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SET CONTROLS FOR THE HEART OF THE SUN

Exordium

 

Imagine if you were able to see every person in the world that happened to be defecating at a given moment, altogether at the same time. You would look up at a huge cavernous canopy of assholes excreting into a void above you. And the sight of countless sphincters quivering and palpitating overhead would be combined with the collective, grisly stench of human effluent and the squelching rasps of half a billion dilating anuses. Although you think your situation is not real, you just cannot be sure. Escape would be impossible. Close your eyes and you risk drowning in putrid, reeking faeces; run for the door and there may be something even worse on the other side. Your need to leave the real world has been expropriated by your out of control subconscious, and you are being punished for your own suppressed, incoherent wants and desires.

The trip had begun well. Within thirty minutes of taking a hit I watched the artex-patterned ceiling develop into a vast rolling ocean above me, and sensed the sofa shift lightly so as to drift a small distance above the floor. The gentle drone of viola and mellotron from the hi-fi washed around the room and created a haze of ambient sound about me. Before long the music formed into visible waves that broke against the walls and floor with a gentle tidal ebb. The window glass sparkled with the crystallised points of orange light from the street lamps outside, some breaking free from the window frame and floating past me on currents of whispering, solidifying air. I settled down and began to luxuriate in the thick, cloying sumptuousness of a trip out of the real world and beyond my saturated ego.
It was probably the sound of screeching car tyres, crunching metal and the ensuing argument caused by the accident outside that shifted the course of the trip for the worse. I moved unsteadily over to the window and squinted to the street four storeys below. The concrete walkway and parapet prevented me seeing what was happening but I could make out the sound of inarticulate abuse being exchanged between the parties involved in whatever collision had taken place. The angry voices vibrated in the coloured night air and immediately I felt threatened.
I stumbled back to the sofa and attempted to filter out the fracas beyond, but already the ocean on the ceiling was becoming a dreary hue of brown and the music had lost its harmonious ambience and gained a repetitious, grating discordance. The sofa now felt hard and uncomfortable and I could not escape the suspicion that there were other people in the room, hiding from me: an undisclosed presence. My body prickled with sweat and my heart raced wildly. Gingerly, I leant over the arm of the sofa to check in the corner for whoever had entered the room. They were there, I knew, but the shadows hid them from me. They must have been Lilliputian in stature, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t grow larger whenever they desired. In fact, they had probably crept in through cracks and crevices as tiny creatures, and were about to expand into their monstrous bodies.
I huddled back into the middle of the sofa and listened to the shouting and yelling getting louder and closer. Then, suddenly, I realised that the beings hiding in my room had stolen the angry voices from outside and appropriated them for their own. They first whispered then yelled from their hiding places, each word diffusing from one end of the room to the other in succession and then above me, like an early stereo recording swapping sounds between speakers:
‘Fuckin’ arsehole… stupid bastard… twat…’
I looked upwards, from where the voices now seemed to come. The artex waves of the ceiling had turned into an unending expanse of dilating anuses. The scene was fascinating in its massive, grotesque obscenity. I could not look away despite a retching disgust at the sight, the all-embracing acrid smell and the insinuated – but at the same time real – juicy splatter of excrement on my face.
Then, finally, I saw the beings that had invaded the flat. My weirdly extended vision compelled me to range close up to the quivering sea of sphincters, where every now and then a Gollum-like head and torso would duck down below its own disembodied alimentary canal, cackle insanely and hurl a stream of broken invective at me: ‘Fackin’ arsehole, heh heh heh… shit arse, shit arse… splatter it, splatter it.’
The timeless horror of the night ahead stretched before me.
But then these are the risks you take when you allow LSD to take your mind down the neural rabbit hole.

I

I don’t really know how it happened to me. After their deaths, a year ago, it crept up on me when my defences were down and then burrowed deep inside like a neurological parasite intent on causing a pathological condition. But I didn’t notice the signs when they first appeared. There was probably a gestation period of several months as it slowly infiltrated me and imperceptibly changed my every thought, action and decision without me realising. I was just too overwhelmed dealing with my grief and guilt to see it getting a grip on me. The thousand shitty accoutrements of living alone on the blocks distracted the remainder of my energy until I was almost completely under its power. It was not as though I had it as bad as so many of the social refugees that inhabited the blocks: the single mothers on welfare and Valium, the junkies spiralling into oblivion, the isolated, hopeless elderly. Compared to them I would have said that I was quite low on the list of latent psychosis-timebombs. And yet within six months I was almost a prisoner in my own home, with only the flat and the walkway outside my front door offering safe refuge.
I should have been on medication during that time, but I never seemed to get around to going to the doctor. The fear of the crowded waiting room was one thing, but the dread of having to articulate my condition to a stranger was even worst. And despite the trauma no one from the Health Services ever got in touch to offer help of any kind. I now know that was an administrative mistake, I had slipped through the system, but at the time I had just thought that was how the system worked.
So I grew into myself, alone in the flat day after day, constantly thinking about them and what I had done but at the same time, without knowing it, gradually repressing each emotive image, each sensual memory of what we had been. As the months passed my neuro-parasite appended itself to the repression of my memories and I began sinking into a pit. It was a dank pit of despair and lethargy, both vying for precedence amidst the nameless days. All I was left with was an emotionless image of them turning round and round inside my head and a crippling dread of the world that had beaten me into a corner.   
There were no friends or family to help me through. They had always seemed unnecessary when it was the three of us. They had drifted away over the years. So I found myself interacting with no-one, talking only to myself and the few people who it was necessary to talk to in order to function. One was my cannabis dealer, a slicked-back nameless pouter on the ground floor of my block who had taken pity on me and supplied me with decent grade stuff at cost. He even delivered it to my door. And I needed it. Cannabis got me through that first six months. It allowed me to make it to the shops without being overcome by sweating palpitations and it allowed me to hold a conversation with another person without stammering my words into an embarrassing meaninglessness. I had replaced my GP with my dealer.
But still I had been confined to the flat for most of the time. It was my harbour from the brutality that I could sense as a predator outside. The beast sometimes took the form of people, but just as often it was simply buildings, traffic, noise, the never-ending maelstrom of the city. The flat was a refuge and a prison. I voluntarily incarcerated myself amidst the concrete blocks that so oppressed me, because even that was better than being outside.
 Then, six months ago, my parasite got tired of its attritional neurological war and burst out like a mental cluster bomb. On one of my rare trips to the shops I found myself in a crowded aisle being jostled by all and sundry. After the usual sweating, shaking and flushing I began to feel a surge of uncontrollable anger breaking down all my internal barricades. But the anger was not contained or directed in any way or at anything. It unleashed itself from God knows where and splattered itself in every direction. It was mixed up with visceral panic and a confusion that attempted to ricochet itself off every cerebral wall in my brain. All I remember is shouting and screaming, lashing out wildly at the people around me, and then passing out. Actually that’s not quite true. During a fleeting lucid moment I do remember landing a particularly satisfactory thwack onto the jowls of one old woman, who had been zealously pushing me to one side in her belligerent pursuit of the last half-priced can of black beans in front of me. Then I passed out. But I’ve never told anyone that I remember this.
Either way, I was hospitalised, sectioned for twenty-eight days and assigned to a psychiatrist. And now I’m taking LSD as the main constituent medication of my treatment.

I wandered outside onto the walkway for a constitutional joint after another unproductive day. It had been two days since my scatological trip and I had done nothing since. As usual, the days were made up of lying in bed or trying to read, the evenings of listening to music and observing the monotonous, rancorous routine of the blocks at night. The previous night I had not felt safe even on the walkway, because there was so much shouting and insidious movement everywhere.

I leant on the concrete and fibreglass parapet, carefully avoiding the weakened section where rusty iron rods poked out of two cracks that had been widening and contracting with the seasons for as long as I could remember. My view was a close trajectory of tenement blocks, some rising no higher than the five-storey block I lived in, but others eliminating the sky and imposing their grim cementious aspects over the relentless asphalt plan. In summer the front window of the flat was granted about twenty minutes per day direct sunlight as the sun moved between the two highest monoliths during the late afternoon. The rest of the time I lived in a constant shadow. It was as if the shade cast over the flat contained all the misery, sorrow and disappointed aspirations of the tenants in the tower blocks. A residue of their pitiful lives had become captured in the gloom that spread out from their concrete dwellings and embraced my home.
Reinforced-concrete tower blocks. They seemed imbued with a malady, a symbol of the urban underclass that had become a real sickness. The malaise was contained within the concrete itself, infecting us, unceasingly polluting our existence until it had gained control of every thought and action. The concrete oppression kept us in our place, opiated and disenfranchised from society, never able to clean off the grey qualm that signalled us out and which would never leave us. It reached deep down into our subconscious filling our dreams up like liquid cement in a foundation trench. Everyone knew this. At some level it seemed that we were collectively aware of each other’s depression. There was a subliminal recognition of our hopeless, stunted lives. Sometimes, in my claustrophobic, dimly lit dreams, I would see people from the blocks that I knew only by sight. They would be weeping and running their fingernails down endless lengths of concrete walls and running through dank underground tunnels beneath the blocks, always looking over their shoulders, afraid of where they were but without any ideas for finding a way out. And I knew that I was in their dream, their collective somnambulant confirmation of despair. I would be there. I had always been there. But I only realised it since I accepted the blame for necessitating the deaths of the only two people I had ever loved. 
The sound of two exasperated voices pulled me from my thoughts and drew my gaze to the third storey walkway of the block across the road about fifty metres away. A girl and boy, neither over eighteen, were making their way to the den at number thirty-three. It took them about five minutes to cover the short distance from the dilapidated stairwell to the front door due to interminable arguing, frequent finger pointing and backward stepping. Finally they reached their destination, knocked the door with furtive, unseeing glances around them, and were let in to the darkened interior. Two minutes later they sidled out of the half opened door, bickering and looking about nervously as though trying to conform to a stereotype of guileless junkies inexperienced in the world into which they had fallen. They disappeared into the stairwell and on to whatever version of reality they would find that night.
Their little act fed the grim inevitability of another evening in the blocks. Before long there was a stream of society’s toe-end on the way to the den and other lesser outlets. Singles, couples, gangs, young, old(ish), white, black, hooded and secretive, t-shirted and brash, talkative, silent, laughing like clowns, trying not to cry – but all of them, every last one, desperate and lost.
I stubbed out my third joint, went inside and double-locked the door.

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