| You ever wonder if we're
really here?
Like here, here? Yeah. Except not just you and me. Everything. Oh. Oh, right. Like is this real. Yeah. I don't know. But if it's not, it sure does feel great.  glaze His insides are gilded with a superconductive glaze, something like mercury, and the music is as dark and unfathomable and as the waters of a depthless sea. Renzo is dancing, submerged in the mass of the crowd. Smoke machines and strobe lights have turned the dance floor into a collage of stark silhouettes. The music pumps away with a machine-like ferocity, the kind of hardcore techno track that the club is best known for, and the mercury glaze glows with every drop of the bass line, pressing outward though his skin toward the man behind the decks. His body is charged with kinetic energy, chemically amplified, as he feels as if someone has overclocked the synaptic transmission speeds in his brain. The quality of Jones' product is leaving nothing to be desired. The track moves toward a climax with a steady, processed urgency, and the beat feels like something solid with its own specific weight. Renzo's heart shudders, synchronizing to that pure and primal electric, and he takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. An echoed silence ensues for the space of four beats. The dance floor is rocked with a bass-dropping digital explosion, and Renzo is propelled upwards, soaring somewhere over the crowd. Everyone's hands and arms are raised towards the ceiling as if they are elevating him, and they send him along to the other side of things on a red-hot, resonant wire. Fast Forward There is an unexplainable cerebral transformation that occurs with a combination of a driving beat, dramatic lighting, and various substances known to expand the conscious mind. The unrelenting series of techno tracks has put the crowd into a frenzy, and Renzo is connected to it by what can only be described as some sort of chemically-induced sixth sense, a subliminal kind of awareness that exists in the borderlands between the metaphysical and the divine. He feels the crowd more than he sees it. His friends are somewhere else, but everyone around him seems indistinctly familiar, with their eyes locked on an ur-place just beyond the sound, the crowd, and the machinations of the dj. He turns and begins dancing with a girl next to him. She moves like an Indian goddess, and the glaze flares with the twisting of her limbs. They are not quite touching, but she is close enough that Renzo can feel the heat radiating off of her body. He notices the shape of her legs, and the rise and fall of her breasts underneath the shirt she is wearing, but what he feels toward her is something beyond the sexual, something a little less defined. She smiles as he catches her eye, and the look between them is almost verbal, an instantaneous and conclusive dialogue that a certain species of pseudo-scientist might consider a telepathic exchange. Yeah? Fuck yeah. Are you down? I am so fucking down. It's all unspoken, somewhere between lust and spirituality, and the complexity of the moment reminds him of another time with Katie Blue. The memory carries an undeniable darkness, and a shadow falls across the mercury glaze like tarnish on antique silver. Fast Forward The physical sensations of ecstasy are predictably cyclical, so much so that the experience is often called the roll. The specific reasons for the phenomenon are rooted in chemistry, but the result is an almost rhythmic shift in Renzo's perception from one extreme to the next. There are long moments when he might feel almost completely normal, followed by intense physical surges that can leave him gasping for breath. The rhythm can be disconcerting for the inexperienced user, who might mistake the downside of a wave for the expiration of the ecstasy and jump into a second pill too soon. An expertise gained from long-term use allows Renzo to recognize the difference, but, regardless, there is always a subtle fear during those times of lucidity that the roll has finally come to its end. The earlier thought of Katie has darkened the glaze's brilliance, and he finds himself descending to lower ground, and low enough that the room begins to take on an alarming normality. He knows it is too soon, but he feels the instinctual disappointment that the end might well be near, and finds himself searching for the second pill in the depths of his pocket. Having confirmed that it is still indeed safely on his person, Renzo focuses again on the crowd, the dj, and the music; the inevitable ascension can only be a few moments away. The dj pulls off a flawless mix, bringing in a dope breaks beat underlined with a bongo drum's tribal bang. Renzo joins the crowd as it roars with pleasure, and the dj triumphantly thrusts his arms into the air. The wave peaks again, carrying Renzo upwards, and everything is lost in a rising surge of light. The intensity is almost unbearable, and he closes his eyes against the bloom of perceptual pleasure, and when he opens them again, he has returned to a place without names, an all-surrounding element of the physical. There is sound, there is feeling, and beyond there is only the next moment and the way it unfolds: complex audio tapestries, glowing fractal cartography, and mile high origami swans on fire. Fast Forward An hour later, the ride is definitely over. Sounds are coming to him in less than three dimensions, and the light in the room is dying in the shadows on the walls. He breathes in, but his body's only response is an ache in his jaw and a growing fatigue in the joints of his arms and shoulders. The smoke begins to clear, the dance floor becomes a place with time and boundaries, and Renzo suddenly experiences a poignant fear of the arrival of today. The roll has come to an end. Having lost his connection to the crowd, and needing some space to fully disengage from it, he walks to the bar, buys another bottle of water, and heads to the bathroom to take a piss. Renzo can still feel the effects of the ecstasy as he empties his bladder into the urinal, a lingering shiver when he locks his knees. There are various phone numbers scrawled on the tile in front of him. A stickered condom machine hangs crookedly on an adjacent wall. Renzo finishes, zippers his pants, and washes up in the sink with a handful of pink disinfectant foam. He stops before he walks out of the bathroom, considering whether or not he should drop the second pill. It is already one o'clock in the morning, and he has to make it to work at some point on the following day. The moment passes as he retrieves it from his pocket: the ambiguously wicked need no rest. He opens his mouth, sets the pill on top of his tongue, and washes it down with a swig from his bottle of water. The second will take less time to kick in than the first, and the mere anticipation of it has made things considerably more manageable. |
