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

The Guru surrounded the four in a wispy dance, her curves confirming contours of fabric and fancy, her delicate fingers posed in measurement; Deke’s hair, Sarah’s cheekbone to her chin, the front of Ollie’s jeans, all of which Sarah found to be burdensome to her thirty-day pledge not to slap someone. The Guru even stood her foot against Ollie’s which was half a foot compared to his. Then she backed up and, from absolutely nowhere, produced a flip notebook and a pencil, which she proceeded to use to write notes in what was practically darkness. Her sight was confirmed by her tsk, tsk, tsk, and the erasure of a mistake she had to have seen. Her hand went to the top of her head, to the top of a mound of hair let loose by the release of a pair of chopsticks.

She faced front and center and conducted her words with the eraser tip of her pencil. “You look adorable, all of you, and I mean that in my truth,” she said. “I think that with a few touches, you might just fit in here. Might just.”

She walked over to Deke and with a graceful arc, spun him around. “Your plaid, you see, it stands out, but not in a good way. It’s not the kind of shirt that you would eat a hot dog in, for example.” She aimed the pencil at a stain on Deke’s shirt, not visible to anybody but the Guru. Ollie had seen him mash the hotdog against his chest in a hot stop for a pedestrian earlier.

“You need a darker shirt to hide your… culinary predilections. And might I recommend you avoid certain sauces? You know most sauces are filled with sodium, and I would guess you’re what, 10 points over your BMI?”

“I don’t believe you,” Sarah said. “I don’t know what kind of guru you are but leave Deke alone.”

The Guru slid over to Sarah, bended knee, her posture supplicant.

“I only mean to help. Deke can be better. You all can be better.” She pulled a folded piece of semi-gloss paper from her flipbook and unfolded it.

“See here, I can get you rock-hard abs in ten weeks if you just follow ten simple steps. And if you avoid butter and sugar, just butter and sugar, I can get you a beach body that’ll turn heads.”

“We don’t want that stuff,” Sarah said. “We’re good.”

The Guru got off her knee and flowed in front of Sarah as she tried to go deeper into the main area. “But you want something,” she said. “You came here for something. Everybody does. I can help you get it. Only a couple of steps. I help everybody here become a better version of themselves. All I need is your ears and an open mind.”

Deke and Harry looked at Ollie, who looked at Sarah, who looked exasperated, but she nodded that they follow Guru, if for no other purpose than that she probably knew where the weak spots in the building were. If her behavior just then was any clue, she’d given all the crumbling concrete and rusted rebar a pep talk and a recipe for papier machete.

“So upon what adventurous paths do you all place your feet?”

“Huh?” Harry said. “This is concrete, right?”

The Guru sighed. “Why have you come? What are you here to accomplish? How do you hope to grow from this?”

Deke shrugged. Harry stared at the ground, picking each foot up and returning it. Sarah threw her eyes to the ducts that lined the ceiling and Ollie pulled the length of his hair from his back down over his shoulder.

“We’re just here,” Ollie said. “You know, just hanging out. Thought it’d be cool to come.” He didn’t even glance at Sarah for fear he’d see a true reason in her eyes and feel like shit that he’d missed it.

“Well, is this one and all?” The Guru said, and the rustle of uncomfortable postures shifting spoke for all.

“Well! What of the Hero’s Journey, then? What of your second acts! There is time, oh, but there is time. You must come. We must get you to God.”

None of them liked the thought of going to God, when uttered in a warehouse filled with homeless drifters and vein-strained junkies. But they followed the Guru in large part because she had a plan, and they could just as easily find God there without one.

“You must have an inciting incident,” she said. She knelt down before a man with no shirt on, trying without success to get a pawn-shop fire sale guitar in playing shape. She tweaked a tuning peg and murmured to the man as she pointed to frets down the neck.

“Inciting incident… oh, yes! You drove here, you must have. You were going about your business when all of the sudden an angel crossed the road. Surely you would be moved. Surely you would chase an angel that was leading an incursion against Hell and God Himself. Your journey begins.”

“Angel what?” Harry said. “Yo, this lady is baked bread, man. Let’s bounce.” He turned, but Deke held him there with a stiff arm.

“We just came in here looking for a place to hang,” Ollie said. “Miss, um, Guru.”

“No one does that,” she said. “No one but tourists, and even they have a hero’s journey. Even they come away changed. How can you not want better?”

Sarah looked around. “This is better?”

“Depending on how you look at it,” the Guru said. “Depending on what you want.”

At that moment they went to take their leave of the Guru and with the rustle of paper she was upon them, in front of them, a bundle of magazines in her hands.

“You can get a better night’s sleep with three new habits. Wouldn’t that be better? Or a workout routine that only takes five minutes a day; you can take it sitting down! And you,” she turned to Sarah. “Those circles around your eyes… did you ever hear about a banana peel mask? We could have you fresh overnight.”

They kept walking.

“I came here to sell weed,” Deke whispered. “Don’t tell her.”

Ollie whispered back, “she might tell you who to sell it to.”

The Guru tried to keep up, but her dress was in her way.

“I get these magazines,” she said. “please listen. People bring them to God, but he doesn’t read them. Because he can get no better, but we all can. Let me make you better!”

“She ain’t no one to lissen to,” came a gruff voice from off to the left of a sparsely attended burn barrel. “She won’t even give cloth.”

“Hey,” Deke said. “You know if anyone needs weed?”

The gruff woman’s face contorted to match her voice, her hair in tufts and her clothes rags barely covering her stringy limbs. The only component of her attire that was whole was a velvet red sash tied around her waist, an ammo belt holding dull steel pairs of scissors of every caliber.

“Lemme see that jacket.” She moved over to Deke, her small frame a wedge to split the group. She placed her hand on the left breast like a heart massage.

“This is fake suede,” she said. “China, probably. Sized extra-large. I bet this’ll take a marker in the fibers; might need to write double on it.”

“I’m glad you like it.” Deke said. “I guess so. So do you know anyone that needs weed?”

“Hemp is weed,” she said. “Got any hemp?” Deke scoffed and backed up and the woman whirled around to face Sarah.

“Your sweatshirt. That’s the stuff. I just need a little snip.”

Ollie put himself between the woman and Sarah.

“Look, whatever you’re doing, we ain’t got no cloth for you. We’re using it.”

The woman shrunk back, pulled the largest pair of scissors from her sash and aimed them at the group.

“Everybody gives cloth,” she said. “We need it. You give it.”

A booming, familiar voice flew between Ollie and Sarah, Deke and Harry.

“Scrounge, you don’t force it,” Shitheels said. “You know the rules.”

“Those jackets are wasted,” a chastised Scrounge wagged her finger.

“You’re the boss down here,” she said. “But they can’t see God ‘cept through me. I’m Jesus Christ in a rayon dress. What’s left of it.” She ran her hands down herself, fingers feeling rayon and bare flesh in a pattern that said her scissors had tasted first blood on her.

Shitheels, a canister of petroleum jelly in his hand, scooped out a gob and rubbed it into his perfect, bald head. He faked a kick, and the Scrounge backed off, hands up like his boot had a rite of exorcism stamped on the sole. She ran off to a man sitting on a pile of tires, fist under chin, looked to be wondering exactly what rock the warehouse occupied in his personal rock bottom. In time cut into quarters she had a quarter of the man’s dingy cotton work shirt in her grasp.

“She’s not wrong,” Shitheels said. “Accosting y’all ain’t anything she’s s’posed to do, but if you all are heading up to see that thing they’re calling ‘God,’ you might wanna catch up with her and give her a little of your cloth.”

“So what is this place?” Harry said. “We came here for some fun but it seems like a freakshow. What’s the deal here?”

Shitheels stretched his arms straight back and clasped his hands, vascular in the glow of the nearest trashcan fire.

“It’s purgatory,” he said. “Maybe hell in some spots. Upstairs they think it’s heaven, but you’d figure if that was so, they wouldn’t be down here begging cloth and wood, gasoline.”

“I think I was on the third floor about a month ago.” Ollie said. Sarah clutched his arm and nodded. “I wasn’t good.” He looked Sarah in the eye searching for a witness to his memory that wouldn’t find the revelation a confidence betrayed.

“I was with him too,” Sarah said. “But I don’t remember where we were.”

Shitheels walked them over to the nearby trash can. He grabbed a cracked piece of palette, torn from a mountain of them in the back lot, and dropped it in and watched the flames feast on the new arrival.

“You weren’t up there,” Shitheels said. “Probably down here.” He pointed to the northeast corner, which looked like a pile of clothes from afar. “That’s where all the junkies do the big think. I have to go over there every couple hours and kick ‘em. Once in a while, one don’t flinch, and we have a problem. Ain’t easy, trust me.”

Ollie’s side shot pain in a last-ditch effort to declare its bruising the fruit of injustice. He would never have figured that Shitheels was simply on dead junkie patrol.

“The upper floors, it’s all the loonies and the artists. Nothing but junkies and drifters down here, opting for a roof and the idea of catching some heat. Upstairs is the somebodies, I guess.”

“Do you think they’ll want weed upstairs?”

“Probably. But like I said, you won’t just get up there. I won’t let you, and I got a couple of people under me that won’t let you. You gotta do the things. Give up the cloth. And find the other one; she calls herself the Poet. She’s really the one. There aren’t keys to the floors, but if there were, she’d have them all. She could bring Hitler upstairs with her, I’d let her pass.”

Ollie rubbed his hands over the trash can. “How do we find her?”

Shitheels’s eyes caught distance as he thought about it. “Best way is to just be friendly. Talk to who you can. She’s more likely to find you. But really, go find Scrounge and give up some cloth, if you really want to get upstairs. Don’t really know what they need it for, but they need it.”

Shitheels left without a word or a wave or an irreverent salute, leaving the group to surround a burning trashcan and have words about their current afterlife.

“I’m not sure if I want to see heaven,” Deke said. “I really just came to sell a quick couple bags. It ain’t worth wreckin’ my jacket for a couple bucks’ profit. I’ll have to buy a new coat.”

“This place is weird,” Harry said. “What possessed you two to come here?”

“Heroin,” Ollie said. “Being high and not being able to go back to my parents’ house.”

“I need to go up there,” Sarah said. “I need to go see heaven. I can’t explain it. It’s just… I need to.”

“So I’m going,” Ollie said. “She’s going, I’m going. Do I have to pull the fact that we’re a band and bands do crazy shit together because it builds character?”

“Asshole,” Deke said.

Ollie pointed toward the center of the first floor. “People playing pans and shit over there. Let’s find some purgatory groove, maybe join up.”

They shifted and shuffled their way from trash can to trash can, to the stories of elders with walking sticks of broom handles and the crowns of trucker’s caps advertising cigarette brands and lottery drawings. Hands over licks of flame, rubbed hard to ignite frigid, rarefied blood mixed with narcotic propellant. Deke wandered, offers of satchels like breath mints, like he was a waiter at the fancy restaurant downtown, which, by years end, might legally be offering what he was just then. Ollie nudged Sarah and she nudged him back.

“You okay in here?”

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “Keep it green. My sponsor would probably pull me out of here pretty fast though. But I gotta be here.”

“I get you won’t say why in front of Dumb and Dumber, but I don’t even know why you’re here. Can you even tell me? You even know?”

Sarah bit her lower lip, which Ollie caught in the pulse of the fire.

“I gotta find Juli,” she said. “She was here when I woke up, when I left. She got me out, and I remembered her saying something about heaven. I thought she was talking death, like she was going to OD or something, but in my group, I heard that one of the floors was called heaven.”

“So you were going to come here whether it was Deke’s idea or not.”

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “I wouldn’t have come alone, I guess.”

Ollie folded his arms and kicked at the dirt with his boot. “Should’ve told me. This place ain’t good for sobriety.”

Sarah laughed. “Your sobriety lasts as long as mine does. Maybe less. You don’t even want to be sober.”

“Not true. I mean it’s hard, but I’m starting to enjoy it.”

“Why don’t you go to meetings, then?” Sarah held out her hand to collect Ollie’s coming excuses. “Why don’t you do the steps?”

“Step one: don’t do drugs,” Ollie said. “Step two: repeat step one.”

“It’s more than that, Ollie. You’re just going to be an addict on a break.”

“Fucking long break,” Ollie said. “Years. Decades. I’ll last longer than you, dry as fuck.”

“It’s your support I love the most.”

“I’m starving my veins. Pretty supportive.”

They found their way to the dead center of the first floor, where a man sat on milk crates, guitar slung but un-played, dark curly hair spilling out of a fisherman’s hat with astronaut patches glued on, round face, thick stubble slicked with sweat.

“Gather round for my story,” he said. “Direct from the Big Book of Q&A, or maybe T&A, I forget.”

He gave the guitar a hard strum. “The first time I ever had a beat was in fifth grade, in my father’s tool shed. See he used beats too, and he left a drumstick out on the table. And it was innocent, just tapping time on the edge of the bench, but it was a feeling, you know? Yeah, you know, that first beat gets your heart racing, but it’s scary at first, you know what I’m saying?”

Ollie and Sarah exchanged peculiar glances.

“By the time I got in high school, I was a heavy musician. But I managed it. I only played in the band, and my father even let me practice on his kit. Managed. Perfect balance, life and beats.”

Another hard strum.

“Then college came,” he said. “And it was just so easy to get my hands on a drum kit. And beyond that, I was “the drummer.” I could walk around with my sticks and practice paradiddle and it was my escape from having to talk to people I didn’t want to talk to.” He waved the nickel he was using for a pick around at the growing crowd.

“I didn’t have a girlfriend; I had a kit in a garage off-campus. There every day, playing, not even trying to get better, though I did get better. At first, I wanted to be in a band, be famous, play rock and roll at all the local places, but it got worse than that. Rock and roll was out, then it was metal. Super-fast beats, double bass, heart racing, adrenaline drip. But even that wasn’t good enough; I went to jazz and weird time signatures just to chase that original thrill, but I never could.”

He strummed and muted the sound.

“They found me in an alleyway, drumming on the side of a dumpster with chopsticks. Now look here, I can handle this guitar. Guitar was never my instrument of choice. But if I so much as drum my fingers, I might as well go back to that dumpster; it’s over for me.”

Sarah tugged at the lapel of Ollie’s coat and he followed her, figuring she knew where she was going.

“That was disrespectful,” she said. “Some people are dealing with real addictions, and he’s talking about music.”

“Well, he’s here. I figure if he was just trying to spoof on addicts, he’d do it on social media from his living room.”

“You think someone could get addicted to music?”

Ollie shrugged. “People can get addicted to anything,” he said. “Fat people to food, my father to work, you to that smokey eye thing.”

“You love that smokey eye thing.”

“I’m an enabler.”

Sarah sighed. “I still think it’s disrespectful. Especially here.”

“I don’t think most the people here who’d agree with you are conscious.”

“You’re right. Let’s find heaven and go look for Juli.”

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