There was a rap star at the door. I opened the door to face up with Stuff N. I hated his poetry. The rhythms were okay, but the lyrics reeked of obsequiousness, ask me. I hung with some other young lungs, folks with real spirit, men not inclined to shoe shine, or polish turds. One of them I could have tolerated at 3 AM, but Stuff N was not one of them. He was like the Enya of rap. No fuckin way. I'd rather be hooked on oxy. Drowning in a dream, letting go of the horror all around me, sucked down into a black hole, which for all I knew led to another iteration in the multiverse. But I'd take my chances. Stuff N just stood there with a sh*t-eating grin.
"What do you want?" I asked him, neutral as the waking hour would let me be.
"You fucked me." He twisted up his face into an expression I immediately wished he'd incorporate into his act. Nasty. Not taking "tomorrow" as an answer.
"Huh?"
"You let me write on your timeline, after you knew they was dossiering your sorry ass."
"They?"
"You know -- Shelly's enforcers."
"You nuts or what? It's the middle of the night. I repeat: What do you want?"
"They are going to kill everyone you know -- everyone on your timeline -- everyone!"
I sighed, sized up the situation, and against my better judgment invited him in, get him out of the hallway where his squeaky noise could only cause trouble for me.
"Coffee?" I asked, already dipping a teaspoon into the coffee powder. Spill some hot water into mugs.
"Sure," he says. Unurged to do so, he plops down on my chair. I sit across from him on the sofa, where the hard core sit with their raging cool, listening to some unheard riddim, invited in with brothering arms. I give Stuff N a look lets him know I've got a date with Return To Sleep, so hurry.
We don't say anything for a minute. Then Stuff N repeats his claim that my invitation for him to write on my timeline somehow incorporated him into my sphere of influences, now scheduled to die evilly, meanly, preposterously without purpose. He was convinced that I had honey-potted him. "motherf*cker," he lisped (and he wondered why his EP sales were sagging). He took out a small brown paper bag and pulled out what looked like a cube of Domino sugar. He plopped it into his black water. Lifted his eyebrow in inquiry to me. I negatoried. He sat back with his cup and sighed, "motherf*cker." I got up to get some Cremora. "Muthafukka, you mean," I corrected him over my shoulder. I returned. Dropped the white powder into my beverage and stirred. He had put away his little brown bag.
"Well," I began. "I don't know what you mean. And that enforcer highsteria is urban legend or conspiracy theory. Nobody's out to get anybody. It's just the same old same old." I sipped away.
"Wrong. They have already nutrified 73 people you know or knew." I sipped some more.
"Well."
"They'll be coming for me. Then coming for you. Don't you even care, motherf*cker?"
"That's paranoia talking."
"Yeah? Try reaching any of those others who have disappeared. Gone. Poof!"
I began to feel hazy, like Bogart talking to the Fat Man in that reveal-all scene in The Maltese Falcon -- the one where, after Bogie collapses on the floor after being drugged, the Fat Man's pocket thug, Wilmer, comes out and kicks the prone dick in the head. I was starting to feel like the stuff that dreams are really made of -- nothing, hallucinatory, vaguely symbolic.
"Did you?"
"I did," he said. "I dropped something akin to acid in your coffee."
I was whoozing. "Yeah, I thought it was kind of unusual for you to have a little brown bag of sugar cubes. Unusual for everyone but you. It seemed to fit you.
"What you don't know," he said, "is I was approached and made to understand that if I wanted to live another day I would have to kill the others on your timeline." I must have looked punchdrunk, goofy. "Then I must kill you. The thought cops are giving me this one chance."
"That's what you think." He punched me for my joking, hard for a lightweight rapper, and I felt my resolve dissolve. Hallucinations began. It started as a Rorschach inkblot and went from there. I was always likely to read too far into things, but now I was those things, abstract and fractal. And the scent of cinnamon wouldn't go away.
Stuff N put his long arty fingers on my temples and rubbed. I had visions. Probably Dantesque from what college lit major friends relayed about The Inferno. Everybody I had ever known was being tortured and demeaned and canceled and thrown into fiery pits of sh*t and frankincense. They were pointing at me. You did this. I tried to scream but had no mouth.
"Why?" I groaned toward the shadow of Stuff N.
"No reason, Lottery. Fun. Sadists. Demigod losers, What difference does it make? Now you must die a horrific death," he howled, as in transcendant pain.
"I." But then he burst into flames and the suck of black hole took him away and he was gone. I crashed. I dreamed, and like Hamlet, to dream, yipes, I entered, for a cup of coffee, the undiscovered country.
Thought cops were everywhere the next day. Fitting me with an implant that would force me to relive the deaths of each mate, know their sorrows, disinter their memories. The thought cops, themselves immune and impune, eliminating lefties, then dissenters, then differently abled, then anyone who knew more than they do, even on the right, which is a lot of people, billions and billions served up to the end time ignoramuses, in an AI-dreamed up version of Shirley Jackson's Lottery. Funny, until it was your turn. Muthafukka. Skulls piled high to the sky like Pol Pot's wettest dream of power.
I looked up with my one working eye and a cop who looked like a flying monkey from Oz began beating me to death with a monkey's paw. Or was it Jeff Bezos' Amazon schlong icon? Absorbing me into AI's hallucinatory -- and superior worldview.
I thought: Eschatology is a b*tch, man. Then I was no more. It was a rap.
