At his mom’s wake, John tasted the latent scream inside him. The fork tine hit his incisor, cut the molar. The cake fell out his mouth. John tracked it, as though he were dropping down from a great height on top of a church steeple. Later he dreamed of sewing sheepskin maps to his flesh with safety pins and copper wire. The maps were alive: inhabited by open-mouthed men who walked upside down, eyeless beasts, and freshly-plucked mandrake roots. He dreamed of pasting first-class stamps all over his face and crawling into a mailbox. He wanted to get sent to some city or country that no longer existed.
His wife had been scrolling through his browser history and thought she’d figured out the problem. She ordered some masks of his favorite porn stars and costumes of his favorite warlords: Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Hannibal Barca. The mashup worked for a while.
The rehab center had nice rooms and decent food. He got glossy binders full of the latest developments in cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapies, psychologists who called themselves doctors, and group-therapy sessions on plushy beanbags with New Age music piped in. He connected only with one other patient there, Roger, behind whose eyes he’d seen dancing leprechauns. Roger was eighty-seven and had recently gotten married. The first thing he told John was how much he missed the world of pre-internet porn: the peep shows, the coin slot booths, the horizon-fixed stares of the dancers through whose empty sockets you could “see all the way back to the beginning of creation, touch the shadow of the spirit as it moved across the waters of the deep.”
Roger’s eyes bulged out like massive orbs when he spoke, drawing the hairs on John’s forearms toward them the way the moon lifts the sea to it as it floats by. Behind their nostalgic mists, he saw all the other Rogers who must have felt the same way about the Moulin Rouge, pre-War Berlin, the bordellos of Venice, Caligula’s Narwhale horn, Priapus floating into Pantagruel’s dream as he lifted Joan of Arc’s skirt and picked the lock on her chastity belt.
“You know what prevents us from going mad?” Roger said once to John, leaning in close, almost licking his ear, “it’s having secrets. Nowadays, there is nothing left to discover, no new worlds to conquer, no more secrets. Which is why we are all going mad.” Roger said this while putting his hand on John’s knee. John gently lifted it off and felt bad for Roger, who had been keeping this secret from himself for almost ninety years.
The rehab materials and therapy sessions were mostly pointless. What worked was taking away the phones. After four weeks, the patients’ brains were rewired from their phones’ absence and John, on the day of his release, felt only a vague emptiness when he turned his on.
His first night back home, his wife tried to coax back the John she’d first met. But John couldn’t manage the little death. He told her there was a dullness down there; that he’d been gelded. Maybe it was the meds. His wife tried the masks again. Then blindfolds, risqué décor, Barbie Doll outfits. John wished his wife understood what he really wanted: obliteration. Total fucking erasure. He just didn’t know how to tell her. He remembered what Roger had said about the “Information Age,” about its “tyranny of ennui. An impervious membrane stretched tight over all our thoughts. Numbing everything: the true death-drive.”
That night he got a text from Roger’s wife. She told him Roger had passed. John went to the living room window. He gazed out at the full moon. He saw a small garden on it filled with small green-costumed men wielding miniature pickaxes burying their pots of gold.
He fell asleep on the couch watching a reality T.V. show about scheming housewives. Thorned vines began slowly wrapping themselves around his hands. The thorns sliced into his palms. John liked the pain. He willed the thorns to go all the way through. Roses sprouted out on the vines. The deeper the thorns went, the sweeter the roses’ fragrance. John screamed, “This is so fucking cliché, can’t my dreams even be original?” Then, as the petals began to eat his face, John inhaled adolescent scents: moist sheets, peaty coat closets, a menthol clouded mouth. A sharp spiking in his groin surprised him. He cried at his wife, “Yes, yes, that’s it, oh God, I’m ready, so ready, please, please, please, I beg you, just hurry the fuck up, there’s so little time.”
