See, Feel, Find Me

***Can we transact." Steven planted the jar, full of glistening dark love firmly in the dirt beside the coffee can mini-hotplate contraption. The smell would have been as fresh as a half buried corpse were it not for the severe overtones of amonia, scorched colon and vaporized bile. "I'm just saying can we please transact. Or," Ron Wynn did not like how Steven's gaze made the skin on his chest attempt to claw away and hide at the small of his back, "you know. Or not. It's up to you." A small storm radio kicked on loud enough to rouse a "fuck, god damn" from Ron's already weak gut, then just as quickly as it started it cut off as the camper ripped the square battery out of it and chucked it across the way with a splash into the duct.***








The question of sanity, of mental fitness, was an enduring one in Steven Fly's life. His lawyer was able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that pressing the plastic moulding that fixes to side view mirrors for 15 months made him go "off the deep end" (was the language the shiny man from two states over liked to use). His lawyer was even able to prove that Steven Fly was a fully functional, loving, caring, even cuddling human being throughout his "drug soaked" youth (was the term the prosecution like to use to describe the man who sheared a co-worker's leg off in the autoclave's ponderous multi-ton door) and well into his adulthood. Sure, he spent some time at the local shelter when he was out of a home and a job from 18 to 23 years of age, but that was no fault of his own. The drugs were not a way of life, or even a habit. They were a symptom of circumstance and pain that plagued the whole town like the factory pollution that killed every single body of freshwater within a 300 mile radius. Though the question was enduring, the answer, coming in an out of court settlement of the suit and counter-suit, was simple enough. Go away.

Steven Fly went away. But he wandered back. Not because he wanted to. His wandering away from the harbor could not have lasted if he wanted it to.  Every road sloped downhill toward the canals and aquaducts and open flames of the tent villages and though the campers moved often and with the same predictability as a heap of cotton seeds in Spring winds, he always tumbled right along to where they came to rest. Right down the roads like mercury down a pipe.

He was always most at home in the factory shadows. And the stacks and massive cylinders of liquid polymers did cast long shadows as the tankers and cargo hulks came and went in silence if not for the occassional wail of the tugs over worked pistons and fog horns. Steven Fly, when he got a chance to think, saw a lot of himself in those hulks. They came to get what he once toiled over day and night and day. Little cups of vacuum formed, oven hardened plastic. Little cups of his sweat and brains and smarts. They came and collected them by the thousands and took them across the south atlantic to the coasts of some continent he knew he should know, and there, the little cups unpacked, the important work was done. The real thought work. And then the hulks came back with nifty little things with his little cups on their faces. Little expensive zippy cars that go and go and go on the backs of trucks by the dozens to places he used to want to know about. So much of him gone these days. He liked being close to the factories. He could still feel the little cups scooping him up like ice cream and taking him away and bringing him back only to take him away again. Not once asking if he could have even a morsel of his refinished self to taste. He was very parched.

"Hey! Hey pal, you alright?" The man in front of Steven Fly was dressed poorly in the way rich people dress when they don't want people to know they have money. His crew cut could've been right out of the corporate 401k catalog they passed around the factory once. His white cotton ribbed tee was cleaner than an artist's smock with painter's block. He could see the Caucasian's snapping fingers before his eyes, but he was so damned parched he couldn't help but look straight through them and their owner to the fine silver sedan behind him. What treasures might abound?

"'ve got any soda?" It was hard to come by in the little roaming camps and going into town was out of the question for bake heads like Steven Fly had always been to greater and lesser degrees.

"Yeah, yeah sure. Wait right here." The man's brown eyebrows knit for a moment. He tried to say to Steven 'if you come near me while my back is turned i swear to god ill shoot you' but it came out more like 'if you come near me while my back is turned ill scream'. But Steven didn't let on. Letting on meant you didn't get money and money, even in the little roaming camps, still made the world go around. The difference was you could get by on a hell of a lot less of it.

"mm waiting," he shrugged, nodded and shook his head all at once creating a serene vulturesque little shimmy that was disarming and alarming to each as necessary. The man, Ron Wynn, was disarmed at Steven's haggard little dance that raised a little cloud of dust from his shoulders.

Steven Fly had the bad gate, but not as bad as other campers. The water, the really concentrated stuff best collected from the defunct sewage traps near factories, could be collected in jars and baked and boiled down until there was only a resin on the inside of the glass. The resin was gatherable and smokeable. But no one in town could make it. The stench was powerful enough to raise the dead during the boiling stages and got into everything the wet fumes came into contact with, promising swift and sure arrest to those who would be dumb enough to try. The dry fumes of the burning resin, however, were nearly odorless and very much sought after. A win win win for the town. Some pollution gets cleaned, dead beats stay out of the healthcare and welfare coffers, and police and prisons keep getting built and funded and factories collect a little rental tax from the campers. But doing too much of the bake gave you the bad gate. The lazy jaw. In it's worst stages the mind revs up but nothing connects between the brain and the mouth. Nothing but dribbles and groans. Steven was starting to get there. He often couldn't get sentences out until the first word was entirely out of the gate and gone. It was bad, but not terrible.

"Soda. Here. Drink." Ron Wynn pushed the can into the flaps of shirt at Steven's chest. It registered and he recieved it, popped the tab and swilled it.

"nk you. Thank you much. So now, I have something for you, too," Steven Fly performed a half turn, head bobbing minutely as he pointed a curled come hither index finger at Ron Wynn. Ron bit his lip, glancing back at the silver sedan with tinted windows as though something valuable were inside.Steven proceeded with his one part smooth-ish, two parts schmooze-ish, gait between quietly undulant blue tent tarps and little barrel fires. Ron, too much into the bake himself, followed out of necessity. Steven was his guy. That was the rule. You have one guy and if you give that guy reason, you can come camping and find yourself very unwelcome at every tent flap you had the (soon to be removed) nuts to poke your face into.

The smell of burning feces, rubber, and bone marrow was thin tonight, but stiffened abruptly as Steven Fly whipped back the flap of his hutch. It was a swell hutch, as the little tarps on salvaged bits of wood and tubing went, with a good view of the looming black demons coasting up and down the wide and deep and three-day-old blood burgundy aquaduct. Steven entered and parked himself in a collapsing corkscrew fashion to end legs crossed comfortably beneath him.  He perched like a heap of used scarves atop a pile of mud caked bones as he raised the black lined jar up to the meager light of his coffee can fire. Ron still did not know if he was black or white and was no closer to broaching the question. "ohm sit down over here and look at this," he patted a knit gloved hand on what looked like the only dry patch of dirt beneath his cardboard roof. Ron shook his head. "Fue don't sit I'm not going to sell you shit. Dick," he chuckled, his head bobbing upward, vulture regality beaming and threatening dually. Ron Wynn complied.

Gate problems were the primary side effect of the bake addiction. The men at the info in/words out toll booth fell asleep permanently. There was another unconfirmed but thoroughly documented side effect of chronic usage. The kind of usage measured in lifetimes of ordinary townie consumption compressed into years instead of decades. Negation dementia. The high was gorgeous, but what holes it could leave in some. Expression of the dementia was so varied that cumulative, encompassing, studies were still years away and the sooner it got solved the sooner that sort of evidence would demand a break in the cycle of passive symbiosis that kept the factories humming. There was no rush.  Steven Fly was not in a hurry. However, Ron Wynn was.

"What's up, man. I gave you the drink, I've got the money, you've clearly got the stuff so what's the big deal. Can we transact." Steven planted the jar, full of glistening dark love firmly in the dirt beside the coffee can mini-hotplate contraption. The smell would have been as fresh as a half buried corpse were it not for the severe overtones of amonia, scorched colon and vaporized bile. "I'm just saying can we please transact. Or," Ron Wynn did not like how Steven's gaze made the skin on his chest attempt to claw away and hide at the small of his back, "you know. Or not. It's up to you." A small storm radio kicked on loud enough to rouse a "fuck, god damn" from Ron's already weak gut, then just as quickly as it started it cut off as the camper ripped the square battery out of it and chucked it across the way with a pit pot pit pot splash into the duct.

"shee pushy pushy. Always so busy. You really should think about slowing down one of these days. Lets test it. I want to keep your faith, you know," Steven Fly, one tattered arm already swirling the head of a screwdriver around just the lip of the jar, was adamant. Ron Wynn understood and patiently awaited the small length of old car antenna casing that served as Steven Fly's pipe in recent weeks. Steven swirled the black tipped screw driver around the inside of the hollow antenna casing and then held it over the coffe can fire. He inhaled sharply, smiled wanly, and leaned back onto his elbows, antenna bit clutched like a conductors wand. He breathed out. Smokeless. The really well baked stuff could be absorbed into lung tissue nearly completely within seconds. Ron knew what was next. He held out his hand. Steven Fly's eyes took in it's span for several seconds before he leaned forward and staked it to the wet and stiff ground with the screw driver.

It should be noted that Steven Fly was not born crazy, but he grew up with both parents bake heads before the mayor and governor and staties knew how bad the stuff could be. Before the honchos and publicists and newsies knew it wasn't the dalliance of youth but the bane of age. His father and mother both died at home in complete conscious paralysis. The ultimate gate malfunction. Gate fail, no restart. He wandered, aged 16, already on his way with a healthy addiction, from one dock job to another. One warehouse job or bullshit vacant property security detail to another. Aged 18 he was already experiencing paroxysms of dementia. Negation dementia. He moved into a shelter to get clean. The dementia did not end. Aged 23 he was reformed and ready to take his place in town life at the factories. He was at the source. The smell blended with the stacks and flues and popoff valves and draining pools, but he knew what it was that was baking all around the place. Underneath his clothes, day by day, he was hacking himself away. Bandages and tape and greasy strands of surgical thread kept him under the radar. Little bits and pieces of him went away every week. He paled. His eyes hollowed. He thinned. And then he saw himself, his leg coming undone, the joy of something, what was it? It hadn't stuck long enough. They asked him to leave. He left. He kept pulling himself away, but the work could not be finished from inside himself. Steven Fly was not born crazy, but Ron Wynn could care less how the son of a bitch was born.

Hearing his own wailing drowned out by the equally baleful, equally frightened, and equally small wailing of a nearby tug horn nearly collapsed Ron's soul. No one was going to hear him, or rescue him, or look for him. He did not pursue the thought of his own demise mainly because he did not have time to. Steven Fly's now free hands sprung out like two muck rakes, grasping Ron's face and driving him bodily, twisting like a netted Heron, to the dirt. He tried to kick his legs but the boniest part of Steven Fly's knee sprung with equal force into his pelvis. Whether by accident or with purpose the effect was the same, his trunk went numb. If he was kicking his legs (he was not) or not he would not have been able to tell anyway. He would have panted with rage, with agression, with fear had Steven's crumbling hands not lain across his mouth. The odor brought tears to his eyes. He could taste bits that had fallen into his nose and come to rest at the back of his throat and it was almost enough to drum up convulsions of his still healthy gag reflex. Steven's eyes lit with a blaze that shone like the exteriors of precious metal plated cathedral domes above the filthy skylines of his cheek bones.

"rrrs too much of you. Too busy. You're filling up your time and spilling over into everything else aren't you," he rasped, firmly straddling Ron's torso.

"God, look man. I can leave. I don't have to be here or ever come back. I'm sorry, I-" Steven rammed the piece of antenna he still held clean through the cartilege where Ron's right ear met the flesh of his right cheek, sinking it four inches into the packed and filthy dirt. Ron's scream was drowned in a few ounces of sputum as his gag reflex got the better of the breath of air he sucked in agony. "What is wrong with you?" he coughed, the taste of his lunch reminding him he was but a few hours removed from a normal life. His life. His breath came fast once more. Helen. Helen was waiting. "Don't kill me okay. I can go, I won't say anything to anyone, just, please," his left hand still skewered to the hard packed earth he held his right hand in his impromptu oath, "what do you want?"

Steven Fly looked at him. The effort of the exchange was making his own wounds weep. He reached a hand through a flap and scratched at an improvised bandage. A fistful of scab came loose and he let it fall into the rest of the rags before withdrawing his hand to wipe his mouth. It wasn't Ron beneath him. It was him. That was him, before he lost track of where the hole was. Where was it? So much easier to see it now that he had a map. Now that he had a complete map before him. How long he tried to get this map. And now it was here. It was him. This was the map. This was his face. This was his mouth. These were his fingers.

Steven Fly slipped, like oil down a drain, four fingers into Ron's mouth. He gagged and bucked and convulsed. And slowed. He felt the heat well up. The sputum. The body flu. The water, welling up to his finger tips as they rasped against the back of his throat, grew and drowned out Ron's wail. The tugs answered and inquired, but Ron had nothing more to say on the matter. It was time. Finally time to plot a course. Where was that hole? That empty space of knowing. He couldn't do the work from inside himself, but now he was outside. He could finally pull and pick and prod and sever and dig and dig and dig as much as he needed to. He would find that hole and fill it all up, but he couldn't really start looking until he moved some of the big stuff out of the way.

He shook the water from Ron's mouth off his hand for a few long moments, smiling as another hulking mass of solid darkness rippled the filthy edges of the duct and the moss at the water's edge. He smiled. Little cups would not do. Not at all. Shuffling through the masses of acquired items and traded artifacts he found a fine old blade near the bottom of the little heap of goods. It was an old boning knife from younger days. It was not sharp, but time was finally on Steven Fly's side and he was ready to really begin the work that for so long trotted twelve steps ahead of him.