I never wanted to see October again. I never wanted to return to the Other-Than-Flesh Club. But that’s where the rotation deposits you. When your life is a series of clicks and tics and the danger of your cheap tie flying into the frame, and the mom screaming at you about handling her toddler roughly, the rotation is the only thing you have. You know if you stay too long in one place, glancing up one too many times at that line of babbling, scented bodies snaking away towards the inner folds of the store, you’ll wind up irreparably undone. I never want to be beyond repair. As senseless and directionless as my life has become, as wracked by guilt as I am for what I have performed by own hands, I never want that.

If I hadn’t been in the process of deterioration long before then, I never would have been there to partake of the delights of the Other-Than-Flesh. I frequented clubs, often staying out till five or six in the morning, and I had grown to prefer the more bizarre places, the sort of places you might have extracted from your nightmares and superimposed on the real world for your twisted amusement. Electric, pulsing, dynamic...these descriptions did not inspire me when it came to the nightclub scene. Thrashing, bleeding, razor-edge...these were the adjectives I sought. As I worked both Saturday and Sunday, bringing the gospel of the $14.99 advertised special to the hungry, the desirous, and the oh-so-fucking-photogenic, I was the creature of the routine and motions of posing and snapping and don’t-you-laugh-at-my-big-nose. I would stumble in forty-five minutes late, eyes bloodshot, hands trembling, alcohol on my breath, the chemicals still shimmering through me, and there would be fifty people in line already. With a glamorous apology, I’d invite the first sitting into my velvety put-together studio, and all would be well again, the world could resume turning on its axis.

Deteriorating. Seeking the threads to sew myself back together. Delivering the gospel to the desirous, gaining little nourishment off their feeble reactions, positive and negative, and taking it all out on the night, my chosen yet circumstantial domain. Sure, there was the occasional sitting where tears would well up in Mom’s eyes and she would say to me, "How did you do it? How did you get Junior to smile?" But then I would only push harder that night, dance harder, take more drugs, brutalize myself in my reinvigorated search for meaning. That was the game. That was the game that led me into the Other-Than-Flesh the first time. It had been open only a month, the hotel clerk told me. There was going to be a huge party to celebrate All Hallows Eve.

That steel warehouse door opened to me as if it knew I had arrived...

* * *

Halloween. The place was packed, jumping, screaming. Costumes gyrating to rhythms beyond the walls of the anti-cage that was the warehouse. Faces fragmented by strobes and chemicals and the sort of pain that was in me. Eyes glared and probed, teeth gnashed, tongues licked and lashed and lusted. Delicious utterances spun on the air while hands touched skin that did not tremble. Fury spewed from blood-red lips, and blood dripped from glands that had nothing else to weep. We were home, where the meaning we were searching for was both irrelevant and discovered--discovered in the moment, the visceral drive, the music, the flesh, the other than flesh...which was only flesh after all.

"I love your eyes," a vampire told me. Which was senseless and uninspired and beautiful all in the same stroke. I reached for her but she was gone, disappeared among the costumes, all of us lost in the flock even as we served only ourselves.

I passed it along to another. "I love your eyes." And she laughed at me, lips as luscious as a succulent fruit and my kissing them, devouring them to the music and the wave that swept over us without abating. "I love your eyes," I heard her sigh to another and I wondered if I knew any of them, if I would know any of them, in their town, capturing their ghosts in my photographs so that others could eat their souls in the dark room. But that’s what we enjoyed, wasn’t it? The chemicals titillating our souls, reproducing us, awakening us from the descent.

Music receded into hollowness, and the anti-cage was a cage suddenly, and silence and heartbeat our captors "Jack Adam!" yelled someone.

"Jack Adam!" yelled another. And the warehouse took up the chant, calling "Jack Adam, Jack Adam, Jack Adam..." He was like some kind of god up there amongst the beams and supports, with his giant jack-o’-lantern head and the bag cradled in the palm of one teasing hand. As he dipped into it, I understood about the bag’s rich contents, not because of the whispers of those around me but because I saw the image through the scarred viewfinder of my mind. He cast the stuff out over us, the particles glittering in the light as the substance fell lazily, falling, falling, our eager mouths and noses reaching to gather it in. As it entered, it seemed something else lifted, and Jack Adam’s fingers calling that something else up to him, calling it up out of us, our last restraint, last vestiges of inhibition and moral encumbrances. Jack Adam. For Edens are not the only ones who desireth the fruit.

We waited as it spread through our collective spiderwebbing veins, and then we left the place as one great army, a thousand of us in Halloween attire. We entered our cars, and the world slowed down for us, normality interceding for as long as it took us to drive there, to the next town, out of the burbs and into the country and upon your sleepy heads watch out. A thousand of us, with the means, with the will, with Jack Adam’s October brew shining in our eyes, in our vessels, serving to drive the convoluted debris back, back and scattering behind us, allowing us to go with that purpose that is always there, you know that purpose. I hope you were not in that town.

We woke them all, trick or treat, household by household, member by member, slaying them each and every one, with our teeth, our hands, their own utensils. Knives and screwdrivers and baseball bats, kerosene and letter openers and telephone cords. We killed them all, a whole town of almost our own army’s number. And yet we weren’t really an army but a host of disciples. Disciples of ourselves. Of October. Kill.

* * *

So I’ve come back. Where the rotation deposits you. Back to October...leaves wafting on the crisp autumn air. Back to the Other-Than-Flesh...particles catching the light as they fall over our greedy faces. Some of those present I recognize, some recognize me, all of us share the knowledge, the knowledge of meaning, the knowledge of blood...

Not unrepairable, not yet. Not as long as the seasons continue to change. Not as long as Jack Adam reigns only once a year.