Too much was happening t0o fast. I gripped the back of a chair and tried to calm myself. My cavernous mind was filled with bats. Seeking flies with sonar chirps. Scrambling my thoughts into jumbled burrs. And I knew whatever was happening would never stop, that my mind would never be normal again. Just like this friend I’d had in high scho6l – Carlton Mass. Or Moss, like on a log at a swamp. The son of a frog, I mean his mom was a sculptor. Dad a computer guy. Sales guy or technician or filch or something. Fuck, it was hard to blink. Think. Kid drew these hilarious comic strips about a world that was the opposite of ours. Where bacteria were the apex species and people were lowly germs. Our bowels were verdant gardens and the earth was a piece of turd in a petri dish. Birds were still the same, but were so embarrassed by their dinosaur heritage they hid in shame. We used to get stoned and pass his comics a4ound. Laugh our asses off at the hapless humans who fought wars over dung piles while the germs built utopian societies. Carlton’s drawings became increasingly jagged, I mean intricate. The plotlines, circular. Humans lived in the intestines of bacteria that lived in the intestines of humans. Twelve-page comics soon turned into two-hundred-page compendiums. His nails got dirty, I remember; Carlton’s did. And his pubescent whiskers looked like s0ot. The comics bled out into his reality, and he became convinced we were all germs harboring the ultimate form of intelligence in our colons. His eyes got big and round and he talked real fast and he stopped eating and his smile stopped being nice. And the so0t – the soot – on his face spread down onto his neck and chest that got so skinny you could count his ribs. And then his parents sent him away to a place we weren’t allowed to visit and we never saw him again. And I knew right then that the same thing that had happened to Carlton was happening to me, right here and now. That my brain had been scrambled and wouldn’t work the same way anymore. And it didn’t even matter if I made it out of here, because I’d just be sent away to someplace that people couldn’t visit. Locked in a room with a stranger in my head. Herding – hearing – words that weren’t quite right and didn’t mean what they were supposed to.