He is a friend of a friend and the gesture closest to friendship that I gained with him releasing my grasp on the opportunity to get to know him, so his real name won't settle in my fiction of him. I will call him Io, the name of one of Jupiter's moons, so that when he is read he will be cloaked with the Galilean mystery of uncharted extra-terrestrial territories and known only as an enigmatic celestial body, or else as a myth.
Io had seen some rough seasons by the time I met him. By that time, his skin was like a lunar surface. At a distance, he glowed pale and luminescent, but up close he was ragged craters, all gritty and scars and teeth. The rougher he looked, the rougher time had been, and the softer his edges became. Any distinctive outlines gradually eroded away and an abrasive asymmetry remained, leaving him looking like just another one but also just another weird one, spilling over into himself, lighting his own eyes from the reflection of others'.
Some thought he was dense, some called him ill. Doped up, autistic, some spectrum of something that could explain his strange sameness, his darkly-lit atmosphere, the way he loomed at parties, an awkward eclipse. After some talks through computers into the long nights I had come to feel as threats, I saw his fearlessness, as infinite space. I had known boys like him before but they had gone to great beyond only to come back with wan faces, indifferent. They were finite because they did not have the fog that formed across Io's eyes, forcing him to be be always squinting through it, always searching, comparing, measuring space between stars. He did not react to the earthly gases that choke the rest of us with truths we come to swallow and stomach.
Pupils expanding like the universe, by the time I met him, he was already playing with the alignment of the cosmos. Soon he was obsessive and so distant his obsessions became orbits of themselves. Astral, unstoppable, inexplicable just as long as the sky is immeasurable. He meticulously experimented with levels of conciousness, crossing his hemispheres, climbing between the different cortices from lower to higher, observing his body as it detached from his mind. He unhinged himself an inch more with each chemical reaction he burnt with flames pale blue, black, grey, brown.
Then he began to collect crystal quartz and carrying them around with him. He claimed that, without them, we would not have our radios, our televisions, our radars. We would not have those powers of detection he felt he was mastering. He was communicating with light refracted from prisms, with lenses, with electric charges. I swear he must have been somewhat starved of oxygen from his imagined cosmogyral conquests because by the time I had stopped getting to know him, by the time he was unhinged too far from my reality, he had become shrunken and discoloured. I heard that he created a shrine in his bedroom and stopped seeing the people who once called him a friend. Only the neighbours had the chance to notice him now he stopped attending parties, to instead stay at home speaking to crystals, tipping the scale of star maps, or standing on his lawn every night in Fulham, with quartz clutched in his fists. The friend through which I had become acquainted with Io told me that he'd said the crystals were parts of his rocket ship, fragments of the vessel that had once brought him home, but he doesn't have a home anymore, no home for me, says Io, for he is just a foreign moon, once explored, now only meant to circle a lonely planet that we can't seem to find.
