Jex Blackwell Saves the World

by P. William Grimm

  Molly whistles through her teeth. “I don’t have interest in that nohow.”

  “Yeah,” Jex agrees. “No fun. But there are a bunch of tips to let you have a drink every now and then without knocking yourself into instant hypoglycemia. That’s just the way it is. And how do you minimize the effects? It’s pretty simple. Not much of anything you don’t already know. Eat stuff, starchy stuff, throughout the night, if you drink.”

  Molly nods, taking in every word. Jex continues. “You shouldn’t just start drinking at the beginning and keep drinking every night. Water is your friend. Alternate between booze and water. That’s smart even if you’re not a diabetic with TB. But if you are, it’s super more important. For real.”

  Molly studies her fingers and considers what Jex says. “Totally makes sense,” Molly says, turning her gaze out into the distance.

  “And be smart about taking your glucose levels. Monitor both before you go to sleep and after – to make sure hypoglycemia isn’t creeping in. I’m a little worried about some of the things you are saying you’re feeling. Sweating, shaking.” She reaches out and touches Molly’s arm, which seems somewhat cold. “Those are pretty straightforward hypo symptoms. You sure you’re cool?”

  Molly nods. “Yeah, I’m taking insulin, and my pills . .. and monitoring my glucose levels. All that shit,” she says with a chuckle, pulling her shirt sleeve up and showing the marks on her arms.

  Jex takes her hand and quickly inspects her injection sites. She nods approvingly, though there is some hesitation in her grasp. Molly doesn’t seem to notice. “Good,” Jex says. You seem to be moving around in picking your sites. No fatty lumps or anything. No lesions or scarring, really.”

  “Yeah,” Molly agrees. “I’m pretty careful not to leave marks,” she says with a shrug.

  “Ok,” says Jex reluctantly. “Well, make sure you carry your monitoring system and some kind of hypoglycemic treatment in case you need it.” Molly holds up her purse and pats it. “Got it covered,” she says.

  “And, Molly, for sure make sure that someone you are drinking with knows about it.” Molly cringes but Jex continues. “For realz. It doesn’t have to be Ian, but someone needs to know. If something goes wrong, somebody needs to be close by to know what to do.”

  Molly shrugs with resignation. “My girlfriend Sarah is cool. She knows. I can keep her kinda attached at the hip.”

  Jex smiles with a clear kindness. “Cool, boo. And remember, I’ll give you my digits. You can always call me. Whenever, seriously.”

  Molly smiles. She reaches over and hugs Jex, the hug having that kind of texture that somehow demonstrates a particular kind of feeling. She is grateful.

  “Now,” Jex proclaims. “I need to get going, or Ms. Tubman is going to have a fit,” she says. “What’s your digits? I’ll text you so you have my number.” Molly smiles and they exchange numbers on their phones.

  “Thanks, so much, Jex. I’m really mean it. I’m kinda freaked out about this whole thing. Ian and drinking and the TB and, shit, I don’t know. It all seems so much.” She is smiling and talking much more calmly, confidently, than she did when she walked in. The change is palpable. The two hug again and Jex watches as Molly walks down Figueroa Street. The sun is warm on Jex’s face, and the pleasant feeling is not lost on her.

  * * *

  The night is dark in a way that some nights are wont to be. Stars pepper the sky but do little to illuminate the streets below. There is a street light here and there, but otherwise the street is dark. Jex tags in silence. Her eyes dart from point to point; she is somewhere else entirely.

  Jex wouldn’t know, if asked, how much time passes in the quiet darkness. All she would likely say if asked is that the silence was broken by a dumb question from Q. Jex never bought into that ‘no stupid question’ thing. Sometimes, a stupid question is just a stupid question.

  “You see any cops around, Jexy?”

  “No,” Jex thinks to herself. “I don’t. If I did, I would be a hundred yards down the street already.” Instead, she just says, “no.”

  There is some more silence and Q breaks it, again, with this simple question. “You OK, boo?”

  “Yeah,” Jex nods absently, not distracting herself from her graffiti piece, which is kind of a mutation between her simple tag and a larger image that lies somewhere between a tiger and a muscular arm. “I’m just thinking about stuff.”

  “What stuff,” asks Q.

  Jex waves her off, clearly not wishing to talk about the stuff in her head. “Nothing. Just thinking.” In an effort to change the subject, Jex raises her conversation with Molly from earlier in the day. “Hey, you know Eugene’s sister, Molly? You know she’s in a band now?”

  Q nods with sudden exuberance. “Yeah, Bawdy DySmurfia,” she exclaims. “They are totally awesome!”

  “Oh,” Jex says. “Have you heard them?”

  Q shrugs. “Not really. I spent a night at a squat last week, one of the chicks in the band is staying there.”

  “Yeah,” Jex says back. “I know that squat. Molly stays there sometimes. Eugene, too.”

  “Yeah,” Q continues. “So. Molly was over and I heard them trying out a song. It sounded pretty cool.” She pauses, thinking. “I think they were gonna call it: Physiology Not Fattyology,” she says with a guffaw.

  Jex nods and comments out of the side of her mouth. “Sounds like they’re coming from a healthy place,” sarcasm clear in her voice.

  Q shrugs again. “Anyways, I like the name of the band: Bawdy DySmurfia. Makes me laugh all day.”

  “Yeah,” Jex says quietly. “It’s funny.”

  “You sure there isn’t nothing wrong with you, girl,” Q asks as she pauses her tagging for a moment to study her friend.

  Jex shakes her head, almost bursting to make a rude comment about stupid questions. She refrains and leaves it at the head shake. She doesn’t want to talk.

  Q waits another moment but can’t seem to stand the silence. “Molly’s a cool girl. She made me laugh.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Q nods, happy to be away from anything that might annoy Jex, who seems endlessly annoyable at the moment. “She is a total goofball, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Jex responds, seemingly back behind the cloak of absenteeism.

  “Yeah,” Q nods again, not prepared to give up. “She totally fell down the stairs, right in front of me. I thought she was like dead or something. Everybody in the squat was like … whatttt?”

  “Yeah,” says Jex, her interest suddenly piqued. “She didn’t mention a fall to me.”

  “Oh, she was OK. She jumped right up after like thirty seconds.”

  “Thirty seconds,” Jex repeats in a voice that has become suddenly demanding.

  “Yeah, maybe a little more, but not much. She was totally OK. She was laughing about it like the next minute. Man, she seemed like a bowling ball going down the alley, you know? Like her head hit the walls and the stairs and everything, you could totally hear it.”

  “No shit,” Jex says, staring out to nothing, her tag trailing off, a thousand calculations suddenly spiraling around in her head.

  “Yeah,” Q confirms with a growly pitch to her voice. “She was totally OK, but there was a minute there where I was like, holy shit.”

  Jex’s tagging stops completely and Jex is engulfed in silence. “No shit,” she says in a whisper, not to Q or anyone else in particular.

  “What’s wrong Jex? Don’t be worried. She is totally OK. I mean you saw her just today, right? She wasn’t bleeding or nothing. She just got rattled around a little, like she tripped over her own feet or something.”

  Q barely gets out “her own feet or something” before she even notices that Jex is up and running. She jumps gracefully, urgently off the barrel she was standing on and she is running down the alleyway. Q is too shocked at the sudden action to move at all. She just stares quizzically as Jex tears down the road, disappearing almost immediately into the darkness.
<
br />   “Jex,” Q calls out quietly, more to herself than to Jex. She tilts her head in uncertain confusion and just stares out into the darkness where Jex was but was now nothing but darkness. It is not unusual for something to strike Jex as unusual; and it is not unusual for Jex to disappear into the night or even the day, following some tangent thought that rages without explanation into her head. But this was a fast exit, even for Jex.

  Q shakes her head, and puts her hands on her hips in exasperation. The moon is bright above her but Jex’s sudden departure renders the street particularly and unexpectedly empty. “Well,” she says, chucking the spray paint can onto the ground. “Shit.”

  [Why is Jex concerned so suddenly about Molly? Is something really wrong? Turn to Bawdy DySmurfia Diagnosis to read Jex’s diagnosis and the conclusion of the story.]

  Little Toy Saxophone

  Jex Blackwell is not in the habit of critically studying her body. Nevertheless, she stands in front of the long mirror in her bedroom, inspecting the image that reflects back at her. She is a mess. Tired. Gaunt. Almost skeletal. She peels off her gray sweatshirt and black v-neck t-shirt. They are drenched in sweat, and the a/c in her house has been shut off. She kicks off her Chucks and yanks off her socks; then her jeans and her underwear. She looks herself up and down. Her skin is almost translucent, scabs here and there, finger nails chewed down practically to the bone. She glares into her own eyes, which seem empty through her few years. Red and swollen, she can barely see the blue of her iris. She squeezes her eyes tightly shut for several seconds and then opens them, watching her reflection in the mirror emerge as the red and blue and green stars and lines fade in and then fade away.

  There are very few things that Jex does without music, but she spends these several minutes with her mirror in complete silence, a weird soundtrack of its own. It’s the eyes that get her, her own eyes, and she finds herself struggling not to cry again. It’s an odd battle she has had to fight time and time again in the six weeks or so since she took Molly to the hospital. Before that night, she can’t remember a time when it was even an issue. So be it, she thinks to herself. She turns away from the mirror and shakes her head as if to shake the thought away, her straggly blonde hair framing her thin face, locks flying this way and that. She throws on a clean t-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts, walks down the hall and lies on the floor of her living room.

  Next to her is a Panasonic RX-FT500. Jex leans over and presses play, and the tape player begins to churn grumpily. The song by Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains, Whiskey is My Kind of Lullaby, is a familiar one to Jex, having been played a hundred times maybe over the last few weeks, filling the emptiness of too many dark days, most of which did not find Jex leaving the house at all. She stares at the ceiling fan above her, watching it revolve as the tape grinds noisily. She tries to fade away.

  She shuts off the tape before the song finishes and chucks it across the room; not hard enough to break it but far enough to make it kind of disappear. She has spent too many days – shit, too many weeks – being Johnny Hobo. It is time to spend some time being a little more Pat the Bunny. Damn, not even that. Something easier than that. It’s time to be Ke$ha. It’s time to be Taylor Swift. Well, hell, Jex thinks to herself, it’s maybe not that bad. She settles on The Front Bottoms and has it on her iPhone in no time. The music, Jex finds, is somehow easier to fade away to than Johnny Hobo, which wasn’t the case even two days ago.

  Several songs on the playlist pass before Jex rubs her face and stands up. “Shit,” she murmurs to herself and looks around. She walks over to the jeans she kicked off, picks them up and starts to rummage through the pockets. She finds her keys and walks them over to her kitchen, drops them into a dish near the sink, where she always keeps them. She goes back into the jeans pocket, pulls out about thirty dollars in crumpled bills and some change. She begins to deposit the coins into two jars next to the keys dish, as she always does, silver in one jar and bronze in the other.

  As she sorts out the pennies from the nickels from the dimes and quarters, she comes across a bronze coin that is larger than a penny. She instantly recognizes it and sighs, dropping the rest of the change onto the kitchen counter. She fingers and rubs the coin, and through foggy eyes, she reads the stylized writing: “18” and “To Thine Own Self Be True.” “Shit,” she murmurs again, and shakes her head, strands of hair falling down onto her face. She looks back over to the kitchen counter, picking through the change. She picks up another coin, a white chip actually, and studies it as well. The bronze chip she’s had for almost twenty months. The white chip she just picked up this morning. She shakes her head again and chuckles. Without a further thought, she tosses the bronze one into the garbage bin. She rubs and studies the white chip for a minute and then sticks it in her pocket. Grinning to herself, she sorts the remaining change and then walks back into the living room. She presses shuffle on the iPhone and lies down next to it on the hardwood floor. There is a pause of just a second and then music begins. Sycamore by Martha. Good deal.

  As the music floats around her head, Jex smiles at the ceiling fan blades as they circle and circle around her. The music hits her and she can’t help but jump up. Instantly she is dancing wildly, all alone, her small frame moving this way and that way in a delicate mixture of grace and earnestness. She bangs her head. She air guitars. She throws her hands into the air, a stupid grin all over her face. As the last notes of the tune play, she drips back down to the floor, lying next to her iPhone, now as quiet as the end of a playlist. She lets the silence syphon through. She is faded away.

  The time Jex spends in silence lying on the floor is unclear, but after some time passes she sits up and looks around. The cigarette butts in the bottle. The dust in the corner. The stacks of clothes everywhere. Black-out curtains shut tight. Pizza boxes. The mess is cliché in its completeness. Jex just shakes her head. “Fuck,” she mutters and picks up her pack of Camel Crushes. There is only one left and it is in the pack upside down; her lucky cig. Jex pauses for just a minute and then pulls it out and lights up. She never used to smoke in the house.

  A couple of drags and Jex stands up. She walks to the front of the house and pulls the curtain to one side. The sun is bright and hurts her eyes. “Fuck,” she repeats and closes them abruptly. She sighs. She takes another drag. She leans her back against the closed front door. She looks around from side to side and then to the iPhone in her hand.

  “Fuck,” she says for the third time and then opens her iPhone, dials some digits with her thumb. “Fuck,” she whispers as the phone rings. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “Hey, Q,” Jex says. She listens to Q on the other end of the line.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry.”

  Jex pauses and listens.

  “I know, I’m sorry. I’m OK.” She grimaces.

  Another pause.

  “Uh, so … you wanna come over, just hang out?”

  Jex nods her head.

  “Uh hmm. Cool.”

  Jex looks around at the mess that surrounds and then at the clock on her iPhone. “Why don’t you give me two hours,” she says, surveying the cigarette butts and dust and stacks of clothes everywhere, the pizza boxes and more. She stubs out her cigarette in an old beer bottle. “Yeah, I’ll see you in a couple hours. Cool.”

  Jex hangs up the phone and, as walks down the hallway and into the living room, she looks up and sees her reflection in the mirror. She is smiling. The smile broadens and with a quick flick of the thumb, the music of Thao and the Get Down Stay Down is emitting from her iPhone. She throws the beer bottle into the recycling bin and begins to dance again.

  * * *

  Q sits on Jex’s living room floor with her legs crossed, engulfed mercilessly in a big old belly laugh. She lies back and holds Jex’s white chip in her hand, her arms extended outwards so the chip is framed by the sun shining through the window. “It’s beautiful, Jexy! I love it.”

  Jex shrugs and smiles shyly. She fingers Q’s green chip, flips it in
her hands. “Yeah, I don’t know. I thought I’d never end up back there. Or that it would seem like such a long struggle back to this one,” Jex says, waving the green chip in her hand, and then tossing it back to Q. Q just barely catches it and smiles as she holds it over her head in a celebration of the catch. Jex smiles a little wider and gives Q a quiet round of applause to recognize the catch.

  “Yeah,” Q says, nodding her head. “I never thought I’d get to this one. And to actually be hopeful that I might hold a blue one soon enough.”

  “You will for sure,” Jex says confidently. “You’re a super bad ass.”

  “Naw,” Q says, suddenly shy and hesitant. “I’m not nothing compared to you. You’re a superhero, you know?”

  Jex chuckles. “I’m nothing but a dumb kid that’s thirty hours into a white chip. Just a stupid kid,” she says quietly, somewhere between a laugh and a whisper.

  “No way,” Q protests. “I knew you were gonna say that shit. It’s just bullshit. You fell off, like a lot of people do. But you made it Jex.”

  Jex shakes her head and stands up. She smiles again and walks to the window, staring out into the back yard. “I don’t know, Q. I feel, good, I mean.” She laughs and says, “I’m hungry all the time. I guess that’s a good thing.”

  Q laughs and says, “it’s always good for me to eat, I think. You want to get something downtown.”

  Jex shrugs, suddenly pensive. “Yeah, maybe.” She pauses. “Or maybe not, I don’t know. I mean, I want to, for sure, but you know, I have a few things I have to do still.” She pauses again. “Some things I have to fix up right away. If I can, I don’t know. I’m stupid.”

  “Stop saying that, boo.”

  Jex waves her off. “You know what I mean. I am just a mess. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You can do whatever you want. You are so smart, with all that medicine stuff and all that.”

  Jex shrugs again. “That’s all just bullshit.”