down to bacon crackling on a stovetop near the exit.

    Tending to the meal was a slender, well-dressed Clown in an apron. His sleeves were rolled up and his red clownfro was packed into a hair net. 

    The Clown glanced over his shoulder, made eye contact, and said, “Good morning, Alexander!” With a turn and a smile, the figure gestured with both mitten-covered hands to a platter on a table, a surface not much larger than a nightstand. "I made your cackleberries just the way you like them." The Clown’s hands remained in their presenting pose, and he looked at me from underneath a raised brow, waiting for a response without further motion or talk.

    I stepped back into the living room and closed the door. 

    In the middle of the dark room was an oversized armchair, and I plopped myself into it, cringing when I slid against the rubber upholstery. Like the other rooms, this one was tidy and decorated with furniture of cheap elegance. Also like the other rooms, the colors were curious in that when the lights were off, as they were at that time, the muted palette seemed surreal and mesmerizing, but once the lights flicked on, the colors collided with one another so harshly they aggravated my headache to the point of nausea.

    Behind me, the grandfather clock chimed seven times. I sunk deeper into the chair and thought about my morning. Was I crazy? Unlikely. Everything else, maybe, but not me. Was I still dreaming? Possibly. There were certainly parallels between this experience and recent ones, like the feelings of being trapped and needing to escape. Feelings of loneliness. Feelings of unavoidable change and uncertainty about my own identity. And there was also the Clown. Hadn’t I recently seen a Clown? Yeah! I had, about a week or two ago in—

    Suddenly, I knew that, without a doubt, dream or no dream, the Clown in the apron was the same Clown from Crumshack. The Clown who had awakened such disgust inside me. The pretentious, hornhonking, thumbsucker who teased all the inmates with false freedom. The one who brought the mighty Enuff to tears with a simple turn of his back.

    And this Clown was the only thing standing between me and the exit, like a boss in a video game or a dragon in a dungeon. Dream or no dream. Dream or no dream...

    I removed myself from the chair and reopened the kitchen door. The Clown was cooking over the stove again, as if closing the door had reset some program, like a figurine in a ku-ku clock. Once more, the Clown looked over his shoulder, made eye contact, and said, “Good morning, Alexander!” turning and smiling. “I made—,”

    “What's your name?”

    The Clown flinched and grew confused. "Oh...well," he said. "Codsfellow...Mr. Arthur Codsfellow. I suppose it—"

    "Who are you?"

    “Um,” he said, circling the thumbs of his oven mitts against the fingers. His posture straightened, and his eyes searched the room for an answer to the question. “Well,” he said. “Yes, I am.”

    “You are...what?”

    “Your. Father. Yes. Quite. I am your father.”

    “No you’re not.”

    “Oh,” the Clown said. His face was so twisted with confusion and worry that it could have been mistaken for pain. His eyes once again darted around the room scavenging for a way to continue. He pulled out a stool from under the table. “I made you cackleberries, Alexander. Just the way you—,”

    “My name is not ‘Alexander’, and I have never in my life had a ‘caggleberry’.”

    “That's right. Yes,” the Clown said, touching the tips of the mittens together. “Yes, well...” 

    Without knowing how to proceed, the Clown retreated back to his cooking.

    I looked at the screen door, which was just two feet to the Clown’s left. Through the screen, I could see that the apartment was placed at the end of a concrete hallway whose rightward wall was lined with entrances to other apartments and whose leftward wall was exposed to the elements. If the Clown could somehow, by some miracle, be distracted for only a second or two, I could probably make it past him and out the door before—

    A bell chimed in the living room.  “Oh! The kidney pie is done! I had almost forgotten.” The Clown jogged past me ("Pardon.") and into the living room. My brain, which had been frantically constructing a plan of escape involving  pots to reflect the sun's glare and strategically throwing my voice behind a small potted fern under a cabinet, halted so fast and so clumsily that I stood there, uncertain of what to do with the opportunity other than to wander towards the oven, open it, and confirm that it was indeed an empty and functional oven. Careful, Elroy. This is too good to be true, I reminded myself. It was dangerous to believe otherwise.

    There was a crash from somewhere else in the apartment. “Hello?” the Clown yelled from the other room. “Alexander? Could you fetch the shoe horn? I’ve gotten stuck again. You know me! Clumsy as ever.”

    I ran. The door opened fine, and when I looked over my shoulder, all I saw was an empty kitchen and a funny story to tell. When my head returned forward, my eyes came into contact with the shimmer of chrome. 

    Just two days prior, I had my first experience with man-made unconsciousness. It had taken effect over the course of hours, and only after a long two days of tormenting my nervous system with various depressants and stimulants. But right then, an amount of pain and shock equal to that entire week of abuse struck me in less than a millisecond, and my brain was rushed away to its second encounter with the Big K.O.

    And thus concluded my first official introduction to Arthur Codsfellow, the man I would come to hate more than any other person in my entire lifetime.