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Show Anting Alone Page 180 if it was open, he ran his finger along his neck to see if any zits were bleeding. He worried about these traditonal teen things, too, and thought that maybe the other children were laughing at these traditional teen things instead of his bright red eyes, his strychnine stupor-alternating-with-shudders, his cold acid sweat, his unconscious moans and teeterings in his chair. Sam didn't know any better. He wasn't much more than a little boy at the time. He worried about open flies and bleeding zits like a traditional teen, even while he was afraid to close his eyes because gravity was twisting somersaults here in the kitchen, and he was in the stratosphere, at the lip of a sucking, flat-black vacuum, and his mom seemed to be asking him who wrote "Ozimandias" and on what occasion was the poem written, Sammy? Sammy? Wake up, Sammy! And all his muscles and sphincters had meanwhile turned to paper, grey cold newsprint - - And all the while Sam and the other children knew that his mom was about due for another six- or seven-month "checkup" at Our Lady of Sorrows psych ward; they could tell from the way her voice broke when she cried, "Sammy? Sammy!" - Whole school days, whole morning chapel services spent writhing like a spaz under the influence of the same poison that the people in Agatha Christie books always kill each other with. Strychnine is one slight twist of a single molecule away from lysergic acid, and can occur easily in a slightly bad batch of the psychedelic. In fact, the two substances occur side by side not only in bio-chem textbooks, but also in Nature, as in peyote - one bubbling up in tufts from the other. A mystical substance, |
