Capsicum
2025-08-29
Mid-afternoon: it was hundreds, perhaps thousands of kilograms. Aluminum, plastic, and glass. It was headed toward me, fast. Threatening. I feel this premonition every day, that some massive object is accelerating in my direction. And I was just walking to my apartment after some lab work, simply walking down Pearl Street. But it gets me everywhere: on my way to the market, to the water, and back. Often, multiple times a day, it gets me. And it gets me today. But I keep on walking. I tuck my head and walk away from these things. I try to walk away from the fact that someday, the bringer of these projectiles will let them keep going, going through me, ending me. But the sun is shining: it brings a great sensation on my walk: on my face, and on my conscience: the snow is disappearing incrementally, day by day; the great fog over the water begins to part; and the plants—the plants are starting to grow. These kinds of things numb my fears, and I merely hope they persist.
Mid-afternoon plus twelve minutes, for what it’s worth: I great the wood panels of my door and I greet the creak of its opening. I great the globules of paint up to the wood trim by the floor that remind me many coatings were needed to reach the wall’s current off-white, and I am grateful tape was used to separate that process from the wood trim below. Pearl Street was harrowing, and throttled the mind to take such observational lengths in the encounter with every object. Up the stairs to my unit I greet more squelchers of fear.
My window: my window looks down on Pearl Street. Pearl Street separates two lines of bungalow houses, often occupied by university students drinking on the porch, fornicating through the window. A few hearty trees pop up where space affords them. As the street gets further down the hill, more and more industrial buildings replace the houses until it hits the lakefront. Some of these buildings operated by cynical restauranteurs, evangelical revivalists, drained community volunteers. The grime of the town is one thing; I at least would like to appreciate it: the human persistence in the face of subsuming decay. But the water at the end of the town is transcendent. On its other shore are wild, grown-out mountains, seemingly untouched by all of the faults of humans. I aspire to look out of my window more than I do, but my attention turns:
My digital terminal: I can’t help but turn to it. I can’t help but spend my time browsing generated indexes, proliferated media. It knows exactly what will intrigue me the most, how to synthesize and present it. Maximal human entertainment. FixLines reports an estimated ten thousand lives saved by terminals from suicide every month. I am less of a proponent than many of the pundits it displays for me—a decade ago I saw many people always walking up and down Pearl Street, but now barely any—though I must admit, it is comforting. So comforting, in fact: I have experienced my fair share of substances: tobacco, coca, cannabis, opium—mostly those I’ve been able to privately grow—but never have I shown addictive tendencies, except in the face of the terminal.
The next morning: I awake having fallen asleep on top of the device. I brush spittle from my mouth and sleep from my eyelids, and remove the terminal’s connective nodes from my skin. The necessity of sleep is what forces me away from its stupor, and recenters me each day on my work and my passions. Ready and out the door I am on my way to the research center. My gate is regular and my pace is quick. I observe my footsteps, until they are stopped. I am held up in terror and so it almost went right into me. I didn’t even notice it until I noticed I was frozen. Without my mind even being allowed to respond, it is safe to say I am wholly governed by this fear.
“Are you doing alright? You seem a little out of it today.”
“More or less. I just haven’t been getting the most sleep lately.” I respond to my research associate. He rarely acknowledges anything but the statistics I relay, so I know I must be exuding a particularly frenzied state. “What about you? I know things must be stressful with all of these deadlines coming up.”
“Can’t say the best. You know about Block 53, right? I don’t have anywhere to go, really.”
“Well surely the University will help you, right?”
“Maybe, but they’re the ones causing all of this because they need more room for the data centers.” We finish the rest of the day in silence. I feel almost like I’ve reached some kind of breaking point. It’s well into the evening now, since we discovered this morning our current project needs to be submitted for presentation in a matter of days. To think about our work: a gene synthesis algorithm for the creation of the optimal industrial lumber. Not only does it seem insulting this is the single kind of topic that ever receives funding, while our town’s own ecology withers away, but this process requires the power of the data centers currently evicting hundreds of people.
I step outside and hope my walk home will soothe the day’s frustrations. I step outside and step no further. It seems I am frozen again. There is no projectile, but merely the fear of one. I fear my causeless death and the outside world that harbors it. I face no other option but to go back inside the lab. Over the next hour I go in and out repeatedly: muster, breach, petrify, retreat. I am stuck here. It seems that everyone is just fine with going back in their labs, which I guess is comforting—I am little to blame—but also horrifying: I worry about what the Universities will do if no one lives outside of labs. I am not too disappointed at being forcibly separated from my terminal, but I am scared about not leaving and then not seeing the sun, the water, my window, my plants. Well, there are plants inside the lab…
SPECIMEN RECORD
Vascular > Flowering > Eudicot:
Solanales > Solanaceae > Capsicum:
Capsicum frenetica
Conservation status: EW
Native to the New World.
Indigenous entheogen.
Cultivation mainly clandestine, for market.
Inventory:
10 seeds—acquired in 2025—substance schedule II cleared—PepperWorks, Ltd.
3 dried fruit—same source
Zealots tout its use in esoteric ritual: glory gained from admiring a culture long eradicated by our own nation’s founding. Supposedly it is the hottest pepper. Speculation exists around it containing psychoactive alkaloids, but none have been found. One is lead to believe its reportedly radical alterations of perception upon consumption merely originate from distinct oral pain. Sometimes one needs radical alterations. Sometimes one cowardice is exchanged for one bravery. Sometimes one must endure pain.
Violation: illegal personal deaccesion—but I need it. There isn’t flavor; there is only an attack. Pain builds and vision occludes until nothing more is possible. There is only white heat, white light. A blindfold is simultaneously lifted and placed. I am in a maze of austere hallways lined with rooms of threatening functionality. I know I need to leave. I find the door and step out. The darkness allows my eyes to relax. I walk further on to the road and am sickened by the sound. Vehicles churn through, deafeningly. Many are for demolition, construction. Many performing deliveries for those privileged enough to relegate the task of going outside. Those for transportation are huge amalgamations, attaining more and more mass to protect fleshy passengers against collisions. There are humans on the road but the road makes no room for humans. It’s easy to see how insanity takes hold.
Something becomes clear: so many seem to obscure ugly visions. But to escape them is first to see them. Peppers are useless now. I wipe my tongue, feverishly. I lick the ground. The more I fight the more I notice the violence—I break off running. The violence in my mouth is in the violence around me: capsaicin in eviction, in alienation, in that which makes people collect bottles. Nothing can interrupt my jet stream, falling down the hill, falling toward the lake at a remarkable pace. Pain eliminates all fear in the way of alleviation. I have dove into pain and so I have sprinted to dive in the water.
It has long been since anyone has enjoyed the lake. Decrepit dock planks shudder underfoot until they are no longer underfoot and all around me is shock, and this disgusting liquid that is rightly very cold and spreads around every surface and enters every pore. Temperatures neutralize and I get the feeling a blindfold is simultaneously placed and lifted.
Midnight: I emerge wet from the shore. I walk up the hill, up Pearl Street, greet my door, its opening, the globules. I trudge up the stairs in rage. I grab hold of my great obscurer, the great derider, tearing its plugs from the wall, open my window, and drop the terminal down. My friend, Pearl Street, smashes the traitor. That night had a great dream where everyone woke up with pain, and all went to the doctor, also in pain. There was a sense of confusion and of violence: the Hospital in pain. But then saw a notion that the pain was in the Hospital, that it needed the violence. Then I woke up.
The next month: in which my research associate started sleeping in the lab, and in which I realized I couldn’t hurt everyone to make things change. It was the month I learned to swim. It was obvious I needed to practice and on the water it become obvious what I needed to to do: after that great night, my breaking point, it seemed like I could make things better by letting everyone see: exposing those who’ve obscured to the violence all around us. But it seemed too harmful to expose others to violence. It seemed too hard to imagine how things work without violence.
So I learned to swim and then I escaped, swimming across the lake to the mountains.
From my window I could see them, but from the mountains’ feet on the other bank, I could not see my window. Human industry was an indescript grey blur. The swim to get here was grueling; truly separatory. The clear green wild distinctly partitioned from the grey blur. The water is unlike anything I’ve felt. Cold and consuming. A dark murk pervades it especially on the grey side, but becomes clearer toward the wild. On these first few nights I construct my plant-made shelter and forage my plant-found food. My botanical knowledge serves me well in this new life, but with its limits approached I only wish I spent more time on practical tree-facts than the co-opted theoretical.
“Three quarters fished and five loose geese always spraying me, it only gets worse up here.” I am awoken on the fourth wild morning by soliloquoy, roughly sung. I stumble out of plant-made shelter and surprise the finesse fisherman: he whips around, gracefully adding slack to his line to allow for an unperturbed lure given such a turn. He shocks me even more: the first person to meet my gaze, in many years. I didn’t realize anyone else to live in the wild, and to think how freely this man acts, it made me shiver. “You know, it’s safer to sleep near the party of course, and warmer too. What makes you out here?” The fisherman speaks with most of his tongue in verse. It makes me feel odd to add my naturally soft, plain, reply.
“What is the party? I’ve only escaped a few days ago.”
“Well, my cold wet friend, you are quite funny and clearly new. The party is the reason most make the ‘scape—the opposite of the grey stuff ‘cross there”—he motions over the water with disgust. Hooking his thumb backwards: “it’s really something special. Half a day’s walk inward, into the hills. Once half the way you’ll hear the right direction.” So the past month I learned to swim, and today I learn to hike. I have no idea what it means to ‘hear the right direction’ but I trusted the way he met my gaze and gave me a fish to eat and I trusted the way he said he was bringing back buckets worth to feed the party later that night.
The grade challenges the body. My insides feel hot like pepper flesh and the liquid of my sweat must be enough to raise the level of the water that partitions away my old life. But the display raised by the wild is redeeming: the beauty of the trees and the act of the trek. My heart pounds. I feel it pound as I march along. I hear it pound as I march along. And soon I know what it means to ‘hear the right direction.’ I follow the beat of my heart as it intensifies—or is it the beat of a drum? It’s all too much to distinguish in the rush of things and it doesn’t matter—I understand the direction. As I march along further it becomes clear the beat is coming from something outside of my body, though it moves it as if we are one. The final break of clarity comes I arrive at the top of a tall ditch with a vague bottom. I hear layers to the beat as well as the warm chatter of human sounds. My legs stick down, down, quickly to compensate for the pitch but it turns into a slide and then a tumble, and then there I am, in a wide clearing with many people, moving as if one with a music unlike anything I’ve heard before. It seems like a party.
I brush mud off my body and out of my ears, letting music seep in: the soundtrack of the many weeks that quickly pass by, fallen into a ditch. I dance, lost in the woods, lost in the sound. I know no longer where I am or who I am but feel more secure than my old life that had maps but no anchor. The partygoers are free people, eye-looking people, with some semblance of clarity.
We dance as we wither away, until we are merely comprised of bones. There is nothing left to see but I can still hear the beat. At least it was a pleasant way to go.