An Excerpt from ‘Psychedelic Narratives’

This excerpt appeared in the Fiction Issue of VICE Magazine UK.

Berlin Envelope (1)

I grab the ceiling and tear it away in hot pink chunks like Turkish delight—scissors snip snap around the falls of blood slicing red fringes—and out! Tra-la! Lord of all I survey . . .

Comedy: two tiny angels draw my lips back into a smile.

Tragedy: fruit bats hook my upper jaw and draw it up into a scream.

Spaceships fly into my mouth and drift to a halt in trees, colonizing my body. The populace breeds as powder on my tongue, builds cities, sends comets reeling across the roof of my mouth, detecting light from the furthest darkness. I swallow and they are gone.

From the balcony in the Salzburgerstrasse my cigarette cuts an orange parabola in the night and hits the pavement with a detonation of sparks and stars. A mongrel flinches. In the white room behind me Matthias is watching a film on a white television, a film in which two lorry drivers compete for the attention of a bored woman. The bagatelle spins its ball up between my ears and the picture shudders, sudden rain on the window, and a new picture develops in the tray, of a boy, his hair tangled in barbed wire. He is beset by floodlights but still makes a dash for freedom, feet sinking into the tarmac as in mud. There is a shot which scatters his infinite pieces far and wide on the silent air.

Berlin Envelope (2)

A bath is running. I hear the hysterical voice of an AFN disc jockey muffled by steam. Footsteps. Flushing lavatory. Door slams. Has Matthias gone out?

Abraxas says, "Your voice is a triangle."

At Tempelhof tomorrow I shall look up the gangway to the aircraft door and see oil dripping successively downwards from step to step. Any second an air hostess might appear at the top and slip and fall ass over tit. They should do something about that oil. In the peace compounded from opposites, even the pylons will genuflect their homage.

The acid in Berlin comes from Humboldt University—high quality—"That's why the East Germans let it through, hoping to undermine the west. They do think like that." That's what the gentle guitarist told me. The bath overflows, sending its cargo of foam lurching over the side and across the floor, like an amoeboid cancer. But there is no fear in me. I look at my cock in the mirror. Am I alone in this flat or are you with me?