Let me tell you these muscle relaxers are working some magic shit on me. The invisible vise is loosening its hold on my skull and I can look all the way over my shoulder for the first time in years. It makes me wonder—how many of my problems that I assume are psychological are actually physical? It’s my fucking faulty genetics, man. I've always suspected that it's my bad blood and brittle, weak ass bones that are holding me back from true happiness.

Thank god for drugs. Of course there are side effects to popping over 2 grams of this shit a day. My pee has turned an unnatural fluorescent yellow. It smells like crab apples taste. Also, there are permanent pins and needles tingling up and down the right side of my body. I can’t feel my pinky and ring finger unless I rub the hell out of them. I play a game on the tram in which I stare and stare at my hand in my lap until I convince myself that it’s not mine. I look objectively at the fingers, the curves of the nails and the shape of the knuckles, thinking, what a weird ass looking hand that is.

Another effect of the pills is a feeling of temporal displacement. I’m out at sea, lost in the past and the future, while real life plays out in real time on the distant beach. I grip my icy elbow and close my eyes.

(I see the shoreline, I see those whitecaps)

When the floating is really deep I find myself thinking about Fitzcarraldo. Not so much about our recent fight, when he hacked into my system and snooped around my files and fucked around with my blog shit. Rather, I’ve been thinking back, way back to seven years ago when we met at Oxford. It was October, the day of the fog. Fitz and I happened to be standing next to each other on Magdalen bridge when it descended from the sky. It was a thick-ass cloud, threatening as hell, unfurling in banners glowing yellow and gray in the hot pink light of the setting sun. We watched, dumbfounded, as the fog tendrils uncurled around steeples and spires and fell across building facades like locks of hair loosened from a bun. The bridge emptied out as people scurried this way and that. I was rocking an old school Jets varsity jacket--I remember looking down and seeing that the white leather of the arms were completely soaked. The busses and the cars slowed down to a stop as the traffic lights blinked a faint turquoise through the haze. People stumbled down the narrow streets, holding one arm out for balance and swatting at the air with the other.

At one point I took a few steps to the side, not seeing that a person was still standing there, and stopped just short of crashing into him. I looked up and saw a shock of white blonde hair. Hands pressed on my shoulders.

“Hello there,” the apparition said. His accent was American with a hint of something else.

I tried to say hello but to my embarrassment I ended up sneezing instead. Not once or twice but five or six times in a row, quick and hard.

“Goodness! Poor Dear!” he exclaimed, and pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from his suit pocket. I noticed a large ruby ring on his pinky finger. His nails were impeccably manicured. His wide forehead was furrowed with concern.

“Let’s get you inside,” he said. “There’s a small boite just around the corner. I was just headed there for a pint.” He motioned to the other side of the bridge, already obscured by a wall of white.

“What’s that smell?” I managed, as I fought the urge to sneeze. “The fog smells like some kind of chemical. Something familiar,” I said, and then I sneezed again as I allowed him to put his arm around me and steer me through the nothingness.

“It’s a sort of acidic humidity,” I said, pressing the handkerchief over my face.

“Yes, I was just thinking the same thing,” he said. I looked up and saw a mischievous, knowing look in his eye.

He gave me a half-smile, the first of thousands that I’d receive over the years.

“It smells like men’s cum--the same smell concrete gives off just before it’s going to rain.”


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