“Blue Movies” by Ian Kappos

Before the whole thing with the ovum, Kekoa and I volunteered at the food kitchen. His parents back in Hawaii told him he needed a job. If it didn’t pay, they’d compensate him for hours put in. This was back when you could get OC 80s for forty dollars, OC 40s for twenty, and forty dollars cash back at Walgreens even if it took you into overdraft. I went into overdraft a lot.

Kekoa’s parents wanted a point of contact here, ideally a chaperone. Since I was nineteen, the same age as him—and, at the time, the only person in the city he knew—his mom and dad were left with just me to corroborate their son’s hours. I accompanied Kekoa to the food kitchen and they paid me, too. Later on, after the ovum got bigger, they stopped calling me in favor of Roman.

During our shifts, clips from the DVDs we watched the previous night would replay in my head. 

“How do I win her back? My money won’t sway her. I’m out of answers.”

“The market’s gonna crash again. I know it and I’ve diversified, but I’m worried I overdid it or didn’t do it enough.”

“Tell me what you know about astrophysics.”

The people staying in temporary housing lined up and you said hello and poured soup into styrofoam cups and gave them plastic-wrapped biscuits. Those who weren’t so lucky, who were still on the waiting list to sleep indoors, formed a line going out onto McAllister, and they came in last. Some of them I recognized because they frequented the same corners as my dealers, or I passed by them as they lined up at the needle exchange. It was easy to imagine their slack faces hidden behind the pixelated ones in the DVDs Kekoa and I put on after getting high.

He had gotten the DVDs back in Hawaii, from a friend who worked at the commercial trade docks in O‘ahu. They were illicit so unlabeled by design, and came from Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore. Oceania. We only ever saw marginal differences in the backdrops. The letters and languages differed. 

Kekoa stayed in the hotel across the street from my dorm at the for-profit art school, on a week-to-week basis. He’d wait on Post Street as I went down to Pill Hill to cop for us. He was too nervous to go down there, even though it was where we’d first met—our paths crossing on Eddy Street as we were both trying to score, Kekoa clearly wigging out, me running into a dude I’d bought from in the past and helping get Kekoa hooked up. 

Everyone knows the Tenderloin is gray and dismal and piss-smelling. It always has been and forever it shall remain. The food kitchen was in the Tenderloin, but I guess for Kekoa going there for volunteer work was one thing and going there to score was another. On the street, asking people what’s up, if they had anything—I think it made him insecure, dismantling his carefully put-together image. It delegitimized him. He wore baggy pants and diamonds in his ears and listened to music through his phone on speaker mode. He was a white kid adopted by rich Hawaiians and very conscious of the fact that his uneasiness—easily picked up on by people on the block—gave him away. 

After I returned we’d go to his place, tear off sheets of tinfoil, put straws in our mouths, scratch the blue coating off our pills, and lay the pills on the foil. The anticipation, the bated breath before we took the breath that mattered. Then we’d spark our lighters underneath the foil and trace blackening zigzags across it, inhaling. Maybe the ovum had already started growing in the corner. I never thought to look. Oxycontin always tasted sweet to me, like cherry cough medicine. If there was a shortage on the block, we resorted to smoking heroin, which tasted like vinegar.

“Will I see my dog again? Did his spirit go where mine will?”

Indispensable to our routine back then was the time release coating they still had on the Oxycontin: you could scrape it off and smoke the pills. A few years later, manufacturers removed the coating in addition to doing some other stuff that made the pills harder to smoke. Shortly after that they also made them less soluble to prevent people from shooting them up. So I’d have ended up slamming heroin—much better that way—no matter what.

Maybe Kekoa wouldn’t have graduated to intravenous use like I did. I still don’t know what became of him after he disappeared.

***

Occasionally I worked on homework at his place, bringing my easel over and drafting paper and charcoal. But mostly we watched the DVDs. The footage was all shittily digitized video, but you got past that pretty fast. 

The clips looked like they’d been shot in warehouses: big shuttered doors in the background, box pallets off to the side. A very large, bulbous creature always sat in a shallow tank of water on a furniture dolly, its ten arms lazing over the sides of the tank. The arms at least twice as long as the rest of it and as wide as birch trees. Even with the bad quality, you could tell this wasn’t any kind of squid or octopus; that those couldn’t be considered tentacles—not technically—with their fibrous, velcro-like strips going the length of the arms instead of suckers. The creature’s protuberant mantle terminated in a concave, V-shaped opening at the bottom where an orifice was located. 

They set the camera up twenty to thirty feet away, on a raised platform, where it never moved.

The subjects had their faces censored out and were always wrapped tight in giant banana fronds. The filmmakers—Kekoa’s theory—probably chose banana fronds over plastic wrap or tarpaulin because the organic material agreed with the creature more and was easier for its fibers to latch onto. Each DVD documented the total number of sessions of a single individual. Kekoa had a lot of these DVDs. It took us a while to make a dent in them because we often had to rewatch stuff we’d nodded out during. I don’t think we ever finished the whole stack. 

Once in a while Roman came over to kick it and watch with us. He partook occasionally, taking a hit of an OC off one of our sheets of foil (it wasn’t easy, pretending to be generous with it). Mostly he smoked blunts. Him and Kekoa. Weed muddied my high so I rarely joined. 

I’d introduced them. Kekoa, who’d moved to San Francisco almost entirely because of his love for hyphy music, took an immediate liking to Roman. While Roman didn’t care for hyphy himself, the fact that he was black, ten years older than us, and grew up in loose proximity to Mac Dre and E-40 and Andre Nickatina lent him an allure Kekoa was powerless against. Kekoa—like most adopted kids, I guess—deeply desired a role model figure. He and I had an addiction in common but little else, unless you counted volunteering at a food kitchen.

If pressed, I’d have to say it was around the time when Roman started hanging out more that the ovum really began to grow, but I wasn’t keeping tabs. Hadn’t even noticed it yet.

Anyway, the establishing shots in the DVDs were always the same: the creature, arms drifting languidly, sitting in about a foot of water, which couldn’t have been comfortable for it but was apparently enough for the purpose of the shoot. Text would superimpose over the screen, never in a language we knew how to read. Subtitles would follow. They said things like “Subject #4, day 6,” or “John Doe, 8th session.”

From off-screen, a body wrapped in banana fronds would be rolled into the frame. Sometimes one wouldn’t get far enough, so a person on set—always pixelated out—would have to enter the shot and kick them closer to the creature. Three or four arms would extend and start fumbling the person closer as the creature readjusted itself in the tank, angling its underside outward, exposing concentric folds of pink-white flesh with columns of black nubs disappearing further up into its anatomy. The orifice would begin to seize. Its canal would begin to contract.

The subjects screamed and cried, begging for help, at least until their third or fourth session, by which time they were in borderline vegetative states. All of them, without exception, went in headfirst; this seemed purposeful on the creature’s part. Each time it inserted someone into itself, the person lost precious oxygen. Never enough to die, which amazed me. Sometimes they were in there for minutes on end, the creature maneuvering them forcibly, the rhythmic spasms of its orifice constricting them. 

There were gushing liquids. 

You’d think people would expire, at least some of them. 

But it was almost as if the creature wouldn’t allow that to happen, or something natural to or circumstantial of the act itself forestalled death. Another natural or circumstantial thing was that being inside the creature seemed to imbue the subjects with special abilities, or maybe it’s more accurate to say it gave them particular insights.

The sounds the creature produced when it manhandled them—switching arms and trying different angles as it thrust them in and out, accelerating rhythm—never failed to captivate me. Like whale song or the buckling of the steel frame of a bridge, underlaid with a sputtering hiss.

In later sessions, I think the filmmakers started drugging the subjects from the start, because there began to be fewer initial protests. 

Roman laughed at the clips. I found the interviews after the sessions just as interesting as the creature parts. The people asking questions remained off-screen, anonymized via voice changers that distinguished individuals from one another through differing pitches and tones. 

The test subjects—now in a separate room in a chair centered in the foreground—still had their faces blurred out. The banana fronds removed, they sat naked and moist. 

Their voices didn’t need to be filtered. After an extended period inside the creature, their vocal cords emerged altered, warped. I continued to be frustrated by the sound quality; the responses the test subjects gave, spoken as though in a trance, came through garbled, hard to decipher, as though limited by subpar on-set audio equipment or some corruption that occurred in the digital transfer. For whatever reason, the editors never bothered captioning the test subjects. Clearly, though, there were enough layers to this industry, or operation, or whatever it was, that the people behind it felt the need to translate the questions for an English-speaking audience.

You could tell from the interviewers’ reactions that whatever the test subjects had to say moved them profoundly. “Oooh”s and things like “My god…” I imagined they must have been extraordinarily wealthy and well-connected to be able to book these interviews, which, most of the time, bore more resemblance to therapy appointments. 

Not all questions, however, were limited to the personal and self-centered. You noticed some speakers trying to ask things that had more gravity, more scope.

“What might the odds be that an extraterrestrial will recognize human art for what it is—creative expression?”

“Is there a god? If so, is it an impartial god, or does this god have a vested interest in mankind?”

For my companions, the interview portions of the videos signaled the time to roll blunts. It was during an interview that failed to capture my attention that I turned and saw the gelatinous sphere in the corner of the room casting a reddish glow over Kekoa and Roman. It connected to where the floor and walls met in a way that reminded me of underwater bacterial growths. It was the size of a beach ball.

“Can the emotional body truly be regulated?”

***

Kekoa and I only worked like three hours a day, two shifts a week max at the food kitchen. But his parents wired money that would tide us over, more or less. They also sent gift cards. Subway, Starbucks, Mel’s, Chipotle, worth anywhere between twenty and seventy-five bucks. Kekoa’s connect, to my utter disbelief, was happy to trade: gift cards plus whatever difference was left in money for pills. The dealer had kids and Kekoa guessed the gift cards incentivized him to buy them lunch. The guy just wasn’t available all the time, which had been what made Kekoa resort to hitting Pill Hill, where he met me.

We watched the DVDs in chronological order (or, at least according to the numbered sequence Sharpied on each disc). Roman came over more frequently, which was cool with me; I liked Roman. I liked him a lot more than Kekoa, who kind of revolted me in spite of the symbiosis of our addiction. Roman and I used to party and have a good time.

One day I came over with two 80s. Kekoa habitually left the door cracked for me, since the hotel doors locked automatically. Our paraphernalia lay strewn across the table in front of the TV. Normally he’d be sitting on the couch expectantly, with that glimmer in his eye that every opiate addict has when they know they’re about to get right. This time he was inside the ovum, which had grown large enough to contain him in a fetal position. Eyes closed, naked, he drifted in softly glowing liquid. Organelles—I didn’t know what else to call the mishmash of multicolored shapes—shifted as his floating body displaced them. 

The ovum throbbed, illuminating the wall in a red that lightened and deepened in turns.

I rapped my knuckles on the wall. His eyes shot open. His head turned toward me, and I found myself centered in the gaze of what was simultaneously Kekoa and something else. His limbs extended, fingers breaking through the outer membrane, and he slid out, dripping. The ovum closed back up behind him, wobbling as it returned to its usual shape.

Kekoa looked at me like he was annoyed. Then his dopesickness seemed to return to him all at once. His pallor dimmed, his eyes sank into their sockets. His focus shifted to my hand carrying the 80s. 

“Yes,” he said.

Only a few seconds later, after taking a seat on the couch and tearing off a sheet of foil, did I notice Roman in the corner opposite the ovum, his dick limp in his hand and shirt cum-dampened. His eyes were red, but not the kind of red your eyes get when you’re stoned. A more fucked up red that covered everything, obscuring his irises. He blinked and seemed to wake up. He registered my presence with ambivalence. Then he pulled up his pants and went to the bathroom. I heard him turn on the faucet and wash his hands. He came back out and sat on the couch. Kekoa hit the remote. It was a new DVD, someone’s fifth session. I hadn’t seen this one. They’d been watching without me.

“Should we care about society? Is society even a valid concept?”

Roman rolled a blunt. I hit my pill until all that was left of it were black trails.

***

The last time I saw both of them, I came over in withdrawals. Kekoa’s parents were no longer communicating with me; we hadn’t worked at the food kitchen in over a week. I’d managed to sell some books I stole from Barnes & Noble at a used bookstore, collecting enough money for an 80. 

I gained entry to the hotel because the person at reception knew me. I knocked on Kekoa’s door, closed now. A foggy, red-eyed Roman opened. I entered. Kekoa was back in the ovum. It throbbed audibly now; its glowing made my eyes hurt.

“Can I borrow your bike?” I asked Roman. He’d sometimes loan me his fixed gear when I was too dopesick to walk down to Pill Hill. It’s hard to ride a fixie in San Francisco, but when you’re fiending, you’ll do anything. He nodded. 

“I’ll be back.” I rode the bike down to the block. I circled and circled, talking to every person I ever bought from who was out that day. The block was dry. Only heroin, the usual black tar, which wasn’t great. It wouldn’t be enough to get right. I’d be feeling like shit still. I copped anyway. 

When I got back to the hotel, a new person was at the reception desk. They were less nice. They wouldn’t let me pass. I called both Kekoa and Roman. Neither answered. I rolled the ball of cellophane-wrapped heroin in my pocket. There was a needle exchange a few blocks away; I’d seen some of the older users line up there. Like I said, when you’re sick, you don’t think twice about doing things that will get you where you need to be. 

The block ended up being dry for months. Heroin stayed around. I got acquainted with Dilaudid. A new chapter began. I never recouped my easel or art supplies, which was fine because I dropped out. I rode around on Roman’s bike, which remained mine until one day when it wasn’t. That was fine, too—I’d ripped off the dealer, simultaneously putting a declined transaction receipt in his hand and plucking the gram out of his other hand before he could register that the paper wasn’t cash. I left the bike on the sidewalk. Escaping on foot was easier. It gave me a few seconds’ headstart that climbing back onto the bike wouldn’t have. I considered it a fair trade.

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