He takes way too long trying to ceremoniously fling his bike into a dumpster.

After a good seven minutes of watching it crash against a chain link fence, he decides to just kind of leave it in a heap amidst the garbage. The sentiment’s still there, he thinks.

According to his MapsQuest printouts, the destination sits at the edge of this parking lot. He stands in the threshold of the fencing, like an arctic explorer in a stupid parka. Teetering before an icy plunge into the unknown.

Here lies the world.

It’s been ages since he last beheld it all, raw, without the warming buffer of cathode-ray tubes keeping reality at an arm’s distance. Out here in barren, industrial Central Fucking Jersey it’s darker than he remembers. Very gray. The only vegetation for miles are spurts of paleolithic greenery that strain through snow and cracks of the parking lot. Nothing like the dreamy rolling knolls of his desktop. 

But amongst the frigid rot of a potentially collapsed civilization stands a singular building. A lone light blinking like a cycloptic eye from a third story room. The last sign of life for miles stuffed inside a lofted apartment building.

The intercom has been bashed in pretty severely; some of the buttons are worn from greasy prying fingers and others are gone altogether. The haze behind his eyes is a little thicker now, from the exhausting commute and all the fucking painkillers in his blood. Makes it hard to focus. He buzzes what he’s pretty sure is 309 and the door almost instantly unlocks. Someone’s waiting for him.

Inside is dark. The elevator’s out of service. He takes the steps despite his knees. 

In the dark he listens to his breathing. A three syllable inhale—strained and thick with sweet mucus—and then the most pathetic waning exhale. Over and over. It volleys off the windowless walls of the stairway and loses bits of itself in the masonry. When it finally makes its way back to him it’s a ragged, hollow husk of its former self. 

You’re supposed to feel scared, he tells himself, and it’s less anything judgmental than it is a genuine helpful reminder. These days he has to remind himself pretty often. Of what to be feeling. Of what those feelings maybe used to feel like. They’d all burrowed out of the pit of his stomach long ago and left a gaping sinewy maw, a chasm perfectly carved for shoving in profane Internet content. And jesus fuck, did he shove. Bytes of digital celluloid stream through his brain in an endless barrage. 24/7, nonstop, all-you-can-eat clips and sound bites and shock images, cartel beheadings and CCTV rape, pranks gone wrong, carnival ride malfunctions, subway sharking and upskirts. An entire section of his brain dedicated to videos titled like Madlibs:

One time he watched a 17-hour livestream of a guy slowly bleed to death after mainlining rat poison. At first it was mostly uneventful, the injection was quick and then there was some waiting around. The guy just sat on his bed staring into the webcam, his hands on his thighs, stoic faced and at times unblinking. Because he didn’t ingest the stuff, his organs didn’t seize from toxicity; there was no foaming at the mouth, no gratuitous puking. Just staring. Around the 2-hour mark his skin started bloating and blistering, pocked with blood pimples. Eventually the pimples popped. His blood forced its way out and the guy didn’t fight it. He just laid down on his bed, bled out into the sheets, pissed and shit himself, eventually he did vomit and then his limbs let go, and then after a few hours more they grew rigid and curled up on themselves, and then they released again and his dog found his way into the room. The livestream went on for another six hours, the dog chewing away at his owner’s sticky skin until the remaining poison ate away at its insides, too. And then the whole process repeated with the dog. And the livestream only ended when the servers crashed.

What else?

There was a “try not to cum” thread that slowly degraded into a “try to cum” thread. Public sex begot public flashing begot public humiliation begot size humiliation begot male degradation begot male infantilization begot “see if this vid of an adult baby stepping on a birthday cake can make you orgasm.” He Pavloved himself into a dank perverse niche. Soon just the smell of the bakery at ShopRite got him hard. 

He’s soothed himself with emergency dispatch recordings of people burning to death. Wondered what urethral stimulation with barbed wire would look like and gotten his answer in vivid color. How many times could a girl’s large intestine be wrung around her own neck before she dies from asphyxiation rather than blood loss? Click the link below and find out! 

Maybe it used to make him anxious. If he tries real hard he can almost remember the journey, the stages of it all, like grief. The first time you see a dead body it’s hard not to react. But then pile dead body on dead body, light them all on fire, squash them with a steamroller—it loses its potency eventually. There was probably some comfort found in it, honestly. Some kind of reassurance, some “well thank god that’s happening to them and not to me” sort of irrational thinking. And the voyeuristic confidence that comes with staring down the barrel through a two-way mirror. Other mixed metaphors. Whatever.

Back to now. He blinks through the fog, clearing his eyes, and realizes he’s standing in front of 309.

Through the plaster he hears noises.

Something’s waiting for him.

Nothing to lose, he just knocks.