I snorted another line off my blow-covered desk and felt like a fucking god. You gotta give whoever the hell made cocaine some credit: it’s a hell of a drug. In the eternal darkness of my ramshackle art studio, finally, there was a light, and that light revealed to me the holy sacrament of cocaine. As I took another communion nose-full, I took a brief moment to say a prayer.


“Let me do something. Amen!”

I slammed my hands on the table, rattling my paint supplies and sending a puff of nose candy into the air—then a bolt of inspiration struck me. I couldn’t say what it was specifically, but I knew it was something of pure magnificence blessed with the cross-trident of Zeus himself. I ran like a giddy schoolgirl, fighting my legs which were determined to tie themselves into knots, and fetched a canvas that I swear must have had at least an inch of dust on it. The rusty, cob-webbed laden gears of my mind had spun for the first time in months, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to waste the opportunity.
Swiping the silvery mix of dust and cocaine from my work area, I grabbed my brushes, dipped one in my palette, and as soon as that brush hit the canvas, I lost my image.

“Fuck you, Zeus!” I screamed. “Fuck you and your stupid crown of thorns!”

I hurled that canvas harder than I should have. I was pretty sure that the sound of cracking glass meant I had broken something expensive. Fucking wrenches gumming up my mind gears. I immediately set about flipping every piece of furniture in the penthouse that my agent hadn’t insisted be bolted to the floor. Everything ranging from steel chairs to wood chairs got flipped, tossed, and smashed against the tempered, bulletproof windows I forgot he had put in, the rat bastard.

The rage quickly subsided, turning into a lethargic depression. A torrent of shitty thoughts rained out my cocaine parade. The fuck was I doing with my life. Why the fuck should I even try anymore? Fortunately, while the window was not spacious enough to allow a chair through, I could fit through if I sucked in my ever-growing gut. I was about halfway out the window when I heard my phone squelch out one of those ridiculous preset ringtones. Figuring that the theme to my suicide shouldn’t be some retarded series of blips and bloops composed by some underpaid dipshit at Samsung, I lowered myself out.

Thank the lord that it was my pusher, not my agent, calling. If that Nazi-shaped vulture asked me one more time about submitting material like he had every week for the last nine months, I would’ve outdone Sylvia Plath.

“Hey Rod, I’m busy, can I call you back?” I said.

“Busy with what? You’re sure as shit not paintin’ art for the Louvre.”

“Suicide.”

There was a brief pause from Rod, followed by a short, annoyed sigh. “Trying to crawl out the window again?”

“Yep.”

“You won’t fit.”

“You don’t know that! What if I lost weight? I know I’m not some Greek god like you, man, but I’m not John Goodman.”

Internally, I apologized for my blasphemy against the Goodman.

“You’re not gonna fit. You’re gonna get halfway out, then get caught on your fat ass. Listen, I got something special for you if you’re ready to stop bein’ such a damn drama queen.”

My ears perked up at that “special” bit. Rod was the jack of all drugs, and everything seemed boring to him. Hell, even angel dust couldn’t faze him. “Shit man, really?” I said, trying to contain myself.

“Yeah, some eggheads cooked up this new thing they call Ambrosia. I don’t know what the fuck it stands for, but it’s like the new LSD. Fucks you up good. You in?”

Once again, I felt like a giddy schoolgirl, albeit a completely different kind. The kind that has her panties around her ankles, ass raised, just waiting to get fucked. I let my mind linger on that image for a good moment before replying.

“Of course I’m in.”

“Good-shit. Be outside in twenty and don’t take the express route, ight? Oh, and wear something nice this time. This is a high-rollers group, not the community college you dropped out of.”

“Yeah, yeah, fine, goodbye.”

Before I got dressed, I had to test something. I jammed my phone back into my pocket and tried to climb out the window again. I got caught on my ass.

Fuck you, Rod. Fuck you and your six-pack.

Luckily, my ass was not so fat enough to prevent me from slipping into my favorite suit. God, it’d been so long since I’d been this excited sober. Forget a spring in my step, there was a goddamn summer in my step. If I’d been any happier, woodland creatures would erupt from brush and join together in song.

When I made my way down to the lobby, I must’ve looked like a freak, because everyone was giving me the evil eye. Parents pulled their kids away from me, people I knew rolled their eyes and were quick to move past me when I said hello, the whole nine yards. I didn’t care.

When Rod finally arrived, he took one look at me and shook his head.

“Have you looked in a mirror?”

Ah, the mirror. Another luxury lost to my czar of an agent. “No why?”

“Here.” He produced a small mirror lightly coated in what I assumed was coke from his jacket pocket.

I rotated the mirror around my face. “I don’t see—”

There was enough cocaine caked to my nose for at least two lines. “Oh.”

“Oh is right. You’re lucky I’m a patron of the arts. This is clown shoes shit. Goofy assholes roll with Mickey and Minnie, not me, you hear?”

“I gotcha.” I took a handkerchief out of my pocket and rubbed down my nose.

“So we’re going to the other place today. There’s too much heat coming down on me recently to go to the usual.”

The other place was a shit-tacular shack with peeling wallpaper and an abundance of cockroaches on the crappy side of the city. Hardly comparable to the upscale
club I was used to, but anything for this Ambrosia shit.

“I’m cool with that.” I said, while not being cool with that in the slightest.

“I’m not asking your opinion.”

More people were at the shit shack than I expected. Rich assholes tended to avoid these sorts of places like the plague unless they were desperate and bombing out, but I counted no less than twenty tweed dickweeds cluttering up the place with idle talks of stock exchange bullshit and the like—all of them staring at Rod and
I expectantly as we walked in.

Rod cleared his throat, and there was silence. He took out a clear bottle containing multicolored pills and held them above his head. “This, my friends, is our holy grail. Drink of it and know enlightenment.” He took a pill, swallowed it.

The assembly of rich dickweeds cheered.

Rod passed the bottle to me. “It takes a couple minutes to hit, but you’ll feel it. I promise.” He winked and smiled: two things that happened so rarely that seeing them both at once nearly blew my mind.

I grabbed that shit as fast as I could. I swallowed a pill, passed it on to some asshole that I didn’t care about, and sat down, waiting on enlightenment.
There was a knock at the door. I knew without knowing that it would be the cops.

“LAPD, open up!”

That in that of itself sent everyone into a bit of a tizzy, while I just kept my ass planted. People started looking for exits, found none, and started hyperventilating: standard rich asshole reaction to thinking they’re going to be put in the pen. Maybe if they weren’t from good money, they’d get some time, but these folks had enough money to stay out of jail. Buncha drama queens.

The knocking grew more insistent. They’d break down the door soon, and I’d have to spend another thirty days in county. Great.

Rod blew a gasket. “Who the fuck led the cops here?!” He grabbed some guy in tacky leopard-print suit. “Was it you, Raymond?!”

Raymond only stammered in response.

“Fucking hell, people, I try to throw a charity event, and this how you repay me?”

A voice from outside yelled, “We’re breaking down the door!”

“Like hell you are!” Rod called back. He forced himself up against the door, his hardened body resisting the rhythmic beatings of the battering ram.
Rod stared at me. “We’re so fucked.” He mimed a gun, stuck it to his temple and pulled the trigger.

Then something unexpected happened. Rod’s face suddenly lost its forehead with an explosive boom. Blood, brains, and skull bits painted that fucking door in a red and gray mosaic. His body crumpled to the floor, arms outstretched. But the door did not fall.

I heard someone scream outside, “Holy shit, those bastards shot me!”

My eyes widened. I shoved past the panicked crowd and dove next to a couch, lying prone. Gunfire erupted all around me as the police began returning firing in droves. The people who were unfortunate enough to be standing in front of the door ended up looking like Swiss cheese mixed with strawberry sauce. Good image for a painting. The door itself didn’t fare much better, collapsing from the hailstorm of bullets.

“Drop your weapons and put your hands in the air!” a police officer said. There was a short, dumbfounded silence after he realized absolutely nobody was armed.

It was at this point I finally realized what had happened, and my third eye opened. Enlightenment had found me. I laughed and stood up slowly, staring down the fake police officer with his fake gun that fired fake bullets. None of this was real; it had to be a hallucination.

“Put your hands in the air!” the police officer said. When I stood, I saw he was surrounded by a squad of five men, all of them holding rifles.

“No,” I said.

“Sergeant, take that one down,” he said.

I raised my hand at the Sergeant, index finger extending towards his head, and very carefully imagined holding a huge fucking gun, something like Dirty Harry’s revolver, only bigger, and with more cylinders. Like twenty cylinders. I felt the weight of the piece, gripped it in my hand, and pulled the trigger. Something I didn’t expect happened though: the gun went off.

There was a considerable mess. Blood and brains splattered over the squad, and they immediately returned fire. The bullets entering my flesh hurt but just a moment and the fountain of my own blood that poured onto the floor did not worry me much. I did not move from the spot I stood, content to absorb bullets like a sponge until they stopped firing.

Frankly, the cops seemed unsure of whether or not they should continue shooting me. Eventually, one of them grew a pair and came up to check my pulse. His grimy hands were covered in sweat.

“Dead.”

“Am I?” I asked.

He jumped back, shocked. “What the fu—”

I imagined his head twisting off, and so it happened. The officer’s head popped like a cork from a champagne bottle, spraying red hot blood and bone foam all over the ground. I stood, sick to my stomach, like I was going to throw up. I spit up something: a colorful red pill, pristine and untouched. This was real? Suddenly it all made sense. The sleeper had awoken. God had ascended back on his throne.

I shrugged off more bullets, the shouting of the police officers becoming a distance buzz, a mosquito in my ear. Still annoying, though. The world was brimming with illusions like them.

With naught but the extension of my arm, I cleansed the world of my art and turned it into a blank canvas. People, buildings, everything, disappeared. Nothing but the color white remained.

Something about this was familiar. I couldn’t place my finger on it, but this emptiness, this place that was not a place, felt like home. The first home I abandoned. How could I have forgotten this, the nexus of creation? How could I have been blinded by the world I created? Of course, there was nobody around to answer these musings besides myself, so I decided that the most logical step was to create another me to converse with.

“Are you me?” I asked.

“Am I you?” the second I replied.

This conversation was already getting tiresome, but I sought to persevere.

“Is there anyone else here, or is it just me? Or you. Or whatever I am?”

“There’s just me. There’s only been just me. What, did you forget?” the clone sneered.

Complications emerged pretty much immediately.

“What the hell am I supposed to do here?”

“I don’t know. Make a decision.”

I was starting to get annoyed with myself. “Why should I? What’s the point? Does anything I do matter?”

“Nope. I am the only thing that exists after all. That previous world you lived in? Just some fake phoney bullshit you cooked up to keep yourself entertained. You got bored being here.”

“So I’m just cursed to be here by myself with some douchebag clone of myself?”

“Such is our nature.”

“Such is bullshit.”

“Very astute observation.” God this guy was such a snarky jackass.


“What am I?”

“You are you. That’s all I can tell you.”

I sighed and dismissed the clone from reality. I took a walk, a long one. I couldn't say how long it took specifically, but all time had been practically eliminated, but I'm sure it was a pretty significant duration.

The loneliness became unbearable—talking to myself yielded no results, no purpose. Maybe if I made someone that wasn’t me to talk to, I’d feel less alone. I decided to create a companion whom I dubbed Chuck and a small world for him to inhabit. A lush Eden with plenty of woods to explore, animals to hunt, and food to eat.

“Hello Chuck,” I said.

I decided that Chuck was a nice fellow who said hello back when he was addressed.

“Hello,” Chuck replied.

“How are you?”

I decided Chuck was feeling pretty dandy.

“Pretty dandy,” Chuck replied.

Again, I was just talking to myself. Chuck said everything according to my volition. I grew frustrated.

“Chuck, I now give you free will. You may do whatever it is you please.”

Chuck set about doing things that suited his needs as he saw fit. Chuck had will, but it was the will I defined for him. He would eat, drink, and sleep when he felt like, only because I had created a set of rules to govern how he felt about the world. Chuck was an elaborate puppet, nothing more. He had no real autonomy. Useless.

Goddammit! Nothing I made had any purpose. Why did I even bother? Might as well just die then. Trying to will myself out of existence yielded no results. I found myself longing for my old life, before the grand revelation. Even the cocaine-induced depression seemed favorable compared to the eternal void caused by a purposeless existence.

At that instant, I realized why I had forgotten this place, why I created a realm of illusion to hold my powers from me. I blinded myself to truth to escape this place, escape the weight of this meaningless. I created a new world, with a new self so that I knew some semblance of purpose instead this boring nothingness. God, of course, is one the being who is truly alone.

I laughed, what a stupid, blind God I am. Maybe next time I’d be a writer. A less dumb one. But for now, I was content to return back to my old life of an artist. Something about being a creative type just felt right.

I brought back the stars and the heavens, the sun and the planets, the earth and the moon. From the ground grew the urban sprawl of L.A., the place I made my home. I gave life to the people and the animals and the plants, even back to Rod and my shitty agent. I returned to my old form of a schlubby, slightly overweight and middle-aged artist, sitting in his apartment. And then I hit my head as hard as I fucking could, repeatedly, until I blacked out.

When I woke up, I was finally able to put the paintbrush to the canvas. I made my own personal masterpiece right then and there. It might have won an award. It might not. What did I make that was so great? Who cares. I was happy just to make something.