This has been written for a while and should have been posted back when it was more relevant but who cares, here’s some content!
Standing gathered around the lightboard looking at x-rays that resembled a ghost’s portrait, the doctors decided the eye socket was the most suitable entryway to Mr. Jay’s brain, rather than drilling to remove a piece of the skull, the rind of bone, the pulp and the brainy pith. A lobotomy method was cheaper and assuredly safer than trepanning, ignoring the temporary sensitivity to light and temperature the eye would experience.
The machine did all the work. Matted steel arms swiveled in position, a soldierly gesture, precise movement as only autonomous beings could do. Tempered robotic phalanges cased in yellow rubber gripped a scalpel more deftly than any of the surgeons could claim to do without at least one drink.
One of the surgeon smeared Vaseline around the eye socket. With a whir the arm began to move. A robotic finger pushed away the eyeball, to it, nothing more than a berry floating in an encasement of gravy. Behind the sinus cavity the brain is pink and congealed, black redness where the space is. An incision made with a scalpel provides room for the microchip to slip in like a little insect, crawling into the fold to reach out her pincers and take neurons into her mouth. There she waited, dormant, away from the light.
Afterwards, the patient was quite mad, having never really received any physical pain during his testing except for perhaps the mild itching, stinging, burning, rashes, hallucinations, poxes, or strands of the common cold for more than a few days. He yelled at the aftercare nurse, then locked himself in the bathroom until his money and clothes were brought to him.
To stimulate the appropriate response, we slipped cold hard cash under the door, fanned out to show all ten hundred dollar bills.
“A coin in the tithing bowl is an investment in your soul,” as my late grandmother used to say. Mr. Jay, in the position to be his own type of judge, must have been placated, for after a bit of time quietly staying in the bathroom, which we later found out he was using to peel the security strips out of the bills, he came out dressed and remained docile until we showed him out the door.
I followed and like flood waters from the storm drains, my hired shadows came creeping to me. I threw their transmitters on the ground and crushed them with my heel. I gave them better ones. I checked their weapons. (They were fine.) I gave them photographs of their subject: Mr. Jay snorting powder in his car, Mr. Jay pissing on the side of a building, supporting himself with one had on the wall, Mr. Jay sleeping on spray-painted concrete, dead leaves and stillborn lotto tickets scattered around him like confetti at some party for the abolishment of fate.
My shadows watched as, of course, Jay got stoned. He met a boy in the parking lot behind Red Lobster. The youth came out with a broom, leaned it against the wall and took from his pocket a biscuit that he began to eat. When he saw Mr. Jay’s car coming, he finished the biscuit, took the broom and began to sweep water into a drain grate as he walked towards where the car was parking.
The window to the car rolled down and the kid leaned inside. “Oh shit! What happened to you? That’s fucked up, man. I don’t even wanna know, nevermind. Wassup? What you need?”
Mr. Jay handed him a hundred dollar bill. The kid laughed, said he wasn’t a cashier. Jay told him to give him what he could get for it.
“Aight, aight. Yea, here you go, get fucked up, man. But, watch out in them streets, man. It’s war out there.”
Mr. Jay backed out of the parking lot. He drove to a Revco where he went inside and bought two bottles of Nyquil. He spent the next few hours in his car, driving around, listening to the radio, sipping cough syrup, and sucking fumes out of a glass tube.
When night came I was able to use the darkness as my gateway, emerging again at another time and place. Jay was asleep in his car, parked under a bridge, the above passing traffic making thrump-thrump, thrump-thrump noises as the vehicles passed by, a fire in a barrel which made my hollow reflection jump and dance on the underneath of the bridge, a two dimensional troll with ESP undermining the stability of the span, Horner’s zoetrope showing dark thoughts to those only asking for safety during that vulnerable time between solid grounds.
