It’s like you’re outside and it’s ten in the morning, and the sun is just scorching the rubber t-shirt you never saw before in your life. Which you realize after you’ve been peeling it off for half a day is actually your skin. You take a deep breath, groan out a rush that makes your fingernails itch, and suddenly dialogue that explains everything is projected in the sky. The letters remind you of your father’s eyes, except you don’t feel the seething. This is what this means, the letters say. That is what that means. Did you mention how sometimes your eyes bleed? You could write a book about bleeding eyeballs. The more that wants more wants more, and the more that can’t do any more wants more, too. One day you wake up and you’re letting your appetite sign your checks. You know that feeling? What was my name again?

IN THE DE-SPEED WING

DAY ONE. You wrote a poem with doorbell and cerebellum appearing in the same sentence thirty-six times. They gave you something for the shakes and put an ice cube in your mouth, which cracked badly at the corners. Your blood appeared to be plaid.

DAY TWO. A counselor later to become famous in a rehab reality show keeps asking you in group what “your deal” is. After the fifth time, when he’s standing right over you, you finally start to answer and he laughs and yells in your face from two inches away. “Bullshit!” It’s not your fault there are secret webs between things; that, with enough amphetamine in your system, you see DEEP AND MEANINGFUL PATTERNS among seemingly random phenomena. How it all CONNECTS. You spend twelve hours reading the cracks in the plaster. After that you think—So what?

You are tired of not being a centipede. You just want a patch of dirt, somewhere you do not have to keep pretending to know how to be human.

DAY THREE. Circle the date, you’re well enough for restraints! A Kush-breath orderly straps you chest-and-ankles over the gurney-blanket, then wheels you down the hall. He leans in, like he wants to smell you, so close you know if you inhale you’re going to test positive for something. Maybe THC, maybe Chlamydia. He kind of smile-whispers. “The first word in boundaries is bound!” His voice is half hardcore speed freak, half twink Widmark, psycho-giggly Tommy Udo pushing an old wheelchair lady down the stairs. (Most people only have one half. Once you realize that, life is not necessarily easier, but it’s explainable.) They put fluorescent lights in the elevator to make you epileptic, then cure you with expensive stimulants.

DAY FOUR. You see the albino. He had some kind of paint-thinner-methedrine incident in his mother’s carnival. Grabbing men and women’s palms on the midway, reading them and weeping: You don’t fucking want to know! You can’t remember if he’s the one who hung himself or became Regional Vice President of Nabisco South America.

Once you start trying to control your feelings, you have already lost control. Shame is like a rush in the wrong direction. Are you saying you’ve never wanted to obliterate the history of your own mind? There was a rumor: The guy who really burned down the L.A. downtown library on April 29, 1986, was a peckerhead tweaker trying to fry Jews and Mexicans out of his brainpan. But that was then.