Got you where I want you

He had gotten mad, let his anger at everything flow out through this lone escape valve that she had carved into his life. He yelled, screamed, about a lot of things he didn’t really care about, like a man swinging in the dark, hoping to feel the impact of hitting something solid, so he can finally fucking give it a rest.

She had left him. She had vanished. She had been the one to complain about her debt, and now that he had—

But she hadn’t asked him to do that, and in fact, had left so he wouldn’t, and could handle herself thanks, like she had done before they met. Like she would do forever.

So, deflected, he tried to be honest.

“I love you. There’s no fucking strings on this shit, I just want to help you. You said they would hunt you. Was that a fucking lie too?”

More screaming. More of her just standing there with her arms crossed like he was knocking shit over in the checkout line, but she only had like three things anyway. Finally, she spoke.

“You want to do something for me? Take all that money, and go find some newborn, some fresh, uncorrupted soul, and do what I did to you,”

Luke had made a noise like someone throwing a punch mid-vomit.

“Everything but the Bliss, ask them what they really want, take them somewhere, show them something, that makes them really happy, it’ll probably be something in their memory—”

“I tried all that shit, and couldn’t find a single god damned—”

“Don’t find someone like you! Find someone better!”

As down there Luke reeled and gasped, supreme, floating Luke studied her movements, her eyes, tried to peel apart her voice and find the thin silver wire of honesty beneath it, because for the first time, he felt she might be getting close to it.

“I was fucking fine when you found me, and now I can’t get this shit out of my—”

“You were already corrupted. I just didn’t see it. You never enjoyed anything but Bliss—”

“You’re the one who showed me that shit!”

“After you hated everything else, after it was the only thing left, I thought maybe you could be the one to catch it—”

“I didn’t hate everything else! I wanted you! I love you!”

“You don’t even know me. I’m not even here,” she said with a strange waver, then vanished.

And Luke spent a long time screaming, until the craft broke apart, like a ship in zero-g that had suddenly lost all its rivets and seams, spilling art deco fixtures and dusty hotel furniture into the black, and then, at that moment, like a joke, his Spirit blinked and touched the Real.

His day flew by like it always did, like a memory suddenly inserted into his brain, but rendered by the extractor in perfect detail. Of course it did. The son of a bitch already had that file on hand, and supreme Luke couldn’t help but notice it had made some artistic edits. The way-down there Luke, the one in the Real, stared out at the city longingly as he took a break on the job site, though the real Luke remembered spending his break on his phone, swapping memes and lying to three or four girls.

Either way, the edited, man lost adrift in the modern capitalist wasteland of America version of Luke’s day in the Real seemed to have a severe effect on down there Luke, and he remembered why.

In the Real, he hadn’t thought of Bliss or her a single fucking time. Suddenly, and for the first time since the rooftop, he was completely taken over by a longing to wake up. It was like the return of an old ailment that, since you had written it off as cured, catches you off guard and unprepared, and knocks you on your ass.

The desire became a weight somewhere in his head. A dense gravity well pulling all of his thoughts into a useless loop around it, a flight path that ultimately resembled circling the drain, with the same end result.

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With no other recourse, he flew off into the black, aiming at the widest space between two still, un-twinkling false stars. Within a few minutes, the stars passed by his ears and he was flying through solid emptiness.

“I’m going to wake up.”

Nothing happened, so he closed his eyes, which changed absolutely nothing, but made him feel better.

“I’m going to wake up, I’m going to wake up, I’m going to—”

He flew through solid darkness. His eyes were closed. His eyes were open. He saw empty darkness. He saw his own eyelids. With nothing around to tell him he was moving, he remained still. He went nowhere. He floated in darkness. He saw and did not see. The only things were his words. His commands. His prayers.

“I am going to wake up,” he said, he thought, as if it had been the conjunction keeping the spell from working.

More darkness. More nothing. More motion indistinguishable from stillness, like he was vibrating in one place.

Ok. He tried something else. He remembered a portal, a big metal O with pulsing multi-color rings of energy, that he had dreamed of once as a kid, after spending a solid 28 hours or so playing Crash Bandicoot, that had woken him up the moment he touched it. He had told everyone about that dream. No one seemed half as excited as him. But he had never forgotten it.

The portal expanded from a single point of light straight ahead, like he had been flying right towards it the entire time.

“Thank God. I’m finally getting out of this fucking place.”

His words died inches from his face, like the black void was a dense carpet. A fear that had been licking up his spine, burst into invisible flame around his head. He tried to focus on the portal. He tried to think of nothing else but his waking life. But it had finally caught him.

That glowing orb of light floating in the darkness. This time, he had been flying away from it, but it didn’t matter. Flying away from it, flying towards it, were so similar as to be interchangeable, polar opposite forces that equaled out to the same outcome. Two motions that ultimately resulted in no motion at all. It felt like that game, the one where the only way to win was not to think about it, and you always lost eventually.

He touched the portal and got yanked down into swirling energy that turned the darkness solid white, and for a moment his heart jumped and he believed he did it.

He fell softly onto the wide red carpet, having apparently dropped out of the gradient skylight above. Out past the lobby, beyond the dramatic arches and red carpet steps, the void twinkled darkly with crafts and Spirits coming and going.

It had once been called Concordia, and had lasted all of six months, he was told. But the Bliss den had been here as long as anyone could remember.

As the tuxedoed, pomade-headed mother fucker led him to a back alcove, (the entire place was somehow crafted of only back alcoves and tucked away booths), he thought about Bliss with a fresh vigor, this time the pent-up momentum throwing him past the typical thoughts, towards a wider reflection.

There was absolutely no physical component to the addiction. Of course, there was technically no physical component to anything here, but you would think whatever god like maker had decided one day to make the ultimate dreamworld drug would have added in some shakes or itching or something to the withdrawal period. Even the burgers in the Allcity made your mouth water.

But with Bliss, the real draw was just the memory of that warm feeling, that pure excitement, of flying towards a ball of pure glowing love, like every hug and fuck and victory of your life squeezed into one, or like the thing that gave all those things their goodness, the pure font of distilled happiness, was right in front of you, and you were going to touch it.

Of course, you never do. Of course, its just a trick, using your own memories as barbs, your own desire as an impression with which to cast a mold, a mold that breaks just as you get yourself wedged into it. Of course, he told himself this every time.

It's not worth it. You won’t feel any better afterward. It's nothing you haven’t seen or felt before, in fact it's only things you’ve seen and felt before, it's you repackaged into a thing you try to enter, to take, that dissolves back into your own shadow and reflection before you can touch it. It’s not even as good as you remember it, because your own memory of it is censored, rose-tinted, fake and delusional. If you just stop doing it, if you just never touch it again, you’ll forget about it, you’ll move on, you’ll survive. You’ll be whole again. All it takes to stop is to do nothing!

And of course, he went down the list and back up again a million fucking times, but his legs or whatever they were kept right on following that ask Jeeves looking mother fucker, as his skin began to warm, as if the light was already glowing on him from some unknown place.

And another Luke watched, and realized that he had never had a chance in hell, because the words of warning he spoke to himself before every dose might as well have been a commercial jingle. Useless without the meaning, the knowledge, the certainty that came, he now knew, paradoxically, only after the habit had been kicked.

It was the hope that was the true snare. Bliss had been ingeniously, insidiously designed, by a maker that was probably closer to God than anyone else kicking around the Other, and its twofold mechanism, of condensing and reflecting one’s own memories and ideals of happiness back at them but just out of reach, and of storing an altered memory of its own use that was far more satisfying than the actual event had been, was effective only because of a single facet of the Spirit. Hope.

It was Luke’s hope that kept him coming back, ultimately. Hope that real pure happiness could be grabbed, held in the hand, measured, bought, or even stolen.

A hope that was the pure defining feature of the Otherworld. A hope that only the Hardworlds could shatter.