The name is Greg. Wait, no. I’m Bad Leftovers. Was Bad Leftovers, I mean.
Please excuse me if I get a little mixed up. A food-borne virus, I once multiplied in a stew, tainting the cubes of meat.
A face peered over me. A bit of skin tugged over too large a skull. A hole opened to chew, chat, and release strings of spit.
Greg.
His tongue ordered me down his throat. For a few weeks, I took up residence in his bowels. The walls responded with sharp spasms and blood.
Within Greg, I erected a city full of hidden passages. If you’re interested, I’d love to give you a tour. Hope you like cracked facades, burnt out tunnels, and uncultivated gardens.
I seeped hard through his pores. Dying tubes spat and prolapsed. You should’ve seen me in the foam.
Sadly, Greg injected a fleet of Chinese antivirals into his rump and made a full recovery, and my city fell into disarray.
Will he ever curl up and die? His soul, I hope, will fracture into brilliant points of light.
Until then, I’m trapped in wet leather. It feels like I’m circulating within a swollen lip or lobe.
As good a place as any, I guess.
Where his body ends, I fracture into eh, uh, and erm.
If I concentrate hard enough, maybe I can manifest a black bulb or collapse a vein. Grow into a pile of glands that slither here and there. A detached hernia dressed in rumpled clothes.
With any luck, maybe a small person with arms, legs, and thoughts of his own.
Right now, I’m too loose. You could wag a finger through my whirling particles, get lost in my whitespace.
I find ways to pass the time. I can become anyone for a while. Until the impression falters and betrays me.
Say, a person who plays video games on a busted console and scribbles on scraps of paper.
I press a few buttons to maneuver my avatar through the diminished light. Core gameplay involves picking up objects and molesting bots.
Most players ignore me, but a few stop to chat. Grins stamped onto blocky heads. We share laughs, the occasional“touch.”
If the mood strikes, we jump off a cliff and respawn in one of the many forested worlds.
The weeds stir by our feet. We tamp the tendrils down with our heels, but the roots flourish, splitting the ground into a web of faults.
The server processes our deaths.
The personas blend in a bout of vertigo.
The phantasmagoria of a wasting disease.
A line of people feed tokens into a machine until the slots bleed.
I focus less on the words I’m writing and more on the jiggling of my fat arm.
By the way, did I ever get your address?
Oh, that’s right. You’re just another rat attempting to escape a glue trap by turning in aimless little circles.
I’ll just flush this paper down the toilet and pray it reaches someone, maybe my shadow self.
An emaciated man who lives in the sewers.
My messages may get sloppy as they spread throughout our common excrement.
I guess I’m addicted to writing farewell letters. Little more than a failed attempt at replication, I mourn people and places I’ve never known.
***
Despite all, Greg is perfectly healthy, albeit a little withdrawn and easily confused. He walks through dusty clearings, plants his ass on a wrought-iron bench, and belches into a dead phone.
Most passersby ignore him, but a few stop to chat. Men wearing silk shirts and bracelets. A few highly-perfumed women.
“Can you hear me?”
“Not really.”
“What about now?”
“Don’t yell at me.”
“Is this a good volume?”
“I’m scared.”
“Is that guy conversing with his indigestion?”
“Let’s make out near my special stone. It’s just behind this bush. Just follow the trail of vertebrae.”
A limp finger curves through a buttonhole. A soggy log, exhumed from the mud, rushes through the air. Holes open through which dirty objects pass.
On the days I– erm–Greg finds himself alone, he sends his hand through his open fly to fold his penis and maneuver his testicles.
Now, where was I?
Today, I’m just a thrill killer living my best life. I try to reconnect with my environment by wearing camouflage. The price of antacids increased by a dollar, so I verbally assaulted my fist, picked up a log, and killed two joggers.
Plastic leaves drop from my sleeve. I pick them up to blow on their jagged edges. They spin in my palm to point this way and that.
A compass serves no purpose when the landscape fizzles out into a red surface. No landmarks. As if the teeth of an electric shaver scraped across the earth.
Holes open to suck up homes, boulders, and people, only to spit them out an immeasurable distance later.
Being nobody is a lot of work. A thousand dead voices compete for attention inside a cartoon mouth.
They make endless prank phone calls.
Is your hernia running? Then you better go catch it!
Imagine being trapped here. In this structure replicating into an excess of nothing.
You wander in and out of thresholds, hoping your next step will supply a sense of direction, of purpose.
Despite the motion and all the stumbling about.
The costumes hang from metal rods. Memory cubes with leather straps that fasten over your head.
On the shelves, tchotchkes covered in a rind of dust. Maybe it’s time to take a damp rag to them and rearrange them into a new tableau.
A barrage of static interrupts your thoughts. As you go near a surface, it draws you in with a sucking sound.
On the side opposite, a face solidifies, swollen with endless fatigue and scorched with eczema.
Nothing really coheres. You enter shadows, bend a paperclip into a helix, smear food over food. You go through doors and sit in chairs. The arc of your story bends out of whack, into eh, uh, and erm.
Your mature form loses itself in the blurred zone that precedes the afterlife.
You’ll never escape.
Best you can do is plop your decrepit ass down and clap at imaginary flies to break apart the silence. Rub the tchotchke in my lap until it fades or cracks.
Scratch your skin until it degrades into a conversation:
“And to whom am I speaking?”
“The name is Gerg. Do you have time to take a quick survey in the form of a multiple-choice assessment?”
“Well, I lack a body and a mind of my own but sure.”
“Great. By what means are you currently communicating with me?
“A latex fist hollowed out with a rusty spoon and refilled with the innards of a cell phone.
“Coded messages in a botulism-inspired form of malware being tested out on old arcade games.
“A handwritten letter of blended observations of site survey equipment and neuroimaging tools studying the communicating capacity of dying rats.
“A ghillie suit possessed by a flesh-eating jinn after being exorcized from a man named Greg.”
“Eh?”
“Perfect. And if atomic data were to replace your childhood memories, how would you avoid psychosis?
“Hide in a damp bush and masturbate, incorporating the conversations of passersby into your sexual fantasies.
“Conduct guided meditations in which you instruct participants to dissect themselves, personify their body parts, and let them mingle in a stew.
“Draft a fantasy novel by breaking into houses and scraping the lore into the wallpaper.
“Charge an altar stone through ritual sacrifice, preferably using small rodents because human faces have been drained of emotional appeal.”
“Uh?”
“Great choice. And, finally, why do you think I’m conducting this multiple-choice assessment?
“I’m conducting psychological research to track you down, kill you, and transform you into a fetish item.
“The words in this multiple-choice assessment are hypnotic suggestions luring you into believing that your friends and family have spontaneously erupted into verbal tics.
“This is not a multiple-choice assessment but the symptoms of a black bulb pulsing your brainstem.”
“Unfortunately, the final option has been copied and cut from the answer bank and subsequently modeled into artificial grass.”
“Erm?”
“You cut out there for a second. Can you please repeat your answer?”
“Sorry, I’m currently traveling through a tunnel within Greg. I’m a little lost within the strange proportions of his stalled death. Or mine. Please excuse me if I get a little confused.”
“Well, you’ve been laboring to breathe after I bludgeoned you with that log and plugged up the head wound with a sponge.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t remember this. I think I exist solely as interruptions within my language center. Remind me why I’m bound with leather straps and thrown in the back of a black utility van?”
“We’ve been penpals for a long time. Surely you’ve gotten my letters. I go by Bad Leftovers. Don’t you love my ghillie suit?”
“I do!”
“Well, I abducted you because you have a very strong personal brand. People will pay good money to participate in the idea of you. Press a few buttons to modify your appearance or change your clothes. You won’t feel it at all.”
“And where are you taking me?”
“Right now I’m driving you through my city to give you a little tour. Later, we’ll play hide and seek and invent bedtime stories until the phosphenes put us to sleep.”
“Are we here?”
“Yes. This road leads to the movie theater.”
A barrage of static interrupts the footage. Brilliant points of light. Like failing to unravel yourself from a string of firecrackers.
From what I understand, I’ve been watching a livestream of a man trapped in a canal.
The muddy waves lap at his ankles and rush down the open channel.
He relieves the bulge in his pocket by removing plastic vampire teeth. He slides them over his gums. The brutal angles shine in the light.
What kind of cosplay do you like?
Hentai vine rape.
Cool. I’m more into vampirism. I hide in the sewer and drain rats to satiate my blood lust.
You’re the only friend I’ve invited here. I hardly leave. But I maintain a sense of the outside world through all the mail flushed down the toilets.
I dip the letters in a bowl of watery glue and sculpt them into shape.
Shattered broom handles prop up limbs. I work glass orbs into the eye sockets. Sentences break apart and reform along the damp ridges inside the papier-mâché skulls.
I gather the dummies in a circle and spin to set the faces into motion, stopping only when I’m dizzy enough to say my name backward or reveal my deepest, darkest secrets.
Like when I tried to turn a person into a vampire like me but fucked up big time.
My face hovered over him. A bit of skin tugged over too large a skull. My hole opened to chew, chat, and release strings of spit.
Right now, he grunts in a sickbed as the phosphenes put him to sleep.
Medical personnel come and go.
Cameras record his feverish monologues, his shifting forms.
Memory silhouettes billow with spent breath.
He’s covered in growths. Is that how you extract a tumor?
I’m sure the footage will be digitized.
Hope they have a firewall.
Corpses do nothing but make noise.
The language center extracts and modifies. Old jokes and worn phrases circulate as our common excrement.
Dear Mr/Mrs:
The purchase order (PO22044048) has been issued to your company.
Order Description: ICBU-SEO Writer
Buyer: 吴毅婷(wyt01308957@swallow-inc.com)
Consignee: 张程程(dajv.zcc@swallow-inc.com);
Please follow up the order in time and comply with the provisions of the relevant agreement. Thank you!
Click here to download the order form.
***
A barrage of static. A man vomits in an uncultivated garden. He grunts, stifles a belch here, a spasm there.
The vegetation rises or does his exhaustion betray him?
Flowering vines weave into anatomy, a face of scummy rocks and black bulbs.
“Hello, you,” says the creature.
“I’ve fallen into a trance after licking up a load of dung. Step inside me and wear me like a suit. Oh, green isn’t your color? Well, I’ll just spit out a black bulb before I wither up and die. Plop it in your mouth. I promise not to corrupt you while I thrive inside your brain stem.”
A vine wraps around a wrist. Greg or Gerg moves unsteadily as he fails to disentangle himself from the invasive species.
Just live with it. It won’t change anything to be smeared with a little chlorophyll. A few tendrils sticking out here and there. Let them overcome your field of vision.
He soon grows tired and resigns himself to the weeds. It’s not all that bad.
An uprush of yellow fluid.
Vegetable man or abandoned avatar?
Did I observe flickering bombs in an earlier scene or was that a soul?
A catastrophic sound confused by its origin.
One of the many places I call home.
I’m trying to watch what happens next.
I guess the editor made a lot of cuts with a knife and added low-grade special effects.
Scenes of the earth wobbling, spitting open, and sutured with metal cables spat from the faces of machines.
I sit at a distance, supplying the voices for his moving lips, the motivations for his actions.
A screenplay with partial credits to a virus.
The premise keeps falling apart.
Are those testicles or glass orbs?
He flicks semen onto his foot cabbage.
Are you listening? I guess you escaped my trap. It’s not safe to wander about with a damaged brain.
You might accidentally lodge yourself in a cup or soliloquize to the wallpaper.
I guess you want to play a little game.
Ready or not, here I come!
— Johnny Alvarez lives in Yucatán, Mexico, where he runs a shelter for stray dogs. He’s currently working on his first collection of short stories.