Hollywood Lied

Chapter 12: Disso Nation

We were bored one Saturday in September with absolutely nothing to do and decided to trip on RoboCough.

It wasn’t some grand plan or wild craving.

It was just that familiar, dangerous mix of restlessness and curiosity, the kind that makes bad ideas look tempting.

Marjorie sat cross-legged on the carpet, shaking the bottle like it was a snow globe.

“You sure?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer.

I shrugged, staring at the ceiling as if it could offer wisdom.

“Sure enough.”

So we took the pills, washed them down with warm tap water, and waited for the world to lose its balance.

And it did.

Slowly at first, then all at once—as if someone loosened the hinges on reality and let it swing crooked for a while.

The come-up hit like a slow-rolling wave, thick and syrupy.

At first it was only a slight shift—edges softening, colors warming, the room taking on this velvety hum that made everything feel twice as heavy and twice as far away.

Marjorie lay beside me on the living-room floor, staring at the ceiling fan as though it were delivering some sacred prophecy.

“Do you feel that?” she whispered.

I did.

A deep, liquid detachment, as if my soul were floating a few inches outside my body, watching me from an angle that didn’t exist in sober geometry. My arms tingled. My legs felt hollow. Breathing became something I had to remember to do rather than something that happened on its own.

About twenty minutes in, the room began to tilt—not in a scary way, just in that dreamlike, underwater wobble that makes you unsure whether you’re sitting still or drifting sideways.

Marjorie laughed suddenly, a breathy, bewildered sound. It sounded incredibly tinny.

“You look like you’re melting into the carpet, Cody.”

I tried to respond, but the words got stuck behind my teeth.

Language suddenly felt like a complex math problem I hadn’t studied for. Instead, I lifted my hand and waved it through the air. It left a faint trail—a soft, ghostly afterimage—that made me gasp.

Everything had an echo.

Not a sound echo.

A movement echo, a visual lag as if reality were buffering.

The walls breathed.

The shadows stretched.

The lamp glowed with this impossible halo, like it had swallowed a tiny sun.

And then came the dissociation—gentle at first, then total.

My thoughts drifted away from each other, slow and fragmented, like puzzle pieces spaced too far apart. I could feel myself slipping into that DXM “third-person” state where I wasn’t Cody anymore—just someone watching Cody, narrating his life from a few feet behind his skull.

Marjorie turned to me with pupils like black oceans.

“Cody… I think we broke the universe.”

And for a moment, I believed her.

The room looked infinite, stretching in subtle, impossible ways.

The clock on the wall was stuck between seconds, ticking without moving.

Time was syrup.

Reality was elastic.

And neither of us knew where the edge was anymore.

I tried standing up and immediately collapsed like a marionette with cut strings. The floor felt alive beneath me—warm, breathing, shifting—almost like some ancient creature waiting to swallow me whole. Every time I tried to lift myself, some invisible force tugged me backward, dragging me without moving me, as if gravity itself had become a prankster.

When I finally managed to rise, it didn’t feel like standing.

It felt like phasing.

One moment I was on the ground, the next I was upright with no memory of the transition. And when I “walked”—if you could even call it that—it was like teleporting in short, glitchy bursts. I’d think about moving, and suddenly I’d be five feet away, my brain lagging seconds behind my body.

“This is too strong!” I tried to shout, but all that came out was a warped, underwater gurgle.

Even I couldn’t understand myself.

My heart hammered.

My skin pulsed.

Every inhale felt like it took an hour, and every exhale felt like it escaped from someone else’s lungs.

And the fear hit—raw and primal.

I genuinely thought I was going to fatally OD on a drug teenagers swigged in parking lots.

What a humiliating obituary that would’ve been.

Not even h****n, not coke—cough syrup.

Something you could buy next to Pepto-Bismol.

My vision rippled, bending the corners of the room.

The walls stretched upward like skyscrapers.

The ceiling felt impossibly high, like the sky itself had replaced the plaster.

“Cody—Cody, breathe,” Marjorie said, but her voice echoed in three layers, each one slightly delayed, like it was being run through a broken stereo.

I grabbed her arm, or tried to—my hand passed through the air in slow motion, leaving a shimmering trail behind it.

“I can’t—I think I’m dying.”

But I wasn’t sure if I said it, thought it, or hallucinated it.

The line between the three had completely dissolved.

Somehow, against every odd stacked against our rattled brains, we made it.

By the end, we were worn out like an old pair of shoes—creased, weather-beaten, and barely holding together at the seams. Every muscle ached, every thought felt wrung dry, yet the world finally stopped melting and twisting around us. We’d survived our own ridiculous, chaotic hero’s journey through a cheap, legal hallucination.

And honestly?

Hunter S. Thompson would’ve been proud.

If anyone understood the appeal of staring insanity dead in the eyes just to see if it blinked, it was him. The man turned chemical madness into art. Into poetry. Into something that made the rest of us look tame by comparison.

But he was gone—shot himself in 2005.

He wasn’t young, but he wasn’t old either.

He died in that strange middle ground where legends seem to exit on their own terms.

Then again, don’t all the greats?

They burn too brightly, too fast—

and the flame always chooses its own moment to go out.