Already regretting assigning J.G. Ballard to cover the Fyre Festival

(Note to proofreader: I just received this copy and figure it should just go up verbatim. Next time they do something like this remind me to send William Golding instead. — Rob)

Later, as he sat in his tent eating the doggo, Robin Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place at the Fyre Festival during the previous three hours.

Now that everything had returned to normal, with most of the rich kids cowering in the airport and the ostensible proprietors begging Twitter for forgiveness and mercy, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which lunch had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension. In the middle of the field, a girl in an Afhan Whigs tee shirt screamed about gluten.

With its forty stages and thousand tents, its Insta feed and letterpress tickets, daisy armbands and artisanal hoodies – all in effect abandoned in the sea – the $12,000-a-ticket festival offered these callow neurotic children, flown in from the suburban and gentrified insufficiency of lives which were always disappointing, more than enough opportunities for confrontation.

Curiously enough, despite all Laing's efforts to detach from the sudden yet trivial nightmare that provided their collective psychic epithelium with an unexpectedly corporeal life, it was here, squatted beside a lithium-ion fire of cellphone batteries, eating the roast hind-quarter of the pupperino, that he realized that all games eventally become serious.

Laing stepped across a spreading pool of paraben-free, keto-friendly lube that had somehow exploded into his tent from the chaos without. He peered out into the face of the darkness.

The minuscule volume of open space that separated his tent from its neighbour unsettled his sense of balance. He noticed the thin-shouldered young woman hiding from the seething orgy of violence. She was pallid and undernourished, garbed only the predistressesed Afghan Whigs tee and one of those neon Indian war bonnets you can get from etsy.

"Help me," she said. "I think I've lost my boyfriend."

Just as he detected the ruthlessness and aggression concealed within the polite memetic convention of her appeal, an unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of having posted more photos with the Kelvin filter than one has twitter followers, he realized he had discovered a second festival inside the one that he had originally set out to visit.

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.

Ducking back inside, he realized he was still hungry, and began methodically basting the bone-white skin of the dog portraitist from Brooklyn, with the samurai pins in his hair, whom he had stuffed with garlic and herbs.

"Though fiction is a branch of neurology where the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels become the written mythologies of memory and desire", he murmured to himself, carefully avoiding all the stick-and-poke tats, "everything tastes great with garlic."