Art Along the Aether, Chapter 6 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.

The council had a vote, not before belaboring the pros and cons of America’s favorite skinhead on the first floor. The campaign field was wide and empty, for as it turned out in the council’s proxy speeches and diatribes, Shitheels had a shit job taken willingly and it would be a Doc Marten miracle if anybody else wanted it. And not that it was the council’s decision in the first place; democracies swung on a ballot, and the Ramen box one of the tweakers brought up contained more than a few slips of paper decorated in abstract scrawl on them, only one of which approximated the phrase “Shitheels for life!” And so, with the votes cast and only one counted, Shitheels was elected Prime Minister, Pit Boss, and Head of Security. And Sheriff.

They returned to the business of governing, but reduced to the minutiae of keeping a hundred-and-twenty thousand square foot, three story flophouse running. The group was invited to sit in on the discussion, and were even invited to join the council, to replace members tired of endless meetings, but they declined. All except Deke, who found it a perfect place to pitch his herbal enterprise, and Harry, who decided it preferable to be a cog in the machine than be the third wheel to Sarah and Ollie, the two of whom took a walk among the rows of parts.

Ollie grabbed for Sarah’s hand, and she pressed it to her outer thigh.

“We okay?” Ollie said.

“Sorry,” Sarah said. “Just having a moment. My pink cloud is on the fritz.”

“You sure it was good for us to come here?”

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “You know like when you go to a movie thinking you’re going to hate it, then you see it and it’s not that bad, but you talked shit about it to everyone you knew, so now you feel like an asshole, or a hypocrite?”

“I never feel one way or another about movies.”

“It’s a metaphor.”

“I never feel one way or another about metaphors,” Ollie said. “Just tell me what’s up?”

“This place,” she said. “I came here to face my fears, you know. To keep it green. To rescue my friend from the hell I was just a part of a month ago today. I came here to prove a point. And maybe to feel superior. But this isn’t something I expected. This floor. These people. A fucking council. This place is supposed to be anarchy, Ollie. A shithole. Not music.” She pointed up to the sky. “Not art. Not a damn woman writing poetry and burning it to light everything. And what the hell is God? Do we even want to see a man, if it is a man, they call ‘God’?”

“Well, it was your idea to come here,” Ollie said. “You wanna go?”

“No,” she said. “Can you just feel one way or another about all this? I know, I know, you go with the flow, that’s why I got with you. Still waters run deep. But maybe I need a fucking ripple here.”

“I want to stay,” Ollie said. “And I don’t just mean tonight, right now. I want to go get a tent and pitch downstairs. Go to the apartment and grab my guitar, go to Jeremy’s house and trade it for an acoustic and just stay here. I want to do dope again. I want to be a scumbag to my parents now that they’re opening up to give me another chance. But I won’t do any of that because of you. So I need you to hate this place just a little, cause I’m only getting a one-man tent.”

“You want to go back to using dope?”

“Yeah, of course,” Ollie said. “Every fucking day I gotta deal with all the shit I put everyone through and I’m like what, ‘sorry, addiction’s a bitch?’ My parents grew up shitty, they didn’t get addicted to smack. Lots of people grew up shitty and didn’t get hooked on shit. Why was I so weak? That’s hard to deal with, and we haven’t even gotten to the dark-ass thoughts that pop in my head, unwelcome. I want to go back everyday, and if it weren’t for you, I would.”

“I can’t have that kind of pressure on me, Ollie,” she said. “I’m barely holding it together.”

“So lean on me and I’ll lean on you.”

“And what happens if I can’t?”

“Same thing that’ll happen if I can’t,” Ollie said. “Look, codependent relationships suck, but it’s what we got right now. What we need right now. You want to go home, we will, we’ll hit the couch and watch dumb shows till dawn.”

“No. I need to find Juli.”

“Well, she’s got to want to be found. What if you get to her and she wants to stay?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

They wander the rows of supplies quietly, Sarah offering her hand to Ollie, he handing her a small crystal snowglobe off one of the piles, most likely pilfered from a dollar store. The supplies were stacked like tetris, illuminated in the blue light emanating from the innards of the dragon above, likely battery-operated strings placed strategically along its ribs. They made it to where they could barely hear the council, and Ollie stroked Sarah’s hair.

“I love you, Sarah,” he said. “I’ll do anything for you.”

Sarah pressed the side of her head against his chest. “I might just need you to do that,” she said. “Anything. And I love you too.”

They made their way back to the council, and to a commotion at the doorway. They looked to see the poet, holding her chest to catch her breath.

“We need help upstairs,” she said. “We have an overdose. The doctor’s trying to revive her. She came to see God and she just collapsed. Juli’s with her. We need a few hands.”

Sarah grabbed Ollie by the collar. Ollie flagged Deke, who flagged Harry, and like a rope of seaweed dragging old, caught hooks, the four of them headed for the third floor.

They were met on the stairs by Shitheels, who ran past them and shouted “no, no, no, no…” which, as he didn’t yet know the election results, would wind up being either his inaugural address or his refusal to serve.

The stairs felt heavy to Ollie, heavier than the stairs to the second floor. After all, they were going to see God, or at least do a flyby on the way to a troubled soul. He had butterflies in his stomach and he felt like he had swallowed a net. He could give a fuck about God. God could hop in a VW Microbus with Jesus and the Holy Spirit and they could go to Burning Man for all he cared. He wasn’t anxious over God, or whoever in there was impersonating Him. He feared a stone-dead junkie that could’ve wore his face the month before, stone lungs, heart asleep at the switch, bacteria in his gut planning the sack of Rome. He feared the results of the plunge that took a young adventurer away too far and too fast and would take them to God, the real God, the everlasting breadth of the indifferent void that somehow knew their name and prayed for them in secret.

They got an atheist’s reception when they went through the third-floor doors. No God. No throne save for a crack in a door at the far end of the floor, light like the council’s, real light, but flickering like the trash cans of the first floor, casting a shimmer on the ceiling above and floor below.

But that wasn’t the center of the room. The center of the room was surrounded by portable generators, fat hoses carrying exhaust to cutouts in the windows, cords bunched together with zip-ties travelling through the side doorway and likely downstairs; even more likely the reason no one seemed to be using the south stairwell.

But in the middle of the middle of the warehouse’s ad-hoc power supply was what could best be described as a lounge, or even an outer sanctum, and in that lounge, that outer sanctum, on the floor, was a man, thirties, dressed in a windbreaker and jeans, T-shirt beneath, and Ollie was hard pressed to understand why he couldn’t even get a winter jacket donated to him by the homeless shelters. He was out, and there was another man, more carefully dressed, kneeling by his side, a small white bottle in his hands, a sprayer with the business end up the prone man’s nose. Ollie would be stupid not to know it was Narcan.

The doctor, for lack of a better term, made a fist and, with some force, ran his knuckles down the prone man’s breastbone. Once, twice, three times… and the prone man coughed and tried not to be prone.

“Ricky, you’re okay,” the doctor, actually a doctor said. “It’s Doctor Morelli. You’re okay. You had an overdose. I used Narcan, but it’s not going to last too long. We have to get you to a hospital.”

Doctor Morelli looked up. “Do any of you have a car?”

“They do,” a young woman with pink hair pointed to Ollie and the group. “One of them does. One of them has to.”

Ollie and Sarah looked at Deke, lest the doctor and the girl, Juli, look at them. Deke backed up, hands out.

“Not me, man,” he said. “I didn’t plan on even being here this long. Just sell my shit and boot.” He looked down at the man on the ground. “Weed,” he said. “Not his jive.”

Doctor Morelli got up, and it impressed upon them all that he was a very large man. He could’ve thrown the OD on his back and ran him to the hospital through the snow, but he had no intention of doing it.

“I have to stay here,” he said. “If I don’t, other people could die. If you came here for some kind of good time…”

“We came here for you,” Sarah pointed to Juli. “I want to get you out of here. If we take him to the hospital, will you come with us?”

Juli looked at Doctor Morelli, who shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “But I’m coming back. I know you got clean. I’m not up for an intervention.” She looked down at the OD, who was sitting up and swearing. “Not yet.”

“No fucking way,” Deke said. “It’s my car. What happens if this guy dies? Cops find a dead man in a drug dealer’s car, and then I’m getting my ass eaten out by D-Block. No way.”

“Deke, this guy dies and we don’t even try, we might as well have killed him,” Sarah said.

“No, that would be heroin,” he said. “We didn’t stick a rusty needle in his arm. I just can’t, guys.”

Ollie wrapped his arm around Deke’s shoulder. “We’re friends to the end, right?”

“Don’t pull this shit on me, Ollie. No friend favors on this.”

“That could’ve been me. A month ago, it nearly was. Would you have left me here? Cause I could’ve died in your car, and it would’ve been the same story, same D-Block.”

“This ain’t fair, man.”

“Look, he’s going to go under again in a few minutes if we don’t do something,” Doctor Morelli said. “Is your car close? We can find a driver if that’ll make you feel more comfortable.”

Deke tensed up. “Fine, I’ll do it. I ain’t dragging him out. And I need to bring someone with who’s responsible for him. I don’t even know the guy.”

“I’ll find someone.”

Deke turned to Ollie. “You and Sarah are going to have to find your own way home. I won’t have room, cause Harry’s coming with, and two in the back is two in the back.”

“We’ll manage,” Ollie said.

“The fuck I’m going,” Harry said.

“The fuck you are,” Deke said. “I’ve got more than enough leverage over you. I know where all your dead are buried.”

Harry took a breath and, without a word, helped the doctor gather the overdosed man to his feat, which amounted to a miracle, perhaps meager evidence to the fact that God was in the building. Doctor Morelli whispered into Shitheels’s ear, and then Deke, Harry, and Shitheels carried the astronaut off the platform.

Juli and the Poet divvied up scraps of paper and walked over to Ollie and Sarah.

“Before we go,” Juli said. “We have to attend to God. Would you like to see Him?”

Sarah’s hand was damp with sweat, with the tears of her anxious body. Ollie could feel her palm’s pulse, purple-veins as potholes black side streets under arterial overpasses. Sarah was the still of a fearless woman learning something new. Ollie was cool, collected in no way, shape of form plussed by the prospect of meeting his maker, because as far as he knew, his maker left his mother in the back of a Geo Metro on the dead-end of a quiet suburban Avenue, a street he knew because his mother had the tacky sense to name him after it. God was no one to him, and whatever poor thing they had fashioned into God was probably as real as the sideshow that filled Sunday coffers.

The Poet stopped them at the door, the light so intense it gave her an angel’s aura.

“He won’t talk,” she said. “Please don’t expect that. It’s his presence that’s important. You can talk to him, and you can ask him any question you want, but don’t expect him to respond.”

“What’s the point, then?” Ollie said. “I could talk to God rifling through a dumpster.”

“You can be disrespectful. That’s allowed. God bears our sins.”

“How does he tell you if he has to eat or shit?”

“Ollie, stop,” Sarah said. “No more.”

“No, it’s okay, people have questions.” The Poet glanced back at the light. “He knows how to get up and go to the bathroom. He can eat and dress himself. I doubt anyone would believe in a God that couldn’t do those things.”

“How long has He been here?”

“On an off for years. No one really knows. The cops clear this place out and then a few days later, he shows up, and we rebuild.”

“So he runs this place,” Ollie said.

The Poet shook her head. “Nobody runs this place, not even God.”

The Poet opens the door and its light in its undivided nature. Small, steel trashcan fire pour liquid into a myriad of incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. Neon signs and color-strung lights made Ollie feel like if there was a heaven, if God wasn’t a one-size-fits-all punchline, the warehouse would’ve nailed the light scheme.

In all the lumen, it was almost impossible to see God, not without a moment for Ollie’s eyes to adjust. But they did see beyond the light, and he did see God, and it was not at all like he would’ve expected.

God was dingy. God wore a sweatshirt and soot-streaked jeans, the sweatshirt only a title, truly a Frankenstein’s monster of many shirts stitched together with thick twine. He was balding, his white hair wild, leading the charge from one side of his scalp to conquer the other, and his wire-frame glasses, pristine, hung low on his nose as he read a book. None caught Ollie’s eye but what was written of God’s patchwork sweatshirt in fat black marker.

Loser.

Scumbag.

Freak.

Asshole.

Cocksucker.

Psycho.

There were more, and probably more on the back, and Ollie had to guess many more on the pile of such shirts upon which God sat, encircled by a ring of books a yard thick.

Both Ollie and Sarah didn’t know what to say to God, or even to the Poet, who was stuffing her poetry into a trashcan that had gone to embers, bringing it back to life as she set three books in it from God’s ring like firewood.

To further astonish, and perhaps to answer a question Ollie hadn’t the wherewithal to ask, God picked up a black marker and, finding a clean spot, wrote down the word “junkie” across his chest.

“Did he just write that for us?” Sarah asked the Poet. “Junkie? Does God think we’re junkies?”

The Poet stood beside them to inspect the new word. “No, God writes that often. He… he takes on the sins, all of them. The hurt, the pain, the judgments. That’s why people come to him. That’s why He’s God.”

Ollie noticed a podium sitting off to the side. “Is there like Mass here?” He said. “Is there a Bible for this God?”

The Poet brought her fist to her lips and chewed on the skin of her index finger. “There was,” she said. “My book. But it was stolen.”

“That’s pretty ballsy,” Ollie said.

Sarah poked him. “Language.”

“He has cocksucker written on his shirt. He probably don’t care, Sarah.”

“I wrote a book,” Sarah said. “My masterpiece. And God told me, the way he does, to come and burn it, like a test of faith. And I went to, but he stopped me. Told me to burn one of his books instead. And since then, we just burn his books when we need warmth.”

“Burning books isn’t cool,” Ollie said. “What kind of God wants you to burn books?”

“The kind that knows when a book isn’t being read by anybody, it’s already burned.” The Poet turned to attend the fire. “You should go see Him, instead of asking me questions, ask him.”

Ollie shifted his weight, aimed his stare upon the Omnipotent hobo sitting on a pile of tabula raza, fat black marker at the ready to put Himself down. Or was he wearing mirrors and dissing the entire encampment, or even the world? Ollie watched him read, his eyes never leaving the page He was on, the tip of his finger pushing the bridge of his glasses up his nose to reverse the entropy of gravity. Ollie felt stupid trying to think of a question for such a man, such a God, but then Ollie realized he felt stupid trying to think of a question for a God of any manner. He looked over at Sarah, who had her knee on the ground and tears in her eyes. And so Ollie tuned into himself. He stripped away the neon mohawk and the scalp tattoo and the collection of buttons of smilies and peace signs fashioned into bird fingers for any establishment suited dick walking into the room. Gone in a blink were the fans. Blasted into dust was the measure of the man. Reduced to a rat’s nest of fears of floods and bare cupboards and unknown spots for the biopsy slot. Nothing but the brick trap house of everything he’d ever have to react to in real time or embrace calamity with an anaconda’s tail entwined. Everything that hid behind his last name on the third-floor mailbox.

Ollie felt diminutive against the God of the laundry. He looked for love and faith in eyes that were soaking ink through thick hornrims. He brought himself back to the last time he asked for God’s help, to pick up where he left off.

2004. Fairlane Avenue. A room too small for him and his brother, a cubbyhole in a cave dark by the order of the power company until their mother could get her paycheck from a boss that wanted to give it to her, and more. A stepdad that felt perfectly fine in a house with no lights save for the one in his pocket, one with two settings: regular for cigarettes and torch-force for crack. Ollie didn’t know much about drugs except how to cook crack, because his stepfather was a slightly less vicious man when he had a cook. But the night God came into Ollie’s life was the night his stepdad had burned out all his fronts, and it was get a job or get clean, and the man wasn’t doing either without a fight. And he made Ollie his opponent.

Ollie prayed that night, and a funny thing happened, which wasn’t so funny at the time of its happening. Ollie’s stepdad took a swipe at Ollie and clutched his chest, keeled over and bought the whole ten count. Ollie was so scared he asked God the number for 911.

2012. Saint Ignatius Hospital. His brother, two bullet holes three inches either way, both wrong. Life support. His mother catatonic, having kicked him out of the house three weeks prior. Ollie, by his side but no form a brother, already six years on the junk, no future, but maybe just a little bit more than the closest person to him a cyborg in saline and sterilized tubing.
2013. Himself in Saint Ignatius, broken ribs, unknown assailant, his girlfriend by his side, swearing she was going to kick. And so was he. For her.

Kick for no one. Not her, not even you. Don’t kick for someone that can let you down. Kick to kick the void.

The thought popped into his head from the depths of nowhere, yet it was his voice. He realized his eyes were shut. He also realized they were tear-slick shut. He opened them to a slight sting and noticed that Sarah was off her knees and reading one of God’s books, waiting for him.

More from Liam Sweeny…