It is not particularly difficult, with a history like his, to identify a means of acquisition and to follow through. He finds himself unfortunately having to engage with one of those loud drawling middle men who stock a makeshift pharmacy in their pockets, procuring bottles with labels chafed beyond recognition and probably lifted out of his own family's medicine cabinets, but Taym doesn't care where they came from provided they end up in his hands, which they do.
The kid's girlfriend is there, huddled into an oversized jacket and looking bored out of her skull, sucking her lip into her crooked yellow teeth, and it is she, not the kid, who eventually offers him something else. The offers quickly escalate from where he'd meant to end the conversation to what he recognizes as the beginning of another, much harder one. If he'd been looking for it he'd never have found it. Opportunity strikes because he does not want it to, he thinks bitterly.
Years before he'd honed a skill: he'd learned to completely block the sound of his parents' voices while he nodded on the couch, their words retrievable in memory later but utterly alien in the moment, a muffled, distant noise as meaningless as the rush of wind in a canopy. He shakes off the rust and dust and tries it now, and he is not sure whether it is more difficult because the angry pleading is now inside his own head or if it is because he is sober or if it is because he is trying to function beyond remaining somewhat vertical.
What starts as an exchange of money, easy and clean, contorts, the shape of it changing under the influence of personal history. When he fights, now, he finds that he moves without thinking; this is much the same but pulled from some much older reserve. The correct modes of conversation open like inviting paths, well-trodden; he navigates social currents with quiet and instinctive self-assurance. Money changes hands a second time but the tone is now friendly and sociable and Taym hates these people, and especially hates the girl sucking her lip into her teeth because her every nervous, glassy-eyed mannerism is one that he recognizes as his own.
Please, sir, Fiona begs, humbled by hurt and disappointment. They invite him out. He's got gear but he hasn't got any gear: he follows them.
--
It isn't as though he'd ever stopped thinking about it, but he thought about it in the abstract. He wouldn't have the chance and he had no reason. There were infinite distractions now: there was work, and a stream (drying up, maybe, or maybe not) of text messages to occupy his hands and his thoughts and a corner of his heart.
I can't stop thinking about it, he'd told America, and he'd been talking about a monster wearing his skin and killing someone else's daughter but he'd been talking about everything else too, and mostly he'd been talking about what he'd left.
A whole life of ********, he thought, but this one (he rolled Fiona's ring around and around his finger) was the worst.
He dreamed about it, between nightmares of cages and mirrors: the same old dreams of being routed from one filthy bathroom after another just as he'd braced for the impact, fairly feeling his bloodstream laid open, breath caught in anticipation as he wrestled the shaking of his hands and his own secretive, uncooperative veins. They were dreams of teeth-clenching, throat-aching frustration, but they were only dreams.
--
The apartment is cleaner than one might guess, only slightly disarrayed, only a few dishes in the sink. The guy who opens the door has started his day early, and it's immediately obvious.
He has a cat, which ignores Taym completely despite his coaxing noises. The place already reeks and he has a joint, his free hand in his pocket wrapped around the packet and shaking, and when he's asked directly he engages in the same stupid desultory conversation that always happens in rooms like these. The girl sucks her lip into her teeth. The kid makes a sale. He asks, finally, if it's safe to do this outside. He asks much more calmly than he feels, his stomach lurching, his mouth dry and bile-filled by turns, and the guy whose name he's already forgotten tells him there's a privacy fence so do whatever you want, man. A commune with nature joke is made. He isn't sure whether he tells it or laughs at it.
She offers to cook. The kid says: don't get too attached. I'm the jealous type. It sounds like something he'd say. Maybe it's something he has said.
--
Sometimes he thinks that maybe he is lucky, in this life. It is a thought that America might be glad to hear, unless he expanded on it. A happy thought to contain a seething mass of unhappy ones. There's something wrong with him, he thinks sometimes, something that makes him not just crave misery but invent it, sculpt it out of relief. His pathetic inability to do anything but suffer has made him resourceful. He can chip pain out of anything, if he tries hard enough. Even the thought that maybe he is lucky, in this life.
Fiona is a constant current of frustration, and, in her blossoming compassion for him, grief.
He is scouring the floor of a newly-empty classroom when he thinks of Ripley's ghost again, the thing with his face, and Fiona without being asked begins to recite for him as she had underground, because she has long since given up counseling him against avoidance and now simply attempts to hold his hand for him as he struggles to think of anything, anything else, except that every other thought is equally attended by frustration or, worse, fear.
He teaches her the next hundred lines of Pale Fire. He has always hated the term "coping mechanism," but he has his, and knows it.
--
"Where'd you get it?" she asks, looking up from where she crouches with her lanky bleached hair hanging nearly to the wood floor of the deck which has, he notices vaguely, been recently refinished. The apartment's nice. The neighbors probably have no idea, or else they know everything. She points to her neck.
"Suicide attempt," he says without hesitation.
"You must be glad you ******** that up," she answers cheerfully, coughing into her shoulder the same way he does.
"Yeah."
--
He was happy, sometimes. The pang of America's presence wasn't enough to kill the pleasure of knowing that she wanted his company. A gleaming, usable room where a wreck had been was a quiet source of pride. At night his room (his room, no one else's) seemed smaller and warmer, Fiona's runes a comforting imitation of firelight, a book in his hand and sheets that were clean, the drowsy purring of two cats, a drink, a cigarette, the buzz of his phone (fanfare. Confetti. Wonderland. Every time).
When the thoughts intruded here they were sharpened by guilt.
He'd put on twenty pounds and while he wasn't likely to put on any more it was more than anyone expected, especially him. He dared himself sometimes not to put on his shirt before he brushed his teeth, confronted with a reflection of a body that was not his own, and he wondered if the thing that had killed another man's daughter had looked like that, or had looked as he had looked underground, and which of those two bodies looked more like Obadiah Thompson's.
He was happy, sometimes. Sometimes days felt normal. But he was, again, resourceful.
--
By the time she's ready he's shaking all over, not just his hands but a full-body trembling of nervous anticipation, and she raises her eyebrows skeptically. It takes him three tries to roll up his sleeve.
"It's been a while," he says, and she hesitates.
"Why bother, then?"
"I don't know."
"Well hold still." But he can't. He tells her to wait, let him smoke a cigarette.
"Smoke it out front on the sidewalk," she tells him. "I don't want to listen to him b***h if he finds cigarette butts out here."
He goes back through the house, disregarded by the Kid, by the Guy, by the cat, and he stands on the front step shaking so hard he can't light the cigarette, shaking so hard it hurts, headache mounting from the tension of clenching his jaw. Fiona has gone silent by now, given up. He knows this silence from a future that wasn't and won't be, a future where he tried to run, and as it did in that future it sets his throat aching and his eyes stinging, and the guilt is overpowering but he will not apologize.
Instead, he walks blindly down the step and through the parking lot. They won't notice he's gone, and when they do they'll chalk him up for either a p***y or already so far gone he didn't realize what he'd done: left them with the money and the product; with everything but a handful of Diazepam rattling around in an orange bottle with someone else's name on it, now safely in his pocket.
He has four leave days a month, now.
He's two blocks away when the shaking subsides; four blocks when he tries to send her a text.
Quote:
Text to America: would you love me if i ******** up more than I already do
(Message deleted)
(Message deleted)
Quote:
Text to America: i cant be trusted to be alone
(Message deleted)
(Message deleted)
Quote:
Text to America: I wish you were here.
