The Mind is a Razorblade

by Max Booth III

  I push him against the wall. “What do you have to say now?”

  I press the muzzle against his dark cheek and watch as the tears stream down his face. Hell, he’s maybe fifteen at most. What am I doing? Am I really holding a gun on a child? For Christ’s sake, he’s about to piss his pants.

  Why is no one stopping this?

  How far can I take this before someone intervenes? If I pull the trigger, would anyone so much as bat an eyelash?

  Would I be arrested?

  I know what arrested means. I know shooting people in the face is exactly the type of thing that’d result in being arrested. But would anyone call the police? Would the police even care? Who’s going to clean up this poor kid’s brains from the wall once the ugly deed is done? How many people would I be able to kill before someone stopped me? Could I kill them all?

  I could own these streets.

  I could own this whole goddamn world.

  These violent thoughts of mine, they make me shake, make me wonder what type of person I really am. But then again, maybe some things are best left unknown.

  Maybe living the rest of my life in the dark isn’t the worst fate. No one wants to live in the light. It gets too bright and gives you a headache. The bulb becomes intolerably hot and you end up burning your hand on it sooner or later. Light is bad news. The darkness is my friend. It understands my condition, and rather than emphasize my situation, it instead sings me a lullaby to help me forget all my troubles.

  Maybe some things are best off locked in the cellar. Maybe this whole lost memory is a blessing in disguise.

  Maybe this is all some crazy dream.

  Either way, I now have somewhat of a hostage on my hands, and I must deal with him in an orderly fashion.

  Note: don’t make him explode.

  Don’t make him explode.

  I wave the gun as menacing as I can and say, “Well, you gonna take me to this place or not?”

  The kid tries to regain his cool posture. “Yeah, fine. I’ll take you. But after you answer this one question. And you have to be honest.”

  I relax, returning the gun to my pocket. “Okay. Go for it.”

  The kid points behind me and goes, “What the fuck is that?”

  Of course I turn around, and of course there’s nothing remarkable behind me. When I turn back around, the kid is halfway down the street.

  Well, shit.

  chapter six

  I’m left with two choices. One, I chase after the kid—or two, I let him go and continue trying to find this club by myself.

  I’m sick of being by myself.

  I push a naked cross-eyed man to the ground and sprint into the sweaty, disgusting mass of pedestrians. Thankfully, he isn’t too short, and I can see his shaven scalp bouncing above the sea of heads. I follow it, not caring whose feet I step on. It’s their own fault for not getting out of my way fast enough.

  I can’t tell if the funny bunnies are helping or slowing me down. I consider ditching them, but at this point, it’s almost as if they’re a part of me now. The thought of losing them sends a shiver down my spine. Instead I push forward, eyes wide and on the watch for the kid’s bouncing scalp.

  I shout for him to stop but my voice is drowned out by the city’s noise pollution. The kid’s head disappears, and I’m certain I’ve lost him. I’m back by myself, left to find this club alone, left to wander this place forever, never finding any answers, never coming any closer to cracking this enigma that is my brain.

  (her hand wraps around my hand and we both squeeze lightly, just enough to feel each other’s presence. her nails are red, not red like fire but red like sweet cherries, red like comfort, red like warmth, red like home. her hand squeezes in a way that tells me i will never be alone, that she’ll always be here for me and everything will be okay, but when i look up, her face is blocked by her long red hair, red like her fingernails. ‘i want to see you,’ i say, and she tells me all i have to do is open my eyes.)

  The kid scrambles over a sleeping vagrant on the sidewalk and flings himself into an alley opening. I head in the same direction, but a morbidly obese elderly naked woman grabs onto the back of my coat collar and pulls me to the ground. She stands above me and her breasts sag down to her knees, slapping against my chest as she kneels.

  “You!” she screams. “Give me your soul! Give me your soul right now!”

  “Jesus Christ,” I cry out, and kick her off me. She goes tumbling backward, somersaulting across the pavement. She screeches as countless vagabonds trample her. I climb to my feet and rush past them all, continuing toward the alleyway. My funny bunnies drown in countless puddles as I plunge deeper into the shadows.

  I pass a dumpster and stop, retreating back to the container. I consider getting my gun back out, but fear accidentally pulling the trigger in the heat of the moment, so I leave it in my trench coat pocket. I reach up and slowly push the dumpster lid open, peering inside. “You in there?”

  “Piss off!” a voice returns from inside.

  “Can’t you see we’re busy here?” another voice says.

  “Hey, he’s kind of hot. Wanna join?” a third voice asks.

  I apologize and quickly close the dumpster. Gross.

  Farther down into the alley, I discover a blank steel door. A filthy, shaggy man sits in the dirt next to it, leaning against a pile of bricks. A rubber tube tied in a tourniquet hangs loosely from his bicep.

  “Hey,” I say, and gesture to the door. “Did you see a little black kid go in there a few seconds ago?”

  The man grunts, then spits a glob of something purple out. “Last time I saw anything, the devil himself was above me. Devil says, ‘Johnny, you done been a bad boy, Johnny, you gonna pay for your misdeeds. Johnny,’ he says, ‘you gonna jerk out fire and shit maggots.’ And then I see no more.”

  He spits again.

  Everyone in this city is a goddamn lunatic. I move past him and open the door. The smell of something foul and toxic punches me in the face and knocks me a few steps back.

  The man on the ground squeals of laughter. “Only thing in there’s Conundrae ready to bite yo dick off and shove it up yo ass.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll take my chances.” I inhale a great gust of air and lunge into the building. The door immediately slams shut behind me, trapping me in the darkness of the room.

  I wave my hands wildly in front of me and walk forward, following the sound of hurried footsteps. I assume it’s the kid still running away, but realistically it could be just about anybody. Or anything. After the pale spider creature, nothing is impossible.

  I wander aimlessly through darkness and eventually discover a staircase. I fumble for the handrail and climb, my grip around the wood so tight it’s probably turning my knuckles white. Anything could be here in the shadows, waiting for me. A gargantuan beast with an unhinged jaw might be resting at the top of the stairs, just hanging out until I walk straight into his mouth. Or I could be walking into nothing. The building could be empty. The kid might already be gone. Or the kid might not even exist. Maybe none of this exists. I am still unconscious back at the river. This is all a dream. A hallucination conjured by a damaged mind.

  “What the fuck did you think you were doing, huh?”

  The voice brings me back to reality, back to the shadows. I suck in my breath and act like a statue. At the top of the staircase a gleam of light flickers in and out of existence. More than one person is up there. One of them’s whimpering, almost crying. It’s the kid.

  “I...I’m sorry,” he says. “I was being chased by a crazy person. I just ran into the first door I saw.”

  “Well, how convenient for you that you happened to see this door first, right?” a woman says. She giggles.

  “I didn’t see nothing,” the kid says. “I swear to fucking God I didn’t see nothing!”

  A man laughs. “Boy, does this look like God’s kingdom to you?”

  Silence for a moment, then the kid screams out.

  “I
asked you a question. Does this look like God’s kingdom to you?”

  “N-n-no! No!”

  “Then why you swearin’ to him, huh? You actin’ ridiculous.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t cut me.”

  “Do it,” the woman says. “Cut the little prick. No, wait, cut his prick off. We can play catch with it or feed it to Brutus.”

  The kid squeals.

  “Nah,” the man says. “Brutus has plenty of food from the last asshole we caught. This kid, I got something special in mind.”

  “Watcha thinkin’, baby?”

  “You know what I’m thinking.”

  “Conundrae?” the woman asks, and I swear I can hear the man nodding. She replies back with another heinous fit of giggling.

  There’s a lot of moving around, feet scuttling, something being dragged, and the kid starts screaming.

  “No! What are you doing? What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Oh shut up,” the woman says. “Consider yourself lucky. Not everyone gets to sacrifice themselves to a god.”

  I move forward, careful not to make the staircase creak as I step onto the landing of the second floor. I crouch behind a support beam, peeking my head out and watching the scene across the room. Small lanterns hang from the ceiling, barely shedding enough light to see. But what I can see is horrifying.

  A man and a woman, both naked, both covered in sores and scars and pus, stand above the kid. The kid’s flat on his back, limbs stretched out and tied to various hooks in the wooden floorboards. The man holds a large hook, softly pressing the tip of the blade against the kid’s chest. Dismembered torsos hang by chains from the ceiling, next to the lanterns. The floors are stained red and black with blood. Satanic symbols are scribbled over the walls, accompanied with words like “CONUNDRAE” and “APOCALYPSE”.

  I gotta play it cool here. These people are clearly psychopaths. I need to sneak up on them, take advantage of the element of surprise.

  And, of course, just as I take another step, my foot breaks the floorboard beneath me. I try to wiggle free, but my funny bunny is so big, my foot’s stuck between the wood.

  Both of the psychos look in my direction at once. “Now who the hell is that?” the man says.

  “That’d be the crazy cracker chasing me,” the kid says.

  “And you led him here?” the woman asks.

  “Holy shit, lady, do you not understand what the word ‘chase’ means?”

  The man kicks the kid in the face and the kid shuts up, then looks back at me. “So, what do ya say? You feelin’ up to being devoured by our great Lord and Master?”

  “Well, uh, not really.”

  “That’s okay. We don’t actually need your permission.”

  “Then why’d you ask?”

  “It’s easier when you’re agreeable.”

  I nod. “Makes sense.”

  The man and woman sprint toward me, the man holding up his hook and the woman holding out her long fingernails like claws. They’re maybe five feet away from me when the floorboards crack again, only this time a much larger section of the wood disintegrates. Both the man and woman fall straight through the floor, to the ground level of the building.

  I take a few steps forward and look down into the newly created hole. They lay down on the floor below, motionless.

  Well. That was a freebie.

  I move around the hole, careful with my steps, fearing the same fate. I bend down and unhook the kid from his chains.

  “Get up,” I tell him.

  He groans, slowly sitting. “You saved me, yo.”

  “They did most of the work.”

  The kid points behind me and says, “Looks like we’re still fucked.”

  I turn around and notice a huge black canine standing behind me, staring at us and growling.

  “That must be the Brutus they were talking about,” the kid says. “They were gonna feed that dog my dick.”

  “Nice doggie,” I whisper, and the dog responds with a viscous bark. It springs at me and I jump to my feet, his snapping jaws missing my face by mere inches. I spin around and run at full speed in the opposite direction of the dog. It quickly gives chase.

  “Nice doggie!” I scream, looking over my shoulder at the dog as I run blindly through the building. It occurs to me that the possibility of falling through the wooden floor is very high, but before I have time to really think about it, I instead run through a glass window.

  I fly through the night sky.

  It only lasts momentarily.

  chapter seven

  “Hey, man, you all right?”

  For a moment I think I’m back at the river, drowning in the mud. But when I open my eyes, the kid is standing above me, extending his hand down. I reach up and take it, grunting as he pulls me to my feet.

  “Shit, man,” the kid says, “that was a long fall. I’m surprised you’re still alive.”

  I look up at the busted window three stories above us. The shard of glass sticking in my neck stings like hell, but I’ll live. I pull the glass out and drop it in a puddle, then crack my neck.

  I nod to the end of the alley. “Well, take me to this fucking club.”

  The kid thinks about it a moment, then says, “Yeah, all right. I can do that.”

  The streets have returned to their own little bizarre normality. Keeping a careful eye on my new guide in front of me, I try my best not to grunt or limp. I twisted my ankle something fierce on the fall down. Plus if the patch of warm wetness on my back is any indication, there must be more shards in my flesh.

  It’s amazing how loud the night is, yet when I look around, no one is saying anything. Even the crazies shouting about the end of the world have quieted down. The noise, it isn’t coming from the voice of another human. This is the voice of despair, screaming its prized melody—backup vocals contributing to hoarse coughs and unstable shopping cart wheels. The monorail no longer passes over us all, otherwise this desperate orchestra would have never been noticed.

  If I continue letting this hopeless music sink into my soul, there’s a good chance I’ll snap and go crazy long before finding out what I want to know. I need a distraction. Anything to pull me out of the gritty reality of this city, of this world.

  I quicken my pace so I’m alongside the kid guiding me through these streets and casually bump his shoulder. I clear my throat. “Uh, hey.”

  He glares at me with the corners of his eyes. “Uh, what?”

  “What’s your name?”

  I’m not sure I give a shit about his name. Obviously he’s just another one of these bleak pedestrians—no special purpose of any kind as far as I can tell. Unlike the others, however, he was lucky enough to notice when the creepy apparition of a surgeon tried to violate me. And he was lucky enough that I followed him up those steps to save his sorry ass from those cultists.

  But the question that’s driving me crazy is if the other vagabonds hadn’t been busy setting fire to the drugstore, would they have actually noticed the creature breathing me in? Would they have batted an eye when the thing exploded into tiny spiders? They didn’t seem to give a shit when I was sticking a gun in an adolescent’s face, threatening to blow his head off.

  Either way, anything’s better than listening to this city’s melancholic composition. So unrelenting in its evil ways. Hear it long enough and it’s bound to depress the hell out of you.

  “Aerosol,” the kid says.

  “What?”

  “Aerosol. That’s my name. Aerosol. The peeps be calling me Aero, though. Not that you’re a peep, of course. You see, peeps don’t hold people at gunpoint. Crazy fuckin’ cracker. I know people who could decapitate you with a pair of fingernail clippers, just like that.” He snaps his fingers. “All I have to do is give the word.”

  “What the hell is a peep? Why are you named Aerosol? That is a stupid name.”

  “Oh, I guess your name’s so much better, huh?” he asks, clearly offended. Like I care if I’m offensive.
I apparently sell stolen hearts for a living, for Christ’s sake. He’ll just have to deal with it.

  “I hope so.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “Guess.”

  “What?”

  “Guess my name,” I tell him. “Go ahead.”

  “Okay.” Aerosol nods. “How about Dickhead?”

  “Wow, good guess.”

  “Oh shut up.”

  I smirk. “So, why do they call you Aerosol?”

  “’Cause it’s my name.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why do they call you Dickhead?”

  “’Cause I am.”

  “Oh.”

  We walk a few more minutes in silence, letting the city’s depression seep into our pores and mix within our chemicals. The street never ends. Not once have we taken a turn, not even a slight curve—just one straight stretch of pavement, accompanied by boarded up buildings.

  No matter how hard I try to concentrate, all sense of time seems to have evaporated. Just as I think I’ve finally figured out how long we’ve been walking, Father Time pulls the rug out from under my feet. I briefly sneak a glimpse at Father grinning maliciously right before I fall into a colossal hourglass, shattering the walls and slamming into its epic contents. It does not take long before my body begins sinking into its innards. Caught in a slow, drawn out panic, I feel the weight of my lungs swelling inside me, drowning in a sea of an infinite conglomeration of sand. Each block could account for either five minutes or five days. Nothing will surprise me at this point.

  “So, tell me, Dickhead,” Aerosol says, “how much bacon did that piece end up costing you?”

  “Bacon?”

  “Yeah, man—bacon. I’m betting it was some crispy bacon, too, huh?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He waves his hand dismissively. “Man, never mind, just forget about it.”

  Of course I know what bacon is. Bacon is delicious. Bacon is good, yet at the same time, bad for your life force. So this means sometimes bad equals good—therefore, does that mean good sometimes equals bad? It’s an equation I’ll probably never understand. Does anyone? Maybe we’re just expected to accept it and move on with our lives.