Withdrawals

The Death of Marion Joseph

Marion struggled to stay upright despite the agonizing withdrawals wracking his body, which felt like being slowly digested by a particularly vindictive stomach. It had been ten days since his last shot of Ignatius's "Hell's Kitchen Premium Blend," and the demon hadn't lied - the withdrawals were getting worse, defying both logic and basic pharmaceutical decency.

Pain had become his new normal, promoted from hated enemy to merely unpleasant roommate. He would be okay if he just believed hard enough, which was essentially the world's worst self-help seminar happening inside his nervous system.

He chanted it like a prayer as he walked through abandoned suburbs that resembled a post-apocalyptic theme park designed by someone with severe depression: "I'm okay (step), I'm okay (step), I'm okay (step)..." Until the hours and miles blurred into one long, gray smear that looked suspiciously like his life's highlight reel.

Inside that gray mantra, Marion became aware of his misery slowing down - like a cosmic DJ switching the universe from 78 RPM to 16. The pain finally stopped its active assault and settled into something almost... comfortable.

Then he face-planted across an epiphany that hit him like a metaphysical brick to the forehead.

Everything grew out of the cosmic substrate. If consciousness Consciousness was the foundation that supported the universe - nothing could exist without it. Even evil relied on it, which must have been deeply embarrassing for Ignatius. It was like watching a toddler try to arm-wrestle The Rock.

This truth was so funny that Marion laughed out loud - and immediately dropped to his knees, felled by immortal agony that felt designed by some cosmic sadist with a PhD in Suffering Studies.

But he couldn't stop laughing, and with each guffaw the torment increased exponentially, like compound interest calculated by Satan's personal accountant.

The agony reduced him to something less than human and more like a biological alarm system stuck in the "ON" position. Cast into an ocean of suffering, Marion had one last cogent thought: "Poor Ignatius... why does it always piss him off when I can't stop laughing?"

The ocean of pain suddenly vomited him back up like a bad oyster at a discount seafood buffet. For an instant, Marion could feel it with all of his senses - the jerking away of agony from him in all directions, leaving a smoking, carbonized Marion-shaped husk that shattered into dust and then blew away like the world's most depressing magic trick.

For one glorious instant he was pain-free, long enough to feel a brief moment of simple joy - the kind of pure happiness that small children experience when they discover puddles -before the pain came rushing back in, as nature abhors a comfortable moment.

But the return of pain was nothing compared to that brief joyful feeling, and with it came another epiphany that hit him like enlightenment delivered by overnight shipping. Marion suddenly understood that the purpose of his existence was to witness the universe, and the universe existed to be witnessed. Nothing more, nothing less. His suffering was part of that circle of acknowledgment, merely necessary as a thing to be observed and catalogued. It was his part in the cosmic filing system.

'I'm just a sensory apparatus,' he thought with the clarity that only comes from being cosmically bitch-slapped by truth, 'evolved inside of a universe that wanted to get a look at itself... and in my case, a feel for itself. My opposite is out there somewhere too - my joy is out there, probably having a much better time than me.'

With this new understanding came a brief lucidity, and Marion was able to isolate a small portion of his limited awareness and separate it from the agony, which had returned with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever who'd just discovered tennis balls. With tremendous effort that felt like trying to juggle while being electrocuted, Marion PULLED his attention away from the pain and toward the source of it...

What he discovered was such a shocking surprise that he almost lost the tenuous grip he'd gotten on himself, which would have sent him spinning back into the totality like a cosmic washing machine on the fritz.

The shock was... the endless agony he was experiencing wasn't in his gut at all. It was in his balls! And it didn't even belong to him - it wasn't his pain at all. It belonged to that demonic drug dealer, that... that absolute motherfucker! Ignatius!

Suddenly Marion felt no more pain. Only pure relief, like stepping out of a sauna directly into an air-conditioned room. On his knees in the McDonald's parking lot, he wept tears of joy and understood, with a clarity that only comes from viewing the structure of the universe through the universe's own reading glasses, that even if that little cosmic tantrum-thrower Cannibalus the Starveling pulled off his magic trick and crammed the Earth into a gaping, transdimensional maw of ever-unsatisfied hunger, it wouldn't matter because the opposite of eternal starvation had been and always would be eternal contentment! Marion knew this to be true more than he'd ever known anything, ever. He knew it with the certainty of a man who had just witnessed the universes customer service department actually resolving a complaint.

Then Marion felt the pathetic remains of his physical withdrawals begin to finally break apart, like a thin coating of congealed bacon grease after a couple of seconds in the microwave of enlightenment. Underneath it he could see in his mind's eye a vast ocean of clear, transparent water - clear, but somehow still a vibrant blue, like the universes screensaver.

He was confused for a bare naked second until he realized that he wasn't looking down into the water. He was looking up through it, and into a pristine blue sky that looked like hope had learned to paint.

Beautiful.

Joy suffused his being like the world's most effective antidepressant, and Marion felt the essence of himself rising like an express elevator operated by angels, up and up and up, impossibly fast. On the way up, he caught a glimpse of Ignatius - as quick as a still-frame but as clear as a photograph.

Ignatius was clutching his crotch, his face contorted in agony that looked exactly like Marion's had moments before. Marion could even hear a faint, diminutive scream that Doppler-shifted away into quick oblivion as the demon fell, way way down and into hell, which sounded exactly like the kind of thing you'd hear on a really unfortunate episode of America's Funniest Home Videos:

"OW, MY BALLS!"

As he rose, faster and faster, Marion felt his awareness begin to shatter quietly as it fell upward and into a vast, gray bliss that felt like being hugged by the concept of peace itself. He was surprised to experience no fear at all, only peace - and as he was finally near the end of his coming apart, the last thing Marion perceived was the voice of Purl Ashblaque, the gun-slinging grunge wizard, whispering something that sounded like an old Pearl Jam song from way back when, from before, and maybe after, too. Oh...

"I'm still alive."

Then Marion felt the soft volumes of infinity enclose him like the universe's most comfortable blanket, and a final memory of the pain that killed his body was what finally returned him to his spirit, like an old friend coming home from the war, carrying stories too strange to believe but too true to deny.