How the Vaccine Fucked Me

Yesterday I wrote about having sex with the vaccine so now I’m going to intersperse dreams with reality. I don’t think what I write is good, I think it’s pretty bad… two different stories almost right now but it’s just something to do… and I haven’t for months been writing anything … obviously still working on it … no one is reading this . i need to read it on my phone until i can wake up tomorrow to edit and add more xo

Part i

Back in December of 2019, I remember there was grotesquely opulent energy in the air. I was taking selfies in a blue velvet lace top, black tulle skirt, with rhinestone clips in my hair. Sitting, lying, standing, down on my knees, and straddling the floor beneath the twin LED lights in my computer room, I spent a few hours pressing my phone over and over and over again. I felt like I could take pictures of myself forever. Mindlesnessly meditating on the act of taxidermizing myself, so my doppelganger corpses could remain forever displayed onscreen. Serenity. I wasn’t a corpse then, but I felt like one at the moment.

A few days later, on new years eve, we went out and I wore a 1920’s inspired outfit with a black fascinator and lots of lace. Earlier that night, I had tried on a gas mask and found out it likely had asbestos in the filter. The person who gave it to me for Christmas told me not to wear it too much, so I held my breath while someone took photos of me in it. But I know I inhaled the poison once. At least I’ve captured all my deaths and preserved them inside monitors of glass.

Thirty minutes or so before midnight, a drunk man leaped up the staircase on the bank of the Seine and accidentally tripped and fell in midair. His half-liter of cheap beer cracked under him and spilled. We all turned our heads in a big circle of eyes to gawk, but he, at the center, was just too cool and couldn’t care less. He crawled up the glass glittered stairway with a big sharp smile on his downcast head, joyfully bloodying up his knees and hands. In slow motion, he traversed those ten or so shallow steps, each reach of his limbs ringing the resound of shattering glass. Like an Olympic champion, upon reaching the summit, he rejoined his friends and received heavy pats on his back, and to break the overbearing silence they let out a guttural, malicious laugh.

He and his friends decided to mill about the staircase overlooking the river. Up and down, they kept their drunken guard. It was their territory, apparently, and the rest of us were mere prisoners or maybe a flock of sheep. After all, it was he whose blood had been strewn upon the entrance and it left a perfect emptied aisle of red shattered glass, where no one but him dared to walk upon or to sit next.

While waiting for the fireworks to begin, people drank and smoked and danced. Teenagers and adults alike were posing for selfies, recording videos, facetiming their family and friends from all over the world. A wall of language so varied that none of it made sense was sung for hours above our heads. Orange street lamps were dim compared to the illumination of a million blinking flashes of light from the phones, cameras, drones, from the miniature plastic illuminated Eiffel Towers, from the neon signs held up with scrolling text, the musical lights of the carousel on the riverside, helicopters hovering in the sky, police cars alert and lit up, cars in traffic switching the intensity of their floodlights.

Someone must have overstepped the invisible boundaries. At the bottom of the stairs, a frenzied movement appeared. What’s happened now, we wondered? But it was just a tourist who’d encroached upon the surveyor’s new territory. It looked like nothing more than an accidental bump, but as quickly as the pushing occurred, the rapid disturbance went still, and the fellow with the bloody hands began screaming, “Fuck You! Fuck You! Fuck You!” He made the accompanying physical gestures, too. His flabby belly gyrated back and forth, like a fat, writhing worm, stroking his hands up and down in the air.“Fuck You! HAHAHAHA! FUCK YOU!” His friends all joined in. Fucking the sickness in the air. The tourists ran up the steps with precision, eyes straight ahead, intent on fleeing. Nobody wants to get into a fight fifteen minutes before the new year and have the last thing they hear before the start of a new decade be fuck you.

The fireworks went up at midnight as expected. Then gunshots, screams, sirens, a mad rush of people, throngs of them blocking the streets, filling up overcrowded avenues, an ocean of fresh garbage crumpled up beneath our feet. A stampede of hooves, red lights in the sky, and brume.

Thirty minutes after, we were at a café with a few thousand people barricading every which way. Shuffling and shuffling. Noise. Only noise. We sat for some hours sipping tea like snobs judging everyone until the crowds died down. Then back home we went, where, until 7 AM, I panicked about how I had poisoned myself and how inevitable it was that I was without much time left.

That New Year’s Eve was the last night before the terminal shift, the last memories of placid “normalcy.”

By mid-February, when COVID-19 broke out in the mainstream, I had already been properly frightened and well-prepared and had collected ample stocks of food, makeup, and lots of detergents, cleaning products, and hand soap. I checked every private forum reserved for the most paranoid and reclusive, and I knew ahead of the governments themselves that their countries were going to be powered down.

Virus. Virus. Virus. That’s the only word we heard.
Threat. Extinction. Sickness. Death.

I had planned on 2020 being a year of expanding my makeup supply, clothes, and accessories closets. That night in December, while I was getting dressed, I had a vision of buying more stuff, so much stuff. Filling myself up with stuff. Taking selfies with all the things I could buy. Shipping containers full of stuff. Plastic packaging, plastic bags, plastic clothes, plastic molecules on my skin. Hands wrapped in plastic covering my plastified corpse. My whole future of automatic shopping was laid bare before my eyes. I was so excited to ascend to new, previously unimaginable consumerist heights.

But selfies in a pandemic? Selfies during World War III? Selfies during a global famine? Selfies during the unsealing of God’s Wrath? Before I’m sent to hell, let me take a selfie and make a six-second tik tok with a wall of niche, relatable text.

I felt the virus that night in December when I took those selfies. Among the residue of the cell phone camera flash and the magnetic waves whirring from my computers’ RAMs, the room became warmer and warmer, while the circuits kept cycling and the phone kept clicking. My arms and legs: momentarily paralyzed, then split apart, turned upwards, twisted, and bent backwards. I performed a death ritual that night while locked inside my dead bolted computer room. Knotting myself up to be photographed, as still as a cadaver, I drowned beneath the perfectly pulsed radiation of too many synchronized digital devices. A single, failing, weak human heartbeat muzzled by the deep and low, immortal vibration of unified electricity. Every outlet, wire, and device leaked thick ectoplasmic flows of underworldly extracted power. Oblivious in that slow heating microwave, I whirled around like a marionette, with a blank unsmiling stare, to the pull of unseen strings tethered to the phone clasped tightly in my hand. I kept pressing my phone and pressing it again, blinding myself with the light of the camera, sinking betwixt the two tower computers illuminated in red. The industrial pollutants accumulated inside me were now melting and seeping out, and the floor beneath me became slick and slimy. I was suddenly too soft, porous, and everything opened up, electrified and humid. The power of the circuits grew dense and frenetic and I was at once hypnotized, overpowered, and saturated by the imperceptible, omnipresent current.

And I remained there for the entirety of the pandemic, spinning in that trance. Throughout that first year, we were locked up in our homes cum storage crypts; almost as if 2020 had never happened. It was more likely that the overpowering radiation in our homes and the newly installed antennas preserved us in a hallucinated stasis, and that only once we became infected, willing hosts to the disease, variants, and vaccinations, were we lucky enough to be reanimated.

Part ii

The memories of those lost months are evidently hard to recollect and my ability to discern reality from dreams has yet to fully mend. By lucky chance, I possess exactly two distinct memories from that frozen time: scouring second-hand online shops and buying the perfect wedding dress, and needing to reorient my environment towards 100% unnaturalness.

I kept the windows shut and opted to have four different humidifiers puffing steam 24/7. Airlessness became my priority and I laid plastic buckets full of salted water throughout every room. The wallpaper quickly began to peel in perfectly coiled spirals. Then the wooden floorboards swelled and became plush. I let the bathtub and sinks be free to flood and the kitchen cupboards developed hard and shiny rubbery fungi. Every surface was meant to be wet to the touch. Even the television and computer monitors, which I continuously left on for months and months, dotted up and dripped wide streams of condensation. Plugs and cables sparked and hissed and to console them, I wound myself in them to keep them close. Tightly coiled like a wire, I’d lay there for days beneath the computer desks and behind the television, keeping power surge protectors plugged between my legs. In the dense, suffocating humid heat, I dreamt of blue and white flames submerged under an endless black liquid-filled pit. Fires blazing at the bottom of the lightless sea. Flames suspended in liquid, burning without surface or air.

Soon after the end of February, I took to sleeping on a clear PVC tarp, placed right beneath the television where I got lost in the pixels of instant news coverage. Above me, oily water pooled and dribbled down from the ceiling. Cobwebs in the corners glistened with steamy dew. Phones, keys, pens, almost everything slipped through my hands. Nothing could stick and friction there almost stopped to exist.

The limpidness of plastic became my dependency. No longer could I ingest anything unpackaged in it. As far as liquid, nothing tastes as good as swallowing microplastics. I sucked plastic straws and squeezed out ooze from soft plastic tubes and I littered the emptied polymerized packages across the foggy room until I felt as though I were in a bed of bleached coral. My project was thus complete. I had remade the mechanized world into a perfectly lubricated and oleaginous gear, while I remained safely inert; atomic, weighed down by the warm humidity, and insulated by lethal currents of overflowing electricity.

In that pinguid state, I whiled away my time, until eventually, in June 2021, I had set the most romantic date. Finally, I would be vaccinated. After months hibernating in a wet shroud of artificial blue darkness, I’d be released into the dry, vivid, sun-lit world, newly blanketed in updated, infinitely small deep penetrating frequencies.

My time spent in the liquid abyss rendered by body jellified, bones warped and sickly. I developed a pale blue, translucent tone, though my feet and legs became gummy, and took on a bruisy, purply blue hue. And for all the soft plastic I had swallowed and sopped up, my teeth only grew sharper and bigger and longer, and, at around the same time, a battery acid, metallic taste developed and still lingers in my mouth. Lightening burn scars crisscross my body from my nights wrapped up in electrical fire hazard wires, and when I leave my gluey haven, I must limply walk with the help of an iron-wrought cane.

An intense, clamping, pressurized feeling was building as the day of my vaccination approached. Awareness of bubbling beneath the surface sensation that was ready to puncture and bleed through reality. I knew, in my warped softened bones, that it was to be something of a wedding day. Marriage to a faceless, sinister, and ephemeral force. When I found out that the state had assigned me a vaccination center located just across the street from an electric substation, I nearly evaporated into a puff of sparkling steam. My own wedding invitation! Sent to me by the government itself, and with an audience compromised of a major percentage of our town’s power delivery network supply. I was stunned and shocked in utter disbelief.

The day of my injection, I woke up with a warm spiraling feeling pumping up and down inside my chest. Running to the green, mold-filled bathroom, I took out the makeup that I had once so cherished and poked at the inflated, round blistering spores. Whatever was left of my favorite silver glitter, I took on my finger and smeared across my cold wet face. Two dots of blue-violet for blush, a smudge of concrete grey lipliner. In the blurry, fogged mirror, I opened my mouth to display a paleozoic shark’s horrifically large smile. Then I slid into the soppy old wedding dress, brushed my soggy, wiry gray hair, and lurched my way, leaving a trail of oily puddles, down the circular wooden stairs.