A Chemical Fire
by Brian Martinez
Copyright © 2010 Brian Martinez
www.bloodstreamcity.com
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For Natalia,
my muse
Act One
Cabinet
Skin, Snow, Stillborns
A guy named Janet sells to me, pills mostly with a few things mixed in. Wrapping, he calls it. I don’t know the story behind Janet’s name because I won’t ask. It could be sensitive for him and it could make him angry, but I don’t care if his feelings get hurt, I care if I can get what I get. If there were a rulebook for the empty-eyed, the first line would read: Don’t piss off your dealer.
Janet keeps the air-conditioning going in his car year round, he says to keep things fresh but I’m not sure it’s the drugs he means. So all year, it’s the stale, frigid air. It’s fine in the summer but now it makes my muscles pull tight and shake, chopping my words to pieces.
He says, “So you’re getting it, right? Tell me you get it and you’re getting this. I don’t get you if you don’t get this.”
My teeth won’t relax, my skin is dead chicken. The cold doesn’t affect Janet though, neither does dealing in daylight: cars passing, kids running around in the snow when they should be running away. They should get far away because we’re not good in here. You can’t be good in a car with all this inside.
“I don’t know,” I say and crack my knuckles, the pop so loud it hurts. “It’s a jump. Something I told myself I’d never go to.” A kid on his lawn, bundled in layers and mittens, takes a plastic bat to his sister’s head. She goes down to the snow, he runs.
I look at the briefcase on the seat behind us, the brown case with cracks at the edges, splotched with old sticker-glue collecting hair and dust. It’s not where his stuff is- that’s in a fake panel cut into the floor. The case, Janet tells me, has a baby in it.
“I bought it off some rag woman,” he says. The baby: stillborn. The mother, scared worse than anything she hid in the old building and pushed and cried and pushed and slipped on sweat and fluids, pushed and did it, proud she’d needed no-one’s help. But then it was too quiet for someone’s birthday so she cried, enough for the two of them. She got up, wrapped him up nice and carried him around in a suitcase. In private places she talked to him and tucked him in, whispering into his shrinking eardrums. Two years later, she met Janet. She was crying when she told him the baby’s name was Casey. He laughed at her. He's still laughing.
“You get it, right? …Casey?”
This is the kind of conversation dealers manage to pull you into. It's never enough to engage in a straight-forward transaction. You have to get filthy in the process.
“I’ve never regretted meeting you,” I say, facing away, rubbing blood into my legs, thinking he's not listening.
His eyes move to the rear-view. “What’s that supposed to mean? You saying I’m fucked up?”
Pull it back or lose him. Patch it up because no one else has anything until Monday, if that.
He says, “What are we talking about here, mother fucker? Who are you right now? Who's sitting in my car?”
Just fix it.
I breathe heavy, exhaustion thick on my eyes. “I’m just a man, Janet, a man enjoying the company of his pharmacist. You’re right, that’s some funny shit.”
Janet leans back, smelling the ass-end of a rolled cigarette. “Damn right, I thought you’d appreciate that. Knowing your money isn’t being pissed away, that it’s going somewhere.”
I pause. “My money bought a suitcase baby.”
“So are you getting the other thing?”
I grab the old can of soda from his cup holder and use it to swig down six pills. My last six.
“Why don’t you take seven,” he asks, running his tongue along the thin, brown paper to make sure the seal is good.
“Don’t have seven.”
“You want to but you’ll get sick.”
The little girl is pouting in the snow, looking small and broken, wondering where her brother went.
“You hit that wall,” he says.
“Not H, it’s not me.”
He lights his homemade cigarette while sucking in, the brown paper burning and the embers glowing. There's something inside lacing the nicotine. He breathes in chunks of smoke and studies me.
“That’s what I like about you. You crack me right up, man, you kill me. Look at you, thinking you’re still somebody, holding your nose up as you crawl into it. This from the guy who picked pills out of his own puke in my toilet.”
I sit up, ready to leave. He still has the pills though, and whatever he’s smoking is turning the volume up, filling the car with a bitter taste. There's nothing he loves more than this. Waving his power in my face. The only power he's ever had. This is why you don't give power to guys like Janet.
“So you say you won’t do the H? Of course you will. You’ve done everything short of it so you’re doing it.” As he talks his hands do something only he understands, the air shifting in his favor. “What’s the point of driving to the beach if you don’t get naked. Am I right? Fuck it, you’re doing the heroin. I’ve been training you for this.”
My mouth betrays me.
“You think that’s funny? Look at you, John. Know what I see? A man who's doing laps.” He looks me dead in the eyes, pupils serious and vibrating. “Like always I have to lay it out for you. Your pills are swimmers, understand, your veins are lanes. They’re tracks. Are they lying when they call them fucking track marks, John?”
I want to tell him what rehab was like. Telling your story to a group of people still lost in one of their own. Instead I say no.
“So listen to me, listen like skin. I’ve known you for two years, dealing you this and keeping you on this program, and you stuck to it the best you could. You did. But this is the next step right here. So I’m here and you’re here and the heroin is here, right, and so here we all are and this kind is one-eighty.”
I look away from him, at the neighborhood and the snow and the kids. At everything not him, and not me either. “So I can’t get the pills,” I say.
“Take off your sandals, John.”
I’m ready to get out of this car, one-eighty it is. I don’t know which I say- either one leads to the same place.
Let them See The Bullets: A Tragedy in Three Parts
1.
A year before I'm standing in a small store. The kind doesn’t matter, only that I’m here to buy something for my father. Three of us are here: me, the employee behind the counter, and a guy with a gun aimed at my chest. Then at the employee, then my chest, back to the kid, chest, kid.
“I’m not fucking around,” the guy says through his mask, but it’s the gun we’re listening to. The kid squints at it, his big cheeks red and pulled in. I lock up and keep to myself. No fast moves, no eye contact. I don't want him to think I can identify him to the police later. I want the additional jail time to outweigh the payoff of killing me. In short, I don't want to be worth the bullet.
Even the guy holding the gun, when he looks down it makes him shaky. I can picture him as a kid- playing with a plastic gun, unaware that twenty or thirty years later it'll be replaced by a metal one and he'll be cast as the robber, not the cop. Makes you wonder what that kid would think of this adult. What all kid versions would think of all adult versions.
The guy orders the kid around, pushing him
to open the register. He says, “C’mon, big boy, I’ll shoot those Tootsie Roll fingers off if they don’t move faster. Let's see you work up a sweat.” It's been like this the whole time, with the fat jokes. The kid's starting to get annoyed.
“That’s everything,” he says, stuffing the money into a shopping bag. “Do you want a bag for your little gun, too? I don’t think we have one small enough." The guy with the gun asks him to repeat that, stepping closer. Feeling good, the kid says, "Don't worry, I'm not talking about your tiny dick."
I see the flash, hear the sound, see the hit. I watch blood hit the wall and I flinch, my chest booming as he turns the gun to me. He pulls the trigger again and only a click comes out. So here I am, standing a few feet from a man whose gun is jammed, leaving him with only fists. The same as me.
But my eyes stay on the gun. It’s a revolver, jammed, sure, but I can see the bullets between the spaces. Seeing them there, knowing they’re real and shiny and can come alive at any moment and explode into my intestines, it does something to my legs.
Then the guy grabs the bag and walks out of the store, money in hand, and I let him.
2.
The drive home feels gorgeous. I’m alive, not bleeding, not hurt and with music turned up loud, singing along with the wind in the windows, heading home to a wife who, having gotten my call, pulls me up the stairs, kisses me hard, leads me to the bed and takes off our clothes. She tells me I’m not allowed to leave her ever, ever, eyes wet when I promise her, so beautiful. Gala. My wife. Her shoulder skin sweet like fruit, her stomach soft against my palms, she pushes me down and puts her warm legs to mine, her head forward and her hair wrapping my neck.
In the morning, running late from Gala, I kiss her and follow the directions to the precinct to finish giving my statement. It takes me a few minutes to see the dark-grey building set above the shrubs but I find it, park across the street and run over.
The building I see. The black car, I don’t.
First my elbow
folds up
Then the hip
hits
and shatters
The leg I don’t feel, just hear,
the sound of silence and trees falling
in my ear
My ear
on the hood
Then glass
up close and spider webbing,
lifting up,
Over the car and
Into blue
sky or
Grey
Sky, no the
Grey is
concrete, and it
comes at me cold
I don’t remember the concrete being red before
Just cars nearby,
A teenage girl crying
Another driver, surprised by his own loud reaction,
Trapped by ten minutes of emergency vehicles
and me
A little cold
and my leg,
Numb when it moves
And in my peripheral
a red, like fire closing in
And my
eyes
going
black.
3.
I wake up three days later with my wife on the right side of the bed and painkillers on the other, and I reach for my wife first.
Nuclear Medicine
We’re both stuck, me under this machine.
My echo: “What’s bothering you?”
“Just thinking.”
“Please don’t speak,” the operator says. I shift under the plastic and metal of this thing rotating around me, searching for injected isotopes; a tracer of Methylene-disphosphonate that gathers where I’m fractured.
I hate prisons unless it’s her. I tell her, “I’m not going anywhere.”
Click, the air hums.
More to herself she says, “I was thinking how everything’s a song.”
“I didn't realize you were giving up Music History to write greeting cards.” I regret it as soon as I say it. “No, tell me."
“You really can’t talk right now, sir,” the operator says. “We’re trying to get an image of how your bones are healing, but if you move all I get is a blur. See this device is called a Gamma Camera-”
“Also called an Anger Camera. Scintigraphy, I know all about it. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
I stop when I see their faces.
“I’m sorry. The thing is I hate being held down. I feel like I’m in a coffin. I’ll go crazy if my wife stops talking, you know?”
He adjusts his glasses and he’s human for a second. “Your doctor saw something in your bones he didn’t like, just try not to move and we’ll get through this.” Click. The air hums.
“Gala?”
The operator sighs.
“I’m still here. So every sound you hear, everything is a note, right?”
My mouth opens, shuts.
“Right?”
I peek up at her, sitting in the chair with her eyes focused far past the gray walls of this room. She’s not like me; the car would’ve gone right through her.
She says how every sound that happens, a footstep, a slap, a wing flapping, they all have their place on the musical scale.
“Like a car crash in D minor,” I say.
She shakes out of her stare with a smile. “Nice. So every sound, every word spoken, every one is a note. Really everything we say is singing. Not always the nicest melody I guess, everyone has their own range, but that doesn’t mean they’re not singing.”
She’s fighting with herself.
“I knew there was a reason I married you,” I whisper.
“Sir, please.”
“Don’t stop me,” she waves, pretending dismissal. “So you can take any conversation, this one right here, or maybe your mother screaming at you for breaking a light bulb, and you can make music out of it. I mean really, record any five minutes anywhere on a tape recorder, on the street, at a soccer match, in a funeral, and all that you hear, all of it can be translated note by note into a song.”
Click. The air hums.
“A really shitty song though,” I add.
“Mr. Cotard,” the operator pleads.
And she says, “Well yes, but still a song.”
I’m lost in her until I die.
Click. Hum. Click.
Home
“I feel ridiculous,” I say.
“I don’t mind you stinking.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve been dying for this.”
“Then this is the price.”
I look down. I'm standing in the dry shower, wearing nothing but a cast on my leg and around that a big, black garbage bag wrapped and held in place with tape.
“What do you think about God,” I ask her.
“He seems different lately.”
“You know what I mean.”
She laughs, “You think God did this to you?”
“I think a Camry did this to me, as for who was driving...”
“Well if God was driving then he’s a prick for doing a hit-and-run. And if they ever catch him, or whoever else actually did it,” she meets my eyes, “you can be sure they’ll have my full wrath to deal with.”
I think of the accident. The momentary face behind glass that never stopped, never came back. The damage was done but they could have helped, could have called an ambulance; minutes matter.
“Really, John, are you okay?"
“Yeah. Great.” I turn the water on, get it to temperature then pull the knob to get the showerhead going. The water plicks and thacks into the garbage bag, loud and running down the curves and trickling off.
Gala watches me for a minute. Then she pulls her green sweater up over her head and off, leaving the green bra and pale skin and birthmark constellations behind.
“What are you doing?"
“Taking out the recycling, obviously. I always get nude for garbage day.” The bra coming off and then the rest.
“You don’t need to do this,” I tell her.
>
She steps in. “I happen to need a shower right now, it’s not always about you.” She grabs the soap and holds it out to me, waiting, face just smiling.
“Thank you,” I say, taking it and leaning back to get under the stream.
***
“Can you come help me with the car?”
“Hello to you, too.” I hug him. “It’s still giving you problems?”
“With all the parts I’ve put into it I could sell it as new, and the goddamn thing still won’t start.”
Gala kisses Dad on the cheek. “I think it’s time for a new one,” she says.
A Chemical Fire Page 1
