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“Come on in,” Kyle answered from behind the door. Was that his brother yelling in? It sounded garbled to Kyle, deeper, stranger. Noah didn’t talk like that. The cartoon duck in the mirror bashed himself in the head with his little hammer again. The source of the voice became inconsequential. If this had been on TV, it wouldn’t have been THAT entertaining. Kyle would have liked to believe that he was smarter than that, but the duck was right there. His head was swimming a little as he walked in and it only got worse when he went to wash his face. That’s when the little yellow duck showed up and the hand outside the door began to knock on it. Was his brother attached to it? He was too busy laughing at the duck in the mirror to think that the disembodied hand knocking on the door might be trouble. If his brother was here, he could just tune the loser out by watching the duck anyway. When Noah walked in, the duck knew it would have to work extra hard. It’s face got funnier, bigger buggier eyes with a histrionically large red Saint Bernard tongue sticking out of its mouth. It had a little beanie on its head with a propeller that lifted it into the air as it spun around. Noah saw none of this.
While Kyle remained riveted by the antics of the duck, Noah noticed that the water in the sink basin was a pale green and the sink was coated in tiny cakes of greenish mud. What the hell was this? It wasn’t muddy outside as far as he knew and if it was, the mud certainly wasn’t this color. Objects in the bathroom felt a bit more distant for Noah, less corporeal. Where did this stuff come from and why was it in the air?
“Kyle, what are you on? What is this shit? What’s all this this this…” the words were harder to reach.
“Fuck, I don’t know, Mr. Wizard,” he laughed, his brother was as funny as the duck , “you’re the scientist. So come on, Frankenstein, gimme a theory.” He fell to the floor. Breathing was starting to get difficult. He began to wish he could stop, but the duck flew out from the mirror and whirled around the room. Pellets of white cartoon duckshit dropped from the sky onto Noah’s head. The duck looked Kyle clear in the eye, putting a feathery finger up to its beak.
“Shh,” it quacked. The duck winked at him.
As Noah looked at all the fading, hazy objects in the bathroom, he saw them tinged with little specks of green. This is not what I’m seeing, he told himself, this is not what I’m seeing, Kyle brought some sort of weird shit and I must be getting a contact high. I’ve gotta find a way to think clearly. He stumbled over his brother, made his way to the window, which he opened. He breathed in the clean air, closed his eyes and sat down on the bathroom floor beside his brother, who was rolling with paroxysms of laughter. He wasn’t sure how much time passed before he felt right again, but the first thing he did was get a pair of rubber gloves and scrape the mud off the sink.
“Where did you get this?” his brown eyes blazed at his brother in a way that was both parental and bestial.
Kyle took in short gasps of breath before he answered. “I fell into a patch of this stuff. There’s a little patch outside. I just stumbled face first into this green shit and then I’m tripping balls. I fucking mean it, Noah. You can’t buy shit like this. I didn’t even get any in my mouth or anything.”
“You’re expecting me to believe that YOU, a pathological liar and purveyor of fine narcotics all over the neighborhood just stumbled into a patch of hallucinogenic mud in our backyard?”
Kyle huffed at the broken-down, gutless nerd who he’d been ashamed to call a brother. “I know last week I begged you to make me some meth with Caroline’s medications and some stuff I took from the pharmacy, but this time, I’m telling the truth. Your miscreant junkie little brother is not lying to you for once, Noah. It was an accident. I don’t take things if I don’t know where they came from. I’m not dead yet am I?”
Noah heaved a sigh. “Then show me where the patch is.”
The patch seemed at first glance to be just a continuation of the compost heap, but when Noah looked closer he saw how distinct it was. Its textures were quite distinct, clumpy in some places, watery in others, ranging from very solid to very liquid. It was only a small patch of mud, but it varied so greatly. Was it more than dirt or clay? The question didn’t hang in Noah’s or Kyle’s minds for long. They looked at each other; scientist and drug dealer, knowing they had made a discovery that could make them soar in their profession. They went back in for both freezer bags and gloves.
“So you study this stuff and I’ll sell it, right?” confusion and disgust dominated Noah’s sharp, stern face as Kyle set forth the suggestion, “you figure out what we can do with it and I’ll give you half of what I make on it. This is all profit. This is all for us.”
“And mom and dad? What about when they go out to the compost heap?”
“They already make me do all the composting. Why would they stop?”
Noah shrugged. He didn’t like the idea of being part of some scheme of his brother’s. On the other hand, he had a chance to present a pretty unique discovery. If this stuff had popped up elsewhere and he knew how to neutralize it, he’d be a hero. He’d be like all those scientists he saw on Super Scary Saturday when he was a kid, working night and day in his lab and finding a way to save the earth from an invader. Only this invader was only a patch of mud and the worst it could do is shake people with hallucinations. That part made him a bit disappointed. Maybe he wouldn’t be saving the earth, but people got into good grad school science programs for a shitload less.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” he said and took his freezer bag down to the cellar to examine it. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Kyle would do with the one he’d taken.
Kyle hadn’t noticed how pleasant the mud was when he had taken his fall. It didn’t feel clumpy to the touch; it felt soft, warm, squishy, friendly. It felt like a woman. As he rubbed it on his face, jokingly making stripes of it, like an Indian warrior or a quarterback, he swore he smelled pussy. Fresh, eager, musky, a scent somewhere between perspiration and a rich Italian dessert. The mud soaked into his skin and the smell called from the hallway, which was soft and pink and dark. Shapely shadows pirouetted on the wall, jumping down from it onto the wall opposite theirs, taking turns to shake seductively before his eyes and around him.
` He reached out for the tantalizing puppets, but they wouldn’t be touched. The shadows stopped at a large, gated cavern and bowed. The black became painted with color, flesh tones and otherwise. A neon green goddess bowed at his feet, while a blue one showed off her generous curves for his appraisal. Girls he longed for in high school kissed and embraced one another, grinding chromatic bodies and exploring with happy hands things he wanted to touch more than life itself. The cheerleaders and student council chicks who wouldn’t give him the time of day began to grind then reached out for a young, nude Susan Sarandon who clasped hands with a shimmering rainbow that was Jayne Mansfield.
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