Heroin Chronicles (4 page)

“Okay.”

Forty-five minutes later she stumbled out of a cab and staggered toward the apartment building. Finding Joe's door, she pounded frantically until he yanked it open. He was stooped over, like a little old man. The apartment was dark, and smelled of sickness and rotting meat. She couldn't tell if the smell was from Joe's apartment, or if it was rising from her own fetid wound. They embraced painfully.

“How're we gonna do this?” she gasped in his sweat-drenched mop of hair.

“The bathroom …”

Tania let her heavy coat fall to the floor, exposing a David Bowie shirt soaked crimson. She staggered after Joe. The fluorescent lights momentarily burned her eyes. He was standing there, pointing to the bathtub. It was full of water. An extension chord snaked in from the living room. An ancient twelve-inch black-and-white TV sat on the toilet's lid.

“This'll be the easiest way. The quickest. And it won't make a mess like the fucking bullets did.”

“Yeah. I guess that's smart.”

As if to emphasize the point Tania pulled off her T-shirt. Right between her tits, in the space where the bullet had gone in, was a wad of surgical cotton the size of a fist. It was stuffed into the wound and stained a gruesome shade of brown. It was clumsily held in place with peeling duct tape.

“I'm still scared,” she said.

“I know.”

“I mean, what if we don't come back this time? Or what if we do, but it doesn't
fix
us?”

Joe shrugged. “Could it be any worse than feeling like this?”

“No. I guess not.”

Joe and Tania undressed silently. There was no embarrassment. There is nothing two people can share that is more intimate than death. They folded their clothes into neat piles and placed them by the sink, grimly focused on the task at hand. Tania went in first. Joe held her hand as she climbed into the lukewarm water. She sat at one end of the tub with her knees pressed tightly together. The water began to turn pink. Joe gingerly eased himself into the tub after her.

His bandages soaked through quickly. The bathwater steadily deepened from pink into a murky scarlet.

“Does it hurt?” Tania had a look of almost motherly concern on her face.

“Not the wound. Everything else hurts, but not the fucking wound.”

“Fucking same thing here.”

Joe reached over and flicked the TV on. A repeat of
Entertainment Tonight
was playing. Mark Steines was talking about Lindsay Lohan.

“Turn it down, Joe. If this doesn't work I don't want this shit to be the last thing I hear.”

Joe muted the channel.

“Here we go.”

Joe picked up the TV and

Dropped

It

In

The

Tub

There was a flash of intense white, a strobelike flicker, and then nothing. Lights instantly went out all over the apartment building.

And then it was over.

Joe came out of it first. The house was shrouded in darkness. The air smelled funny. In the dark, he could see the television floating in the water between them. The water was brown and fetid. They had shat themselves at the moment of death. It didn't matter. Tania started to stir, lifting her chin from her chest. Joe smiled a slow, satisfied smile.

“How do you feel?”

Tania let out a long, ecstatic sigh. “Fucking
fantastic
. You got a cigarette?”

There was a faint smell of cooking meat in the air. Joe placed a hand on his hair and it felt brittle, singed. But the unbelievable relief that he felt was better than anything he had ever experienced in his entire life. As they both sat there in a tub full of electrified water and shit, coasting on their high, they started to slowly nod off into a gentle dream state.

* * *

“My name is Joe, and I'm an addict.”

“
Hi, Joe.
”

“I'm finding it impossible to quit. I've had three relapses in as many weeks. I know they say to
keep coming back
but … I'm sick right now. It's been two days since my last relapse. I'm here because it's all I can think to do …”

As Joe talked, Tania sat next to him, watching. She didn't tell him, but this morning as he lay passed out on Valium, she'd silently crept into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Withdrawal sweat was soaking every inch of her stick-thin body. Her tits looked a cup-size smaller. She reminded herself of those awful pictures of Nazi concentration camp survivors. The hole in her chest wasn't healing. In fact, it was starting to smell worse and no matter what she stuffed in there—cotton, old newspapers—the stench still leaked out from under her clothes. She had even tried an air freshener inside the rotting cavern, but that uneasy mixture of decay and potpourri was somehow worse.

What use was this if the body couldn't heal itself afterward? She had been shitting blood for four days since the last reckless, desperate fix. She had gulped down a bottle of drain cleaner in a moment of feverish madness. This morning, with the sickness back worse than ever, she
had
to do something about it. Joe was insisting that they detox and she'd initially agreed, and now he was watching her for signs of weakness. It was like being back in that fucking sober living house. Back to the cycle of meetings, prayers, and self-denial. She couldn't stand it. Joe could stick out his attempt at doing it cold turkey if that's what he really wanted. After all, she rationalized, how could she help him with his own detox if she was incapacitated by sickness? If she could just stay well enough to help him, then maybe he stood a better chance of actually making it.
Then
she would detox. Her mind made up, this morning she had a fix without telling Joe. She carefully slid the kitchen knife up into the hole in her chest, and stabbed around in there until she hit paydirt. When she came to on the bathroom floor, she finally felt human again.

Joe's words of pain and sickness washed over her as she sat in the AA meeting later that day. Even the old-timers, the lifelong drinkers with red noses and rotted teeth and dead livers, looked at this bedraggled pair with a mixture of pity and concealed disgust.

“… And that's it. I'm going to keep going. I'm going to try and break my addiction this time. Thanks for listening.”

“
Thanks, Joe.
”

“
Keep coming back
!”

“
One day at a time
!”

Afterward they walked back toward the Hollywood and Western Metro. The car had been towed, after being illegally parked for two days.

“I feel like shit,” Joe said. “I want to die.”

Tania summoned up her best “sick” face. “Yeah. Me too.”

“You lying fucking
bitch
. You're high as a fucking kite. Don't give me that shit.”

“I'm not high! Honestly, Joe!”

She reached out to him, but he shrugged her away. He moved ahead of her, down into the station. She caught up to him as he hissed, “Don't try and bullshit me, all right? I can see it all over your damn face. You were nodding out in that fucking meeting.”

Down on the platform, Tania stood next to Joe feeling like a chastised kid. She felt guilty, ashamed of her lies. On the display it said the next train to Pershing Square would arrive in one minute. She looked over at Joe. He was ashen. A droplet of sweat was forming on his nose. Even though the platform was pretty crowded, the people gave the two of them the wide berth usually reserved for the dangerously insane, or the stinking homeless. Black wind gusted through the tunnel as a train approached.

“Tania?” Joe said in a quiet voice.

“Yeah?”

“I'm sorry.”

And then Joe was gone. He stepped forward, straight off the platform. For a moment it looked like he was suspended in the air. He looks like Wile E. Coyote, Tania thought for a shell-shocked moment, before Joe tumbled forward, then vanished completely as the train whooshed past her.

Thhhhhuuuuuddddddddd!

The impact carried Joe away. The scream of brakes and the yells of shocked commuters echoed around the station as Joe flew off in a hail of blood. Tania felt it hit her in the face, like some obscene custard-pie gag. Joe's insides splashed across the face of a screaming woman next to her with the impact of an open-handed slap. The woman fell to the floor screaming, covered in gore.

People were running around in confusion. The train came to a stop halfway into the tunnel, with Joe's mangled corpse caught in the wheels, ripped into meaty fragments across the track, shredded and starting to cook in the hot crevices of the brake levers. In the mayhem, nobody noticed a silent, decaying woman silently make her way off of the platform.

She considered following Joe into the path of an oncoming train in the weeks that followed. As the sickness worsened, Tania found that the quickest, easiest way to do it was asphyxiation. The biggest problem was that when she held the plastic bag tight over her head, and the heat started to build as she instinctively gasped for breath, the urge to tear the bag off was almost unbearable. It took several attempts before she was able to see it through for the first time. After that, Tania was a pro. Once you rode out those two or three minutes of panic, death came on slow and easy, like sliding into a warm bath. Instead of rotting wounds or a bleeding anus, she was left with a red face—the result of the blood vessels constantly erupting under her skin. But she looked no worse, she supposed, than many of the alcoholics she had met at the meetings.

But still, she did consider doing what Joe did. Maybe it would be easier to just cease to
be
, once and for all. The rush was becoming less and less, and the withdrawal symptoms seemed to intensify with each passing week. The past few months she had become a ghost, a shell, something that existed only in the shadows.

A month or so later, something happened that made her change her mind about following Joe. She was visiting the quiet section of Griffith Park where she'd spread Joe's ashes. She was just sitting there, watching the sky as the golden hour began to fade. The place was silent, peaceful. The noise and heat of the city may as well have been a million miles away. It was in this fleeting moment that she thought she heard it, an almost subliminal noise carried softly to her in the breeze.

Tania
…

Taaania
…

Pleasssee
…

Pleasse
…

Just one more fix
…

And then I'll quit
…

For goood
…

The tears came then, as she finally understood the true extent of Joe's hell. She imagined him reduced by a crematorium's violent heat to a billion little ashes, countless tiny fragments of carbon, dumped out of an urn and left to flit around in the careless breeze. She imagined Joe clinging to the underside of plants and trees, lost in discarded beer cans, and stuck in piles of fresh dog shit. And all of those infinitesimal specks of what he once was still burning with that terrible sickness, that unimaginable yearning, a billion fragments of Joe still futilely screaming out for the relief of a fix he could never have again.

Tania stood stiffly, and addressed the breeze: “Goodbye, Joe. I'm sorry. I can't help you anymore. I've got my own habit to feed.”

And then she was gone. As the sun sank behind the hills, the park fell into miserable, pensive silence once more.

S
OPHIA
L
ANGDON
grew up in Tampa, Florida, and moved to New York City in 2003. She is a writer of short fiction and a poet. She is currently working on a short story collection titled
What's Normal About Love?
and two books of poetry,
Love Letters to My Master
and
Is This How the World Turns Out
. She can be seen performing selections of her poetry at various venues throughout New York City.

hot for the shot

by sophia langdon

E
liza stepped with light protracted steps to the bathroom two feet away from their bed, and headed toward the stash she had been hiding: her old cottons. She looked back at him as she closed the door. He was asleep. She was thankful for that. She didn't want him to be awake, his eyes searching for her next move, looking for what he could get.

She did everything with awareness of every creak, every footfall. She didn't want to share. There wouldn't be enough. She reached into the medicine cabinet, took one tampon from the back row of many, pulled it from the cardboard applicator, and emptied the hardened pelts of cotton hidden behind it into her hand. The faucet clacked and chattered. She stood unmoving for a moment, listening. Then let the dribbling of water fill a white top from a water bottle. She added the cotton stones, watching them soften and bloom. It would be a shot of mostly cool water in her veins. She began the extraction, hoping for gold. Hoping whatever made it into the syringe would take the edge off, get her a little well—it wouldn't. She would once again be the victim of her exaggerated memory.