{ cont'd from here 🆘 }
Ben reclines on the floor with an alpine knee drawn into his chest and an elbow resting on a flat grey uni-cushion, no less than an inch from where Marc chooses to languish that day, watching.
"You wish you were normal? That's just precious."
He throws his black dog hair back and snorts. The laughing kind. Blow isn't off the table so much as dusted off in streaks, virgules of fingerprints on a black glass boomerang in the center of the room. Chews and speaks around a rosé colored knuckle. (~ He doesn't keep up with Grant's hand lotion regimen or whatever the fuck it is, and Grant is out of town. ~)
"Pete's sake. Listen to you. Nobody wished people listened. We worked. They did listen. Listeners formed all by 'emselves, like ant colonies. These massive para-social organisms made out of itty-bitty people."
He takes his hand out of his mouth and makes his fingers into squirming tarsi. Presses the serrated moons of his nails into the area rug, the three thousand dollar area rug he hates, with a smile that could cut hate from the heart of hatred.
"I didn't wish for that," Ben scoffs. "We fed the ant farm. It's called playing an audience. It's called marketing. It's history, over."
Rolls his eyes. Sniffs back yesterday's drip. The day before yesterday's?
"God makes fire; man steals it. Man makes music with that fire; God and man die alone. You try and guess what I wished for. Any-fucking-way."
He pins Marc with a roiling gaze and the hand not clenching Desert Dust fibers, places his fucked up thumb and forefinger, the corner of his palm over Marc's exposed abdomen, the arch of muscle where his oblique starts.
"Why, you worried?" A pause, a dark look. His own questions going on in there. Who's 'everyone?' How's it 'not the same?' "You know what I wish? I wish you would explain all that to me."
@silverjetsystm
