Billy took the little knife and swung it around like a dart about the room. He would sometimes put on strange music and play with it.
It would give him visions, the knife would. He would take his shirt off and stare into the mirror, holding it. Like the finger of some nice Mexican girl he would drag the knife solely down through the middle of his chest, and imagine what it would be like, if he were to make an incision, like a surgeon would, and suddenly all his guts were to just fall out. Guts. Imagine them.
Sometimes Billy would think that his guts, if he were somehow able to get them out - they would not be normal guts. They would not be intestines. It wouldn't be like the wolves his father killed. It would be something much different. Much stranger.
He would swallow the pills, eating them up greedily, and then he would see the knife cutting his chest open, and he would imagine wolves, and dogs, and cats, and gazelles, falling out of his chest, instead of guts. Or flies, maybe, insects, mosquitoes, hornets, bees.....
Billy would often pose in front of the mirror naked all alone, when the hour was right, often at night. He would strip down out of his corduroy jeans he always wore, out of his button down shirt, out of his socks and Chuck Taylor sneakers, and he would stare at himself.
He could imagine someone, a man, some much older man, or maybe a woman, crawling out of the silver mirror and they'd be holding a camera. Billy loved to imagine himself being filmed like the people he saw inside the computer screen at his fathers house. He loved to imagine himself as an actor walking, pretending to shoot. He would be like Johnny Depp. He would swing a sword in front of the camera, a pretend sword, and he would make faces. Sometimes he would pull his pet ferret Dan in front of the mirror with him.
Billy kept the ferret on a little leash, usually it sat on his bed. He talked to it and it would stare at him. He would touch it on the head and rub its fur. He spent most of his time with that ferret or he spent it alone lost in weird dreams of the camera. In December near Christmas the camera dreams (thats what Young Bill called them, "my little camera dreams") always got ferociously strong. He would dream of films and their titles, he would see himself on the red carpet waving to all of Hollywood, he would imagine the co-stars, he would imagine the shit stink director who would bow and scrape for him, he would see himself diving off Trump Tower doing a sky dive like in the films... and he would live.. becaise it would just be inside the camera... ..........------
^^^&&^^^$$$^
But then there were other times when life got meaner and more vicious and Little Bill would disconnect and "do the drift" . The desire to get filmed like Depp would end then. It would float off like a bad amphetamine high in the chilly New york dawn....whoosh. Right around some corner. It would waltz around through Brooklyn and somebody would just - Bang Pop! - the knife sucks in and out of the throat like a frog, the dude falls, the dude dies...
& then Little Billy would change and that new version, he was not like the others, no matter who they were. The new Billy resented the camera and its evil ways, its obsession with storing everything and recording everything and SAVING everything. The new century number 21. The fucking devil Gods had made everyone obsessed with saving everything, setting up archives, clouds, hard drives, notebooks, diaries, blogs, journals, newspapers, TV shows, advertisements, books, fucking rat wreak museums. Billy Lee! Billy in a museum? Never. Mai. He walked in one; he vomited....
Oh but all those otthers! The scientists, thinkers, directors, mechanics, artists, musicians, painters, binders, fashionistas, everyone had some idea and some place they wanted to be, everyone had some big plan to get their face on somme cover, inside some screen, their voice on some recording. For Billy the other Billy it did not matter in some way. He was "CONTENT". He had thoughts. He drifted in them. Johnny Depp can go to hell!
Was he an artist of course he was. But something else too.... something much else. The others had all these ideas of differnt cities..."scenes"..."places". They wanted to fall in love and make memories and sit on mountains and go to fancy restauraunts, they wanted to take pictures together, smoke, drink fancy wine and build things, assemble houses and buy cars, see the Grand Canyon and tour San Francisco.
Billy had wanted it too once. Long ago. In some black beginning far off from him now.He had wanted it and he could remeber wanting it. Had wanted to dress up in some nice Oscar Wilde dandy suit, tie the tie just right,kiss women, maybe men, be a 'Parisian', go waltz around in secret bookstores, wear jewels, swallow it all....
But it went away at some point along the Road. Billy lost INTEREST. He lost MOTIVATION. How did it hit him? Why did it hit him? When? Where? What day? ---- He could never figure it out ---- he just knew "it happened".He crept up like a snake and got coiled and went s-o-l-o. He fell into "solitude". Isolation. Friends vanished and tried to call him and Billy took the iPhone and threw it...he shattered it..a million pieces..the glass just ...flying...he ripped the wire out of the wall and cursed the name of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.. he banished them..he went UNDER...he went DEEP..
His cousin Joe Scar used to call it "Tripper' Ville". That's where he went. Wonderland.He shut the lights off and closed his eyes, he got on his bed and pulled the covers over him and, like some kid who breaks his ankles and then falls off into the deepest end of the pool, Billy slipped under. He slipped into real true silver visions (so he called them in his head).
radiation Osiris call out the digits scream the names Moon it Beam it Own it Posess it "Cut it and flip it" make the ### make the ####
---
(an excerpt from the Scorched Planet, a book by Madeline Monroe)
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