Junkie on the Lam (Flash Fiction)

Junkie had a bad habit.

He/she/it lived in the lower East. Side.

Junkie knew what it was like to live and suffer in the belly of the beast. Of Babylon, as he called it. But she didn't know why he called it that. It wasn't religious. Although s/he was blue a lot. He couldn't fathom why.

The cops were after Junkie. The Consciousness Cops. They had a Shoot to Kill. Order. Junkie had a bad habit. He had to shoot, too. Order.

Junkie spent days in the Jungle, as she called these city streets, spraying graffiti on the brick walls of the decrepit bricks down by where Jacob Riis wrote about How the Other Half Lives. He couldn't explain why he felt that way. That way he felt. She sprayed across the bricks: It's an intertextual world, run for your life.

Cops saw this and pestle-and-mortared, fist into palm, as if punching and grinding Junkie's face at the same time. Consciousness. More than one cop was gnashing his teeth.

Junkie had tried everything it could think of to get off the juice, and get back to work, and produce again. Consciousness. I don't feel like it, he told his supervisor at work, like a latter-day Bartleby chasing some Moby Dick in her dark oceanic mind. Lost. Angry. Someone had eaten the strawberries, it intuited.

There is no need to get fugal. There's no need to get fast. There's no need to blow the bugle. There's no need for the past. Sprayed on the walls of the toilet of the ferry to Staten Island. Junkie waved at Lady Liberty as the ferry passed and he giggled at the raised torch, thinking it looked like a deodorant ad it had seen somewhere. But Junkie couldn't recall where. A jingle wafted through his "mind" that recalled for Junkie an old TV ad that went something like, I can't seem to forget you / you're windsong stays on my mind. On the other hand, he didn't remember ever having seen such an ad. Overhead seagulls luffed and laughed in the clear blue overcast sky. Junkie had a bad habit. Order.

You can wake up and think. You can think you're at the center of the last fertile mind you met. The last fertile mind that Junkie met was an off-Broadway he/she/it. The juice is good. If you let it. And he let it. And she was good. But the cops found her in the alley, dress hoisted over her head, strung out, her mind extracted of its essence. Attar. Her expression was blue. Mortar-and-pestle. Gnashing of teeth. And she had a tic.

Junkie had the new interactive mind. The one that leaves everything behind. Designed by buddhaindustries,inc. Promised positive nothingness, but folks had bad trips. Junkie was on one. It was all karma and kismet. It was a fractal world of subtle persuasions. Bad habit. Order.

Junkie needed people. Junkie listened to their thoughts. Literally. Through a bluetooth transmitter/code switch. Often, he hungered to be inside their heads. Junkie had a bad habit. Junkie was seeing red. Inside, you found pure. Inside, you found the manna of the gods. Inside were chalices of ichor. Inside, you were transmogrified. Transfigured.

The cops were chasing Junkie. Junkie was chasing heads. The cops had a Shoot to Kill. Junkie needed to be fed. Consciousness. No Batman could stop this crime wave.

Junkie could jump, from mind to mind, and could even jump to another zone and land on his feet in a foreign mind and lay there hidden between the host lobes for weeks in the gobbledygook of untranslated windbreaks of tongue. Once when he was forced to lay low in Tokyo he crashed in the mind of an ESL teacher from Santa Monica and heard things he wished he could forget. This guy had had an affair with Dylan's wife, Sarah. Or thought he had. Or wished he had. Pestle-and-mortar. In Tokyo, he heard ESL say to himself, be careful you don't get in trouble with the yakuza. But he heard instead, don't get in hot water with the jacuzzi. Which confused him. His working language model sometimes sucked eggs. Whatever that meant.

But now he was in Gotham and they'd cut off his way out. There was a crisis. There was a crisis of confidence. Things were shutting down. The Internet was down. Too many junkies on the lam were creating havoc to the system. Each zone was now hunting down the Problem. Pestle-and-mortar. Gnashing of teeth. Consciousness. Boots on the ground. Grinding the tarmac with jackboots in several zones. Order. Order. Order.

Junkie had a bad habit.

Consciousness had turned into a nightmare. Junkie loped like Ratso. Junkie crashed down by the Jacob Riis housing project. Junkie watched his favorite movie, Midnight Cowboy, over and over in his head. He cried real tears when he heard the harmonica riff such loneliness. But he didn't know why.

People were leaking. That was another crisis. Alleyways were full of victims of consciousness overdoses or extractions. Gotham had no answer for this crime wave. Batman (George Clooney) was found taking Judith Butler from the rear, during a break in their Nescafe ad shoot together. At least, that's what his mind told him. Sound of jackboots. Grrr.

Junkie sprayed and sprayed. Sprayed the walls with Nebuchadnezzar Neon Red. Junkie sprayed, Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. The writing was on the wall.

And finally, the leather came for him. Pestling. Gnashing. Crunched crushed gravel. Junkie leapt through the eyes of his beholder. Junkie could not escape the zone. Junkie ricocheted around the MAN. The Metropolitan Area Network. Like a digital pinball. Lighting up the hive. Faster and faster. 1812. And then in an explosion of color and meaning he burst into light and disappeared. Consciousness was back, baby.

Junkie had a bad habit.