Hiro

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Warm blankets and milk put me in a natal cocoon. I play pretend. The rubber teat on my sippy cup is a real living flesh-tit; the tangle of electric blankets is the womb. Analogies fall apart somewhere around umbilical cords, a tangle of IV tubes around the neck as I twist and writhe, a sickening pop of needles jerking out of veins. That will bruise, someone tells me. Inside and outside are undifferentiated, words and thoughts running together--

I feel exasperated. Why can't I stay still? I want to escape. I feel restrained. I see leather straps through someone else's eyes. I feel the click of belt-notches on my wrists, rectangular edges fuzzy and blue as they cut into skin.

A vague, unspecified want, intense and directionless. Television, a cigarette, my sippy cup. Needles probe, burrow back into my arms. Did I want phenobarbital? Saline? I see the nurse's clipboard and know I have these things. The want dims.

The alienation and schizophrenia comes in so many hues and keys that I know I am not alone; a polyphonic pink floyd laser-lightshow of desperation. Three rows of eleven stacked ten high, identical cells stuffed with the variously ill. All of us wound up and turned inward and being pushed further and further away from reality, society. It is not the internal state that makes us mad; it is the separation from Outside.

Driven inward, we exist inside as a tangled lattice of light against a nothingscape, pulses running against each other, our signal-flow jerky and confused: all dead-ends and recursive loops. At night, when the nurses pad through the hallways with their wants and desires and neurosis running into ours, I spend my hours untangling knots, playing hop-scotch across mind fields.

Somewhere, at the infinite horizon, square pigs snuffling at the network's edge. Somewhere, just at the periphery of my vision, a drunk bitch and a sodding cunt.