The Man from Austin

////Drugs & Language

You need to think. Where is the man you met in Austin?

The club bass was blaring. Drum beats hit the concrete walls of the tunnel as I stumbled through the cinderblock hallway.

Leaning onto the walls as I went. Grabbing at anything that could give me support. My fingers scraped against the coarse edges.

My hands were raw and in pain, I looked down and let the throbbing go from my fingertips to my palms. Slowly the skin of my hands drooped and fell between my bones as it melted like a Dali painting. The skin spread like a thick, viscous interior paint.

I was melting. Two tabs of LSD can do this I guess.

The cinder blocks on the walls were talking to one another.

I need to get to the bathroom immediately. I'm tripping way too hard.

Now the surrounding walls swiveled and orbited one another like I was inside a kaleidoscope. Each twist and pull of the walls made the contents of my stomach move further and further toward my throat. I was going to explode.

Feeling back around the doorway, I plunged into the bathroom.

The air was different, cold, and humid.

The temperature changed my perception enough that now I was trudging through thick mud and mist. Like a swamp had engulfed me.

I was still dragging the puddles of my liquid hands on the floor behind me too.

"What the hell is going on?" I thought as I tried to run.

"I need a stall!" I yelled. "Get out of my fucking way!"

I dove towards the toilet in the nearest stall as people jumped out of my way.

Just as I began throwing up, my head was pulled on an imaginary string through the toilet itself. The world seemed to tilt on its axis as my body broke through the plane of existence. My consciousness was blurring.

Was the LSD doing this? I really should have taken fewer tabs. This was disorienting and uncomfortable.

I was now being pulled, and my body was engulfed in a current.

Was I underwater? No. I was just puking my guts at that club, no way was I anywhere else. I was just high. Or was I? Who was the DJ again?

My arms and legs couldn't move. I could only be pulled. Then, air.

I was in the air slapping against the surface of what I thought was water until I was slammed into the coarse anti-slip surface of a boat. I was a fish. I was being cleaned, and prepared for ice and transport. A man with a cleaver ready to chop each fin and inedible part of me.

The cleaver came down.

Chop!

I was being tortured. This was torture. Each chop was pain. I felt my body being torn apart. Was it my body?

The cleaver was coming down again and just as it was about to hit. The cleaver morphed into a baseball bat hitting my knee.

Where was this? How? The room was dark, mildewy, and smelt of old wood. Used wooden palettes were in the corner not ten feet away. The ceilings were high, and the rafters were made of thick steel beams.

I was in a warehouse.

A man with a bat was dressed in a black leather jacket and standing in front of me. He had a deeply scarred face and the same stature as the fisherman with the cleaver. His face had seen better days. I knew squirrels that looked better coming out of a wood chipper.

Wires and plugs connected to a vital signs monitor were on my right. It was beeping rapidly. My heart rate was elevated and it wasn't going down anytime soon. On top of that, I was tied to a metal chair with thick, scratchy, and moist rope.

I was trapped.

"So do you remember?" said the scar-faced man.

What the fuck was he talking about?

I managed a word, "What?"

My mouth and jaw began trembling. My body felt like it was falling apart.

I'm being interrogated? Looks like chemically induced interrogation with an added beating.

"You were at a bar in Austin. There was a man who sat next to you and asked if it was going to rain. That was his signal. Where is he?"

"I don—" I lost consciousness again and the next thing I knew I was hanging from a hook along with some dead pigs. Slowly moving along a line.

Where is he!

The man's voice echoed against the white tile room like some omnipotent god.

The hooks moved through an area where butchers trimmed and hacked off any parts that weren't to go to the store.

"Ok! Ok!" I said, "I know where he is!"

I flew out by the hook through the virtual plane and was sitting in the chair again.

"Where!?" the man said, tapping his baseball bat on the ground in urgency.

"He's by the river, at a storehouse that sells gear for hikes. He sold me the cocaine for downtown."

His eyes narrowed and the muscles in his face lost their tension. A crooked smile creeped across his face. The scars accented the evil river beds running along his face.

He had all he needed.

"Thank you, you've helped me long enough."

The scarred man raised the baseball bat and took aim right at my face. He wound up his hands for the swing, and thrust forward, then—blackness.

An alarm bell sounded. My vision was turning red and flashing.

"Failed attempt number four!" said a voice through a speaker.

"Come on Jesse! You're better than that! This is what happens when you have too many drinks before your yearly screening."

I sat suspended in a carbon fiber and vinyl chair with rubber padding. I had on a flexisuit made of nylon fiber and polyester. The suit covered me from my toes to my neck. It was suffocating.

I was still snapping out of it. Realizing what my world was and where I had been.

"Fuck!" I was upset. I had every reason to be.

I was disoriented and losing my cool. This wasn't my normal. I can do better for Langley. They've seen me in action. The CIA only recruits the best for the new drop team. But this was truly abnormal. Three failed attempts? I was nearly forty-eight years old but not that out of shape. Was the drinking really the problem? If Tom was right I swear I'll quit just out of pride.

"Fire it up again god damnit!" I yelled back.

I watched Tom press the button for the speaker in front of him. There was a slight delay from his lips and the sound coming out of the speaker in the glass.

"Whatever princess, but this one is the last one we got time for today."

I laid my head back into the cold rubbery seat and waited for the wires that coursed along the entry points in my suit to tense up with the chemical interrogation cocktail.

One more try.