CHOOSE YOUR OWN MINDFUCK: A Night in Eighth Block Tower (A66)

Bedlam Bible fans! Explore the Eighth Block Tower! Choose your fate! New posts every Tuesday and Friday. September '23 through December '23. Don't succumb to the huummmmmmmmm...

You’ve decided to blow him up by the crumbling rubble in the back alley…

“It’s a tight squeeze, so you’ll have to be the one to set me off. I won’t be able to do it myself,” the wired man says, then hands you a tiny remote with only a single button and a short, wiry antenna protruding from its top. It’s clunky and awkward. You get the feeling he made it himself.

The two of you are standing outside in the alleyway, near the back exit of the tower. It’s surprisingly bright outside, despite it being the dead of night. A full moon blazes overhead, somewhat obscured by the surrounding buildings.

Several others stand in the spaces around you—some homeless, some tower residents—but no one seems to be doing anything other than just standing. Are they waiting? Maybe, but you’re not sure what they’re waiting for. A couple of them are pacing back and forth. One walks right up and pokes you in the chest. He reeks of piss.

"There's a starman, bitch," he grunts. He's rapping, beatboxing between every pause. "He's waitin' in the sky. He'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'll blow our motherfuckin' minds."

You're not sure how to process this, so you just stand there and take it all in.

The man pokes you in the chest again. "You waitin' on the starman too, bitch?"

In a past life, this man never would've had the chance to call you a ‘bitch’ twice, because you would've had him swallowing his teeth after the first slip of the word—but you're not the same person you once were. You're fully reformed... or at least partially reformed. You let it roll off your shoulder.

"Bowie?" you ask, recognizing the lyrics.

He pokes you in the chest a third time. "Nah, bitch. The motherfuckin' starman. He's comin', and all you motherfuckers..." He opens his palm and places it flat on top of your head, then makes a popping sound with his mouth. He walks away.

It's weird and you have no clue what it means, but then again every encounter you've had in this tower has been a mindfuck in its own unique way. Even the wired man is weird—especially weird—perhaps even the weirdest yet. He has these giant, unblinking eyes, thick electrical wires jutting out of his skin that run from the top of his body to the very bottom, and if it weren’t for his dirty tighty-whities, then he’d be completely naked too. For some reason, not a single soul pays him any mind. You get the feeling guys like him are fairly common in these parts.

Geez. If that’s true, then maybe the man’s right, you think. The tower really should be destroyed. It’d be for the greater good of the entire world.

Your thoughts are interrupted by another hot belch of black smoke.

“Destiny awaits,” the wired man croaks, then gets down on his hands and knees and crawls deep into a pile of rubble collected a few feet away, remnants of fragmented brick that once served in supporting the weight of this building, now busted and broken and useless. At this pile’s peak, there are substantial cracks in the outer wall of the building, extending upward from its foundation, nearly penetrating through the entire first floor. You surmise these cracks are significant enough that even the tiniest of explosions could potentially take the entire building down.

This guy’s serious, you think, as if initially you truly thought the man wasn’t crazy enough to follow through. The remote nearly slips from your grip due to your sweaty palms.

“Do it!” the man yells, his voice slightly muffled from being tucked inside the rubble. The lower half of his body is lying still on the pavement, in full view. “Now! Damn it! Now!” He kicks his legs in frustration.

Your thumb hovers over the button on the remote, but before you can convince yourself to press it, a long white limousine pulls into the alleyway, parking directly behind the tower. The wired man is unaware of its presence.

“Fucking do it! Now!” the wired man yells. “Nooooowwwwwww!”

No matter how loud he gets, his voice is just background noise to you now. You’re no longer paying attention to the wired man or the words he’s saying, as your full attention is focused solely on the impossibly long limousine parked in front of you, its pearl white, iridescent paint, and the mirrored license plate that hangs on the front, sporting a very familiar metallic blue and red lightning bolt.

The engine hums for nearly a minute, then at last the driver turns the key and the entire alley falls silent. The driver’s door opens. A man in a black suit and dark sunglasses steps out and immediately walks the entire length of the car until he’s standing just outside the back passenger door. He opens it, and for several seconds, nothing at all happens.

You’re staring. You can’t help it. The anticipation is driving you mad. Is it really who you think it is? Was the homeless man right?

A hand suddenly appears, dainty, but also slightly elongated—the hand of a witch… the hand of a god. It slides along the top edge of the open door and you watch until the rest of its body finally reveals itself to you. The driver purposefully obstructs your view, and for long enough that the man’s able to scamper off toward the building without you getting a proper look at his face. You chase after him, but before you can get anywhere close, the gathered crowd unknowingly creates a barrier between the two of you. The man quickly slithers through the crowd with expert precision. He’s clearly done this many times before. You nearly lose sight of him.

“Push the goddamn button!” the wired man yells.

Hearing this briefly distracts the man. He turns his head. It's David Bowie. David fucking Bowie, but he's young, much younger than he would've been today—and dressed in full Ziggy Stardust regalia—well, except for the gold makeup. Instead, he's sporting the iconic Aladdin Sane lightning bolt. It starts on the left side of his face and stretches over his right eye. He's tall and inhumanly thin. He looks like a monument. Seeing him doesn't feel real. It can't be real. It's impossible.

But there he is, standing before you.

He's magnificent.

And as quickly as he manifested before you, he vanishes. You follow him inside the Eighth Block Tower, all the way to one of the uppermost floors of the building, a floor with a label that reads simply: THE NETWORK.

It’s here where you lose him. Thankfully, there aren’t many places to hide on this floor, as it seems to be some sort of office space—mostly open floor and cubicles. It’s dark, but because of the intensity of the moon, you’re able to navigate through the room without much trouble. Someone’s whistling in spaces ahead. “Life on Mars?” Holy shit, it really is him, you think, then walk briskly towards the sound.

But before you’re able to locate him, the whistling ends—abruptly. The silence is eerie, and enough of a thrill that your brain releases a round of adrenaline to help guide you through it. Your hands are trembling, you’re sweating, and where you are now, you’ve just run out of moonlight.

However, in this space, it isn’t totally dark. There’s a light at the end of the hallway, illuminating the frame of a single doorway. It’s bright neon green, like a blazing fountain of antifreeze, and you notice too that the light is pulsating in perfect rhythm with your heart. Instantly, you feel connected to it.

You walk towards it.

The closer you get to it, the more blindly bright the neon becomes. And there’s this strange humming sound now, vibrating through the floor and the walls and your own blood and bones, emitting from somewhere just inside that curious doorway.

That’s when you see it, the source of that awful humming: a giant green brain, its countless tentacles whip furiously against the floor. You’re stupefied, unable to accept this radical vision as truth. This must be the same brain the wired man spoke of earlier, but of course you’re not thinking about that now. Instead, you just stand there, staring at its brilliance.

Suddenly, a hand splits the brain flesh and reaches out to you. It’s the same hand you watched run along the passenger door of the limousine only minutes ago—the hand of a witch… a god.

It’s him! David Bowie is inside that horrid creature!

He must be in trouble, you think, and without hesitation you grab hold of his hand, hoping to pull him out of the beast. But unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way at all.

The hand, instead, grabs hold of you, and after a respectable bout, it’s finally able to pull you deep into the folds of the giant, pulsating brain.

The light inside is so impossibly bright that closing your eyes has no effect whatsoever, and you can do nothing at all but sit inside this brightness—still, silent, and for quite a long time.

Then, without any sort of warning, you find you’re standing in some other place, somewhere totally unknown to you. The concrete here is wet and glistening like a blanket of diamonds under the ginger glow of a streetlamp.

There’s an old beater van parked a few feet in front of you, in an otherwise empty parking lot, just outside an abandoned baseball stadium. The air here is clean, fresh, with a hint of rain. You take in a deep breath, then walk over to the van, tracing your finger along the outer edge of the side glass window. The yellow paint of the van is beginning to chip away, revealing the original eggshell white underneath. The words, ‘BRACKFAS BURRITOS ¥99’ are written in large red lettering across the side panels and doors.

Suddenly, the van door slides open, revealing two men in dark coveralls sitting inside, each sporting an odd glass fixture that seems to have been installed in one of their eye sockets. The men inside seem just as startled to see you as you are to see them.

“Who the fack are you?” one of them asks, with a thick cockney accent. You shrug your shoulders and laugh.

“Well, that all depends on who’s askin’?” you say.

“We’re the Crunks. Divey and Reynold, to be exact,” the man says, seemingly to the annoyance of the man sitting beside him.

Though you haven’t smoked in a year or longer, you find yourself now craving a cigarette. You suppose it’ll only be a matter of time before you’re reunited with old habits.

“The name’s Pete,” you say, taking in another round of the crisp, cool air. “Could I trouble you fellas for a cigarette?”

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