Gruesome Trevor, torn between staying gross and getting clean, seeks the wisdom of his crabs. He constructs a sensory deprivation tank in his kitchen (it's really just a big fridge with a few holes cut in it for breaths).
He floats for two weeks in a saline solution that is very soon mostly congealed gravy, crab roe and curdled diarrhoea. But he won't leave until the crabs have told him how to proceed. Crabs have hatched in his stomach, his throat; they climb over his teeth in the dark. The larval crabs colonise his nostrils and his eyes. In the foetid milky bouillobasse he marinades, a human rockpool, his flesh breaking apart like sodden tissue. but he won't leave.
He gulps from the unspeakable soup to stay conscious, his senses depleted, denied. He is going deep this time, right to the rotten core of self. His horrible past glories play out in the infinitely black screen before him. His mind lives now in the dead world of the past while his body rots and degrades unattended to in the present. Every thought of death and despair and wasted time life, a slow sticky hell spun out beyond the measurement of time.
Fifteen days into the treatment, the fridge door opens and a sticky, blind, horrendously melted figure spews forth onto the greasy lino. He has his answer. The crabs have spoken.
