The effect at first is simply one of nausea and Joe begins to regret his decision. Carlin, though, is ready for the reaction and after the two have continued to look out at the east side of lower Manhattan for ten minutes or so, Carlin says, “Don’t worry, man. Another ten minutes and the queasies will pass. And if you think you need to throw up, go ahead—no big deal.”

Joe shoots him an irritated look.

“Hell, barf off the roof! There’s nothin’ over there anyway.”

Joe shuffles down off the roof deck on to the tar-papered roof itself and makes his way to the edge that faces the East river. Sure enough, he leans over the foot high wall at the back of the roof and looks down nine stories. Behind the building is a weeded concrete lot, demarcated with chain link faces on either side that run from the building’s back corners directly into the river. Scattered around the lot are tires, the rusty metal remnants of a mattress, water-logged pieces of wood. Joe takes a deep breath and the air feels fresh. His eyes journey out across the empty lot and finally his gaze ends at the water’s edge where… the water is electric. Polygons of bright blue seem to rise from the bottom of the darkness of the East River, where they dance, and vanish only to be replaced by another school of sparks. The sparks in the river swarm and, in unison, spiral and dash back toward the other side of the river.

He tries to follow them, but they are hard to watch, hard to focus on, and more: they reveal another Manhattan entirely, a Manhattan made of shimmering, not lines, a Manhattan lit by dancing, not bright, white squares, a Manhattan that stretches downward. Joe is dragged out of his meditation when Carlin sits down on the short retaining wall next to him. “You’re all right now, aren’t you?” Carlin asks. Without knowing why, Joe simply holds his hands in front of his face. For a moment, all is right, but gradually, Joe realizes he can sense the blood pulsing through his veins, can feel the pressure on the walls of his blood vessels. Then, he squints and he can see the pumping, the pushing, the course of his vital liquids squirting through his wrists. Yes. The streets, the traffic, the pulse. He stares longer and harder until the pushing and squeezing begins to light up and suddenly he is not seeing veins at all, but rather a myriad of tiny lights racing through his veins, through his capillaries even, like a superhighway at night from the vantage of a helicopter. Do you see, Joseph? Do you see? The lights race and stop, race forward again and stop, all to the pulse of his heart beat, which he feels he can slow by will. He breathes in deep and then remembers to turn to Carlin. Carlin, who is simply watching Joe with fascination lets their eyes meet and then releases a mischievous laugh. Nodding, Carlin says, “Yeah. You’re all right now.”

Joe barely acknowledges the diagnosis before he is compelled to return to the theater of his hands, still held up in a prayer of awe before him. The lights return to his veins and watches, mesmerized. They race and slow and race and slow until something strange begins to happen and the lights gain shadows and depth. Then, they appear to not so much have depth as much as height and as he watches, the lights lose their electricity and their pattern of motion and begin to move off the beaten path of his arteries and veins and now they are lumps crawling just beneath his skin. Joe squeezes his eyes shut. Carlin, ever watchful, puts his hand on Joe’s shoulder, “Joe, look at me.” Joe obliges and Carlin is smiling kindly and with the lights of Queens behind him, even appears to have a halo, or be a source of light. “Your just seeing things, it’s not real.” He waits for Joe to take a breath. “Look at ’em again.”

Joe looks and his hands are just hands. He cocks his head and lets the lights emerge and then adjusts and lets them dissipate again. Control. He had control. He turns to Carlin, “Wow. This is neat.”

“Yeah. And I got an idea.”

“What’s that?”

Carlin leans in for emphasis, “Let’s go higher.”

After a ten arduous and clumsy minutes that feels like an hour to Joe, the pair ave climbed up the ladder alongside Jodie’s roof deck to the highest point on the building. Now arrived, they have seated themselves against the front wall of the building and are staring at the brick wall that surrounds the rooftop water tower. It must be the drugs, Joe thinks, but he is glad that Carlin is unusually content to just be quiet, and Joe himself lets his mind lapse. He stares at the bricks in the wall before him. They are lit up by something but he cannot guess what. It is night but it looks like dusk. The sky is black, but all else looks like the light on the surface of the moon; pale, ghostly. Slowly the bricks merge into groups, the groups form patterns: alligator-headed figures in profile, strange spiral flowers, and conveyor belts. The alligatorheads begin to eat the other shapes and then climb higher on the wall. They scale with their long mouths open and scepters in their hands. They have intricate headresses and when they eat the strangely spinning flowers that roll down the conveyor belts they do it quick, like lizards with long tongues, and Joe laughs. Carlin, beside him, smiles at the laugh, but he too is having visions.

Then, from the bottom of the wall, the bricks begin to grow darker in color. The pale light seems to rise like a curtain on the wall and a dark redness begins to come over the show, chasing the alligatorheads away, devouring the conveyor belts. The red pattern is all-consuming, and it constructs and does not break up in to pieces. Parts of the cloud shoot out stalks that crawl higher quicker than the rest, and parts seem to pull away into the wall. Joe widens his eyes and his mouth drops open as the wall seems to push away from him into itself, until it seems more a door, a passage… no! A Bridge! He sees it, and at the peripherally of it, the whole of the island of Manhattan, dark blue and out-of-focus. The bridge is pushing in through the wall and into the island, into the city. The shot stalks weave and become cables, and the vision of a suspension bridge is complete. Several moments of awe pass as Joe stares at the vision and is afraid to even blink for losing sight of it. It speaks to him; he can feel the perspective from the other shore draw lines directly into his heart. And then…

You are the bridge. You must cross the bridge.

“Woah!” shouts Carlin, and he jumps up from where he is sitting. “Woooooah!”

Joe looks up, the bridge vanishes, “What? What?”

“You are the bridge!? Did you hear that? Did you hear that?”

“Yeah. I did.”

“Holy shit, bro! Holy shit!”

Read the whole thread: The Hunger Engine

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