Drowning In the Next Room

Section Three of Three

Summary: In the morning you're a child, happy and free. In the afternoon, you're an adult and you're breathing but the life inside is fading. In the evening, well, in the evening you lie down to die. That's your life in one day. That's one day of your life. An exercise in style [stark/dreamscape/anon]. [future.lit.rambler]

Note: Stark means that certain details were kept skeletal. That makes the prose more visceral. That makes it all more rigid, and somehow still able to have an intense emotional impact. Dreamscape is the use of more otherworldly-sounding words to describe things, like calling baby blue something like lullaby blue. Anon is the technique in which the main characters have no names, but clues are given as to their identities. It should be pretty easy but whine all you want if you can't figure it out.

*

You could have it all, my empire of dirt.

He could buy her anything, he could, but he couldn't buy her. He supposed it was his fault. He had an awful way with people, especially the ones he claimed to love oh-so-deeply. That is, if he could find it in him to do so.

He didn't especially love her anymore, he supposed. She didn't love him anymore, and really, that was the whole reason he felt himself pulling away. To save face. In his world, that was quite all right. In his world, nobody was ever wrong, except maybe himself. A nice, tidy masochistic existence well insulated by the Valium.

Kick in already, damn it!

He glared at the orange bottle on his bedside table. It laid on its side, a few pills spilled out of its jagged mouth. The white child safety cap was discarded nearby. A can of Seagram's ginger ale and a half-drunk bottle of Killian's sat nearby. Both drinking vessels had rings of condensation around their bases, soaking into the shiny particle board surface of the table. She was going to kill him. Wait-- guess that didn't matter so much any more.

A toxic level of Darvocet is about twenty pills for a grown man accustomed to prescription painkillers, less for a woman, less for a teenage boy. He'd seen it happen twice, someone taking too much and keeling over because of it. The first time he'd been so high himself it had been uproariously funny. It had been his much older step cousin Genevieve, the twit, who dramatically flattened the back of her hand against her forehead and declared in a horrible travesty of a Southern accent that she could bear no more of the world and wouldn't he just please let her have some of his lovely pills to help her out? Being fucked up himself, he handed her the whole bottle, which she promptly uncapped and dumped half of into her mouth. She grabbed the bottle of Bacardi from the man next to her and washed half of her mouthful down in one gulp, the rest in a second. She laughed, kissed the man, gave him back his Bacardi, and promptly passed out. She never regained consciousness.

Tragic, really. She had two mulatto bastard kids and a mortgage, not to mention about five reams of credit card debt.

He laid back and stared at the shadowy ceiling, wondering what exactly it was that had led him to be locked up in his bedroom on Christmas night. His little boy quietly opened his presents that morning while his girlfriend did God-knows-what a city away. The rest of the universe had the supreme audacity to pick up and carry on as though he were the most insignificant thing in the world, the silly man trying to kill himself with the very thing that kept them in the apartment in the first place.

The second time he watched someone die hadn't been quite so funny. For one thing, he had been completely sober. For another, it had been his ex-girlfriend Mel's younger brother, Josh. He'd met Mel at his father's hotdog stand. Mel, the beautiful, tormented, artistic college dropout. Mel, who served hotdogs with a bored abandon that his father had never seen before and was fascinated by. Mel who was a former dancer and current on-the-side hard-core porn star. Mel, whose daily coke habit leveled off at about three hundred dollars. Mel, who was willing to do pretty much anything for her drugs. That was actually how their relationship began. He had just started dealing, mostly as a way to get away from his books and memories and his father. It was easy money, hugely entertaining, and he got to carry a gun. She was no ingenue at the process, he realized about the time she tried (between a jar of relish and the grill) to haggle him down to five bucks for a Valium, which everyone should know doesn't work and if someone tries to sell you one for so cheap, they're not Valiums you're about to buy.

Mel was the oldest of five children, the youngest being the only boy, Josh. With just six years between the oldest and the youngest of five children, the family was close-knit and so very Midwestern. Mel had pictures of all her siblings everywhere. She broke up with him because Josh got his lethal dose of Darvocet from him. Josh was a sad boy, small and lithe with dark hair, unlucky and sarcastic at all the wrong times. He hadn't known that Josh was going to down all the pills himself. He was used to people coming and buying in bulk to sell with a markup to make profit at a party or whatever. He'd never been party to a suicide, so he hadn't anticipated that anyone would do such a thing.

Thing was, he really had liked the kid. Mel broke up with him at her brother's funeral, her mascara all smeared down below her eyes even though she insisted she used the waterproof variety.

He rolled over and stared at the wall for a while. He couldn't look up because his vision was stating to go, which was such a relief. He couldn't look at the bottle because he didn't want to start to regret his actions. He supposed he could have easily gotten up, gone to the kitchen to get some grain alcohol chaser to wash down the rest of the bottle to speed the process up but he really didn't want to bother.

The bedclothes, baby fern green sheets and a ratty chamois-colored fleece blanket, were bunched up sadly around his legs. His left foot hung off the edge of the bed, uncovered and cold from the air conditioning in the room. He could hear the sounds of television and the Pacific Ocean on the other side of his door and he wondered if his family was there or not. He wondered what she would do when she found him, cold and blue-lipped in their bed. He wondered if she would cry, or if she'd just go pick up the phone and dial calmly like she had expected it for a long time coming.

The window above the bed looked out on a different vista of Los Angeles than the terrace. It glanced back at the ocean of yellow lights of the city. She had once told him-- back when she still loved him-- while they sat up on the roof that, on a hazy night, it looked like the whole valley was on fire. In fire season when there was a little smoke in the air, the effect was magnified. In the rainy season, it looked crisper and darker. He didn't have to sit up and look out to see the dim gray-violet sky to know the last sun of his life had already set, had gone to set on Hawaii before rising on Australia and Japan. He could look straight ahead at the lullaby blue wall and pray that his death wouldn't involve vomiting.

He wondered back to when he'd started the dealing thing. It had probably been when his best friend Archie brought him to this Hollywood C-list party, full of callow, wannabe actors and porn queens looking for their big break and balding producers and casting agents looking for an easy score. Archie was seeing this cockstar (the industry name for a candy boy, he didn't ask why Archie with his two little kids was seeing a gay porn guy), and that cockstar (named Nate) only did what he did so that he could pay for his habits. Nate knew this girl called Scam with waist-length, blue-green hair and more black eye makeup than Alice Cooper. She dealt for her cousin, Stan. Stan was at the party, Alice Cooper Girl was there, and Archie had brought him so Nate could hook him up with Stan and Scam. He slept with Scam that night, got a gun the next day from Stan, and entered the world he would inhabit for the next decade.

The next party he went to, he was big drug dealer guy. There were more Hollywood types there, too, than the last. And they were coming to him, the young, pretty upstart, for their stuff instead of Archie or one of the others. Three raves later, he was dealing to A-listers. And he was twenty-three.

That was when his uncle had a baby with a married woman and he'd gone to stay with him to help smooth them over. He'd met up with a high school girlfriend, who was incidentally his new cousin's sister if he had to be technical. And, of course, he promptly got her pregnant, though he didn't know it until the end of the second trimester when she mustered up the huevos to call him and then move out to California.

He had seriously considered giving up selling the drugs forever the first time he held his son in his arms. As horrible and cliché and uncharacteristic as it had been for him to think it, he'd just been so awestruck that anything that shared genetic material with him could be so perfect and gorgeous. A tiny baby staring up at him with mirror-image sable eyes, wondering who the hell the man holding him was and where his mother had gotten to.

Then, he realized that selling drugs was his only real marketable skill and he had to support the kid in his arms somehow.

He stared at the wall and waited. He listened to the front door open and the voices of his family come inside before one of them slammed the door shut behind himself or herself. He wondered if they would be able to hear his last breath through the two cheap layers the bedroom door was composed of. Maybe through the crack underneath the door.

"I love you," he heard her voice saying to the boy. "I want you to know that even though I'm the worst mother in the world and I can't show you. It's never because I don't love you, because I do. I'm leaving your father, though. I have to get out of here. I just want to know if you want to come to Connecticut with me or if you want to stay with him."

He rolled over to face the door with a frown stretched across his brow. He suddenly felt like he had been underwater for too long and was choking on the liquid surrounding him. A look in the mirror would have revealed blue lips and pale juniper-stained skin reminiscent of a newborn baby. His hands were beginning to shake. He had no feeling left from about his chest down. The room was going hazy-dim, and he knew it wasn't just his suicidal dose of Darvocet doing it to him.

If only she would come into the room and feel his pulse drop like the New Year's ball of light. He'd gone to Times Square with his mother once, when he was six and still controllable. They'd gotten there on December twenty-ninth and were bundled within inches of their lives, but they were in the frontmost row. He couldn't remember having felt quite so happy since that day a thousand years earlier.

Really, he was starting to wonder if he would have to take another handful to get an effect at all. Maybe seven years' worth of selling and skimming a snippet for himself had built him up a higher than normal toxicity defense. Truthfully, he didn't care all that much. It wasn't suicide so much as an angry lashing-out at the world. He was such a normal human being, quiet and dependant and covetous and he hated it. He liked to think he was more sophisticated than the rest of the world with their trivial ways. Many times in his life he had spoken this idea, and every time he told it, it sounded sour to his own ears and it tasted like old vinegar in his throat, mainly because he was just a regular boy packaged in a taut little Italian shell with an inferiority complex and a nicotine addiction.

Once his uncle had snidely asked him, "So, what exactly are you rebelling against?" to which he snidely replied, "Whaddaya got?"

Suicide is the ultimate rebellion because it's fighting the simple human (animal?) nature of trying to stay alive. That and the fact he was bored and the only thing nobody else in the world really knew about was the experience of death. And he knew everything he'd ever wanted to know. He had everything he'd ever wanted. He had done everything he'd wanted to do. So, there was nothing left to explore, nothing left to hold his mind in a spell.

There wasn't anything left to dream.

*****

I want to thank Anna and Cel and Green Eve for the inspiration (in whichever form it took), Tony Berbelis for unknowingly providing the quotes, blink-182 for whichever song on their new album that features the lines "drowning in the next room" and "cold with disappointment," Casey and John just because, and my little six-year-old, The-Hobbit-reading cousin Johnny for being the model for Rory and Jess' son.

Lorelai married Digger, by the way.

And, I'd like to add that maybe Jess read to his son when he was little, and maybe Rory's detached because she's unhappy-- plenty of people change with malcontent, fuck you if you can't accept this.

[posted] le 30 décembre 2003

[t. henneth]