Sublime

enigmatic

tryst.

Bukowski’s advice to young writers: “Drink, fuck, and smoke plenty of cigarettes.”

(A simopath – the technical name for this disorder escapes me – is a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army, and discharge cures it.)

Billy coughed up clots of nonsequential mumblings, but as he talked a second line dialed up in his head and a stranger started talking, whispering the truer words that Billy couldn’t speak. It was raw. It was some fucked-up shit. It was the blood and breath of the world’s worst abortion, baby Jesus shat out in squishy little turds.

Marlowe stands close and lights it for him, smelling of hair cream and something else as well. The faintest whiff of brimstone. Marlowe enjoys a different kind of immortality, achieved by different means. No magic acorns or slumbering under trees. He sold his soul on the dotted line, joined an exclusive members’ club. Eternal life. But not eternal

BACK AT CHETWYND-PITT’S chalet, floating in the tub, Nirvana’s Nevermind thumping through the walls, I smoke a joint among the steam serpents and peruse the Case of the Body-Hopping Mind for the thousandth time. The facts are deceptively simple: Six nights ago, outside my parents’ home, I encountered one mind in possession of someone else’s body. W

Mephistopheles,”