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Goat came to visit me in the night once.
He chewed free from the CATGUT leash that otherwise tethered him in a circle. He trimmed the bushes around my tent and left a trail of 0- and 1-shaped nuggets for me to find him by.
I picked up his trail of 1s and 0s all the way back to his circle. He was kneeling in the middle of it, still chewing his bush-cud from around my tent where I had been sleeping.
I watched the cud snake down his throat. "You dropped something," he said, when his cud swallowed down, then he regurgitated back up and resumed chewing.
I looked to see what it was I had dropped. There was nothing in particular in my wake besides tire tracks.
When I turned back, Goat wasn't there. I shrugged my shoulders in case anyone was watching then went on with my day.
First stop was the doctor's office. He took a blood test and said I was "of accumulating health." I asked what that meant and he told me not to worry, that it was only natural I'd accumulate residuals as I went along.
Next I went to the dentist who had a ferret named Ferret that he would let run free around the office. Ferret was trained to secrete a bromine smell strong enough to put people under.
I had this condition where more and more teeth kept coming in. At least this is how the dentist described it. He called it Pineal Lampritis.
Ferret put me under so the dentist could extract some teeth.
While I was under, I ran into Goat again. He admitted he felt threatened by Ferret, that he could be driven to extinction.
Goat made it so I could smell the inside of my nose. That's the only way I can explain it. I became conscious and tried to rip off the special AGCUT mask but the dentist stopped me.
"We're right in the middle of doing this thing," he said. "If we stop now there'll be irreversible consequences."
He held the mask pressed to my face and I threw up right into it. This induced me to dream about the time I was SCUBA diving and threw up into my regulator, just like they teach you to, but it wasn't really dreaming because it was something that really happened to me. It was more like a memory, triggered by the smell of my own vomit.
I pulled the regulator from my mouth and fish swarmed from all directions to gobble up the grassy chunks. My dive buddy at the time, Fish, made some complicated gesture to me that I couldn't understand. So Fish produced an underwater clipboard and wrote, "what the hell have you been eating to cause this?" where instead of the word this, she drew a mess of 0s and 1s in a hashed cloud pattern.
"This mixture is making me sick," I wrote back. I floated to the surface, making sure to float no faster than the air bubbles around me. Fish stayed under.
When I bobbered above the surface, Albatross told me I dropped my mask. I went back under and opened my eyes. I made out the fading blur of my mask sinking, but my buoyancy controller prevented me from going under to retrieve it.
When my head resurfaced I was sick again, this time all over the front of myself. Some of it got on the dentist who was wearing a bib with Lobster on it. "We're going to have to do this thing another day," he said, holding his gloved hands out to Ferret who chewed them off.
"Way to get yourself out of it," said Goat as I was exiting the building. He tried to follow me but was tethered to the doorknob.
"I wasn't faking," I said.
"Now get me out of my own Alcatraz."
"Not now, I need sleeee --," I tried to say, but couldn't get the rest out and at the same time my voice was skipping and bunching up no itself like a gland gone haywire, secreting.
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