Negative I

What medicines do not heal, the lance will; what the lance does not heal, fire will. - Hippocrates


After the urgency and blur of the last couple of hours, stepping into the dark silence of his apartment is a relief.

He leaves off most of the lights.

It's quiet and dark.

He is familiar with every corner, every edge; he's bumped into most of them more than once over the years.

Important things first.

He fills his backpack with some basics. His ID. His driving licence. A change of clothes. All the pain meds he can find. He'll need those when he comes down.

He doesn't need much. He doesn't want much.

Then he takes a shower to get rid of the grime and soot. His leg is crying out for a long soak. But he fears he'll fall asleep if he lingers. He can't afford to fall asleep in the tub or anywhere else right now.

There isn't time. He doesn't have to rush things, but he wants to be out of here before daylight. Needs to be out of here.

In the darkness, he knocks over a bottle on top of the piano. He doesn't need to see to know it was empty. It's too light.

And that's a good thing because alcohol and heroin don't mix. As in: do not even think about messing around with this unless you really want to die.

Does he? He remembers visions and hallucinations in the warehouse, arguments with himself about whether or not he wanted to or even deserved to die. He didn't. Doesn't. Not anymore. He doesn't want to think about whether he had wanted to going into the warehouse. He clearly hadn't wanted to making his way out.

He's cheated death twice already in the last few hours, he doesn't need to try again.

He lets his hand rest on the piano for a moment.

There isn't much time. But there is time for this.

There is always time for this.

One last time.

He sits down.

Everything is quiet. He doesn't need to check his watch to know it's well after 2 am. It's that quiet, lonely time after most people have gone to bed and before the early risers get up.

He knows this time intimately. Over the years, he's spent a lot of it right here, seated at his piano, trying to escape, trying to sleep, trying to outplay the pain.

There is no need to be quiet. The people in the apartment above his are away; their mail has been piling up for the last week or so. Maybe they have skipped town. He is a tax advisor. He has always thought he looked shifty; maybe he got involved with the wrong people. Or maybe they've just gone away on a cruise. They look like cruise people. If he hadn't been so distracted by Wilson's cancer, he would've found out already.

And Mrs Redmond across the hall will be asleep by now after taking her meds. A few months ago, she'd waited for him to come home and pounced on him just when he was about to close his own door. He doesn't like her but he wasn't about to slam the door into an old lady's face either. She'd asked him for advice about her insomnia, wanted to know if her doctor was doing the right thing by prescribing her sleeping pills.

"I'm afraid to take them."

"What are you afraid of," he'd asked her.

"That I won't wake up."

"Well, one day you won't, whether you take the pills or not. But until then they'll help you get some rest so that day won't come sooner than necessary."

She'd looked at him with her head cocked to one side, as if he were trying to con her into something.

"Go, take the damn pills!" He'd finally called before closing the door.

So there really is no need to be quiet. There is nobody around who would remember hearing the piano in the middle of the night.

Without thinking, he begins to play a Schubert sonata but stops after a few bars and tries something else. He gives up after several more attempts – everything sounds off tonight, nothing flows.

Finally, he just picks some random notes and watches them fade away.

Until one doesn't fade right away.

The last note lingers for a moment and then disappears. It leaves a hole in the darkness, its edges blurry and ill-defined. He tilts his head slightly. With his shifting focus, the hole begins to look less like a hole and more like a crack. A small crack with irregular edges.

It floats above the piano, still in his line of sight but just out of reach. The darkness that's darker than the darkness around him doesn't move unless he moves. Whenever he changes focus, the edges seem to take on a slight shimmer.

It takes him a moment to realise he is seeing music.

He smiles.

He hadn't expected to hallucinate holes in the darkness. If this is down to the heroin then it's the first positive effect he's felt, aside from the initial blissful abandonment of responsibilities and worries. Before he passed out. Before he felt like crap. Before he couldn't remember anymore whether he wanted to live or die. Before he started hallucinating dead people. Before he decided on a whim that dying was a good idea after all.

Just to see what will happen, he adds a few more notes to the darkness. They start moving around and bouncing off each other in slow motion. Some notes linger and join the rest. Others disappear.

After a little while, his hands seem to instinctively pick notes that stay, ones that seem willing to join the others.

Somehow he's managed to slip through the cracks of his life and land – where? Back at the piano, alone in the darkness. If it weren't for the dark holes, darker than the darkness, it would be just like any other night.

But as of now, he doesn't exist anymore. He has ceased to be.

He hits one more note, one that flies up into the darkness to join the others but bounces right off them. He watches it float up towards the ceiling and finally merge with the darkness surrounding it.

The other notes fade slowly.

The world outside the window isn't quite as dark anymore as before.

Time to go.

He picks up his backpack and takes one last look around.

Leaving all this behind isn't a problem. He has done this so many times growing up that it hardly seems to matter anymore. We're leaving in two weeks, pack your things. He'd always ended up leaving something behind, spent weeks wondering who would find his book on beetles, who would throw his old baseball around the yard. Was there another boy living in the house? Or was it a girl who had no use for his beetle jar or his baseball?

This is no different.

Yes, he would like to take a few more things – a guitar or two. John Henry's trumpet. A few books he's had for years. A couple of records.

But what's the point?

He doesn't know where he'll end up. He has a plan. A plan that doesn't involve an apartment or any kind of permanent base. He can't be lugging things around. If it goes as he hopes, he'll have to worry about something other than things. Something bigger than mere ballast.

Standing at the door, he turns back once more.

Soon, people will be through here.

His mother will be through here.

Wilson will be through here – probably for some really sentimental reason.

It doesn't matter.

He just hopes Wilson will do the right thing even if he can't know what it is.

He quietly closes his door behind himself, pulls his backpack up on his shoulder and steps out into the night that's beginning to change into a new day.