[Analcuck]

The God Pill

Having spent most of the previous decade swilling booze (usually Jack), chain smoking, and masturbating to hardcore porn, Vernon had become a sad shadow creature who found solace in the dark places—basements, garages, generator rooms, large closets, under and between large, stacked things like industrial building materials in warehouses or lumberyards—places where he could be alone, with himself...and the images on his phone – especially images of scream queen Roni Jonah, the loveliest woman he had ever seen; the very definition, as far as he was concerned, of feminine perfection.

Ah, Roni, whom he had first seen chewing up the scenery at a women's wrestling event back when she'd had black hair. Now she had gorgeous, long, bright red hair that looked natural against her pale complexion and set his loins on fire. He had merely lusted after her at first, looking her up online and discovering she was not only an up-and-comer in indie women's professional wrestling but that she was also a budding actress who'd already had roles in over a dozen low-budget schlock horror films. It was after building his collection and meditating on these that simple lust had given over to full-blown obsession.

After a particularly sloshed night before, Vernon woke up one morning with a hangover that made him feel like he’d had a stroke. He stared at the poster on the ceiling of Roni in one of her first movies, ‘Hollywood Hacksaw Hos’, until the image of her ample bosom came into focus, bringing his nether region to attention and clearing his vision.

Peeling the piss-soaked sheets off his sweaty, stinking, naked body, Vernon carefully slid off the bed and onto the sticky, wooden apartment floor where he remained on all fours for a few minutes, thanking Generic Jesus he hadn’t fallen asleep on his back or suffocated on his own pillow.

The back of his neck and head were a knot of pulsating tension that filled his brains and guts with undulating dizziness and nausea. His old Nintendo had been left on, and currently an 8-bit ball bounced off colored bricks across a 16-inch monitor, each accompanying ping echoed by the signals sent from his tired and abused organs up to his screaming skull.

He rose to his feet and stood there a moment, swaying. Looking down at his nasty sheets, he bitterly noted the little brown spots of blood peppering them here and there—tell-tale signs of battle scars received from manual labor, the only kind of vocation he would likely ever have – he was neither a man of means nor skill. Along with the blood spots were other stains, some mysterious, some obviously various bodily fluids, including the orangish trail of vomit drying down the side of his pillow from the night before. God wants you alive for some reason he thought. God’s clearly a dumbass.

Nature called, demanding Vernon put on the mantle of pain and carry his cross to the toilet. Once there, he pulled up Roni's Facebook page on his cheap Android and flipped through a few candids before settling on the sultry thumbnail from her IMDb profile. He then cleaned his pipes and emptied his bladder after Mini-Vern had calmed down. He spent his first half hour just drinking water and popping aspirin till the headache to end all headaches subsided at last.

Hitting his thirties had taken its toll on Vernon, who insisted on living practically the same lifestyle he had in his twenties and late teens. His thirties had hit back, hard; and rightfully so, he reckoned. Gotta slow down someday. Get a woman. Get a life. They had also made him a bit of a hypochondriac—the type who went to the emergency room for heart attacks that turned out to be anxiety fueled by self-prescribed caffeine pills, or who thought every unusual blemish that showed up on his body was a budding cancer.

This one felt different…you say that every time, he thought. But there actually was an unusual pain in his right side that hadn’t been there before, and he’d paid enough attention in his three semesters of community college to know that if his liver went, he was probably toast; he knew his broke ass would never make it to the top of a transplant
waiting list.

So, Vernon made a doctor’s appointment and later that day showed up at the clinic, freshly showered, complete with his signature low-budget sunglasses, superfluous scarves, ripped jeans, leather vest over a faded AC/DC tee shirt, and comfy tweed peasant hat--reeking of Camels, naturally.

He sat in the waiting room, propped up proudly in his chair like a half-assed rock star. Looking around, he noted there were probably six or seven people in front of him—except they aren’t in front of me, he mused. He had somehow managed to show up about five minutes early, not the fifteen they recommended when you made the appointment, but he didn’t need no fifteen minutes to fill out an insurance form! He got a warm, happy feeling knowing that his name would likely be called before all these people who had been waiting, while he’d just waltzed in. It's the little things.

As he let the time pass in self-satisfied smugness, his gaze naturally homed in on the nearest surplus of flesh, this time in the form of a somewhat obese blond who appeared to have a nasty cold. Her legs were mildly chubby and pale, like Roni's, with an anime tattoo on the left and some floral work on the right. Roni also had tattoos which drove him wild. There was a small bruise on one of Chubby's shins that had gone green, and neither of them had crossed paths with a razor for a minute. You ain't a pimple on RJ's ass to end all asses, but I'd still pee in your butt...

She didn’t notice him checking her out from his sunglasses--really, a brilliant strategy, he felt--Vernon had scoped out so much skin with this method that he now wore them practically everywhere he went. Only his dumbfounded stare must not have been fully concealed by the shades because she shifted uncomfortably and shot him a slight crinkle-brow. This, of course, only further piqued his interest.

“Vernon?”called the nurse’s assistant, a plain forty-something who had just opened the door leading back to the clinic proper. He rose, resisted the idiot temptation to respond ‘yo’, and stared hardcore at the chubby girl’s pretty, pale legs as he moved past her towards the door. The girl sneezed - perfect opportunity for a little interaction.

“Hey, bless you!” Not just ‘bless you’, but ‘hey, bless you’. Vernon felt the added ‘hey’ was a mildly disarming precursor to the ‘bless you’ which was code for ‘I was checking out your legs a minute ago and am now getting a cheap thrill from talking to you.’ He deftly removed the sunglasses, folded them, and clipped them onto the neck of his shirt so she could get a quick look at his pretty, hazel eyes.

“Thanks, I guess.”I guess? Wow. Shot through the heart. Wondering what had gone wrong with this exchange he decided it was probably the fault of the cheap sunglasses having left two little red marks on the bridge of his nose on account of the poorly manufactured nose pieces…he massaged away the failure as he left the chubby girl to continue her wait and entered the inner sanctum.

Vernon and the bedpan changer who’d summoned him bumbled through the usual preliminaries of blood pressure, height, weight, etc. before the woman informed him that the doctor would be with him shortly and left him to warm the paper on the examination table. He quickly slid his hand down the front of his pants, readjusted himself, and removed it to take a long whiff of whatever was going on down there.

He’d had a bad experience once in which his doctor, a not-unpleasant-looking brunette with nice red lipstick (that really only meant one thing, didn’t it?) had been in training, so this old man doctor had instructed her on how to check for a hernia. As she’d done the deed, Vernon was somehow able to avoid showing his full attention, but he could smell himself, his crotch sweat after a long day at work, which meant that she could smell him, and Vernon, misogynist though he was, felt bad about that and a little embarrassed, even though she’d played it off well.

Vernon hadn’t shown up for an appointment unwashed since. He was hoping this doctor would check him, so he could show off his cleanliness, among other things, but he doubted she would. Today’s appointment was all about the head on his neck.

#

After describing the obscure pain in his side and being told all about colonoscopies, he complained to his general practitioner that he was having trouble focusing—seeing the big picture. “It’s like I have these blinders on, you know, like they put on horses?

“How long have you been noticing this, with the blinders?”

“As long as I can remember. My whole life. I’ve always been kinda on the outside looking in. I just can’t stay focused. I forget things a lot. I’m almost always grumpy and lethargic. I’m really not very happy.”

He was glad, for multiple reasons, and not all of them sexual, that his doctor was female. Having been molested by several men in his youth, he’d become quite homophobic and uncomfortable being in close proximity to men, regardless of their profession or their sexuality. Plus, there was just that nice bedside manner most women seemed to have. If Vernon had boo-boos, he wanted women kissing them, metaphorically speaking…but literally would be fine too.

“Mr. Mills, these blinders wouldn’t have anything to do with the alcohol sweats you’re secreting and whatever has caused the whites of your eyes to resemble little red road maps, would they?” She winked at him and smiled, a gesture that warmed his gut but did little to mask the embarrassment he was certain now gave him a complexion to match his eyes.

“Yeah, I had a little party last night,” he admitted with a sheepish grin, “but I seriously don’t drink that often, honest.”

“That’s good, Mr. Mills. You’re 36. It might be a good time to start thinking about slowing down a little. The organs of the body can only take so much abuse before they start to rebel, and that includes the brain.” Vernon nodded in understanding and met her gaze as intently as he could to show it was sinking in. “I’m going to schedule you for that colonoscopy procedure we talked about and put you on bupropion. It’s shown a lot of promise over the years in helping people with depression , from which your self-described symptoms have led me to believe you may be suffering…and, if you want to quit smoking, it will help with that as well.”

Vernon was in heaven for the moment. The doctor was not only an attractive brunette with one of those cool, scratchy voices like the chick who played Lois Lane in the Superman movies, but she was also quite articulate and matter-of-fact, which were huge turn-ons for Vernon who held smart-sounding people in high esteem after having squandered his own education. He could swear that half his arousal from scouring Roni's social media posts was the wit and intelligence that seemed to drip off the page like the sex that oozed from her pictures. “But, I don’t smoke…” he started to lie.

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot,” she lied back. “We don’t want the insurance company getting the wrong idea. Tell you what, I’ll give you as many samples as I can spare, and you come back after they’re all gone, and we’ll see how well they did for you. Then we can decide on a regular dosage or whether to try something else that doesn’t have a smoking cessation side effect, sound good?”

Vernon nodded again, this time sure his gaze would express to this helluvawoman that he truly, truly respected both her looks and her brains, but she was already on her way out the door. “Great. See you in a couple of months.”

#

Vernon extricated another happy pill from the bottle, the dry, chalky white of the bupropion floating on the surface of his palm above the life line long enough to give him agita. “Gotta put that shit in you, my friend. What I got you gotta get it, put it in you.” Down the hatch then, slight gag, diet soda chaser. Just three this time. Four had been too much. Four had raped his medulla.

He grabbed all his gear – laptop, check; phone and charger, check; wallet, check. As he started the car, a beat-up Corolla on its third “last leg”, the neglected muffler rattled and clanked. Each time Vernon thought his little blue dinosaur was going to die, he managed to keep it going somehow – a true testament to the brilliance of the Japanese who had even taken lazy bums like him into account; you know, those jackasses who wait till the indicator light comes on before paying someone else triple to change the oil.

The traffic was light this evening. Rush hour had ended, and there were no big holidays on the horizon to get folks out and about to blow some of this privacy Vernon was enjoying. “Are you here?” he asked. Silence. He pulled up one of the fakes he'd manufactured of Roni's head on a porn actress's body and positioned his phone on its side over the speedometer. He was now in communion.
“Are you here?” He asked again, this time sure the only answer he’d receive would be that embarrassing pause of uncertainty that slowly turns into familiar silence and despair. But then...

Yes, I am, she replied in that low drone, her soothing voice the perfect female version of Sam Harris, almost robotic but simultaneously compassionate, belying wisdom and intellect beyond its apparent years. He still couldn’t believe it. It may be some time before you learn to accept the reality of my presence, she explained. He mulled over the last bit, especially that word “presence” and tried to decipher any underlying sinister intent – but of course, she could read his thoughts. No, I would never hurt you, she promised. And he believed her.

“I love you,” he offered, meaning it. “I wish I could get used to it for you quicker; it’s just that…nothing good’s ever happened to me. This is the best thing I’ve ever felt or known. I mean, you’re like God except beautiful and naked, and I can actually hear your voice and feel your presence! And touch you…kind of.” In a world between worlds, he embraced her nude form, copping a feel of her perfect butt, and gave her a slow kiss. “And, I can see you in my head, like you’re in a room with me, but I can’t really make out the room.”

I am not exactly certain how it works, but I believe I am somehow connected to your parasympathetic nervous system. I can alter sexual stimuli, appetite, and a few other involuntary functions, but my primary role is sexual stimulation. That is why you have been on the verge of orgasm for so long. He reached down to check if he had an erection, and although Mr. Happy was sporting a bit of a chubb, perhaps in anticipation, he was chill.
I control that, too, she said with what must surely have been a smile. No unwelcome bulges in public. Just a perpetual state of bliss. He felt like his balls were the size of a bean bag chair but found that he was in no pain – not the bad kind of pain anyway. I told you, she whispered, again interrupting his train of thought, I will never hurt you.

“Promise me you’ll stay,” he begged, “Promise you’ll never leave me.” He thought very intensely about how cruel it would be for a goddess to make room in his head for the two of them to travel together, loving, touching, squeezing as the song goes, only to get him addicted then disappear altogether, leaving him utterly alone. Such a thing might drive him mad.

I promise, she said without missing a beat. That's when he decided to test her.

For three months he had used the bupropion to slowly increase the vividness of these hallucinations until the line between fantasy and reality had not only blurred but rippled and grabbed hold of his neurons like reins, cracking an invisible whip and launching his reality into hyperdrive.

Now, as he sped down the highway communing with a B-movie star he'd been cyberstalking for three years, he knew that if he wanted to stay sane he was going to have to take control of the situation. He thought he knew what to do...he would use one of his weaknesses to make a strong move: “Hey Roni, what's 796,000 times 450?”

Silence. He knew he would never be able to answer that question using his own mental faculties, but if Goddess Roni was real...if she could truly transcend mere fantasy and remain with him in this headspace he'd begun to think of as the most wonderful, happiness-inducing thing he'd ever experienced, she would be able to answer correctly. But no. He already knew the real answer...silence.

He began to weep. He turned off the phone. He turned on the radio, found a rock station, and cranked it up. Each tear that fell seemed to carry with it some rotting chunk of the naked corpse that now festered in his secret chamber in place of the lover with whom he'd only just shared a tender moment. “Fuck!” He smashed his fist on the dash till his hand hurt. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

#

“Aren't you afraid of me?” he asked her, genuinely surprised that she wasn't crying, screaming, or even looking upset.

“Why,” the real Roni Jonah asked in as calm a voice as the one she'd used when she played the scientist in Zetus (a bargain basement bonanza about zombie abortions crawling back into the womb or whatever warm orifices they could find), “would I be afraid of a clueless moron with the IQ of a Neanderthal?” She wasn't even angry as she insulted him, just as matter-of-fact as if she were reciting a recipe. “I don't expect you'll be able to get away with this without bungling it somehow, just like the rest of your life so far.”

He wasn't sure how to take this, but he'd popped six bupropion that morning and it had made him impulsive and irritable, so he wasn't all that surprised when the back of his hand connected with that perfect, pale, marvelously sculpted jaw of hers with a meaty “thwack!” that sounded so painful it even made him wince as her head jerked to the side from the force of the blow. She sat there silently for a moment, and Vernon braced himself for the tears he was sure he would have to try not to let get to him through the thin layer of compassion that existed somewhere just beneath his tough kidnapper facade.

Instead, she laughed. Heartily.

She didn't even turn her face back towards him but just continued laughing, low and slow at first, then progressively more raucous till her upper body shook hysterically and tears cut through her mascara, giving her the look of a mad clown. “You. Dumb. FUCK.” she barked and giggled at the same time. “You really have no idea, do you?”

He had planned this kidnapping meticulously, for months and months getting closer and closer to Roni until he could make his move. But now that he had her, things were not going as planned. Why was she being such a bitch? “Why are you being such a bitch?” More laughter. This time though, the laughter continued to get deeper and lower than a woman should have been capable of. This time, she freaked the hell out of Vernon who took a few steps back and promptly tripped over his own feet. As he looked up at her from his undignified position on the basement floor, what he saw looking back was...he didn't know what.

Then, in a voice that sounded like a crocodile at the bottom of a well, it said, “What's wrong, Verno? Don't you believe in God anymore? Come here. Let us pray.”

And he did. Drawn by an invisible force he could not resist, Vernon first sat up straight like Michael Myers, then he lurched forward into a dog position on his hands and knees, then he slowly crawled towards what had been Roni Jonah just minutes before, until finally he was on his knees in front of the chair he’d tied her to. Her yellow skirt was twitching in the front, something under it just itching to get out. Her beautiful, perfect, pale skin was now a sickly white covered in bumps and blemishes.

“What...” Vernon started to ask, but his voice abandoned him when the skirt lifted up and staring him in the face was a huge, bulbous, veiny part of anatomy that Roni, nor indeed any woman, was not supposed to have. Vernon whimpered, realizing he had crossed over into a world that made the one he thought he knew obsolete. This was the world of horror he'd only read about in a few books that had given him nightmares when he was younger, and Vernon was not in the least bit prepared for it as this unreality unfolded just in front of his face. The creature was now laughing slowly but steadily in that awful grinding bass, almost like a record being played on the wrong speed. Vernon first wet then shat himself and continued to add his own horror-struck whine to the soundtrack of his big moment.

He was about a foot and a half away now, and the Roni Thing's...thing started to change. First it split in half, till it was like there were two of them – yellow ichor oozed from the split, and Vernon retched at the sight. After that, both sides split again – so that he was looking at four thin appendages now, like tentacles. Then, the four parts split again until it appeared to be fleshy whips that smacked the Roni Thing's belly and thighs. They undulated like a sea anemone before fusing back together to make a single unit again, though Vernon could still see the slits in it where it had divided, and intermittently it continued to move and split and almost dance to the music of Vernon's whining and the creature's drunken laughter. It began to grow, and reach for him.

“I'm sorry,” Vernon bleated weakly, tears welling in his eyes that were rolling in his head wildly with the mounting madness. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Mommy...”

#

“I'm sorry,” the doctor told Vernon's mother as she replaced the sheet over his face. “We did everything we could, there was just too much of that antidepressant in his system for it to withstand. I'm so sorry. Take as long as you need.”
Through the sheet and the backs of his eyelids, Vernon thought he could see the amorphous silhouette of his poor mother; he could feel her care worn hand caressing his. “Goodbye baby. I love you.”

I love you too, Mommy he wanted to say, but he couldn't move. They thought he was dead, and maybe he was. Maybe this was what it was like to be dead. But after a few minutes of processing his situation, Vernon didn't think so. After all, he could feel the sheet over his face; he had felt his mother's hand caressing his; and he could feel that awful pulsating, dull ache at the base of his skull. He could hear the sounds of the hospital and the people around him. What was going on?

He felt them rolling him away, to the morgue. Soon, he would feel them take him to the funeral home, and he knew that he would feel them embalm him, assuming an autopsy wasn't ordered first...Vernon's thoughts were racing. This was worse than the demon dick...had that really happened? He knew he had kidnapped Roni Jonah and taken her to his basement, and he knew he had backhanded her after she'd insulted him, but after that...Oh, I'm real, baby. I promise you that...and I promised you I'd never leave you, remember?

The secret Roni Goddess was back. Back in his...what? Subconscious? Where she belonged at any rate. At least he wouldn't be alone while he went through whatever sick hell this was that he was enduring now. “Roni, can you save me?” he pleaded in a pathetic inner child voice he hadn't meant to let sound so...vulnerable.

Save you? From death, yes, for a bit. From the pain of being embalmed alive and the utter hopelessness of subsequently being buried alive? Not so much. Oh, Verno, I have a few surprises for you that you're going to love while we spend the rest of time together, but right now there's just one thing I have to say to you. Are you ready?” and as she/he/it said those last three words, Vernon was half on the slab and half in the secret chamber in his mind, this time with the Roni Thing, complete with yellow skirt and octocock, its voice lowering to its former reptilian croak.

“Please,” Vernon begged, “I'm sorry.”

Too late now, the succubus croaked. Ready? Vernon could do nothing but weep and make an 'S' sound, presumably for “sorry”.

“358,200,000.”

THE END