Addiction

Chapter 15
Gone Daddy Gone

Today: Very Late Afternoon

15. Beautiful girl, lovely dress

High school smiles, oh yes

Beautiful girl, lovely dress

Where she is now I can only guess

‘Cause it’s gone, daddy, gone- your love is gone

Yeah, it’s gone, daddy, gone- your love is gone

Yeah, it’s gone, daddy, gone- your love is gone

Yeah, it’s gone, daddy, gone- your love is gone away

- Violent Femmes; “Gone Daddy Gone”.

Damien had slept away the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon while his mind and possibly even his soul had journeyed somewhere far more insidious than a mere office building. He would have made it home sooner, but building security detained him before the I.T. guys went through his computer.

They found porn. Lots of porn. At least, Damien thought it might be porn. Iwannamama.com contained downloads for videos and photo shoots of Damien in baby clothes and oversized baby diapers, getting cared for by a woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, and a kind of motherly charm. There were tons of them, it seemed. Page after page after page of the stuff. And every screenshot seemed eerily familiar to Damien. There seemed to be one video for every bizarre dream he’d had over the last three months.

Damien only got out when he did because he signed an agreement that basically made him forfeit unemployment benefits and severance packages in return for a nondisclosure promise of what the company had found at his computer. Damien was financially fucked beyond all reason, but it beat risking getting put on a sex offenders list. Could it really be considered child pornography if literally every person was obviously over the age of consent? Still, Damien hadn’t wanted to chance it, and he frankly didn’t care.

Damien had finally hit some form of rock bottom, and with it came a form of clarity. Those creepy women who had been tormenting his slumber, those freaky dreams, his increasingly infantile behavior: All of it was somehow connected to the drug, Re-Lease, and by extension, Eden and its owner Levi Athan. He only needed to test his theory by going home.

Damien managed to pull into his apartment as the sun was just touching the horizon. He immediately spotted Delilah’s car in the parking lot, having seen it several times during the previous one month fling. So far, so good. He felt a damp, disgusting, and solid squish with every step he took. He hadn’t even taken the time to change his diaper. Hell, he had been so short sighted because of the drug in his system that he had thrown away all the other diapers that he’d bought.

He passed his tongue nervously over his few remaining teeth as he pushed open the door to his apartment. His infantile state had begun to bleed over into the waking world, obviously. His potty training, or perhaps his maturity, had been the first to go, but now the more obvious physical signs were making themselves known. If he went to sleep again and was lucky enough to wake up, he might be reduced to crawling.

He couldn’t remember whether he had bothered to lock the door or not; but the knob being busted open attested to the presence of a second party.

“Delilah?” Damien called out. “It’th me! Come on out!” The place was even more of a wreck than usual. If Damien’s place this morning had been a dump, now it was a dump where a wild animal had been set loose. His refrigerator was empty, with what had been perfectly full jugs of milk and apple juice laying empty on the floor. Someone, besides Damien, had gorged.

Damien went over to his couch, high stepping over his own garbage and squishing in his pants every step of the way; his shitty diaper sagging and threatening to pull his loose sweatpants down.

“I knew I shouldn’t have fallen athleep at your plathe while you were gone,” Delilah’s voice from the dream echoed in Damien’s memory. Damien ran his hand over the couch cushions. He stopped when he felt a large wet spot. He leaned in and breathed deep through his nose.

“Bingo,” Damien said, immediately recognizing the smell of stale piss for what it was. Delilah had been here alright. The dream hadn’t lied about that. But why had she been here?

-“I’m out of Re-Leathe,”.-

-“Don’t feel so bad, kid,” Levi’s voice echoed from memory. “You’re not the first that she’s tricked into giving away your buzz, but you’re definitely the longest con she’s pulled.”-

“Oh fuck!” Damien shouted with realization. He ran to his bathroom. The medicine cabinet had been ripped off the wall. Damien scrambled on the floor.

“Where ith it where ith it whereithit?!” Damien shouted in a panic. He scattered pill bottles everywhere. Where was the one pill bottle that mattered, the one with the precious miracle pills? “Gone!” his voice echoed off the bathroom walls. “SHIT! THAT BITCH! THAT FUCKING CUNT!

No. No. That was the addiction talking. That wasn’t Damien. The stuff must not be completely out of his system, yet. He had to take a moment and think rationally.

“If Delilah took my pillth,” Damien reasoned to himself, “why ith her car thtill in the parking lot? Where did she go?”

More memories flashed across Damien’s brain, some of them mere hours old:

-“I heard Lucille talking the other day about how her baby was so much easier after her first diaper change.”

-“Have you been able to pull him across the threshold, yet?”

-“Oh, so you mean the rest of him is…?”

-“Back there, I’m afraid.”

-“Once you’ve both been changed, you and your little friend can play all you want, forever and ever.”

In the dream, Delilah had finished getting a diaper change mere seconds before Damien woke up on the floor with his pants around his ankles. She had stopped talking, too, and instead had begun babbling like an infant. Maybe there was more to this than just some kind of crazy dream.

Maybe whatever force was causing them to have the same weird dreams and regress, had pulled Delilah over this threshold that the Mamas had been talking about. Maybe just like his weird dreams were bleeding over into the waking world, maybe Delilah had slipped out of this world and into whatever place they went to while Damien had slept.

It sounded ridiculous, he knew, but Damien was in no position to call anyone or anything names.

He had to find out more. Damien went over to the desktop in his bedroom where he had spent countless hours researching “Re-Lease”, only to find a bunch of legal terms about renting houses and such.

He sat down in his still unclean diaper. Whether it was because he was too distracted or because he was lacked the ability to clean himself up any longer, God only knew. It was time for a new search.

He googled “Eden,” and nothing useful came up. There were some “Eden Clubs” mostly golf courses, and a movie, and of course the original Biblical reference, but nothing about the still trendy hotspot downtown that supplied the little red pills.

Then, Damien googled “Levi Athan”. Maybe he could find something out about Levi’s past, though Damien couldn’t imagine what use that might be. Still, know thy enemy. All he got was some basic sites that told him that “Levi” was Hebrew for “Joined in Harmony”, and Athan meant “immortal”. The hairs on the back of Damien’s neck told him that that was not a coincidence.

Other than the name’s meaning though, Damien couldn’t find shit. No Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram, no news articles, no pictures, no mentions of anyone with that name at all.

As far as the internet was concerned, Levi Athan didn’t exist.

When he typed in “Levi Athan” for what must have been the tenth time, Google came back with a message: “Did you mean ‘leviathan’?” No he didn’t. He was looking for a man, not a mythical-

Then Damien saw the images. They were painting after painting of giant sea serpents, dragons and snakes. Leviathan. Serpents. Snakes. Eden.

“No way,” Damien gasped. “No. Fuckin’. Way.”

It had to be just a stage name. A dumb play on words. That’s all. No way could Levi be-

-“Then how come I’ve only seen you wear those snake skin shoes?”

Levi paused for a beat. “I like to remember where I came from, newbie. They keep me humble.”-

Call it intuition. Call it a gut instinct. Call it whatever you want, but Levi was definitely behind all of this; and Levi definitely wasn’t human. And, more importantly, Damien felt, Delilah was there right now, waiting to be rescued. But how to get to her?

Then, Damien got an idea. He waddle rushed back to his bathroom and dug through the pile of clothes that had accumulated over months and months of disuse and neglect.

“Come on,” Damien growled. “Come oooooon!” So many pairs of unwashed pants, so little time. He found a pair that had laid untouched for the better part of a month. He reached into the pockets and turned them inside out. And there it was: The little red miracle pill that he had had in his pocket a month ago when he had last gone to meet Levi.

That same pill, that Gary the doorman wouldn’t allow him to swallow, had gone back into Damien’s pocket while the rest of the refill Levi supplied had gone in an orange pill bottle. For the last thirty days, the pill had languished in the pocket of one of Damien’s unwashed pair of slacks. Now Damien had his way back in to Eden. Now he had his chance to make things right.

“Let’th do thith!”