Enter withdrawal: Inside the corrugated cardboard hummed its warning that the collapse of logic had in fact already passed and the signals were just late in arriving. If it was the hotel’s velvet or a bottle thrust empty that set us off I would never know. The surge protector pulsed: Here the parallel lines meet.

In their last failed grasp for reception the chemicals lifted a ship skyward only to watch it fall, its sailed tipped like teeth clenching against treeline. And before the ship was the airplane, with wings splayed perpendicular and defeated. I had lost control of steering, that was what it was, sure. Because no matter how backwards the tiller feels it is right because it mirrors the plane’s thrusted vectors, and no matter how much levity is breathed into the sky, it’s no more than walking: the same as standing, which might as well be heaving in a bed.

In that bed while crawling atop, the woman watched me through her window. She watched me spinning the gold on axles, trying to unravel what alchemy could not. She watched me pacing. She watched me confront the empty desk where cardboard boxes multiplied. Watched me wonder if the lamp work, watched me consider the goddamn eyeteeth and how they meet in jags, watched me cower from electricity with a fear jolted higher with each shred of the cardboard sinking into itself. But If I could watch the corrugation’s wale grow thinner it meant I could still watch. That was as far as I got. Thermometers loomed and called me liar.