Fiend

by Peter Stenson

  And just like that, the mood’s shit. That’s how it always is among tweakers. Ecstatic to miserable in less than a second. Either too much scante or not enough or a thought that burrows into your brain and becomes an itch and then a fully colored panorama and then it’s real, that vision like a DVD skipping, over and over and over again.

  Need to find a cure and shit, Maddie says.

  Randy smiles. He’s missing the back two molars on his right side. I wonder if he can still hear out of his cleaved ear. He says, And I need a rim job from Queen Elizabeth.

  We laugh. Type rolls the dice to see how much he owes for landing on Water Works. I’m thinking about the word cure. I’m thinking maybe I’ve already found it. Maybe it’s copious amounts of scante. Shit worked for Typewriter. He was seconds away or maybe already turning and I saved him and maybe we just need to be able to produce tons of dope and our world would be restored. I mention my theory.

  Bullshit, Randy says.

  I’m like, What’s bullshit? That scante starves this shit off? That we’re alive because of meth?

  So what are you suggesting? Randy asks. That we just find a Z—

  Z? Typewriter says.

  Walking dead.

  Call ’em Chucks, like Chucklers, Type says.

  Randy runs his index finger over the cavern on the side of his head. He’s like, So, we find a Chuck, and just shoot him full of our limited supply of dope?

  Worth a shot, Maddie says.

  Type shakes his head and KK fiddles with her hotel on Park Place. Randy says things about the Chucks being oxygen starved, not to mention their thick blood and strips of missing flesh. That there’s no way to reverse damage like that. I’m not really listening. I’m thinking this could all be over with, the fucking apocalypse, the Chucks, the need to carry guns and cry when we hear laughter. I’m thinking about inventing the cure, administering it, our numbers growing, me saving the fucking world. And then I think about the Hindu dot I put between my mother’s eyes. The baby with Crayola blue eyes. If there is a cure, it came too late. I’ve already done shit I can’t take back. The story of my fucking life.

  Could use the Chuck in the interrogation room, I say.

  Randy says, Bloke’s looking for a Nobel Prize.

  Dr. Kevorkian motherfucker, Type mutters.

  Not trying to be part of this, yo, KK says.

  Me neither, Type says.

  Fuck it, Randy says, if your mate wants to play scientist, let him. I’ll run it by Derrick in the morning.

  I smile and then it fades and we’re quiet. I hold play money in my sweaty hand.

  Maddie stares at me. There’s a light pus dripping out of his worst pick mark. He says, I just don’t get how the hell… I mean, how’d you guys… you know?

  I don’t want to go into the whole thing—the little girl, Svetlana, the trucker, Walgreens, KK and Jared, the Albino and the Canadians, my mom, Cheng, that cooing baby. He doesn’t need to hear this. I feel bad I asked him about his story, dredging up the killing of his younger brother.

  I say, Junkies are about the most resourceful motherfuckers on the planet.

  Cheers to that, mate, Randy says.

  We raise our cups of water in a toast. KK says, To walking dead motherfuckers like us.

  11:22 PM

  The earplugs don’t work worth shit so I’ve taken them out and lie on my cot listening to a symphony, an unbearable symphony, of giggles echoing from down the hall into our grouping of cells. The laughter penetrates my mind, my sleep, my consciousness. It reminds me there’s no way out. No end. Nothing we can do to get away, and I hear the gales, am able to start to catalog the different sources, and I’m giving them names—Jerome, fourteen, second-degree felony for possession of a firearm; Andre, sixteen, first-degree felony for assault with a deadly weapon; and then me years before, Chase, sixteen, two counts of second-degree felonies, possession of narcotics, intent to distribute.

  I hear bare feet on tile. I tense for a second until I see KK’s skinny frame in my doorway.

  You up?

  Yeah.

  Fuckin’ awful.

  I know.

  I raise one arm as an invitation. She walks into my cell wearing a pair of panties and a wifebeater. I move my back against the wall and she crawls under the thin sheet. She smells like BO and yeast and she takes my left arm and wraps it around her waist and then brings my hand to her face. I breathe her in. I pull her tight. I’m naked and the head of my penis rubs just under the elastic of her underwear. I tell myself to stay calm. My dick isn’t feeling it. I tell her I have earplugs if she wants. Maybe she feels my hardening dick because she pushes backward and I’m telling myself she just needs safety, she’s scared, she isn’t on board, and we hear giggles and roars and laughs and she raises her left leg an inch or two and my penis slides between her thighs.

  You think it could work? she asks.

  A cure?

  Yeah.

  Fucking hope so.

  I kiss her vertebrae.

  This is met by the softest of exhales.

  What I’ve wanted is finally happening and I’m kissing her neck, telling myself to go slow, to cherish this moment, to not freak her the fuck out. She turns. We kiss. Her breath is rot and so is mine and it doesn’t matter and we’re kissing with tentative strokes of our tongues and it’s years before, the psych ward, our apartment, and I ask if she really wants to do this and she tells me to be quiet. She’s on top of me and she’s wet and tight and I trace her nipples with my tongue and I tell her I love her and she has her eyes closed and goes faster and I tell her again and she leans forward and our noses touch and she tells me she loves me too. The slapping of our skin matches the howling giggles. She’s going faster, faster, and I cup her head with both of my hands and she’s gasping for air, biting the tip of my thumb, and her body tenses, the edge of her upper lip curling, and our rhythms match each other, everything the release of dopamine, our scarred synapses once again firing.

  She rolls off me. She assumes the position of little spoon. I’m having trouble not smiling. She asks if I came inside her and I lie and she laughs and says, I can feel you drippin’ out of me, yo.

  Such loving pillow talk.

  Speaking of, you’re hogging it.

  I move backward and she puts her whole head on the deflated pillow.

  I’m a ball of fucked up. I think what we did was amazing and I imagine a baby growing in her belly and her giving birth with no doctors, nothing sterile, about her somehow surviving, and the three of us a family. Then I think about having to shoot my newborn up with drugs and this seems like the saddest fucking thought ever. Not so much abusing my baby. But that we’re done as a species. There’s no way to reproduce. No way to ensure our offspring make it out of the womb and no way to cultivate their minds and bodies. Even if there is some sort of cure, we’ll still have to shoot crystal every day. A baby couldn’t take that. So we’re it. Pockets of motherfucking junkies around the state. Around the country. Probably other countries too. All of us hunkered down wondering how much longer until the next thing goes wrong. Until we’re out of ephedrine to break down, or ammonia, or HCl. Until the power grid fails. Until we can’t stand our lives and slit our fucking wrists. We’re it. The six of us here multiplied by every major city and then rural areas like the Albino’s farm. I bet altogether there are under a thousand of us. A thousand people who couldn’t handle it when the world was normal, that’s who’s left to keep our species alive.

  Haven’t had my period in three months, anyway, KK says.

  You’re pregnant?

  She laughs. I like the way her stomach feels against my hand. She says, No, my system gets all fucked up when I’m using.

  Oh.

  She places the bottoms of her feet on the fronts of mine. I pull her tighter. I never want to let go.

  I knew this was going to happen, KK says.

  Chucks?

  No, us. I mean, fuck, not the way it happened, but I knew we weren’t done
.

  Me too.

  Figured you’d think that. Called me every day for six months straight after we broke up.

  Can’t blame a guy for trying.

  Guess not.

  I tell her I figured things were looking good during the Marco Polo game.

  Get off it.

  Just saying…

  An accidental touch, KK says.

  Bullshit.

  I whisper Polo in her ear, running my hand over her pubic stubble.

  In your fucking dreams, yo.

  I know.

  Cheese-ball motherfucker.

  You fucking love it.

  Kind of.

  I rest my chin on her bony shoulder.

  Breath is awful, she says.

  I’m embarrassed but I can’t help but laugh and I tell her I about vomited kissing her and she says, Fuck you, and makes a show of tossing my arm off and I grab her, spin her around, and pull her toward me. We kiss. I tell her I love it, her taste. She calls me a sick puppy and then rests her head on my chest. I watch her rise and fall. We’re kids. We’re however old we were when we starting getting high. We insult to flirt. I love KK and I tell her this and she says, Do you remember the first thing you ever told me?

  That you were sexy?

  Serious.

  I try to remember. I can’t. The psych ward is a trazodone blur. I tell her I have no idea.

  You said, and I quote, I just called my mom a cunt.

  Her head bounces with my laughs.

  Do you remember what I told you?

  Yeah.

  What?

  That nothing’s as bad as it seems, but nothing’s as good either.

  SUNDAY

  7:00 AM

  Big cocksucker Derrick makes a production of doling out little cloudy rocks—shitty crank, impure as hell—and I know that Typewriter, KK, and I have been shorted but whatever, we’re new, plus we have a little head stash of that Albino shit.

  Derrick stares at me when he talks. He says, This is it for the day. Got it?

  Roger that, I say.

  He continues to stare and it makes me feel violated. I use KK’s needle and blast the whole thing.

  Shit’s stronger than I would have guessed and it gives me a pulse in my asshole.

  It’s good, man, I say.

  No shit it’s good, Derrick says. He turns to leave, then pauses. He takes a few steps in my direction. He’s holding on to a needle and I’m thinking he’s either going to puncture my eye or offer me another booster and he’s all, This is it, for your little fucking experiment. One shot. One motherfucking wasted dose because Maddie begged me.

  I tell him thanks, but I’ll probably be needing—

  He cuts me off with a wet laugh in my face.

  I think about the pain of having your Adam’s apple tattooed. I tell myself to let his aggression slide. Really, I have no option. The dude’s a fucking beast and would smash my skull with one clubbing fist. He tells me he’ll hold on to it, to come find him when I want to play doctor. He walks out of the cell block and down the hall. Typewriter uses a new vein on the back of his foot. KK uses her darkened one. Randy and Maddie shoot theirs too. Our eyes get wider, our attention peaks.

  So now what? KK asks.

  Typewriter’s standing on his tiptoes, hitting the Power button on the hanging TV.

  Doesn’t work, Maddie says.

  I’m kind of dreading another game of Monopoly. I have the urge to retire to the cell with KK. I feel like I could fuck for hours. I try to give her bedroom eyes but she’s dabbing her bleeding arm with her finger, then sucking the blood.

  Go watch ’em, Maddie says.

  Watch who?

  Them.

  Randy says, Don’t have to. Might be a good idea to let it be, actually.

  I’m confused, I say.

  The monitors, Maddie says, that’s how we saw you. We watch the Chucks.

  Forget it, maybe another day, Randy says.

  I’m down, Typewriter says, I think it’d be some shit to see them when I’m not running away. To study what they’re like, you know?

  It’s wild, Randy says.

  I know KK won’t want to watch streams of walking dead, that it would probably be the worst thing for her, and I think about the brief moment last night when she actually fell asleep, how she talked in her sleep and woke up screaming.

  You two are good? Randy asks.

  All good, I say.

  The three of them leave and part of me wants to go with and study these things, see how they move, see what the fuck they do when they’re not laughing, but I know I should stay with KK.

  You can go, she says.

  No, that’s cool.

  Chase the chivalrous.

  Not sure what I’m thinking is too chivalrous.

  KK rolls her eyes, gets up. Her jumpsuit gives me a boner. She stops at her cell door and glances over her shoulder. I’m up and she’s laughing and then we’re doing our thing and I take her from behind and my dick’s at the perfect sped level—hard and lacking feeling—and she comes twice and then I do into her aluminum toilet.

  We sit on her bed.

  There’s no sleep coming and there’s nothing to do and KK must be thinking the same thing because she grabs her jean shorts from the floor and pulls out a shard of the Albino shit and we shoot each other up.

  KK says, The hand of God, yo.

  I’m leaning against the white wall. My forehead jumps in small spasms.

  And sometimes it’s all worth it, she says.

  My heart is a snare drum.

  Fucking love you, I say.

  KK doesn’t look, just gives me her hand. I stroke her long fingers.

  10:45 AM

  We’re going over cartoons from our childhood. We’re talking about the Gummi Bears. We’re talking about Rugrats, trying to remember their names. KK swears the twins are Lil and Phil. I say they’re Lilly and Billy. We lie on opposite ends of the bed, our legs intertwined. I ask if she remembers Captain Planet. She sings the song. She says, Fuck that noise, let’s get spun.

  11:06 AM

  We’re at the black bookshelf. We’re debating between a game of War and cracking open the red Bible.

  I’m feeling War.

  Game is ridiculous, KK says.

  Go Fish?

  Fuck that.

  KK takes a Big Book off the shelf. She doesn’t open it. She says, Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our paths.…

  She’s reciting “How It Works,” the section read at the beginning of most meetings. She raises her eyebrows, wanting me to continue. I say, Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves over to this simple program.

  Remember, huh?

  Kind of hard to forget.

  Figured you’d blotted that shit out.

  Tried, I say.

  She says, Usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.

  There are such unfortunates.

  We laugh and then we don’t because it’s sad. All of us, heads full of AA, veins full of dope. It’s fucking sad because we’d bought into the whole thing—meetings and sponsors and prayers and steps and making coffee beforehand and cleaning up afterward and a life that involved working a real job and saving for small material comforts and because we’d been happier then, wanting a different life, believing we could have it.

  KK puts the book back on the shelf.

  Were you ever serious about it? she asks.

  I don’t want to have this conversation. To dredge up shit that has no resolution. I shrug.

  You were, I know it.

  Why are you bringing this up? Like what good does—

  It was a question, Chase, that’s it.

  But why? So we can go through the whole thing again? How I was somehow responsible for us ending.

  Not somehow.

  That’s great.

  She stares at me. She has her cheeks sucked in lik
e she always did when we fought. This is exactly why I didn’t want her to bring it up in the first place, my seriousness for AA years ago. It would lead to the same fucking fight, our only fucking fight. Me ruining everything because I couldn’t stop smoking shit. Her blaming me for fucking up her life, telling me that she’d have been clean the whole time if it wasn’t for my pressure, my hints, my assurance that we could handle it, that it would be just this once.

  No, Chase, it isn’t great. I asked you a question, that’s it.

  What are you doing? I ask.

  The tension in her cheeks releases. She blinks twice. She says, I don’t know.

  I take her in my arms. I kiss her forehead. She tells me she killed Jared. I ask her if she wants to get spun.

  You’re fucking with me?

  Just something to do, I say.

  You realize it’s never going to end, don’t you?

  I talk to her about testing for the cure and about being safe and that Randy and Maddie seem rad and I tell her it’ll work out.

  KK’s like, Not what I said, yo.

  Stop doing this.

  KK says, The cure, if there even is one, which there fucking isn’t, is splice. It’s more fucking dope.

  I can’t believe she’s doing this. After everything, after finally being able to sleep for a few fitful hours, after being guarded by locks that keep hardened criminals tame, after finally reaching some sort of fucking destination and grasping on to some semblance of a future, she turns. Always the same thing. A tide pulling outward—her attitude and love and psyche—leaving nothing but cement-looking sand stretching for miles, desolate as fuck.

  Just try not to fuck all this up for yourself, I say.

  The look she gives me is disgust and hurt, her mouth slightly open. She pulls away and heads to her cell and I’m left standing there alone. I call out her name. She doesn’t respond.

  11:29 AM

  I head out of cell block C. I can hear giggles down the hall. I reach the metal doors for the cafeteria and think about going in and seeing if Derrick needs help. Maybe it’ll be a way to bridge the gulf between us. I push open the door. I’d eaten corndogs in this very cafeteria. I’m about to call his name but I don’t. I’m not sure why. I make my steps light. I can’t hear anything from the kitchen. Maybe he’s with the others watching the security cameras? I walk around the stainless-steel serving stations. I know I should announce myself, Derrick just the type of motherfucker who takes being surprised as an act of war. I don’t. I push open the swinging doors. There’s nobody inside the kitchen. Beakers and tubes and Erlenmeyer flasks cover a stainless-steel rolling cart. It’s the smell of poison, of better moods. What the hell is KK’s problem? I take a few cautious steps into the kitchen. Derrick isn’t there and neither is anybody else. There’s a cookie sheet cooling on top of the oven and I’m a little kid sneaking to a tray of chocolate chip cookies my mother has made for her bridge group and I’m staring down at an eighth of an inch of chalky crystalline candy and who the fuck would notice if one cookie is missing? I can’t shake the feeling of being watched. I give another spin around the room. I take the butt of my lighter, and as delicately as I can, strike it against the tiniest of corners. There’s a soft crack. The half-inch shard is still a little warm. It’s a pleasant feeling in my palm. I slip it into the pocket of my jumpsuit. Can’t even tell it was ever there.