I took the first drag from my cigarette and nearly passed out from the headrush. My brain started to spin and I felt sick. I staggered into the room and collapsed onto Alex’s bed.
“Okay,” I said, still holding the lit cigarette but too dizzy to hit it. “What, pray tell, is the plot of your 'Cave 81?'”
“That’s where you come in. I’m just the idea man— you have to handle the plot.”
If I wasn’t so ill I might have laughed at that, but I was too busy trying not to puke or faint, and my hand that was holding the cigarette was starting to shake. A piece of red at the end of the stogie shook itself free and landed on the green quilt, making a black ring until a hole formed and it fell through. I watched it without doing anything besides noting the smell of the burning cotton.
“Have you ever read Plato’s cave allegory?” Alex asked.
I said, “I have. Have you?”
Alex had a tendency to reference intellectual sounding things without having any grasp of what he was talking about. A few feet away from us, hanging on the wall, was a portrait I’d made of a disembodied face with a somber expression. Alex had insisted on making it a “collab,” and his sole contribution, other than pasting gold leaf around the edges, had been to title it the “Mask of Dante.” When I questioned him on that title I discovered he didn’t know who Dante Alighieri was, nor did he have any idea where he’d heard the term “the mask of Dante.” On the table next to his bed lay my copies of On the Road and Slaughterhouse Five. The former was supposedly Alex’s favorite book of all time (I can’t even count the number of times I’ve read it!) and yet he didn’t know any of the characters’ names nor have any favorite part of it,. The latter I’d lent to him two weeks earlier, and twenty-four hours after I gave it to him he claimed he’d already finished it. It was amazing, eye-opening, life-changing, but when I pressed him to tell me more of what he thought about it he kept saying, “I have to take some time to really absorb it. I’ll read it a few more times and then I’ll be ready to talk about it.” It was clear he hadn’t read a page of either book, but he was happy to give the impression that he was an expert on both of them. I didn’t believe for a second that he had read the Allegory of the Cave. In all likelihood he had just watched an interview with Johnny Depp or some other actor he liked, the celebrity had referenced it, and he’d clung onto it in effort to become whatever Hollywood idol of his he’d been worshipping this week.
“Of course I’ve read it,” he said. “It’s one of the pinnacles of human literature.”
I decided not to press any further. My dizziness was finally going away so I took another drag from my cigarette, which had nearly gone out already. I considered that title, Cave 81, and it occurred to me that it wasn’t altogether idiotic, as many of his drunken ideas were. It might actually be genius— the house was the cave of course, and we roommates were the prisoners trapped in there, watching an illusory world of shadows play against the wall, not knowing that there was a greater reality beyond the cave. We each had our own private delusions— Joe was going to be a famous Democratic politician someday, Marv was gong to be either an athlete or a supermodel, Bobby was going to code an app for a billion dollar company, I was going to overcome my woes and anxieties by writing the Great American Autobiographical Drug Novel, and Alex was going to use whatever I wrote to launch an illustrious career as a Hollywood actor and director. None of these things were going to happen. You could take one look at any of us and see we were destined for mediocrity and failure, but that heartbreaking fact was enough to make us all compelling characters, and what better way to make a low budget film than have the whole thing shot inside of the house?
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve got it. The house is the cave. We’re all the prisoners in the cave. But what’s outside of the cave? What is the grand truth that we’re all missing?”
Alex’s eyes were closed. He was passed out in the wreckage of the chair, facing up at the ceiling fan with the butt of his cigarette still smoldering between his fingers.
“Is it the ego? Narcissism? What is it that’s deluding us?”
Alex didn’t stir. The only noise was the fan whirring and screeching overhead.
“Or is it the past we’re seeing on the wall? Maybe instead of unrealistic goals and false futures it’s our memories that we’re seeing in those shadows, and the only way to get out of the cave is to get rid of the past?”
“But how do we get rid of the past? How do we become the people we’re supposed to be and stop seeing those shadows?”
“And what happens once the shadows are gone and we’re out of the cave? Are we ever really out of the cave? It’s not like the allegory is supposed to apply to people in actual caves. It was meant to be read by people that were walking around in the sun, living regular lives. Once you’re out of the cave you’re still not out of the cave, because there’s layers and levels to it. Is there anything in the world that isn’t in the cave?”
“AH FUCK!” Alex screamed, lurching awake and hurling the cigarette butt across the room. The embers had run down the paper and burned his fingers. “Fuck!” he yelled again, shaking his hand. “Do we have any more alcohol?” My own cigarette was just a filter now too, so I threw it out the open window.
“No,” I said. “You finished the Burnetts.”
“Damn!”
“Yes, it’s unfortunate.”
Alex lay back down and closed his eyes again. I took my bottle of Katharax out of my pocket, took off the cap, and poured two kathies into my hand. I’d been taking two every night for the past several weeks, maybe longer. I had no idea what the date was, only that it felt like sometime in fall. My tolerance was growing, and now two pills would only make me blackout immediately if I snorted them, so I'd made a habit of swallowing them to savor the high. If I were going to escape the cave then I’d need to take more than two this time, though. I’d need enough to wipe everything out, give myself a clean slate, then after that— once Sarah, my panic attacks, all my failures and guilt complexes had disappeared— I’d stop taking Katharax for good and I’d restart my life. I’d become a new person, a fully-functional human being.
Eating five would be too much-- it might kill me. But three would be too few-- I'd get the same effect I'd get from just snorting two of them. I poured two more kathies into my hand, looked at the little pile for a moment, then I tossed all four into my mouth and let them settle on my tongue. As usual they fizzed slightly, and there was a sweet taste to them, like Fun Dip. I swallowed them all at once, coughing a bit as one of them rubbed the back of my throat the wrong way.
The room immediately began to look orange. It was like a haze coming off the floor, mixing into the bland wallpaper, like an orange street light coloring fog. I let my eyes rest on the shaggy red fabric of the rug where Alex was lying down again, now sprawled out cartoonishly, like he’d fallen off a building and landed on that chair. I put the cap back on the bottle and stood up, beginning to picture the four white pills, fizzing and gurgling in my stomach acid, as tiny chemical chains of whatever-the-fuck-Katharax-is gradually made their way into my bloodstream to ride the lazy river to my brain.
Even as I imagined this, I could still see the room, like some sort of double-vision between imagination and reality. I turned my eyes from Alex and the entire room split in two. Alex was now overlapping the door, but also floating on the left side of my peripheral vision. In between was a cluttered mess of ghost objects all running together. I turned my eyes toward it and unintentionally added a third layer of stretched images that rendered the scene completely incomprehensible.
This was a bad idea, I thought. What am I doing? Why can’t I just be normal? It was like broken stained glass, fractured chaos splintering with each passing moment. I can't even fucking see!
I started feeling my way toward my bedroom as everything around me dissolved into a sizzling orange and yellow haze, a vibrant cloud of color made of pixels that boiled into tiny streaks of green, yellow, and blue and spread out into little wisps, like liquid, oozing into the visual cacophony, now with fiery reds, neon greens, and purples, nearly every color. Even the floor under my feet stopped consisting of wood and carpet but became that same fog, insubstantial and everywhere, a kind of gaseous or liquid light that went right through me, blotting out the fractured reality of the house.
TO BE CONTINUED
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter10
Chapter 11
.
Why I'm Writing/ Recap of first 11 chapters
.
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22