You cook the powder down to a brown puddle and inhale the smoke with your straw. You feel like a whore with a mouthful of someone’s hate, and you hate yourself for loving the feeling.
Your Fisheater peels fish flesh and stuffs it into his mouth, his tiny shriveled penis engorging until it becomes the size of a small child’s, though he never achieves an erection. He watches until you are done smoking the small amount of drugs he could afford to bring, then slithers silently over the porch railing. He clings to the outside of the building and scratches the walls quietly beneath the clouds with their odd pink flashes of light, marking his territory with the whorls, arabesques, and octagons indigenous to his obsessions.
The first dream wasn’t that bad. Jim awoke tired, the tiny studio apartment already too warm. He could tell he was late for work by the angle of the sunlight slanting in through the small, undressed window above his bed.
He jumped out of bed, pulled on yesterday’s clothes, gargled with mouthwash, and ran out the door, making it to the bus stop just as the number nine pulled to the curb. When the driver asked him for his pass, however, Jim realized he’d left it back in his room, and when he ran home to his apartment to get it, he discovered he’d locked himself out. He broke the window to get in, and the apartment manager yelled at him.
He didn’t get to work until almost lunchtime. The girl at the dispatch desk wouldn’t look at him. She slid a small cardboard box across the reception desk. The contents of his locker: a towel, bar of soap, stick of deodorant, and an old paperback copy of The Man in the High Castle.
The Salvation Army said this was the last job they would find for him. He was on his own now. His clothes stank, he hadn’t had a shower in two days, he was hungry, and — as always — tired.
He picked up an abandoned newspaper from a table outside a coffee shop, and checked the Help Wanted section for unskilled labor jobs. There were three, all places he’d been fired from already. He went back to the halfway house and asked to use their washer and dryer, but the lady in charge was new. She didn’t recognize Jim, and she wouldn’t let him in. He went home, taped a piece of cardboard over his broken window, and fell asleep though it was only three in the afternoon.
Your Fisheater brings a woman this time. It has been a long time since he could afford to bring a woman. You can smell her outside on the landing, sex and hunger and shame wafting beneath the locked door. You wait impatiently as the Fisheater breaks into your apartment, the same as last night, the same as always.
You become aroused the moment he opens the front door and lets her in, because you know what he will want. Deep down inside, beneath your hiding and feigned revulsion, you are glad the Fisheater controls you, glad he hot-wires you into his obsessions and uses you, glad you are unable to fight it.
Sin without accountability — the gift of the Fisheater.
You can’t go to him right away; like last night and all the other nights, you must try to abstain, though you are impatient to be started. You are already imagining the ritual.
You and the girl will take off all your clothes. You will stand naked before the Fisheater, and it will inspect both of you. You will feel shame at its gaze, but you will not be permitted to cover yourselves. Then the girl will lie down on her back, on your floor, directly in front of the Fisheater’s chair. She will lift her legs and spread them, using her hands to spread her vagina, open a portal to her soul, like a vortex you’re are unable to look away from. And you will crawl — like an animal, drooling and shaking, eyes on her hole, your attention focused inside of her — until you are above her, genitals to face to genitals to face, hunger to satiation, a perfect loop. You will stay this way until your muscles ache and you are both insane with want and hunger and need.
Then the Fisheater will tap its staff on the ground and you will be released. You will consume each other to consummate your marriage of guilt and shame. You will ejaculate and taste the essence of your own energy inside her, and the taste will make you come again. Which will make her come again, and you will circulate this energy, like two batteries hooked up in series, positive to negative to positive to negative, until the Fisheater wishes you to stop.
When he has had his fill, he will crawl out over the railing, leaving you and the girl to avoid each other’s gaze while he scratches his patterns on the wall.
He is ready now. You can tell from the taste of self-loathing — artificial though it may be — in your mouth. You crawl across the moonlit floor to gorge yourself on hunger again.
The second dream was worse. Jim went to the Nevada Mental Health Institute as soon as he woke in his studio. Leslie, the receptionist, agreed to let him stay in the waiting room even though he didn’t have an appointment.
He kept glimpsing Cui-ui out of the corner of his eye, as if the dark city were bleeding into the day world like mold growing on a white wall. He saw piranha teeth in Leslie’s thin, obligatory, administrative smile; felt kinship with the goldfish in the bowl on her desk; and tasted amphetamines in the salty perspiration on his upper lip. His stomach growled, and the hunger reminded him of Cui-ui too.
He dozed in the chair most of the day, fish-shaped shadows swimming behind his eyelids. Finally, after six hours, the receptionist said, “You can see Doctor Duncan now. Down this hall here, just follow the blue line.”
Doctor Duncan’s office was a single-wide trailer attached to the outside of the building by a ramshackle wooden walkway reminiscent of the architecture of Cui-ui. The doctor’s bloodshot eyes, disheveled hair, rumpled shirt, and loosened tie testified to a long day of dealing with the rotting sanity of the Reno Metro area.
“What can I help you with, Mr. Jim?” asked Doctor Duncan, sighing, already exasperated.
“It’s the dreams again, sir,” said Jim, talking a little too loud to cover his suddenly growling stomach. “I lost another job because I couldn’t wake up. And even when I’m up I can’t stay awa—”
“We’ve been through this before,” said the doctor. He shut a manila folder with Jim’s name on it, and tossed it on the desk. “I can’t prescribe you anything unless you’re a patient here, and if you were a patient here, I wouldn’t prescribe anything anyway.”
“I’m not asking for—”
Doctor Duncan raised a hand and Jim stopped talking. “What you really need, Jim, is a clean system. You did quite a number on yourself last Christmas. No one can do that much crystal meth and not have some negative side effects.”
“But I haven’t—” began Jim.
“Long term,” interrupted Doctor Duncan, “side effects. You’re lucky you didn’t die.”
“I don’t feel lucky,” said Jim.
“If Leslie hasn’t already gone home for the day, you can pick up an admittance request form at the receptionist’s desk,” said the doctor, standing. “Mail that form to NMHI’s head office, and a caseworker will contact you within four weeks. Now if you will excuse me…”
“But—” said Jim, already rising to leave, habitually responding to the doctor’s cue.
“Really, Jim. I must insist you leave now.” The doctor sighed. “And stay away from the drugs.”
Leslie, the receptionist, was not at her desk when Jim left. Jim checked the desktop, to see if maybe she had left the forms for him to fill out, but the reception desk was empty save for the fishbowl. The fish watched him, its bulging eyes accusing.
He tucked the fishbowl under his arm and took it with him. At home, he cut the tiny fish into pieces, ate them slowly, drank the water in the bowl, and fell asleep.
You awake at home, on Cui-ui. The girl is still here. You can hear her crying in the dark though you can’t see her.