The doctor is bent over a young boy, a needle strapped into his vein, and a large dildo sticking out of his ass. The boy’s feet are even with his ears and I have some sick paranoid fantasy that I will be blamed for anything that happens here. The doctor is eagerly licking at the boy’s asshole, stopping now and then to dictate messages into a tape recorder. “Patient’s urinary tract contains traces of semen, possible back up into the bladder from the testicles. Recommend immediate removal of the bladder to counteract problem.” Another boy watches from a chair across the room, counting down the minutes until it’s his turn with the doctor.

Stevenson throws back his head and smiles his big shit-covered grin at me and says, “Boys turn sour after they’ve hit puberty. You catch them when they’re young like this and you’re sitting in butter. I advise you to take a hit of the Baroline that’s in that needle there,” pointing at a syringe on the desk. “It’ll turn you sideways.”
I do as he suggests and immediately the scene starts to pulse before me. It reaches a fever pitch as the boy’s throbbing cock shoots a white jet of sperm onto Stevenson’s forehead. Stevenson lifts his face from the boy’s asshole and shouts, “This is better than being a priest because I get paid for this one!”

Finished with the first boy, who has no doubt formed a relentless bond with the second after their many experiences with the famed Dr. Stevenson, the second is called forward and asked to disrobe. Stevenson talks to me out of the side of his mouth while staring at the boy’s movements. “Always wondered if you can delay ejaculation by a quick stab to the prostate,” he’s explaining to me. “Never had the patient to try it on but I think this one right here might be the very thing. Look at the shape of his pubic area. You can see because there’s no hair there yet. Nothing prettier in the world than a hairless pubic area.”

I’m out above the skyscraper mountains, floating somewhere that the birds avoid. I can see grim two-tone junkies turning gray with bad doses. I examine killer whales in aging prizefighter stances. When a whale commits suicide by running aground, often the other whales of the group will follow his example, even if they are not suicidal. The doctor is still talking but I’m miles away by now. His voice is the tether that keeps me from floating off entirely. “Now this subject is a prime specimen of the beauty of an underage body,” he’s saying. “I will remove his prostate as he nears ejaculation and see exactly what effect this has on the process.”

He’s setting up his instrument tray while he says this, the scalpels and clamps arrayed before him. “He’ll need something to relax him,” Stevenson goes on, removing a needle from his pocket. “More Baroline, why not? It’s certainly working for you.”
I feel a momentary rage over this statement, incensed that this child, this mere boy, will be getting the drug I so desperately crave. Baroline is like cocaine, as soon as you have some you’re immediately wailing for more and more.

He’s hidden the H in a fur hat, some kind of mink or fox, one more shot and then the cure. He broke down train station schedules, shit in the city’s water supply, ate mussels on some foreign shore that he never fully left. They caught him sneaking over a fence to get into a pool, claiming he’d had too much and just needed to cool off for a bit. They beat him there until there was nothing left of him.

In atruscan atrophy there is a lion loose in the city. It has escaped from one of the zoos and is seen wandering the shopping district by night, eating the homeless and shitting them out in great chunks. People carry guns, more guns than during the riots, and they often shoot each other, that strange twilight effect where people begin to resemble an approaching carnivore. I sleep at the bus station, trying to touch up my empire roots.

The procedure finished, the doctor holds up the prostate, the size of a large bean, and proclaims it a success. “Look at this,” he admonishes me. “It’s perfectly shaped. Not a tumor in sight. Now there’s a disciplined body. Doesn’t spread its tumescent activities. Why, I could kiss the boy if it were not untoward. Can’t make any mistakes,” he’s explaining. “Gotta stay on the straight and narrow.”

The boy is laying dead on the table, a thin stream of jizzum protruding from his penis and extending as far as his belly button. His golden hair is crusted with blood. The door bursts open and the doctor doesn’t even turn around before saying, “That would be Mr. White. The father.” And then Stevenson has produced a red shotgun and is taking aim at the father’s ashen face.

“Too bad to kill you here,” Stevenson says as I take another Baroline and pop it in my mouth. “I had always planned something more formal. But trees and snakes and planes all come down eventually. I ask you, did Eve eat the apple or did God give the pair curiosity so that they would eat the apple? It’s an awful experience, that. Giving someone an overpowering curiosity, deceitfulness, duplicity. And you know they have this trait, you know how much exists in them. Then you give them an order they can not follow because of the way you’ve made them.”

He’s edging closer to the father now, lifting the shotgun to face level. “I was a father too, once,” Stevenson is telling Mr. White. “I was lured to the call of fast cars and easy women. Oh boy, don’t get me started. I might tell you a story that makes you sit up and beg for buttermilk. I apologize for the condition of the body,” Stevenson says, pointing at the boy with his free hand. “It was not meant to end this way, in my office. But you get carried away at times and then you’re left with fall sprockets, angry angel heads. Ever heard the angels sing? They come in angles. I buried a half-prison in the desert once. Early days, you understand. It was an extremely clean experiment. One man survived the ordeal. He ate the bodies of every other prisoner and came out fatter than when he went in. So I said ‘Oh, we’ll see about this’ and unbuttoned my fly right there. I had him down the sideways backwards exit, the whole of the Santa Anna winds at his back, and I pumped into him for a good twelve minutes before blasting my shot home. But I wasn’t content to let him swallow my seed, I had to see his system at work so I had a scalpel in my left hand and in the instant before orgasm I sliced his throat wide open.

“I don’t have to tell you the effects of this experience as it is probably irrelevant to you at the moment. But I do love to hear myself talk. Well this guy didn’t even register that his throat now had an air vent. His eyes rolled back but his teeth didn’t shut. So I shot it down his throat and could see my fluid running down the back of his throat, headed toward the cannibal stomach. They carried him out on a stretcher but there was no reciprocation of my effort. They had fooled me good.”

Orderlies have appeared at the door and are waiting for a signal from the doctor. He gives them one, a flip of the hand, and they advance on Mr. White and drag him off to some operating room where the doctor will do god knows what to him. Turning back to me, Stevenson lowers the shotgun and says, “Now, my assistant wants to talk to you. He’s a worrisome old thing but he says you two have business with each other. I stand by my statements of the previous night, whatever they may be.” And then he moves quickly out the door and off to deal with Mr. White.

I stand staring out the window, still partially removed from the reality of the room. A box on the doctor’s desk begins to shake back and forth and light streams out of a joint in the fold. I walk to the box and throw it open and am immediately bathed in a sick light. There is no way to describe the light but it makes me feel wretched, weak and closed off, broken with no possibility of rehabilitation. A ten inch blue monster of some sort steps out of the box and clears its throat. It has pointed ears and sharp teeth, jagged claws, a mane of jet black hair. The eyes are meaningless hunks of black.

“You are Josh Kell,” the beast says. “I am Zet. Dr. Stevenson is my familiar.” I’ve skirted behind the chair to protect myself and am holding a shoe over my head, ready to take the offensive if need be.
“You won’t need that,” Zet says, motioning towards my shoe. “I’ve eaten enough souls in my time to know when there’s no profit to be made. I am here as a representative of a faction.” He pauses and pulls up his loincloth to expose a miniature penis. “Could you be so kind as to rub me right here?” he asks.

I lift the shoe high, in preparation to bring it crashing down upon the beast, but he just smiles and shakes his head sadly. I comply with his request and begin to rub the flesh under the penis, an area conspicuously lacking any scrotum or testicles. He ejaculates on my finger within seconds and begins laughing. I wipe the fluid on Stevenson’s leather chair. “That was perfect,” Zet says. “Now you carry my mark. Can I interest you in some bedrock?” and he motions towards a vial that lays on the desk, a black powder within. “It’s made from scorpion grindings. Intolerable chemicals in their poison, but taken in small doses it initiates euphoric states.”
He opens the vial and pours a small amount of the black dust on the desk and begins to roll in it.

“What do you want from me?” I ask.
“I want what all factions want,” he responds, still rolling in the powder. “Control.”
“What factions?”
“You are,” he says, lifting himself to his knees and staring up at the ceiling, “an agent of the narcotics bureau now. You have turned on the people that have provided for you and sheltered you all of your adult life. They are in control of your life now. You are beholden to them because you value your freedom. But the game is rigged in their world. You have broken no moral laws. This city is a monument to self-actualization, to non-conformity. The way you dress, the way you talk, the choices you make, all are imbued with the essence of individuality.”

He bends down and scoops some of the powder up and begins rubbing it on his lips. “But the establishment is not always the voice of the people,” he says. “The establishment is, indeed, a faction itself. They are intent on controlling thought processes, on molding behavior to conform to carefully selected preset patterns. Think of a wheel within a wheel. They are the axle, turning the spokes that move the wheel. There is another wheel outside of that, free to engage in motion in any direction as long as it is circular.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.

There’s a knock at the door and I look up to see Dr. Stevenson standing there, his white coat covered with blood. “Pardon the interruption,” he says, “I need a sample of the jizzum for laboratory study.” He walks in and scoops semen off the body into a petri dish then makes a hasty exit.
I say to Zet, “He said you’re his assistant.”
“Yes, another piece of control. I want him to believe that he is in charge of our relationship. But he actually serves me. He also serves the establishment. His work is preoccupied with control of thought process and behavioral patterns. These are the exact functions that the establishment is most interested in. His brutality acts as a barrier, he believes, to keep him from becoming a corporate stooge, as the youngsters say these days. But he is carrying out the research that they want him to. The greatest trick they’ve pulled so far is convincing that man that he’s a rebel.

“Now, why I’ve called you here. You are a prisoner now. You are being controlled. You are a Baroline addict despite warnings that you were not to partake of it. Is that false information?”
“No,” I say eagerly.
“Do you think they would have introduced you to the drug and given you a supply of it if they had no intention of letting you become hooked on it?”
“I’m not sure,” I reply.
“Of course you’re sure. Things happen for a reason, Josh. Especially with the establishment. But as I said, there are other factions. They exist outside of the city. They exist on abandoned street corners in forgotten burgs. They exist at the black market. Hero falls will never be welcome outside the establishment. I want you to move away from here.”
I begin to sweat and he reads my mind, saying, “I’ll make sure your Baroline habit is maintained. But you must move onward. I want you to sell your belongings and go to Eberhart on the Frontier. It is a lawless place of corruptions where the other factions gather en masse to plot against the establishment.”

At this point I begin to lift the shoe high above my head again and Zet stops licking up the black powder and shouts, “No, you fool! It’ll do us all in!”
I bring the shoe crashing down with amazing force and the creature is condensed to an oozing stain on the doctor’s desk. I can’t believe my action once it’s completed. I stare at the disgusting substance covering the sole of the shoe and then immediately ransack the desk and take all three bottles of Baroline out of it.

I discover the door is locked from the outside, some kind of intercom system required for exit. I don’t want to push the button and alert anyone to what I’ve done in here so I punch out the window and unlock the door that way. I race down the back stairs and appear on the street in daylight, my shoe still in my hand, Baroline making the city sing with the voice of a million angels.