Fever dreams in the study. Money whore doctors and medical professionals kept their heads down, in light of a new federal investigation that’d already resulted in the arrest of two very guilty quacks. One of whom had soon after hanged himself to death through the use of his bedsheets; he was around seventy and had been selling the stuff at an extortionate price since the nineteen-twenties. So, script opiates such as morphine and oxycodone were off the table and therefore couldn’t suffice. This was bad news since the streets were completely clean; pushers had burrowed back underground and their pieces remained within their holsters – no one was peddling. In consequence to these dire circumstances, another drought quickly came about, the type of drought that was always more or less invisible to the eye of an average Joe, but as real as a mainline kick for shmeckers who would’ve been wise to take a bullet before going without a fix. Because you see, heroin was above eating and far more important than water, and since there was no supply for these junkies’ demand, chemists within a seventy-five-mile radius knew to lock their doors.
Fever dreams in the study. Neither cocaine nor nembies were an option, he’d finished the last of his yen pox some hours before, and cannabis sure wouldn’t’ve cut it. Lucky Strike after Lucky Strike, with trembling hands he’d almost gone through two decks of twenty in that day alone; took some edge off, not much though. ‘Can’t score – tough luck,’ he told himself repeatedly, for he had deadlines and expectations to meet. Coffee, he needed coffee; shame he could barely move from his chair, expensive Victorian chair – mahogany. Shifting around, he thought he’d pissed in it, but couldn’t say for certain since his senses had become about as useful as an assortment of plastic knives at a gunfight. It was as if a flock of pigeons had fatefully flown into and consequently impaired the turbine of his cerebellum. It was as if his brain was yelling ‘Report! Report!’ but to no response. To put it simply, his body had gone haywire and nothing was functioning normally at all; muscles ached and spasmed regularly, nerves were on fire… And the sweat… So much fucking sweat. It never ceased and seeped from every possible and previously perceived impossible place on his body: kneecaps, eyelids, tongue, toes. He sweated through nauseating heat and through ungodly cold flushes alike; one minute the windows and doors would be completely wide open, and he’d be sat as naked as a new-born-babe; the next, he’d be wrapped in a sleeping bag – shivering. Fever dreams in the study. Oskar (Oscar) Svendsen was born in rural Denmark to a shoe-smith and a housewife on the sixteenth of June, nineteen-twenty-eight. When he was young, his father had taught him to become quite the fiddler; in fact, spectators would often flock from neighbouring villages, just to witness his prowess during Sunday services at the local church. Until, of course, the unfortunate day came when one rather disgruntled SS-officer smashed his fiddle against a cobbled wall. Apparently, he didn’t quite fancy his fiddling. Now, not only was Oskar a boy with no money, but he was also a boy with no fiddle to pass the time away! However, through anger and an equal amount of boredom, he quickly learnt to channel his intelligence and creativity into writing. At first, he mostly wrote poems of affection for his first and only true love, but this fast evolved into bigger creative projects and criminally critical pieces on the subject of Germany and her politics. Soon enough, writing became his calling... He moved to America alone at the age of nineteen, where he’d continue to write in a small studio apartment, somewhere in San-Francisco. He became well known, locally at least, but far from famous; this was what obsessing and fascinating over the negro and queer communities did to a white man back in those days… Well, in the early days of his career anyway, because, by this point in the mid-sixties, it was all “Peace and love, brother! Peace and love.” In under ten years, the common man had gone from sipping martinis and beating his girlfriend, to walking around the streets naked with flowers in his hair. Fever dreams in the study. When Oskar wasn’t creating fiction, he’d spend most of his time composing
youth articles for various independent publications. His earliest article was released a few days before his twentieth birthday and was centred around an underground blues cult. His latest was focused on Andy Warhol and his recent work surrounding the ‘Chelsea Girls.’ You could say that Oskar was a culture sponge, you could say that he had to be; but you could also say that he absorbed too much culture, seeing as constantly having to keep up with the ever-changing styles and philosophies in popular and counter cultures alike, proved terribly exhausting. The pressure would often get to his head – really get to his head. Not only this, but with culture came drugs, and you can bet he absorbed those too… So, without them, he was sat at his desk in his Victorian, piss-soaked chair, smoking Lucky Strike after Lucky Strike. An obnoxious screeching then started in his ears, he couldn’t tell if this was real or not, and looking up through dreadfully blurred vision, he watched as the clock on the wall began to bubble and melt, as he began to wonder why he didn’t become a shoe smith instead… Or a fiddler. Oskar was pretty certain that he was about to die. Deadlines and expectations to meet, “Fuck it,” they’d have to wait, for he was going under and wasn’t certain that he’d ever resurface… His head hit the typewriter.
Fever dreams in the study. Awake but asleep. Light but heavy. Drowning but not. In the study but somewhere else. He was lifting his head from where his typewriter was placed at some point in space and time, but this wasn’t true as he had no body and was rather an interdimensional cluster of feverous, loud, fast energy and thoughts that made no sense but made sense. He was a thermodynamics defying anomaly with no place in any world or conceivable reality. He belonged outside of time. He belonged inside of nothing. Confused, an anxious half-smile blossomed from the cracks of his chapped lips, as he looked forward to the closet opposite his desk and witnessed the arrival of his first and only true love, a girl from his hometown, Ida. Ida had flowing blonde hair, deep blue eyes and a singing voice that could end a holy war. Ida would sing for Oskar under the willow tree by the stream whilst he’d play the fiddle; when they were young, they’d spend the most of their summer days this way. She was in her sundress, the same sundress that she wore on the day that Oskar had asked her to leave with him, the same sundress that she wore when she touched his cheek and with teary eyes said that she couldn’t. Ida returned a smile before stepping out from the opened closet, perhaps as a cruel metaphor conjured up in the deepest most merciless place in his mind. Somehow,he always knew that such a pristine cunt was too good for the likes of any man.
Fever dreams in the study.
“Six, nine, eight, four, one, two, seven, seven, six, three, five,” numbers spoken by an old demon streamed from the radio floating across the study, numbers that Oskar had to type down quickly, numbers he had to put together, document and figure out;loud numbers that stung in his ears, numbers that he could see, important numbers in shapes that didn’t matter or make sense. It was like he’d time travelled to an illegal rave in the year two thousand, as strobe-like entities hammered at and impaired his already obsolete vision, whilst numbers continued to a backing of fast, vicious music of some sort; music that wasn’t music, music with no rhythm, pace, pitch, sound or soul. This induced sheer terror as he drowned in a pit of ever-increasing pressure. His fingers then internally combusted down to thin ash during his struggle to type down all the sharp numbers that by then were shooting from the radio like fluid from a chronic masturbator. He cried and bashed his fingerless hands over the keys in sheer desperation. He was powerless, bent over like an elderly maid at the hands of her master. “I can’t please you all!” he screamed to no effect as his dead parents, alongside scores of beatniks, poets, hippies, musicians; critics, kids and publishers alike, slithered out and expanded from dark corners, cracks in the walls and open cupboards. In a matter of seconds, they came to surround him and his desk like some malevolent cult,towering above him with ungodly height. They then began spitting on him and collectively beating him with wooden meter sticks.
Fever dreams in the study.
Fever dreams in the study…
