by Paul Ham for the Autumn 2026 issue
Somerville Ave. Left goes under the highway, East Somerville, a Pollock of pigeon poop, where a serial killer attacked homeless people in the Target parking lot; right is towards Porter Square’s vintage shops, beer gardens, and a Whole Foods. When you’re looking to hide from hulking townie gangsters, there’s only one way to go.
Towards the hipsters and the whites. So I ran to my right.
Once I saw the glow of ironic neon lights, I slowed down to a jog-walk. Act normal, don’t draw attention, even if they do catch up, they’re looking for someone running, not someone chill. I called an Uber Black (fuck it, I deserve it), and in 15 minutes I was back home in Brookline. Didn’t shower (I’m lucky; no body-odor gene for me) and my Oura ring said asleep in 1 minute.
***
These days I’m the acquisitions editor at Paragon Publishing, a small horror/crime publishing house in Cambridge. Right in Central Square, where shopping carts full of trash bags and worldly possessions scatter across a landscape of MIT grad students, Asian-style tapas bars, and Teslas.
As an editor, I read every manuscript submitted to our shop. I’ve seen murder committed by a single needle (“ike jime”) to the most OCD-description of a body-part mandala (“you cannot forget the knuckles!”). Endless fight scenes, from dumb brawls (“meat slapping meat”) to maniacal slaughter (“face-fucked with bullets”). I’ve heard what fear sounds like from thousands of voices (mostly silence). I’ve read the final moments of death cataloged one hundred times.
Sometimes the horrible things people imagine are so incessantly grotesque, I can’t stop the tremor in my right hand, such that I can’t type, much less write.
It took me a bit, but now I agree with my psychiatrist: ICD-10 Diagnosis Code F43.12 PTSD, chronic. PTSD not once. Not twice. But chronic.
***
From Kill First & Kill Again:
It’s a myth that Eskimos have myriad ways to describe snow, but the point is taken: if something is important to you as a society, you’ll have more words to describe its nuances. In the US we have two words for two distinct types of prisons: jail is often short-term; prison is technically longer-term and post-conviction. Then there’s state and federal prisons; Juvie; correctional facilities, detention centers. Then there’s lockup, incarceration, county, state, doing time, the pen, the can, the slammer. The brig, the farm, the clink, down bad, la pinta. We even know about internment camps.
We know the words for the different areas in these places: Cell. Dorm. Cell block. Yard. Commissary. Mess hall. Low Security. High Security. Supermax. Solitary confinement. Visitation room. We all know prisons have libraries. And we know the process: Parole. Probation. Monitored release. Ankle bracelet. Halfway house. Community service. The chair.
So we all know precisely what this means:
Serving 5 years in state lockup for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, soon to be paroled and released on probation.
In many other societies, these words would be gibberish.
Maybe as a society, we all have PTSD.
***
Marcus finally texted back the next morning:
Sorry brother did they fuck you up
That’s not something I’m texting back to.
***
Marcus grew up in Andover, a half-blue collar suburb an hour north of Boston. Being Wasian, he lived in two privileged worlds: white enough to not get called chink; Korean enough that women would think oppa in their minds. After Tufts (biochemistry), he worked in finance for a few years before law school at BU. Far from his classmates’ dreams of Big Law, he aimed to be a criminal prosecutor, and when he landed in Cambridge, right next to Boston, he salivated thinking of the action he’d see. Guns, assaults, rapes, and murders.
Nope. Massage parlors, operating under the influence, bike thefts, and fentanyl. Moving society’s shit from one pile to another and then back again.
In the doldrums, one night he started digging into the details of all that shit. He found the underground economy of human trafficking and money laundering in the massage parlors; the street-gang affiliated network of bike thieves and their embrace of technology (crypto, Telegram/Signal); the world of dealers, distributors, and imports/exports for fentanyl and its chemical components. This secondary world opened up to him like the network of the nervous system spliced out of a cadaver.
***
Precursors, the chemicals that are turned into addictive drugs, sit in a legal grey area where they can be used for scientific purposes, as long as you promise not to use them in people. Therefore, anyone can buy them online. Marcus tracked them crossing the border from Canada, with the smaller trucks working their way through Leominster. He saw shipments land in Atlanta and get tucked inside semis up to Boston; there a network of local delivery services moved them out down Route 2 and into Leominster. There a diffuse army of cooks mash up their one-of-a-kind batches, based upon academic papers and guesses, in a battle for the strongest, cheapest hit.
Addicts know they’re zombies stumbling to suicide. At times, you crave the finality of an overdose; you want it–and by chasing that dream the strongest hits take you to the edge… but give you one more day for another hit.
Until it doesn’t. You fall over that edge. But if you’re in Massachusetts, there is Narcan, and one hit and you’re back on the streets. Or no Narcan, and you’re just where you expected, high and then dead.
Cooks constantly tweak their recipes based upon market forces: the price of precursors, tending to those that are the cheapest, from fastest, least quality-controlled manufacturers; their customers’ desire for the latest, the hottest, the strongest, and so the funky names, the gaudy packaging, the one novel compound that customers will die for.
The ugly math is that the more overdoses, the more deaths, the more popular a cook’s batch.
***
Jonathan X (JX) was Marcus’s first test case. He was in his 50s, divorced and in a condo in Porter Square. Former D1 college athlete, now overweight, fleece-vested, and milquetoast, but fire at paddleball. No longer in the shape of his youth, his ego and nostalgia pushed him above his means, and he was constantly injured. He had success with BPC, but couldn’t take the needles, so Marcus’s kombucha-based batch was perfect.
Within days, he was back to paddleball-glory. One year later he was consistently crushing it on the down-sized tennis court.
But one more year… I saw a different picture. All JX could talk about, think about, rave about was Marcus’s BPC kombucha. Even though it was still in skunkworks, Marcus loved, even encouraged the viral publicity. But what I saw in JX was fear. Fear of falling off his game; fear of his starved ego if he’s losing not winning; fear of losing Marcus’s kombucha.
He eventually invested $50K in Marcus. I bet he asked for his investment back in-kind.
***
JX had a nuts drop-shot, but a wild overhead smash. I’ve seen his knees and ankles bend in ways that’ll make you say fuck that. And he plays on.
***
From The Bureaucracy of Chaos (Gloss, unpublished):
6 Back when all was simply Chaos, Cthulhu formed from the primordial stew that assembled amino acids into proteins into acids into bile. 7 Cthulhu took first breath, and They breathe from now through Eternity. 8 They swarmed and boiled, and, as They agitated Chaos more and more, God formed. 9 God feared Them, and so fled Chaos and pieced Heaven together from stars and planets He stole from Chaos. 10 Far away from Chaos, He built Heaven and then Earth and then us.
11 Cthulhu swarmed and boiled, and as They agitated Chaos more and more, Leviathan formed. 12 Leviathan squirmed through Chaos, but drawn by the stench of stolen stars and planets, fell out of Chaos in pursuit of Chaos’s loss.
13 Leviathan saw God. 14 God, while gardening the universe, grew angels. Of those, He loved Lucifer, who was beautiful. 🏁
To be continued…
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