Spiral of Flies

Asher took a long, hard look at the pair of stilts resting against the wall of his living room, a hypnotic Deftones song echoing through his wavering consciousness: “I watched you change, into a fly . . . .” In a sudden rage he threw his beer bottle at the radio, took up a nearby axe, and chopped the stilts into a thousand pieces.

He awoke on the couch a few hours later, disoriented and hung over. All was quiet but for the crackling radiator and the hum of the refrigerator. If it hadn’t been for a hint of sunrise pressed against the east window, and a faint glow from beneath the bathroom door, he’d have been in complete darkness.

Mumbling to himself about having smoked some bad shit, Asher looked up and noticed that the walls of his apartment were now exceedingly high and made of amber. Flies zipped back and forth between them, bumping into one another and spiraling down in aerial combat. A tall, looming figure then appeared beside the TV on a pair of stilts, its body black save for two red orbs on an otherwise featureless face. A long flat object lay stretched across its upturned arms, while a small mandrill squatted sleepy-eyed on its left shoulder.

With a sudden huff from its scarlet nose, the monkey stretched a clawed hand toward the object and nudged it forward; there it split apart and wafted down to the floor like a pair of feathers. Asher rubbed his eyes, unsure of how to respond. Wasn’t this all just a hallucination? A waking dream? With a yawn he nonchalantly reached down and dragged the objects to his lap for closer inspection. There they gave the impression of oversized insect wings, like those of a house fly. The moment he realized this, they disappeared.

“What in the hell?” Asher looked to his guest for an answer, but the figure was gone. The apartment then reverted back to its original state, a blazing sunrise now pouring in through the open window.

Asher lit a cigarette and contemplated all he had seen. Explanations rose and fell away. A few satisfactory ones stuck, and in time, his nerves began to settle. After all, it wasn’t his first hallucination.

By noon he was back to his old routine, sprawled out on the couch with a can of beer between his legs. A group of scantily clad women stood around yelling at each other on the TV; annoyed, Asher shut it off. In that moment he heard, or thought he heard, a moan coming from inside the bathroom. Just the neighbors, he thought to himself. But then the silent, bizarre creature and its servant monkey came to mind.

“So much for drowning nightmares in alcohol,” he grumbled, taking a long drag from his cigarette. That’s when he casually glanced down at the track marks on his arm; and that’s when the cause of his hallucinations became clear: smack.

Smack. Horse. Heroin. H. Many names for the same monster. Asher had recently been using, but managed to quit before the urges got too strong. A residual amount, he figured, or mild withdrawal coupled with the intake of alcohol and marijuana, must have triggered those visions. What logic he still possessed encouraged him to sober up, to give the drug ample time to leave his system. But that hideous figure had raised his anxiety to new heights, so he grabbed another beer and rolled a joint.

The remaining afternoon was spent listening to music and strumming his guitar. He was beyond all worry, beyond the constant image of his brain spiraling down a toilet with piss and shit. Gone, too, were thoughts of that haunting figure and its ambiguous agenda.

But it wasn’t long before the weed had transformed him into a heap of tangled nerves. “Man, I need balance,” he said to himself, pacing the apartment and punching at his head. “Fuck—I need H!”

Pausing to remind himself of the progress made regarding heavy drugs, of the promises made not only to himself, but to his mother and sister, Asher lay down and tried to sleep off the cravings.

To no avail.

By evening he began to shake with fever. That’s when the stilts reappeared at the wall, their quiet, inanimate presence enticing him over. Soon a buzzy, inner voice went plugging through the silt of his brain: Go higher, Asher. Go higher. Ridiculously, he covered his ears. The mantra only rose in pitch. He pressed his palms tight against his head and hummed, but the voice breached all barriers. And then, through trembling hands, he began to hear that Deftones song from the previous night, the lyrics revealing something about a person changing into a fly . . . .

A new thought sparked in Asher’s mind, one that made him stand straight up: Destroy the stilts! That’s when the axe reappeared on the coffee table and he made good use of it. That’s how another night passed without H.

But he awoke to more hallucinations in the pre-dawn of the next morning. Once again the walls turned to amber and took on abnormal dimensions. Flies zipped around in circles beneath the ceiling, buzzing with laughter, and the dark figure on the stilts reappeared with its monkey and fly wings. But none of it disappeared like it had the previous morning; instead, the room retained its nightmarish qualities and the figure merely backed into the shadows, leaving behind the wings. Something turned on the bathroom light, door now ajar, and the moaning inside grew more audible.

Asher sank into the couch with a fresh joint and turned on the TV—an attempt to ignore the lingering hallucinations. The day carried on as usual, and then it was night. To his horror, the visions perpetuated; in fact, they had grown more vivid, more ominous.

In the end they broke him.

“Just one bag,” Asher pleaded over the phone. “No-no—two.”

Cowering in the amber light beneath the laughing flies, Asher sat at the edge of his couch and wept.

*     *     *

The first dose expelled the hallucinations right away—an expected result, and Asher began to relax. But the stilts soon reappeared, this time walking themselves back and forth in front of the TV. The axe appeared next, again on the coffee table. So he injected a second dose into his swollen arm, and then a third, and a fourth. The objects remained. By then he no longer cared, and this time, instead of chopping the stilts into pieces, he climbed into them. He wasn’t sure how he did this, but he did. He climbed into them, and the walls and ceiling expanded to accommodate his new height.

For a time he ambled around in the stilts, somehow possessing a natural ability. Indescribable sensations blasted through his body and instilled a cliché oneness with the universe. A loud buzz arose from behind, and when he glanced back he saw them: large, beautifully patterned insect wings rising off his shoulders.

Magazines began to flutter and dust took to air. Thousands of flies appeared all around him: some alive, others trapped inside the colossal amber walls. The stilts grew and lifted him higher. The wings accelerated, and he felt ready to fly. But then the moaning from the bathroom reached his greatly attuned ears, and in glancing down he noticed that the door was now wide open—a long, spiral stream of flies going in.

From that point on, Asher could somehow see inside the bathroom. It was as if his sight had been usurped by a telescopic lens. And through that perspective he saw himself lying motionless in the bathtub—a syringe stuck in his arm, his naked, skeletal body heavy with purple veins that throbbed in the fluorescent light. Hundreds of flies stood on the rims of the sink and bathtub, rubbing their front legs together in anticipation.

Asher shut his eyes to escape the vision, but the mandrill suddenly appeared on his shoulder and he lost his balance, the stilts cracking apart and falling into the darkness. And when the man in the bathtub let out a sick, sludgy moan and puked on his own chest, Asher joined the spiral of flies and laughed as he zipped around the convulsing body—laughed and laughed like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen.

(From the book The Hunchback's Captive and Others)