I shake my head. Typewriter tells him it’s too dangerous, explosions and everything. KK says he knows she doesn’t.
Fuck, he yells. He kicks the wall. KK tells him to calm down.
It just never ends, he says. He paces. I wonder how much of this is the dope and how much of this is him. I don’t know who he’s speaking to. He says, Never fucking ends.
That’s what I’m saying, I say.
Give me that base, KK says. Typewriter hands her the aluminum foil. She gets a hit, maybe two, and I know this is her answer, all of our answers really—to sit and get high, pretending like life is nothing but endless opportunities.
We need to leave. Have no choice, I say.
Shit yeah, bro, Typewriter says.
Fuck, Jared responds.
I say, We can get back to St. Paul. I’m sure Frogtown is pumping out that Hmong-made crank. Can give my boy Cheng a visit. Shit’s better than nothing.
KK exhales. Her jaw clenches and unclenches.
Jared kicks the wall.
I think about pumping rounds into the bowling-ball face of that guy. How each shot carved away more of his flesh until I saw the ground through where his nose once was.
We’re about a half hour from St. Paul driving down a deserted I-35E and maybe it’s because we’re scared, because we have no idea what we’re doing, because we are driving to where we fled from, but we have each shot up twice more. Type blares techno. We’re four nodding heads. We’re talking over one another and laughing at our own jokes and I see the turnoff for Highway 96, for my parents’ home.
Pull off.
What?
Pull off here.
Typewriter swerves onto the exit ramp.
What the fuck? KK says.
Need to see something.
Bro, Typewriter says.
What’s going on? Jared asks.
I need to see something.
Jared leans forward, his face between the seats. He’s telling me not to be stupid and then he’s calling me selfish and I’m not responding and Typewriter keeps going down 96 past suburban strip malls and dry cleaners and gas stations and Subways.
Jared says, Why don’t we just stick to your stupid fucking plan?
Shut the fuck up.
No,
you
shut the fuck up. He’s in my face now. His eyes are nothing but pupil. He says, Turn this fucking car around.
Or else what?
You really want to know?
And I hate him at this moment. Him all up in my shit, flecks of his dry-ass mouth speckling my face, trying to assert his dominance and I don’t owe him a fucking thing, the least of which is an explanation, but I say it anyway—my parents live here.
They’re fucking dead.
My pistol is jammed against his eye socket before I realize I’ve moved. I’m thinking about having killed another human, how it’s not new to me anymore, how this would be just one
more notch on the fucked-up belt of the new me. I can hear Typewriter telling me to chill and KK is screaming. Jared has barely flinched and I wonder if he wants me to pull the trigger, to end his pathetic life so he can die a holy martyr in the eyes of KK.
I put the gun back in my lap.
Jared sits back down.
Bass and synthesizer rattle the Civic’s windows.
I tell Typewriter to take a left at the light. We’re the only car. We pass Pennzoil and Decoy’s Bar and Grill and then downtown White Bear with its quant little shops on cobblestone streets and the bookstore and the 687 Saloon. When we drive past the gazebo with its wooden benches and a small fountain, I remember riding my bike down here, my deck strapped onto my backpack, and how excited I was when I landed my first kick flip off the set of three stairs, and hanging out with the other skaters, us in saggy pants and bare chests and backward hats. This was before we had armpit hair and we wanted to be older so fucking bad. We’d steal packs of Reds and smoke them behind the bank, and listen to boom boxes spit out Wu-Tang and Rage. Life was rad then, at twelve or thirteen, nothing but summer sun, skating, and feeling oppressed by our rich parents.
Turn right up here at McDonald’s, I say.
Jared snorts. I want to put a bullet between his eyes.
I’m high as shit, my legs are bouncing and I’m smoking cigarette after cigarette. We’re passing White Bear Lake now and I see movement along the highway. It’s one of them, a reanimated teenager in tight boxers, and we all turn to watch,
silent, him watching us too. I’m thinking about Fourth of Julys when we went to family parties on the lake. I was all about tubing and I would hold on to that motherfucker with astonishing force, and my parents would clap and cringe and maybe that’s the role of a mother or father—simultaneous cheering and shielding of eyes.
I hear Jared whispering to KK and she tells him to be quiet.
Maybe she knows this is going to be impossible for me.
We pass the Maplewood Country Club with its three-tiered driving range and empty parking lot. I feel like vomiting. I tell Typewriter to take a right into the next driveway. I see the shed where we kept the riding lawn mower. We go down the little hill and the house is a giant white number with wood shingles. I remember the bats that would come out at five o’clock every night of the summer. We park facing the three-car garage. To my right is an area of grass where my father would set up a miniature soccer net and we practiced, him telling me to keep my ankle locked, strike with the laces.
I know they’ll be dead.
I get out of the car. It’s humid, hot. I leave the rifle and shotgun, slipping the pistol into my pants. The others get out too. Typewriter tells me I don’t have to do this. KK says the same thing. She touches my back. I tell them I do.
I test the garage door. It’s locked. I lead them around the garage to the side of the house into the fenced-in kennel for our long-dead retriever. I get down on all fours and push open the swinging dog door. I listen for movement, then climb through. I’m in a seldom-used storage room filled with
Christmas decorations and I hold the door for the other three and we’re all there and I don’t want to keep going, to see them dead, like maybe it’s better not to venture inside, to pretend they’re okay, making things work, in love and together.
The key is under the clay flowerpot. I put it in the lock. Then we’re inside the mudroom, and there’s a stale smell and I know it will only get worse with each foot traveled and I’m thinking about the nights I’d hide in the mudroom with the dog, sleep with her on her red pillow of a bed. Then we’re in the hall and the smell is worse. My framed artwork lines the white walls—a still life in watercolor from the third grade, a castle in crayon from kindergarten—and I peek into the family room with its paisley couches and flat-screen TV and more of my artwork. I climb the stairs. Nobody talks. Upstairs it’s rotting meat and family pictures: me as a toddler on a beach in Florida, a family Christmas card with my giant head in a red sweater, me as a baby in a diaper, an ice-cream cone in my hand, my chest streaked with gooey mess. KK’s crying. I just keep walking. I stare at my parents’ wedding photo. My mom has very short hair, the longest strands only a few inches, and her face is pressed into my father’s, his seventies Afro, his nostrils wide. KK gasps, probably seeing the resemblance, and I’m walking down the red-carpeted hall and it’s like I’ve never really seen these pictures, never understood they were the happiest moments of our lives, us at our best, our attempt to make our lives meaningful, before I was a fuckup, smoking speed, bouncing from psych ward to juvie to treatment center. Maybe these pictures were a reminder for my parents that I was still worth the fight.
The smell is horrific.
I’m crying. I turn left at the end of the hall and the carpet switches color to blue and I’m remembering every morning when I sprinted from my bed to theirs, how sometimes they’d be awake, other times asleep, and I’d jump into the middle of their queen-size bed, and they’d each wrap an arm around me, how safe I felt.
KK asks if I want her to go in and check. I shake my head.
Their dressing room is filled with light and outside the sun shines and birds chirp and all that shit. I have my T-shirt pulled over my nose and I would give anything to tell them I’m sorry.
Their bedroom door is open.
I can see the bookshelf of Dick Francis mysteries, the fireplace, the pink easy chair. I can see the right corner of their bed, the dark wooden bedpost. Then I’m in their room and I’m expecting a greeting—Jesus Christ, son, I’ve been so worried—and I don’t want to do it, turn to my left, see them lying there decaying, but I do.
I want to vomit up everything inside of me.
I want to purge myself of who I am. My father lies there alone, his stomach ripped open, his ribs exposed, picked clean.
I turn around and stumble into their dressing room. Everything’s spinning—the white dressers, the blue carpet, the green love seat—and I tell myself it’s for the better, my father dead. But I know his body had been eaten and I’m wondering where my mom is, like maybe she escaped, maybe she’s okay. Then I hear giggling, and I pinch my eyes and the giggling gets louder and this can’t fucking be happening. I look up and
there she is standing in the bathroom doorway, my mother, the woman who birthed me, who taught me to read, who told me she would never give up on me, that she knew I could beat this addiction. She’s wearing a white slip covered in blood. Her face is the same but different, her right cheekbone poking through a patch of exposed skin. I look at her hands. They’re covered in blood. I understand she’s fed on my father.
Mom?
She takes a step toward me.
I hear the pumping of a shotgun. I yell at Typewriter to put his fucking gun down.
My mom giggles.
I remember ordering Domino’s pizza on Friday nights, watching a rental movie, maybe
Uncle Buck
, us sitting together and laughing. Maybe her giggle is the same, my mom standing there like she’s happy to see me, and maybe she is, maybe she knows who I am, her prodigal son finally returning.
She takes a step closer.
Chase, Typewriter says.
Mom.
Giggle.
It’s me.
Another step.
And then we lock eyes, my mother and me, and I know she understands who I am. That she can change. That somebody will find a cure. That it will go back to how it was but I’ll be better and I’ll do what I couldn’t before. She’s coming closer and closer and she’s going to hug me, and it’s been over a year since I’ve seen her and I’m sorry, so fucking sorry. I hear
Typewriter yelling and so is Jared and my mom is almost in arm’s reach now and her giggles are shrill. She sticks out one hand, covered in bits of my dad, and I just want it all to stop, the blinding pressure behind my eyes, for it to go back to how it was, for me to never have found meth, for me to never have been born. I know in my deepest core that she will kill me, that she’s gone, that everything that made her Cheryl Daniels has been swallowed up by disease. I have my pistol raised, and I am bawling, telling her I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I pull the trigger. She drops instantly and doesn’t move. I sit on the blue carpet. I am a little boy making snow angels on its freshly vacuumed surface, listening to my parents talk about their days.
I’m given my first speedball ever. I’m sitting in the backseat. KK crushes up an Oxy and mixes in a tenth of Tina and she boils the whole thing on a charred spoon she’d taken from the Albino’s. I’m not crying. I’m not talking. I’m not even thinking about killing my mother. I’m just watching KK work magic and thinking about all the things that led her to use her skills and deft hands for the mixing of drugs instead of transplanting kidneys. She tells me not to fight it. I give her my left arm. She slaps my skin. She puts in the needle. She presses the plunger down, stopping with an inch left. I can already feel it working and I tell her
the whole thing
and she gives me the last few milligrams.
I know I’m fragile, my psyche, my whatever the fuck you
want to call it, that thing that keeps me human, that keeps me as a person with a habit instead of a walking dead motherfucker just living for his next high. I can feel this fragility. I bob my head. I’ve been driving in cars getting high for half of my life. Everybody I know is dead. I killed my mother. My eyes are dry and I feel like I’m done shedding tears. My retinas feel like bungee cords. Something is breaking. Something has broken. And then it’s opiates mixing with amphetamines and I know it won’t be much longer for any of this, the snapping of my mind, putting up with Jared, wanting the impossible with KK. I’m looking at a handful of days before we’re out of scante, until we fall asleep, not caring if we wake up.
We’re off the freeway and driving around behind the capitol. Its marble pillars are a pretentious joke. I wonder how Rome looked days after it fell. On Marshall the storefronts switch to Hmong lettering above small restaurants and clothing shops and we see a few squat gigglers, their naked flesh a copper bronze, their hair jet black.
I’m high as fuck, feeling like maybe junkies and their tar had it right the whole time. KK keeps asking if I’m good. I nod. Jared is talking, complaining, something about this being a stupid idea, an ill-conceived plan, and I mouth the word
conceived
and think of my mom.
Bro, what street does Cheng live on? Typewriter asks.
I think. I have no idea. I don’t care, not really. Cheng was
the one Hmong kid on scholarship at the academy. He was the shit on the soccer field. The ball stuck to his duck-toed feet. At the start of our senior year, he came back different. His clothes changed to incorporate red. He rocked Dickies with a handkerchief hanging out of the back pocket. He’d started selling crank. I’d seen him a handful of times since then. It was either him calling me or me calling him when we needed a ball for ourselves or because we shorted a bag and it was noticed.
Prince, I think.
Right?
Yeah, down University, right at the light.
So let me get this straight, Jared says, we’re just driving around, hoping to find some kid
Cheng
, in the ghetto mind you, and what then? Say,
hey, I was wondering if you could cook us some shit?