Rumiko inhales wide eyed in the cloud she blew and grabs this dumb Pinch motherfucker by the shoulders, spiraling fractals whirl across her vision but that’s normal. Been a while since she did that much raw but after two days sweating out the trauma of what she came home to after working GIRL’S NIGHT and boy, you really want this.
Yank, shoulder spun Pinch spins through across the threshold and into room 650. The scalpel flies out of his hand six times. The door slams and echoes hollow metal and may as well be Metatron with the four on the floor pounding in his yellow painted heart. Time dilates as he spins off his knot tangled feet, but ballerina graceful and bounces against the pillow edge of the closer Queen of Hearts bed. Slides all six arms and legs that he can feel to the ground. That little bitch is stronger than she looks. The door slamming metallic echo won’t stop and lurches into his ears burning past his ear canals and into his brain brain brain brain brain brain.
Rumiko watches him tumble off the bed and hit the floor scrambling. Bubbles are forming on the wallpaper and the television is just a supernova blur illuminating the room. This is the birth of a new universe. Can he see it?
Arthur is all about that bitch, but his insides are distinctly yellow, and he’s happy.
“You’re already a fucking MK Ultra victim,” Rumiko says. She sways in his vision, her tattoos moving, eyes glowing bright yellow, but not in a happy way. “I just blew enough raw into your face to get this whole city high five times over, now you’re going to tell me what the fuck this place is about and what this scalpel is about.” She’s holding the scalpel out at him and getting taller, her demon head about to hit the ceiling, blade about to hit him in the nose as he scrambles. “Gokiburi,” she says.
“Munna fun kill you so many times,” he hears himself slurring a slurry of half of what he means to say, but his hands are growing new fingers that melt into whatever they’re touching in a dizzy color fucked haze and he can feel her thoughts, the vicious little bitch.
“Sincerely, I doubt that.” Pinch is averse to the very idea of ingesting psychoactive pharmaceuticals, especially LSD. “You’re a control freak, so you’re having a very strange time.” How can she speak so matter of factly, and how come hers is the only voice or thing he can understand? “What is this place Gokiburi?”
Pinch crawls into the bed, sinking and melting into a lake of colors forming under him. “Hotel, hotel, hotel,” he says.
“The last thing I need is you stuck in a fucking acid loop,” Rumiko says, steps down from heaven, and slaps Arthur across the face. “No, what IS this place?” she asks.
She hits him and bugs start to crawl out of holes the slap opened in his skin. Thick colorful maggots worm from them and fall into the bed, disappearing. There’s no way to compose himself from this. The clockwork mind has exploded and in its place is yellow, just blank yellow, thick blank yellow. Cadmium yellow. The room darkens and strobes but the television is a round light, a supernova, a universe being born. Arthur doesn’t notice or know how long but he’s staring at it, blinking, blinking, blinking, staring, blinking.
Rumiko looks from him, frozen on the bed, pissed himself, to the television. “So you can see it too Gokiburi?”
“This is the birth of a new world,” Arthur says. He’s trembling. Something is wet on the other side of the planet.
“You may keep my money, in return I will offer you this moment of Satori and you can keep your life. Shared experiences are rare” She speaks. Bodhisattva placid. Her breath circulating through her bloodstream, air replacing blood, blood replacing air when she exhales and crimson cascades down her front.
Both of them are sauna sweating and time is thin, a frozen sheet of ice that they both stand on. Him on all fours on the bed, her standing by the television with blood pooling at her feet every time she breathes out. Arthur catches sight of it and it multiplies and grows, blood covers the floor. He opens his mouth and can’t scream. Looks up and on the TV screen is that pulsing white sphere, a universe born in front of him.
Rumiko puts the scalpel down on the thing, the, it’s a thing the television with the new universe in it is on top of, and walks to him. Blood pouring from her mouth, eyes glowing yellow with black stars for pupils, flowers and animals running up and down her arms, not touching the floor but pantomiming like she should be. Arthur is either in love or “Am I going to die?” he asks, a clear blue sky, the eye of the hurricane.
“You won’t die Gokiburi man. But it’s the one’s where you think you’re dying this is when you learn something, if you’re open.” She glides onto the bed he’s stuck on, in, all fours, dog, a dog has pissed in Pinch’s pants. Rumiko reaches out and strokes his face where she slapped him, the holes close, flowers bloom under her touch.
“I love you,” Pinch says.
“All that there is is LOVE,” she says and grabs his hand, he melts and warps, slinking and rolling across the bed in his own piss, laughing, and giggling. Terrifying rare noises if he’s making them under any other circumstances. He’s a well respected man.
She appears as a demon and her aura is black but her touch is silken smooth and springs life from life.
He’s harder to roll up when he’s giggling and professing his love for her, wallowing in his own piss, tears streaming down his face from fear, joy, ecstasy, don’t care what, but she sits on the edge of the bed and pulls him to sitting next to her, feet planted firmly on the floor, his, not hers. She takes both of his hands. “Share this moment with me. We can watch a new universe being born.”
“But what if it’s being destroyed?” Arthur verges vomit. Her hands are so warm, so soft, he feels them inside his own. He looks down and their hands are inside of each other, connecting them completely.
“We would know,” Rumiko says and winks at him.
“Really love you,” Arthur says.
“No loop, no loop, no loop, just turn and watch with me Gokiburi,” once the universe is born it’s all going to make sense. “Now turn and watch this with me,” and they both turn to watch the television.
Time expands the way LSD demands it to. Not the forever in thirty minutes of a good K hole, but the revelation of white time, the coming to again and again with both of them laughing and holding hands staring at the white pulsing orb on the television. For them the light bursts from the screen and fills the room nuclear bomb bright. After this their shadows behind them will be burnt into the hotel wall for eternity.
“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” Arthur is crying. Sniffling. Neither of them realize it but they’re crushing their hands holding them, so stiff and long that they’ve cramped, lactic acid built up and they couldn’t let go if they wanted to. Neither of them does.
“I know. I want to live here,” Rumiko says. She’s not crying. She’s hit though. They’re sharing something. This is what you call a moment.
“Anything for you,” Arthur says. “I would do anything for you.”
“I’m doing everything for you,” she says. They may as well be blind.
“I came to hurt you.” The tears, the tears rolling down Pinch’s face. He’s never cried so much. Felt so much. “I’m sorry.”
“What’s your name Gokiburi?” Rumiko has honestly forgotten it in this infinity of light.
“I’m Arthur Pinch.”
“I am Matayoshi Rumiko, but I am called the White Rabbit. I came here looking for shelter. I had returned to my hutch, my rabbit hole, from gathering food, only to find all of my children slaughtered. I had heard of this hotel, and the sanctuary that it could offer. I came to you in my trauma and you took my money. I came to from my slumber, and you arrived at my door offering me pain and death, but I offer you this,” she points at the universe forming in the television, bathing them in white light, white heat, sweat beads. “So now we have a deal, and you will be kind to me. If anyone comes looking for me, you will protect me. You love me. And I love you. And all there is, is love.”
She’s done this before, it’s half an act and half her soul being laid alive on a slab outside her body to the person she’s talking to, pulsating and breathing external to her. She strokes his face and keeps it going.
“I will find more Baby Rabbits. I will have more children. Nothing is ever lost.” She closes her eyes for a beatific inhale so deep it doesn’t end. Pinch tries to hold his breath while she inhales but can’t. “Entropy is just part of a cycle. Entropy is followed by extropy,” she points at the universe birthing itself, expanding, flaring, some kernel of something dark in the middle of it. “Time is thin here. This is the new hotel coming into being in front of us.” Rumiko exhales her breath and how did she do that?
The White Rabbit hugs the Gokiburi and licks the tears from the cheek exposed to her. It staunches Pinch’s crying, and they hold each other around the shoulders with one arm, their other arms sitting between, hands clasped, as the universe unfolds around them, and they burn.
Eyes closed and lying down.
Taste the chemical sour grit in a dry mouth being forced to chew, nearly choking on so many pills. Discount Mexican Xanax is chalk threatening to tumble wrong pipe into Arthur’s lungs. He sputters and gags, that dead pressed pill mouth.
She plunges a needle into his neck, 18 gauge green tip directly mainline into the artery. Sobriety clips Arthur pinch back sweat lathered and sticky into the real world, or, the realer world, or a realer world.
“Katenserin and Benzos,” she says, flat affected. “Katenserin is a research pharmaceutical that stops Lysergic dead in its tracks, right at the serotonin 2A receptors. The benzos are just to calm you down and keep you from being stupid, if you can be stupid after what we shared.” flat affect gives way to affection.
Arthur blinks, the ceiling is not melting, or bathed in the whitest light, or doing anything a ceiling in his hotel shouldn’t do. So he blinks again. She holds a straw to his lips from a glass of water and he sips so he doesn’t choke to death on Mexican Farmapram. “I certainly don’t love you,” first thing he says.
Arthur raises his head at the neck to look at her sitting next to him. She’s smiling and nodding tiny little up downs “yeah, I’m sorry, you do.” she takes a sip of the water kawaii demure and then swishes her lashes at him. “I’m sorry you pissed yourself.”
Arthur feels and, “Oh for heavens sake can we not? And no, I do not love you.” Flashes, embarrassing scenes. Hippie bullshit. Her spouting it like he’s trapped in a bukakke scene getting jelly splashed with tie-dyed cum. “How long,” she cuts him off saying it’s only been six hours and the groan Pinch makes is a sound Rumiko has never heard before come from a human larynx and wishes never to hear again.
“Our deal stands,” she says, and he props himself all the way up. She’s wearing no shirt, covered in silver glitter and splattered with white paint. White paint in crescent arcs slashed on the walls. glitter stuck to his piss damp crotch, so much glitter. All Pinch can do is wish he could be mad. His brain is so benzo smooth that he doesn’t care, any bluster is bad theater.
“Our deal stands but never do that to me again or I’ll do worse than kill you,” he says.
“Can’t kill me. Not after we saw the hotel give birth to itself. Not after what we shared. And you love me,” she smiles teeth displayed and they’re blood red, solid blood red.
“You may stay at the hotel miss Matayoshi Rumiko, and you will be protected,” what words come from his mouth? “This has been the single worst and most embarrassing experience of my professional life.” He’s trying to brush the glitter off, straighten his sweaty clothes, but he might have just climbed out of a pool, and the silver mold just spreads on his pants, up his hands and arms. “We experienced nothing. This never happened. And there is no proof. Nevertheless you are welcome at the Nine, and I may have work for you.”
“Gathering bunnies already,” she’s playing so innocent.
“I’m not a bunny.” She suggests that he prefers Gokiburi? but “I don’t know what that means so also no.” Cockroach. “Yes, not a bunny, not a cockroach.”
“Then you are Pinch, and I’m the White Rabbit, and you love me and we have a deal,” the voice playing up that act like she’s strapped with a suicide bomb vest.
“I do not love you,” Pinch says.
“Repetition is the mother of all knowledge, but you didn’t say that when you were suckling my breast?” She raises her chin, exposing her neck, and pinches a nipple for him, “trying to get milk tea."
Arthur shakes his head. “Never happened, no proof. I’ll be on my way.”
She giggles and pinches her silver nipple. Arthur will admit, they are not unattractive in the least. She is, no. Fuck. "You were SO faded.”
“And if I remember you were too,” he says.
“You know what a white out is?”
“No, and I don’t care” Arthur pushes himself off the bed, standing, leaving her lascivious and breathy voiced, turns to the door, and a photographic survey betrays the room as a disaster he will think about later.
“White out is when you lose it, blank, like a blackout when you’re drinking. You’re still there but you don’t form memories, how else do you lose six hours? We’re cuddling and then…” Her head nods back and forth, side to side, an off balance metronome moving tick tock tick into a snake hip sway.
“Do call if you need anything Rumiko,” his choice to ignore her and walk to the door. Hand on the handle behind him she speaks.
“In the first five minutes you were so gone. I uncovered every camera in the room. You can watch the footage later, I’m sure it will be illuminating.”
Arthur pauses, closes his eyes, and takes a four count breath before making an exit, and a left, straight to an empty room with a secret stairway into the viscera.
“The reminder will do you good.” The last thing she shouts, and a downpour of her laughter cascades from the room behind him. His little Satori comes back in flashes and he remembers it. Watching the universe bearing itself in white. His insides, yellow.
In her room The White Rabbit closes and locks the door, rewinds the cassette in her player, and The Test starts again.
From the top.
Incredible work. Felt this one.