OBLIVION HAS NO NARRATIVE.

Just because there’s no plot does not mean the story can’t get worse.

After questionable man and boy leave, Carmine (Britt?), who must have been triple-jointed, brazenly lifts a bare dirt-crusted foot up to her nose unassisted. She sniffs a filthy toe—as if, you think, to see if you’re a dirty toe man—then hisses at you. “Don’t give me that look. Dewey happens to be Dewey Junior’s daddy! And don’t think I don’t know what you are, neither. God made a lower place in hell for lowlife drug thieves than kiddie diddlers.”

Is it normal to keep remembering grievous things? It’s not your fault they keep happening. Remember? That tweaked-out voice low as the hell pit he was describing. “It’s in the bible.” Did you dream the evangelist? Or is he in the walls? This is a question you didn’t used to ask yourself. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want you all to look in your heart, ask yourself this question. Is your life nothing more than a history of saying yes to the wrong things?” Can zombies be sad?

THE ESKIMO WITH HOOKS FOR HANDS LOOKS UNFAMILIAR, BUT HE SAYS HE’S A VET.

He’s shooting up Penny, who you can’t remember meeting, in the neck. While you watch, her jugular wriggled like a worm in cookie dough, cracking the makeup she used to cover up vein-puff. “It’s important,” she said, while the shooter dabbed her off, “I’m a nurse. People can see our necks.” The story doesn’t track. But speed stories never track. They only make sense if you’re on speed. (This is a test.) At what point did the Inuit show up with the vial of liquid meth? “What you staring at?” The big-faced musher was eyeballing you, clicking his hooks. You screamed, Get the fuck out of here, and he backed away. Was he laughing? Maybe he didn’t leave. Impossible to tell what was going on; everything three-day up echoey. Maybe the Eskimo just went in the bathroom. Maybe they were married. Maybe she brought him white assholes to kill after she fucked them in front of him. Maybe she killed them after he fucked them. Shit. Why does all your energy go into panic? Except for everything you knew about her, Penny seemed almost normal. Like a cheerleader who slept outside.

NOT EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU CAN BLACK OUT ON SPEED.

You can be unconscious and chatty at the same time. Flip back from a clammy sense-memory of Mommy-flesh to an IHOP booth beside a plus-size ironic she-male busy not eating her Belgian waffles. Miss Waffles was still talking when you re-materialized, when your star fell from the night sky over Methladelphia. To reenter the earth’s B.O. Boring Orbit. “What was that movie? They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Well, screw the ponies! I shoot the same go-fast that made Philip K. Dick a psychotic genius!” Plus-size Tranny-pants cannot stop talking. Mouth moving in a face dead as the papier-mâché Belgian Waffles in the IHOP display case. “Listen up, ’kay? I don’t mind payin’ for the party, but you gotta at least look interested! My husband had a thing where he’d drop black beauties and touch himself. He wouldn’t eat dinner. That was the tell. I’d peep him cracking open them ten black capsules on rice puddin’ and gulpin’ it down. Then he’d put his hands on me, rough, all over, like he wanted to pull out my organs and dunk them in coffee. Ooooooooooooh! It was goddamn heaven.” You stay fake-interested. Long enough to burn through what’s left of a crappy eight-ball wedged between the honey bear and the teapot. Nobody at IHOP gives a shit. It’s IHOP. It’s five after fucked-up o’clock in the morning. Just as you get up, Miss Waffles blurts, “You can’t hide, I can read your mind in nine languages.”