Adrian Gray

“I began to feel as if we were merging with one another. The process was more than simply emotional. It was biological, systemic. Each of our bodies was a biosphere, slick with bacterial and insect life. Reteamed, and what we teamed with brought us closer not only to each other, but to the ecosystem we inhabited, fed off, and nourished. Bacteria bred in the ooze of our waste, our discarded food remains and puddled shit, then travelled onto us and between us, carried not only on the thickened air, but by the fleas and lice that hopped and crawled from one body to another. There was no difference, I began to think, between the puddles on the floor and the streaks of filth on my skin and the acne that erupted on Margot’s face. It was all just life, matter, the biome. We were leaking out into the world, and the pooled primordial essence of the world was soaking back into us in turn. (p.235)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“We could barely even recognise each other, let alone differentiate. With our hair slicked down with awful, a faces glistening with translucent slime, our clothes rotted and tattered, and revealing bodies in equal and complementary states of decay, we appeared to each other simply as shining, semi-fluid forms in the darkness. We reached for anything we could consume - food, old and new, detritus from the floor, are own squelching shit - and washed it down with all the booze we could manage

[...] If we kept on, I knew, our skin itself would leave us, rotting from our bones and pooling at her ankles, until there was nothing at all to tell one of us from the other, or any of us from anyone else. Even in the haze, I understood what I had achieved. I’d stripped everything back, rendered myself down to nothing but the shit I contained. I had transcended even wildness and animality, become bacterial, amoebic, viral. I was infinite and self-dividing, no longer near to death, but death itself, airborne and particulate. The skin of the world had been peeled away, and what was beneath, I knew was the true face of God: pulsing and writhing and ugly with life. (p.300)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“I understood, too, what was upsetting my supposed benefactors. This wasn't about my work or my Instagram feed, or whatever uncomfortable email or phone call. Ryan and Seth had received this morning from whichever of their corporate partners was currently on edge. This was about the extent to which I would seem to be playing my role. Just as I had come to understand that in the world of Pict it wasn't enough simply to go to work and go home - that there was, in addition, and expectation of some deeper, human contribution - so too, in the context of this programme, this opportunity, it would never be enough simply to point to the material gains I had made. They needed me to be not only successful, but happy, evolved, gratefully aglow. It was my job to make them feel good about themselves and to help them package up that satisfaction for the consumption of others. In my mind, I saw their vision: me, on a podium or stage, perhaps giving a TED talk, gushing about the life in the change in my life they'd occasioned. (p.165)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“You know what I think?’ said Zelma. ‘You got to start small, start symbolic, then grow it until it's huge.’
‘Meaning what’, I said
‘Meaning take back certain moments, enjoy certain moments starting with your body. Starting with how the only shit you can actually save her is at the weekend. I mean, Why? Why is that?’
‘In the morning I'm rushed. And when I get and then I get to work and I'm busy. And I feel like people notice when I'm away from my desk. I feel like either they think to themselves that I'm skiving, or that they just immediately know that I'm shitting.
‘Why shouldn't they know that you're shitting?’
‘I don't know.’
‘From now on, she said, I want you to prioritise your shitting. In your day now starting tomorrow nothing matters except shitting. Your sole purpose is to shit. I want you to get professional at shitting. And when you get good at it, celebrate it.’ (p.141)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease