The Weight of Air

by David Poses

  “I prefer heroin, but the company only provides legal drugs.”

  “You are too funny,” Loretta says, snarfing a fraction of doughnut.

  Patrick joins us with a tall, clear effervescing beverage in hand.

  “So, Patrick,” Loretta says, “what’s your poison these days?”

  “Club soda,” he says. “Seventeen years. Since we were at McCann together. Remember?”

  Loretta sucks air through her teeth. “I was going to ask, but . . .”

  “It’s a disease, Loretta. No shame in that.”

  There’s an awkward silence.

  Loretta snaps her fingers. “Patrick, I’ve been meaning to tell you. I saw Barb at Barney’s last year. We just waved but she was with—I’m so sorry. Remind me.”

  “Rebecca. My daughter’s name is Rebecca.”

  “Rebecca. That’s right. She got big. How old is she these days?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “And how’s she doing?”

  “I wouldn’t know. She hasn’t talked to me in years.”

  twenty-nine

  In the bathroom Friday morning, I stick a rolled dollar in my nose and hesitate. Holding the bag upright, I look down and consider the physics. Tilt my arm slightly and the dope spills into the toilet. I snort the hit and get dressed—jeans and a flannel shirt. I look at myself in the mirror and change into a suit and tie.

  F train to Forty-Seventh Street. I stop at a drugstore and reach into my pockets and frisk myself at the pharmacy counter.

  “I wrote everything down—it’s here somewhere. Ugh. Grandma and I were at baggage claim at La Guardia for an hour before anybody talked to us. Thank God her medicine was in her purse, but everything else was in her suitcase and . . . I’m sorry. I have a huge presentation in half an hour and a jerk of a boss who’ll fire me if I’m late and . . . I think Grandma said they’re orange? Super fine? Does that make sense?”

  I lift my head and meet the pharmacist’s pitiful gaze. She reaches for a box of BD brand syringes. Thirty-one gauge. Orange cap. Jackpot.

  “Most diabetics use these,” she says. “Ultra fine. See, the box is orange.”

  “You. Are a saint. Bless you.”

  “I know how it is. My husband’s suitcase went missing on our flight home from Hawaii last year.”

  I run to work and take the elevator to the fortieth floor. Dan stops me in the hall.

  “Are you coming from or going to a job interview?”

  “Huh?”

  “Puh-leezze.” He twirls my tie. “Like you dress this nice every day.”

  I put a spike in my pocket and lock the box in my desk and ride the elevator to the fifth floor. In the handicapped bathroom, I shake a hit into a spoon, add water, and suck it into the chamber. I roll up my sleeve and make a tight fist and hammer the needle into my vein. Relief comes fast. I drop the uncapped syringe on the floor, bend my knees, and slide down with my back against the wall.

  My sweaty palms melt into the cold tiles. I close my eyes and see a scene from the movie Lean on Me. High school principal Joe Clark (played by Morgan Freeman) drags a student to the roof and yells at him for smoking crack and getting expelled. As the kid cries and begs for another chance, Clark gets in his face and tells him to jump.

  “I don’t want to jump,” the kid says.

  “Yes, you do. You smoke crack, don’t you? Don’t you? Look at me, boy. Don’t you smoke crack?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know what that does to you? Huh?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It kills your brain cells, son, it kills your brain cells. Now when you’re destroying your brain cells, you’re doing the same thing as killing yourself—you’re just doing it slower. Now I say if you want to kill yourself, don’t fuck around and do it expeditiously. Now go on and jump.”

  In April, my Smith Barney account balance: $9,800.

  May: $9,100.

  June: $7,900.

  July: $6,700.

  August: $5,400.

  September: $4,100.

  As usual, the phone rings at nine.

  “I bumped into your old friend Rob yesterday,” Mom says. “I told him you’re clean and working at Ammirati and you’re going to be running that place soon.”

  “What’s he up to?”

  “David, he looked terrific. He’s been clean for two years, runs fifteen miles a day. He’s training for the New York City marathon. When he asked for your number, I figured . . .”

  Rob calls on Saturday. He sounds good, healthy. “Your mom said you stayed clean. What’s that, four and a half years?”

  I hesitate for a beat.

  “David, please tell me you’re not on dope.”

  “I had a couple slips—very early on. I’m fine now.”

  “Thank God. I’ll never forgive myself for turning you, of all people, onto that shit.”

  Rob fills me in on his life, from the four-hundred-day orgy of heroin and crack that began when he left me at my mother’s house to multiple arrests for burglary, shoplifting, possession, and check forging. He got sober in jail two years ago.

  “The things I did near the end. I’m just so relieved you never . . . I had no idea what I was capable of until I got to that point.”

  Early fall air creeps through the bedroom window. My throat stings. My eyes burn. My body aches. Is today the day? I ask myself every morning. I know how this will end: a bundle in my arm at once. I’ll do it before the money is gone.

  In the bathroom, I stand on the toilet seat and grab my works from the top of the vanity, between the mirror’s high beveled edges and the wall. I prepare a hit, draw the liquid into the chamber, and make a fist and drive the sharp into my vein. My muscles and joints get loose and limber. My throat cools. The opening lick from “Airbag” plays in my head. Six notes.

  No, today is not the day.

  October: $2,600.

  November: $1,000.

  The hit starts to wear off before I leave the handicapped bathroom. At this point, I use to stave off withdrawal. Some fleeting semblance of “even” is the most I can hope for.

  By the time Grant gets to the restaurant, I’ve already dealt with the moped guys and ordered two dishes of disgustingness.

  “My friend,” he says, taking a seat. “When was the last time we saw each other?”

  “August or September, I think.”

  “Yeah. Well, between then and now—you look bad, dude.”

  “Work is killing me. I’m getting plowed in the ass by a giant, commercialized dildo every day.”

  “Did you ever send your shit to an agent or a publisher?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do. It’s called fear of failure.”

  A waiter brings two plates of empanadas with a small white ramekin of orange liquid and the customary bowl of rice and beans and basket of bread. Grant tears the crust off a slice, dunks it in the sauce, and stuffs it into his mouth.

  “If you hate your job and you’re obviously too much of a pussy to be a writer, why don’t you invent something? I know a ton of VCs who’ll throw money at anything halfway intelligent.”

  “Actually, when I first got into mp3s, I had an idea for a Walkman but with a hard drive. You could fit thousands of albums on something the size of a pack of cigarettes.”

  “Not to be a dick, but nobody’s buying that.”

  “I would.”

  “I meant no normal person is. Music’s a tactile experience. People want to touch covers and liner notes and shit. That’s why vinyl’s coming back.”

  “Okay, then how about a custom kayak made from a mold of your vagina, or the vagina of someone you love?”

  “Do you come up with this shit on the spot?”

  “Don’t want to spend the money on a custom model? Imagine yourself paddling around in something from Vayak’s Deluxe line. The Simone de Beauvoir, perhaps, lined with genuine imitation fur.”

 
“I should hook you up with my friend Sara. You need to get laid.”

  “She a kayak enthusiast or a person with a vagina who might want to order?”

  “She’s a whacked-out artist-type who writes poetry and listens to Radiohead. Her grandpa has terminal emphysema. She said when he dies, she’ll grab every fentanyl patch and lollipop in his house. I should call her and see how Gramps is doing . . .”

  December. One bag left. Only $1.13 in Smith Barney. I push my Chase card into the ATM. The joint account balance is $3.28.

  Today is Tuesday. Jane gets paid next Wednesday, and I get paid next Friday.

  Across the street from the office, kids in plaid and khaki school uniforms sell candy bars to raise money for hurricane relief. Their upturned watercooler jug teems with tens and twenties. I stare for a minute before going inside.

  Dana is by the window on the fortieth floor, waving a twenty-dollar bill. “Free candy for whoever’ll get me a candy bar from those cute little kids on the corner.”

  I volunteer. I think I’m going to Bushwick, but when I get outside, my feet go across the street and my hand gives the money to a cheery boy, who gives me two Hershey bars, a ten-dollar bill, and five singles. I shove the ten into my pocket, ball up the singles, and give them to Dana with a Hershey bar. She puts the money in her wallet without counting it. I return to my desk and call Grant.

  “Do you think the moped guys would come to the restaurant to sell one bag?”

  “Dude. You need to control dope, not the other way around.”

  “I lost my ATM card.”

  “You know you can go inside a bank and get money from a teller, right?”

  “It’s Smith Barney—no branches.”

  Fax machines and people yelling on Grant’s end. “I’ll front you a bundle,” he says. “Of course, you have to blow me first.” He laughs. We agree to meet at the restaurant at six. “Oh. Good news. Sara will be there. Gramps is on his way out.”

  Dana laughs when I return her money and apologize. She stops Loretta in the hall and tells the story of how I robbed her.

  “You gave it back?” Loretta says. “I would have kept it.”

  “David’s weird,” Dana says, running an impeccably manicured finger along the crease of the ten-dollar bill. “Since Patrick left, he’s the only one here who doesn’t drink.”

  A thin, semi-frozen mist falls on Myrtle Avenue. I pass a liquor store and a convenience store with bulletproof glass partitions at the counter. I get to the restaurant ten minutes early and smoke a cigarette outside.

  An NYPD cruiser creeps by. When the streetlight turns yellow, the cruiser’s sirens start flashing and it blazes through the intersection. A short Latina woman approaches. She gestures for me to take off my headphones.

  “Hey Papi. You got a cigarette for me?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You here for coca or crack?”

  “Neither.”

  “Oh,” she says, nodding salaciously. “I know why you here. I could tell you where to find some mean-ass puta. Tear that pussy up all night, son.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You okay? Yeah. You okay, fag.”

  By six-thirty, the mist has turned to sleet, the moped has come and gone half a dozen times with military precision, and Grant still isn’t here. My face is frozen, my ears stinging. I dig a quarter out of my pocket and try three different pay phones before I find one with a dial tone. Grant’s answering machine picks up. I don’t leave a message. I walk back to the restaurant and stand under the awning, listening to Radiohead on my Walkman, trying to lose myself in Thom Yorke’s ghostly vocals on “Paranoid Android.”

  When the song ends, I enter the restaurant and make a beeline for the bathroom, waving to a waiter in a way that—to me—means “I’m meeting a friend, going to pee first.” I latch the door, scrape the remnants from my last bag, and snort the hit off the flattened glassine envelope. Then I throw it in the trash and turn to leave. Wait. The trash is probably nothing but empty bags. Maybe they’re not all scraped. I tear the lid off and root around and find fourteen empties.

  Hot, wet, tiny daggers shoot out of the shower head, drilling my skin. I get out and dry off and put on my jeans and open the bathroom door.

  Jane’s jaw drops. “Baby. Oh. My God. I can see your ribs.”

  I stick my hands in my pockets to hold up my jeans. I’ve been meaning to go back to the shoe repair place and get another hole punched in my belt.

  “I’m going to make you lunch. You need to eat. There’s plenty of eggplant parm—”

  I say “Great,” knowing I’ll give it to a homeless person.

  On TV, a meteorologist reports a hurricane forming in the Caribbean. “Local law enforcement in towns along the eastern seaboard are urging residents to evacuate before the Category-4 storm makes landfall.”

  Footage of rain and wind, battering a beach. I fantasize about sitting on a beach, letting the surge carry me away. If I disappear, will everyone forget I existed?

  “David.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I just said your name like fifty times.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “David.” Jane lets out an “are you fucking kidding me” laugh. “I said that Kathy and Valon were talking about going to South Carolina and helping.”

  “Cool.”

  “Cool?”

  Jane gives me a Tupperware container and comes at me for a goodbye kiss. Our lips barely touch. She says, “We got a second notice from Con Ed.”

  “I paid the bill.”

  “Are you sure? I’d hate for our credit scores to get messed up.”

  I don’t know how credit scores are calculated or what’s considered good or even what my score is.

  At work, cheesy classic rock blares in the hall as my bosses prepare for a big pitch. Steve Miller’s hits. Peppier Elton John. Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits disc two. “Pressure” plays on repeat for more than an hour. Everyone speed walks and sings along, pausing midstride to belt out the chorus. “Pres-sure.”

  I put on my headphones and listen to Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A Minor—possibly the saddest music ever composed. After a quick look around me, I tilt my computer monitor to the side and read about suicide methods on an online forum called Catch the Bus. Most are messy or obvious or both. I click on a thread with the subject “Exit Bag.” You tie a plastic bag around your head and run a hose from a helium tank. It seems quick and painless—not that anyone posts with firsthand experience. Evidence would be a problem. Forget it.

  Bill charges toward me. I close the browser window before he pulls me out of my chair and shakes me, screaming, “Are you psyched?”

  I nod.

  “I said, ‘ARE. YOU. PSYYYYYYCHED?’”

  “I’m psyched, okay? I’m psyched.”

  “GRAAAAAAHHHH!”

  An exit bag chain could work. A cleans up after B. Then C for B. No. There’d be geographic obstacles. And I wouldn’t trust a stranger.

  Grant calls and says he got arrested last night for buying crack from an undercover cop in Washington Heights. I think he’s lying. If the situation were reversed, I wouldn’t have been so eager to help him.

  “It was insane,” he says. “Plainclothes pigs hopping out of this beat-up Maxima on the corner of St. Nicholas and 149th after I gave the money to the supposed dealer.”

  “Can you meet tonight? I still don’t have a replacement ATM card and—”

  “Are you kidding? The amount of crack was just above the threshold between casual smoker and dealer. If I get caught with anything before my trial, I’m fucked. So until further notice, I’m out.”

  One hit left. At five in the morning, I’m in the bathroom. The door is closed but not locked. I stab the needle in hard, pushing until it hurts, until the plastic at the base feels like it’s puncturing my skin. Blood rushes to the surface. I raise my arm and lick it clean, and then quietly get dressed in
the kitchen.

  A wall calendar is inches from my face. December 29 has a big star—Daniel’s birthday. I still have a couple of weeks to send him a gift, but not if all goes to plan. I fill a moving box with CDs and write his address on the top. In a cabinet, I find a roll of packing tape on the stack of New York Posts featuring me on the front page.

  The office will be empty. I don’t know where else to go.

  A security guard and three cleaning women argue in Spanish around a wet vac in the lobby. I drop Daniel’s box in the mail room and take the elevator to the fortieth floor. At the end of the hall, I press my face against the cold glass window. Morning light sprays across Manhattan—my last sunrise. A feeling of calm envelops me.

  thirty

  At the top of a poster-sized file in QuarkXPress, I type “PLEASE GIVE,” and underneath, I place images of hurricane-ravaged landscapes. Then I go to the lounge and remove the jug from a watercooler, spilling most of the contents on the way to the sink. I tape the poster to the jug and swipe a box of Three Musketeers bars from the pantry. My plan: I’ll raise however much money, go to Bushwick, and bang every bag into my arm in one shot. Game fucking over.

  The exercise in legerdemain commences outside Grand Central Station. It can’t hurt that I happen not to look like a complete slob—corduroys and a clean peacoat. Nobody knows there’s blood on the inside of my elbow, sticking my shirt to my arm.

  Commuters look at me and the jug and reach into their pockets and drop money in. A cop approaches, cupping his gloved hands to his mouth, huffing steamy breaths. He reads the sign aloud and asks in a heavy Brooklyn accent, “This a con?”

  I shake my head and unintentionally affect a faint Southern drawl. “No, sir. Father McKenzie was just helping a blind gentleman inside, and Sister Eleanor’s over there somewhere. Our church is raising money for the victims.”

  The cop kind of chuckles and nods. Did he get the “Eleanor Rigby” reference? Why did I do that? He slides a black leather wallet from his back pocket, flips through bills and receipts, and donates a few singles. I offer a Three Musketeers bar. He takes it and mutters about his ex-brother-in-law’s rental properties in the Outer Banks.