"Oh, yes. Please," I say, graciously taking the bottle sideways with both hands.
"Careful there, cork's out," he says. With a smile, the mustached man parts, with his brown bowler's fedora and green sweater-vest. As soon as I recognize the bottle in my hands Geddon has taken it with force, pulling the cork out and beginning a dizzying swig, before handing it back to me forcefully. The shadow of the valley pass has peaked, beginning an incline set upon rutty tracks, an appalling shroud beset upon us in the car. It's as if this moment is the culmination of a series of lessons I've been trying to learn all my life, but for the life of me, I couldn't tell you what those questions are—it seems to me, then, that I have truly learned no lesson, but the shock of this moment has left me in a sobering state of catatonia, a feeling of how truly small I am. With this zenith upon us, I struggle to understand what's next, to see into the very next moment—to see myself a part of this world, eliciting a madness that I must be well-prepared for because in spite of this dissociating opium I can feel my character returning. Presently, it's as if Geddon has become very weak, and I laugh.
All around us is life, connected to us inextricably—a life that we have to endure, to bide, to abide by. I would chastise myself for letting my sexual feelings go like that in public, but this experience has, if anything, reminded me that I can never be far enough away from other people to escape the privacy of my own orgasm. I can see Geddon twisting, recoiling in the weakness that's set upon him, a faltering vision towards his own insignificance, a fate destroyed, someone betrayed by his vice. I swallow the image of his imprisonment, try to understand who's inside that body of his—to see his fear, his rejection of pleasure, the orgasm he denied. I take a swig of the rouge bourbon for myself and with skulls in my eyes feel that I could already be drowning, or swimming—if one was to try to swim only to feel that they've begun drowning—to begin to know, or see the fight for my life that stood before me. A narcotic moment as the whiskey and rouge's poison is accelerated by that catalyst that is my mind, my body—that rare moment of intoxication—a true feeling, defined best by the character of auspicion. I drink more, to brace against the tide of dark clouds that have suddenly assailed the train, that penetrating cold in combination with the rouge bourbon inviting malady upon my muscles.
Following convulsing, Geddon grabs the bottle again, saying, "If we don't finish this, we won't be able to hold it upright." I invite the red carpet into my periphery, the carpet of that endozark creature, the organic made artificial, and think how thirsty the carpet might be for the rouge, the red narcotic found in rare springs only on Abraxia. As Geddon thirsts upon the bottle, the whole darkness of the valley falls upon us and I can feel the test come upon me. I wait for my turn, and he passes the bottle back and I begin, too, to thirst from the bottle, steeled against the pang of the bourbon, tempered by the dark fruitiness of the rouge. Visions sprawl out across my memory—not only glass ships, the sound of Imperial salvos lancing through them, watching from our retreat under cloud cover, wet clouds on my face, watching ships of glass crashing into temples of glass, the screams, the utter disbelief—I am tempted by the future. I see moments unfolding before me, questions that I've left unasked and unanswered. I see around corners that formerly obstructed my vision. I see the impossible unfold—I make the shot. I discover that a mole has been working for Nengablio, there's an outcry at the theater. Some great fury overcomes me, and I hear the roar of a motorcycle, I see a sickly green sky, a poisonous aurora, a dark figure on the horizon.