Your Poor Self Dead
Categories: Orange Is The New Black, Alex Vause, Piper Chapman, Vauseman.
Summary: Alex's POV on her worst days post Paris, circa 2005.
Disclaimer: Drug abuse, depression, suicidal thoughts, angst, black humor.
Rated T.
Chapter oneCan I explain? Are there words in the dictionary for this? We formed a circle and began talking about our experiences. For the first time in my life I suspended the jokes. Not that I wanted to, as it always gave me a sense of levity, but this time I was carrying such weight I literally couldn't walk, couldn't stand up. Not even in my worst depression I felt gravity forming a deep hole in me. They found me half-asleep on the floor. That's their version, but I was probably half-dead.
I had no one to talk to, anyway, and no one here knew me at all. It was a safe space in a life lived always on the edge. I could've bullshitted and hide behind the usual layers. But these defense mechanisms began feeling stupid, the same walls I had been putting up since childhood. Who could I be kidding during the worst year of my life? I read once, while attending those film studies classes, that this director had her first mental breakdown at 35, and we didn't discuss it in class but her films post-breakdown had something extra, or was it more like an absence that could never be filled again? She wandered in her films until her death and her films wandered in my head especially during my own mental breakdown. That's what I was remembering as some of the people were talking about their experiences. So I shared. I was social for a moment. I stepped out of myself. I only talked of the consequences of my actions, never the actions that preceded the intakes. After all, this wasn't a personalized, private therapy. When I finished talking, I realized it had helped me dissipate the mental blur. It helped me put my thoughts in order. Simultaneously, during the two months program in seclusion, they helped my body heal, restore my metabolism and set it free from that glorious and deadly substance so I could go back and put myself on autopilot again, a money making machine on the edge of a knife. A money making machine with no home to go to, no family to share that money with. Not a lonely woman, but an alone woman lost in the labyrinth of hardcore capitalism. And god was I efficient.
I controlled what I said during those sessions, for the organization's safety and also because I didn't want to bore the group. Once in silence, the thinking wouldn't stop. The memories overwhelmed me. Not in order. In flashbacks that would mostly sting. Some of them made me happy. Some were colorful. I would hang on to them and hold back the tears.
Of all people Fahri had to be the one there for me during my mom's funeral. Ironic he was there for my father's "other type of funeral" as well. Sometimes I wonder if we met in a previous life. The guy knew my weaknesses and how to exploit them. At 18 I was half blind to this. At 26? I expected it. I saw him operate and copied his strategies almost as a template, with the plus of my seduction of naive girls on autopilot. Whoring myself to oblivion went on and on as a modus operandi. At 20 it was all a massive joke of the universe to me, and I got a fuckload of cash as a reward. What was there to lose? Could I foresee the impossible to escape situation I called a "job"? I suppressed those thoughts. Fear and hunger drove me to take it all. Yes, an addictive personality.
On the bathroom floor with eyes half-shut, I could create a mental map of when and where I had begun to incorporate this activity that was bottomless, insatiable. Cigarettes at 12 were nothing; mostly I was posing and shaping a cool and confident self. I had my elderly neighbor buy me Lucky Strikes but that shit was for cowboys and their raspy throats. Sure I was tough, but not a savage. Once in Istanbul someone offered me a mentholated Benson & Hedges. To my surprise, it tasted delicious, and it helped a lot that it was also the brand of choice of the pretentious aristocracy, so it became my brand. What I liked the most is I didn't have to share because everybody hates mentholated cigarettes.
She used to hate them with a passion. Any type of cigarette, but especially my B&H seemed ridiculous to her, considering how expensive my packages were. I was never able to understand this thinking; I bought her first class plane tickets, put her in the most expensive hotel rooms, bought her jewelry and brand clothes. Once we even showered in the most expensive champagne, but she had to complain about how expensive my cigarettes were. She could be weird like that.
By 18 I was drinking bourbon, emulating those southern writers driven to the written word by stinging pain. What was my pain? I turned that harsh upbringing and the early bullying into a drama plot that I never really believed in, not even that night when I found how much of a douche my father was. It was all part of the modeling, the creation of the superficial self. It didn't hurt that the liquor tasted delicious. By 25 I drank more bourbon than water. Still a young age and the body can't resent it yet. Drinking was part of the business. Every single weekend, be it at bars recruiting or at reunions with clients, liquor came in gallons. Back home it helped me relax and fall asleep. In my line of work synthetic drugs were always available, but I was weary of touching them. I used them as part of the seduction or as treats. We did grab a few e's when we were together, especially the first months together when we couldn't bear to be apart from each other. But with routine this erotic candy went away while the liquor stayed, for me, really. She was always a casual drinker whose anxieties got resolved briefly during her early morning jogging and then returned to normal state in her neuroses. Her substances for coping were those typical of a new age yuppie: various infusions, green smoothies and various disgusting beverages I imagined only helped the digestive system. Our body and mental systems were damaged. Our systems of coping were opposite.
Chapter two
So, 2005. Routine and work, my obsessive method of working, the long hours away from home. Whole weekends spent alluring, convincing, setting up. Whole weekdays spent meticulously planning, because one error could cost us our lives. Who said this wasn't a serious job? They squeezed the life out of me. Of us. Six months travelling here and there, we were IT, unstoppable. I was at my highest. I could feel she was, too. Addictive. The chemicals in our brains were all messed up. People romanticize this, but is it healthy? With her I was at my highest and then at my lowest. We went through a slow comedown that she couldn't accept. We couldn't bear to be separate, but my work was a clear picture of the real world and I was the only one who could see it. She stayed, or insisted on staying in those early phases of extreme happiness, unable to accept they were as extreme as brief. She kept holding on the more I slipped away, and how could I explain? No, I can't explain. My love would not accept explanations. She wanted me all the time, she was needy, she'd become moody and I began recognizing these shifts in her without being able to give her what she wanted. Returning home in the early hours of the morning, I was exhausted. I managed to change clothes, wash my teeth, kiss her on her temple and go to bed for at least six hours until a slammed door would wake me up. That became her communication.
There was a time I promised I'd slow down after a sex session when I had fallen asleep. She was hurt, my pride was hurt. I promised change while laughing at the embarrassing experience. She was pissed off and disappointed, somewhere in her mind the end was beginning to take shape. How did it come to this, babe? What happened to us. We deserved so much better, but I took you for granted. It went on and on like this. I stopped myself from making promises but I had no alternatives. "Do you think I work at Walmart and can stop showing up whenever I want?" I asked, really meaning "Do you know we both may get killed if I fuck up, and I'm beginning to fuck up?". Sometimes I wondered if she was really blind to this truth. I was harsh and frustrated. With my tone, when imposing my physicality while reciting bitter remarks. I was aggressive and digging a knife into us and she complained, she demanded, she threatened, but mostly, she cried. Every fight was a chance for me to lash out. What was I defending? My anxiety was out of control. From the balcony, before I called my mother, I tried to scheme a way out, where we could be safe. We can board a plane tomorrow, land and disappear in a small town, get jobs somewhere and use the stashed money as backup. It never worked like this. Many had thought of schemes and they all ended up dead, or their families killed, to teach a lesson. The ways of a cartel. I smoked the mentholated shits and dialed mom, calculating the moment Piper had gone out, so I felt free to cry in isolation. That one action I never did in front of my girlfriend. I was that type of person. A coward. With mom there were no defense mechanisms, walls and lies and euphemisms never worked between us. Mom had a built-in bullshit detector that always worked better than mine. I cried, I sobbed, the latency didn't help and she could barely understand. I said I was terrified, "everything is crumbling", "she's gonna leave me", "it's gonna happen". Mom managed to calm me down with her "it's gonna work out fine, babe, but you put in the effort, you do what you need to do to save this, you make it happen, Alex". She told me to start communicating openly and honestly with her. I wished she had explicitly instructed me to not hold back the tears because that was eating me up, and maybe crying would've freaked Piper more, but what person goes against the most basic human instinct? I always went against the flow. I listened to mom, I wished I had her next to me, for a minute I wanted to stop being old me, go back to being 10 and be hugged by her, be told things were going to be fine, and things usually ended up being fine. But reality dragged me back: no advice could work when in the middle of everything was my fucked up way of making a living.
When she returned I considered the open and honest communication thing, maybe more than that, an act of begging for us to remain together. Did I do this? My final hours of vanity were spent mocking her ingenuity. You have all of this because of my work / we'd be screwed without it / grow up / once spoiled, always spoiled… God, my mouth was on fire, my knife was in her heart, but killing us. In retrospect I wonder if this abuse added an extra sense of power to my already delusional sense of self. An addictive personality, unawareness as a black mirror. I made her cry again and again. Her threats of leaving and flying back home sounded so childish and unplanned. I'm the one here with the plans, don't you see? The suitcases ready, the plane ticket bought, the passport I hid. I thought at one point she'd realize how clownish this was. Was she really going back to her frigid family, her superficial friendship with Polly? Was that home? But then, was this home? I know it wasn't home for me. It was a crumbling house I was demolishing.
Chapter threeThen the floor crumbled. People who describe their mental breakdowns often mention this image: a dissolving floor underneath their feet. Your mind's eye sees the color red, a flash, a quick one, then everything is a whirlwind. The fear settles quietly in the back, but you can feel it moving from the front of your consciousness, roaming every corner, marking its territory. And it stays in the back. That was the call from my aunt. My mother was dead. Half of my brain was processing this logically. People die. People die all the time, every second. The other half had me paralyzed. Disbelief, depersonalization, out-of-body experience. The floor dissolving. My heart wasn't racing, it just didn't feel a thing. Piper was saying something buried in the background. I thought, what if I fix this by jumping from the balcony? Support is gone, anyway, so I may as well make it quick. Quick fix to stop this feeling. I couldn't connect my brain and my tongue, as I was thinking People die all the time but my mom will only die once and she's dead now. This is it. This is happening. So I blinked, I swallowed, I was able to sob in a contained manner. Piper came into the room with her passport thing, hurried, her tone louder. That's when I told her. I was relieved I was able to pronounce words. Once when I was 11 mom didn't come home after her usual schedule. The phone lines weren't working because of the storm. She couldn't tell me she was stuck at work. It was obvious, but in my mind she had suffered a terrible accident, she had been kidnapped and murdered, she had been taken away from me forever. She finally made it home at 3 am and hugged me, apologized for hours. I couldn't say a word. I was paralyzed by fear, but the weird thing was my mutiny, which lasted a whole week, and she begged, apologized, cried… did everything for me to react and come back to my normal self. I don't think I ever went back to that old version of myself. This memory came to me in the span of two seconds. I feared I had lost my voice again, maybe hoped I had lost it for good.
I think she hugged me? Asked me what had happened. I had to snap out of it. Plans, organization. It's what I do to regain control. Then she said "this" didn't change anything and she was leaving anyway. "This" being the death of my mother. After the shock and disbelief of the news, I felt a lesser kind of shock and disbelief coming from Piper. It was lesser, but the sum of the two events felt, for a moment, like being struck twice by lightning. Was she for real? Who was this person? The sharp pain in the middle of my chest was overwhelming and this time I did beg. She left, anyway. I didn't want to jump from the balcony, there was no red flash in my mind. This second punch I took it on the floor and for a long time I wasn't able to stand up. A slow dissolve. My planning and organization skills now were about putting myself on the path of a slow descent into nothingness, for nothingness was all I possessed.
I packed a suitcase and bought a ticket home. I had some benzos hidden in a gum can for those times when not even booze or exhaustion helped me sleep. I swallowed two on the plane and the stewardess had to wake me up. I can't recall if it was dawn or dusk, but I do remember having bought a strong coffee at the airport and renting a car. I drove for two or three hours to mom's house, the road so familiar, but my eyes were blurry. Again, I thought, what if… What if I was granted this one wish, what if I hit a tree and end it once and for all? I couldn't see the signs. I drove slowly, a constant struggle in my brain to decide. I arrived but of course she wasn't there. Nobody had reclaimed her body at the morgue. My aunt is a technicality. They shared genes and resentment, but at least she had the decency to call me. I didn't expect more. I followed the instructions with the logical part of my brain, set up a small funeral service with a few of mom's diner colleagues and some church people I had never seen, but apparently they knew about me. At that point of my life I was sure they knew me better than I knew myself. The logical part of my brain helped me maintain the strength of my legs while the coffin was being put in the ground. My mom in that box. My mom buried. What the fuck. I sobbed. The sun was shining bright, the air was humid, at the distance I saw two stray dogs. They were together. I was burying my mom and I was alone. Not even a dog went through something like this alone. Outside the cemetery Fahri approached me. Of all people in this goddamn rotten world, Fahri is with me on the worst day of my life when I want to die and dissolve and just go with her, underground. He convinced me to go back to Paris with him. Work is the best distraction. And our work included the fun of substances and excesses. So we went back to Paris. The weekends were like they used to be, with the exception I wasn't providing drugs to clients and mules, but sharing and consuming with them, mixing with booze, ending up puking or asleep on floors, being picked up by one of the guys who put me in my hotel room –I have no recollection of this, every morning I woke up in my room after a blackout–, until this day I can't even believe I recognized I was living in hotels. They all looked like floors with walls and doors and I was a passer by.
After Piper I sent someone to pick up the rest of her shit and throw it away, then the apartment we shared was closed for good. Hotels. I mostly slept with the TV on, sometimes on the bed and sometimes in the toilet. There was a comfy couch where I once puked. I took a combination of bourbon, benzos, coke, sometimes e when the mules came into the room and I had to function, but pretty soon I began doing heroin. The shit was our prime product and for years I was terrified of it, always making sure not to touch it. But now things were different; the line of life on my palm was bifurcated. I was pretty sure that was a roadmap, an inverted constellation: one of hell, and the instruction was to destroy myself. Heroin was the safe route. I began smoking and the relief was heavenly. Then Monique, one of the mules, injected the shit right into my vein and that was it, the top of the experience. We did that a few times, or more like she did because I could barely move. We spent the days in the room doing that shit, that ritual. We could drink some water, but we couldn't tolerate booze. I didn't eat in a week, maybe two. I had to make a hole in my belt so my pants wouldn't fall off of all the weight I had suddenly lost. I was able to perform this task this one moment when Monique left me and my arm alone for a few hours. Then we both missed a deadline, maybe more than one. I can't remember who came into the room to warn me or threaten me. It all sounded flat and passè. I was almost gone and couldn't give a shit about the business. They took Monique and I never saw her again. Friday night a combination of e and bourbon was shared with the guys and Fahri, plus some hot girls that were visiting from Lithuania or some place. I was reckless and it was contagious. I brought Fahri down with me, my old boss Fahri. He fucked up and we freaked out and hid like idiots in some hotel room. Kubra sent one of his guys to shoot him in front of me. I thought I was next. I was terrified, but I'd be lying if I said the amount of booze and drugs didn't make me feel a sense of relief. An addictive personality. In front of Kubra, something or someone helped me because I was about to begin laughing. Not just my nerves; the whole thing was absurd. Asshole, I just buried my mother. You'd be doing me a favor. That's what I thought of me: your poor self dead. But I stayed quiet and obeyed. He chose to send me to rehab so he could keep exploiting me; after all my job and Fahri's had become one and the same. I was becoming better than him at setting up new routes and convincing reliable clients, while acquiring new mules and verifying obsessively the drops went as planned. I was making Kubra's business easy and breezy. All of this the previous months before my mom's passing and Piper's betrayal.
I thanked him for sparing my life and decided to make the best of rehab. This wasn't remotely hitting rock bottom. That had happened to me x2. I was quietly comfortable in my newfound humble persona that I didn't want to be just a persona. Just me. Please, help me be just me, as fucked up as I am, I just can't keep up with the facade. But it was so hard being me. So painful, so fucking alone. I kept thinking of those dogs. I took my baby steps. Months into it. Some days I wished I could talk to one person, not the whole group. I wanted to talk not of childhood, but how disgusted I still was at my father and at myself for having tracked him down and that was a betrayal of my mother. I wanted to talk about my mother, how much I missed her that I had to put a pillow on my face while sobbing. I wanted to talk about Piper and her stabbing, and how I imagined her living the yuppie life after our affair that probably didn't even make it to a relationship in her yuppie family, in the conversations she didn't have with her family and that stupid friend of hers. I wanted to talk about how I thought that if I escaped from this facility and ran to the desert the sun would kill me in less than five minutes and my body wouldn't be sent to rest next to my mom's because I hadn't told a soul where she was buried or what were my wished if I died. I wanted to talk of all these ideations, almost plans, these impulses, this hunger, this need to end things because I couldn't see the other side to this story.
I completed the program and was sent back to work. I set up the business plans quickly and I didn't touch drugs or booze, I only talked when it was necessary: to give instructions, to seduce the girls, to report to the cartel CEO. To order my morning coffee. But during my free time I tried my best to pass as a ghost. I read and it kept my head away from myself. Occasionally I thought of Piper. I called her once but I didn't leave a voice message. I wanted to call again many times, to ask why, to ask her to come back, to ask her how she was doing, to tell her how alone I was, to ask her if she had any good memories at all. But I refrained. I forced myself to imagine her new life. Married, maybe a mother… the type of life I always thought was for others.
Chapter fourOne year passed. The second year Piper was the one becoming a ghost. The third year work was fine and I got into the closest thing to a relationship without naming it that, but I allowed Anja, a dutch mule with progress possibilities, to take over my life, my personal schedule. I had an apartment again, which she decorated. The Amsterdam years. I was never in love with Anja, as I didn't think I could be able to feel love again, but I was fine with it, with just affection and friendship with privileges. Reading deconstructions of romantic love helped me a lot. I used this as self help literature. Read and read until I was sort of convinced. I couldn't love Anja but she had a sense of humor, and suddenly I wasn't walking the streets of Amsterdam alone, but holding hands with her. By the fifth year Piper was such an abstract idea. I remembered her mostly when I had to set up drops or meetings in Paris. What a drag that Paris would always remind me of the worst time of my life. I was lucky enough to share some of these traumatic experiences with Anja, never going into details, but this helped in making our attachment a light one. After a while, we became close; she always felt those protective walls and she accepted it. But a relationship doesn't work like that. If you're crazy in love but unable to come clear, it won't work. And I wasn't remotely in love with her. I never bothered to ask her what she felt for me. With Anja I was able to dissociate sex and business, and to enjoy my erotic life again. We were together and that was enough for me until it wasn't for her. We parted ways, but she remained working for us. She handled some of the northern Europe routes, I coached her through it and she was good until shit began happening. Our expansion had been quiet and there were almost no fuck ups, but we had been under the radar of the authorities for years, while they were building a case.
I traveled to the States for business and that was it. My arrest was subtle: no cuffs, no uniformed officers. They took me to an office where the agents and my lawyer kept negotiating. They were tough, but those deals work by naming from the bottom to the top, never really reaching the top or you may as well sign your own death sentence. The Feds and their protection programs are a joke. So I had to begin giving up names. Because of my status in the organization, they originally wanted to give me decades in prison. Every given up mule took a couple of years off, depending on how much the mule had been efficient. I had run out of mules and my sentence threat was still insane. I had to go after one of the guys that oversaw the distribution in eastern Asia. This helped a lot, as the whole region operation was sized and this took something like 8 years off my proposed jail time. I debated internally if I should give up Piper's name. I didn't do it right away, but there I was, in a grey room drinking decaf, trying to reduce the number of years I'd rot in a cell while she was living her plan A, and I was pissed off, I tried hard not to take the memories back to the Paris event, but this was impossible. You fucking owe me. You pulled the trigger on me. I even laughed at the idea that her husband and kids would have to visit her in prison. Surely that was better than burying your mom in front of stray dogs? God, I'm dark. My life before the agents was mostly grey but calm and functional. But I did remember and it could fuck me up sometimes. Because my head had been clear of drugs for years, I was able to remember so clearly, to relive the moments, to hurt again. How it hurt that she left me when I needed her the most. How bad it hurt that I gave her everything I could and she soon got bored, then worried and ready to bail, and finally stabbed me in the heart by abandoning me. I thought someone like Piper would put herself at risk in jail. I couldn't even picture her in that environment. But given her smaller crime, maybe they'd have mercy on her, maybe her family would fight this in trial and she'd skip jail time. She had options. In my balance, I simply couldn't let go. The hurt had been immense, the pain almost drove me insane. Let her have a fraction of it. So I named her. They took less than a couple of years off my time after naming her. It was done. It was my closure. Two days later my phone rang and it was her. I freaked out and couldn't answer. I thought she was calling to insult me for having named her. But after eight years, it turned out Piper still had my number and she had made a drunken call where she said many things about some silly tattoo and some silly boyfriend, and she ended the call after saying that she missed me. All those years I had forced myself to think of her as a ghost, but I was still a very vivid memory in her mind. And I had just stabbed her back. I went to the bar, I told this horror story to some dude who stared at me as a scumbag, I swallowed what I knew were the last shots of raspy bourbon before going to jail. Piper, I can't explain. It's so hard. It's like I wake up in the morning and I find my poor self dead.
NotesBased on Black Tambourine's Can't Explain
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