Disque 9

Des Incurables (Slow River)
by Jessica Rylan

So you wake up one beautiful sunny morning and say to yourself “Well, I didn’t really have any plans today, so why not eat those last two hits of acid.” They’ve been sitting in the refrigerator for two months, so you eat both of them ’cause they’ve probably lost some of their punch by now. You go out for a walk in the park and as your trip starts to kick in you realize how much fun it would be to go to the thrift store and buy some records. Mysteriously, a new shipment of fifties easy-listening has come in, Music for High-Fi Living, Big Top Carousel Band Organ, Hawaiian Magic, etc. And then there’s some exotic-looking French cabaret music. And they’re only 50 cents a piece, so how can you go wrong? You’re struggling home under the weight of your newfound treasures, when suddenly the sun disappears and it starts pouring rain.

So you duck into a café for a cup of coffee to steel yourself for the walk home, but everyone keeps leering at you and muttering. It’s straight out of Richard Sala and you really don’t want to be the victim of conspiracy so you go right back out into the rain, and now there’s thunder and wind shaking all the fresh buds off the trees, the branches are turning back into the skeletal things you see in the fall, never mind it’s supposed to be spring. You cut through the cemetery and the flowers in front of the gravestones are all taunting you. “Well, I know that part’s not real at least, ’cause flowers can’t speak,” you think. You just smile at them, playing dumb. Finally you reach your house and bolt the door behind you and go into the living room and switch on the fifties console stereo that’s reserved for playing easy-listening. It takes a minute to warm up ’cause it’s a really old tube model, and thinking about those cute little tubes glowing orange makes you think how nice it would be to have a cup of tea, and there just so happens to be one sitting on the floor. “How thoughtful,” you say happily, putting on Big Top Carousel Band Organ, and feeling the steam from your tea going up your nostrils. Between the tea and the organ music, the world’s comfortable again. Then a few bars into an oom-pah-pah carnival song, the record starts skipping and then it’s playing backwards and then there’s some terrible screech in the background and then you hear your upstairs neighbors, who you always assumed were freaks, lumbering around dragging huge iron balls from their ankles and banging on the metal bars of their cages, then a slide guitar lead from the Hawaiian Magic record starts looping and looping even though you hadn’t put it on the turntable, and some guy from the cabaret record starts singing in a voice that sounds like you set your turntable to 16 by accident, and your lips touch something withered that used to be furry and you realize the nice hot tea is actually cold, in fact it had been sitting there for a few days, ’cause a mouse climbed in and drowned when you left it on the floor overnight and you’ve been too grossed out to go near the glass. And you realize maybe that acid wasn’t such a good idea after all.