PrevieW

Editorial ThinkPiece Published to PsyNet; 5/19/2039

-MindStreamed By Vivian Reyes; CEO and Editor of Retro

For years rumors swirled about some inkling of fling I had with the late self-proclaimed auteur and ‘hermit’, Ashton Lučić. Usually with damming images of a late night at the club, painting the two of us as lovestruck cocaine aficionados in a fateful encounter over a long red sofa, me lying back on his legs devoid of judgment, my hand stroking his beard and his crawling down my stomach, which I reiterate are about as real as celebrity sightings in Studio 54’s final year before the IRS closed it down. More absurd are the hyenas that speculate this situationship as the catalyst of his untimely end. I am writing this piece to set the record straight. I will finally admit to you all, yes I was together with Ashton. I need to emphasize, though, that this was NOT the nature of our relationship.

I will let you listeners in on a secret. Ashton and I had no fling because we were married. We were both as lovestruck and now defunct as Bonnie and Clyde. We were a skeleton in my closet I had hoped everyone would find far less sensational. Why reveal this now after years staying stoic in the face of gossip?  Last week, a little bird told me that a journalist at A.I.U. was putting together an undeniable expose, the career ending kind that makes executives quake in their boots, I’m sure, and so I am reaching out now so that nothing is misconstrued. I will tell you everything that happened in the years before our divorce. While nothing like the rubbish (fit to be printed off the PsyNet and used as toilet paper if you ask me, listeners) you’ll find at A.I.U. today, it certainly will make for an interesting story. I knew A.I.U. better than the wrinkles on my stomach, so while they struggle for a piece of the personality-pie, I have decided to let you all in on what that place is really about.

I had lived with Ashton for some time, at first when I was in New York City and he was at NYU. Back then, we were wreathed in passion for life, inflamed like a bursting boil. The downfall came a bit later, after Las Vegas, when we settled into Los Angeles and I started working at A.I.U. while Ashton lost his shit because some scene he wrote in film consulting showed up in that summer’s auteur flick uncredited.

My place was behind the screen, his behind the camera. We ingested this as truth, and so I sought ways to be both his promoter and his muse. It was the social media landscape of the day—shortform videos meant to be pill-popped by kids with dopamine circuits as decrepit as opioid junkies—that brought me to A.I.U. for the first time. Their building in downtown LA was a towering tessellation of glass windows, arranged in a style of antiquity to have a black pyramid sitting at the top, reminding passerby of something Buddhist or perhaps Mesoamerican. 

There were plenty of influencer-cultivating think-tanks by then, infused by the gargantuan cash flows of politicians and Pepsico to wrangle the attention economy. Some were scams. Most were duds. A.I.U. was a leviathan. They cut their teeth back in 2005 when they produced Jaudy Crimson’s infamous ‘The Current Crimsons’ and turned her into an overnight goliath of media, herself puppeteered by their-then mastery of human minds. When I stepped into the maw of their front door, my guard was tossed in the trash by a sauna-like heat. What appeared to be windows on the outside were closer to mirrors within, magnifying all light and turning the whole thing into an oven, as entrees traded a mild L.A. winter for a sweat lodge. 

Back then, you might have mistaken the woman in the many mirrors that made A.I.Us walls as more a vagabond than a maven. I used to wear an old flannel together with jeans ripped from actual use, with unkempt brown curls spilling over my shoulders, uncut for years. I was caught in a funhouse of my own mediocrity, every angle urging that I replace my old hoop earrings, that I get a new nose, that I put more effort into morning makeup, and that I stop eating. The heat was the larger insult. It came from a colossal fixture in the center of the room, this bronze-sculpted monstrosity pocked with holes and bearing spikes resembling a sun with a blazing lamp at its core, hanging on a three-hundred foot long chain through the spiral staircase tracing the walls.

Treading over a red carpet in a white-tiled lobby, I passed by several marble statues of cherubs on my way to the reception desk. Naked and laughing with a snide veneer, they seemed more like imps, amused someone as low as myself would come here. But back then, Ashton and I had a plan for everything, and knew how to turn a clay brick into a gold bar. There was already sweat on my forehead when I made it to the front desk, some kind of quartz formation erupting from the floor like an inverted cave. Sitting in its center was a woman with oversized, golden octagon glasses to match yellow eyeshadow and lipstick. She had these immense braids, each one carefully twisting to the floor and wrapping her like a cape. 

“I have an appointment at 11,” I let her know.

Her eyes snapped to me from her computer monitor like a magnet. “Lučić, right?”

“He’s my husband. It’s Reyes.”

Hiding behind her fashion glasses, her eyes moved to my head, then down to my toes. “Alright, you can wait in the lobby. Second floor.”

“Have the ones up there heard of air conditioning?”

She rolled her eyes back to her computer and planted them there. “The kinds of folks they send us nowadays.”

There was a glass staircase crawling along the wall between every floor that I took to the second. Staring up, the floors themselves were glass, teasing the waiting with a sliver of greatness in the higher realms. Everything here was transparent or reflective, which I’d later learn to mean that we must look through others but see ourselves through their eyes. Having made my way beyond the daunting entrance, my next challenge was to wait an hour amidst a lobby of potted palm trees and ferns, sitting on a suede sofa and turning into a blubbering mess of dripping eyeling, sweat, and drool. 

It was in that state that I first met Mr. Lucia, himself a deliberate contrast. He was one of those homosexual men who made cleanliness an artform, to the point that the models at L'oreal and Dove would stare at him as he went by on the street. He wore a tan suit so perfectly tailored to his sloping shoulders and toned buttocks that if ever showed up here naked, it would take everyone a second to catch on. Each fingernail had the same, symmetrical shape, with smooth, unblemished skin and narrow glasses that gave his face an cunning edge. 

He came my way with rhythmic steps, pursued at his coattails by a woman carrying a clipboard. When he found me, he planted both his fists on his hips and remarked, “I hope to heavens we didn’t keep you waiting long,” although he clearly knew exactly how long I’d been out here and was quite amused by what they’d done to me. Not a drop of sweat marked his forehead, which I later learned was something he could control.

When we find ourselves under the thumb of others, we imagine our masters must be cunning leaders like Victoria and her razor-sharp wit, or otherwise loud despots rabbling up our bratty nation. What people always neglect are the physical aspects of influence, like the fatigue of keeping a smile just right on your lips or the strain on the larynx that carries a cadence to fool someone you’re acting in their interest. This aspect was the brokerage of Mr. Lucia and his feinds at A.I.U., his ungodly cleanliness a walking advertisement for the power they exerted over their own bodies. 

I answered a series of personal questions about my history and what brought me here, with Mr. Lucia pursing his lips more. The list went on, and soon I found by my answers I had constructed a more complete character than my real-life self, with his tech growing impatient and checking her phone between each question. Mr. Lucia got started on employment history, which I explained away by proudly announcing, “I’ve run my own start-up agency since I graduated. I already have two full-time clients.” The second part wasn’t a lie, although it referred to Ashton and his old fratmate from NYU. We were so desperate back then that we’d pull any scheme, we’d sell our own blood for cash, but always with the next ploy cocked in the rear pockets of our torn-up Saint Laurent jeans. 

“Mr. Lucia, remember that you have training with Jaudy in a half-hour,” the tech cut in. 

“Then we’ll have to move on, won’t we? Please follow,” he said, beckoning me with curled fingers like a dog. I walked just behind him along a path that spanned over the first floor, with a middle-strip of green carpeting splitting glass flooring. “Your man ponied up a lot to bring you here, didn’t he?” said Lucia. 

“Why should you care? He’s not your client.”

“I’ll stop caring about our fee if you play your cards right. But by then, one footstep from your house would mean being swarmed like a carcass in piranha waters. If that’s what you want, you’re in the right place.” He turned to look me in the eye and pulled his glasses down. “And on that day, you’ll wish for the mediocrity when people could talk about your husband like you weren’t there at all.”

After that warning, we took a hallway from the second floor and ended up in a cramped room. The floor was made of rugged limestone, but swept clean. They had me remove my sneakers and socks and leave them by the door. On one end was a desk for the test-giver, made of sturdy brown oak and sitting atop a fuzzy, crimson rug. Mr. Lucia took his seat there in a felt, high-backed chair, a mug of coffee already between his slender fingers. Behind him burned a fire, adding more heat to a room that already felt like an oven and darkening my view of Mr. Lucia’s facial features. 

My end of the room had no decor. Only a single, metal folding chair atop the bare sandstone. His assistant dragged the seat close to the desk and had me sit, so that Mr. Lucia and I both leaned towards each other like we were about to have a fierce game of bridge. The tech took her place in the corner of the room, her gaze clinical behind small-framed glasses.

Fingers clasped together, Mr. Lucia got right to the interview. “I do apologize for that lengthy QA about your life, but I needed to gauge how good of a liar you were. You have a vocal tic. Every time you lie, you end your sentence in a lower tone. You also contract your pupils. That one is frankly embarrassing because even my assistant picked it out.”

I was there for a consultation and now I was being examined. “A test?” I said. “How did you know I was going to lie at all?”

“That part was obvious. Mrs. Reyes, do you know what my job is here?” he said, then gave brief pause. “You don’t. I can’t blame you though, when we don’t exactly advertise. You might think your boy is a catch, that he could whisper in our ear, but you’re hanging by a thread. I’ll give you one more chance to be a client, if you can pass a simple test.”

I shifted away from the desk, back into my seat. “Depends on the test.”

“Of course. Allow me to start with a broad question. What do you know about influencing people?”

“Market to youth. Hop on trends early and buck them early. Be hot. Not much else to it.”

Mr. Lucia let out a hyena-like cackle, giving me a good look at his rather large uvula dangling in the back of his throat. He sputtered out like a dying car before taking a sip of coffee and asking, “That’s all you have to say, what, with your 10k followers on Tik-Tok? Heavens, girl. Did you even take a second to consider this place’s name?”

“Aesthetic Influencers United? To give us the right stuff and cultivate us en masse, in return for a slice of the pie.”

“Aesthetic,” he said, spitting out the word like a bitter medicine. “They always see Aesthetic. The word’s Ascetic. Ascetic Influencers United.”

“What, like for salad dressing?”

“No. For reverence towards pain. By coming here, you’re bargaining for a lonely life full of empty-spectacle. You must love your pain to want that life. You must use your pain. It heightens the mind. It lets you see others like no one else.”

“Is that why you keep this place a sauna?”

“Now you’re catching on. But it goes a lot deeper. Think about the absolute, most influential people in history. Jesus Christ. Alexander the Great. Buddha. What did they have that Walter Cronkite didn’t?”

“A real message, for one thing.”

“A message, and pain. At A.I.U., we thread the psyche with suffering. We stitch religious fervor to entertainment. Because like I’ve demonstrated, we know our audience a mile-ahead. Now, before we waste anymore time on each other, I need to evaluate your potential, if you wouldn’t mind.”

It was clear that he wanted to hurt me next. Back then, I would have desecrated myself in a number of worse ways to get what I thought I wanted in life—a place behind the screen. Despite this, I found myself with my arms crossed, defensive. “Okay, fine.”

Mr. Lucia reached over the table and grabbed my hand, unfurling my defenses as his fingers dragged mine atop the table, leading them like a devil to a witch. He laid my left arm over the table, then pulled back my checkered flannel-sleeve. From under the table, he pulled forth some kind of device. It was a small box full of dials and knobs, and a few screens displaying a sine wave trailing from one end of the device to another. From the back, he pulled out two cords with needle-probes at both ends, which he rubbed down with ethanol wipes. 

“Any chance you’ve heard of the Milgram experiment?”

I shook my head, my eyes locked onto the dangling needles and their viciously sharp points.

“It’s quite a famous one. A Yale psychologist ordered participants to shock a stranger, demonstrating that people are submissive at heart. Only, the shocks weren’t real. This is going to be a similar idea, but without the last part. And you’re the stranger”

While I struggled to parse what that would mean for me, Mr. Lucia took both needle ends and shoved them into the skin of my left underarm, one at a time, but with such speed and precision that I hadn't realized there were electric probes inside me until we were moving onto the next step.

The entrance didn’t hurt, but they sat inside uncomfortably, glistening translucently under my skin with potential for something far worse. Mr. Lucia hit a few switches on the box and it spurred to life with a high-pitched whine. The sine waves began to move as he tuned a few dials with his hand over his chin.

“Is this really necessary?” I said, never consenting to go this far.

As I tried to relax my arm, as if it would somehow make the needles less intrusive, Lucia’s assistant cleared her throat and reminded, “Mr. Lucia, Jaudy Crimson is here. She wants to see you.”

Lucia looked at her, growing agitated. “Tell her she can wait for the agreed on time.” Then returning to me, he said. “I sense a crumb of potential in you. Not something delicious, but the scatterings of carrot cake on a near-empty plate for the dog to lick. If a test wasn’t in your cards, you would have never made it up here.” The Assistant set down her tablet beside Mr. Lucia, leaning on a stand so I could see the screen. On it was the face of a child, a small crying boy. His toothless mouth was stretched into a wail, his eyes shut tight beneath tousled brown hair.

“What is this child feeling?” asked Mr. Lucia.

“He’s clearly upset about something.”

Mr. Lucia pushed a button on his machine and a current followed. Electrons fleeing the battery arced into my skin, using it as a conduction point to hop between needles. Along the way, they burned a red trail. It didn’t hurt at first, but only felt funny like sitting on one’s foot until it fell asleep. My hand tensed up. Then the pain kicked in. It felt a bit like a strong man set his knuckles onto my arm, pressed them deep, and rubbed them back and forth as fast as they could go.

I grimaced and instinctively went for the probes, but the Assistant’s hand caught me and pulled them away. 

“Did you taste anything?” said Mr. Lucia.

“Huh?” 

“We’ll try again.”

Once more, he pushed a button, sending a wave of heat and vibrations curling through my arm along the most jagged, spiny path between skin cells. Already, my fingers were beginning to twitch. 

“Did. You. Taste. Anything?” he said.

I sifted through my memories, looking for any feeling beside the pain. I found nothing, but needed this to stop. “Salty?” I ventured, a wild guess.

Lucia looked at me, then back to the tablet. “You contracted your pupils. I thought we spoke about this?” He sighed. “This child is not upset. He is putting on a face to get something, likely from his parents. You’ve never seen one crying in a toy store? Children learn early on that their emotions are a weapon. Shame some adults forget so fast.”

He swiped the tablet to the next slide, playing a short video of an older man talking to his fossil of a mother about her having to move into a retirement home. At face value, the man seemed somber and serious and the woman rather nonplussed, but had caught on that there was something else to infer. 

“What would you say that old lady is feeling?” said Mr. Lucia.

“What am I supposed to taste?”

“Gustatory sensations are a basic extraempathy channel. Not the most informative, but the keen may learn to associate tastes with an emotion.” 

“Extra-empathy? How do you figure that’s a thing?”

“Mrs. Reyes, I need your answer.”

“So I can be wrong and you can shock me again? There’s a million things that she could be feeling. I’d say bummed out—”

Mr. Lucia twisted a knob and went for the shock button.

“—That’s not my answer! I would say bummed out if I were her, but I’m not, so I’d sooner say she’s happy to finally get out of her son’s hair.”

The electrical current that followed made the previous ones feel like touching a sweater. I swear it didn’t pass through my arm, but instead took the long way up my body, to my head where it spun my eyeballs into their sockets, then back out. The whole time, I tensed up, frozen and appalled. Then for a moment, I tasted something. It was bitter and metallic. Deep in the fog was a vision of my father, sticking a wrench between his teeth as his blackened hands reached deep into the engine of a car. I sat on the dusty floor of the garage, imitating him. I grabbed a screwdriver, the first thing metal, and stuck it in between my teeth as well. What was that? Is that extraempathy?

“Did you taste anything?”

“Nickels,” I said.

“Not such a pleasant taste though?”

I enjoyed it, for the memory of a simpler time. Objectively, though? “Not so much.”

“This woman is experiencing a semi-complex emotion. What Freud called Thanatos Drive, although you might call wanting self-destruction. You won’t feel that nuanced gustation, but you did realize it’s not pleasant.”

“Does that mean I passed?”

Mr. Lucia’s next laugh stayed in his mouth and came out his nose in a large snarl. “No. And once again, you contracted your pupils about the taste.”

“I was telling the truth!” I said. I went to pull out the diodes, but once more, the Assistant’s hand snapped onto my own and held me back.

“We have a few more,” he said, then swiped to the next slide. It was a couple having an argument. The man was much larger and more imposing than the woman, although that didn’t stop her from hitting him several times. He took it without much complaint, but wore a face like he was moments from breaking. Are these kinds of videos really necessary?

“You seem concerned about that guy, but hardly cared about zero warning for the needles in your arm?” said Mr. Lucia.

I had to remember he could poke at my thoughts by looking at my face. I stared down to the floor and tried to predict what each was feeling. 

“What emotion does this pair feel?” he asked. 

I had to prepare for another trick, but what else could there be? “That man is a masochist and is feeling joy. The woman is hired and is feeling greed.”

“You are deranged, and easily duped,” said Mr. Lucia, turning up a knob once more.

Duped?! He was LYING for all I knew. No, it was certain. A taste for a death urge? What insanity! The taste of a liar, more like. And it wasn’t like I could do a thing. He probably made up his mind before we even stepped in here—

Mr. Lucia’s finger slammed into the on switch.

The jolt was no longer localized anywhere. 

My mouth hung open, and I felt my hair stand on its end. 

It held me in place fast, all thoughts waning to darkness.

Fire

My eyes were pinpoints and

my skin prickled.

I could be on the sun.

I crashed back down like a tsunami as the current plunged into my arteries and came alive as it searched. It was a shredding, spreading buzz, like a plumber was probing a barbed drain snaking up my blood vessels, its tiny-million knife-wielding hands searching for the nearest organ. 

Lucia looked on like a demon ready to poke me with his pitchfork. “You need to hone your empathy if you ever hope to be here. Find the flavor.”

 The ebbing pain flowed once more. “What?” was the only thing I could get out of my mouth. The stinging power of this shit, God dammit, this stinging! I could barely put one thought in front of the other, much less talk to him. Okay, I needed a taste. Nickels? Cucumbers? This burning shit!

“They’re both serious,” said Mr. Lucia. “In the zone, you could say. They’re actors. This is a staged video, I’m afraid.”

The current continued, however, and I tasted nothing but my teeth gnawing at my tongue. Underneath, there was only a flavor of ferric blood. By the time he shut it down, I was crying.

“Oh, it’s just a harmless emotional stimulant,” he said, his voice cutesy. “Focus, Vivian. You must be in touch with the feelings of the world.”

Backlit by the fiery hearth, Mr. Lucia was a demon. “You’re enjoying this?” I said through gritted teeth.

“So cruel, to doubt me, hon,” Mr. Lucia said. “You can only think of yourself and your first-world creature comforts and think you belong in our business.” He shook his head. “I’ll give you one more chance.”

“No need,” I said. I took my elbow and jabbed the Assistant in the gut first this time. With my pain-addled mine, my elbow collided as hard as it could, sending her doubling over. Mr. Lucia’s eyes followed that bitch as she recoiled back, but didn’t look disappointed as I pulled the probes loose. They came loose with no relief from the sandpaper sensation still squirming beneath my skin. 

“And by the way. Nickel’s the taste of a liar,” I said, marching out of there.

Yes, A.I.U. had a nasty habit of abusing its clients. There was no doubt that Lucia got off on it. He’d go home after a day of shocking and dripping boiling oil onto young women, strip out of his extra-tight suit, and think of the most pained expressions of the day as he rubbed one out in front of the endless windows of his penthouse, imaging he could shoot his ejaculate off the building and onto the heads of a passerby but never daring himself that far. 

Crass, I know, but I never made my career by lying when it was convenient. I had to mention that story first so that you all understood what A.I.U. was when I first met them, with their sadism and cold efficiency, and what a mess they’d soon become. Now that you know where my life had taken me at the time, I’ll tell you about Ashton. It’s hard to trace the beginning of the end of our idyllic relationship, but the salad days definitely were gone by the time he discovered several lines he wrote in someone else’s movie.

Back then, Ashton had uncut brown hair and a face angled forward like a hound. He always wore the same intense stare, half-here and half in a daydream. It was January, so he wore a brown aviation coat with hands tucked into corduroy pants. By the time we’d been in LA for two months, he had found the underground spots throughout what he considered “derelict” neighborhoods. One of his, and I suppose by extension, my, favorites was this hole-in-the wall theater, The Arcadia, hidden like a speakeasy in Boyle Heights. Ever since he quit his job we’d frequent there midday when the “bustling” nightcrowd of 20 dithered to just us, and he could swagger about like he owned the place. 

We knew the proprietor, this old Jewish guy called Scab who always smoked out the window behind the snackbar, leaning over the paper while mumbling to himself about changing neighbors. He was an old timer, flown in from Israel thirty-years ago and previously, New York, and ex-military with a big scar over his forehead where he claimed to have taken shrapnel shortly before his discharge from the IDF. That had morphed into a sore spot and although Ashton talked about that country with crass indifference when drunk, here he held his mouth shut. In these midday outings between the leanly packed showings, Scab would put on anything Ashton and I could dig up, from ancient indie criterion-core crap to literal mall security footage.

I used to walk through the living-room sized theater filled with Scab’s old sofas and armchairs, peeling at their upholstery, imagining we built our own theater and that the sound of Scabs’ TV droning nonstop baseball was the sounds of our children playing in the backyard. I always sat in the same chair, obvious from the ripped up right-arm where I liked to dig my fingers, grasping and searching through old foam. This place smelled like my dad’s old garage, oil and must, from back when he was honest. 

Ashton returned, having put onto the reel the newest project co-written by the consulting agency that he worked remotely for ever since college. He had an impression that he was a big deal (and admittedly was—in college) after he won best student documentary at a film festival for his work about the lives of New York City sex workers. It was semi-earned. Mainly because it wasn’t a documentary. Just some scenes of me and my old friends that I wrote and he held a camera in front of. 

The screen of the new movie blazed to life as the old soundsystem weaned. Ashton grumbled about how Scabs refused to bust out the old Kinoton FP30D, instead putting his reel on the Kodak Carousel, which per Scabs was more authentic to how this was meant to be seen, but Ashton thought it bent out the film over time. He sat next to me and let his arm stretch around my shoulder, which I reciprocated by nuzzling closer. I stuck my nose in his aviator jacket on his chest, breathing in leather scents. In his other hand was popcorn doused with butter and salt, which we both called peasant food. A pair of his clenched fingers brought a few morsels to my mouth, which I ate like a lap-dog, savoring the trans-fats and oily crunch.

Although I cared far less about the line-controversy, I distinctly remembered this one was called “Time’s Melange.” In the movie, a Congolese immigrant man sits in a dingy, one room house lit by a lightbulb. He has one young son, who is arguing with his mom about the year’s Christmas budget, eventually causing the man to get up and leave. He sets out through a run-down neighborhood. He waves to a jovial old-timer rocking on the porch and gets into a chat with another working man at the street corner about an upcoming soccer game they plan to see together next week.

Moving along, he rounds a few corners and lays his eyes on his target, a small Catholic church at the end of the lane. By this point, the buildings are beginning to grow in size and change. Instead of straight, red-brick pillars, they bend towards him at their tops, a wide set clasping hand moments from slamming shut. 

In the church, he asks the priest if God can bestow a boon upon him so he can get his son a toy, to which the priest shares some parables about rich people squeezing through needleheads and the promised meek inheritance. The man finds this unfair, but the priest assures him his suffering comes with a bill of credit in character. The man prays and leaves the church, but outside the buildings have become twisted spires. An abstract city both foreign and unwelcoming.

At this point, Ashton’s demeanor shifted and his face grew red. His hands crawled their way up and down the soda can until they gave up and snapped shut, crushing the can and spouting Coca Cola into the air, trailing down his hands to blend in with his brown coat.

As the movie continued, the man kept looking for a way to get his son a gift. First, he waits in line for assistance at some bureau, but finds it growing longer in front of him, moving him backwards. A skeevy-guy in front of him explains how need-based priority queuing means more people line up in front of them than the line can serve, and that the people back here won’t ever get to the front. The pair of them instead head downtown, to a trap house basement where they gamble away the rest of their money, and both get drunk. Some rough guys around them try to detain them on account of debts owed, starting a big fight. The man gets beaten badly, but manages to slip out after shoving his skeevy-pal into the group of thugs and diving out the window. Wasted, he limps to the factory where they used to make toys, but finds it replaced by a recycling plant after the toy factory moved to Mexico. The sorters welcome him to grab anything he wants, so the man manages to rustle up a slightly-worn bicycle and rides it home. By now, the road isn’t solid anymore, instead more like a wavy ribbon detached from floating bits of sidewalk and buildings twisted beyond repair. The man rides up and down like a sidewalk, arriving back to his neighborhood. The old-timer’s rocking chair is empty. On his lawn is that guy he chatted with from earlier, now bearing a long, white beard. They make plans to see a soccer game next week. The man enters his home to find it empty, his family gone. The reel ended right there. 

Ashton hurled the empty tin of popcorn into the screen. If Scabs saw, he said nothing. “That church scene was mine! I wrote it for ‘Orthodox Wire’! Remember, Viv? I was telling you about my scene that Winston scrapped. Remember my scene?”

I did, considering I edited every single final draft he pushed up the consultancies’ ladder. The scene he penned got rejected and its associated movie, ‘Orthodox Wire’, was scrapped a year into development, wasting a huge amount of our mutual time. That day, I recall he got verbally reamed for failing the client and came home pissed off, which made it more perplexing why his contributions had leaked into a movie he had no part in, uncredited, of course. This was the catalyst for him quitting his job which would lead both of us down diverging, dark paths that could only break our relationship.

Memory is a stupid thing. Both time machine and tether, it gives shape to our past but holds us within it. A child of war will live in unconscious fear of the bombs falling on their village that set alight their neighbors and immolated their parents, yet they will crave that distant time when they still had their mothers touch. An immigrant’s journey across desert and snow, blistering hands and feet and a stomach only filled by cheap rum, is a mind-breaking, grueling endeavor in the moment but a nostalgic hankering for the camaraderie of travel companions in recall. Memory is a sieve that leaves behind the fear and must never be counted on. It’s that very reason that memory is the only important thing.

We lust for memory. We spend everything to make new memory. A struggling family will push themselves near destitution so their children can spend a weekend at the beach. A dying grandpa will load himself with DNA-ablating, chemotherapeutic drugs so he can taste memory a few months more, trapped in the same body in the same bed in the same room in the same hospital. Memory is the death of natural selection. We must always remember that memory is the most valuable concept in the universe and so we should never blame a risk taker.

We are memory. It gives shape to the clod of cells that we call a brain, pulling us forth from that biological yarn into a tapestry of the self. Therefore, to share memories of another is to become them. Memory is the seed for conscious experience and will merge individuals. Under relativity, time can be flattened. This means memory has no inherent time. We cannot think of it as a line, but instead a map through which you can trace any moment of a life.

The universe is memory. Perception of moving time is itself an artifact of memory split points. These are called Mnemoseeds. This is why sleep skips time. The thing we call a ‘body’ is just a projector for the film of our lives. I was awakened with this understanding. I had to become memory. I had to go somewhere nobody would follow. I will show you how. By the time I am finished, I will become you too. 

A MNEMOSEED ABOUT WHY YOU NEVER MEET YOUR HEROES:

I always found it disturbingly easy to make it past the oafs they pulled from Craigslist to act like bodyguards for their private shindigs. There were only two protecting the Acker estate this time. The first was a short, rowdy guy with short-cut black hair and premature wrinkling on his face that made him look tested when he was really just a loud talker. The other seemed his superior, this guy with the last bits of his thinning gray hair grown and tied back into a ponytail, matching a white, well-groomed goatee. They both were red in the cheeks, a clear signal they had gotten into the house wine before Jordan Acker, the clearest perk of the position. I had wedged my new mini-cooper between two big SUVs in an illegal group-park, then walked the distance so they couldn’t see where I came from, carrying a tray of sandwiches from the nearby deli. In my suit, they assumed I was catering and let me go by with no trouble, too caught up in a conversation about whom at the party they’d most like to bang. 

Jordan Acker had a double-decker pool in his backyard that watched over the Hamptons, which proved to be the core of the schmoozing, with guests leaking out of his house and collecting along his garden and patio. I helped myself to an Italian sandwich piece, shoving the oily concoction into my mouth all at once. Mouth full and greasy hands, I jostled aside a smattering of martini glasses and planted the sandwiches down on a small, round glass table. A few odd looks from ladies in their morning gala dresses followed, which I answered with a shrug before swallowing and licking my fingers.

I came here to see Jordan about a new pitch I had concocted, this show idea about mind-control via brain chips. Whether or not he’d be inclined to listen didn’t really matter. I would yell it in his ear if I had to. His location was obscured by the globs of people standing around chatting about the mundanities of where they sent their runts to school in between blowing the kid’s trust fund in ill-thought hedge fund schemes that would fund their next vacation homes. If I squinted right, I could almost see my father amongst them, and if I got that far, I could almost hear his voice, chattering in well-practiced English. One of them snapped at me with hairy fingers peeking out behind a Rolex for a refill, so I ducked aside, grabbed a half-finished old fashioned on a table and stuck it into his sweaty palms. 

Jordan must have been beside his waterfall separating the upper-pool from the lower, standing in a section of elevated patio, because the coalescing mob that choked its way up the staircase embolized there in a big clot. I couldn’t spot his profile within, but during my search, I managed to eye my other white whale picking away at the tray of sandwiches I had brought. Despite not having been photographed for several years, I still recognized Starky Schwabacher by his beret and the back of his head. His iconic shoulder-length hair was thinning but impressive for his age. He had on a pink woman’s pantsuit, which was obvious by the fabric and the make of the jacket hugging his waste. Starky was born in East Germany in 1957 and came into his own during that whole capitalist-revival era after the wall fell and he was roped into the party scene. That fish-out-of-water experience dripped through all his movies, a rigid, brutalist-minded protagonist folding into newfound, gender-bending debauchery. He had some critical but never commercial laudation before he made it to America in the early 2000s and his flicks only got stranger, now only fit to be condemned. I saw the truth in them though. The hostility of the immigrant experience, to be a foreigner in one’s head compared to the man they once were, was something the WASPs running the system could never parse.

I abandoned Jordan for now and went to verify if what I saw was correct. He had earbuds in and was bobbing along to his own music, drowning out Jordan’s boomer rock, going at the sandwiches like he had just gotten sprung from a gulag. A finger on the shoulder got his attention, and he looked at me with a confused expression, pulling loose an earbud but hiding his hangover-headache and addled eyes behind sunglasses. 

“Finally decided to get some sun, eh Starky?” I asked.

“Sorry, were you trying to bus the table? Don’t let me stop you,” he said through a German accent, picking up another sub.

“No, I’m a student actually. And a big fan! Where have you been, man? I’ve been fucking with your recent stuff on the silver screen.”

“What, is this supposed to be some kind of joke? How the fuck is that possible when I haven’t held a camera in ten years?”

“News to me. Didn’t you put out ‘Harry’s Hair Day’ last year?”

“Ja, that’s all back catalog. The studio owns my asshole so whatever you see is a product of those bastards.” Through his sunglasses, he must’ve seen the concern on my face, so he clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Dude! I’m screwing with you. Really, I appreciate the support. Taking flattery was never my forte.” Starky took one last sub then wandered off, dawdling through the crowd with steps like a drunk penguin.

I gave chase, not wanting to lose another connection. “Wait, Starky. I was wondering, any chance you still follow any film festivals?”

He didn’t give up on his march towards the pool. “I mean, I watch what I watch.”

“You catch any of NYU First Run perhaps?” I yelled after him.

“Are you kidding me? I’d rather saw off my cock than have a bunch of tykes rub their daddy’s money in my face.”

Reaching the pool, Starky took out from his chest pocket what looked to be some kind of cigarette, which he unfurled onto the stone-sided edge of the pool to be a big tuft of cocaine. He sifted through the powder with his fingers, putting together a sloppy, fat excuse for a line and snorted away. In that moment, he looked and sounded a lot like a snarling hog. 

“If you get a chance, you should check out the documentary winner. That was my movie.”

Starky lifted his head, then his sunglasses and shook his head several times as he sighed with deep relief. “Oh ja, Gotham’s Call Girls, right? I did catch some of that.”

“Then it might ease your mind to know that filming that thing put me into debt. I’m pretty far from the tykes you hate. So, what did you think?”

At last, Starky turned my way, letting me get a good look at his bloodshot eyes and their shrinking pupils. “Sounds like you got cut off. Good. It’ll make you more honest, at least. Let me think. So you spent a few months following the city’s whores around? They’re a funny bunch, don’t get me wrong. I did like some of the dialogue but it was a little over-colloquial, I mean nobody actually talks like that. You should know better than to pimp yourself out to the city’s slime like that. People like them are ruining this country. I would know. When I was a kid, you couldn’t set foot in the bakery without them touching you all over, grabbing you by the goddamn nipples and penis. America used to be a great place, you dig? I used to dream about going there. Until it whored itself out. It’s a multi-tiered problem. Beneath the star-spangled drag are all the whores. The financiers that run this plutocracy are whores. And their accountants and secretaries are whores. And their families and kids are whores. And their kids’ teachers are whores. And their kids’ teacher’s husbands are whores. And then they fuck the whores. I mean, those girls in your little movie. If you think about it, everyone whores themselves out for something. You’re a whore to your film festivals. I’m a whore to this cocaine. And then the whole ecosystem becomes a whored-up knot with a million tits and a billion discharge-coated fingers strutting its way across the globe, selling a new, perverted brand of freedom for subservience to its American cunt. So ja, that’s what I thought of your movie.”

I couldn’t begin to make sense of any of that, but then again, should I have expected any different. Time and time again, my life made it clear that the only real artists out there were the most maladjusted motherfuckers. I allowed myself to be fooled by the profundity of his movies, but we’re complex creatures. Sometimes the part of us that does the talking has no idea what the rest of us wants to say, and instead what we say comes out like that.

His rant must have caught more attention than I thought, because suddenly a big hand planted itself on Starky’s pink shoulder and began to massage it. I saw a big, hairy fist carry a martini glass into view and then looked up at Jordan himself, the sun shining past his graying hair as he frowned with sadistic intention. He put away the rest of his drink, a tongue idly licking at the olive and the toothpick sticking through it, as his hand pressed further into Starky.

“Don’t mean to interrupt, but I don’t think we’ve met,” said Jordan Acker in a baritone rumble. Then he spotted me and squinted his eyes. “Sorry, is she with you?” he asked.

I felt like Jack had been spotted by the giant and was about to get his bones ground up. “No, I don’t…” I mumbled.

“Oh, so you won’t mind if I have a go?” said the billionaire.

Jordan Acker grabbed Starky by his chest—or breast, perhaps—, and started searching for a nipple with his finger. Starky looked somehow more confused. His coked up eye-blood receded and entered his reddening cheeks, then his pupils enlarged as his fight-or-flight kicked in. I wanted to reach out and stop him as soon as I saw his plan—Starky’s jaw unlocked and flashed a few abnormally pointy canines. His head turned and bit the hand currently molesting him. Jordan recoiled, shouting as he dropped his Martini glass. With the speed of a mantis, Starky’s fists came loose as he stood up and punched Jordan in the face. Holding nothing back, it hit Jordan like a shotgun slug, probably breaking a cheekbone or two and sending the big producer spiraling backwards over the pool and into the waters. He crashed down in a dramatic backflop, at first sinking a little. I straightened my posture, trying to see if he was going to drown. The party’s chatter all stopped. Nobody helped, but stared with the same morbid curiosity. Then like a buoy, Jordan arose once more. The party went into a frenzy when he breached the surface, all people squirming like diarrhea-filled intestines, before several ‘heroes’ finally jumped in and fished Jordan out of his own pool.

Jordan Acker, now soaked with chlorinated water, pointed to us with a trembling, wrinkled finger and cried, “Get them out of here! Those two! Get them out before I call the police!” 

Before I could argue I had nothing to do with this, a dozen hands grabbed Starky and I, pushing and shoving us to the edge of the property before the two guards from earlier finally stopped talking about girls and instead took on the pair of us.

“Let me back in! I’ll abolish that bastard. Let me back in!” yelled Starky, wrestling with the guards and kicking like a toddler. I didn’t resist and instead lamely let us get thrown to the edge of the driveway. Starky cupped his fingers and began to yell in their direction, “Buttholes! Buttholes!” Finally, he put his sunglasses back down and said to me, “See kid. Just like that. They’ll use us like a whore. That’s the world we live in.”

After that day, Starky officially got black list, something I narrowly avoided on account of my relative anonymity. His back catalog put out one more movie before he got canceled in 2020 after a Covid-fueled Twitter tirade where he called “The modern mainstream queer the new Nazi” and was shot and killed at the U.S. capitol while scrambling over a barrier on January 6th.

A MNEMOSEED ABOUT YOUR FRIENDS:

I had been mapping out Los Angeles’s underground long before I moved there. In one of their dankest tunnels, I discovered the Gold Souls months before Mikey Chung’s parents flew their private jet into the Matterhorn in a half-tragedy, half-suicide. This must have hit the old fellow hard, because he was making it his job to ignore my texts, emails, discord calls on the matter (of the Gold Souls, that is). Even the odd snail-mail rotted in his postbox. Determined to drag him from his cave, I tugged Vivian into the mini cooper to make a housecall.

His Malibu Mansion had a mile-long approach that was so littered with cars I had to park all the way at the gated entrance that had been long-left open, now strangled by vines. Realizing I meant for her to come inside, Vivian bundled up her scarred arm in a cardigan. The explosive, striating paths that fractured her soft skin with crimson insults had not yet healed since that devil Lucia had plugged her with needles and shocked her to high heavens. My pact that I’d kill that guy on sight wouldn’t expire before the scars did, but she had managed to talk me down from actively searching for him.

The only thing more wracked than Vivian’s scars was the path up to Mikey’s manse. Along the road were around five dozen cars, all in some state of advanced decay. A prissy beemer with a dick graffited onto it, a lambo had its roof smashed in, an upside down cybertruck had its hood busted open and the word ‘JUSTICE’ scrawled into its frame, the oh-so-prized battery stolen. Most of them had whelk-like people living in them, sandy, unwashed, and faded. While not an uncommon sight on the West Coast, Mikey’s parents and the rest of the autistic elites that nested here normally had them shot for even looking at a Hollywood Boulevard postcard of their property. 

Breaching Mikey’s garden and crossing his pools surrounded by alabaster statues of the presidents, we spiraled up five flights of stairs into his house. His doors were these huge glass panels, now shattered, with embroidered gold, now scraped off and melted down. Inside his foyer, more strange bedfellows had taken up residence. Instead of Mikey, we only got the moans of passed out vagabonds. A few were sleeping in a line, a veritable obstacle course of pantsless, white-dreadlocked, backpackers. 

In the kitchen, we finally found him—face-first in a bean-bag. Vivian got me cold water and I dumped it on his head.

Though doused, he didn’t move an inch. “What do you want?” he mumbled into the felt chair. 

I tossed the bucket onto the floor. “Have you been getting my calls?”

His head shook as much as the chair would allow. “I threw my cell in the pool…”

I found a mound of his mail sitting on the island, opened by well organized by whatever impromptu tenet had gathered them there. I sorted through the letters, mumbling their authors. “Lawyers, lawyers, more lawyers…” the next one gave me pause. “Is this from Trump?”

“Barron,” said Mikey. “He’s at NYU now.”

I scanned over the letter, some plea for a half-baked crypto scam. Vivian had it in her hands before I could finish, ripping it apart. Then, I found what I wanted. “There are three letters from the Gold Souls in here.”

“The who what?”

“They’re super underground. You ought to thank me for filling you in.”

“Tell them I don’t want…”

I dumped the mail in Vivian’s arms and grabbed Mikey, hoisting him by his blue, mothball-scented flannel. “Mikey, listen. These cats are the easy street. You hear me? You won’t have to run with Hyundai if you roll with them.”

“That’s my uncle. My mom studied divinity.”

“You have to send them a letter back.”

“I don’t know…” he said, his eyes trailing away from me. “Oh, hey Vivian. You guys still together? That’s wild.”

“Watch out, that’s my husband you’re talking abour,” she said.

“No shit,” said Mikey, stone-faced. His redenned eyes, pin-point eyes seemed to relax a little. He noticed her scars peeking through her woven cardigan and scratched at his own. 

Vivian took a cautious step forward. “Mikey, are you… feeling okay?”

“Oh. Not too bad.”

I shook him around. “Viv, get more water.”

Mikey broke free from my grasp, rolled across the floor several times and stood to shuffle away like a reanimated corpse, heading out the back door towards his gardens of overgrown, now-unrecognizable topiaries. Vivian and I followed him out, standing dumbfounded as we watched him descend a staircase to his Olympic-sized pool. 

“Is that enough for you?” Vivian asked.

“He must be going for his phone,” I said. From up here, I could actually see it, a little black dot spiralling in and out of a side-filter. 

I hopped down the steps, pushing past him at the bottom, then threw my shirt off, diving into the cool water. Its cold water wrapped my skin with unchlorinated prejudice, now home to a billion new bacteria. My hand crawled its way into the filter, scanning along concrete until I clutched the little electronic and held it aloft, Vivian clapping to see my prize. I stepped out and presented it to Mikey.

“Are you kidding?” he said. “I only came down here to nap in the sun.”

I stuffed it into his chest as Vivian came to join us. “This. Is so you can pick up calls. And this…” I said, grabbing the Gold Souls invitation from Vivian’s hands, “...is so you can get your life back together.”

His lazy eyes slowly shifted between Vivian and myself, surely realizing we’d take up residence here as long as it took for him to shake his funk. “If I do this for you, do you promise to do all the writing for me?”

“Better me than you.”

A MNEMOSEED ABOUT WHY YOU MEET YOUR ENEMIES:

We left the mini cooper behind and ubered downtown to wear the Gold Souls had repeatedly asked Mikey to fraternize. A thousand dollar prickly sweater that I got at the thrift store overtop tan slacks was my attempt at looking old-money, with salt-scented cologne that resembled the Hermes-Gucci hodge-podge. Vivian changed into a cocktail gown and bore the best jewelry I’d gotten her back when that was in my budget—a diamond studded gold necklace with similar bangles, and a much more modest engagement ring. We tried a similar treatment on Mikey, oiling back his hair, putting him in a denim jacket and some silver-spike jeans we found in his place, though he resisted our attempts to bring a razor to his scrag. 

On the way there I explained the situation. Months ago, a scene I penned for a horror movie about a killer priest ended up in one of those trite Bloomhouse shitpiles, but on the silver screen nonetheless. A scene which I had passed to nobody save those higher ups at my consulting firm, which they had balled up and tossed, which still wormed into Hollywood without so much as an acknowledgement to me. My workplace covered their tracks the best they could, but IT was lazy and I was able to squeeze the paper trail from the main server. This went so much deeper than Starkey getting molested. The client went by the ‘Gold Souls’: a postgrad’s high-society club that doubled as a Hollywood Think-Tank, whose existence was a deadly secret beyond their select contacts and invitees.

The invite brought us to a warehouse along the universal production studios. We rolled up along a gravel driveway, flagged down by a pair of guards. When they barked for IDs, a flash of the envelope had them near-swallow their throats, stumbling back in a mix of reverence and fear. Dropped off close to the wrap up shots of some big film, we had to step between a crane holding stunt doubles suspended on wires, assistants running back and forth carrying coffee and donuts, and a dozen boom mics swinging just passed our heads before we found a modest looking door by the dressing rooms. The rest of them had bronze stars with engravings of talents’ names like Mertyl Strep and Wilhelm Duffy, but this one was unmarked beechwood. 

I went for the door knob. Their apparatus found me first. The door opened and there emerged Winston, a senior consultant at my agency, waving Mikey and Vivian past him while cornering me into the wall. I gave them an okay sign to head inside, trapped between this man and his dapper suit and gold earrings. 

“I guess that explains your sabbatical,” he said of my quitting. “We missed you at the office.”

“When was the last time you spoke a word to me there?”

He walked forwards, moving me backwards, towards the bar. “I just thought you complimented the room well. It’s like the other week, when my daughter killed one of our house plants, a floppy aloe-thing. I never really thought about it when I walked through the kitchen, but now I kind of miss it.”

“So you want me back?”

Winston raised his arm against the wall, pinning me like you would a reluctant flirt. “I’m afraid you can only burn a bridge once.”

I knew they’d get wise to my snooping sooner or later. The bigger question was why he still let this meeting happen. “Come on. People leave consulting more than highschool sweethearts. I thought you had thicker skin.”

“And then some. But I like all my knic-knacs. It’s part of why I wanted to show you what a mistake you’re making. 

“So I was right, then?” I tried to look beyond him, if I could see any Gold Soul within, but he blocked me with his body.  “Look Winston, I’d do anything to get in with them. Anything.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll work like a dog. The most menial bullshit. I want you to use me.”

“Stupid kid. You should’ve stayed in my business if you wanted that. These kinds, they’re after something more personal. It’s a bad crowd.”

“That’s okay. We’ll see him, Winnie,” came the piping voice of a woman within. Winston rolled his eyes and brought me into the room, slamming the door. Inside was an impromptu bar rather than a dressing room, a circular set of stools surrounding a pile of liquor within. The alcoholic huddle ejected Vivian and Mikey. Winston seated me in an empty seat facing these five new challengers as he escorted my only allies out of the room.

The one who summoned me introduced herself as Mackenzie, a stunning heiress with salon-platinum blonde hair, a face with slight plastic augment, extravagant Dolce & Gabana black pants,  Ralph Lauren red top, and puffy, puffy-white Prada coat. Winston returned and stood behind her like a well-trained hawk, nesting near her shoulder. “Who is this again?” she asked. My ex-coworker bent to her level and whispered in her ear. I saw her pink eyelids shrink into something devious hearing that, then fix themselves as she said something inaudible to the guy on her right.

“Is that so?” that guy replied. He told me his name was Martin. He had chin-length hair that swayed with him to the music. Underneath he had gaunt features. Big cheekbones, hollow cheeks, a protruding forehead, tender eyes, with a V-neck showing off his chest hair. His forehead made me want to punch him. Where you might expect a freckle, a fat emerald had been butchered by a surgeon to the spot above his eyes, flashing bright green. “Ashton, I need to get this out of the way early. Are you a hugger?”

“When I take enough molly, maybe.”

“Well said. Come here, man, it's great to meet you!” he answered, hopped from his stool and embraced me, shoving some kind of green drink in my fingers, then patted me on the back a few times. “All the way from New York City. Is this your first time in the real world?”

“As in an LA movie set?”

“Ashton, everyone’s from NYC,” said Mackenzie, rolling her eyes. 

“Of course, its all a lie,” said Martin his emerald flashing alongside his eyes. “Taken from Croatia, brought to America. Cut off by daddy? Now what’s your legacy?” Of course I should have known how much race mattered to these Hollywood types. Categorization was their business. Horror or thriller. Blockbuster or tax break. Pedantic Oscar speech about feminism or actually doing something.

Winston whispered into Mackenzie’s ear. “He moved from Europe when he was three,” she repeated.

“So no legacy, then?” said Martin. “Don’t worry about it. We all start somewhere.”

“Well I for one, always loved the big apple,” said a Russian-accented, tenor voice. The next one around the circle had chromatic hair and a face full of piercings resembling that I might have mistaken for a dead body full of bullets in the streets of Baltimore. They straddled their gender harder than Starky Schwabecker, but I did feel some immediate kinship for the fellow Slav, who introduced themselves as Poplar. “Or what it represented. I am sorry Ashton, that they want to demolish it.”

“And not soon enough,” the guy beside Poplar said. A cut-and-dried white guy with short brown hair, probably fancying himself a mini Elon Musk, wearing a full suit and tie to the bar. “Seriously, if I fly there one more time to just end up having to snort crack in a yuppy loft I think I might start ending some lives.”

“Your lofts are the problem, Jake,” Poplar answered. “American cities are families, not housing projects. Your yuppies are having their way with them. No more Harlem Renaissance. No more Stonewall. Now you better bow to Metlife and Verizon.”

“At least they can sweep up some of the trash while they’re at it,” said Jake.

“He would know,” said the final member of the group, a woman with a smooth voice who clothed herself in oversized, flowery silks that parted to show her belly button. “Jake is the type to have ICE on speed dial.”

“Is that your idea of a joke, Opal? We both know America needs workers. Oh, and Poplar gets to have the culture too. Más Salsas y etc,” Jake answered, then stuffing his face in his drink. 

Although I tried to keep it in for politeness sake, he had crossed a line with me at this point. “Why do you have to say it like that?” I said. “You know those people work themselves to the bone for a country we shit on. Shut up about New York City, you’ve never been to a really bad place. America knows no wars. It knows nothing. So just leave off, okay?”

Jake raised his eyebrows and uncocked his mouth, but was cut off by Poplar who simply said, “Good find, Mackenzie.”

I looked at her next, wondering if she had anything to add. Mackenzie stirred at her neon drink with a spoon, considering something. “No, Ashley’s [sic] right. What I think is funny is how Jake threatens to ‘end’ people, when he hasn’t a clue about suffering.”

“Oh, and you do?” Jake retorted. “As if any of that suffering belongs to you.”

Mackenzie shrugged. “I got a septic joint as a kid. Went under. Died for real.”

Poplar laughed at the notion of Mackenzie kicking it. “When I die, it won’t be in some hospital like that. It will be somewhere aggressive. Like that submarine that imploded looking for the titanic. I want to be at the bottom of the Marianas trench and let my corpse become a nesting ground for blobfish to spawn in.”

“They’d probably mistake you for one of their own,” said Jake. “Me personally, I’d go down in a blaze of glory. Fires burning, smoke in the air, people crying out for a hero. Like Blackhawk Down.”

“Of course you’d reference that imperialist trash,” said Opal. “I’d sooner see the sky full of American blood than support another genocide.”

“Winnie, ask Ashton next,” said Mackenzie.

“What do you think the best way to die would be, Ashton?” said Winston.

In the rare gasps of lucidity that was the boozy haze of college, I did have some late night fantasizing of blowing myself up with homemade nitroglycerin. Although Alfred Nobel might say otherwise, bombs were a basic science. The answer left my lips impulsively. “I would like to be eaten alive. What’s that like? One piece at a time, bit-by-bit, you get taken apart until there’s nobody left. Do the lights go out? Are you consumed or immortalized? Sometimes I imagine that happened to me. It’s like this fucking instinct. Like I know that someone already ate me and I’m not myself anymore, but a merger.”

This was half inspired by another rejected scene from ‘Orthodox Wire’, sitting as a crumpled up wad of paper in Winston’s wastebasket. The consultant gave an inquisitive look,  but the rest of the Gold Souls took it better. Opal was smirking, trying to restrain laughter.  Jake made no eye contact, still pissy about being bullied. Then Poplar, biting their lip as if unsure whether to be offended or intrigued. Beside them, Martin looked lost in thought at the scene, his emerald glowing under the disco lights. 

“Being down to get eaten’s one thing. How do you feel about eating?” said Mackenzie with a mischievous grin. “You’re not a vegan are you?”

I found myself moving closer. “No, but vegan seems like a big jump from cannibal.”

Mackenzie shrugged.  “Don’t you like knowing your food lived some kind of life? Otherwise you could just eat rocks. I’m only saying this because, Ashton, we have certain standards.” My eyes must have glimmered or something, because she was immediately onto my deeper interest. “Yes, we. And they must be obeyed, capiche?”

“With friends like you, I’m sure my beliefs could become fads.”

“Well said!” Martin responded, snatching my drink from my fingers. “Fellas, I’d say we ought to have Ashton put his money where his mouth is. Let’s test his stomach. Objections?” 

Around the table there were none. Martin next jabbed his finger through his ear and pulled out a maroon glob, swirling it around the grin-tinged drink they gave me. It was passed around the table, each Gold Soul adding their own twist. Mackenzie had Winston spit in it. Poplar snorted back something fierce, then hawked it down within. Jake added some vial that I could scarcely make out. Opal rung the sweat out of her braids.

Mackenzie had her manservant bring me the concoction with a single order. “Drink.”

I tepidly brought the now-orange mixture to my lips and took one, hesitant sip. It had all the flavor of donkey urine, but the consistency of curdled milk. I set it back down as a shiver wracked my body.

“All of it,” Mackenzie demanded.

All their eyes were on me. The keys to my future lay behind one disgusting swig? The decision was made long before I could consider it, the rest of the mixture falling down my gullet. I held my nose shut as long as I could as my stomach twisted at the foreign invader. My eyes slammed shut, an overwhelming flavor of sewer and sump blistering through my throat. It seized me at once, as I keeled over and dry heaved, doing all I could to keep the liquid within so as to not forfeit the challenge.

A hearty laugh seized all of the Gold Souls. Poplar pounded the table while Opal concealed her face and Mackenzie clapped in joy.

“Oh, what fun!” Mackenzie said. “Winnie, bring the others back.” Mikey was pulled back into the fold, lined up beside me as she proclaimed, “How’s this for new initiates?”

Martin watched us with wide-eyed vacancy, his gem’s glare more real than his gaze, while Jake shrugged and Opal lifted her hands in questioning defeat. 

“Why not just the cute one,” said Poplar, evaluating Mikey. “Well, Chung?” 

I felt my pupils widen to five times the size of Mikey’s as I awaited his next answer, frozen by his favor. He took a minute to process, emotion finally breaking his haze and blustering, “Fuck off. I’m not writing so we’re a package.”

“Well said,” Martin uttered. “Since we need the Chung anyway, we’ll pledge the pair of them. The pretty face and the brain.”

He handed me a new drink, clean this time, and we all toasted to a bright future. We stayed out late that night, burning a hole in the production’s pocket as our gaggle took turns pouring rounds. They spent the next few dozen minutes interviewing my wife, plying her with strange, intimate questions, most particularly concerning her new engagement with that Lucia bastard. Oh yes, the Gold Souls were like a moth to a flame to her. Her story of crossing the border with a Coyote (Which was untrue, but she liked to tell it to rich people!), they ate the hell up. Before she could let real skeletons loose, I took Vivian’s hand and led her to a private spot. They played the disco song September in January. When I stepped forwards, Vivian stepped back. I put a hand on her waist, fingers playing with her black sequined dress and thought of nights on cloud nine forgotten, when we had taken dancing for granted before the dark cloud of responsibility thundered us back to earth. Her black hair parted and I lost myself in her brown eyes slicked by feline eyeliner. I told her it was just us. She knew what that meant. To make them jealous.

In the lonely information age, our love was a protest. I stuck my finger high into the air, and she shot hers low to the ground. Where work became virtual and our friends were figments of facebook, our intimacy was civil disobedience. Vivian’s arm lifted, and I spun underneath. I’d make the Gold Souls sweat envy before I joined up. When people hated you a little, they wanted you more, as if to confirm their suspicions. With a hand on her shoulder, I could feel the timbre rising through the floor, shaking through her black dress, up my arm, into our eyes, and we were in synchronicity. When I lunged aside, she was already there. When I bobbed and dipped, she played at being my reflection. 

By the time the song passed, we left the others for the void. Drinks somehow entered one hand and left through the other. Sips of screwdriver and late-night margaritas on our lips only made the disco ball glow brighter. One-two-step-and-spin, we let out the rehearsed dance we used on our wedding night when it was just us and a bunch of strangers we wrangled together at Caesar’s Palace. I remember practicing it for hours with a dance coach, then striking gold on the wedding night podium, and now here, the moves came back out with drunken perfection. Their eyes were on us. They had to be. Then, it was over as all memories are. As the morning cracked, Winston hoisted Mackenzie onto his shoulder and the Gold Souls rolled back up like pieces falling into the back of a chessboard and filed out moments before the sun made its entrance.