(content warning: mental illness, suicide, body horror)

The first track of Isaac Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul plays in the background. “Walk on By” is a cover song; subsequently it has been sampled repeatedly: Damn they trynna stick me for my paper. I can’t go to sleep. I can’t shut my eyes. But my technique is ill son. Watch how I spill one.

“I just can’t get over losing you, so if I seem broken in two,

please, walk on by.”

I’m ready to die. I composed a Quetiapine dirge for my love bomb.

I gave her my vascular ring. She gave me nothing. God damn. She murdered everybody and I was her witness.

My heartbreak pushes out an elastic sack; a cord with an anaconda body and a lion-face pushes my pulse in and out of sync holes; nothing is the future rhythm, (spastically and violently grabbing at air at the moment of the down beat. How many chambers?); my mirror heart struggles to suck up and fluidly vomit its own defecated chemical load. 

I saturated tributaries in the hopes of living a more comfortable life.

The rooms wheezed in and out. Something obstructed the pump, clogging the trachea like hair in a drain; the wad, a collection of human byproduct and woven nylon, tangled through my fingers. The thin cables snapped as I attempted to yank the mass swiftly out of my heart, only freeing the protruding tip of a black nest while the rest sunk deeper into the hole to accrue more ingrown follicles. A thick black cable grows from a purulent embryonic sack at the back of the throat, embroidered with this hair, on which tiny scriptures issue a warning not to pull it all out lest there be nothing left.

An assortment of blisters have since cropped up around the root of my penis, encircling my anus, bubbling up with a slow circadian rhythm that only trees can observe. Gurgling, suppurating mouths whispering a constant reminder of a love/illusion. Taking pictures of a sexy, gaping ulcer. I shift uneasily scraping the skin on my ass against mildew-ridden upholstery, a tempo determined by the random firing of nerve endings at the base of blister wells, abraded and popping, pouring infectious, clear, effervescent serum, a seltzer syrup that spreads the sickness if you take a taste; or open your holes to hollow thuds, a flesh drum that beats arrhythmic gasps and moans, moans, moans, then boredom.

I should never trust (rich) white people. Mama, the name we gave to nuestrx abuela, me llamó, “el muñequito o ese blanquito.” My whiteness was treasured and envied by the doting chorus of Latinas who, in an assembly-line process not unlike the preparation of pollo frito, dunked me into a sink bath, dried me off while I giggled, splashed me with baby powders, covered me in freshly ironed linens, and tucked me into a little sailor outfit, admiring the contrast between my lily-white flesh and tiny crimson fish lips. 

But when I was mal portado, they called me by the name of the white father, whose ontological status, to me, is always in question. His name became 2/3’s of mine: Michael Todd Pierce. My official name was tacked on a document from Lenox Hills. My mother gave “Michael” as an additional concession. As the story goes, at first, she preferred the name Wesley. My grandfather’s thick Ecuadorian accent could not wrap around the sound: “Wayslay,” mischievously pretending to confuse it with Wesson Oil. That Lenox Hills document meant I would never be Miguelito Solis. I was to be the trojan-horse of whiteness, a step towards my family’s full assimilation. Passing easily – eventually filtering the blood until only toxic whiteness remained in the river, next to textile factories on indigenous lands.

Love ages like toxic blue cheese; my taste buds numb to the spoiling, as I keep shoveling away in rapid repeating crunches, the cheese sinking into my gums riding atop a stale rusk scraping away layers of flesh. The sweet salt of my mouth procured its own blood sausage. “Silly Sausage.” M, you aren’t allowed in the Chelsea Art Club without a chaperone. Your next stop is the meat processor where the trust-fund pays for personal plastic packaging. And it goes a little something like this: kick it, ripping flesh liquidated, congealing fats from a bloated corpse for the site-gag stuff, fuck/stuff a membrane, seasoned, desiccated, and boiled back to soft, with spice for white fish flakes to taste enhanced despited serving solipsist. My “lover” gags and grows bored, oscillating between an afterimage of disgust and dead affect. The thrill of my entangled appendages, of my strange being, once welcomed inside, has long since become the residue of blisters popping/bubbling like a cauldron.

Then boredom. 

“A sick lover.” Get it. That’s the medicine I have to take every day. I’m filled with pink tablets that catch a bit of intestinal tissue in the grooves of their mechanical engravings.

I’ll be lucky if I become interstitial nostalgia. The next time she gags it might percolate up a vomited bile that settles, in its bitter citrus pool, and projects my image with a neon dollar sign. But then I will oscillate back to nothing. She’s not even the worst.

“It is better for your health to forget,” the therapist recommended. His qualifications were apparently apocryphal. I sat and stirred on a large blue foam mat about 6’ long, 3’ wide, and 2 1/2’ deep. Just a little too small to be my coffin but what they thought was the perfect forgery of a bed. It reminded me of the gymnastics gym at Evanston Township High School, always soiled and covered in the collected smegma of cheese-lined shoes. A douchebag named Judas used to walk about the mats with hole-ridden sock scum emanating sour stank. Some filth never gets washed off.

The psych ward room was covered in stains. The bathroom door was locked open, strapped to the wall by locks. Two cameras in opposing corners of the room took note of me. A semicircular mirror was implanted just above the bed. Curiously, by some kind of optical trick, my image was erased from its reflection, so as I gazed up at the mirror, I only saw an empty bed. Apparently, I was not there, but the panopticon ensured that indeed I was. Even when I pissed into a seatless receptacle, not quite a toilet, a camera winked at me, judging the size of my penis. It was shriveled up and cold from an absurd drought in typically endless lust, a welcome respite from the coursing pornography that otherwise dragged on in the dark. I still felt the need to enlarge my flaccid, distant cock, but by the time the neon yellow of medicated piss had been sufficiently drained, I started thinking about “falling down” and snapping my neck. Fish digging through my bloated corpse like a special treat from the Thames. My fair lady is compulsively wiping up her nose like she’s the sick one. “Achooo,” phantom powder flurries; Ecuadorian tribes with nothing but chemical rain from wypipo dot com.

I pushed in the silver, rust-speckled, “flush” button and watched, with amusement, the familiar pattern – the miniature representation of the Milky Way galaxy with chromatic shifts of my piss. The spiral, my old friend. Sometimes rigid, sometimes soft. Sometimes urine, bath water, spacetime flowing into a hungry hole.

The guard (the therapist?) sat scrolling through their phone. I could only see their legs peeking through a doorframe. They assured me “the door is always open, but you can’t leave until you see the doctor.”

Squeeze out the blisters. I’ll tell anyone who will listen about the scar down my back, punctuated with thick black wires growing a pubic hedge. I can’t pluck them out, so they just grow freely from scar tissue.

I’m the fault line; etched from my left shoulder to the bottom of my rib cage, conceals a surgical sculpture and a medical marvel – a heart that wraps around my trachea and esophagus like a spiral staircase around a dark column. The hole in the center is me – the consciousness I reflect back upon when I disassociate my body to take account of the miserable agony, like a cautious customer on the verge of signing for a rental car. Did you note this scratch? There’s very clearly a dent here. Shall we inspect the undercarriage? Do you notice that smell? I think the vents might have mold. Is there enough combustion in the engine? Is that rust? Has it been in any collisions? Is there any way of scanning the negative architectures?

They gave me bacon. United Kingdom bacon reeks of pig piss. I still ate it up and politely thanked them for the microwaved food. I remembered: “the next time you want to jump off of a bridge, don’t let anyone know.” The police asked my name. Sobbing, I tried to keep walking towards the bus I planned to take to the bridge. The bridge was right next to the Tower of London. The middle of the bridge raises and lowers to allow the ships to pass underneath. Recently the bridge got stuck open as if it were also in mental crisis. I chose this promiscuous bridge as my final ground, imagining the moment of regret that would inevitably push my shitslop through the singular death hole. During the summer, I was taken to a carnival. I got a kiss in a photo booth. I finally threw out the souvenir.

J Dilla: Broken and Blue. Broke and Blue. Broke and Blue.

The photo strip, rendered in black and white, was difficult to tear, so I kept it in my computer bag until I gathered the energy to cut it unceremoniously with a pair of scissors and dispose of it in a pile of shit. We continued on to other amusements, virgins of turbulent spacetime, ecstatic to feel our organs shifting out of place, our hearts in our throat, where mine is stuck, in an embryonic sack.

“My heart wraps around my trachea and esophagus.”

“Oh wow, so did they fix that?”

“No, they just loosened it. They had to fix a sack that was in danger of popping. It was filling with blood. They call it Kommerell’s Diverticulum. But I would’ve died had they not cut me open and snipped a bit. They told me I have a dense lymphatic system. Anyway, I still can’t quite feel my left side. It’s like the volume is turned down.”

I could tell the guard stopped listening to me. I felt the hole. A foot-long drainage tube (a yellow snake) had once been swiftly tugged from my innards with the aid of lowered dosages of morphine. A cold ice pick reverse-fuck. Then the catheter; yanked hard. “Everything looks great!” I was assured by the nurse.

Years later, I scrolled through Instagram and felt my cripple-heart aspirating molasses. In its chambers, the echoes of vultures and prophetic dreams bounced bounced bounced bounced bounced, eventually becoming soup. In a dream, she was holding the hand of someone named Nathan, like the hot dogs, and she kept looking back at me, her brows furled, licking the sores erupting from the scar tissue on her upper lip, perturbed by my misery: “What? Whaaaaaaaaat? What!?” She looked back at her mirror and allowed herself to forget whatever it was she was using me for.

She unconvincingly assured me: “I love you, M. Don’t let that stupid dream get to you.” 

Light is never gone, and it always waves back and forth and back and forth, riding along. But it turns to red. And in its suspended, infinite end stage of decay, that red takes on the quality of all darkness until its radiating dance is reduced to negligibility. I remembered this as we glided across Echo Park Lake in a plastic swan boat, propelled by a twin set of pedals. I could see the ghosts of Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse killing extras in the shadows. (I laughed it off before recognizing I was just an extra on the call sheet.) The swans were fitted with tube lighting that curled about the pitch-black horizon below the twilight. I felt her thoughts: Love love love love love nothing love love love nothing love love nothing love nothing nothing love nothing love nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing.

A soulmate is pushed down a flight of spiral stairs. Loses soul. Why did I expect compassion from anyone?

I politely asked multiple (therapist guards) for a blanket.

“The doctor is coming!”

“But may I have a pillow, please. I’m having problems falling asleep is all. It’s just a bit cold.”

“Yes, we asked for one.”

“Oh thank you. My apologies. It’s just that I asked a few hours ago and I didn’t know if maybe it was busy and the last attending had forgotten.”

“Yes, the doctor is on the way.”

“Thank you very much.” My voice trembles in a higher pitch when I attempt to be polite (as trained). Unfortunately, this reveals my inner, sickly child, choked from the twisted vines of my heart, trembling, seeking shelter from bullies in the warm embrace of my grandmother’s soothing hums. “Ahhh-uhhh-Ahhh-uhhh-Ah”

I asked again. Nothing replied.

After five hours, the room was flooded with light. The (nurse/guard/therapist?) informed me that the doctor would arrive in 10 hours. My voice rose, curdling with agitation, and rudely demanded a blanket and pillow. Within five minutes, two nurse/guard/therapists finally provided them, and I tried to sleep as the light projected through translucent lids, burning orange-red; the after-image of my subcutaneous maps against white minimalism.

“When I get out of here,” I thought to myself, “I’m not going to tell anyone the next time I want to jump off a bridge.”

Then one of my favorite songs came on the psych ward intercom:

I’m in love for the first time,
Don’t you know it’s gonna end,
It’s a love that gasps for never,
It’s a love that’s just pretend.

---

M. Woods (They/Them/He/Him) is the principal media drug designer at DISASSOCIATIVE PRODUCTIONS www.thedigitalsickness.com. M is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and activist based in Chicago. They graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (BFA 2010) and received the Erna Plachte Award at the University of Oxford (MFA 2021). They have exhibited their work internationally for the past 15 years, including at IFFR, the Flaherty Seminar, The Royal Society of British Artists, The Oberhausen International Film Festival, the Bodleian Library, Prismatic Ground, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival, where they also served as special curator. They have received support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Light Cone Paris, and Collectif Jeune Cinema.